by Dick Francis
I could picture her exactly, dressed for work in a cashmere sweater and ski pants, sitting upright on her special stool, with her head thrust forward as if to hear more from the piano than the notes themselves. She was digging the bones out of the piece, and I knew better than to interrupt her. Digging the bones, the essence, the composer’s ultimate intention: and when she had these things firmly in her mind, she would begin the process of clothing them with her own interpretations, sharpening the contrasts of mood and tone, until the finished conception emerged clear and shining and memorable.
My mother might not have been a comforting refuge in my childhood nor take much loving interest in me now I was a man, but she had by her example shown me many qualities to admire and value. Professionalism, for instance; a tough-minded singleness of purpose; a refusal to be content with a low standard when a higher one could be achieved merely by working. I had become self-reliant young and thoroughly as a result of her rejection of motherhood, and because I saw the grind behind the gloss of her public performances, I grew up not expecting life’s plums to be tossed into my lap without any effort from me. What mother could teach her son more?
Joanna’s time was tangled inextricably with several performances in different places of the Christmas Oratorio. I managed to hook her only for one chilly morning’s walk in the Park, which was not a success from my point of view since Handel easily shoved me into second place for her attention. She hummed bits of the Oratorio continuously from the Albert Gate to the Serpentine, and from the Serpentine to Bayswater Road. There I put her into a taxi and gave her a Christmassy lunch at the Savoy, where she appeared to restrain herself with difficulty from bursting into full song, as the acoustics in the entrance hall appealed to her. I couldn’t decide whether or not she was being irritating on purpose, and if she was, why?
She was definitely a great deal less serene than usual, and there was a sort of brittleness in her manner which I didn’t like and couldn’t understand, until when we were half-way through some excellent mince pies it belatedly occurred to me that she might be unhappy. Unhappiness was not a state I had seen her in before, so I couldn’t be sure. I waited until the coffee came, and then said casually, ‘What’s up, Joanna?’
She looked at me, then she looked round the room, then at me again, then at her coffee.
Finally she said, ‘Brian wants me to marry him.’
It wasn’t what I expected, and it hurt. I found myself looking down at my own coffee: black and bitter, very appropriate, I thought.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ she said. ‘I was content as we were. Now I’m unsettled. Brian keeps talking about ‘living in sin’ and ‘regularising the position.’ He goes to church a lot now, and he can’t reconcile our relationship with his religion. I never thought of it as sinful, just as enjoyable and fruitful and … and comfortable. He is talking about buying a house and settling down, and sees me as the complete housewife, cleaning, mending, cooking, and so on. I’m not that sort of person. The thought appals me. If I marry him, I know I’ll be miserable …’ Her voice trailed off.
‘And if you don’t marry him?’ I asked.
‘I’ll be miserable then, too, because he refuses to go on as we are. We’re not easy together any more. We nearly have rows. He says it’s irresponsible and childish not to want to marry at my age, and I say I’ll gladly marry him if we live as we do now, with him coming and going from the studio when he likes, and me free to work and come and go as I please too. But he doesn’t want that. He wants to be respectable and conventional and … and stuffy.’ The last word came out explosively, steeped in contempt. There was a pause while she stirred her coffee vigorously. There was no sugar in it. I watched the nervous gesture, the long strong fingers with the pink varnished nails gripping the spoon too hard.
‘How much do you love him?’ I asked painfully.
‘I don’t know,’ she said unhappily. ‘I don’t know any more what love is.’ She looked straight across the little table. ‘If it means that I want to spend my life attending to his creature comforts, then I don’t love him. If it means being happy in bed, then I do.’
She saw the movement in my face, and said abruptly, ‘Oh hell … Rob, I’m sorry. It’s so long since you said anything … I thought you didn’t still …’
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘It can’t be helped.’
‘What … what do you think I should do?’ she said after a pause, still fiddling with the coffee spoon.
‘It’s quite clear,’ I said positively, ‘that you should not marry Brian if you can’t bear the prospect of the life he intends to lead. It wouldn’t work for either of you.’
‘So?’ she said, in a small voice.
But I shook my head. The rest she would have to resolve for herself. No advice I could give her would be unbiased, and she must have known it.
She left presently to go to a rehearsal, and I paid the bill and wandered out into the festive streets. I bought some presents for my family on the way, walking slowly back to the flat. The sort of marriage which Joanna had offered Brian, and which he spurned, was what I most wanted in the world. Why, I wondered disconsolately, was life so ruddy unfair.
On Boxing Day Template won the King Chase, one of the ten top races of the year. It put him conclusively into the star class, and it didn’t do me any harm either.
The race had been televised, and afterwards, as was his custom, Maurice Kemp-Lore interviewed me as the winning jockey before the cameras. Towards the end of the brief talk he invited me to say hullo directly to Pip, who, he explained to viewers, was watching at home. I had seen Pip only a week or two earlier and had discussed big-race tactics with him, but I obligingly greeted him and said I hoped his leg was mending well. Kemp-Lore smilingly added ‘We all wish you a speedy recovery, Pip,’ and the interview was over.
