by Dick Francis
“For those races only?”
“Don’t be stupid. You’re not stupid. You’re too bloody smart for your own good.”
I shook my head. “Why does he want to start this caper again? He’s won a lot of prize money playing it straight these last three years.”
Harold shrugged. “I don’t know. What does it matter? He told me on Saturday when we got to Sandown that he’d laid his horse and that I was on to a big share of the profit. We’ve all done it before . . . why not again? Just what has got into you, Philip, that you’re swooning over a little fiddle like a bloody virgin?”
I didn’t know the answer. He swept on anyway before I’d thought of a reply. “Well, you just work it out, boy. Whose are the best horses in the yard? Victor’s. Who buys good new horses to replace the old? Victor. Who pays his training bills on the nose? Victor. Who owns more horses in this yard than anyone else? Victor. And which owner can I least afford to lose, particularly as he has been with me for more than ten years and has provided me with a large proportion of the winners I’ve trained in the past, and is likely to provide most of those I train in the future? Just who, do you think, my business most depends on?”
I stared at him. I supposed that I hadn’t realized until then that he was in perhaps the same position as myself. Do what Victor wanted, or else.
“I don’t want to lose you, Philip,” he said. “You’re a prickly bastard, but we’ve got on all right all these years. You won’t go on forever, though. You’ve been racing . . . what . . . ten years?”
I nodded.
“Three or four more, then. At the most, five. Pretty soon you won’t bounce back from those falls the way you do now. And at any time a bad one might put you out of action for good. So look at it straight, Philip. Who do I need most in the long term, you or Victor?”
In a sort of melancholy we walked into the yard, where Harold shouted, but halfheartedly, at a couple of dawdling lads.
“Let me know,” he said, turning towards me.
“All right.”
“I want you to stay.”
I was surprised, but also pleased.
“Thanks,” I said.
He gave me a clumsy buffet on the shoulder, the nearest he’d ever come to the slightest show of affection. More than all the threatening and screaming on earth it made me want to agree to do what he asked; a reaction, I acknowledged flickeringly, as old as the hills. It was often kindness that finally broke the prisoner’s spirit, not torture. One’s defenses were always defiantly angled outward to withstand aggression; it was kindness which crept around behind and stabbed you in the back, so that your will evaporated into tears and gratitude. Defenses against kindness were much harder to build. And not the defenses I would ever have thought I needed against Harold.
I sought instinctively to change the subject, and came up with the nearest thought to hand, which was George Millace and his photograph.
“Um,” I said, as we stood a shade awkwardly, “do you remember those five horses of Elgin Yaxley’s, that were shot?”
“What?” He looked bewildered. “What’s that got to do with Victor?”
“Nothing at all,” I said. “I was just thinking about them, yesterday.”
Irritation immediately canceled out the passing moment of emotion, which was probably a relief to us both.
“For God’s sake,” he said sharply. “I’m serious. Your career’s at stake. You can do what you damn well like. You can bloody well go to hell. It’s up to you.”
I nodded.
He turned away abruptly and took two purposeful steps. Then he stopped, looked back, and said, “If you’re so bloody interested in Elgin Yaxley’s horses, why don’t you ask Kenny?” He pointed to one of the lads, who was filling two buckets by the tap. “He looked after them.”
He turned his back again and firmly strode away, outrage and anger thumping down with every foot.
I walked irresolutely over to Kenny, not sure what questions I wanted to ask, or even if I wanted to ask questions at all.
Kenny was one of those people whose defenses were the other way around: impervious to kindness, open to fright. Kenny was a near-delinquent who had been treated with so much understanding by social workers that he could shrug off pleasant approaches with contempt.
He watched me come with an expression willfully blank to the point of insolence, his habitual expression. Skin reddened by the wind; eyes slightly watering; spots.
“Mr. Osborne said you used to work for Bart Underfield,” I said.
“So what?”
