Nerve

by Dick Francis

  The worst of it was that Tick-Tock won. I was standing beside Peter on the jockeys’ stand when the scarlet colours skated by the winning post, and he made a choking sound as if he were about to burst into tears. He managed not to, but there was a certain dampness about his eyes and his face had changed to a bloodless, greyish white.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said awkwardly, embarrassed for him. ‘It’s not the end of the world.’

  It had been unfortunate that we had arrived so late, but the trainer he rode for was a reasonable man, if impatient, and there was no question of his not engaging him in future. Peter did in fact ride for him again that same afternoon, but the horse ran less well than was expected, and pulled up lame. My last glimpse of him showed a face still dragged down in lines of disappointment and he was boring everyone in the weighing-room by harping on the tank carrier over and over again.

  For myself, things went slightly better. The novice chaser fell at the water jump, but went down slowly and I suffered nothing but grass stains on my breeches.

  The young hurdler I was to ride for James Axminster in the last race on the card had as vile a reputation as his stable-mate the previous day and I had made completing the race my sole target. But for some reason the wayward animal and I got on very well together from the start, and to my surprise, an emotion shared by every single person present, we came over the last hurdle in second place and passed the leading horse on the uphill stretch to the winning post. The odds-on favourite finished fourth. It was my second win of the season, and my first ever at Cheltenham: and it was greeted with dead silence.

  I found myself trying to explain it away to James Axminster in the winner’s unsaddling enclosure.

  ‘I’m very sorry, sir,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t help it.’

  I knew he hadn’t had a penny on it, and the owner had not even bothered to come to see the horse run.

  He looked at me broodingly without answering, and I thought that there was one trainer who would not employ me again in a hurry. Sometimes it is as bad to win unexpectedly as to lose on a certainty.

  I unbuckled the girths, pulled the saddle off over my arm and stood waiting for the storm to break.

  ‘Well, go along and weigh in,’ he said abruptly. ‘And when you’re dressed I want to talk to you.’

  When I came out of the changing-room he was standing just inside the weighing-room door talking to Lord Tirrold, whose horse he trained. They stopped talking and turned towards me as I went over to them, but I could not see their expressions clearly as they had their backs to the light.

  James Axminster said, ‘What stable do you ride for most?’

  I said, ‘I ride mainly for farmers who train their own horses. I haven’t a steady job with a public trainer, but I have ridden for several when they have asked me. Mr Kellar has put me up a few times.’ And that, I thought a little wryly, is the true picture of the smallness of the impression I had made in the racing world.

  ‘I have heard one or two trainers say,’ said Lord Tirrold, speaking directly to Axminster, ‘that for their really bad horses they can always get Finn.’

  Axminster grinned back at him. ‘Just what I did today, and look at the result! How am I going to convince the owner it was as much a surprise to me as it will be to him when he hears about it? I’ve told him often that the horse is pretty useless.’ He turned to me. ‘You have made me look a proper fool, you know.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ I said again: and I meant it.

  ‘Don’t look so glum about it. I’ll give you another chance; several, in fact. There’s a slow old plug you can ride for me on Saturday, if you’re not booked already for that race, and two or three others next week. After that … we’ll see.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said dazedly. ‘Thank you very much.’ It was as if he had thrust a gold brick into my hands when I had expected a scorpion: if I acquitted myself at all well on his horses he might use me regularly as a second-string jockey. That would be, for me, a giant step up.

  He smiled a warm, almost mischievous smile which crinkled the skin round his eyes and said, ‘Geranium in the handicap chase at Hereford on Saturday, then. Are you free?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘And you can do the weight? Ten stone?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I’d need to lose another three pounds in the two days, but starvation had never seemed so attractive.

  ‘Very well. I’ll see you there.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

  He and Lord Tirrold turned away and went out of the weighing-room together, and I heard them laugh. I watched them go, the thin angular Lord Tirrold and the even taller trainer, a pair who had between them won almost every important event in the National Hunt calendar.

