by Dick Francis
“Tomorrow,” I said, “is the opening day of the main Flat racing season in England.”
“I know it.”
“They run the Lincoln Handicap on Saturday.”
Nash nodded. “At Doncaster. Where's Doncaster?”
“Seventy miles north of here. Less than an hour by helicopter. Do you want to go?”
Nash stared. “You're bribing me!”
“What about insurance?”
“I cleared it with O'Hara.”
“Be damned!” he said.
He stood up abruptly in amused good humour and began measuring his distances in paces round the set.
“It says in the script,” he said, “that I stand on the mat. Is this the mat, this thing across the open end of the table?”
“Yes. It's actually a bit of carpet. Historically the person accused at a Newmarket horseracing enquiry had to stand there, on the carpet, and that's the origin of the phrase, to be carpeted.”
“Poor bastards.”
He stood on the carpet and quietly said his lines, repeating and memorising them, putting in pauses and gestures, shifting his weight as if in frustration and finally marching the inside distance of the horseshoe to lean menacingly over the top chair, which would contain Gibber, the inquisitor.
“And I yell,” he said.
“Yes,” I agreed.
With the fury at that point silent, he murmured the shout of protest, and in time returned to his former seat beside me.
“What happened to those people in real life?” he asked. “Howard swears what he's written are the true events. O'Hara tells me you're sure they're not, because no one's screaming foul. So what really did happen?”
I sighed. “Howard's guessing. Also he's playing safe. For a start, none of the people who were really involved are called by their real names in his book. And I don't honestly know more than anyone else, because it all happened in this town twenty-six years ago, when I was only four. I can't remember even hearing about it then, and in any case the whole thing fizzled out. The trainer you're playing was a man called Jackson Wells. His wife was found hanged in one of the boxes in his stable yard, and a lot of people thought he'd done it. His wife had had a lover. His wife's sister was married to a member of the Jockey Club. That's about as far as the known facts go. No one could ever prove Jackson Wells had hanged his wife and he swore he hadn't.”
“Howard says he's still alive.”
I nodded. “The scandal finished him in racing. He could never prove he hadn't hanged his wife and although the Jockey Club didn't actually take away his licence, people stopped sending him horses. He sold his place and bought a farm in Oxfordshire, I think, and got married again. He must be nearly sixty now, I suppose. There apparently hasn't been any reaction at all from him, and Howard's book's been out over a year.”
“So he won't come bursting onto the set here swinging a noose to lynch me.”
“Believe in his innocence,” I said.
“Oh, I do.”
“Our film is fiction,” I said. “The real Jackson Wells was a middle-ability man with a middle-sized training stable and no outstanding personality. He wasn't the upper-class powerful figure in Howard's book, still less was he the tough, wronged, resourceful conqueror we'll make of you before we're done.”
“O'Hara promised an up-beat ending.”
“He'll get it.”
“But the script doesn't say who did hang the wife, only who didn't.”
I said, “That's because Howard doesn't know and can't make up his mind what to invent. Haven't you read Howard's book?”
“I never read the books scripts are written from. I find it's too often confusing and contradictory.”
“Just as well,” I said, smiling. “In Howard's book your character is not having an affair with his wife's sister.”
“Not?' He was astonished. He'd spent a whole busy day tumbling about in bedclothes half naked with the actress playing his wife's sister. “However did Howard agree to that!”
I said, “Howard also agreed that Gibber, the sister-in-law's husband, should find out about the affair so that Gibber could have an overpowering reason for his persecution of your character; in fact, for the scene you're playing here tomorrow.”
Nash said disbelievingly, “And none of that was in Howard's book?”
I shook my head. O'Hara had leaned on Howard from the beginning to spice up the story, in essence warning him “No changes, no movie.” The shifts of mood and plotline that I'd recently introduced were as nothing compared with O'Hara's earlier manipulations. With me, Howard was fighting a rearguard action, and with luck he would lose that too.