The water splashed over the top of the first bucket. He bent to remove it, and kicked the second one forward under the tap.
“And looked after some of Elgin Yaxley’s horses?”
“So what?”
“So were you sorry when they were shot?”
He shrugged. “Suppose so.”
“What did Mr. Underfield say about it?”
“Huh?” His gaze rested squarely on my face. “He didn’t say nothing.”
“Wasn’t he angry?”
“Not as I noticed.”
“He must have been,” I said.
Kenny shrugged again.
“At the very least,” I said, “he was five horses short, and no trainer with his size stable can afford that.”
“He didn’t say nothing.” The second bucket was nearly full, and Kenny turned off the tap. “He didn’t seem to care much about losing them. Something pissed him off a bit later, though.”
“What did?”
Kenny looked uninterested and picked up the buckets. “Don’t know. He was right grumpy. Some of the owners got fed up and left.”
“So did you,” I said.
“Yeah.” He started walking across the yard with water sloshing gently at each step. I went with him, warily keeping a dry distance. “What’s the point of staying when a place is going down the drain?”
“Were Yaxley’s horses in good shape when they went off to the farm?” I asked.
“Sure.” He looked slightly puzzled. “Why are you asking?”
“No real reason. Someone mentioned those horses . . . and Mr. Osborne said you looked after them. I was just interested.”
“Oh.” He nodded. “They had the vet in court, you know, to say the horses were fine the day before they died. He went to the farm to give one of them some antitetanus jabs, and he said he looked them all over, and they were OK.”
“Did you go to the trial?”
“No. Read it in the Sporting Life.” He reached the row of boxes and put the buckets down outside one of the doors. “That all, then?”
“Yes. Thanks, Kenny.”
“Tell you something . . .” He looked almost surprised at his own sudden helpfulness.
“What?”
“That Mr. Yaxley,” he said. “You’d’ve thought he’d been pleased getting all that cash, even if he had lost his horses, but he came into Underfield’s yard one day in a right proper rage. Come to think of it, it was after that that Underfield went sour. And Yaxley, of course, quit racing and we never saw no more of him. Not while I was there, we didn’t.”
I walked thoughtfully home, and when I got there the telephone was ringing.
“Jeremy Folk,” a familiar voice said.
“Oh, not again,” I protested.
“Did you read those reports?”
“Yes, I did. And I’m not going looking for her.”
“Be a good fellow,” he said.
“No.” I paused. “To get you off my back, I’ll help you a bit. But you must do the looking.”
“Well . . .” He sighed. “What sort of help?”
I told him of my conclusions about Amanda’s age, and also suggested he should get the dates of the various tenancies of Pine Woods Lodge from the real estate agents.
“My mother was probably there thirteen years ago,” I said. “And now it’s all yours.”
“But I say . . .” he almost wailed. “You simply can’t stop there.”<
br />
“I simply can.”
“I’ll get back to you.”
“Just leave me alone,” I said.
I drove into Swindon to take the color film to the processors, and on the way thought about the life and times of Bart Underfield.
I knew him in the way one got to know everyone in racing if one lived long enough in Lambourn. We met occasionally in the village shops and in other people’s houses, as well as at the races. We exchanged “Good mornings” and “Hard lucks” and a variety of vague nods. I had never ridden for him because he had never asked me; and he’d never asked me, I thought, because he didn’t like me.
He was a small busy man full of importance, given to telling people confidentially what other more successful trainers had done wrong. “Of course Walwyn shouldn’t have run such-and-such at Ascot,” he would say. “The distance was all wrong, one could see it a mile off.” Strangers thought him very knowledgeable. Lambourn thought him an ass.
No one had suggested, however, that he was such an ass as to deliver his five best horses to the slaughter. Everyone had undoubtedly felt sorry for him, particularly as Elgin Yaxley had not spent the insurance money on buying new and equal animals, but had merely departed altogether, leaving Bart a great deal worse off.