On the following day the sporting press was complimentary about the race, and a number of trainers I had not yet ridden for offered me mounts. I began to feel at last as though I were being accepted as a jockey in my own right, and not principally as a substitute for Pip. It even seemed likely that when Pip returned to his job I would not fade back into the wilderness, for two of the new trainers said they would put me up on their horses as often as I was free.
I had, of course, my share of falls during this period, for however fortunate I was I couldn’t beat the law of averages: but no damage was done except for a few bruises here and there, and none of them was bad enough to stop me riding.
The worst fall from the spectators’ point of view happened one Saturday afternoon in January, when the hurdler I was riding tripped over the flight of hurdles nearest to the grandstand and flung me off on to my head. I woke up dizzily as the first-aid men lifted me into the ambulance on a stretcher, and for a moment or two could not remember where I was.
James’s face, looming over me as they carried me into the first-aid room, brought me back to earth with a click, and I asked him if his horse was all right.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘how about you?’
‘Nothing broken,’ I assured him, having explored my limbs rather drunkenly during the short trip back in the ambulance.
‘He rolled on you,’ he said.
‘I’m not surprised.’ I grinned up at him. ‘I feel a bit squashed, come to think of it.’
I lay for a while on a bed in the first-aid room, but there was nothing wrong with me that a good sleep wouldn’t cure, and at the end of the afternoon I went back to Berkshire with James as expected.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked once, on the way.
‘Yes,’ I said cheerfully. ‘Fine.’ Actually I felt dizzy now and then, and also shivery and unsettled, but concealing one’s true state of health from trainers was an occupational habit, and I knew I would be fit again to ride on Monday.
The only person who was openly annoyed at the run of good luck I had had was John Ballerton, and I had caught him several times in the parade ring staring tight-lipped at me with a patent and mo
st unstewardly animosity.
Since the day of our joint broadcast we had exchanged the fewest possible words, but I had heard from Corin, who repeated it to me with sly relish, the Ballerton had said loudly to him and Maurice Kemp-Lore in the members’ bar at Kempton, ‘Finn isn’t worth all the fuss that’s being made of him. He’ll come down just as quickly as he’s gone up, you’ll see. And I for one won’t weep about it.’
In view of this it was astonishing that on the day after my fall I should be offered a ride on one of his horses. At first I refused to take Corin seriously. His telephone call woke me on the Sunday morning, and I was inclined to think the concussion had returned.
‘If it were a choice between me and a sack of potatoes,’ I said sleepily, ‘he’d choose the potatoes.’
‘No, seriously Rob, he wants you to ride Shantytown at Dunstable tomorrow.’ Corin’s voice held no trace of humour. ‘I must say, I don’t really understand why, as he’s been so set against you before. But he was quite definite on the telephone, not five minutes ago. Perhaps it’s an olive branch.’
And perhaps not, I thought. My first instinct was to refuse to ride the horse, but I couldn’t think of a reasonable excuse, as Corin had found out I was free for the race before he told me whose the horse was. A point-blank excuseless refusal was, while possible, a senseless course. It would give Ballerton a genuine grievance against me, and if he sincerely wanted to smoothe over his hostility, which I doubted, I should only deepen it by spurning his offer.
Shantytown was no Template. Far, far from it. His uncertain temper and unreliable jumping were described to me in unreassuring terms by Tick-Tock on the way to Dunstable the following morning.
‘A right one,’ he said, putting his foot down on the Mini-Cooper’s accelerator. ‘A knacker’s delight. Dog-meat on the hoof.’
‘His form’s not bad,’ I protested mildly, having looked it up the previous day.
‘Hmph. Any time he’s won or been placed it’s because he’s dragged his jockey’s arms out of the sockets by a blast-off start and kept right on going. Hang on and hope, that’s how to ride him when he’s in that mood. His mouth is as hard as Gibraltar. In fact I cannot,’ finished Tick-Tock with satiric formality, ‘I cannot instantly recall any horse who is less receptive of his jockey’s ideas.’
There was no bitterness in his voice, but we were both aware that a few weeks ago riding Shantytown would have been his doubtful pleasure, not mine. Since his parade before the stewards for not pushing his horse all out into third place, he had been ignored by Corin Kellar. It was the sort of injustice typical of Corin, to sack a man who ran into trouble looking after his interests, and it had done nothing to lay the unfair rumour that Tick-Tock was a habitual non-trier.
Apart from abruptly lessening the number of races he rode in, the rumour had had little effect on Tick-Tock himself. He shrugged his shoulders, and with a determined look on his angular young face stated, ‘They’ll change their minds again in time. I’ll mash every horse I ride into a pulp. I’ll do my nut on every hopeless hack. No one henceforth will see me finish eighth when by bashing the beast I could be sixth.’
I had smiled to hear these fighting words from one whose chief asset was his lightness of touch, but was relieved too, that he was intact in spirits. No suicides, no mental breakdowns for him.
Shantytown, when it came to the race, was not what I had been led to expect. The damp raw January afternoon had drawn only a small crowd of stalwarts to watch a second-class programme at a minor meeting, and as I watched the big chestnut plod round the parade ring I thought how well he matched the circumstances. Uninspiring.
