Nerve

by Dick Francis

  Stifling hope is a hopeless business. As I went into the weighing-room I saw James Axminster talking to Pip’s close friend, another leading jockey. The jockey shook his head, and across the room I watched his lips say, ‘No, I can’t.’

  Axminster turned slowly round looking at faces. I stood still and waited. Gradually his head came round and he saw me. He looked at me steadily, pondering, unsmiling. Then his eyes went past me and focused on someone to my left. He came to a decision and walked briskly past me.

  Well, what did I expect? I had ridden for him for only four weeks. Three winners. A dozen also-rans. During the past fortnight I had taken digs in the village near his stable and ridden out at exercise on his horses every morning; but I was still the new boy, the unknown, unsuccessful jockey of the television programme. I began to walk disconsolately over to the changing-room door.

  ‘Rob,’ he said in my ear. ‘Lord Tirrold says you can ride his horse. You’d better tell Pip’s valet; he has the colours.’

  I half-turned towards them. They stood together, the two tall men, looking at me appraisingly, knowing they were giving me the chance of a lifetime, but not sure that I was up to it.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said; and I went on into the changing-room, queerly steadied by having believed that I had been passed over.

  I rode better than I had ever done before, but that was probably because Template was the best horse I had ever ridden. He was smooth and steely, and his rocketing spring over the first fence had me gasping; but I was ready for it at the second, and exulted in it at the third; and by the fourth I knew I had entered a new dimension of racing.

  Neither Axminster nor Lord Tirrold had given me any orders in the paddock on how to shape the race. They had been too concerned about Pip, whom they had just briefly visited. The sight of his shattered leg had left them upset and preoccupied.

  Axminster said only, ‘Do the best you can, Rob,’ and Lord Tirrold, unusually tactless for so diplomatic a man, said gloomily, ‘I put a hundred on Template this morning. Oh, well, it’s too late to cancel it, I suppose.’ Then seeing my rueful amusement added, ‘I beg your pardon, Rob. I’m sure you’ll do splendidly.’ But he did not sound convinced.

  As the pattern of the race shifted and changed, I concentrated solely on keeping Template lying in about fourth position in the field of twelve runners. To be farther back meant leaving him a lot to do at the end, and to be farther forward meant that one could not see how well or how badly everyone else was going. Template jumped himself into third place at the second last fence, and was still not under pressure. Coming towards the last I brought him to the outside, to give him a clear view, and urged him on. His stride immediately quickened. He took off so far in front of the fence that for a heart-breaking second I was sure he would land squarely on top of it, but I had under-estimated his power. He landed yards out on the far side, collecting himself without faltering and surged ahead towards the winning post.

  One of the two horses close in front had been passed in mid-air over the fence. There remained only a chestnut to be beaten. Only. Only the favourite, the choice of the critics, the public and the press. No disgrace, I fleetingly thought, to be beaten only by him.

  I dug my knees into Template’s sides and gave him two taps with the whip down his shoulder. He needed only this signal, I found, to put every ounce into getting to the front. He stretched his neck out and flattened his stride, and I knelt on his withers and squeezed him and moved with his rhythm, and kept my whip still for fear of disturbing him. He put his head in front of the chestnut’s five strides from the winning post, and kept it there.

  I was almost too exhausted to unbuckle the saddle. There was a cheer as we went into the unsaddling enclosure, and a lot of smiling faces, and some complimentary things were said, but I felt too weak and breathless to enjoy them. No race had ever before taken so much out of me. Nor given me so much, either.

  Surprisingly Lord Tirrold and Axminster were almost subdued.

  ‘That was all right, then,’ said Axminster, the lower teeth glimmering in a smile.

  ‘He’s a wonderful horse,’ I said fervently.

  ‘Yes,’ said Lord Tirrold, ‘he is.’ He patted the dark sweating neck.

  Axminster said, ‘Don’t hang about then, Rob. Go and weigh in. You haven’t any time to waste. You’re riding in the next race. And the one after.’

  I stared at him.

