by Dick Francis
‘My God, I’ve wasted my time coming here, haven’t I?’ she said bitterly, standing up. ‘You’re like all bloody men. You’ve got menopause on the brain.’
‘That’s not true. And I said I’d try.’
‘Yes.’ The word was a sneer. She was stoking up her own anger, indulging an inner need to explode. She practically threw her empty glass at me instead of handing it. I missed catching it, and it fell against the side of the coffee table, and broke.
She looked down at the glittering pieces and stuffed the jagged rage halfway back into its box.
‘Sorry,’ she said shortly.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Put it down to strain.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll have to go and see that film. George will ask …’ She slid into her raincoat and moved jerkily towards the door, her whole body still trembling with tension. ‘I shouldn’t have come here. But I thought …’
‘Rosemary,’ I said flatly. ‘I’ve said I’ll try, and I will.’
‘Nobody knows what it’s like.’
I followed her into the hall, feeling her jangling desperation almost as if it were making actual disturbances in the air. She picked the black wig off the small table there and put it back on her head, tucking her own brown hair underneath with fierce unfriendly jabs, hating herself, her disguise and me: hating the visit, the lies to George, the seedy furtiveness of her actions. She painted on a fresh layer of the dark lipstick with unnecessary force, as if assaulting herself; tied the knot on the scarf with a savage jerk, and fumbled in her handbag for the tinted glasses.
‘I changed in the lavatories at the tube station,’ she said. ‘It’s all revolting. But I’m not having anyone see me leaving here. There are things going on. I know there are. And George is scared …’
She stood by my front door, waiting for me to open it; a thin elegant woman looking determinedly ugly. It came to me that no woman did that to herself without a need that made esteem an irrelevance. I’d done nothing to relieve her distress, and it was no good realizing that it was because of knowing her too long in a different capacity. It was she who was subtly used to being in control, and I, from sixteen, who had respectfully followed her wishes. I thought that if tonight I had made her cry and given her warmth and contact and even a kiss, I could have done her more service; but the block was there, and couldn’t be lightly dismantled.
‘I shouldn’t have come here,’ she said. ‘I see that now.’
‘Do you want me … to take any action?’
A spasm twisted her face. ‘Oh God … Yes I do. But I was stupid. Fooling myself. You’re only a jockey … after all.’
I opened the door.
‘I wish,’ I said lightly, ‘that I were.’
She looked at me unseeingly, her mind already on her return journey, on her film, on her report of it to George.
‘I’m not crazy,’ she said.
She turned abruptly and walked away without a backward glance. I watched her turn towards the stairs and go without hesitating out of sight. With a continuing feeling of having been inadequate I shut the door and went back into the sitting room; and it seemed that the very air there too was restless from her intensity.
I bent down and picked up the larger pieces of broken glass, but there were too many sharp little splinters for total laziness, so I fetched dustpan and brush from the kitchen.
Holding the dustpan could usefully be done left-handed. If I simply tried to bend backwards the real hand that wasn’t there, the false fingers opened away from the thumb. If I sent the old message to bend my hand inwards, they closed. There was always about two seconds’ delay between mental instruction and electrical reaction, and taking that interval into account had been the most difficult thing to learn.
The fingers could not of course feel when their grip was tight enough. The people who fitted the arm had told me that success was picking up eggs: and I’d broken a dozen or two in practising, at the beginning. Absentmindedness had since resulted in an exploding light bulb and crushed-flat cigarette packets and explained why I used the marvels of science less than I might.
I emptied the bits of glass into the dustbin and switched on the television again; but the comedy was over, and Rosemary came between me and a cops-and-robbers. With a sigh I switched off, and cooked my steak, and after I’d eaten it picked up the telephone to talk to Bobby Unwin, who worked for the Daily Planet.
‘Information will cost you,’ he said immediately, when he found who was on his line.
‘Cost me what?’
‘A spot of quid pro quo.’
