by Dick Francis
The princess had insisted on reimbursing me for that little lot, where other owners might have raged. ‘If she wouldn’t go, she wouldn’t go,’ she’d said with finality. ‘And she’s my horse, so I’m responsible for her debts.’ Owners didn’t come more illogical or more generous than the princess.
I’d told her never to let her friends back Bernina on the days she went flat-footed to the start, and she’d acknowledged the advice gravely. I hoped, sitting on top of the bravura performance going on in Devon, that she, the Inscombes and the niece would all be at that moment trekking to the bookmakers or the Tote. The mare was feeling good, and, beyond that, competitive.
The event was a two-mile hurdle race, which meant eight jumps over the sort of fencing used for penning sheep: hurdles made of wood and threaded with gorse or brushwood, each section unattached to the hurdle on either side, so that if a horse hit one, it could be knocked over separately. Good jumpers flowed over hurdles easily, rising little in the air but bending up their forelegs sharply; the trick was to get them to take off from where the hurdle could be crossed in mid-stride.
Bernina, graciously accepting my guidance in that matter, went round the whole course without touching a twig. She also attacked the job of beating her opponents with such gusto that one mightn’t have blamed the Stewards this time for testing her for dope, such was the contrast.
She would, if she’d had serious talent, have won by twenty lengths, especially as the chief danger had fallen in a flurry of legs about halfway round. As it was, she made enough progress, when I gave her an encouraging kick between the last two hurdles, to reach the last jump upsides of the only horse still in front, and on the run-in she produced a weak burst of speed for just long enough to pass and demoralise her tiring opponent.
Accepting my congratulatory pats on her victorious neck as totally her due, she pulled up and pranced back to the winners’ enclosure, and skittered about there restlessly, sweating copiously and rolling her eyes, up on a high like any other triumphant performer.
The princess, relieved and contented, kept out of the way of the powerful body as I unbuckled the girths and slid my saddle off on to my arm. She didn’t say much herself as the Inscombes were doing a good deal of talking, but in any case she didn’t have to. I knew what she thought and she knew I knew: we’d been through it all a couple of hundred times before.
The niece said, ‘Wow,’ a little thoughtfully.
I glanced briefly at her face and saw that she was surprised: I didn’t know what she was surprised at, and didn’t have time to find out as there was the matter of weighing in, changing, and weighing out for the next race. Icicle, the princess’s other runner, didn’t go until the fourth race, but I had two other horses to ride before that.
Those two, undisgraced, finished fifth and second, and were both for a local trainer who I rode for when I could: besides Wykeham I also often rode for a stable in Lambourn, and when neither of them had a runner, for anyone else who asked. After, that is, having looked up the offered horse in the form book. Constant fallers I refused, saying Wykeham wouldn’t give his approval. Wykeham was a handy excuse.
Icicle, like his name, was the palest of greys; also long-backed, angular and sweet-natured. He had been fast and clever over hurdles, the younger horses’ sport, but at a mature eight years and running over bigger fences, was proving more cautious than carefree, more dependable than dazzling, willing but no whirlwind.
I went out to the parade ring again in the princess’s colours and found her and the friends deep in a discussion that had nothing to do with horses but which involved a good deal of looking at watches.
‘The train from Exeter is very fast,’ Mrs Inscombe was saying comfortingly; and the niece was giving her a bright look of stifled impatience.
‘Most unfortunate,’ Mr Inscombe said in a bluff voice. ‘But the train, that’s the thing.’
The princess said carefully as if for the tenth time, ‘But my dears, the train goes too late…’ She broke off to give me an absent-minded smile and a brief explanation.
‘My niece Danielle was going to London by car with friends but the arrangement has fallen through.’ She paused. ‘I suppose you don’t know anyone who is driving straight from here to London after this race?’
‘Sorry, I don’t,’ I said regretfully.
I looked at the niece: at Danielle. She looked worriedly back. ‘I have to be in London by six-thirty,’ she said. ‘In Chiswick. I expect you know where that is? Just as you reach London from the west?’
I nodded.
‘Could you possibly ask,’ she waved a hand towards the busy door of the weighing room, ‘in there?’
‘Yes, I’ll ask.’
‘I have to be at work.’
I must have showed surprise, because she added, ‘I work for a news bureau. This week I’m on duty in the evenings.’
Icicle stalked methodically round the parade ring with two and a half miles of strenuous jumping ahead of him. After that, in the fifth race, I would be riding another two miles over hurdles.
After that…
I glanced briefly at the princess, checking her expression, which was benign, and I thought of the fine she’d paid for me when she didn’t have to.
I said to Danielle, ‘I’ll take you myself straight after the fifth race… if, er, that would be of any use to you.’
Her gaze intensified fast on my face and the anxiety cleared like sunrise.
‘Yes,’ she said decisively. ‘It sure would.’
Never make positive commitments on race-days…
‘I’ll meet you outside the weighing room, after the fifth, then,’ I said. ‘It’s a good road. We should get to Chiswick in time.’
