Nerve

by Dick Francis

  He smiled vividly, the charm turned on to full wattage, his slim figure radiating health and confidence and his blue eyes achieving the near impossible of twinkling on a grey January afternoon. I smiled back automatically: one couldn’t help it. All his impressive success stemmed from the instantaneous, irresistible feeling of well-being he inspired in whomever he talked to, and there was no one from the Senior Steward downwards who did not enjoy his company, even if, like me, one suspected his unfailing motive was the gathering of material for his programme.

  ‘What bad luck, Rob,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I hear the good word I put in for you with John Ballerton has gone awry.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ I agreed. ‘But thanks for trying, anyway.’

  The blue eyes glimmered. ‘Anything to help,’ he said.

  I could hear distinctly a faint high-pitched wheeze as he drew breath into his lungs, and I realised it was the first time I had encountered him in an asthmatic attack. I was vaguely sorry for him.

  The horses for the sixth race cantered past, going down to the start.

  ‘Are James’s plans fixed for the Midwinter Cup?’ he asked casually, his eyes on the horses. I smiled. But he had his job to do, I supposed, and there was no harm in telling him.

  ‘Template runs, all being well,’ I said.

  ‘And you ride him?’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed.

  ‘How is Pip getting along?’ he asked, wheezing quietly.

  ‘They think his leg is mending well, but he is still in plaster,’ I said. ‘It comes off next week, I believe, and he might be ready for Cheltenham, but of course he won’t be fit for the Midwinter.’

  The race in question was a richly endowed new event at Ascot, introduced to provide a high spot in mid-February, and nicely timed to give three full weeks for recovery and re-tuning before the Cheltenham Gold Cup. It lay almost a month ahead, on that day at Dunstable, and I was looking forward to it particularly as it seemed possible that it would be my last chance on Template. Pip would do his very best to be fit to ride him in the Gold Cup, and so would I have done in his place.

  ‘What chance do you give Template in the Midwinter?’ Maurice asked, watching the start through his race glasses.

  ‘Oh, I hope he’ll win,’ I said, grinning. ‘You can quote me.’

  ‘I probably will,’ he agreed, grinning back. We watched the race together, and such was the effect of his personality that I left Dunstable quite cheerfully, the dismal two days’ results temporarily forgotten.

  Eight

  It was a false security. My charmed run of good luck had ended with a vengeance, and Dunstable proved to be only the fringe of the whirlpool. During the next two weeks I rode seventeen horses. Fifteen of them finished in the rear of the field, and in only two cases was this a fair result.

  I couldn’t understand it. As far as I knew there was no difference in my riding, and it was unbelievable that my mounts should all lose their form simultaneously. I began to worry about it, and that didn’t help, as I could feel my confidence oozing away as each disturbing and embarrassing day passed.

  There was one grey mare I particularly liked riding because of the speed of her reactions: she often seemed to know what I intended to do a split second before I gave her signals, rather as if she had sized up the situation as quickly as I had and was already taking independent action. She was sweet tempered and silken mouthed, and jumped magnificently. I liked her owner too, a short jolly farmer with a thick Norfolk accent, and while we watched her walk round the parade ring before her race he commiserated with me on my bad luck and said, ‘Never mind, lad. The mare will put you right. She’ll not fail you. You’ll do all right on her, never fear.’

  I went out smiling to the race because I too believed I would do all right on her. But that week she might have been another horse. Same colour, same size, same pretty head. But no zip. It was like driving a car with four flat tyres.

  The jolly farmer looked less jolly and more pensive when I brought her back.

  ‘She’s not been last ever before, lad,’ he said reproachfully.

  We looked her over, but there was nothing wrong with her that we could see, and she wasn’t even blowing very hard.

  ‘I could get her heart tested I suppose,’ the farmer said doubtfully. ‘Are you sure you gave her her head, lad?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But she had no enthusiasm at all today.’

  The farmer shook his head, doleful and puzzled.