‘All right,’ I said.
‘What are you after, then?’
‘Um,’ I said. ‘You wrote a long piece about George Caspar in your Saturday colour supplement a couple of months ago. Pages and pages of it.’
‘That’s right. Special feature. In-depth analysis of success. The Planet’s doing a once-a-month series on high-flyers, tycoons, pop-stars, you name it. Putting them under the cliché microscope and coming up with a big yawn yawn exposé of bugger all.’
‘Are you horizontal?’ I said.
There was a short silence followed by a stifled girlish giggle.
‘You just take your intuitions to Siberia,’ Bobby said. ‘What made you think so?’
‘Envy, I dare say.’ But I’d really only been asking if he was alone, without making it sound important. ‘Will you be at Kempton tomorrow?’
‘I reckon.’
‘Could you bring a copy of that magazine, and I’ll buy you a bottle of your choice.’
‘Oh boy, oh boy. You’re on.’
His receiver went down without more ado, and I spent the rest of the evening reading the flat-racing form books of recent years, tracing the careers of Bethesda, Gleaner, Zingaloo and Tri-Nitro, and coming up with nothing at all.
2
I had fallen into a recent habit of lunching on Thursdays with my father-in-law. To be accurate, with my ex-father-in-law; Admiral (retired) Charles Roland, parent of my worst failure. To his daughter Jenny I had given whatever devotion I was capable of, and had withheld the only thing she eventually said she wanted, which was that I should stop riding in races. We had been married for five years; two in happiness, two in discord, and one in bitterness; and now only the itching half-mended wounds remained. Those, and the friendship of her father, which I had come by with difficulty and now prized as the only treasure saved from the wreck.
We met most weeks at noon in the upstairs bar of the Cavendish Hotel, where a pink gin for him and a whisky and water for me now stood on prim little mats beside a bowl of peanuts.
‘Jenny will be at Aynsford this weekend,’ he said.
Aynsford was his house in Oxfordshire. London on Thursdays was his business. He made the journey between the two in a Rolls.
‘I’d be glad if you would come down,’ he said.
I looked at the fine distinguished face and listened to the drawling noncommittal voice. A man of subtlety and charm who could blast through you like a laser if he felt the need. A man whose integrity I would trust to the gates of hell, and whose mercy, not an inch.
I said carefully, without rancour, ‘I am not coming to be sniped at.’
‘She agreed that I should invite you.’
‘I don’t believe it.’
He looked with suspicious concentration at his glass. I knew from long experience that when he wanted me to do something he knew I wouldn’t like, he didn’t look at me. And there would be a pause, like this, while he found it in him to light the fuse. From the length of the pause. I drew no comfort of any sort. He said finally, ‘I’m afraid she’s in some sort of trouble.’
I stared at him, but he wouldn’t raise his eyes.
‘Charles,’ I said despairingly, ‘you can’t … you can’t ask me … You know how she speaks to me these days.’
‘You give as good as you get, as I recall.’
‘No one in their senses walks into a ti
ger’s cage.’
He gave me a brief flashing upward glance, and there was a small twitch to his mouth. And perhaps it was not the best way of referring to a man’s beautiful daughter.
‘I have known you, Sid,’ he said, ‘to walk into tigers’ cages more than once.’
‘A tigress, then,’ I amended, with a touch of humour.
He pounced on it. ‘So you’ll come?’
‘No … Some things, honestly, are too much.’
He sighed and sat back in his chair, looking at me over the gin. I didn’t care for the blank look in his eyes, because it meant he was still plotting.
‘Dover sole?’ he suggested smoothly. ‘Shall I call the waiter? We might eat soon, don’t you think?’
He ordered sole for both of us, and off the bone, out of habit. I could eat perfectly well in public now, but there had been a long and embarrassing period when my natural hand had been a wasted, useless deformity, which I’d self-consciously hidden in pockets. At about the time I finally got used to it, it had been smashed up again, and I’d lost it altogether. I guessed life was like that. You gained and you lost, and if you saved anything from the ruins, even if only a shred of self-respect, it was enough to take you through the next bit.