‘Great,’ she said, and the princess seemed relieved that we could now concentrate on her horse and the immediate future.
‘Kind of you, Kit,’ she said, nodding.
‘Any time.’
‘How do you think my old boy will do today?’
‘He’s got bags of stamina,’ I said. ‘He should run well.’
She smiled. She knew ‘bags of stamina’ was a euphemism for ‘not much finishing speed’. She knew Icicle’s ability as well as I did, but like all owners, she wanted good news from her jockey.
‘Do your best.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
I mounted and took Icicle out on to the track.
To hell with superstition, I thought.
SEVEN
It wasn’t Icicle I had trouble with.
Icicle jumped adequately but without inspiration and ran on doggedly at one pace up the straight, more by good luck than anything else hanging on to finish second.
‘Dear old slowcoach,’ the princess said to him proudly in the unsaddling enclosure, rubbing his nose. ‘What a gentleman you are.’
It was the hurdler afterwards that came to grief: an experienced racer but unintelligent. The one horse slightly ahead and to the right of us hit the top of the second hurdle as he rose to the jump and stumbled on to his nose on landing, and my horse, as if copying, promptly did exactly the same.
As falls went, it wasn’t bad. I rolled like a tumbler on touching the ground, a circus skill learned by every jump jockey, and stayed curled, waiting for all the other runners to pass. As standing up in the middle of a thundering herd was the surest way to get badly injured, staying on the ground, where horses could more easily avoid one, was almost the first lesson in survival. The bad thing about falls near the start of hurdle races, however, was that the horses were going faster than in steeplechases, and were often bunched up together, with the result that they tended not to see a fallen rider until they were on top of him, by which time there was nowhere else to put their feet.
I was fairly used to hoof-shaped bruises. In the quiet that came after the buffeting I stood slowly and stiffly up with the makings of a new collection, and found the other fallen jockey doing the same.
‘You all right?’ I said.
‘Yeah. Yo
u?’
I nodded. My colleague expressed a few obscene opinions of his former mount and a car came along to pick us up and deliver us to the ambulance room to be checked by the doctor on duty. In the old days jockeys had got away easily with riding with broken bones, but nowadays the medical inspections had intensified to safeguard the interests not altogether of the men injured but of the people who bet on them. Appeasing the punter was priority stuff.
Bruises didn’t count. Doctors never stopped one from riding for those, and in any case bruises weren’t visible when very new. I proved to the local man that all the bits of me that should bend, did, and all the bits that shouldn’t bend, didn’t, and got passed fit to ride again from then on.
One of the two volunteer nurses went to answer a knock on the door and came back slightly bemused to say I was wanted outside by a woman who said she was a princess.
‘Right,’ I said, thanking the doctor and turning to go.
‘Is she?’ the nurse asked dubiously.
‘A princess? Yes. How often do you come to race meetings?’
‘Today’s my first.’
‘She’s been leading owner three times in the past six jumping seasons, and she’s a right darling.’
The young nurse grinned. ‘Makes you sick.’
I went outside to find the right darling looking first worried and then relieved at my reappearance. She was certainly not in the habit of enquiring after my health by waiting around outside ambulance room doors, and of course it wasn’t my actual well-being which mattered at that point, but my being well enough to drive the niece to work.
The niece was also there and also relieved and also looking at her watch. I said I would change into street clothes and be ready shortly, and the princess kissed the niece and patted my arm, and went away saying she would see me at Newbury on the morrow.
I changed, found the niece waiting outside the weighing room, and took her to my car. She was fairly fidgeting with an impatience which slightly abated when she found the car was a Mercedes, but changed to straight anxiety when she saw me wince as I edged into the driving seat.
‘Are you OK? You’re not going to pass out, or anything, are you?’ she said.
‘I shouldn’t think so.’
I started the car and extricated ourselves from the close-packed rows. A few other cars were leaving, but not enough to clog the entrance or the road outside. We would have a clear run, barring accidents.
‘I guess I thought you’d be dead,’ the niece said without emotion. ‘How does anyone survive being trampled that way by a stampede?’
‘Luck,’ I said succinctly.
‘My aunt was sure relieved when you stood up.’
I made an assenting noise in my throat. ‘So was I.’
‘Why do you do it?’ she said.
‘Race?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I like it.’
‘Like getting trampled?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘That doesn’t happen all that often.’
We swooped down the hill from the moor and sped unhindered along roads that in the summer were busy with holiday crises. No swaying overloaded caravans being towed that day, no children being sick at the roadside, no radiators boiling and burst, with glum groups on the verges waiting for help. Devon roads in November were bare and fast and led straight to the motorways which should take us to Chiswick with no problems.
‘Tell me truthfully,’ she said, ‘why do you do it?’
I glanced at her face, seeing there a quality of interest suitable for a newsgatherer. She had also large grey eyes, a narrow nose, and a determined mouth. Good-looking in a well-groomed way, I thought.
