by Dick Francis
The two-year-old was skittering around playfully at the end of his rope. Michael’s headman, half running, came to take him into custody and lead him away to his new home.
With the second import safely unloaded, Michael’s irritation subsided into his normal bonhomie and he suggested a cup of coffee before I went on my way. We walked together into his house, into the bright warm welcoming kitchen where frequent visitors sat unceremoniously round a long pine table and helped themselves to juices and toast.
Maudie was there in jeans and sweatshirt, blond hair still tousled from sleep, face bare of makeup. She received my hello kiss absentmindedly and asked for Lewis.
“Flu,” Michael said succinctly.
“But he helps the children with the rabbits! Bother and damn. I suppose I’ll have to do it myself.”
“Do what?” I incautiously asked.
“Clean out the run and the hutches.”
“Be careful,” Michael teased, “or she’ll have you mucking out the wretched bunnies. Let the children do it, Maudie. They’re quite old enough.”
“They’ll be dressed for school,” she objected, and indeed her two younger children, boy and girl in tidy gray, came bouncing in with gleeful appetites and good-morning hugs for their father. They were followed, to my severe surprise, by my own daughter, Cinders.
She wore the same gray clothes. I gathered from the chatter that she went to the same school and had stayed with the Watermeads overnight. Hugo, I reflected, couldn’t have reckoned on my coming to breakfast.
She said “Hi” to me nonchalantly as someone she’d met in passing at lunch two days ago, as someone who knew her parents. Her attention reverted at once to the other children with whom she giggled, at ease.
I tried not to watch her, but I was as conscious of her as if I’d grown new antennae. She sat opposite me, dark-haired, neat and vivacious, secure and loved. Not mine. Never mine. I ate toast and wished things were different.
Maudie’s daughter said, “If Lewis has flu, who’s doing the rabbits?”
“Why not Ed?” Maudie said, suggesting her elder son.
“Mother! You know he won’t. He’s a dead loss as a brother. Lewis loves the bunnies. He strokes them, strokes their fur. They hop all over his hands. There’s no one as good with them as Lewis. I wish Lewis was my brother.”
Michael raised his eyebrows at Maudie, neither of them relishing the promotion of Lewis to son.
“Who’s Lewis?” Cinders asked.
“One of Freddie’s drivers,” the children told her, explaining the fleet of vans, explaining they were mine.
“Oh,” she said, lacking much interest.
Michael said he would get one of the grooms to clean the hutches that afternoon and Maudie chivied the three children like a flock of sparrows to finish their breakfast, bundle up in coats and scramble out to the car for her to drive them miles to reach school by eight-thirty.
The kitchen seemed quiet and empty after they’d gone. I finished my coffee and rose to my feet, thanking Michael for the company.
“Anytime,” he said amiably.
My glance fell on one of John Tigwood’s ubiquitous round collecting tins standing on the windowsill.
“Oh yes,” I said, remembering. “One of my vans is fetching a load of ancient steeplechasers from Yorkshire today. John Tigwood says you’re taking two of them in your bottom paddock. What shall I do about them? Do you want the whole lot to come here first? I mean, which two do you want?”
Not surprisingly he looked faintly exasperated. “Lorna talked me into it again. Let her and that wretched little man sort them out at that awful little place. But see if you can bring me two here that aren’t on the point of expiring. I told Tigwood to take the last two to the knackers to put them out of their misery. It’s a lot of sentimental rubbish, keeping those poor tottering wrecks on their feet, but of course I can’t say that in front of the children. They don’t understand the need for death.”
He came out into the stable yard to drive up to the Downs to watch his horses complete their morning exercise, and on an impulse asked if I would like to go with him, as Irkab Alhawa would be up there doing fast work.
I accepted at once, intensely pleased at what I knew to be a compliment and a gift. He drove us in his high-wheel-based Shogun and pulled up at a vantage point near the end of his upland all-weather exercise track. From there we had a clear view of horses galloping uphill towards us three abreast, and a closer look as they swept past us, to pull up a hundred yards farther on.