The waiter told us our table would be ready in ten minutes and went quietly away, hugging menus and order pad to his dinner jacket and grey silk tie. Charles glanced at his watch and then gazed expansively round the big, light, quiet room, where other couples, like us, sat in beige armchairs and sorted out the world.
‘Are you going to Kempton this afternoon?’ he said.
I nodded. ‘The first race is at two-thirty.’
‘Are you working on a job?’ As an inquiry, it was a shade too bland.
‘I’m not coming to Aynsford,’ I said. ‘Not while Jenny’s there.’
After a pause, he said, ‘I wish you would, Sid.’
I merely looked at him. His eyes were following the track of a bar waiter delivering drinks to distant customers: and he was taking a great deal too much time thinking out his next sentence.
He cleared his throat and addressed himself to nowhere in particular. ‘Jenny has lent some money … and her name, I’m afraid … to a business enterprise which would appear to be fraudulent.’
‘She’s done what?’ I said.
His gaze switched back to me with suspicious speed, but I interrupted him as he opened his mouth.
‘No,’ I said. ‘If she’s done that, it’s well within your province to sort it out.’
‘It’s your name she’s used, of course,’ Charles said. ‘Jennifer Halley.’
I could feel the trap closing round me. Charles studied my silent face and with a tiny sigh of relief let go of some distinct inner anxiety. He was a great deal too adept, I thought bitterly, at hooking me.
‘She was attracted to a man,’ he said dispassionately. ‘I didn’t especially like him, but then I didn’t like you, either, to begin with … and I have found that error of judgement inhibiting, as a matter of fact, because I no longer always trust my first instincts.’
I ate a peanut. He had disliked me because I was a jockey, which he saw as no sort of husband for his well-bred daughter: and I had disliked him right back as an intellectual and social snob. It was odd to reflect that he was now probably the individual I valued most in the world.
He went on, ‘This man persuaded her to go in for some sort of mail order business … all frightfully up-market and respectable, at least on the surface. A worthy way of raising money for charity … you know the sort of thing. Like Christmas cards, only in this case I think it was a sort of wax polish for antique furniture. One was invited to buy expensive wax, knowing that most of the profits would go to a good cause.’
He looked at me sombrely. I simply waited, without much hope.
The orders rolled in,’ he said. ‘And the money with them, of course. Jenny and a girl friend were kept busy sending off the wax.’
‘Which Jenny,’ I guessed, ‘had bought ready, in advance?’
Charles sighed. ‘You don’t need to be told, do you?’
‘And Jenny paid for the postage and packing and advertisements and general literature?’
He nodded. ‘She banked all the receipts into a specially opened account in the name of the charity. Those receipts have all been drawn out, the man has disappeared, and the charity, as such, has been found not to exist.’
I regarded him in dismay.
‘And Jenny’s position?’ I said.
‘Very bad, I’m afraid. There may be a prosecution. And her name is on everything, and the man’s nowhere.’
My reaction was beyond blasphemy. Charles observed my blank silence and nodded slowly in sympathy.
‘She has been exceedingly foolish,’ he said.
‘Couldn’t you have stopped her? Warned her?’
He shook his head regretfully. ‘I didn’t know about it until she came to Aynsford yesterday in a panic. She has done it all from that flat she’s taken in Oxford.’
We went in to lunch, and I couldn’t remember, afterwards, the taste of the sole.
‘The man’s name is Nicholas Ashe,’ Charles said, over the coffee. ‘At least that’s what he said.’ He paused briefly. ‘My solicitor chap thinks it would be a good idea if you could find him.’
I drove to Kempton with visual and muscular responses on auto-pilot and my thoughts uncomfortably on Jenny.
