Reflex

by Dick Francis

  If he’d had a dagger and privacy, I wouldn’t have turned my back on him, as I did, to walk away.

  Lord White was there, deep in earnest conversation with fellow stewards, his gaze flicking over me quickly as if wincing. He would never, I supposed, feel comfortable when I was around. Never be absolutely sure that I wouldn’t tell. Never like my knowing what I knew.

  He would have to put up with it for a long time, I thought. One way or another the racing world would always be my world, as it was his. He would see me, and I him, week by week, until one of us died.

  Victor Briggs was waiting in the parade ring when I went out to ride Coral Key. A heavy brooding figure in his broad-brimmed hat and long navy overcoat: unsmiling, untalkative, gloomy. When I touched my cap to him politely, there was no response of any sort, only the maintenance of an expressionless stare.

  Coral Key was an oddity among Victor Briggs’ horses, a six-year-old novice ’chaser bought out of the hunting field when he had begun to show promise in point-to-points. Great horses in the past had started that way, like Oxo and Ben Nevis, which had both won the Grand National, and although Coral Key was unlikely to be of that class, it seemed to me that he, too, had the feel of good things to come. There was no way that I was going to mess up his early career, whatever my instructions. In my mind and very likely in my attitude I dared his owner to say he didn’t want him to try to win.

  He didn’t say it. He said nothing at all about anything. He simply watched me unblinkingly, and kept his mouth shut.

  Harold bustled about as if movement itself could dispel the atmosphere existing between his owner and his jockey; and I mounted and rode out to the course feeling as if I’d been in a strong field of undischarged electricity.

  A spark . . . an explosion . . . might lie ahead. Harold sensed it. Harold was worried to the depths of his own explosive soul.

  It might be the last race I ever rode for Victor Briggs. I lined up at the start thinking that it was no good speculating about that; that all I should be concentrating on was the matter in hand.

  A cold windy cloudy day. Good ground underfoot. Seven other runners, none of them brilliant. If Coral Key jumped as he had when I’d schooled him at home, he should have a good chance.

  I settled my goggles over my eyes and gathered the reins.

  “Come in, now, jockeys,” the starter said. The horses advanced towards the tapes in a slow line and as the gate flew up accelerated away from bunched haunches. Thirteen fences; two miles. I would find out pretty soon, I thought ruefully, if I wasn’t yet fit.

  Important, I thought, to get him to jump well. It was what I was best at. What I most enjoyed doing. There were seven fences close together down the far side of the course. If one met the first of them just right, they all fitted, but a brakes-on approach to the first often meant seven blunders by the end, and countless lengths lost.

  From the start there were two fences, then the uphill stretch past the stands, then the top bend, then the downhill fence where I’d stepped off Daylight. No problems on Coral Key: he cleared the lot. Then the sweep around to the seven trappy fences, and if I lost one length getting Coral Key set right for the first, by the end of the seventh I’d stolen ten.

  Still it was too soon for satisfaction. Around the long bottom curve Coral Key lay second, taking a breather. Three fences to go and the long hill to home. Between the last two fences I caught up with the leader. We jumped the last fence alongside, nothing between us. Raced up the hill, stretching, flying, doing everything I could.

  The other horse won by two lengths.

  Harold said, “He ran well,” a shade apprehensively, patting Coral Key in the unsaddling enclosure; and Victor Briggs said nothing.

  I pulled the saddle off and went in to weigh. There wasn’t any way that I could think of that I could have won the race. The other horse had had enough in hand to beat off my challenge. He’d been stronger than Coral Key, and faster. I hadn’t felt weak. I hadn’t thrown anything away in jumping mistakes. I just hadn’t won.

  I had needed a strong hand for talking to Victor Briggs; and I hadn’t got it.

  When life kicks you in the teeth, get caps.

  I won the other ’chase, the one that didn’t matter so much except to the owners, a junketing quartet of businessmen.

  “Bloody good show,” they said, beaming. “Bloody well ridden.”