  One of the horses I rode belonged to a tall sharp-faced woman who knew a great deal about racing and had no sympathy with bunglers. She laid straight into me with her tongue after I had eased her ultra-expensive new gelding from last into second last place only feet from the winning post.

  ‘I suppose you realise,’ she said in a loud, hard voice, unashamedly listened to by a large group of racegoers, ‘That in the last five minutes you have succeeded both in halving the value of my horse and in making me look a fool for having paid a fortune for him.’

  I apologised. I suggested possibly that her animal needed a little time.

  ‘Time?’ she repeated angrily. ‘For what? For you to wake up? You speak as if it were my judgment that is at fault, not yours. You lay far too far out of your ground. You should have taken closer order from the beginning …’ Her acid lecture went on and on and on, and I looked at the fine head of her glossy high-bred black gelding and admitted to myself that he was probably a great deal better than he had appeared.

  One Wednesday was the big day for a ten-year-old schoolboy with sparkly brown eyes and a conspiratorial grin. His wealthy eccentric grandmother, having discovered that there was no minimum age laid down for racehorse owners, had given Hugo a colossal chestnut ’chaser twice his height, and was considerate enough to foot the training bills as well.

  I had become firm friends with Hugo. Knowing that I saw his horse most mornings at James’s, he used to send me tiny parcels containing lumps of sugar filched from the dining table at his prep. school, which I conscientiously passed on to their intended destination: and I used to write back to Hugo, giving him quite detailed accounts of how his giant pet was progressing.

  On that Wednesday Hugo had not only begged a day off from school to see his horse run, but had brought three friends with him. The four of them stood with me and James in the parade ring, Hugo’s mother being the rare sort who liked her son to enjoy his limelight alone. As I had walked down from the weighing-room she had smiled broadly to me from her station on the rails.

  The four little boys were earnest and excited, and James and I had great fun with them before the race, treating them with seriousness and as man-to-man, which they obviously appreciated. This time, I promised myself, this time, for Hugo, I will win. I must.

  But the big chestnut jumped very clumsily that day. On the far side of nearly every fence he ducked his head, and once, to prevent myself being hauled over in a somersault, I had to stretch forward down his neck with one hand only, leaving go of the reins entirely with the other. The free arm, swinging up sideways, helped to bring my weight far enough back to keep me in the saddle, but the gesture known as ‘calling a cab’ was not going to earn me any bonus points with James, who had denounced it often as the style of ‘bad, tired, scared or unfit amateurs.’

  Hugo’s little face was pink when I dismounted, and the three friends glumly shuffled their feet behind him. With them as witnesses there would be no chance of Hugo smoothing over the disaster with the rest of his schoolmates.

  ‘I’m very sorry, Hugo,’ I said sincerely, apologising for everything – myself, the horse, the race, and the miserliness of fate.

  He answered with a stoicism which would have been a lesson to many of his seniors. ‘I expect it was an off day,’ he said kindly. ‘And anyway, someone always has to be last. That’s what Daddy said when I came bottom in History.’ He looked at the chestnut forgivingly, and said to me, ‘I expect he’s keen really, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I a
greed. ‘Keen, very.’

  ‘Well,’ said Hugo, turning bravely to the friends. ‘That’s that, then. We might as well have tea.’

  Failures like these were too numerous to escape anyone’s attention, but as the days passed I noticed a change in the way people spoke to me. One or two, and Corin in particular, showed something like contempt. Others looked uncomfortable, others sympathetic, others pitying. Heads turned towards me wherever I went, and I could almost feel the wave of gossip I left in my wake. I didn’t know exactly what they were saying, so I asked Tick-Tock.

  ‘Pay no attention,’ he said. ‘Ride a couple of winners and they’ll be throwing the laurel wreaths again, and back-pedalling on everything they’re saying now. It’s bad-patchville, chum, that’s all.’

  And that was all I could get out of him.

  One Thursday evening James telephoned to my digs and asked me to go up to his house. I walked up in the dark, rather miserably wondering whether he, like two other trainers that day, was going to find an excuse for putting someone else up on his horses. I couldn’t blame him. Owners could make it impossible for him to continue with a jockey so thoroughly in the doldrums.