I’d spent innumerable mornings most of my life riding training-gallops. I still did it, given the chance. There wasn’t going to be any chance I would exercise Watermead horses, though, as steeplechase jockeys of my size, whether retired or not, tended to be too heavy and too strong for young Flat-racers.
“How’s Irkab coming along?” I asked tentatively.
“Doing just great.”
Michael’s voice was full of satisfaction, the anxiety of training a horse fancied to win the Derby hovering well below sweat-level so early in the year. Come June he’d be insomniac.
We watched three or four trios of his string come past us in a prearranged order, and Michael said, “Irkab will be in the next three, on this side nearest to us. You’ll see the white blaze down his nose.”
“Great.”
The three horses came into sight, moving easily, fast shadows on the brown track. Irkab Alhawa, with his awkward Arab name, had been a late-developing two-year-old, not revealing the extent of his athletic ability until the Middle Park Stakes in October the previous year. Lewis had driven him to Newmarket that autumn day as merely another Watermead runner and had returned with a revelation that had attracted newsmen to Pixhill like a flock of starlings.
The promise of the Middle Park had been confirmed two weeks later by a scintillating six-length victory in the Dewhurst Stakes, the final top two-year-old event of the season, slaughtering the best that Newmarket could muster on its own turf, with the result that during the peaceful i nactive winter Irkab Alhawa had become almost a cult, the odd-sounding syllables part of his mystique. The press had translated the words into English as “Ride the Wind,” which had caught the public’s imagination, though somewhere I’d heard that that rendering wasn’t quite right. Never mind; Irkab Alhawa was good news for Michael, for Pixhill, for Lewis and not least for Freddie Croft.
The brown sensation with the narrow white blaze, recognizable afar off, swept effortlessly up the track towards us in the smooth coordination of muscle and mass that was nature’s gift to the lucky few, horses and humans, in whom grace of movement equaled speed.
I felt, as always in the presence of great horses, an odd sort of envy: not to be on their backs, but to be them, riding the wind. In rational terms it was nonsense, but after so many years of closeness with the marvelous creatures they were in a way extensions of myself, always hovering in the back of consciousness.
Not everyone had rejoiced with Michael over the emergence of a prodigy in his stable. Human nature being what it was, a certain portion of the racing world would have been happy to hear that ill had befallen the horse. Michael shrugged it off. “There will always be spite and envy. Look how some politicians encourage it! It’s not my problem if people grudge and bitch, it’s theirs.” Michael, easygoing and civilized, couldn’t understand the force of unprovoked hate.
Irkab Alhawa galloped past us, majestically strong. Michael turned to me with a glimmering smile and saw he needed to make no comment. For a horse like that, comment was inadequate, banal.
We drove back to the stables. I thanked him. He nodded, and in an odd way, because of that gallop, we’d come closer to a positive friendship, not just friendly business relations.
I took Lewis’s super-six back to the farmyard, its daily bustle embracing me, bringing my feet back to earth.
Aziz had reported for work, his vitality and flashing smile having already produced a sort of glaze in Harve’s less shiny eyes. Har
ve greeted my arrival with relief and told me he’d been trying to explain to Aziz, disappointed with his first assignment, that a job was a job was a job.
“There’s a whole lot of no glamour in this business,” I assured Aziz. “Somedays you take seven terminal hasbeens. One day, maybe, a Derby winner. Getting the cargo alive and well to journey’s end is all that matters.”
“OK.”
“And do remember that all horses doze off and dream while you’re driving at a constant speed on a motorway, but when you leave the motorway and slow down and come to a roundabout they’ll wake up and not know where they are and judder about trying to stay on their feet. All horses are like that but these very old ones will be shaky on their pins to start with, so be extra careful or you’ll come back with all seven threshing around on the floor and, even if they survive, at the very least we will not get paid for our efforts.”
Aziz listened to this homily at first with a disbelieving grin and latterly with thoughtful attention. He should, though, have been nodding throughout.
