by Dick Francis
I looked from him to den Relgan, who was using Dana, instead, for much the same purpose. Nothing sad or pathetic, though, about Ivor den Relgan. A bully boy on the march, power hungry and complacent, a trampler of little men.
I went up to him, and in an ingratiating voice, which after years of buttering up owners I could regrettably do quite convincingly, thanked him again for the gifts he had scattered at Kempton.
“The silver saddle . . . thought I must tell you,” I said. “Great to have around, just to look at.”
“So glad,” he said, his gaze passing over me without interest. “My daughter selected it.”
“Splendid taste,” Lord White said fondly, and I said directly to Dana, “Thank you very much.”
“So glad,” she murmured also with an almost identical lack of interest.
“Please do tell me,” I said, “whether it is unique, or whether it is one of many.”
I moved a step or two so that to answer she had to turn away from the two men, and almost before she had finished replying that it was the only one she’d seen, but she couldn’t be certain . . . I said to her quietly, “Lance Kinship is here, wanting to see you.”
“Oh.” She glanced quickly to the two men, returned Lord White’s automatic smile with a dazzling one of her own, and softly said to me, “Where?”
“After the third race in a private box.” I gave her the number.
“So glad you liked the saddle,” she said clearly, turning back towards Lord White. “Isn’t it fun,” she said to him, “to give pleasure?”
“My dear girl,” he said roguishly, “you give pleasure just by being yourself.”
Enough to bring angels to tears, I thought.
I wandered away and by a roundabout route arrived at Lance Kinship’s side. “She got the message,” I said, and he said, “Good,” and we arranged for me to give him his pictures outside the weighing room during the running of the last race.
Daylight’s race was third on the card, and Chainmail’s fourth. When I went out for the third I was stopped on my way from weighing room to parade ring by a pleasant-mannered woman who I realized with delayed shock was Marie Millace.
Marie Millace with scarcely a trace showing of the devastation of her face. Mrs. Millace on her feet, dressed in brown, pale and ill-looking, but healed.
“You said there wouldn’t be a mark,” she said, “and there isn’t.”
“You look great.”
“Can I talk to you?”
I looked to where all the other jockeys I’d started out with were already filing into the parade ring. “Well . . . how about later? How about . . . um . . . after the fourth race? After I’ve changed. Somewhere warm.”
She mentioned a particular bar, and we agreed on it, and I went on to the ring where Harold and Victor Briggs waited. Neither of them said anything to me, nor I to them. Everything of importance had already been said and for the unimportant there was no appetite. Harold gave me a leg up onto Daylight, and I nodded to him and Victor and got a grade-one blank Briggs stare in return.
There was no certainty that day that Daylight would win. With much stronger opponents, he wasn’t even favorite, let alone odds-on.
I cantered down to the starting gate thinking about courage, which was not normally a word I found much in my mind. The process of getting a horse to go fast over jumps seemed to me merely natural, and something I very much liked doing. One knew theoretically that there would be falls and injuries, but the risk of them seldom affected the way I rode. I had no constant preoccupation with my own safety.
On the other hand I’d never been reckless, as some were, as Steve Millace was, and perhaps my aim had been a little too much to bring myself and the horse back together, and not enough to throw my heart over the fence and let the horse catch up if he could.
It was the latter style of riding that Victor Briggs would expect on that day. My own fault, I thought. And moreover I’d have to do it twice.
On Daylight it turned out to be fairly easy, as his jumping style held good enough though I could sense his surprise at the change of mental gears in his rider. The telepathic quality of horses, that remarkable extra sense, picked up instantaneously the strength of my intention, and although I knew horses did tune in in that way, it freshly amazed me. One got used to a certain response from horses, because it was to oneself they were responding. When one’s own cast of mind changed radically, so did the horse’s response.
