Reflex

by Dick Francis

  “Yes,” I said dazedly.

  “Come on then. Come on.”

  I fetched the camera from the changing room and found him still waiting for me but definitely in a hurry. I would have to get over there and assess the best angles, he explained, and I’d only have one chance because the crew would be moving out to the parking lot presently to film the racegoers going home.

  He had apparently tried to get the regular racing photographer to do the present job, but they had said they were too busy.

  “I remembered you. Worth trying, I thought. With that camera, you at least have to be able to focus. Right?”

  We were walking fast. He broke now and then into a sort of trotting stride, and his breathing gradually grew shorter. His mental energy however was unflagging.

  “We need these pics for publicity. Right?”

  “I see,” I said.

  His words and manner were so much at variance with his appearance that the whole expedition seemed to me powerfully unreal. Urgent film producers (who might or might not provide cocaine for sniffing at parties) were surely not accustomed to look the country gentleman, nor tweeded country gentlemen to speak with slovenly vowels and glottalstop consonants. The “right?” he was so fond of was pronounced without its final “t.”

  I would have thought, if he wanted publicity pictures, that he would have brought a photographer of his own; and I asked him.

  “Sure,” he said. “I had one lined up. Then he died. Didn’t get around to it again. Then today, saw you. Reminded me. Asked the news photographers. No dice. Thought of you, right? Asked them about you. They said you were good, you could do it. You may be lousy. If your pics are no good, I don’t buy, right?”

  He panted across the course to the winning post on the far side, and I asked him which photographer had died.

  “Fellow called Millace. Know him?”

  “I knew him,” I said.

  “He said he’d do it. Died in a car crash. Here we are. You get on with it. Take what you want. Got color film in there, have you?”

  I nodded and he nodded, and he turned away to give instructions to the crew. They again listened to him with the slightly averted heads, and I wandered away. Lance Kinship was not immediately likeable, but I again had a strong feeling that his crew felt positive discontent. He wouldn’t buy photographs showing that response, I thought dryly, so I waited until the crew were not looking at him, and shot them absorbed in their work.

  Lance Kinship’s breathing returned to normal and he himself merged again into the racing background as if he’d been born there. An actor at heart, I thought; but unlike an actor he was dressing a part in real life, which seemed odd.

  “What film are you making?” I asked.

  “Stock shots,” he said uninformatively. “Background.”

  I left it, and walked around the crew looking for useful angles for pictures. The horses came out onto the course and cantered down to the start, and the frizzy-haired boy with the clapper board, who happened to be close to me, said with sudden and unexpected fierceness, “You’d think he was God Almighty. You’d think this was an epic, the way he frigs about. We’re making commercials. Half a second on screen, flash off. Huh!”

  I half smiled. “What’s the product?”

  “Some sort of brandy.”

  Lance Kinship came towards me and told me it was important that he should be included in my photographs, and that I should take them from where he would be prominently in shot.

  The frizzy-haired boy surreptitiously raised his eyebrows into comical peaks, and I assured Lance Kinship with a trembling straight face that I would do my absolute best.

  I did by good luck get one or two reasonable pictures, but no doubt George Millace and his inner eye and his motor-drive camera would have outstripped me by miles. Lance Kinship gave me a card with his address and told me again that he would buy the pictures if he liked them, right?

  He didn’t say for how much, and I didn’t like to ask.

  I would never be a salesman.

  Taking photographs for a living, I thought ruefully, would find me starving within a week.

  Reaching home I switched on the lights and drew the curtains, and sat by the kitchen table going again through George Millace’s rubbish box, thinking of his talents and his cruel mind, and wondering just how much profit he had made from his deadly photographs.

  It was true that if he’d left any more pictures in that box I wanted to decipher them. The urge to solve the puzzles was overpowering. But if I learned any more secrets, what would I do with them . . . and what ought I to do with those I already had?

  In a fairly typical manner I decided to do pretty well nothing. To let events take their course. To see what happened.

  Meanwhile there were those tantalizing bits that looked so pointless . . .

  I lifted out the black plastic light-proof envelope, which was of about the same size as the box and lying at the bottom of it, under everything else. I looked again at its contents, as I had in Steve Millace’s house, and saw again the page-sized piece of clear plastic, and also, what hadn’t registered before, two sheets of paper of about the same size.

  I looked at them briefly and closed them again into their light-proof holder, because it had suddenly occurred to me that George might not have stored them like that unless it was necessary. That plastic and that paper might bear latent images . . . which I might already have destroyed by exposing them to light.

  The piece of plastic and the sheets of paper didn’t actually look to me like photographic materials at all. They looked like a piece of plastic and two sheets of typing paper. If they bore latent images, I didn’t know how to develop them. If they didn’t, why had George kept them in a light-proof envelope?

  I sat staring vaguely at the silent black plastic and thinking about developers. To bring out the image on any particular type of film or any type of paper one had to use the right type of developer, the matched mixture of chemicals made for the task. All of which meant that unless I knew the make and type of the plastic and of the two sheets of paper I couldn’t get any further.