  ‘Well, what did you expect?’ he said. ‘Pip’s obviously going to be unfit for months. I took you on to ride second to him, and you will stand in for him until he comes back.’

  Tick-Tock said, ‘Some people would climb out of a septic tank smelling of lavender.’

  He was waiting for me to change at the end of the afternoon.

  ‘Six weeks ago you were scrounging rides. Then you get yourself on television as a failure and make it obvious you aren’t one. Sunday newspapers write columns about you and your version of the creed gets a splash in The Times as well. Now you do the understudy-into-star routine, and all that jazz. And properly, too. Three winners in one afternoon. What a nerve.’

  I grinned at him. ‘What goes up must come down. You can pick up the pieces later on.’

  I tied my tie and brushed my hair, and looked in the mirror at the fatuous smile I could not remove from my face. Days like this don’t happen very often, I thought.

  ‘Let’s go and see Pip,’ I said abruptly, turning round.

  ‘Okay,’ he agreed.

  We asked the first-aid men where Pip had been taken, and as they were leaving in any case they gave us a lift to the hospital in the ambulance. It was not until they told us that we realised how seriously the leg was broken.

  We saw Pip only for a few moments. He lay in a cubicle in the casualty department, a cradle over his leg and blankets up to his chin. A brisk nurse told us he was going to the operating theatre within minutes and not to disturb the patient, as he had been given his pre-med. ‘But you can say hello,’ she said, ‘as you’ve come.’

  Hello was just about all we did say. Pip looked terribly pale and his eyes were fuzzy, but he said weakly, ‘Who won the big race?’

  ‘Template,’ I said, almost apologetically.

  ‘You?’

  I nodded. He smiled faintly. ‘You’ll ride the lot now, then.’

  ‘I’ll keep them warm for you,’ I said. ‘You won’t be long.’

  ‘Three bloody months.’ He shut his eyes. ‘Three bloody months.’

  The nurse came back with a stretcher trolley and two khaki-overalled porters, and asked us to leave. We waited outside in the hall, and saw them trundle Pip off towards the open lift.

  ‘He’ll be four months at least with a leg like that,’ said Tick-Tock. ‘He might just be ready for Cheltenham in March. Just in time to take back all the horses and do you out of a chance in the Champion Hurdle and the Gold Cup.’

  ‘It can’t be helped,’ I said. ‘It’s only fair. And anything can happen before then.’

  I think Axminster had trouble persuading some of his owners that I was capable of taking Pip’s place, because I didn’t ride all of the stable’s horses, not at first. But gradually as the weeks went by and I seemed to make no unforgivable bloomers, fewer and fewer other jockeys were engaged. I became used to seeing my name continually in the number boards, to riding three or four races a day, to going back to my digs contentedly tired in body and mind and waking the next morning with energy and eagerness. In some ways, I even became used to winning. It was no longer a rarity for me to be led into the first’s enclosure, or to talk to delighted owners, or to see my picture in the sporting papers.

  I began earning a good deal of money, but I spent very little of it. There was always the knowledge, hovering in the background, that my prosperity was temporary. Pip’s leg was mending. Tick-Tock and I decided, however, to share the cost of buying a car. It was a second-hand cream coloured Mini-Cooper which did forty miles to the gallon on a long run and could shift along at a steady sevent
y on the flat, and a friend of Tick-Tock’s who kept a garage had recommended it to him as a bargain.

  ‘All we want now are some leopard-skin seat covers and a couple of blondes in the back,’ said Tick-Tock, as we dusted the small vehicle parked outside my digs, ‘and we’ll look like one of those gracious living advertisements in the Tatler.’ He lifted up the bonnet and took at least his tenth look at the engine. ‘A beautiful job of design,’ he said fondly.

  Gracious living, good design or not, the little car smoothed our paths considerably, and within a fortnight I could not imagine how we had ever managed without it. Tick-Tock kept it where he lived, seven miles away, near the stable he rode for, and came to collect me whenever Axminster himself was not taking me to meetings in his own car. Race trains came and went without any further support from either of us as we whizzed homewards through the black December afternoons in our cosy box on wheels.

