by Dick Francis
They began to talk again, but not much to me. I guessed they didn’t know what to say. Nor did I.
I felt neither more nor less courageous than I had done all my life. It was surely impossible, I thought confusedly, to be subconsciously afraid, to keep out of trouble and yet think one was as willing as ever to accept risks. Three weeks earlier, I would have laughed at the idea. But the shattering fact remained that none of the twenty-eight horses I had ridden since I had been knocked out in that fall had made any show at all. They were trained by several different trainers and owned by different owners: all they had had in common was me. There were too many of them for it to be a coincidence, especially as those I had been removed from had done well.
Round and round in a jumble went the profitless thoughts, the hopeless statistics, the feeling that the sky had fallen. I put on my street clothes and brushed my hair, and was surprised to see in the mirror that I looked the same as usual.
I went outside on to the steps outside the weighing-room and heard the normal chatter which my presence had muffled in the changing-room break out cheerfully again as soon as I was gone. No one outside either seemed very anxious to talk to me: no one, that is, except a weedy little ferret of a man, who worked, I knew, for one of the minor sporting papers.
He was standing with John Ballerton, but when he caught sight of me he came directly over.
‘Oh, Finn,’ he said, taking a notebook and pencil out of his pocket and looking at me with a sly, malicious smile. ‘May I have a list of the horses you are riding tomorrow? And next week?’
I looked across at Ballerton. There was a smirk of triumph on his heavy face. I took a great grip on my rising temper and spoke mildly to the Pressman.
‘Ask Mr Axminster,’ I said. He looked disappointed, but he didn’t know how close he had come to feeling my fist in his face. I had just enough sense to know that letting fly at him would be the worst thing I could do.
I strode away from him, seething with rage; but the day had not done with me, even yet. Corin, crossing my path purposefully, stopped me and said, ‘I suppose you’ve seen this?’ He held out a copy of the paper for which the ferrety little man wrote.
‘No,’ I said. ‘And I don’t want to.’
Corin smiled thinly, enjoying himself. ‘I think you ought to sue them. Every one thinks so. You’ll have to sue them when you’ve read it. You can’t ignore it, or everyone will think …’
‘Every one can think what they damn well please,’ I said roughly, trying to walk on.
‘Read it,’ insisted Corin, thrusting the paper in front of my eyes. ‘Everyone else has.’
It needed only half a glance to see the headline. There was no missing it. In bold type it said, ‘Nerve Lost.’
Against my will I began to read.
‘Nerve, depending on how it takes you, is either fear overcome by an effort of will, or a total lack of imagination. If you ride steeplechasing it doesn’t matter which sort you have, as long as you have one of them.
‘Does anyone understand why one man is brave and another is not? Or why a person can be brave at one time and cowardly at another?
‘Maybe it is all a matter of hormones! Maybe a bang on the head can destroy the chemical make-up which produces courage. Who knows? Who knows?
‘The crumbling of a jumping jockey’s nerve is a pathetic sight, as every recent racegoer will realise. But while one may extend sympathy to a man for a state which he cannot help, one must at the same time ask whether he is doing the right thing if he continues to seek and accept rides in races.
‘The public deserves a fair run for its money. If a jockey can’t give it to them because he is afraid of hurting himself, he is taking fees under false pretences.
‘But it is only a matter of time, of course, before owners and trainers withdraw their custom from such a man and, by forcing him into retirement, protect the betting public from wasting any more of its money.
‘And a good thing too!’
I gave the paper back to Corin and tried to loosen the clamped tension of my jaw muscles.
‘I can’t sue them,’ I said. ‘They don’t mention my name.’
He didn’t look surprised, and I realised sharply that he had known it all along. He had wanted only the pleasure of watching me read, and there was still about his eyes a remnant of a very nasty smile.
‘What did I ever do to you, Corin,’ I asked, ‘to make you feel the way you do?’