  A little pensively I pushed the black envelope aside and took up the strips of blank negatives, which at least didn’t have the built-in difficulty of being still sensitive to light. They had already been developed. They just looked as if they had held no latent images to bring out.

  They were thirty-five-millimeter color film negatives, and there were a lot of them, some simply blank and others blank with uneven magenta blotches here and there. The negatives were in strips, mostly of six. I laid them all out end to end and made the first interesting discovery.

  All the plain blank negatives had come from one film, and those with magenta blotches from another. The frame numbers along the top of each strip ran consecutively from one to thirty-six in each case. Two films of thirty-six exposures each.

  I knew what make of film they were, because each manufacturer placed the frame numbers differently, but I didn’t suppose that that was important. What might be important, however, was the very nature of color negatives.

  While slide films—transparencies—appeared to the eye in their true lifelike colors, negative film appeared in the reciprocal colors: and to get back to the true colors one had of course to make a print from the negative.

  The primary colors of light were blue, green and red. The reciprocal colors, in which they appeared on a negative, were yellow, magenta and cyan. Negatives therefore would have looked like mixtures of yellow, deep pink (magenta) and greeny-blue (cyan), except that to get good whites and highlights all manufacturers gave their negatives an overall pale orange cast. Color negatives therefore always looked a pale clear orange at the edges. The overall orange color also had the effect of masking the yellow sections so that they didn’t show to the eye as yellow bits of negative, but as orange.

  George Millace’s negatives looked a pale clear transparent orange throughout. Just suppose, I thought, that under the orange ther
e was an image in yellow, which at the moment didn’t show.

  If I printed those negatives, the yellow would become blue.

  An invisible yellow negative image could turn into a totally visible printed image in blue.

  Worth trying, I thought. I went into the darkroom and mixed the developing chemicals, and set up the color print processor. It meant waiting half an hour for the built-in thermostatic heaters to raise the various chemical baths to the correct temperatures, but after that the prints were conveyed automatically inside the closed processor from one bath to another on rollers, each sheet of photographic paper taking seven minutes to travel from entry to exit.

  I found out almost at once, by making contact prints, that under the orange masking there was indeed blue: but not blue images. Just blue.

  There were so many variables in color printing that searching for an image on blank negatives was like walking blindfold through a forest, and although in the end I printed every negative separately and tried every way I knew, I was only partially successful.

  I ended, in fact, with thirty-six solid blue oblongs, enlarged to four inches by five and printed four to a sheet, and thirty-six more with greenish blotches here and there.

  The only thing one could say, I thought, as I let them wash thoroughly in running water, was that George wouldn’t have taken seventy-two pictures of a blue oblong for nothing.

  I dried some of the prints and looked at them closely, and it did seem to me that there were faint darker marks on some of them. Nothing one could plainly see, but something.

  When it dawned on me far too late what George had done I was too tired to start all over again. I cleaned up the processor and everything else, and went to bed.

  Jeremy Folk telephoned early the next morning and asked if I’d been to see my grandmother.

  Give me time, I said, and he said I’d had time, and did I remember I had promised?

  “Well . . . I’ll go,” I said. “Saturday, after Ascot.”

  “What have you been doing?” he asked plaintively. “You could have gone any day this week. Don’t forget she really is dying.”

  “I’ve been working,” I said. “And printing.”

  “From that box?” he said suspiciously.

  “Uh huh.”

  “Don’t do it,” he said, and then, “What have you got?”

  “Blue prints. Blue pictures.”

  “What?”

  “Blue as in blue. Pure deep blue. Forty-seven B.”

  “What did you say? Are you sober?”

  “I am awake and yawning,” I said. “So listen. George Millace screwed a deep blue filter onto his camera and pointed it at a black-and-white picture, and he photographed the black-and-white picture through the blue filter onto color negative film. Forty-seven B is the most intense blue filter you can buy, and I bet that’s what he used.”

  “You’re talking Chinese.”

  “I’m talking Millace. Crafty double Millace. Second cousin to double Dutch.”

  “You really are drunk.”

  “Don’t be silly. As soon as I work out how to unscramble the blue, and do it, the next riveting Millace installment will fall into our hands.”

  “I seriously think you should burn the lot.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “You think of it as a game. It isn’t a game.”

  “No.”

  “For God’s sake be careful.”

  I said I would. One says things like that so easily.

  I went to Wincanton races in Wiltshire and rode twice for Harold and three times for other people. The day was dry with a sharp wind that brought tears to the eyes, tears which the standard of racing did nothing to dispel, since all the good horses had cried off and gone to Newbury or Ascot instead, leaving chances for the blundering majority. I fumbled and booted my way around five times in safety, and in the novice ’chase, owing to most of the field having fallen over each other at the first open ditch, found myself finishing in front, all alone.

  My mount’s thin little trainer greeted my return with a huge grin, tear-filled eyes and blue dripping nose.