  James called me into his office, a square room joining his house to the stable yard. Its walls were covered with racing photographs, bookshelves, a long row of racing colours on clothes hangers, and filing cabinets. A huge roll-top desk stood in front of the window, which looked out on to the yard. There were three broken-springed armchairs with faded chintz covers, a decrepit Turkish carpet on the floor, and a red-hot coal fire in the grate. I had spent a good many hours there in the past three months, discussing past performances and future plans.

  James waited for me and stood aside to let me go in first. He followed me in and shut the door, and faced me almost aggressively across the familiar room.

  ‘I hear,’ he said without preamble, ‘that you have lost your nerve.’

  The room was very still. The fire crackled slightly. A horse in a near-by loose box banged the floor with his hoof. I stared at James, and he stared straight back, gravely.

  I didn’t answer. The silence lengthened. It was not a surprise. I had guessed what was being said about me when Tick-Tock had refused to tell me what it was.

  ‘No one is to blame for losing his nerve,’ James said non-committally. ‘But a trainer cannot continue to employ someone to whom it has happened.’

  I still said nothing.

  He waited for a few seconds, and went on, ‘You have been showing the classic symptoms … trailing round nearly last, pulling up for no clear reason, never going fast enough to keep warm, and calling a cab. Keeping at the back out of trouble, that’s what you’ve been doing.’

  I thought about it, rather numbly.

  ‘A few weeks ago,’ he said, ‘I promised you that if I heard any rumours about you I would make sure they were true before I believed them. Do you remember?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I heard this rumour last Saturday,’ he said. ‘Several people sympathised with me because my jockey had lost his nerve. I didn’t believe it. I have watched you closely ever since.’

  I waited dumbly for the axe. During the week I had been last five times out of seven.

  He walked abruptly over to an armchair by the fire and sat down heavily.

  Irritably he said, ‘Oh sit down, Rob. Don’t just stand there like a stricken ox, saying nothing.’

  I sat down and looked at the fire.

  ‘I expected you to deny it,’ he said in a tired voice. ‘Is it true, then?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Is that all you’ve got to say? It isn’t enough. What has happened to you? You owe me an explanation.’

  I owed him much more than an explanation.

  ‘I can’t explain,’ I said despairingly. ‘Every horse I’ve ridden in the last three weeks seems to have had its feet dipped in treacle. The difference is in the horses … I am the same.’ It sounded futile and incredible, even to me.

  ‘You have certainly lost your touch,’ he said slowly. ‘Perhaps Ballerton is right …’

  ‘Ballerton?’ I said sharply.

  ‘He’s always said you were not as good as you were made out to be, and that I’d pushed you on too fast … given you a top job when you weren’t ready for it. Today he has been going round smugly saying “I told you so”. He can’t leave the subject alone, he’s so pleased.’

  ‘I’m sorry, James,’ I said.

  ‘Are you ill, or something?’ he asked exasperatedly.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘They say the fall you had three weeks ago was what frightened you – the day you got knocked out and your horse rolled on you. But you were all right going home, weren’t you? I remember you being a bit sore, but you didn’t seem in the least scared of falling again.’

  ‘I didn’t give that fall another thought,’ I said.

  ‘Then why, Rob, why?’

  But I shook my head. I didn’t know why.

  He stood up and opened a cupboard which contained bottles and glasses, poured out two whiskys, and handed one to me.

  ‘I can’t convince myself yet that you’ve lost your nerve,’ he said. ‘Remembering the way you rode Template on Boxing Day, only a month ago, it seems impossible. No one could change so fundamentally in so short a time. Before I took you on, wasn’t it your stock in trade to ride all the rough and dangerous horses that trainers didn’t want to risk their best jockeys on? That’s why I first engaged you, I remember it clearly. And all those years you spent in wherever it was as a stockman, and that spell in a rodeo … you aren’t the sort of man to lose his nerve suddenly and for nothing, and especially not when you’re in the middle of a most spectacularly successful season.’