  While the Gods heaped good fortune on my head, others fared badly.

  Grant had offered neither explanation nor apology for hitting me on the nose. He had not, in fact, spoken one word to me since that day, but as at the same time he had also stopped borrowing my kit, I was not sure that I minded. He withdrew more and more into himself. The inner volcano of violence showed itself only in the stiffness of his body and the tightness of his lips, which seemed always to be compressed in fury. He loathed to be touched, even accidentally, and would swing round threateningly if anyone bumped into him in the changing-room. With my peg at most meetings still next to his I had knocked into him several times, for however hard I tried it was impossible in those cramped quarters not to, and the glare he gave me each time was frankly murderous.

  It was not only to me that he had stopped speaking. He no longer said much at all. The trainers and owners who still employed him could get him neither to discuss a race beforehand nor explain what had happened afterwards. He listened to his orders in silence and left the trainer to draw his own conclusions through his race-glasses about how the horse had run. When he did speak, his remarks were laden with such a burden of obscenity that even the hardened inmates of the changing-room shifted uncomfortably.

  Oddly enough Grant’s riding skill had not degenerated with his character. He rode the same rough, tough race as always; but he had, we knew, begun to let out his anger on to his mounts, and twice during November he was called before the stewards for ‘excessive use of the whip.’ The horses in question had each come in from their races with raw red weals on their flanks.

  The Oldfield volcano erupted, as far as I was concerned, one cold afternoon in the jockeys’ and trainers’ car park at Warwick. I was late leaving the meeting as I had won the last race and had been taken off to the bar afterwards by the elated owner, one of my farmer friends. Tick-Tock had gone to a different meeting, and I had the car. By the time I got there the park was empty except for the Mini-Cooper and another car which was standing almost next to it, and two or three cars further on down the row.

  I went towards the Mini still smiling to myself with the pleasure of this latest win, and I did not see Grant until I was quite close to him. I was approaching the cars from behind, with Grant’s on the right of mine. His near hind wheel lay on the grass, surrounded by a collection of implements spilling out of a holdall tool bag. A jack held up the bare axle of his black saloon and he was kneeling beside it with the spare wheel in his hand.

  He saw me coming, and he saw me smiling, and he thought I was laughing at him for having a puncture. I could actually see the uncontrollable fury rise in his face. He got to his feet and stood rigidly, his thickset body hunched with belligerence, the strong shoulders bunching under his coat, his arms hanging down. Then he bent forward and from among the mess of tools picked up a tyre lever. He swished it through the air, his eyes on me.

  ‘I’ll help you with your puncture, if you like,’ I said mildly.

  For answer he took a step sidewards, swung his arm in a sort of backwards chop, and smashed the tyre lever through the back window of the Mini-Cooper. The glass crashed and tinkled into the car, leaving only a fringe of jagged peaks round the frame.

  Tick-Tock and I had had the car barely three weeks. My own anger rose quick and hot and I took a step towards Grant to save my most precious possession from further damage. He turned to face me squarely and lifted the tyre lever again.

  ‘Put it down,’ I said, reasonably, standing still. We were now about four feet apart. He told me to do something which is biologically impossible.

  ‘Don’t be an ass, Grant,’ I said. ‘Put that thing down and let’s get on with changing your tyre.’

  ‘You ——’ he said, ‘you took my job.’

  ‘No,’ I said. It was pointless to add more, not least because if he was going to try to hit me I wanted to have all my concentration focused on what he was doing, not on what I was saying.

  His eyes were red-rimmed above the high cheek bones. The big nostrils flared open like black pits. With his wild face, his bursting anger, and the upheld quivering tyre lever, he was a pretty frightening sight.

  He slashed forward and downward at my head.

  I think that at that moment he must have been truly insane, for had the blow connected he would surely have killed me, and he couldn’t have hoped to get away with it with his car standing there with the wheel off. He was beyond thought.