  “By gum, lad, well done. By gum, it’s bloody cold. Get thee in and weighed. Don’t stand about. By gum, then, that was a bit of all right, wasn’t it, all them others falling?”

  “You’d schooled yours a treat,” I said, pulling off the saddle. “He jumped great.”

  His mouth nearly split its sides with pleasure. “By gum, lad, he’d jump Aintree, the way he went today. Get thee in. Get thee in.”

  I went in and weighed, and changed and weighed out, and raced, and returned, and changed and weighed . . .

  There had been a time, when it was all new, that my heart had pumped madly every time I walked from the changing room to the parade ring, every time I cantered to the start. After ten years my heart pumped above normal only for the big ones, the Grand National and so on, and then only if my horse had a reasonable chance. The once-fiendish excitement had turned to routine.

  Bad weather, long journeys, disappointments and injuries had at first been shrugged off as “part of the job.” After ten years I saw that they were the job. The peaks, the winners, those were the bonuses.

  The tools of my trade were a liking for speed and a liking for horses, and the power to combine those two feelings. Also strong bones, an ability to bounce, and a tendency to mend quickly when I didn’t.

  None of those tools, except probably the liking for horses, would be of the slightest use to me as a photographer.

  I walked irritably out to my car at the end of the afternoon. I didn’t want to be a photographer. I wanted to remain a jockey. I wanted to stay where I was, in the known; not to step irrevocably into the future. I wanted things to go on as they were, and not to change.

  Early the following morning Clare Bergen appeared on my doorstep accompanied by a dark young man whose fingertips in a handshake almost tingled with energy. Publishers, I had vaguely supposed, were portly father figures. Another out-of-date illusion gone bust.

  Clare herself had come in a bright woolly hat, bright scarf, afghan sheepskin jacket, yellow ski pants and huge fleece-lined boots. Ah well, I thought, she would only frighten half of the horses. The nervous half.

  I drove them up onto the Downs in the Land Rover borrowed from Harold for the occasion, and we watched a few strings work. Then I drove them round the village, pointing out which trainers lived where. Then I took them back to the cottage for coffee and cogitation.

  The publisher said he would like to poke round a little on foot, and walked off. Clare drank her second steaming cup and said how on earth did we bear it with a wind like that sawing everyone in half.

  “It always seems to be windy here,” I agreed, thinking about it.

  “All those naked hills.”

  “Good for horses.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever actually touched a horse.” She looked faintly surprised. “Most of the people I know despise horse people.”

  “Everyone likes to feel superior,” I said, uninsulted. “Particularly when they aren’t.”

  “Ouch,” she said. “That’s a damned fast riposte.”

  I smiled. “You’d be surprised the sort of hate that gets aimed at horses. Anything from sneers to hysteria.”

  “And you don’t mind?”

  “What those people feel is their problem, not mine.”

  She looked at me straightly with the wide gray eyes.

  “What hurts you?” she said.

  “People saying I jumped overboard when I went down with the ship.”

  “Er . . . what?”

  “People saying I fell off when it was the horse which fell, and took me with it.”

  “And there’s a distinction?”

  “Most important.”

  “You’re having me on,” she said.

  “A bit.” I took her empty cup and put it in the dishwasher. “So what hurts you?”

  She blinked, but after a pause she answered. “Being tho
ught to be a fool.”

  “That,” I said, “is a piercingly truthful reply.”

  She looked away from me as if embarrassed, and said she liked the cottage and the kitchen and could she borrow the bathroom. She emerged from there shortly minus the woolly hat and plus some fresh lipstick and asked if the rest of the house was on a par.

  “You want to see it?” I said.

  “Love to.”

  I showed her the sitting room, the bedroom, and finally the darkroom. “And that’s all,” I said.

  She turned slowly from the darkroom to where I stood behind her in the hall.

  “You said you took photographs.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “But I thought you meant . . .” She frowned. “Mother said I was short with you when you offered . . . but I’d no idea . . .”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s quite all right.”

  “Well . . . can I see them?”

  “If you like. They’re in that filing cabinet over there.”

  I pulled open one of the drawers and sorted through the folders. “Here you are, Lambourn village.”

  “What are all those others?” she said.

  “Just pictures.”

  “What of?”

  “Fifteen years.”

  She looked at me sharply as if I wasn’t making sense, so I added, “Since I owned my own camera.”

  “Oh.” She looked along the tags on the folders, reading aloud, “America, France, Children, Harold’s Place, Jockey’s Life . . . What’s Jockey’s Life?”

  “Just everyday living, if you’re a jockey.”

  “Can I look?”

  “Sure.”

  She eased the well-filled folder out of the drawer and peeped inside. Then she carried it away towards the kitchen and I followed with the pictures of Lambourn.

  She laid the folder she carried on the kitchen table and opened it, and went through the bulky contents picture by picture, steadily and frowning. No comments.

  “Can I see Lambourn?” she said.

  I gave her Lambourn, and she looked through those also in silence.

  “I know they’re not marvelous,” I said mildly. “You don’t have to rack your brains for something kind to say.”