He looked taken aback, and said weakly, ‘Er … nothing …’
‘Then I’m sorry for you,’ I said stonily. ‘I’m sorry for your spiteful, mean, cowardly little soul …’
‘Cowardly!’ he exclaimed, stung and flushing. ‘Who are you to call anyone else cowardly? That’s a laugh, that really is. Just wait till they hear this. Just wait till I tell …’
But I didn’t wait. I had had far, far more than enough. I went back to Kensington in as deep and terrible a mood of despair as I ever hope to have to live through.
There was no one in the flat, and for once it was spotlessly tidy. The family, I concluded, were away. The kitchen confirmed it. There was no food or milk in the refrigerator, no bread in the bin, no fruit in the basket.
Back in the silent sitting-room I took a nearly full whisky bottle out of the cupboard and lay down full length on the sofa. I uncorked the bottle and took two large gulps. The neat spirit bit into my gums and scorched down to my empty stomach. I put the cork in the bottle and the bottle on the floor beside me. What is the point of getting drunk, I thought: I’d only feel worse in the morning. I could stay drunk for several days perhaps, but it wouldn’t do any good in the end. Nothing would do any good. Everything was finished. Everything was busted and gone.
I spent a long time looking at my hands. Hands. The touch they had for horses had earned me my living all my adult life. They looked the same as always. They were the same, I thought desperately. Nerves and muscles, strength and sensitivity, nothing was changed. But the memory of the last twenty-eight horses I had ridden denied it: heavy, cumbersome and unresponsive.
I knew no other skill but riding, nor had ever wanted any. I felt more than whole on horseback: I felt extended. Four extra limbs and a second brain. More speed, more strength, more courage … I winced at the word … and quicker reactions. A saddle was to me as the sea to a fish, natural and easy. Home. And a racing saddle? I drew in a breath, shivering. For a racing saddle, I thought bleakly, I am not sufficient.
It wasn’t enough after all to want to race as well as anybody, one had to have the talent and the staying power as well; and I was face to face with the conviction that I was not good enough, that I was never going to be good enough, to take firm hold of the position which had been so nearly in my grasp. I had thought myself capable of seizing the incredible opportunity I had been given. The mess I had made of it, the weak degrading retreat from the brink of success, was tearing to shreds all I had known or believed about myself.
I picked up the whisky bottle and held it on my chest. It was all the company I had, and it offered sleep, at least. But I suppose old habits cling hard: I held the bottle to my chest like a life-jacket to a drowning man and knew I wouldn’t pull the cork out again. Not for a while. Not that night, anyway.
And what of the future? I could return during the next week and race on one or two of James’s horses, if he would still let me, and perhaps even on Template in the Midwinter. But I no longer either expected or hoped to do well, and I could feel myself shrink at the prospect of going back to a racecourse to face all those stares and insults again. Better to start a new life at once, perhaps. But a new life doing what?
It couldn’t be the old life. Being a stockman might have suited me at twenty, but it was not what I would want at thirty, nor at forty, nor fifty. And whatever I did, wherever I went now, I would drag around with me the knowledge that I had totally failed at what I had tried hardest to do.
After a long time I stood up and put the bottle back in the cupboa
rd.
It was then a good twenty-six hours since I had eaten, and despite everything my stomach was beginning its squeezing routine. On a second inspection the kitchen revealed only some assorted tins of escargots, cheese straws and marrons glacés; so I went out and along the streets until I came to a decent-looking pub where I was sure I was not known by sight. I didn’t want to have to talk.
I ordered ham sandwiches and a glass of beer, but when it came the thick new white bread stuck tastelessly in my mouth and my throat kept closing convulsively against all attempts to swallow. This can’t go on, I thought. I’ve got to eat. If I can’t get drunk and I can’t have Joanna and I can’t … I can’t be a jockey any more … at least I can eat now as much as I like, without worrying about gaining a pound or two … but after ten minutes trying I had swallowed only two mouthfuls, and I couldn’t manage another bite.