I said slowly, “You have been driving racehorses, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” he replied instantly. “Of course. But local, round Newmarket. And to Yarmouth races. No motorways, really.”
Harve frowned but didn’t pursue it, and question marks rose like a prickly hawthorn hedge in my own mind. It was true there were few if any long motorways in East Anglia, where Newmarket stable was situated, but it passed credibility that a Newmarket stable would never have sent runners farther afield.
I might have asked Aziz a few searching questions but at that moment Maudie’s sister, Lorna, swept through the gates in her expensive crimson Range Rover, the aristocrat of safari cars, built to withstand raw African veldt and the smooth roads of Pixhill.
Lorna, concerned and intense, hopped down from behind the wheel and strode across to give me a peck on the cheek. Blond, blue-eyed, long-legged, richly divorced and thirty, lovely Lorna looked me firmly in the eye and told me I was a pig to charge for fetching the pensioners.
“Um,” I said, “is John Tigwood charging the pensioners’ owners?”
“That’s entirely different.”
“No, that’s getting it both ways, or trying to.”
“Centaur Care needs the money.”
I smiled a usefully bland smile and introduced Aziz as the day’s driver. Lorna blinked. Aziz, shaking her hand, gave her a white blinding smile and a flash of dark eyes. Lorna forgot about my meanness and told Aziz animatedly that they were going on a wonderful Errand of Mercy and that it was a Privilege to be involved in Saving Old Friends.
“Yes, I agree,” Aziz said.
He gave me the ghost of a sideways grin as if daring me to denounce his hypocrisy. Aziz was a rogue, I thought, but rogues were good for the spirits, up to a point.
John Tigwood chose that moment to give us the benefit of his company, which I could certainly have done without. The potty little pipsqueak, as Harve had called him, emerged from a coffee-colored van emblazoned all over with CENTAUR CARE FOR AGED HORSES in titanium-white letters and strode in our direction with thrusting important steps. He wore gray corduroy trousers, an open-necked shirt and a heavy-knit sweater and was carrying an anorak.
“Good morning, Freddie.”
His voice tried hard, but the self-important fruitiness couldn’t disguise the lack of substance beneath. Tigwood was essentially an inadequate man inventing a role for himself: not, I supposed, an unusual phenomenon or even one necessarily reprehensible. What else could he do? Slink along, wringing Uriah Heep hands?
I’d always taken the Centaur Care charity to be a long-established facet of the local community. That Tuesday morning I wondered whether Tigwood himself had set it up, and whether he lived off the collecting boxes, and whether, if he did, should Pixhill object? There were always old horses around dozing in sunshine. Such a cause had to be worthy, if compassion meant anything.
“Morning, Lorna,” the charity man said.
“John, dear.” Lorna pecked his thin cheek somewhere above the sparse beard that straggled round his pointed chin. Even the beard, I thought, trying to stifle my impatience, was inadequate. So in a way was his thin neck with the sharp larynx, neither of which he could help.
“What can I do for you, John?” I asked, welcoming him.
“Thought I’d go with Lorna,” he announced. “Seven horses . . . two pairs of hands will be better than one. Is this our driver?”
Lorna gave a quick glance at Aziz, not sure that she wanted John with her after all, but the potty little pipsqueak had made up his mind, had come dressed for the journey and would stick obstinately to his plan, it was clear.
“How nice,” Lorna said insincerely.
“You’ve a long way to go,” I told them in general, “you may as well get started.”
“Yes, yes,” Tigwood said, taking bustling charge. “Come along, driver.”
“His name is Aziz,” I remarked mildly.
“Oh? Come along then, Aziz.”
I watched them climb aboard, two totally incompatible men with the well-intentioned Cause-embracer between them. Aziz looked grimly out of the window in my direction, all relish for the day, small at best, evaporating. I couldn’t blame him. I’d have hated to have taken his place.