Nash said bemusedly, “Is the real Gibber still alive as well? And how about the wife's sister?”
“About her, I don't know. The real Gibber died three or so years ago. Apparently someone dug up this old story about him, which is what gave Howard the idea for his book. But the real Gibber didn't persecute Jackson Wells as relentlessly as he does in the film. The real Gibber had little power. It was all a pretty low-key story, in reality. Nothing like O'Hara's version.”
“Or yours.”
“Or mine.”
Nash gave me a straight look verging on the suspicious and said, “What are you not telling me about more script changes?”
I liked him. I might even trust him. But I'd learned the hard way once that nothing was ever off the record. The urge to confide had to be resisted. Even with O'Hara, I'd been reticent.
“Devious,” O'Hara had called me. “An illusionist.”
“It's what's needed.”
“I'll not deny it. But get the conjuring right.”
Conjurors never explained their tricks. The gasp of surprise was their best reward.
“I'll always tell you,” I said to Nash, “what your character would be feeling in any given scene.”
He perceived the evasion. He thought things over in silence for a long full minute while he decided whether or not to demand details I might not give. In the end, what he said was, “Trust is a lot to ask.”
I didn't deny it. After a pause he sighed deeply as if in acceptance, and I supposed he'd embraced blind faith as a way out if the whole enterprise should fail. “One should never trust a director...”
In any case he bent his head to his script, reading it again swiftly, then he stood up, left the pages on the table and repeated the whole scene, speaking the lines carefully, forgetting them only once, putting in the pauses, the gestures, the changes of physical balance, the pouncing advance down the horseshoe and the over-towering anger at the end.
Then, without comment, he went through the whole thing again. Even without much sound, the emotion stunned: and he'd put into the last walk-through even the suggestion that he could be a killer, a murderer of wives, however passionately he denied it.
This quiet, concentrated mental vigour, I saw, was what had turned a good actor into a mega-star.
I hadn't been going to shoot the scene in one long take, but his performance changed my mind. He'd given it a rhythm and intensity one couldn't get from cutting. The close shot of Gibber's malevolence could come after.
“Thanks for this,” Nash said, breaking off.
His smile was ironic. “I hear I'm the green light around here.”
“I ride on your coat tails.”
“You,” he said, “do not need to grovel.”
We left the set and the house and signed ourselves out with the night-watchman. Nash was driven away in the Roller by his chauffeur, and I returned to Bedford Lodge for a final long session with Moncrieff, discussing the visual impacts and camera angles of tomorrow's scene.
I was in bed by midnight. At five, the telephone rang beside my head.
Dorothea's wavery voice, apologetic.
“I'm on my way,” I said.
CHAPTER THREE
Valentine was dead.
When I arrived at his house I found not the muted private grief I expected, but a showy car, not the doctor's
or the priest's, parked at the kerbside, and bright lights behind the curtains in every window.
I walked up the concrete path to the closed front door and rang the bell.
After a long pause the door was opened, but not by Dorothea. The man filling the entry was large, soft and unwelcoming. He looked me up and down with a practised superciliousness and said, almost insultingly, “Are you the doctor?”
“Er... no.”
“Then what do you want so early?”
A minor civil servant, I diagnosed: one of those who enjoyed saying no. His accent was distantly Norfolk, prominently London-suburban and careful.
“Mrs Pannier asked me to come,” I said without provocation. “She telephoned.”
“At this hour? She can't have done.”
“I'd like to speak to her,” I said.
“I'll tell her someone called.”
Down in the hall behind him, Dorothea appeared from her bathroom and, seeing me, hurried towards the front door.
“Thomas! Come in, dear.” She beckoned me to sidle past the blockage. “This is my son, Paul,” she explained to me. “And Paul, this is Valentine's friend Thomas, that I told you about.”
“How is he?” I asked. “Valentine?”
Her face told me.