The fact that it was Friday had meant nothing to me all evening, and the approach of 9 o’clock went unnoticed. But just when I pushed away the sandwiches and was eyeing the beer with the beginnings of nausea, someone turned up the volume of the television set which stood at one end of the bar, and the opening bars of the ‘Galloping Major’ suddenly blared out across the tinkling glasses and the buzzing voices. A large bunch of devotees who had settled themselves with full pint pots in front of the set made shooshing noises to those nearest to them, and by the time Maurice Kemp-Lore’s tidy features materialised there was a more or less attentive audience to receive him. My little glass-topped table was as far as it could be from the door, so that it was more because leaving meant weaving my way through the sprawling silent crowd, than from a positive desire to watch, that I stayed where I was.
‘Good evening,’ Maurice said, the spellbinding smile in place. ‘This evening we are going to talk about handicapping, and I have here to meet you two well-informed men who look at weights and measures from opposing angles. The first is Mr Charles Jenkinson, who has been an official handicapper for several years.’ Mr Jenkinson’s selfconscious face appeared briefly on the screen. ‘And the other is the well-known trainer, Corin Kellar.’
Corin’s thin face glowed with satisfaction. We’ll never hear the last of this, I thought; and then with a stab remembered that I wouldn’t be there to hear any of it anyway.
‘Mr Jenkinson,’ said Maurice, ‘will explain how he builds a handicap. And Mr Kellar will tell you how he tries to avoid having his horses defeated by their weights. The battle between handicappers and trainers is none the less fierce for being conducted in gentlemanly and largely uncomplaining reticence, and perhaps tonight you will capture a whiff of that unrelenting struggle.’ He smiled engagingly. ‘A handicapper’s pinnacle of success is for every single runner in a race to pass the winning post in a straight line abreast – a multiple dead-heat – since it is his aim to give each horse an exactly equal chance. It never actually happens, but handicappers dream about it in their softer moments.” He grinned sideways in a friendly fashion towards his guests, and when Mr Jenkinson appeared on the screen one could almost see the self-confidence begin to flow in him as he started to talk about his job.
I listened with only half my mind, the rest being submerged in persistent misery, and Corin had been speaking for some moments before I paid much attention to him. He was being of necessity less than frank, since the bald truth would have lost him his licence very smartly. In practice he felt no qualms at all when giving his jockey orders to start at the back and stay there, but in theory, I was sardonically amused to see, he was righteously on the side of the angels.
‘Horses from my stable are always doing their best to win,’ he said, lying without a tremor.
‘But surely you don’t insist on them being ridden hard at the end when they’ve no chance at all?’ said Maurice, reasonably.
‘As hard as necessary, yes,’ Corin asserted. ‘I hate to see jockeys easing up too soon, even if they are beaten. I dismissed a jockey a short while ago for not riding hard enough at the end. He could have come third if he had ridden the horse out …’ his voice droned on, pious and petulant, and I thought of Tick-Tock, thrown to the stewards for obeying his orders too conscientiously and now having trouble getting other trainers to trust him. I thought of Art, nagged and contradicted and driven to death; and the active dislike I already felt for Corin Kellar sharpened in that dim pub corner into hatred.
Maurice dragged him back to handicapping and finally wrung from him a grudging admission that from the point of view of the weight he would be allotted in future, it was better for a horse to win by one length than by ten. Maurice would have done better, I thought, to have chosen almost anyone else to show how to dodge the handicapper: or perhaps he did not know Corin well enough to expect him hypocritically to deny in public what he had said in private. Every jockey who had ridden the Kellar horses had learned it the hard way.
‘One is always in the hands of one’s jockey,’ Corin was saying.
‘Go on,’ said Maurice encouragingly, leaning forward. A light somewhere in the studio lent his eyes a momentary shimmer as he moved. Corin said, ‘You can slave away for weeks preparing a horse for a race and then a jockey can undo it all with one stupid mistake.’
‘It does the handicap good though,’ Maurice interrupted, laughing. The pub audience laughed too.