  James Axminster was a big man in every sense. Six foot four and solidly bulky, he moved and spoke and made decisions with easy assurance. He had a big face with a prominent nose and a square-looking heavy lower jaw. When he smiled his lower teeth showed in front of the upper ones, and they were good strong teeth, evenly set and unusually white.

  His stable was one of the six largest in the country: his jockey, Pip Pankhurst, had been champion for the past two seasons: and his horses, about sixty of them, included some of the best alive. To have been offered a toe-hold in this set-up was almost as frightening as it was miraculous. If I messed up this chance, I thought, I might as well follow Art into oblivion.

  I spent most of the next day running round Hyde Park in three sweaters and a wind-cheater and resisting the temptation to drink pints of water to replace what I had sweated off. Some of the other jockeys used dehydrating pills to rid their bodies of fluid (which weighs more than fat and is easier to shift) but I had found, the only time I took some, that they left me feeling almost too weak to ride.

  At about six o’clock I boiled three eggs and ate them without salt or bread, and then removed myself hurriedly, for my mother was entertaining some friends to dinner, and the girl who came to cook for us on these occasions was beginning to fill the kitchen with demoralisingly savoury smells. I decided to go to the pictures to take my mind off my stomach; but it wasn’t a great success as I chose the film somewhat carelessly, and found myself watching three men staggering on their parched way through a blazing desert sharing their rations into ever dwindling morsels.

  After that I went to the Turkish Baths in Jermyn Street and spent the whole night there, sweating gently all evening and again when I woke in the morning. Then I went back to the flat and ate three more boiled eggs, which I no longer cared for very much, and at last made my way to Hereford.

  The needle quivered when I sat on the scales with the lightest possible saddle and thin boots. It swung up over the ten stone mark and pendulumed down and finally settled a hair’s breadth on the right side.

  ‘Ten stone,’ said the clerk of the scales in a surprised voice. ‘What have you been doing? Sandpapering it off?’

  ‘More or less,’ I grinned.

  In the parade ring James Axminster looked at the number boards where the weights the horses carried were recorded, if they differed from those printed in the race cards. He turned back to me.

  ‘No overweight?’ he asked.

  ‘No, sir,’ I said matter-of-factly, as if it were the easiest thing in the world.

  ‘Hm.’ He beckoned the lad who was leading round the slow old plug I was to ride and said, ‘You’ll have to kick this old mare along a bit. She’s lazy. A good jumper, but that’s about all.’

  I was used to kicking lazy horses. I kicked, and the mare jumped: and we finished third.

  ‘Hm,’ said Axminster again as I unbuckled the girths. I took my saddle and weighed in – half a pound lighter – and changed into the colours of the other horse I had been engaged to ride that afternoon, and when I walked out into the weighing-room, Axminster was waiting for me. He had a paper in his hand. He gave it to me without a word.

  It was a list of five horses running in various races during the following week. Against each horse�
�s name he had put the weight it had to carry and the race it was to run in. I read through them.

  ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Can you ride them?’

  ‘I can ride four of them,’ I said. ‘But I’m already booked for that novice chase on Wednesday.’

  ‘Is it important? Can you get off?’ he asked.

  I would dearly have liked to say yes. The paper I held was an invitation to my personal paradise, and there was always the chance that if I refused one of his mounts, the man who got it might corner all the future ones.

  ‘I … no,’ I said, ‘I ought not to. It’s for the farmer who gave me my first few rides …’

  Axminster smiled faintly, the lower teeth showing in front. ‘Very well. Ride the other four.’

  I said, ‘Thank you, sir. I’d be glad to.’ He turned away, and I folded up the precious list and put it in my pocket.

  My other ride later that afternoon was for Corin Kellar. Since Art’s death he had employed several different jockeys and moaned to them about the inconvenience of not having a first-class man always on call. As it was his treatment of Art which had driven a first-class man to leave him in the most drastic possible way, Tick-Tock and I considered him a case for psychiatry; but both of us were glad enough to ride his horses, and Tick-Tock had ridden more of them than anyone else.