Daylight and I therefore turned in what was for us a thoroughly uncharacteristic performance, leaving more to luck than judgment. He was accustomed to measure his distance from a fence and alter his stride accordingly; but infected by my urgency he began not to do that but simply to take off when he was vaguely within striking distance of getting over. We hit the tops of three fences hard, which was unheard of for him, and when we came to the last and met it right we raced over it as if it had been but a shadow on the ground.
Hard as we tried, we didn’t win the race. Although we persevered to the end, a stronger, faster, fitter—whatever—horse beat us into second place by three lengths.
In the unsaddling enclosure I unbuckled the girths while Daylight panted and rocketed around in a highly excitable state, which was a world away from his “placid cow” image; and Victor Briggs watched without giving a thought surface life.
“Sorry,” I said to Harold, as he walked in with me to the scales.
He grunted, and said merely, “I’ll wait for your saddle.”
I nodded, went into the changing room for a change of lead weights in the weight cloth and returned to the scales to check out for Chainmail.
“Don’t kill yourself,” Harold said, taking my saddle. “It won’t prove anything except that you’re a bloody fool.”
I smiled at him. “People die crossing the road.”
“What you’re doing is no accident.”
He walked off with the saddle and I noticed that he had not in fact instructed me to return to a more sober style of his second runner. Perhaps he too, I reflected, wanted Victor to run his horses straight, and if this was the only way to achieve that, well . . . so be it.
With Chainmail things were different to the extent that the four-year-old hurdler was unstable to begin with, and what I was doing to him was much like urging a juvenile delinquent to go mugging. The rage within him, which made him fight against the jockey and duck out at the jumps and bite other horses, needed to be controlled by a calm mind and steady handling: or so I’d always thought.
On that day he didn’t get it. He got a rider prepared to overlook every aggressive act except that of ducking out, and when he tried that at the third hurdle he got such a fierce slash from my whip that I could almost feel him thinking resentfully, “Hey, that’s not like you,” and it wasn’t.
He fought and scrambled and surged and flew. I went with him to his ultimate speed, to total disregard of good sense. I did without any reservation ride my bloody guts out for Victor Briggs.
It wasn’t enough. Chainmail finished third in a field of fourteen. Undisgraced. Better, probably, than one would realistically have expected. Beaten only by a length and a neck. But still third.
Victor Briggs unsmilingly watched me pull the saddle off his second stamping, tossing, hepped-up horse. I wrapped the girths around the saddle and paused for a moment face to face with him. He said nothing at all, nor did I. We looked with equal blankness into each other’s eyes for a space of seconds, and then I went on, past him, away to the scales.
When I had changed and come out again, he was nowhere in sight. I had needed two winners to save my job, and got none. Recklessness wasn’t enough. He wanted winners. If he couldn’t have certain winners, he’d want certain losers. Like before. Like three years ago. Like when I and my soul were young.
With a deep feeling of weariness I went to meet Marie Millace in the appointed bar.
12
She was sitting in an armchair deep in conversation with another woman, whom I foun
d to my surprise to be Lady White.
“I’ll come back later,” I said, preparing to retreat.
“No, no,” Lady White said, standing up. “I know Marie wants to talk to you.” She smiled with all her own troubles showing in lines of anxiety, her eyes screwed up as if in permanent pain. “She tells me you’ve been so helpful.”
“Nothing,” I said, shaking my head.
“Not what she says.”
The two women smiled and kissed cheeks, and said goodbye, and Lady White with a nod and another vague smile for me made her way out of the bar. I watched her go; a thin defeated lady trying to behave as if the whole racing world were not aware of her discomfiture, and not altogether succeeding.
“We were at school together,” Marie Millace said. “We shared a bedroom, in our last year there. I’m very fond of her.”
“You know about . . . er . . . ?”
“About Dana den Relgan? Yes.” She nodded. “Would you like a drink?”
“Let me get you one.”
I fetched a gin and tonic for her and some Coke for me, and sat in the armchair Lady White had left.