I had been asked the same question many times by other newsgatherers, and I gave the standard answer.
‘I do it because I was born to it. I was brought up in a racing stable and I can’t remember not being able to ride. I can’t remember not wanting to ride in races.’
She listened with her head on one side and her gaze on my face.
‘I guess I never met a jockey until now,’ she said reflectively. ‘And we don’t have much jump racing in America.’
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘In England there are probably more jump races than Flat. Just as many, anyway.’
‘So why do you do it?’
‘I told you,’ I said.
‘Yeah.’
She turned her head away to look out at the passing fields.
I raced, I thought fancifully, as one might play a violin, making one’s own sort of music from coordinated muscles and intuitive spirit. I raced because the partnership with horses filled my mind with perfections of cadence and rhythmic excitement and intensities of communion: and I couldn’t exactly say aloud such pretentious rubbish.
‘I feel alive,’ I said, ‘on a horse.’
She looked back, faintly smiling. ‘My aunt says you read their thoughts.’
‘Everyone close to horses does that.’
‘But some more than others?’
‘I don’t really know.’
She nodded. ‘That makes sense. My aunt says you read the thoughts of people also.’
I glanced at her briefly. ‘Your aunt seems to have said a lot.’
‘My aunt,’ she said neutrally, ‘wanted me to understand, I think, that if I went in your car I should arrive unmolested.’
‘Good God.’
‘She was right, I see.’
‘Mm.’
Molesting Danielle de Brescou, I thought, would be my quickest route to unemployment. Not that in other circumstances and with her willing cooperation I would have found it unthinkable. Danielle de Brescou moved with understated long-legged grace and watched the world from clear eyes, and if I found the sheen and scent of her hair and skin fresh and pleasing, it did no more than change the journey from a chore to a pleasure.
Between Exeter and Bristol, while dusk dimmed the day, she told me that she had been in England for three weeks and was staying with her uncle and aunt while she found herself an apartment. She had come because she’d been posted to London by the national broadcasting company she worked for: she was the bureau coordinator, and as it was only her second week there it was essential not to be late.
‘You won’t be late,’ I assured her.
‘No… Do you always drive at eighty miles an hour?’
‘Not if I’m in a real hurry.’
‘Very funny.’
She told me Roland de Brescou, the princess’s husband, was her father’s eldest brother. Her father had emigrated to California from France as a young man and had married an American girl, Danielle being their only child.
‘I guess there was a family ruckus when Dad left home, but he never told me the details. He’s been sending greetings cards lately though, nostalgic for his roots, I guess. Anyway, he told Uncle Roland I was coming to London and the princess wrote me to say come visit. I hadn’t met either of them before. It’s my first trip to Europe.’
‘How do you like it?’
She smiled. ‘How would you like being cosseted in a sort of mansion in Eaton Square with a cook and maids and a butler? And a chauffeur. All last week the chauffeur drove me to work and picked me up after. Same thing yesterday. Aunt Casilia says it’s not safe here after midnight on the subway, the same as it isn’t in New York. She fusses worse than my own mother. But I can’t live with them for too long. They’re both sweet to me. I like her a lot and we get along fine. But I need a place of my own, near the office. And I’ll get a car. I guess I’ll have to.’
‘How long will you be in England?’ I asked.
‘Don’t know. Three years, maybe. Maybe less. The company can shift you around.’
She said I didn’t need to tell her much about myself on account of information from her aunt.
She said she knew I lived in Lambourn and came from an old racing family and had a twin sister married to a racehorse trainer in Newmarket. She said she knew I wasn’t married. She left the last observation dangling like
a question mark, so I answered the unasked query.
‘Not married. No present girlfriend. A couple in the past.’
I could feel her smile.
‘And you?’ I asked.
‘Same thing.’
We drove for a good while in silence on that thought, and I rather pensively wondered what the princess would say or think if I asked her niece out to dinner. The close but arms-length relationship I’d had with her for so many years would change subtly if I did, and perhaps not for the better.
Between Bristol and Chiswick, while we sped with headlights on up the M4 motorway, Danielle told me about her job, which was, she said, pretty much a matter of logistics: she sent the camera crews and interviewers to wherever the news was.
‘Half the time I’m looking at train schedules and road maps to find the fastest route, and starting from when we did, and taking the road we’re on right now, I expected to be late.’ She glanced at the speedometer. ‘I didn’t dream of ninety.’
I eased the car back to eighty-eight. A car passed us effortlessly. Danielle shook her head. ‘I guess it’ll take a while,’ she said. ‘How often do you get speeding tickets?’
‘I’ve had three in ten years.’
‘Driving like this every day?’
‘Pretty much.’
She sighed. ‘In dear old US of A we think seventy is sinful. Have you ever been there?’
‘America?’ I nodded. ‘Twice. I rode there once in the Maryland Hunt Cup.’
‘That’s an amateurs’ race,’ she said without emphasis, careful, it seemed, not to appear to doubt my word.