by Dick Francis
If my hair hadn’t been so short he would probably have succeeded in knocking me out, but his fingers kept slipping when I twisted my head violently in his grasp, and the third time my ear grazed the plaster I managed at last to wrench my right hand free as well.
After that, hauling off a fraction, I landed a socking right jab in his short ribs, and the air whistled out of his lungs screeching like an express train. He went a sick grey-green colour and fell slackly off me, gasping and retching and clawing his throat for air.
I got to my feet and hauled him up, and staggered with him over to the window, holding him where the fresh cold air blew into his face. After three or four minutes his colour improved and the terrifying heaving lessened, and some strength flowed back into his sagging legs.
I clamped his fingers round the window frames and let go of him. He swayed a bit, but his hands held, and after a moment I walked dizzily out of the room and padlocked the door shut behind me.
Buttonhook had found her way into the front room and was placidly eating the hay. I leaned weakly against the wall and watched her for a while, cursing myself for the foolish way I had nearly got myself locked into my own prison. I was badly shaken, not only by the fight itself but by the strength with which Kemp-Lore had fought and by the shocking effect my last blow had had on him. I ought to have had more sense, I knew, than to hit an asthmatic with that particular punch.
There was no sound from the back room. I straightened up and walked round to the window. He was standing there, holding on to the frames where I had put him, and there were tears running down his cheeks.
He was breathing safely enough, the asthma reduced to a more manageable wheeze, and I imagined it would not get any worse from then on, as Buttonhook was no longer in the room with him.
‘Damn you,’ he said. Another tear spilt over. ‘Damn you. Damn you.’
There wasn’t anything to say.
I went back to Buttonhook, and put on her halter. I had meant to deal with her later, after I had let Kemp-Lore go, but in the changed circumstances I decided to do it straight away, while it was still light. Leading her out of the front door and through the gate, I jumped on to her back and rode her away up past the two cars hidden in the bushes and along the ridge of the hill.
A mile further on I struck the lane which led up to the Downs, and turning down that came soon to a gate into a field owned by a farmer I had often ridden for. Slipping off Buttonhook I opened the gate, led her through and turned her loose.
She was so amiable that I was sorry to part with her, but I couldn’t keep her in the cottage, I couldn’t stable an elderly hunter in James’s yard and expect his lads to look after her, I couldn’t find a snap buyer for her at six o’clock in the evening; and I frankly didn’t know what else to do with her. I fondled her muzzle and patted her neck and fed her a handful of sugar. Then I slapped her on the rump and watched my eighty-five quid kick up her heels and canter down the field like a two-year-old. The farmer would no doubt be surprised to find an unclaimed brown mare on his land, but it would not be the first time a horse had been abandoned in that way, and I hadn’t any doubt that he would give her a good home.
I turned away and walked back along the hill to the cottage. It was beginning to get dark, and the little building lay like a shadow in the hollow as I went down to it through the trees and bushes. All was very quiet, and I walked softly through the garden to the back window.
He was still standing there. When he saw me he said quite quietly ‘Let me out.’
I shook my head.
‘Well at least go and telephone the company, and tell them I’m ill. You can’t let them all wait and wait for me to come, right up to the last minute.’
I didn’t answer.
‘Go and telephone,’ he said again.
I shook my head.
He seemed to crumple inside. He stretched his hands through the bars and rested his head against the window frames.
‘Let me out.’
I said nothing.
‘For pity’s sake,’ he said, ‘let me out.’
For pity’s sake.
I said, ‘How long did you intend to leave me in that tack-room?’
His head snapped up as if I’d hit him. He drew his hands back and gripped the bars.
‘I went back to untie you,’ he said, speaking quickly, wanting to convince me. ‘I went back straight after the programme was over, but you’d gone. Someone found you and set you free pretty soon, I suppose, since you were able to ride the next day.’
‘And you went back to find the tack-room empty?’ I said. ‘So you knew I had come to no harm?’
‘Yes,’ he said eagerly. ‘Yes, that’s what happened. I wouldn’t have left you there very long, because of the rope stopping your circulation.’
‘You did think there was some danger of that, then?’ I said innocently.
‘Yes, of course there was, and that’s why I wouldn’t have left you there too long. If someone hadn’t freed you first, I’d have let you go in good time. I only wanted to hurt you enough to stop you riding.’ His voice was disgustingly persuasive, as if what he was saying were not abnormal.
