by Dick Francis
“Money,” Clare said crisply. “All the darling little Colleagues go out with saintly faces and collecting boxes, and rake in the cash.”
“To live on?”
“Sure, to live on. And to further the cause, or in other words, to line the pockets of our great leader.”
I made the tea and we sat by the table to drink it.
Amanda in a stableyard at Horley; Caroline twenty miles away at Pine Woods Lodge. Colleagues of Supreme Grace at Pine Woods Lodge, Colleagues ditto at Horley. Too close a connection to be a coincidence. Even if I never found out precisely what, there had been a rational sequence of events.
“She’s probably not still there,” I said.
“But you’ll go looking?”
I nodded. “Tomorrow, I think, after racing.”
When we’d finished the tea, Clare said she wanted to see the Jockey’s Life folder again, so we took it upstairs, and I showed some of the pictures blown up on the wall to amuse her, and we talked of her life and mine and of nothing in particular; and later in the evening we went to the good pub at Ashbury for a steak.
“A great day,” Clare said, smiling over the coffee. “Where’s the train?”
“Swindon. I’ll drive you there . . . or you could stay.”
She regarded me levelly. “Is that the sort of invitation I think it is?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.”
She looked down and fiddled with her coffee spoon, paying it a lot of attention. I watched the bent dark thinking head and knew that if it took her so long to answer, she would go.
“There’s a fast train at ten-thirty,” I said. “You could catch it comfortably. Just over an hour to Paddington.”
“Philip . . .”
“It’s all right,” I said easily. “If one never asks, one never gets.” I paid the bill. “Come on.”
She was distinctly quiet on the six-mile drive to the railway station, and she didn’t share her thoughts. Not until I’d bought her a ticket (against her objections) and was waiting with her up on the platform did she give any indication of what was in her mind, and then only obliquely.
“There’s a Board meeting in the office tomorrow,” she said. “It will be the first I’ve been to. They made me a director a month ago, at the last one.”
I was most impressed, and said so. It couldn’t be often that publishing houses put girls of twenty-two on the Board. I understood, also, why she wouldn’t stay. Why she might never stay. The regret I felt shocked me with its sudden intensity, because my invitation to her hadn’t been a desperate plea but only a suggestion for passing pleasure. I had meant it as a small thing, not a lifetime commitment. My sense of loss, on that railway platform, seemed out of all proportion.
The train came in and she climbed aboard, pausing with the door open to exchange kisses. Brief unpassionate kisses, no advance from Monday on the doorstep.
See you soon, she said, and I said yes. About contracts, she said. A lot to discuss.
“Come on Sunday,” I said.
“Let you know. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
The impatient train ground away, accelerating fast, and I drove home to the empty cottage with a most unaccustomed feeling of loneliness.
Newbury races, Friday, late November.
Lord White was there, standing under the expanse of glass roof outside the weighing room, talking earnestly to two fellow stewards. He looked the same as always, gray-white hair mostly hidden by trilby, brown covert coat over dark gray suit, air of benign good sense. Hard to imagine him high as a kite on love. Impossible, if one hadn’t seen it.
I had to pass near him to reach the weighing-room door. He steadfastly continued his conversation with the stewards, and only through the barest flicker of his eyes in my direction did he show he knew I was there. If he didn’t want to talk to me, I didn’t mind. Less embarrassing all around.
Inside the weighing room stood Harold, expansively telling a crony about a good place for cut-price new tires. Hardly pausing for breath he told me he’d wait for my saddle if I’d do him a favor and change and weigh quickly, and when I went back to him in colors he was still on about cross-ply and radials. The crony took the opportunity to depart, and Harold, taking my saddle and weightcloth, said with mischievous amusement, “Did you hear that Ghengis Khan got the boot?”
I paid him sharp attention.
“Are you sure?” I said.
Harold nodded. “Old Lanky”—he pointed to the disappearing crony—“was telling me just before you arrived. He says they held an emergency-type meeting of the Jockey Club this morning in London. He was at it. Lord White asked them to cancel plans for a committee chaired by Ivor den Relgan, and as it was old Driven Snow’s idea in the first place, they all agreed.”
“It’s something, anyway,” I said.
“Something?” Harold swung towards exasperation. “Is that all you think? It’s the best about-turn since the Armada.”
He stalked off with my saddle, muttering and shaking his head, and leaving me, had he but known it, in a state of extreme relief. Whatever else my visit to Lord White had done, it had achieved its primary object. At least, I thought gratefully, I hadn’t caused so much havoc in a man I liked for nothing at all.
I rode a novice hurdler, which finished second, pleasing the owner mightily and Harold not much, and later a two-mile ’chase on a sensitive mare who had no real heart for the job and had to be nursed. Getting her around at all was the best to be hoped for, a successful conclusion greeted by Harold with a grunt. As we had also finished fourth I took it for a grunt of approval, but one could never be sure.
When I was changing back into street clothes a racecourse official stepped into the big bustling jockeys’ room and shouted down the length of it, “Nore, you’re wanted.”
I finished dressing and went out into the weighing room, and found that the person who was waiting was Lord White.
