by Dick Francis
‘Do it tomorrow,’ I said. ‘They won’t run away.’
She looked at me with a worried frown of indecision, and then round the comfortable little candlelit restaurant, and then at the shining glass and silver on the table and then back to me, and the frown dissolved into a smile of self-amusement.
‘All right. Tomorrow. The Lorrimores may be the icing on this cake but they’ve meant a lot of extra work.’
‘Who are the Lorrimores?’ I asked.
She looked at me blankly and answered obliquely, ‘Where do you live?’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘If I lived here, I would know the Lorrimores?’
‘You certainly wouldn’t ask who they are.’
‘I live in London,’ I said. ‘So please tell me.’
She was wearing, as so many women in business tended to, a navy suit and white blouse of such stark simplicity as to raise questions about the warmth of the soul. Women who dressed more softly, I thought inconsequentially, must feel more secure in themselves, perhaps.
‘The Lorrimores,’ Nell said, showing no insecurity, ‘are one of the very richest families of Toronto. Of Ontario. Of Canada, in fact. They are the society magazines’ staple diet. They are into banking and good works. They own mansions, endow art museums, open charity balls and entertain heads of state. There are quite a few of them, brothers, sisters and so on, and I’m told that in certain circles, if Mercer Lorrimore accepts an invitation and comes to your house, you are made for life.’ She paused, smiling. ‘Also he owns great racehorses, is naturally a pillar of the Ontario Jockey Club and has this private rail car which used to be borrowed regularly by campaigning politicians.’ She paused again for breath. ‘That’s who’s honouring our train – Mercer Lorrimore, the big chief of the whole clan, also Bambi, his wife, and their son Sheridan and their daughter Xanthe. What have I left out?’
I laughed. ‘Do you curtsey?’
‘Pretty nearly. Well, to be honest, Mercer Lorrimore sounds quite nice on the telephone but I haven’t met him yet or any of the others. And he phones me himself. No secretaries.’
‘So,’ I said, ‘if Mercer Lorrimore is on the train, it will be even more in the news from coast to coast?’
She nodded. ‘He’s going For the Benefit of Canadian Racing in capital letters on the Jockey Club’s PR handout.’
‘And is he eating in the dining car?’ I asked.
‘Don’t!’ She rolled her eyes in mock horror. ‘He is supposed to be. They all are. But we don’t know if they’ll retreat into privacy. If they stay in their own car, there might just be enough room for everyone else to sit down. It’s a shambles in the making though, and it was made by my boss selling extra tickets himself when he knew we were full.’ She shook her head over it, but with definite indulgence. The boss, it appeared, ranked high in her liking.
‘Who did he sell them to?’ I asked.
‘Just people. Two friends of his. And a Mr Filmer, who offered to pay double when he found there was no room. No one turns down an extra profit of that sort.’ She broke open a roll with the energy of frustration. ‘If only there was more room in the dining car, we could have sold at least six more tickets.’
‘David … er … Zak was saying the forty-eight seater was already stretching the actors’ vocal cords to the limit against the noise of the wheels on the rails.’
‘It’s always a problem.’ She considered me over the candle flame. ‘Are you married?’ she said.
‘No. Are you?’
‘Actually, no.’ Her voice was faintly defensive, but her mouth was smiling. ‘I invested in a relationship which didn’t work out.’
‘And which was some time ago?’
‘Long enough for me to be over it.’
The exchange cleared the ground, I thought, and maybe set the rules. She wasn’t looking for another relationship that was going nowhere. But dalliance? Have to see …
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.
‘About life in general.’
She gave me a dry look of disbelief but changed the subject back to the almost as compelling matter of trains, and after a while I asked her the question I’d had vaguely in mind all day.
‘Besides the special passes for the races, and so on,’ I said, ‘is there anything else an owner of a horse is entitled to? An owner, that is to say, of one of the horses travelling on the train?’
She was puzzled. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Are they entitled to any privileges that the other people in the special dining car don’t have?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Her brow wrinkled briefly. ‘Only that they can visit the horse car, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Yes, I know about that. So there’s nothing else?’