Those horses, I reflected, had undoubtedly been good, and must always have earned more than their keep, and could have been sold for high prices. They had been insured above their market value, certainly, but not by impossible margins if one took into account the prizes they couldn’t win if they were dead. It was the fact that there seemed to be little profit in killing them that had finally baffled the suspicious insurers into paying up.
That . . . and no trace of a link between Elgin Yaxley and Terence O’Tree.
In Swindon the processors, who knew me well, said I was lucky, they were just going to feed a batch through, and if I cared to hang about I could have my negatives back in a couple of hours. I did some shopping and in due course picked up the developed films, and went home.
In the afternoon I printed the colored versions of Mrs. Millace, and sent them off with the black-and-white lot to the police; and in the evening I tried—and failed—to stop thinking in uncomfortable circles about Amanda and Victor Briggs and George Millace.
By far the worst thoughts concerned Victor Briggs and Harold’s ultimatum. The jockey life suited me fine in every way, physically, mentally, financially. I’d put off for years the thought that one day I would have to do something else: the “one day” had always been in the mists of the future, not staring me brutally in the face.
The only thing I knew anything about besides horses was photography, but there were thousands of photographers all over the place . . . Everyone took photographs, every family had a camera, the whole Western world was awash in photographers . . . and to make a living at it one had to be exceptionally good.
One also had to work exceptionally hard. The photographers I knew on the racecourse were always running about: scurrying from the start to the last fence and from there up to the unsaddling enclosure before the winner got there, and then down the course again for the next race, and six times, at least, every afternoon, five or six days a week. Some of their pictures they rushed off to news agencies who might offer them to newspapers, and some they sent to magazines, and some they flogged to the owners of the horses, and some to sponsors handing over cups.
If you were a racing photographer the pictures didn’t come to you, you had to go out looking. And when you’d got them, the customers didn’t flock to your door, you had to go out selling. It was all a lot different from Duncan and Charlie, who had mostly done still-life things like pots and pans and clocks and garden furniture for advertisements.
There were very few full-time successful racing photographers. Fewer than ten, probably. Of those perhaps four were outstanding; and one of those four had been George Millace.
If I tried to join their ranks, the others wouldn’t hinder me, but they wouldn’t help me either. I’d be out there on my own, stand or fall.
I wouldn’t mind the running about, I thought; it was the selling part that daunted. Even if I considered my pictures good enough, I couldn’t push.
And what else?
Setting up as a trainer was out. I hadn’t the capital, and training racehorses was no sort of life for someone who liked stretches of silent time and being alone. Trainers talked to people from dawn to bedtime and lived in a whirl.
What I wanted, and instinctively knew that I would always need, was to continue to be self-employed. A regular wage packet looked like chains. An illogical feeling, but overwhelming. Whatever I did, I would have to do it on my own.
The habit of never making decisions would have to be broken. I could drift, I saw, into jobs which had none of the terrific satisfactions of being a jockey. I had been lucky so far, but if I wanted to find contentment in the next chapter I would have for once to be positive.
Damn Victor Briggs, I thought violently.
Inciting jockeys to throw races was a warning-off defense, but even if I could manage to get Victor Briggs warned-off, the person who would most suffer would be Harold. And I’d lose my job anyway, as Harold would hardly keep me on after that, even if we didn’t both lose our licenses altogether because of the races I’d thrown in the past. I couldn’t prove Victor Brigg’s villainy without having to admit Harold’s and my own.
Cheat or retire. A stark choice . . . absolutely comfortless.
Nothing changed much on the Tuesday, but when I went to Kempton on Wednesday to ride Pamphlet, the weighing room was electric with two pieces of gossip.
Ivor den Relgan had been made a member of the Jockey Club, and Steve Millace’s mother’s house had burned down.
6
“Ivor den Relgan?” I heard the name on every side, repeated in varying tones of astonishment and disbelief. “A member of the Jockey Club! Incredible!”