Under that nine-van, I reflected, as Aziz turned competently out of the gate, was the magnet Jogger had found. I’d taken it on trust that the nails in the insulating block of wood were still holding fast. I hadn’t warned Aziz it was there. I hadn’t told him to look out for strangers trying to roll under the fuel tank section of the chassis. I couldn’t envisage anyone seeking to transport anything in such awkward secrecy between Yorkshire and Pixhill, when all they’d have to do was drive down in a car.
Harve left in Aziz’s wake, setting out five minutes after, in time to pick up two runners for the later races at Cheltenham. Another van had already left for the same destination, two had gone to Bristol Airport to collect Irish horses flying over for Gold Cup day and three were out with broodmares. Not bad, considering.
I went into the offices where Isobel and Rose were looking in frustration at blank computer screens and asking what they should do with the day.
“Type letters on the old-fashioned typewriter?” I suggested.
“I suppose we’ll have to,” Rose said, disgusted.
“The man promised he’d come tomorrow,” I assured her.
“Not before time.”
Tigwood’s collecting box stood on Isobel’s desk and I picked it up and shook it. The result was a hollow rattle, three or four coins at most.
“Mr. Tigwood came to empty it last week,” Isobel said.
“There wasn’t much in there. He thinks we should try harder.”
“Perhaps we should.”
I went out to my jalopy and drove to Newbury to leave my film of Jogger with a one-hour developing outfit and to collect the ordered, reserved and ready rhyming dictionary. I hadn’t actually seen one of these before and sat in the car park flicking over the pages to pass the hour’s wait, finding that the rhymes were listed not in regular alphabetical fashion but all starting with vowels.
“Amely,” I read. “Gamely, lamely, namely, tamely.
“Etter / better, debtor, fetter, getter, letter, setter, sweater, wetter . . .
“Oard / board, floored, ford, gourd, hoard, horde, oared, pored, sword, toward, aboard, afford . . .”
Hundreds and thousands of rhymes, available but useless. I realized I needed to have Jogger’s cryptic statements under my eyes, not just in my memory. Maybe if I could simultaneously see what he’d said, some spark might fly out of entries like “unch / brunch, bunch, crunch, hunch, lunch, munch, punch, scrunch . . .”
Always remembering, I thought in depression, that in Jogger’s cockney accent bike became boike and lady, lidey, and t’s and d’s could be swallowed and not heard.
Closing the book, I collected the sharp sad pictures of his death and drove home to read
y the house and get my sister’s room ready, which meant making the bed and opening the windows to let in whatever March cared to deliver.
I picked more daffodils and put them in a vase, and punctually at noon my sister, Lizzie, arrived.
She flew in literally, from on high, in a helicopter.
6
Lizzie owned a quarter share of the tiny Robinson 22, her only extravagance and the way she chose to use her inheritance from our parents. To my mind, the helicopter was her equivalent of Roger’s cruise ships and my steeplechasing, the elder sister’s statement that if boys could have toys, so could girls. She had shown us each in turn as children how to run a complicated train set. She’d taught us how to bat unafraid at cricket, she’d climbed trees like a cat; in her teens she’d led us into jungle woods and scary caves and defended us and lied for us in our wrongdoings. Because of her, we’d grown up understanding many faces of courage.
She cut the engine and, when the rotor had stopped, jumped down from the little glass bubble and walked collectedly to meet me on the tarmac.
“Hi,” she said; small, light, wiry, pleased with life.
I hugged her.
“Have you fixed lunch?” she asked.
“No.”
“Good. I brought a picnic.”
She returned to the helicopter and retrieved a carrier, which we took with us into the house. She never came empty-handed. I never wasted time catering for her except to put champagne on ice. I popped the cork and poured it straight, and she relaxed in a big chair, taking a deep fizzy gulp and looking me over as sisters do.
“How was the flight?” I asked.
“Bumpy over the moors. Some snow still lying about. I dropped down at Carlisle to refuel. Four hours, door to door.”
“Three hundred and fifty miles,” I said.
“Near enough.”
“It’s great to see you.”