‘Well, the racecourse at Winnipeg is planning a group photograph of owners only, and there’s television coverage of that.’ She pondered. ‘They’re each getting a commemorative plaque from the Jockey Club when we get back on the train at Banff after the days in the mountains.’ She paused again. ‘And if a horse that’s actually on the train wins one of the special races, the owner gets free life membership of the clubs at all three racecourses.’
The last was a sizeable carrot to a Canadian, perhaps, but not enough on its own, surely, to attract Filmer. I sighed briefly. Another good idea down the drain. So I was left with the two basic questions, why was Filmer on the train, and why had he worked so hard to be an owner. And the answers were still I don’t know and I don’t know. Highly helpful.
We drank coffee, dawdling, easy together, and she said she had wanted to be a writer and had found a job with a publisher (‘which real writers never do, I found out’) but was very much happier with Merry & Co, arranging mysteries.
She said, ‘My parents always told me practically from birth that I’d be a writer, that it ran in the family, and I grew up expecting it, but they were wrong, though I tried for a long time, and then I was also living with this man who sort of bullied me to write. But, you know, it was such a relief the day I said to myself, some time after we’d parted and I’d dried my eyes, that I was not really a writer and never would be and I’d much rather do something else. And suddenly I was liberated and happier than I could remember. It seems so stupid, looking back, that it took me so long to know myself. I was in a way brainwashed into writing, and I thought I wanted it myself, but I wasn’t good enough when it came to the point, and it was such hard work, and I was depressed so much of the time.’ She half laughed. ‘You must think I’m crazy.’
‘Of course not. What did you write?’
‘I was writing for a women’s weekly magazine for a while, going to interview people and writing up their lives, and making up lives altogether sometimes if I couldn’t find anyone interesting or lurid enough that week. Don’t let’s talk about it. It was awful.’
‘I’m glad you escaped.’
‘Yes, so am I,’ she said with feeling. ‘I look different, I feel different, and I’m much healthier. I was always getting colds and flu and feeling ill, and now I don’t.’ Her eyes sparkled in the light, proving her right. ‘And you,’ she said, ‘you’re the same. Lighthearted. It shows all over you.’
‘Does it, indeed?’
‘Am I right?’
‘On the button, I suppose.’
And we were lucky, I thought soberly, paying the bill. Light-heartedness was a treasure in a world too full of sorrows, a treasure little regarded and widely forfeited to aggression, greed and horrendous tribal rituals. I wondered if the Fluted Point People had been lighthearted ten thousand years ago. But probably not.
Nell and I walked back to where she had parked her car near the office: she lived twenty minutes’ drive away, she said, in a very small apartment by the lake.
To say goodnight we kissed cheeks and she thanked me for the evening, saying cheerfully that she would see me on Sunday if she didn’t sink without trace under all the things she still had to do on the next day, Saturday. I watched her tail lights recede until she turned a corner,
then I walked back to the hotel, slept an untroubled night, and presented myself next morning at ten sharp in the Public Affairs office, at Union Station.
The Public Affairs officer, a formidably efficient lady, had gathered from Nell that I was one of the actors, as they had helped with actors before, and I didn’t change that understanding. She wheeled me back into the cavernous Great Hall of the station (which she briskly said was 250 feet long, 84 feet wide and had a tiled arched ceiling 88 feet above the floor) and led me through a heavy door into an undecorated downstairs duplication of the grandeur upstairs, a seemingly endless basic domain where the food and laundry and odd jobs of the trains got seen to. There was a mini power station also, and painting and carpentering going on all over the place.
‘This way,’ she said, clattering ahead on snapping heels. ‘Here is the uniform centre. They’ll see to you.’ She pushed open a door to let me through, said briefly, ‘Here’s the actor’ to the staff inside, and with a nod abandoned me to fate.
The staff inside were good natured and equally efficient. One was working a sewing machine, another a computer, and a third asked me what collar size I took.
There were shelves all round the room bearing hundreds of folded shirts of fine light grey and white vertical stripes, with striped collars, long striped sleeves and buttoned cuffs. ‘The cuffs must remain buttoned at all times unless you are washing dishes.’