The bar itself, an attractive place of bamboo furniture and green and white colors, was seldom crowded and often, as on that day, almost empty. Tucked away up on the stands far away from the parade ring and the bookmakers, it was a better place for talking than for following the horses, and as such was also warm where most of the stands were not. Semi-invalids tended to spend a lot of time there, with nephews and nieces scurrying backward and forward with Tote tickets.
Marie Millace said, “Wendy . . . Wendy White . . . was asking me if I thought her husband’s affair with Dana den Relgan would just blow over. But I don’t know. I couldn’t tell her. How could I tell her? I said I was sure it would . . .” She paused, and when I didn’t answer, said, “Do you think it will?”
“Not for a while, I wouldn’t think.”
She gloomily swilled the ice around in her drink. “Wendy says he’s been away with her. He took her to some friends overnight. He told Wendy he was going to shoot, which she finds boring. She hasn’t gone with him to shooting parties for years. But he took Dana den Relgan with him this week, and Wendy says when the party went out with the guns, her husband and Dana den Relgan stayed in the house. I suppose I shouldn’t be telling you all this. She heard it from someone who was there. You’re not to repeat what I’ve just said. You won’t, will you?”
“Of course not.”
“It’s so awful for Wendy,” Marie Millace said. “She thought it was all over long ago.”
“All over? I thought it had just started.”
She sighed. “Wendy says her husband fell like a ton of bricks for this Dana creature months ago, but then the wretched girl faded off the scene and didn’t go racing at all, and Wendy thought that he’d stopped seeing her. And now she’s back in full view and it’s obvious to everyone, Wendy says, that her husband is more overpoweringly in love than ever, and also proud of it. I’m so sorry for Wendy. It’s all so horrid.” She looked genuinely sympathetic, and yet her troubles, by any standard, were much worse.
“Do you know Dana den Relgan yourself?” I asked.
“No, not at all. George knew her, I think. Or at least he knew her by sight. He knew everyone. He said when we were in St. Tropez last summer that he thought he’d seen her there one afternoon, but I don’t know if he meant it; he was laughing when he said it.”
I drank some Coke and asked her conversationally if she and George had enjoyed St. Tropez, and if they had been there often. Yes they had loved it, and no, only once. George as usual had spent most of the time glued to his camera, but he and Marie had lain on their balcony looking out to sea every afternoon and had tanned marvelously . . .
“Anyway,” she said, “that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about. I wanted to thank you for your kindness and ask you about that exhibition you suggested . . . and about how I might make some money out of those photographs. Because . . . and I know it’s a sordid subject . . . I’m going to need . . . er . . .”
“Everyone needs,” I said comfortingly. “But didn’t George leave things like insurance policies?”
“Yes. Some. And I’ll have the money for the house, though not its full value, unfortunately. But it won’t be enough to live on, not with inflation and everything.”
“Didn’t George,” I asked delicately, “have any . . . well . . . savings . . . in any separate bank accounts?”
Her friendly expression began to change to suspicion. “Are you asking me the same sort of things as the police?”
“Marie . . . think of the burglaries, and your face, and the arson.”
“He wasn’t,” she said explosively. “George wouldn’t . . . I told you before. Don’t you believe me?”
I sighed and didn’t answer, and asked her if she knew which friend George had stopped for a drink with, on his way back from Doncaster.
“Of course I know. He wasn’t a friend. Barely an acquaintance. A man called Lance Kinship. George rang me from Doncaster in the morning, as he often did when he stayed away overnight, and he mentioned he’d be half an hour or so late as he was calling at this man’s house, as it was on his way home. This Lance Kinship wanted George to take some pictures of him working. He’s a film director, or something. George said he was a pernicious self-deluding little egotist, but if he flattered him he’d pay well. That was almost the last thing he said to me.” She took a deep breath and tried to control the tears which stood suddenly in her eyes. “I’m so sorry . . .” She sniffed and straightened her face with an effort, fishing in her pocket for a handkerchief.