The Jockey Club, that exclusive and gentlemanly body, had apparently that morning voted into its fastidious ranks someone they had been holding at arm’s length for years, a rich self-important man from no one knew where, who had spread his money about in racing and done a certain amount of good in a way that affronted the recipients.
He was supposed to be of Dutch extraction. Extraction, that is, from some unspecified ex-Dutch colony. He spoke with an accent that sounded like a mixture of South African, Australian and American, a conglomerate mid-globe amalgam of vowels and consonants which could have been attractive but came out as patronizing. He, the voice seemed to say, was a great deal more sophisticated than the stuffy British upper crust. He sought not favors from the entrenched powers, but admiration. It was they, he implied, who would prosper if they took his advice. He offered it to them free, frequently, in letters to the Sporting Life.
Until that morning the Jockey Club had indeed observably taken his advice on several occasions while steadfastly refusing to acknowledge he had given it. I wondered fleetingly what had brought them to such a turnaround; what had caused them suddenly to embrace the anathema.
Steve Millace was in the changing room, waiting by my peg.
The strain in him that was visible from the doorway was at close quarters overpowering. White-faced, shaking, he stood with his arm in a black webbing sling and looked at me from sunken desperate eyes.
“Have you heard?” he said.
I nodded.
“It happened on Monday night. Well, yesterday morning, I suppose . . . about three o’clock. By the time anyone noticed, the whole place had gone.”
“Your mother wasn’t there?”
“They’d kept her in the hospital. She’s still there. It’s too much for her. I mean . . .” He was trembling. “Too much.”
I made some sincerely sympathetic noises.
“Tell me what to do,” he said; and I thought, he’s elected me as some sort of elder brother, an unofficial advice bureau.
“Didn’t you say something about aunts?” I asked. “
At the funeral?”
He shook his head impatiently. “They’re Dad’s sisters. Older sisters. They’ve never liked Mum.”
“All the same . . .”
“They’re cats,” he said, exploding. “I rang them . . . they said what a shame.” He mimicked their voices venomously. “ ‘Tell poor dear Marie she can get quite a nice little bungalow near the seaside with the insurance money.’ They make me sick.”
I began taking off my street clothes to change into colors, aware that to Steve the day’s work was irrelevant.
“Philip,” he said imploringly. “You saw her. All bashed about . . . and without Dad . . . and now the whole house . . . Please . . . please . . . help me.”
“All right,” I said resignedly. What else could one say? “When I’ve finished riding, we’ll work something out.”
He sat down on the bench as if his legs wouldn’t hold him and just stayed there staring into space while I finished changing and went to weigh out.
Harold was by the scales as usual, waiting to take my saddle when I’d been weighed. Since Monday he’d made no reference to the life-altering decision he’d handed me, and perhaps he took my silence not for spirit-tearing indecision but tacit acceptance of a return to things past. At any rate it was with a totally normal manner that he said, as I put the saddle over his arm, “Did you hear who’s been elected to the Jockey Club?”
“Yeah.”
“They’ll take Genghis Khan next.”
He walked out to put the saddle on Pamphlet, and in due course I joined him in the parade ring, where the horse walked nonchalantly around and his pop star owner bit his nails with concentration.
Harold had gleaned some more news. “I hear that it was the Great White Chief who insisted on den Relgan joining the club.”
“Lord White?” I was surprised.
“Old Driven Snow himself.”
Pamphlet’s youngish owner flicked his fingers and said, “Hey, man, how’s about a little sweet music on this baby?”
“A tenner each way,” Harold suggested, having learned the pop star’s language. The pop star was using the horse for publicity and would only let it run when its race would be televised: and he was, as usual, wholly aware of the positions of the cameras, so that if they should chance to point his way he would not be carelessly obscured behind Harold or me. I admired his expertise in this respect, and indeed his whole performance, because offstage, so to speak, he was apt to relapse into middle-class suburban. The jazzed-up working-class image was all a fake.