Catch me, I thought mildly, washing dishes.
There were two racks of the harvest gold waistcoats on hangers. ‘All the buttons must be fastened at all times.’
There were row on row of mid-grey trousers and mid-grey jackets tidily hung, and boxes galore of grey, yellow and maroon striped ties.
My helper was careful that everything he gave me should fit perfectly. ‘VIA Rail staff at all times are well turned out and spotlessly clean. We give everyone tips on how to care for the clothes.’
He gave me a grey jacket, two pairs of grey trousers, five shirts, two waistcoats (which he called vests), two ties and a grey raincoat to go over all, and as he passed each garment as suitable he called out the size to the man with the computer. ‘We know the sizes of every VIA employee right across Canada.’
I looked at myself in the glass in my shirtsleeves and yellow waistcoat, and the waiter Tommy looked back. I smiled at my reflection. Tommy looked altogether too pleased with himself, I thought.
‘Comfortable?’ my helper asked.
‘Very.’
‘Don’t vary the uniform at all,’ he said. ‘Any variation would mark you out straight away as an actor.’
‘Thank you.’
‘This uniform,’ he said, ‘trousers, shirt, tie and vest, is worn by all male service attendants and assistant service attendants when on duty. That’s to say, the sleeping car attendants and the-dining car staff, except that sometimes they wear aprons in the dining car.’
‘Thank you,’ I said again.
‘The chief service attendant, who is in charge of the dining car, wears a grey suit, not a vest or an apron. That’s how you’ll know him.’
‘Right.’
He smiled. ‘They’ll teach you what to do. Now, we’ll lend you a locker for these clothes until Sunday morning. Collect the clothes and put them on in the changing room here before boarding, and take your own clothes with you onto the train. When you’ve finished with the VIA uniform, please see that we get it back.’
‘Right,’ I said again.
When I’d put my own clothes on once more, he took me along a few passages into a room with ultra-narrow lockers into which Tommy’s clothes barely slotted. He locked the metal door, gave me the key, showed me the way back into the Great Hall and smiled briefly.
‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘Don’t spill anything.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘very much.’
I went back to the hotel and had them arrange a car with a driver to take me to Woodbine, wait through the afternoon and bring me back. No trouble at all, they said, so as it was a nice bright autumn day with no forecast of rain I curled my hair and put on some sunglasses and a Scandinavian patterned sweater to merge into the crowd at the races.
It actually isn’t easy to remember a stranger’s face after a fleeting meeting unless one has a special reason for doing so, or unless there is something wholly distinctive about it, and I was reasonably certain no one going on the train would know me again even if I inadvertently stood next to them on the stands. I had spectacular proof of this, in fact, almost as soon as I’d paid my way into the paddock, because Bill Baudelaire was standing nearby, watching the throng coming in, and his eyes paused on me for a brief second and slid away. With his carroty hair and the acne scars, I thought, he would have trouble getting lost in a crowd.
I walked over to him and said, ‘Could you tell me the time, sir, please?’
He glanced at his watch but hardly at me and said, ‘One twenty-five,’ in his gravelly voice, and looked over my shoulder towards the gate.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’m Tor Kelsey.’
His gaze sharpened abruptly on my face and he almost laughed.
‘When Val told me about this I scarcely believed him.’
‘Is Filmer here?’ I asked.
‘Yes. He arrived for the lunch.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Thanks again.’ I nodded and walked on past him and bought a race-card, and when in a moment or two I looked back, he had gone.
The racecourse was packed with people and there were banners everywhere announcing that this was the opening event of The Great Transcontinental Mystery Race Train’s journey. Race Train Day, they economically said. There was a splendid colour photograph of a train crossing a prairie on the race-card’s cover. There were stalls selling red and white Race Train T-shirts, with a horse face to face with a locomotive across the chest. There were Race Train flags and scarves and baseball caps; and a scatter of young ladies with Support Canadian Racing sashes across their bosoms were handing out information leaflets. The PR firm, I thought with amusement, were leaving no one in any doubt.