“I want to talk to you,” he said. “Come over here into the stewards’ room . . . and close the door, will you?”
I followed him into the room off the weighing room used by the stewards for on-the-spot enquiries, and, as he asked, shut the door. He stood behind one of the chairs which surrounded the big table, grasping its back with both hands as if it gave him a shield, a barrier, the rampart of a citadel. “I regret,” he said formally, “what I imputed to you on Tuesday.”
“It’s all right, sir.”
“I was upset . . . but it was indefensible.”
“I do understand, sir.”
“What do you understand?”
“Well . . . that when someone hurts you, you want to kick them.”
He half smiled. “Poetically put, if I may say so.”
“Is that all, sir?”
“No, it isn’t.” He paused, pondering. “I suppose you’ve heard that the committee is canceled?”
I nodded.
He drew a sober breath. “I want to request den Relgan’s resignation from the Jockey Club. The better to persuade him, I am of a mind to show him those photographs, which of course he has seen already. I think, however, that I need your permission to do so, and that is what I am asking.”
Talk about leverage, I thought; and I said, “I’ve no objection. Please do what you like with them.”
“Are they . . . the only copies?”
“Yes,” I said, which in fact they were. I didn’t tell him I also had the negatives. He would have wanted me to destroy them, and my instincts were against it.
He let go of the chair back as if no longer needing it, and walked around me to the door. His face, as he opened it, bore the firm familiar blameless expression of pre-Dana days. The cruel cure, I thought, had been complete.
“I can’t exactly thank you,” he said civilly, “but I’m in your debt.” He gave me a slight nod and went out of the room: transaction accomplished, apology given, dignity intact. He would soon be busy persuading himself, I thought, that he hadn’t felt what he’d felt, tha
t his infatuation hadn’t existed.
Slowly I followed, satisfied on many counts, on many levels, but not knowing if he knew it. The profoundest gifts weren’t always those explicitly given.
From Marie Millace I learned more.
She had come to Newbury to see Steve ride now that his collarbone had mended, though she confessed, as I steered her off for a cup of coffee, that watching one’s son race over fences was an agony.
“All jockeys’ wives say it’s worse when their sons start,” I said. “Daughters too, I dare say.”
We sat at a small table in one of the bars, surrounded by people in bulky overcoats which smelled of cold damp air and seemed to steam slightly in the warmth. Marie automatically stacked to one side the debris of cups and sandwich wrappers left by the last customers, and thoughtfully stirred her coffee.
“You’re looking better,” I said.
She nodded. “I feel it.”
She had been to a hairdresser, I saw, and had bought some more clothes. Still pale, with smudged grieving eyes. Still fragile, inclined to sound shaky, tears under control but not far. Four weeks away from George’s death.
She sipped the hot coffee and said, “You can forget what I told you last week about the Whites and Dana den Relgan.”
“Can I?”
She nodded. “Wendy’s here. We had coffee earlier on. She’s very much happier.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“Are you interested? I’m not prattling on?”
“Very interested,” I assured her.
“She said that last Tuesday, sometime on Tuesday, her husband found out something he didn’t like about Dana den Relgan. She doesn’t know what. He didn’t tell her. But she said he was like a zombie all evening, white and staring and not hearing a word that was said to him. She didn’t know what was the matter, not then, and she was quite frightened. He locked himself away alone all Wednesday, but in the evening he told her his affair with Dana was over, and that he’d been a fool, and would she forgive him.”
I listened, amazed that women so easily relayed that sort of gossip, and pleased they did.
“And after that?” I said.
“Aren’t men extraordinary?” Marie Millace said. “After that he began to behave as if the whole thing had never happened. Wendy says that now he has confessed and apologized, he expects her to go on as before, as if he’d never gone off and slept with the wretched girl.”
“And will she?”
“Oh, I expect so. Wendy says his trouble was the common one among men of fifty or so, wanting to prove to themselves they’re still young. She understands him, you see.”
“So do you,” I said.
She smiled with sweetness. “Goodness, yes. You see it all the time.”
When we’d finished the coffee I gave her a short list of agents that she might try, and said I’d give any help I could. After that I told her I’d brought a present for her. I had been going to give it to Steve to give to her, but as she was there herself, she could have it: it was in my bag in the changing room.
I fetched out and handed to her a ten-by-eight-inch cardboard envelope which said “Photographs—Do Not Bend” along its borders.
“Don’t open it until you’re alone,” I said.
“I must,” she said, and opened it there and then.
It contained a photograph I’d taken once of George. George holding his camera, looking towards me, smiling his familiar sardonic smile. George in color. George in a typically George-like pose, one leg forward with his weight back on the other, head back, considering the world a bad joke. George as he’d lived.
There and then in full public view Marie Millace flung her arms round me and hugged me as if she would never let go, and I could feel her tears trickling down my neck.
15
Zephyr Farm Stables was indeed fortified like a stockade, surrounded by a seven-foot-high stout wooden fence and guarded by a gate that would have done credit to Alcatraz. I sat lazily in my car across the street from it, waiting for it to open.