“It’s natural to cry,” I said. It was only three weeks, after all, since George had died.
“Yes, but . . .” She tried to smile. “Not at the races.” She wiped the edge of the handkerchief along under her lower eyelids and sniffed again. “The very last thing he said,” she said, trying too hard, “was to ask me to buy some Ajax window cleaner. It’s stupid, isn’t it? I mean, except for saying ‘see you,’ the last thing George ever said to me was, ‘Get some Liquid Ajax, will you?’ and I don’t even know . . .” She gulped. The tears were winning. “I don’t even know what he wanted it for.”
“Marie . . .” I held my hand out towards her and she gripped it as fiercely as at the hospital.
“They say you always remember the last thing that someone you love says to you . . .” Her lips quivered hopelessly.
“Don’t think about it now,” I said.
“No.”
She wiped her eyes again and held onto my hand, but presently the turmoil subsided and she loosened her grip and gave a small laugh of embarrassment: and I asked her if there had been an autopsy.
“Oh . . . alcohol, do you mean? Yes, they tested his blood. They said it was below the limit . . . he’d only had two small whiskies with that Kinship. The police asked him . . . Lance Kinship . . . after I told them about George planning to stop there. He wrote to me, you know, saying he was sorry. But it wasn’t his fault. I’d told George over and over to be careful. He often got dozy when he’d been driving a long way.”
I told her how it happened that Lance Kinship had asked me to take photographs that George had been going to do, and she was more interested than I had expected.
“George always said you’d wake up one day and pinch his market.” She produced a wavery smile to make it the joke it had undoubtedly been. “I wish he knew. I wish . . . oh dear, oh dear.”
We just sat for a while until the fresh tears subsided, and she apologized again for them, and again I said one would expect them.
I asked for her address so that I could put her in touch with an agent for George’s work, and she said she was staying with some friends who lived near Steve. She didn’t know, she said forlornly, where she would be going from there. Because of the arson she had no clothes except the few ones she was wearing. No furniture. Nothing to make a home of. Worse . . . much worse . . . she had no photograph o
f George.
By the time I left Marie Millace, the fifth race had been run. I went straight out to the car to fetch Lance Kinship’s pictures, and returned towards the weighing room to find Jeremy Folk standing outside the door on one leg.
“You’ll fall over,” I said.
“Oh . . . er . . .” He put the foot down gingerly, as if to stand on two legs made him more positively there. “I thought . . . er . . .”
“You thought if you weren’t here I might not do what you want.”
“Er . . . yes.”
“You may well be right.”
“I came here by train,” he said contentedly, “so can you take me with you to St. Albans?”
“I guess I’ll have to.”
Lance Kinship, seeing me there, came over to collect his prints. I introduced him and Jeremy to each other out of habit, and added for Jeremy’s sake that it was at Lance Kinship’s house that George Millace had taken his last drink.
Kinship, untucking the flap of the stiffened envelope, gave each of us a sharp glance followed by a sorrowful shake of the head.
“A great fellow, George,” he said. “Too bad.”
He pulled the pictures out of the envelope and looked through them with his eyebrows rising even higher above his spectacle frames.
“Well, well,” he said. “I like them. How much do you want?”
I mentioned a figure which I thought exorbitant, but he merely nodded, pulled out a stuffed wallet, and paid me there and then in cash.
“Reprints?” he said.
“Certainly. They’d be less.”
“Get me two sets,” he said. “Right?”
As before, the last “t” of “right” stuck somewhere in his throat.
“Complete sets?” I said surprised. “All of them?”
“Sure. All of them. Very nice, they are. Want to see?”
He flicked them invitingly at Jeremy, who said he’d like to see them very much; and he too inspected them with his eyebrows rising.
“You must be,” he said to Kinship, “a director of great note.”