  I saw Victor Briggs watching from ten paces away, balefully staring. I wondered if he knew how much I’d have given to have those two results reversed.

  Clare said, “I suppose the wrong one won?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How much does it matter?”

  “I’ll find out on Monday.”

  “Well . . . let’s forget it.”

  “Shouldn’t be difficult,” I said. I looked at the trim dark coat, the long polished boots. Looked at the large gray eyes and the friendly mouth. Incredible, I thought, to have someone like that waiting for me outside the weighing room. Quite extraordinarily different from going home alone. Like a fire in a cold house. Like sugar on strawberries.

  “Would you mind very much,” I said, “if we made a detour for me to call on my grandmother?”

  The old woman was markedly worse.

  No longer propped more or less upright, she sagged back without strength on the pillows; and even her eyes seemed to be losing the struggle, with none of the beady aggression glittering out.

  “Did you bring her?” she said.

  Still no salutation, no preliminaries. Perhaps it was a mistake to expect changes in the mind to accompany changes in the body. Perhaps my feelings for her were different and all that remained immutable was her hatred for me.

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t bring her. She’s lost.”

  “You said you would find her.”

  “She’s lost.”

  She gave me a feeble cough, the thin chest jerking. Her eyelids closed for a few seconds and opened again. A weak hand twitched at the sheet.

  “Leave your money to James,” I said.

  With a faint outer echo of persistent inner stubbornness, she shook her head.

  “Leave some to charity, then,” I said. “Leave it to a dog’s home.”

  “I hate dogs.” Her voice was weak. Not her opinions.

  “How about lifeboats?”

  “Hate the sea. Makes me sick.”

  “Medical research?”

  “Hasn’t done me much good, has it?”

  “Well,” I said slowly, “how about leaving it to a religious order of some sort.”

  “You must be mad. I hate religion. Cause of trouble. Cause of wars. Wouldn’t give them a penny.”

  I sat down unbidden in the armchair.

  Amanda was lost within her religion. Indoctrinated, cared for, perhaps loved: and fourteen formative years couldn’t be undone. Wrenching her out forcibly (even if one were able to) would inflict incalculable psychological damage. For her own sake one would have to leave her in peace, however stunted and alien that peace might seem. If one day she sought change of her own accord, so much the better. Meanwhile, it remained only to see that she was provided for.

  “Can I do anything for you?” I asked. “Besides, of course, finding Amanda. Can I fetch anything? Is there anything you want?”

  My grandmother raised a faint sneer. “Don’t think you can soft soap me into leaving any money to you, because I’m not going to.”

  “I’d give water to a dying cat,” I said. “Even if it spat in my face.”

  Her mouth opened and stiffened with affront.

  “How dare you?”

  “How dare you still think I’d shift a speck of dust for your money?”

  The mouth closed into a thin line.

  “Can I fetch you anything?” I said again, levelly. “Is there anything you want?”

  She didn’t answer for several seconds. Then she said, “Go away.”

  “Well, I will, in a minute,” I said. “But I want just to suggest somet
hing else.” I waited a fraction, but as she didn’t immediately argue I continued. “In case Amanda is ever found, why don’t you set up a trust for her? Tie up the capital tight with masses of excellent trustees. Make it so that she couldn’t ever get her hands on the money herself, nor could anyone who was perhaps after her fortune. Make it impossible for anyone but Amanda herself to benefit, with an income paid out only at the direction of the trustees.”

  She watched me with half-lowered eyelids.

  “Wherever she is,” I said, “Amanda is still only seventeen or eighteen. Too young to inherit a lot of money without strings. Leave it to her with strings like steel hawsers.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Mm.”

  She lay quiet, immobile.

  I waited. I had waited all my life for something other than malevolence from my grandmother. I could wait forever.

  “Go away,” she said.

  I stood up and said, “Very well.”

  Walked to the door. Put my hand on the knob.

  “Send me some roses,” my grandmother said.