  ‘If Corin asks you,’ I said as we collected our saddles and helmets ready to weigh out for the race, ‘will you accept Art’s job?’

  ‘If he asks me, yes,’ said Tick-Tock. ‘He won’t harass me into the hereafter.’ He looked up slantwise from under his rakishly tilted eyebrows, the thin-lipped, wide mouth stretched in a carefree grin. A vivid, almost aggressive sanity moulded the angular planes of his face, and for a moment he seemed to me more than ever to have been born too soon. He was what I pictured twenty-first century man should be – intensely alive, curiously innocent, with no taint of apathy or anger or greed. He made me feel old. He was nineteen.

  We went out together to the parade ring.

  ‘Paste on a toothy leer,’ he said. ‘The eye of the world has swivelled our way.’

  I glanced up. From its draughty platform a television camera swung its square snout towards us as it followed the progress of a grey horse round the ring. It tracked briefly over us and moved on.

  ‘I’d forgotten we were on the air,’ I said indifferently.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Tick-Tock, ‘and the great man himself is here somewhere too, the one and only M. Kemp-Lore, no less. Puff pastry, that man is.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘A quick riser. And full of hot air. But rich, man, and tasty. A good crisp flavour, nice and crunchy.’

  I laughed. We joined Corin and he began to give us both our instructions for the race. Tick-Tock’s mount was a good one, but I was as usual riding a horse of whom little was expected, and quite rightly, as it turned out. We trailed in a long way behind, and I saw from the numbers going up in the frame that Corin’s other horse had won.

  Corin and Tick-Tock and the horse’s owner were conducting a mutual admiration session in the winner’s enclosure when I walked back to the weighing-room with my saddle, but Corin caught me by the arm as I went past and asked me to come straight out again, when I had dumped my saddle and helmet, to tell him how the horse had run.

  When I rejoined him he was talking to a man who had his back towards me. I hovered, not wanting to interrupt, but Corin saw me and beckoned, and I walked across to them. The man turned round. He was in his early thirties, I judged. Of average height and slim build, with good features and light hair. It never ceases to be disconcerting, meeting for the first time in the flesh a man whose face is as familiar to you as a brother’s. It was Maurice Kemp-Lore.

  Television is unflattering to everybody. It fattens the body and flattens the personality, so that to sparkle from the small screen an entertainer must be positively incandescent in real life, and Kemp-Lore was no exception. The charm which came over gradually in his programme was instantly compelling when one met him. Intensely blue eyes looked at me from a firm, sun-tanned face; his hand-shake was quick and strong; his smile, infectious and warm, indicated his delight in meeting me. But it was a professional delight, and even as I responded to him I recognised that the effect he had on me was calculated. His stock in trade. All good interviewers know how to give people confidence so that they expand and flower, and Kemp-Lore was a master of his art. Dull men had shone as wits in his programme, taciturn men chattered, bigoted men thought again.

  ‘I see you were last in the race,’ he said. ‘Bad luck.’

  ‘Bad horse,’ said Corin, put into smiling good humour by his presence.

  ‘I’ve been wanting for some time to do a programme on – if you’ll forgive me – an unsuccessful jockey.’ His smile took the sting out of his words. ‘Or at least, a jockey who is not yet successful. Perhaps that would be a fairer way of putting it?’ His blue eyes twinkled. ‘Would you consider coming on my programme and telling viewers what sort of life you lead? I have in mind your financial position, your reliance on chance rides, insecurity … that sort of thing. Just to give the public the reverse side of the coin. They know all about big retainers and fat presents and jockeys who win important races. I want to show them how a jockey who seldom wins even unimportant races manages to live. A jockey on the fringe.’ He smiled his warm smile. ‘Will you do it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘certainly. But I’m not really typical. I …’

  He interrupted me. ‘Don’t tell me anything now,’ he said, ‘I know enough about your career to find you suitable for what I have in mind, but I always prefer not to know the answers to my specific questions until we are actually on the air. It makes the whole thing more spontaneous. I have found that if I rehearse with my subject what we are going to say the programme comes over stiffly and unconvincingly. Instead, I will send you a list of the sort of questions I will be asking, and you can think out your replies. O.K.?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘All right.’

