by Dick Francis
“Yes. You don't get good meat without a good butcher.”
O'Hara liked it. “I’ll tell Howard that.”
:Better not,” I said resignedly, knowing that he would.
O'Hara's mobile phone buzzed, and he answered it. “What? What did you say? I can't hear you. Slow down.”
He listened a brief moment more and passed the instrument to me. “It's Ziggy,” he said. “You talk to him. He goes too fast for me.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
O'Hara shrugged. “He went to Norway yesterday morning. I outlined what you wanted to an agent, who whisked him off at once.”
Ziggy's voice on the telephone was as staccato as automatic rifle fire, and just as fast.
“Hey,” I said after a while, “have I got this straight? You've found ten wild Viking horses but they must come at once.”
'They cannot come at twenty-four days, or at thirty-eight days. They are not free. They are free only next week, for the right tides. They are coming on the ferry on Monday from Bergen to Immingham.'
“Newcastle,” I corrected.
“No. The Bergen ferry goes usually to Newcastle, but for horses it must be Immingham. It is better for us, they say. It is on the River Humber. They will leave Bergen on Sunday. They have a trainer and five grooms. They are all coming in big horse vans. They will bring the horses' food. They can work on Wednesday and Thursday and on Friday they must return to Immingham. It is all arranged, Thomas. Is it good?”
“Brilliant,” I said.
He laughed happily. “Good horses. They will run wild without bridles, but they are trained. I have ridden one without a saddle, as you want. They are perfect.”
“Fantastic, Ziggy.”
“The trainer must know where we are to go from Immingham.”
“Er ... are you meaning to travel with them?”
“Yes, Thomas. This week I work with the trainer. I learn his ways with the horses. They get to know me. I will practise with a blonde wig and a nightgown. It is arranged. The horses will not then panic. Is it good?”
I was practically speechless. Good hardly described it. “You're a genius,” I said.
He said modestly, “Yes, Thomas, I am.”
“I’ll arrange where the horses are to go. Telephone again on Saturday.”
He said goodbye excitedly without giving me a number where I could call him back, but I supposed the agent might help in an emergency. I relayed Ziggy's news to O'Hara and Nash and said we would have to rearrange the following week's schedule, but that it shouldn't be much problem.
“We have the hanged-wife actress working next week,” O'Hara reminded me. “We have to complete all her scenes in fourteen days.”
I would take her to the beach, I thought. I'd have the nightgown diaphanously blowing against the sunrise. I'd have her standing on the shore, and have Ziggy galloping for her on the horse. Insubstantial. Unreal. All in her mind.
Pray for a sunrise.
“Sonia,” I said.
“Yvonne,” O'Hara corrected. “We have to call her Yvonne. That's her name in the book and in the script.”
I nodded. “Howard wrote the usual hanging cliché of legs and shoes swaying unsupported, with onlookers displaying shock. But I've ideas for that.”
O'Hara was silent. Nash shuddered.
“Don't get us an NC-17 certificate,” Nash finally said. “We'll have to cut that scene, if you do.”
“I'm to make it tastefully horrifying?”
They laughed.
“She did hang,” I said.
Downstairs again, one of the first people I saw was Lucy Wells, who was arguing with a man obstructing her way. I walked over and asked what was the matter.
“This man,” Lucy said heatedly, “says he has instructions not to let anyone near you.”
O'Hara's order, the man explained. I reassured him about Lucy and bore her off, holding her arm.
“I thought you weren't coming today,” I said.
“Dad changed his mind. He and Mum are both here again. So is Uncle Ridley. Wild horses wouldn't keep him away, he said.”
“I'm glad to see you.”
“Sorry I was so uncouth.”
I smiled at her blue eyes. “A wise child,” I said.
“I am not a child.”
“Stay beside me,” I said. “I'll tell Moncrieff it's OK.”
“Who's Moncrieff?”
“The Director of Photography. Very important man.”