  I saw his arm go up a fraction before it came down and it gave me time to duck sideways. The lever whistled past my right ear. His arm returned in a backhand, again aiming at my head. I ducked again underneath it, and this time, as his arm swung wide and his body lay open to me, I stepped close and hit him hard with my fist just below his breast bone. He grunted as the wind rushed out of his lungs, and the arm with the tyre lever dropped, and his head came forward. I took a half pace to the right and hit him on the side of the neck with the edge of my hand.

  He went down on his hands and knees, and then weakly sprawled on the grass. I took the tyre lever from his slack fingers and put it with all the other tools into the holdall, and shut the whole thing into the boot of his car.

  It was getting very cold and the early dusk was turning colours to black and grey. I squatted beside Grant. He was hovering on the edge of consciousness, breathing heavily and moaning slightly.

  I said conversationally, close to his ear, ‘Grant, why did you get the sack from Axminster?’

  He mumbled something I could not hear. I repeated my question. He said nothing. I sighed and stood up. It had been only a faint chance, after all.

  Then he said distinctly, ‘He said I passed on the message.’

  ‘What message?’

  ‘Passed on the message,’ he said, less clearly. I bent down and asked him again, ‘What message?’ But although his lips moved he said nothing more.

  I decided that in spite of everything I could not just drive off and leave him lying there in the cold. I took out the tools again, and sorting out the brace, put the spare wheel on and tightened up the nuts. Then I pumped-up the tyre, let the jack down and slung it with the punctured wheel into the boot on top of the tools.

  Grant was still not properly conscious. I knew I hadn’t hit him hard enough to account for such a long semi-waking state, and it occurred to me that perhaps his disturbed brain was finding this a helpful way to dodge reality. I bent down and shook his shoulder and called his name. He opened his eyes. For a split second it seemed as though the old Grant smiled out of them, and then the resentment and bitterness flooded back as he remembered what had happened. I helped him sit up, and propped him against his car. He looked desperately tired, utterly worn out.

  ‘O God,’ he said, ‘O God.’ It sounded like a true prayer, and it came from lips which usually blasphemed without thought.

  ‘If you went to see a psychiatrist,’ I said gently, ‘you could get some help.’

  He didn’t answer; but neither did he resist when I helped him into the passenger seat of the Mini-Cooper. He was in no state to drive his own car, and
there was no one else about to look after him. I asked him where he lived, and he told me. His car was safe enough where it was, and I remarked that he could fetch it on the following day. He made no reply.

  Luckily he lived only thirty miles away, and I drew up where he told me outside a semi-detached featureless house on the outskirts of a small country town. There were no lights in the windows.

  ‘Isn’t your wife in?’ I asked.

  ‘She left me,’ he said absently. Then his jaw tensed and he said, ‘Mind your own——business.’ He jerked the door open, climbed out and slammed it noisily. He shouted, ‘Take your bloody do-gooding off and——it. I don’t want your help, you——.’ He appeared to be back to his usual frame of mind, which was a pity, but there didn’t seem to be any point in staying to hear more so I let in the clutch and drove off: but I had gone only half a mile down the road when I reluctantly came to the conclusion that he shouldn’t be left alone in an empty house.

  I was at that point in the centre of the little town whose brightly lit shops were closing their doors for the day, and I stopped and asked an elderly woman with a shopping basket where I could find a doctor. She directed me to a large house in a quiet side street, and I parked outside and rang the door bell.

  A pretty girl appeared and said, ‘Surgery at six,’ and began to close the door again.

  ‘If the doctor is in, please let me speak to him,’ I said quickly, ‘it’s not a case for the surgery.’

  ‘Well, all right,’ she said and went away. Children’s voices sounded noisily somewhere in the house. Presently, a youngish, chubby, capable-looking man appeared, munching at a piece of cream-filled chocolate cake and wearing the resigned, enquiring expression of a doctor called to duty during his free time.

  ‘Are you by any chance Grant Oldfield’s doctor?’ I asked. If he weren’t, I thought, he could tell me where else to go.