  I smiled for almost the first time that day, realising how deeply I wanted him not to lose faith in me.

  I said, ‘I feel as if I’m fighting a fog. I tried everything I knew today to get those horses to go faster, but they were all half-dead. Or I was. I don’t know … it’s a pretty ghastly mess.’

  ‘I’m afraid it is,’ he said gloomily. ‘And I’m having owner trouble about it, as you can imagine. All the original doubters are doubting again. I can’t reassure them … it’s like a Stock Exchange crash; catching. And you’re the bad stock that’s being jettisoned.’

  ‘What rides can I still expect?’ I said.

  He sighed. ‘I don’t exactly know. You can have all the Broome runners because he’s on a cruise in the Mediterranean and won’t hear the rumours for a while. And my two as well; they both run next week. For the rest, we’ll have to wait and see.’

  I could hardly bring myself to say it, but I had to know.

  ‘How about Template?’ I asked.

  He looked at me steadily. ‘I haven’t heard from George Tirrold,’ he said. ‘I think he will agree that he can’t chuck you out after you’ve won so many races for him. He is not easily stampeded, there’s that to hope for, and it was he who drew my attention to you in the first place. Unless something worse happens,’ he finished judiciously, ‘I think you can still count on riding Template in the Midwinter a week on Saturday. But if you bring him in last in that … it will be the end.’

  I stood up and drained the whisky.

  ‘I’ll win that race,’ I said, ‘whatever the cost, I’ll win it.’

  We went silently together to the races the following day, but when we arrived I discovered that two of my three prospective mounts were mine no longer. I had been, in the expressive phrase, jocked off. The owners, the trainer in question brusquely explained, thought they would have no chance of winning if they put me up as planned. Very sorry and all that, he said, but no dice.

  I stood on the stands and watched both the horses run well: one of them won, and the other finished a close third. I ignored as best I could the speculative, sideways glances from all the other jockeys, trainers and pressmen standing near me. If they wanted to see how I was taking it, that was their affair; just as it was mine
if I wanted to conceal from them the inescapable bitterness of these two results.

  I went out to ride James’s runner in the fourth race absolutely determined to win. The horse was capable of it on his day, and I knew him to be a competent jumper and a willing battler in a close finish.

  We came last.

  All the way round I could barely keep him in touch with the rest of the field. In the end he cantered slowly past the winning post with his head down in tiredness, and mine down too, in defeat and humiliation. I felt ill.

  It was an effort to go back and face the music. I felt more like driving the Mini-Cooper at top speed into a nice solid tree.

  The freckle-faced lad who looked after the horse deliberately did not glance at me when he took hold of the reins in the paddock. He usually greeted me with a beaming smile. I slid off the horse. The owner and James stood there, their faces blank. No one said anything. There was nothing to say. Finally, without a word, the owner shrugged his shoulders and turned on his heel, and walked off.

  I took my saddle off the horse and the lad led him away.

  James said, ‘It can’t go on, Rob.’

  I knew it.

  He said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. I’ll have to get someone else to ride my horses tomorrow.’

  I nodded.

  He gave me a searching look in which puzzlement and doubt were tinged for the first time with pity. I found it unbearable.

  ‘I think I’ll go to Kensington tonight after the races,’ I said, trying to speak evenly. ‘Instead of coming back with you.’

  ‘Very well,’ he said, obviously relieved at not having to face an embarrassing return journey. ‘I really am sorry, Rob.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know.’

  I took my saddle back to the weighing-room, acutely aware of the glances which followed me. The conversation in the changing-room died into an embarrassed silence when I walked in. I went over to my peg and put the saddle on the bench, and began to take off my colours. I looked at the circle of faces turned towards me, reading on some curiosity, on some hostility, on some sympathy, and on one or two, pleasure. No contempt: they would leave that to people who didn’t ride, to the people who didn’t know at first hand how formidable a big fence can look to a jockey on a bad horse. In the changing-room there was too much consciousness in their minds of ‘there but for the grace of God go I,’ for them to feel contempt.