She looked at me dubiously when I introduced her to the untidy beard and the earthquake-victim clothes, but after allowing us one old-fashioned sideways look he took a fancy to her and let her get in his way without cursing.
She looked colourfully bright in a scarlet short coat over clean new blue jeans, and mentally bright with noticing eyes and a firm calm mouth. She watched the proceedings without senseless chatter.
“I told Dad about that knife,” she told me after a while.
“What did he say?”
“Funny, that's exactly what he said. He said, "What did he say?"”
“Did he?” I considered her guileless expression. “And what did you say I said?”
Her forehead wrinkled. “I told him the knife looked beautiful, but you hadn't said much at all. I told Dad it hadn't pleased the producer, O'Hara, and I didn't know why.”
“O'Hara doesn't like knives,” I said, dismissing it.
“Oh, I see. Dad said it might be because someone had tried to cut Nash Rourke, like he'd heard on the radio, but it was his stand-in, not Nash himself.”
“That, too,” I agreed.
“Dad said directors don't have a stand-in,” she was teasing, unaware, “and you don't know which they are until someone points them out.”
“Or when they come to your home.”
“Goodness, yes. Did the photo of Sonia come out all right?”
“I’m sure it did, but I won't see it until I go back to Newmarket this evening.”
She said, hesitantly, “I didn't tell Dad. He really wouldn't like it.”
“I won't mention it. The actress playing Yvonne -that's Nash's wife, in the film - starts work on set next week. I promise she won't look like the photo. She won't upset your father.”
She smiled her appreciation and thanks, exonerated from her deception. I hoped no deadly harm would come to her, but in so many lives, it did.
First on the afternoon's schedule was the last of the wide crowd shots round the parade ring; the mounting of the jockeys onto their horses and their walk out towards the course. Even though the action would in the end be peripheral to the human story, we had to get the race-day sequences right to earn credibility. We positioned the owner-trainer groups again as before, each of them attended by their allotted jockey. Moncrieff checked the swivelling camera and gently moved Lucy out of shot.
Nash arrived in the ring trailing clouds of security and detoured to tell me a friend of mine was looking for me.
“Who?” I asked.
“Your TV pal from Doncaster.”
“Greg Compass?”
He nodded. “Outside the weighing-room. He's been yacking with the jockeys. He'll meet you there, he said.”
We rehearsed the mounting scene twice and shot it three times from two camera angles until the horses grew restive, and then asked all the townspeople to go round to the course side of the stands, to watch the string cantering down to the start.
During the inevitable delay for camera-positioning I left Lucy with Moncrieff and walked over to the weighing-room to meet Greg, whom I found in a milk-of-human-kindness mood, dressed in an expensive grey suit and wide open to suggestions from me that he might like to earn an unexpected fee by briefly taking on his usual persona and interviewing the winning trainer; in other words, Nash.
“It won't be more than a few seconds on screen,” I said. “Just enough to establish your pretty face.”
“Don't see why not.” He was amused and civilised; friendly.
“I
n half an hour?”
“Incidentally, do you yourself remember anything about the trainer whose wife was hanged, who we're making this saga about?”
“Jackson Wells?”
“Yes. He's here, himself, today. So is his present wife. So's his daughter. And his brother.”
“Before my time, old lad.”
“Not much,” I assured him. “You must have been about sixteen when Jackson stopped training. You rode in your first race not long after that. So, did you hear anything from the older jockeys about ... well ... anything?”
He looked at me quizzically. “I can't say I haven't thought about this since last Saturday, because of course I have. As far as I know, the book, Unstable Times, is sentimental balls. The jockeys who knew the real Yvonne were not dream lovers, they were a randy lot of activists.”
I smiled.
“You knew?” he asked.
“It sort of stands to reason. But they're still going to be dream lovers in the film.” I paused. “Do you remember any names? Do you by any chance know who?”
“By the time I'd dried behind the ears in the changing-room, no one was saying anything. All scared at being sucked into a murder. Clams weren't in it.” He paused. “If Jackson Wells himself is truly here today, I'd like to meet him.”