“He's slipped away, dear. Come in, do. I need your help.” She was flustered by this son whom she'd described as pompous and domineering; and nowhere had she exaggerated. Apart from his hard bossy stare he sported a thin dark moustache and a fleshy upturned nose with the nostrils showing from in front. The thrust-forward chin was intended to intimidate, and he wore a three-piece important dark blue suit with a striped tie even at that hour in the morning. Standing about five feet ten, he must have weighed well over fourteen stone.
“Mother,” he said repressively, “I'm all the help you need. I can cope perfectly well by myself.” He gestured to me to leave, a motion I pleasantly ignored, edging past him, kissing Dorothea's sad cheek and suggesting a cup of tea.
“Of course, dear. What am I thinking of? Come into the kitchen.”
She herself was dressed in yesterday's green skirt and jumper and I guessed she hadn't been to bed. The dark rings of tiredness had deepened round her eyes and her plump body looked shakily weak.
“I phoned Paul later, long after you'd gone, dear,” she said almost apologetically, running water into an electric kettle. “I felt so lonely, you see. I thought I would just warn him that his uncle's end was near...”
“So, of course, although it was already late, I set off at once,” Paul said expansively. “It was only right. My duty. You should never have been here alone with a dying man, mother. He should have been in hospital.”
I lifted the kettle from Dorothea's hands and begged her to sit down, telling her I would assemble the cups and saucers and everything else. Gratefully she let me take over while the universal coper continued to rock on his heels and expound his own virtues.
'Valentine had already died when I got here.' He sounded aggrieved. 'Of course I insisted on telephoning the doctor at once, though Mother ridiculously wanted to let him sleep! I ask you! What are doctors for?'
Dorothea raised her eyes in a sort of despair.
“The damned man was rude to me,” Paul complained. “He should be struck off. He said Valentine should have been in hospital and he would be here at seven, not before.”
“He couldn't do anything by coming,” Dorothea said miserably. “Dying here was what Valentine wanted. It was all right.”
Paul mulishly repeated his contrary opinions. Deeply bored with him, I asked Dorothea if I could pay my respects to Valentine.
“Just go in, dear,” she said, nodding. “He's very peaceful.”
I left her listening dutifully to her offspring and went into Valentine's bedroom which was brightly and brutally lit by a centre bulb hanging from the ceiling in an inadequate lampshade. A kinder lamp stood unlit on a bedside table, and I crossed to it and switched it on.
Valentine's old face was pale and smoothed by death, his forehead already cooler to the touch than in life. The laboured breathing had given way to eternal silence. His eyes were fully closed. His mouth, half open, had been covered, by Dorothea, I supposed, with a flap of sheet. He did indeed look remarkably at peace.
I crossed to the doorway and switched off the cold overhead light. Dorothea was coming towards me from the kitchen, entering Valentine's room past me to look down fondly at her dead brother.
“He died in the dark,” she said, distressed.
“He wouldn't mind that.”
“No ... but... I switched off his bedside light so that people wouldn't see in, and I was sitting in that chair looking out of the window waiting for Paul to come, listening to Valentine breathing, and I went to sleep. I just drifted off.” Tears filled her eyes. “I didn't know ... I mean, I couldn't help it.”
“You've been very tired.”
“Yes, but when I woke up it was so dark ... and absolutely quiet, and I realised ... it was awful, dear. I realised Valentine had stopped breathing ... and he'd died while I was asleep, and I hadn't been there beside him to hold his hand or anything ...” Her voice wavered into a sob and she wiped her eyes with her fist.
I put an arm round her shoulders as we stood beside Valentine's bed. I thought it lucky on the whole that she hadn't seen the jolt of her brother's heart stopping, nor heard the last rattle of his breath. I'd watched my own mother die, and would never forget it.
“What time did your son get here?”