  We found a flower shop still open in the town, though they were sweeping out, ready to close.

  “Doesn’t she realize it’s December?” Clare said. “Roses will cost a fortune.”

  “If you were dying, and you wanted roses, do you think you’d care?”

  “Maybe not.”

  All they had in the flower shop were fifteen very small pink buds on very long thin stems. Not much call for roses. These were left over from a wedding.

  We drove back to the nursing home and gave them to a nurse to deliver at once, with a card enclosed saying I’d get some better ones next week.

  “She doesn’t deserve it,” Clare said.

  “Poor old woman.”

  We stayed in a pub by the Thames which had old beams and good food and bedroom windows looking out to bare willows and sluggish brown water.

  No one knew us. We signed in as Mr. and Mrs. and ate a slow dinner, and went unobtrusively to bed. Not the first time she’d done it, she said: did I mind? Preferred it, I said. No fetishes about virgins? No kinks at all, that I knew of. Good, she said.

  It began in friendship and progressed to passion. Ended in breathlessness and laughter, sank to murmurs and sleep. The best it had ever been for me. I couldn’t tell about her, but she showed no hesitation about a repeat program in the morning.

  In the afternoon, in peaceful accord, we went to see Jeremy.

  He was lying in a high bed in a room of his own, with a mass of breathing equipment to one side. He was, though, breathing for himself. Precariously, I guessed, since a nurse came in to check on him every ten minutes while we were there, making sure that a bell-push remained under his fingers the whole time.

  He looked thinner than ever and grayly pale, but there had been no near-execution in his brain. The eyes were as intelligent as ever, and the silly-ass manner appeared strongly as a defense against the indignities of his position.

  I tried to apologize for what he’d suffered. He wouldn’t have it.

  “Don’t forget,” he said. “I was there because I wanted to be. No one exactly twisted my arm.” He gave me a traveling inspection. “Your face looks OK. How do you heal so fast?”

  “Always do.”

  “Always . . .” He gave a weak laugh. “Funny life you lead. Always healing.”

  “How long will you be in here?”

  “Three or four days.”

  “Is that all?” Clare said, surprised. “You look . . . er . . .”

  He looked whiter than the pillow his head lay on. He nodded, however, and said, “I’m breathing much better. Once there’s no danger the nerves will pack up again, I can go. There’s nothing else wrong.”

  “I’ll take you home if you need transport,” I said.

  “Might hold you to that.”

  We didn’t stay very long because talking clearly tired him, but just before we went he said, “You know, that gas was so quick. Not slow, like gas at the dentist. I’d no time to do anything. It was like breathing a brick wall.”

  Into a short reflective silence Clare said, “No one would have lived if they’d been there alone.”

  “Makes you think, what?” said Jeremy cheerfully.

  As we drove back towards the pub Clare said, “You didn’t tell him about Amanda.”

  “Plenty of time.”

  “He came down last Sunday because he’d got your message that you’d found her. He told me while we were in the kitchen. He said your phone was out of order, so he came.”

  “I’d unplugged it.”

  “Odd how things happen.”

  “Mm.”

  Our second night was a confirmation of the first. Much the same, but new and different. A tingling, fierce, gentle, intense, turbulent time. A matter, it seemed, as much to her liking as mine.

  “Where’s this depression one’s supposed to get?” she said, very late. “Post what’s-it.”

  “Comes in the morning, when you go.”

  “That’s hours off yet.”

  “So it is.”

  The morning came, as they do. I drove her to a station to catch a train, and went on myself to Lambourn.

  When I got there, before going to Harold’s, I called at my cottage. All seemed strangely unfamiliar, as if home was no longer the natural embracing refuge it should be. I saw for the first time the bareness, the emotional chill which had been so apparent to Jeremy on his first visit. It no longer seemed to fit with myself. The person who had made that home was going away, receding in time. I felt oddly nostalgic, but there was no calling him back. The maturing change had gone too far.