“His daughter says he's here.”
I refrained from asking him why he wanted to meet Jackson Wells but he told me anyway. “Good television. Rivet the couch potatoes. Good publicity for your film.”
“Jackson Wells isn't keen on the film.”
Greg grinned. “All the better, old lad.”
I returned to Moncrieff with Greg in tow and promptly lost Lucy's attention to the smooth commentator's allure. Lucy promised breathlessly to take him to find her father and, when they'd gone, Moncrieff and I went back to work.
We shot the scenes of the horses walking out onto the course and cantering off to the start. One of the horses bolted. One of the saddles slipped, dumping its rider. One of the rented cameras jammed. The crowd grew restive, the jockeys lost their cool and Moncrieff cursed.
We got it done in the end.
I walked with drained energy back towards the weighing-room and found O'Hara there, talking to Howard.
Howard, to my complete astonishment, had brought with him his three friends: Mrs Audrey Visborough, her daughter Alison and her son Roddy.
O'Hara gave me a wild look and said, “Mrs Visborough wants us to stop making the film.”
I said to Howard, “Are you mad?” which might not have been tactful but summed up my exasperation. I'd been afraid of a stiletto through the heart, and Howard had brought clowns.
All three of them, however, wore unremarkable race going clothes, not white cone hats, bobbles and red noses. Audrey Visborough leaned on her cane and continued with her complaint.
“Your director, Thomas Lyon,” she flicked me a venomous glance, “has obviously no intention whatever of either returning to the facts or of stopping making this travesty of a film. I demand that you order him to cease at once.”
Howard shuffled from foot to foot and ineffectually said, “Er ... Audrey.”
O'Hara, restraining himself amazingly, told her that he hadn't the power to stop the film himself (which I guessed he actually had) and that she should write her objections directly to the moguls of the film company: in other words, to the top.
She announced that she would do that, and demanded names and addresses. O'Hara obligingly handed her two or three business cards with helpful and soothing advice that slid over her consciousness without sticking. Audrey Visborough felt personally and implacably insulted by the film's plot, and nothing would satisfy her short of preventing its completion.
Alison stood to one side of her, nodding. Roddy looked weakly supportive but from the glances he gave his mother I would have guessed he cared a good deal less than she did about the scurrilous suggestion that she would ever have contemplated going to bed with the unspeakable lower-class Jackson Wells.
I said to Howard, “Why on earth did you bring them here?”
“I couldn't stop them,” he said huffily. “And I do agree with Audrey, of course, that you have made her almost ill with disgust.”
“You agreed to the plot changes,” I pointed out. “And you yourself wrote the love scenes between Nash and Silva.”
“But they were supposed to be quiet, in the drawing-room, not rutting about in bed.” His voice whined with self pity. “I wanted to please the Visborough family with this film.”
With a second twinge of guilt I reflected that his troubles with Audrey Visborough hadn't yet reached a peak.
I said to her daughter, Alison, “Would you care to watch a scene being shot?”
“Me?” She was surprised and glanced at her mother before answering. “It won't change our minds. This film is a disgrace.”
When I moved a pace away in irritation, however, she took a pace after me.
“Where are you going?” her mother demanded sharply. “I need you here.”
Alison gave me a dark look and said, “I’ll work on Mr Lyon.”
She walked resolutely beside me, sensible in tweed suit and flat shoes, earnestly committed to just causes.
“Daddy,” she said, “was a good man.”
“I'm sure.”
“Not easy going,” she went on with approbation. “A man of principle. Some people found him boring, know, but he was a good father to me. He believed that women are very badly treated by the English system of leaving family inheritances chiefly to sons, which is why he left his house to me.” She paused. “Rodbury was furious. He's three years older than I am and he'd taken it for granted he would inherit everything. He had been generously treated all his life. Daddy bought all his showjumpers for him, and only insisted that Rodbury should earn his own keep by giving lessons. Perfectly reasonable, I thought, as Daddy wasn't unduly rich. He divided his money between the three of us. None of us is rich.” She paused again. “I expect you wonder why I'm telling you this. It's because I want you to be fair to Daddy's memory.”