“Oh, it must have been getting on for three. He lives in Surrey, you see, dear. It's quite a long drive, and he'd been ready for bed, he said. I told him not to come ... I only wanted someone to talk to, really, when I rang him, but he insisted on coming ... very good of him, dear, really.”
“Yes,” I said.
“He closed the curtains, of course, and switched on all the lights. He was quite cross with me for sitting in the dark, and for not getting Robbie Gill out. I mean, Robbie could only say officially that Valentine was dead. Paul didn't understand that I wanted just to be in the dark with Valentine. It was a sort of comfort, you see, dear. A sort of goodbye. Just the two of us, like when we were children.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Paul means well,” she insisted, “but I do find him tiring. I'm sorry to wake you up so early. But Paul was so cross with me ... so I phoned you when he went to the bathroom because he might have stopped me, otherwise. I'm not myself somehow, I feel so weak.”
“I'm happy to be here,” I assured her. “What you need is to go to bed.”
“Oh, I couldn't. I'll have to be awake for Robbie. I'm so afraid Paul will be rude to him.”
A certainty, I thought.
The great Paul himself came into the room, switching on the overhead light again.
“What are you two doing in here?” he demanded. “Mother, do come away and stop distressing yourself.”
“The old man's had a merciful release, as we all know. What we've got to talk about now is your future, and I've got plans made for that.”
Dorothea's frame stiffened under my embracing arm. I let it fall away from her shoulders and went with her out of Valentine's room and back to the kitchen, flicking the harsh light off again as I went and looking , back to the quiet old face in its semi-shadow. Permanent timeless shadow.
“Of course, you must leave here,” Paul was saying to his mother in the kitchen. “You're almost eighty. I can't look after you properly when you live so far away from me. I've already arranged with a retirement home that when Valentine died you would rent a room there. I'll tell them you'll be coming within a week. It's less than a mile from my house so Janet will be able to drop in every day.”
Dorothea looked almost frightened. “I'm not going, Paul,” she contradicted. “I'm staying here.”
Ignoring her, Paul said, “You may as well start packing your things at once. Why waste time? I'll put this house on the market tomorrow and I'll move you
immediately after the funeral.”
“No,” Dorothea said.
“I'll help you while I'm here,” her son said grandly. “All Valentine's things will need sorting and disposing of, of course. In fact, I may as well clear some of the books away at once. I brought two or three empty boxes.”
“Not the books,” I said positively. “He left his books to me.”
What?” Paul's mouth unattractively dropped open. “He can't have done,” he said fiercely. “He left everything to Mother. We all know that.”
“Everything to your mother except his books.”
Dorothea nodded. “Valentine added a codicil to his will about two months ago, leaving his books to Thomas.”
“The old man was ga-ga. I'll contest it.”
“You can't contest it,” I pointed out reasonably. “Valentine left everything but the books to your mother, not to you.”
“Then Mother will contest it!”
“No, I won't, dear,” Dorothea said gently. “When Valentine asked me what I thought about him leaving his books and papers to Thomas, I told him it was a very nice idea. I would never read them or ever look at them much, and Valentine knew Thomas would treasure them, so he got a solicitor to draw up the codicil, and Betty, a friend of mine, and Robbie Gill, our doctor, witnessed his signature with the solicitor watching. He signed it here in his own sitting-room, and there was no question of Valentine being ga-ga, which both the solicitor and the doctor will agree on. And I can't see what you're so bothered about, there's just a lot of old form books and scrap books and books about racing.”
Paul was, it seemed to me, a great deal more disconcerted than seemed natural. He seemed also to become aware of my surprise, because he groped and produced a specious explanation, hating me while he delivered it.
“Valentine once told me there might be some value in his collection,” he said. “I intend to get them valued and sold ... for Mother's benefit, naturally.”
“The books are for Thomas,” Dorothea repeated doughtily, “and I never heard Valentine suggest they were valuable. He wanted Thomas to have them for old times' sake, and for being so kind, coming to read to him.”