‘You’re a liar,’ I said calmly. ‘You didn’t go back to untie me after your show. You would have found me still there if you had. In fact it took me until midnight to get free, because no one came. Then I found a telephone and rang up for a car to fetch me, but by the time it reached me, which was roughly two o’clock, you had still not returned. When I got to Ascot the following day, everyone was surprised to see me. There was a rumour, they said, that I wouldn’t turn up. You even mentioned on television that my name in the number frames was a mistake. Well … no one but you had any reason to believe that I wouldn’t arrive at the races: so when I heard that rumour I knew that you had not gone back to untie me, even in the morning. You thought I was still swinging from that hook, in God knows what state … and as I understand it, you intended to leave me there indefinitely, until someone found me by accident … or until I was dead.’
‘No,’ he said faintly.
I looked at him without speaking for a moment, and then turned to walk away.
‘All right,’ he screamed suddenly, banging on the bars with his fists. ‘All right. I didn’t care whether you lived or died. Do you like that? Is that what you want to hear? I didn’t care if you died. I thought of you hanging there with your arms swelling and going black … with the agony going on and on … and I didn’t care. I didn’t care enough to stay awake. I went to bed. I went to sleep. I didn’t care. I didn’t care … and I hope you like it.’
His voice cracked, and he sank down inside the room so that all I could see in the gathering dusk was the top of his fair head and the hands gripping the bars with the knuckles showing white through the skin.
‘I hope you like it,’ he said brokenly.
I didn’t like it. Not one little bit. It made me feel distinctly sick.
I went slowly round into the front room and sat down again on the hay. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter-past six. Still three hours to wait: three hours in which the awful truth would slowly dawn on Kemp-Lore’s colleagues in the television studio, three hours of anxious speculation and stop-gap planning, culminating in the digging out of a bit of old film to fill in the empty fifteen minutes and the smooth announcement, ‘We regret that owing to the –er –illness of Maurice Kemp-Lore there will be no Turf Talk tonight.’
Or ever again, mates, I thought, if you did but know it.
As it grew dark the air got colder. It had been frosty all day, but with the disappearance of the sun the evening developed a sub-zero bite, and the walls of the unlived-in cottage seemed to soak it up. Kemp-Lore began kicking the door again.
‘I’m cold,’ he shouted. ‘It’s too cold.’
‘Too bad,’ I said, under my breath.
‘Let me out,’ he yelled.
I sat on the hay without moving. The wrist which he had latched on to while we fought was unc
omfortably sore, and blood had seeped through the bandage again. What the Scots doctor would have to say when he saw it I hated to think. The three warts would no doubt quiver with disapproval. I smiled at the picture.
Kemp-Lore kicked the door for a long time, trying to break through it, but he didn’t succeed. At the same time he wasted a good deal of breath yelling that he was cold and hungry and that I was to let him out. I made no reply to him at all, and after about an hour of it the kicking and shouting stopped, and I heard him slither down the door as if exhausted and begin sobbing with frustration.
I stayed where I was and listened while he went on and on moaning and weeping in desolation. I listened to him without emotion; for I had cried too, in the tack-room.
The hands crawled round the face of my watch.
At a quarter to nine, when nothing could any longer save his programme, and even a message explaining his absence could scarcely be telephoned through in time, Kemp-Lore’s decreasing sobs faded away altogether, and the cottage was quiet.
I got stiffly to my feet and went out into the front garden, breathing deeply in the clear air with an easing sense of release. The difficult day was over, and the stars were bright in the frosty sky. It was a lovely night.
I walked along to the bushes and started Kemp-Lore’s car, turning it and driving it back to the gate. Then for the last time I walked round the cottage to talk to him through the window, and he was standing there already, his face a pale blur behind the window frames.
‘My car,’ he said hysterically. ‘I heard the engine. You’re going to drive away in my car and leave me.’
I laughed. ‘No. You are going to drive it away yourself. As fast and as far as you like. If I were you, I’d drive to the nearest airport and fly off. No one is going to like you very much when they’ve read those letters in the morning, and it will be only a day or two before the newspapers get on to it. As far as racing goes, you will certainly be warned off. Your face is too well-known in Britain for you to hide or change your name or get another job. And as you’ve got all night and probably most of tomorrow before the storm breaks and people start eying you with sneers and contempt, you can pack up and skip the country quite easily, without any fuss.’