I couldn't be, not in the way she wanted.
I said, “Think of this film as being about fictional people, not about your father and mother. The people in the film are not in the least like your parents. They are not them. They are inventions.”
“Mummy will never be persuaded.”
I took her with me into the parade ring where Moncrieff as ever was busy with lights.
“I’m going to show you two people,” I said to Alison. “Tell me what you think.”
She looked puzzled, but her gaze followed where I pointed to a nearby couple, and she looked without emotion at Gibber, a sober fifty, and at lovely young Silva in her well-cut coat and polished narrow boots and bewitching fur hat.
“Well?” Alison demanded. “They look nice enough. Who are they?”
“Mr and Mrs Gibber,” I said.
She whirled towards me, halfway to fury. Then, thinking better of a direct physical attack, turned back thoughtfully and simply stared.
“Beyond them,” I said, “is Nash Rourke. He plays the character loosely based on Jackson Wells.”
Alison speechlessly stared at the broad-shouldered heart-throb whose benign intelligence was unmistakable from twenty feet.
“Come with me,” I said.
Dazed, she followed, and I took her to where Greg Compass and Lucy seemed finally to have found Lucy's father.
“These people,” I told Alison, “are Greg Compass, who interviews racing people on TV.”
Alison briefly nodded in recognition.
“This family,” I said neutrally, “are Mr and Mrs Jackson Wells and their daughter, Lucy.”
Alison's mouth opened but no words came out. Jackson Wells, good-looking and smiling, stood between his two wholesome, well-groomed women, waiting for me to complete the introduction.
“Alison Visborough,” I said.
Jackson Wells's sunny face darkened. He said, almost spit
ting, “Her daughter!”
“You see,” I said to Alison, “Jackson Wells dislikes your mother as intensely as she dislikes him. No way in real life would they ever have had a love affair. The people in this film are not them.”
Alison remained dumb. I took her arm, wheeling her away.
“Your mother,” I said, “is making herself ill. Persuade her to turn her back on what we are doing. Make her interested in something else, and don't let her see the completed film. Believe that I mean no disrespect to her or to your father's memory. I am making a movie about fictional people. I have some sympathy with your mother's feelings, but she will not get the film abandoned.”
Alison found her voice. “You are ruthless,” she said.
“Quite likely. However, I admire you, Miss Visborough, as Howard does. I admire your good sense and your loyalty to your father. I regret your anger but I can't remove its cause. Gibber in the film is not a nice man at all, I have to warn you. All I can say again is, don't identify him with your father.”
“Howard did!”
“Howard wrote Gibber as a good man without powerful emotions. There's no conflict or drama in that. Conflict is the essence of drama ... first lesson of filmmaking. Anyway, I apologise to you and your mother and brother, but until last week I hardly knew you existed.”
“Oh, Roddy!” she said without affection. “Don't worry about him. He doesn't care very much. He and Daddy were pretty cold to each other. Too different, I suppose. Rodbury - and I call him by his full name because Roddy sounds like a nice little boy, but he would never let me join in his games when we were children, and other girls were so wrong when they said I was lucky having an older brother -” She broke off abruptly. “I don't know why I said that. I don't talk to people easily. Particularly not to people I disapprove of. Anyway, Rodbury wouldn't care what you said about Daddy as long as he didn't lose money over it. He only pretends to Mummy that he cares, because he's always conning her into buying things for him.”
'He's not married?'
She shook her head. “He boasts about girls. More talk than action, I sometimes think.”
I smiled at her forthright opinion and thought of her unfulfilled life: the disappointing brother, the adored but distant father, the mother who'd prevented a perhaps unsuitable match. An admirable woman overall.