But far from pulling my arms out of their sockets, Shantytown seemed to me to be in danger of falling asleep. The start caught him flat-footed, so little interest was he taking in it, and I had to boot him into the first fence. He rose to it fairly well, but was slow in his recovery, and it was the same at every jump. It was puzzling, after what Tick-Tock had said, but horses do have their off-days for no discernible reason, and I could only suppose that this was one of them.
We trailed round the entire three miles in the rear of the field, and finished ingloriously last. All my efforts to get him to quicken up the straight met with no response. Shantytown hadn’t taken hold of his bit from the beginning and at the end he seemed to be dead beat.
A hostile reception met us on our return. John Ballerton, with whom I had exchanged coldly polite ‘Good afternoons’ in the parade ring before the race, now glowered like a July thunderstorm. Corin, standing on one leg and wearing an anxious, placatory expression, was obviously going to use me as the scapegoat for the horse’s failure, to save his face as its trainer. That was always one of the hazards to be run in riding Corin’s horses.
‘What the hell do you think you were doing?’ Ballerton said aggressively, as I slid off on to the ground and began to unbuckle the saddle girths.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ I said. ‘He wouldn’t go any faster.’
‘Don’t talk such bloody rubbish,’ he said, ‘he always goes faster than that. I’ve never seen a more disgusting display of incompetence … you couldn’t ride in a cart with a pig net over it. If you ask me, the horse wasn’t given a chance. You missed the start and couldn’t be bothered to make it up.’
‘I did say,’ said Corin to me reproachfully, ‘not to let him run away with you, and to keep tucked in behind for the first two miles. But I do think you carried my orders a bit too far …’
‘A bit too far!’ interrupted Ballerton furiously. ‘Were you afraid to let him go, or something? If you can’t manage to ride a decent race on a horse which pulls, why the hell do you try to? Why not say straight out that you can’t? Save us all a lot of time and money.’
I said, ‘The horse didn’t pull. There was no life in him.’
‘Kellar,’ Ballerton was nearly shouting. ‘Is my horse a puller, or is he not?’
‘He is,’ said Corin, not meeting my eyes.
‘And you told me he was fit. On his toes.’
‘Yes,’ said Corin. ‘I thought he’d win.’
They looked at me accusingly. Corin must have known that the horse had run listlessly because he had seen the race with experienced eyes, but he was not going to admit it. If I had to ride often for Corin, I thought wryly, I would soon have as many rows with him as Art had had.
Ballerton narrowed his eyes and said to me, ‘I asked you to ride Shantytown against my better judgment and only because Maurice Kemp-Lore insisted I had been misjudging you and that you were really a reliable man who would ride a genuine race. Well, I’m going to tell him he is wrong. Very wrong. You’ll never ride another horse of mine, I promise you that.’
He turned on his heel and stalked off, followed by Corin. My chief feeling, as I went back to the weighing-room, was of irritation that I hadn’t relied on instinct and refused to ride for him in the first place.
By the end of the afternoon the puzzlement I had felt over Shantytown’s dead running had changed to a vague uneasiness, for neither of the other two horses I rode afterwards did anything like as well as had been expected. Both were well backed, and both finished nearly last, and although their owners were a great deal nicer about it than Ballerton had been, their disappointment was obvious.
On the following day, still at Dunstable, the run of flops continued. I had been booked for three horses, and they all ran badly. I spent the whole depressing afternoon apologetically explaining to owner after owner that I had not been able to make their horse go faster. The third horse, in fact, went so badly that I had to pull him up half way round. He was a slow jumper on the best of days, but on that particular one he took so long putting himself right and so long starting off again when he landed, that the rest of the field were a whole fence ahead by the time we had gone a mile. It was hopeless. When I reined him in he slowed from a reluctant gallop to a walk in a couple of strides, sure sign of a very tired horse. I thought as he was trained by a farmer-owner who might not kn
ow better, that he must have been given too stiff a training gallop on the previous day, but the farmer said he was sure he had not.
Runs of bad luck are commoner in racing than good ones, and the fact that six of my mounts in a row had made a showing far below their usual capabilities would not have attracted much notice had it not been for John Ballerton.
I changed into street clothes after the fifth race and strolled out of the weighing-room to find him standing close by with a small circle of cronies. All the heads turned towards me with that sideways, assessing look which meant they had been talking about me, and Ballerton said something forceful to them, of which the word ‘disgrace’ floated across clearly.
Jockeys being as accustomed as politicians to abuse I gave no sign of having heard what had obviously been intended for my ears, and walked casually off to the stands to watch the last race; but I did wonder how long and how maliciously Ballerton would hold Shantytown’s failure against me, and what effect his complaints would have on the number of horses I was asked to ride. He was not a man to keep his grudges to himself, and as a National Hunt Committee member he was not without influence either.
Up on the stands Maurice Kemp-Lore came across to talk to me. We had met briefly on racecourses several times now, and were on superficially friendly terms, but in spite of his charm, or perhaps because it sometimes seemed too polished, I felt his friendship came strictly into the professional, ‘might be useful’ category. I did not believe that he liked me for my own sake.