  ‘Good. Next Friday then. The programme goes out at nine o’clock. Get to the studios by seven-thirty, will you? That gives time for seeing to lighting, make-up, and so on, and perhaps for a drink beforehand. Here is a card which will tell you how to get there.’ He produced a card which had ‘Universal Telecast’ printed in large capitals on one side and a simplified map of Willesden on the other.

  ‘Oh, and by the way, there will be a fee, of course, and your expenses.’ He smiled sympathetically, letting me know that he knew that that was good news.

  ‘Thank you,’ I smiled back. ‘I’ll be there’.

  He spoke a word to Corin and strolled away. I turned to Corin and caught on his face as he watched the retreating figure of Kemp-Lore, the same expression that I saw so often on hangers-on round my parents. The smug, fawning smirk which meant ‘I am on speaking terms with a famous person, clever me.’ It would have been more impressive, I thought, if like most other trainers he had taken knowing the illustrious Kemp-Lore entirely for granted.

  ‘I know Maurice quite well,’ said Corin aloud, in a self-satisfied voice. ‘He asked my advice about whether you’d be any good as his – er – unsuccessful jockey, and I told him to go ahead.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, as he waited for it.

  ‘Yes, a grand fellow, Maurice. Good family, you know. His father won the National – an amateur of course – and his sister is the best lady point-to-point rider there has been for years. Poor old Maurice, though, he hardly rides at all. Doesn’t even hunt. Horses give him the most ghastly asthma, you know. He’s very cut-up about it. Still, he’d never have taken to broadcasting if he’d been able to race, so perhaps it’s all for the best.’

  ‘I dare say,’ I said. I was still in lightweight silk colours and breeches and the afternoon was growing cool. I dragged the conversation back to the horse I had just come last on, got the post-mortem over, and eventually went back to the weighing-room to change.

  The jockeys
had already gone out for the last race, but several others were standing about in various stages of undress, gossiping and putting on their street clothes. As I went down the room I saw Grant Oldfield standing by my peg, holding a paper in his hand, and I was annoyed to find, drawing nearer, that it was the list of horses James Axminster had given me. Grant had been going through my pockets.

  My protest was never uttered. Without a word, without any warning, Grant swung his fist and punched me heavily in the nose.

  Four

  The amount of blood which resulted would have done credit to a clinicful of donors. It splashed in a scarlet stain down the front of my pale green silk shirt and made big uneven blotches on the white breeches. There were large spots of it on the bench and on the floor and it was all over my hands where I had tried to wipe it out of my mouth.

  ‘For God’s sake, lay him down on his back,’ said one of the valets, hurrying over. His advice was almost unnecessary, since I was already lying down, mostly on the floor but half propped up by the leg of the bench. It was where that one blow, catching me off balance, had felled me.

  Grant stood at my feet, looking down as if surprised to have caused so much mess. I could have laughed if I had not been so busy swallowing what seemed like cupfuls of my own blood.

  Young Mike thrust a saddle under my shoulders and pushed my head backwards over it. A second later he was piling a cold, wet towel across the bridge of my nose; and gradually the breath-clogging bleeding lessened and stopped.

  ‘You’d better stay there for a bit,’ said Mike. ‘I’ll go and get one of the first-aid men to see to you.’

  ‘Don’t bother,’ I said. ‘Please don’t bother, it’s all right now.’

  He came back irresolutely from the door and stood by my head. He looked upside down to me, as my eyes were level with his ankles.

  ‘What the hell did you do that for?’ he said to Grant.

  I wanted to hear his answer too, but Grant did not reply. He scowled down at me, then turned on his heel and pushed his way out of the changing-room against the incoming tide of the jockeys returning from the last race. The list of Axminster horses fluttered to the floor in his wake. Mike picked it up and put it into my outstretched hand.