  Shivering a little I spread out on the kitchen table a variety of photographs of different people, and then I asked my neighbor Mrs. Jackson to come in and look at them.

  “What am I looking for, Mr. Nore?”

  “Anyone you’ve seen before.”

  Obliging she studied them carefully one by one, and stopped without hesitation at a certain face.

  “How extraordinary!” she exclaimed. “That’s the council man who came about the taxes. The one I let in here. Ever so sarcastic, the police were about that, but as I told them, you don’t expect people to say they’re tax assessors if they aren’t.”

  “You’re sure he’s the one?”

  “Positive,” she said, nodding. “He had that same hat on, and all.”

  “Then would you write on the back of the photo, for me, Mrs. Jackson?” I gave her a felt pen that would write boldly and blackly on the photographic paper, and dictated the words for her, saying that this man had called at the house of Philip Nore posing as a tax assessor on Friday, November 27th.

  “Is that all?” she asked.

  “Sign your name, Mrs. Jackson. And would you mind repeating the whole message on the back of this other photograph?”

  With concentration she did so. “Are you giving these to the police?” she said. “I don’t want them bothering me again really. Will they come back again with their questions?”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” I said.

  20

  Victor Briggs had come in his Mercedes, but he went up to the Downs with Harold in the Land Rover. I rode up on a horse. The morning’s work got done to everyone’s reasonable satisfaction, and we all returned variously to the stable.

  When I rode into the yard, Victor Briggs was standing by his car, waiting. I slid off the horse and gave it to one of the lads to see to.

  “Get in the car,” Victor said.

  No waster of words, ever. He stood there in his usual clothes, gloved as always against the chilly wind, darkening the day. If I could see auras, I thought, his would be black.

  I sat in the front passenger seat, where he pointed, and he slid himself in beside me, behind the steering wheel. He started the engine, released the brake, put the automatic gear into drive. The quiet hunk of metal eased out of Lambourn, going back to the Downs.

  He stopped on a wide piece
of grass verge from where one could see half of Berkshire. He switched off the engine, leaned back in his seat, and said, “Well?”

  “Do you know what I’m going to say?” I asked.

  “I hear things,” he said. “I hear a lot of things.”

  “I know that.”

  “I heard that den Relgan set his goons on you.”

  “Did you?” I looked at him with interest. “Where did you hear that?”

  He made a small tight movement of his mouth, but he did answer. “Gambling club.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “True, isn’t it?” he said. “You still had the marks on Saturday.”

  “Did you hear any reasons?”

  He produced the twitch that went for a smothered smile.

  “I heard,” he said, “that you got den Relgan chucked out of the Jockey Club a great deal faster than he got in.”

  He watched my alarmed surprise with another twitch, a less successful effort this time at hiding amusement.

  “Did you hear how?” I said.

  He said with faint regret. “No. Just that you’d done it. The goons are talking. Stupid bone-headed bull-muscle. Den Relgan’s heading for trouble, using them. They never keep their mouths shut.”

  “Are they . . . um . . . out for general hire?”

  “Chuckers out at a gaming club. Muscle for hire. As you say.”

  “They beat up George Millace’s wife. Did you hear that too?”

  After a pause he nodded, but offered no comment.

  I looked at the closed expression, the dense whitish skin, the black shadow of beard. A secretive, solid, slow-moving man with a tap into a world I knew little of. Gaming clubs, hired bully-boys, underworld gossip.

  “The goons said they left you for dead,” he said. “A week later, you’re winning a race.”

  “They exaggerated,” I said dryly.

  I got a twitch but also a shake of the head. “One of them was scared. Rattled. Said they’d gone too far with the boots.”

  “You know them well?” I said.

  “They talk.”

  There was another pause, then I said without emphasis, “George Millace sent you a letter.”

  He moved in his seat, seeming almost to relax, breathing out in a long sigh. He’d been waiting to know, I thought. Patiently waiting. Answering questions. Being obliging.