Divorce itself, it seemed, had changed nothing. The recent antiseptic drawing of the line, the impersonal court to which neither of us had gone (no children, no maintenance disputes, no flicker of reconciliation, petition granted, next case please) seemed to have punctuated our lives not with a full stop but with hardly a comma. The legal position had not proved a great liberating open door. The recovery from emotional cataclysm seemed a long slow process, and the certificate was barely an aspirin.
Where once we had clung together with delight and passion, we now, if we chanced to meet, ripped with claws. I had spent eight years in loving, losing and mourning Jenny, and although I could wish my feelings were dead, they weren’t. The days of indifference still seemed a weary way off.
If I helped her in the mess she was in, she would give me a rotten time. If I didn’t help her, I would give it to myself. Why, I thought violently, in impotent irritation, had the silly bitch been so stupid.
There was a fair attendance at Kempton for a weekday in April, though as often before I regretted that in Britain the nearer a racecourse was to London, the more vulnerable it became to stay-away crowds. City-dwellers might be addicted to gambling, but not to fresh air and horses. Birmingham and Manchester, in days gone by, had lost their racecourses to indifference, and Liverpool had survived only through the Grand National. Most times it took a course in the country to burst at the seams and run out of racecards; the thriving plants still growing from the oldest roots.
Outside the weighing room there was the same old bunch of familiar faces carrying on chats which had been basically unchanged for centuries. Who was going to ride what, and who was going to win, and there should be a change in the rules, and what so-and-so had said about his horse losing, and wasn’t the general outlook grim, and did you know young fella-me-lad has left his wife? There were the scurrilous stories and the slight exaggerations and the downright lies. The same mingling of honour and corruption, of principle and expediency. People ready to bribe, people with the ready palm. Anguished little hopefuls and arrogant big guns. The failures making brave excuses, and the successful hiding the anxieties behind their eyes. All as it had been, and was, and would be, as long as racing lasted.
I had no real right any longer to wander in the space outside the weighing room, although no one ever turned me out. I belonged in the grey area of ex-jockeys: barred from the weighing room itself but tolerantly given the run of much else. The cosy inner sanctum had gone down the drain the day half a ton of horse landed feet first on my metacarpals. Since then I had come to be glad si
mply to be still part of the brotherhood, and the ache to be riding was just part of the general regret. Another ex-champion had told me it took him twenty years before he no longer yearned to be out there on the horses, and I’d said thanks very much.
George Caspar was there, talking to his jockey, with three runners scheduled that afternoon; and also Rosemary, who reacted with a violent jerk when she saw me at ten paces, and promptly turned her back. I could imagine the waves of alarm quivering through her, although that day she looked her usual well-groomed elegant self: mink coat for the chilly wind, glossy boots, velvet hat. If she feared I would talk about her visit, she was wrong.
There was a light grasp on my elbow and a pleasant voice saying ‘A word in your ear, Sid.’
I was smiling before I turned to him, because Lord Friarly, earl, landowner, and frightfully decent fellow, had been one of the people for whom I’d ridden a lot of races. He was of the old school of aristocrats; sixtyish, beautifully mannered, genuinely compassionate, slightly eccentric, and more intelligent than people expected. A slight stammer was nothing to do with speech impediment but all to do with not wanting to seem to throw his rank about in an egalitarian world.
Over the years I had stayed several times in his house in Shropshire, mostly on the way to northern race-meetings, and had travelled countless miles with him in a succession of elderly cars. The age of the cars was not an extension of the low profile, but rather a disinclination to waste money on inessentials. Essentials, in terms of the earl’s income, were keeping up Friarly Hall and owning as many racehorses as possible.
‘Great to see you, sir,’ I said.
‘I’ve told you to call me Philip.’
‘Yes … sorry.’
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I want you do something for me. I hear you’re damned good at looking into things. Doesn’t surprise me, of course, I’ve always valued your opinion, you know that.’
‘Of course I’ll help if I can,’ I said.