I waited while the cold gradually seeped through my anorak and numbed my hands and feet. Waited while a few intrepid pedestrians hurried along the narrow path beside the fence without giving the gate a glance. Waited in the semisuburban street on the outskirts of Horley, where the streep lamps faltered to a stop and darkness lay beyond.
No one went in or out of the gate. It stayed obstinately shut, secretive and unfriendly, and after two fruitless hours I abandoned the chilly vigil and booked in to a local hotel.
Enquiries brought a sour response. Yes, the receptionist said, they did sometimes have people staying there who were hoping to persuade their sons and daughters to come home from Zephyr Farm Stables. Hardly any of them ever managed it, because they were never allowed to see their children alone, if at all. Proper scandal, said the receptionist, and the law can’t do a thing about it. All over eighteen, they are, see? Old enough to know their own minds. Phooey.
“I just want to find out if someone’s there,” I said.
She shook her head and said I didn’t have a chance.
I spent the evening drifting around hotels and pubs talking about the Colleagues to a succession of locals propping up the bars. The general opinion was the same as the receptionist’s: anything or anyone I wanted from Zephyr Farm Stables, I wouldn’t get.
“Do they ever come out?” I asked. “To go shopping, perhaps?”
Amid a reaction of rueful and sneering smiles I was told that yes indeed the Colleagues did emerge, always in groups, and always collecting money.
“They’ll sell you things,” one man said. “Try to sell you bits o’ polished stone and such. Just beggin’ really. For the cause, they say. For the love of God. Bunk, I say. I tell ’em to be off to church, and they don’t like that, I’ll tell ye.”
“Ever so strict, they are,” a barmaid said. “No smokes, no drinks, no sex. Can’t see what the nitwits see in it myself.”
“They don’t do no harm,” someone said. “Always smiling.”
Would they be out collecting in the morning, I asked. And if so, where?
“In the summer they hang about the airport all the time, scrounging from people going on holiday and sometimes picking someone up for themselves . . . recruits, like . . . but your best bet would be in the center of town. Right here. Saturday . . . they’re sure to be here. Sure to be.”
I thanked them all, and went to bed, and in the morning parked as near to the center as possible and wandered about on foot.
By ten o’clock the town was bustling with its morning trade, and I’d worked out that I would have to leave by eleven-thirty at the latest to get back to Newbury, and even that was cutting it a bit fine. The first race was at twelve-thirty because of the short winter days, and although I wasn’t riding in the first two, I had to be there an hour before the third, or Harold would be dancing mad.
I saw no groups of collecting Colleagues. No groups at all. No chanting people with shaven heads and bells, or anything like that. All that happened was that a smiling girl touched my arm and asked if I would like to buy a pretty paperweight.
The stone lay on the palm of her hand, wedge-shaped, greeny-brown and polished.
“Yes,” I said. “How much?”
“It’s for charity,” she said. “As much as you like.” She produced in her other hand a wooden box with a slit in the top but with no names of charities advertised on its sides.
“What charity?” I asked pleasantly, fishing for my wallet.
“Lots of good causes,” she said.
I sorted out a pound note, folded it, and pushed it through the slit.
“Are there many of you collecting?” I asked.
She turned her head involuntarily sideways, and I saw from the direction of her eyes that there was another girl offering a stone to someone waiting at a bus stop, and on the other side of the road, another. All pretty girls in ordinary clothes, smiling.
“What’s your name?”
I asked.
She broadened the smile as if that were answer enough, and gave me the stone. “Thank you very much,” she said. “Your gift will do so much good.”
I watched her move on down the street, pulling another stone from a pocket in her swirling skirt and accosting a kind-looking old lady. She was too old to be Amanda, I thought, though it wasn’t always easy to tell. Especially not, I saw a minute later as I stood in the path of another stone-seller, in view of the otherwordly air of saintliness they wore like badges.
“Would you like to buy a paperweight?”
“Yes,” I said, and we went through the routine again.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Susan,” she said. “What’s yours?”
I in my turn gave her the smile and the shake of the head, and moved on.
In half an hour I bought four paperweights. To the fourth girl I said, “Is Amanda out here this morning?”
“Amanda? We haven’t got a . . .” She stopped, and her eyes, too, went on a giveaway trek.
“Never mind,” I said, pretending not to see. “Thanks for the stone.”
She smiled the bright empty smile and moved on, and I waited a short while until I could decently drift in front of the girl she’d suddenly glanced at.
She was young, short, smooth-faced, curiously blank about the eyes, and dressed in an anorak and swirling skirt. Her hair was medium brown, like mine, but straight, not slightly curling, and there was no resemblance that I could see between our faces. She might or she might not be my mother’s child.
The stone she held out to me was dark blue with black flecks, the size of a plum.
“Very pretty,” I said. “How much?”
I got the stock reply, and gave her a pound.
“Amanda,” I said.
She jumped. She looked at me doubtfully. “My name’s not Amanda.”
“What then?”
“Mandy.”
“Mandy what?”
“Mandy North.”
I breathed very slowly, so as not to alarm her, and smiled, and asked her how long she had lived at Zephyr Farm Stables.
“All my life,” she said limpidly.