by Dick Francis
When we had finished I lay beside her on the rug and felt the released tension weighing down my limbs in a sort of heavy languorous weakness. The world was a million light-years away and I was in no hurry for it to come closer.
‘Wow,’ she said, half breathless, half laughing. ‘Boy, you sure needed that.’
‘Mm.’
‘Doesn’t your wife let you …?’
Elizabeth, I thought. Oh God, Elizabeth. I must sometimes. Just sometimes.
The old weary tide of guilt washed back. The world closed in.
I sat up and stared blindly across the darkening room. It apparently struck Gail that she had been less than tactful, because she got up with a sigh and put her clothes on again, and didn’t say another word.
For better or worse, I thought bitterly. For richer, for poorer. In sickness and in health keep thee only unto her as long as you both shall live. I will, I said.
An easy vow, the day I made it. I hadn’t kept it. Gail was the fourth girl in eleven years. The first for nearly three.
‘You’ll miss your train,’ she observed prosaically, ‘if you sit there much longer.’
I looked at my watch, which was all I had on. Fifteen minutes.
She sighed, ‘I’ll drive you along to the station.’
We made it with time to spare. I stepped out of the car and politely thanked her for the lift.
‘Will I see you again?’ she said. Asking for information. Showing no anxiety. Looking out at me through the open window of the estate car outside Virginia Water station she was giving a close imitation of any suburban wife doing the train run. A long cool way from the rough and tumble on the rug. Switch on, switch off. The sort of woman I needed.
‘I don’t know,’ I said indecisively. The signal at the end of the platform went green.
‘Goodbye,’ she said calmly.
‘Do Harry and Sarah,’ I asked carefully, ‘always play golf on Sundays?’
She laughed, the yellow station lighting flashing on teeth and eyes.
‘Without fail.’
‘Maybe …’
‘Maybe you’ll ring, and maybe you won’t.’ She nodded. ‘Fair enough. And maybe I’ll be in, and maybe I won’t.’ She gave me a lengthy look which was half smile and half amused detachment. She wouldn’t weep if I didn’t return. She would accommodate me if I did. ‘But don’t leave it too long, if you’re coming back.’
She wound up the window and drove off without a wave, without a backward glance.
The green electric worm of a train slid quietly into the station to take me home. Forty minutes to Waterloo. Underground to Kings Cross. Three quarters of a mile to walk. Time to enjoy the new ease in my body. Time to condemn it. Too much of my life was a battlefield in which conscience and desire fought constantly for the upper hand: and whichever of them won, it left me the loser.
Elizabeth’s mother said with predictable irritation, ‘You’re late.’
‘I’m sorry.’
I watched the jerks of her crossly pulling on her gloves. Overcoat and hat had already been in place when I walked in.
‘You have so little consideration. It’ll be nearly eleven when I get back.’
I didn’t answer.
‘You’re selfish. All men are selfish.’
There was no point in agreeing with her, and no point in arguing. A disastrous and short lived marriage had left hopeless wounds in her mind which she had done her best to pass on to her only child. Elizabeth, when I first met her, had been pathologically scared of men.
‘We’ve had our supper,’ my mother-in-law said. ‘I’ve stacked the dishes for Mrs Woodward.’
Nothing could be more certainly relied upon to upset Mrs Woodward than a pile of congealed plates first thing on Monday morning.
‘Fine,’ I said, smiling falsely.
‘Goodbye, Elizabeth,’ she called.
‘Goodbye, Mother.’
I opened the door for her and got no thanks.
‘Next Sunday, then,’ she said.
‘That’ll be nice.’
She smiled acidly, knowing I didn’t mean it. But since she worked as a receptionist-hostess in a health farm all week, Sunday was her day for seeing Elizabeth. Most weeks I wished she would leave us alone, but that Sunday it had set me free to go to Virginia Water. From the following Sunday, and what I might do with it, I wrenched my thoughts away.
When she had gone I walked across to Elizabeth and kissed her on the forehead.
‘Hi,’
‘Hi yourself,’ she said. ‘Did you have a good afternoon?’
Straight jab.
‘Mm.’
‘Good … Mother’s left the dishes again,’ she said.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll do them.’
‘What would I do without you!’
We both knew the answer to that. Without me, she would have to spend the rest of her life in a hospital ward, a prisoner with no possibility of escape. She couldn’t breathe without the electrically driven pump which hummed at the foot of her high bed. She couldn’t cut up her own food or take herself to the bathroom. Elizabeth, my wife, was ninety per cent paralysed from poliomyelitis.