‘Well …’ agreed Corin, nonplussed.
‘If you look at it that way,’ Maurice continued, ‘there is always some compensation for a jockey not getting the most out of a horse. Whatever the reason, trivial, like a mistake, or more serious, like a failure of resolution at a crucial point …’
‘No guts, you mean?’ said Corin flatly. ‘I’d say that that would be as obvious to a handicapper as to everyone else, and that he’d take it into account. There’s a case in point now …’ he hesitated, but Maurice did not try to stop him, so he went on more boldly, ‘a case now where everything a certain jockey rides goes round at the back of the field. He is afraid of falling, you see. Well, you can’t tell me any handicapper thinks those particular horses are not as good as they were. Of course they are. It’s just the rider who’s going downhill.’
I could feel the blood rush to my head and begin to pulse there. I leaned my elbows on the table and bit my knuckle. Hard.
The voices went on inexorably.
Maurice said, ‘What are your views on that, Mr Jenkinson?’
And the handicapper, looking embarrassed, murmured that ‘Of course … er … in certain circumstances, one would … er … overlook the occasional result.’
‘Occasional!’ said Corin. ‘I wouldn’t call nearly thirty races in a row occasional. Are you going to overlook them all?’
‘I can’t answer that,’ protested Jenkinson.
‘What do you usually do in these cases?’ Maurice asked.
‘I … that is … they aren’t usually as blatant as this. I may have to consult … er, others, before coming to a decision. But it really isn’t a thing I can discuss here.’
‘Where better?’ said Maurice persuasively. ‘We all know that this poor chap took a toss three weeks ago and has ridden … er … ineffectively … ever since. Surely you’d have to take that into account when you are handicapping those horses?’
While the camera focused on Jenkinson hesitating over his answer Corin’s voice said, ‘I’ll be interested to know what you decide. One of those horses was mine, you know. It was a shocking exhibition. Finn won’t be riding for me again, or for anyone else either, I shouldn’t wonder.’
Jenkinson said uneasily, ‘I don’t think we should mention names,’ and Maurice cut in quickly, saying, ‘No, no. I agree. Better not.’ But the damage was done.
‘Well, thank you both very much for giving us your time this evening. I am sorry to say we have come nearly to the end once again …’ He slid expertly into his minute of chit-chat and his closing sentences, but I was no longer listening. Between them he and Corin had hammered in the nails on the ruins of my brief career, and watching them at
it on the glaring little screen had given me a blinding headache.
I stood up stiffly as the chatter broke out again in the crowded pub and threaded my way a little unsteadily to the door. The bunch of racing enthusiasts were downing their pints and I caught a scrap of their conversation as I squeezed round them.
‘Laid it on a bit thick, I thought,’ one of them said.
‘Not thick enough,’ contradicted another. ‘I lost a quid on Finn on Tuesday. He deserves all he gets, if you ask me, the windy b——.’
I stumbled out into the street, breathing in great gulps of cold air and making a conscious effort to stand up straight. It was no use sitting down and weeping in the gutter, which would have been easy enough to do. I walked slowly back to the dark, empty flat, and without switching on any lights lay down fully dressed on my bed.
The glow from the street below dimly lit the small room, the window frame throwing an angular distorted shadow on the ceiling. My head throbbed. I remembered lying there like that before, the day Grant’s fist pulped my nose. I remembered pitying him, and pitying Art. It had been so easy. I groaned aloud, and the sound shocked me.
It was a long way down from my window to the street. Five storeys. A long, quick way down. I thought about it.
There was a chiming clock in the flat below ours, counting away the quarter-hours, and in the quiet house I could hear it clearly. It struck ten, eleven, twelve, one, two.
The window threw its shadow steadily on the ceiling. I stared up at it. Five storeys down. But however bad things were I couldn’t take that way, either. It wasn’t for me. I shut my eyes and lay still, and finally after the long despairing hours drifted into an exhausted, uneasy, dream-filled sleep.