I didn’t see Filmer until just before the Race Train’s special race, which had been named without subtlety The Jockey Club Race Train Stakes at Woodbine. I’d spent some of the afternoon reading the information in the race-card about the owners and their horses and had seen that whereas all the owners were on the train’s passenger list, none of the horses were. We would be taking fresh animals to Winnipeg and Vancouver.
Filmer wasn’t on the race-card as an owner, but Mrs Daffodil Quentin was, and when she came down to see the saddling of her runner, Filmer was with her, assiduous and smiling.
Daffodil Quentin had a big puff-ball hair arrangement of blonde curls above a middle-aged face with intense shiny red lipstick. She wore a black dress with a striped chinchilla coat over it: too much fur, I briefly thought, for the warmth of the afternoon sun.
There was hardly time to identify all the other owners as the pre-race formalities were over much more quickly than in England, but I did particularly look for and sort out Mercer Lorrimore.
Mercer Lorrimore, darling of the glossy mags, was running two horses in the race, giving it his loyal support. He was a man of average height, average build, average weight, and was distinguishable chiefly because of his well-cut, well-brushed full head of white hair. His expression looked reasonable and pleasant, and he was being nice to his trainer.
Beside him was a thin well-groomed woman whom I supposed to be his wife, Bambi: and in attendance were a supercilious looking young man and a sulking teenage girl. Son and daughter, Sheridan and Xanthe, no doubt.
The jockeys were thrown up like rainbow thistledown onto the tiny saddles and let their skinny bodies move to the fluid rhythm of the walking thoroughbreds. Out on the track with the horses’ gait breaking into a trot or canter they would be more comfortable standing up in the stirrups to let the bumpier rhythms flow beneath them, but on the way out from the parade ring they swayed languorously like a camel train.
I loved to watch them: never grew tired of it. I loved the big beautiful animals with their tiny brains and their overwhelming instincts and I’d always, all over the world, felt at home tending them, riding them and watching them wake up and perform.
The Lorrimore colours were truly Canadian, bright red and white like the maple leaf flag. Daffodil Quentin’s colours weren’t daffodil yellow but pale blue and dark green, a lot more subdued than the lady.
She and Filmer and all the other owners disappeared upstairs behind glass to watch the race, and I went down towards the track to wait and watch from near where the lucky owner would come down to greet his winner.
There were fourteen runners for the mile-and-a-half race and I knew nothing about the form of any of them except for the information on the race-card. In England I knew the current scene like a magnified city map, knew the thoroughfares, the back alleys, the small turnings. Knew who people knew, who they would turn to and turn away from, who they lusted after. In Canada, I was without radar and felt blind.
The Race Train Stakes at Woodbine, turning out to be hot enough in the homestretch to delight the Ontario Jockey Club’s heart, was greeted with roars and screams of encouragement from the stands. Lorrimore’s scarlet-and-white favourite was beaten in the last stride by a streak in pale blue-and-dark green and a good many of the cheers turned to groans.
Daffodil Quentin came down and passed close by me in clouds of chinchilla, excitement and a musky scent. She preened coquettishly, receiving compliments and the trophy, and Filmer, ever at her side, gallantly kissed her hand.
A let-off murderer, I thought, kissing an unproven insurance swindler. How very nice. Television cameras whirred and flash photographers outdid the sun.
I caught sight of Bill Baudelaire scowling, and I knew what John Millington would have said.
It was enough to make you sick.
CHAPTER SIX
On Saturday evening and early Sunday morning I packed two bags, the new suitcase from England and a softer holdall bought in Toronto.
Into the first I put the rich young owner’s suit, cashmere pullover and snowy shirts and into the second, the new younger-looking clothes for off-duty Tommy, jeans, sweatshirts, woolly hat and trainers. I packed the Scandinavian jersey I’d worn at Woodbine into the suitcase just in case it jogged anyone’s memory, and got dressed in dark trousers, open-necked shirt and a short zipped navy jacket with lighter blue bands round waist and wrists.