‘You mean … I can go? Just go?’ He sounded astounded.
‘Just go,’ I said, nodding. ‘If you go quickly enough, you’ll avoid the enquiry the Stewards are bound to hold, and you’ll avoid any charge they might think of slapping on you. You can get away to some helpful distant country where they don’t know you, and you can start again from scratch.’
‘I suppose I haven’t much choice,’ he muttered. His asthma was almost unnoticeable.
‘And find a country where they don’t have steeplechasing,’ I finished.
He moaned sharply, and crashed his fists down on the window frame.
I went round into the cottage and in the light of Joanna’s big torch unlocked the padlock and pushed open the door. He turned from the window and walked unsteadily towards me across the straw, shielding his ravaged face from the light. He went through the door, passed me without a glance, and stumbled down the path to his car; and I walked down the path behind him, shining the torch ahead. I propped the torch on top of the gate-post so as to leave my hands free in case I needed to use them, but there didn’t seemed to be much fight left in him.
He paused when he was sitting in his car, and with the door still wide open looked out at me.
‘You don’t understand,’ he said, his voice shaking.
‘When I was a boy I wanted to be a jockey. I wanted to ride in the Grand National, like my father. And then there was this thing about falling off … I’d see the ground rushing past under my horse and there would be this terrible sort of pain in my guts, and I sweated until I could pull up and get off. And then I’d be sick.’
He made a moaning noise and clutched his stomach at the memory. His face twisted. Then he said suddenly, fiercely, ‘It made me feel good to see jockeys looking worried. I broke them up all right. It made me feel warm inside. Big.’
He looked up at me with renewed rage, and his voice thickened venomously.
‘I hated you more than all the others. You rode too well for a new jockey and you were getting on too quickly. Everyone was saying “Give Finn the bad horses to ride, he doesn’t know what fear is.” It made me furious when I heard that. So I had you on my programme, remember? I meant to make you look a fool. It worked with Mathews, why not with you? But Axminster took you up and then Pankhurst broke his leg … I wanted to smash you so much that it gave me headaches. You walked about with that easy confidence of yours, as if you took your strength for granted, and too many people were getting to say you’d be champion one day …
‘I waited for you to have a fall that looked fairly bad, and then I used the sugar. It worked. You know it worked. I felt ten feet tall, looking at your white face and listening to everyone sniggering about you. I watched you find out how it felt. I wanted to see you writhe when everyone you cared for said … like my father said to all his friends … that it was a pity about you … a pity you were a snivelling little coward, a pity you had no nerve … no nerve …’
His voice died away, and his hollowed eyes were wide, unfocused, as if he were staring back into an unbearable past.
I stood looking down at the wreck of what could have been a great man. All that vitality, I thought; all that splendid talent wasted for the sake of hurting people who had not hurt him.
Such individuals could be understood, Claudius Mellit had said. Understood, and treated, and forgiven.
I could understand him in a way, I supposed, because I was myself the changeling in a family. But my father had rejected me kindly, and I felt no need to watch musicians suffer.
Treated … The treatment I had given him that day might not have cured the patient, but he would no longer spread his disease, and that was all I cared about.
Without another word I shut the car door on him and gestured to him to drive away. He gave me one more incredulous glance as if he still found it impossible that I should let him go, and began to fumble with the light switches, the ignition, and the gears.
I hoped he was going to drive carefully. I wanted him to live. I wanted him to live for years, thinking about what he had thrown away. Anything else would be too easy, I thought.
The car began to roll, and I caught a last glimpse of the famous profile, the eclipsed, exiled profile, as he slid away into the dark. The brake lights flashed red as he paused at the end of the lane, then he turned out into the road, and was gone. The sound of his engine died away.
I took the torch from the gate-post and walked up the path to the quiet cottage, to sweep it clean.
Forgiveness, I thought. That was something else again.
It would take a long time to forgive.
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First published in Great Britain January 1964
Second impression August 1964
Third impression November 1967
Fourth impression March 1971
Fifth impression October 1973
Sixth impression August 1976
Seventh impression January 1979
Eighth impression September 1982
Ninth impression June 1985
Tenth impression May 1987
Eleventh impression September 1991
Twelth impression March 1998
Copyright © Dick Francis 1964
Cover photograph © Action Plus Sports Images/Alamy
Cover design © www.asmithcompany.co.uk
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ISBN: 978-0-14-194235-3