3
We lived over a row of lock-up garages in a mews behind Grays Inn Road. A development company had recently knocked down the old buildings opposite, letting in temporary acres of evening sunshine, and was now at the girder stage of a block of flats. If these made our place too dark and shut in when they were done, I would have to find us somewhere else. Not a welcome prospect. We had moved twice before and it was always difficult.
Since race trains mostly ran from London, and to cut my travelling time down to a minimum, we lived ten minutes’ walk from the Blaze. It had proved much better, in London, to live in a backwater than in a main street: in the small mews community the neighbours all knew about Elizabeth and looked up to her window and waved when they passed, and a lot of them came upstairs for a chat and to bring our shopping.
The District Nurse came every morning to do Elizabeth’s vapour rubs to prevent bed sores, and I did them in the evenings. Mrs. Woodward, a semi-trained but unqualified nurse, came Mondays to Saturdays from nine-thirty to six, and was helpful about staying longer if necessary. One of our main troubles was that Elizabeth could not be left alone in the flat even for five minutes in case there was an electricity failure. If the main current stopped, we could switch her breathing pump over to a battery, and we could also operate it by hand: but someone had to be there to do it quickly. Mrs Woodward was kind, middle-aged, reliable, and quiet, and Elizabeth liked her. She was also very expensive, and since the Welfare State turns a fish-faced blind eye on incapacitated wives, I could claim not even so much as a tax allowance for Mrs Woodward’s essential services. We had to have her, and she kept us poor: and that was that.
In one of the garages below the flat stood the old Bedford van which was the only sort of transport of any use to us. I had had it adapted years ago with a stretcher type bed so that it would take Elizabeth, pump, batteries and all, and although it meant too much upheaval to go out in it every week, it did sometimes give her a change of scenery and some country air. We had tried two holidays by the sea in a caravan, but she had felt uncomfortable and insecure, and both times it had rained, so we didn’t bother any more. Day trips were enough, she said. And although she enjoyed them, they exhausted her.
Her respirator was the modern cuirass type: a Spirashell: not the old totally enclosing iron lung. The Spirashell itself slightly resembled the breastplate of a suit of armour. It fitted over the entire front of her chest, was edged with a thick roll of latex, and was fastened by straps round her body. Breathing was really a matter of suction. The pump, which was connected to the Spirashell by a thick flexible hose, alternately made a partial vacuum inside the shell, and then drove air back in again. The vacuum period pulled Elizabeth’s chest wall outwards, allowing air to flow downwards into her lungs. The air-in period collapsed her chest and pushed the used breaths out
again.
Far more comfortable, and easier for everyone caring for her than a box respirator, the Spirashell had only one drawback. Try how we might, and however many scarves and cardigans we might stuff in round the edges, between the latex roll and her nightdress, it was eternally draughty. As long as the air in the flat was warm it no longer worried her. Summer was all right. But the cold air continually blowing on to her chest not surprisingly distressed her. Cold also reduced to nil the small movements she had retained in her left hand and wrist, and on which she depended for everything. Our heating bills were astronomical.
In the nine and a half years since I had extricated her from hospital we had acquired almost every gadget invented. Wires and pulleys trailed all round the flat. She could read books, draw the curtains, turn on and off the lights, the radio and television, use the telephone and type letters. An electric box of tricks called Possum did most of these tasks. Others worked on a system of levers set off by the feather-light pressure of her left forefinger. Our latest triumph was an electric pulley which raised and rotated her left elbow and forearm, enabling her to eat some things on her own, without always having to be fed. And with a clipped on electric toothbrush, she could now brush her own teeth.
I slept on a divan across the room from her with a bell beside my ear for when she needed me in the night. There were bells, too, in the kitchen and bathroom, and the tiny room I used for writing in, which with the large sitting-room made up the whole of the flat.
We had been married three years, and we were both twenty-four, when Elizabeth caught polio. We were living in Singapore, where I had a junior job in the Reuter’s office, and we flew home for what was intended to be a month’s leave.
Elizabeth felt ill on the flight. The light hurt her eyes, and she had a headache like a rod up the back of her neck, and a stabbing pain in her chest. She walked off the aircraft at Heathrow and collapsed half way across the tarmac, and that was the last time she ever stood on her feet.
Our affection for each other had survived everything that followed. Poverty, temper, tears, desperate frustrations. We had emerged after several years into our comparative calms of a settled home, a good job, a reasonably well-ordered existence. We were firm close friends.
But not lovers.
We had tried, in the beginning. She could still feel of course, since polio attacks only the motor nerves, and leaves the sensory nerves intact. But she couldn’t breathe for more than three or four minutes if we took the Spirashell right off, and she couldn’t bear any weight or pressure on any part of her wasted body. When I said after two or three hopeless attempts that we would leave it for a while she had smiled at me with what I saw to be enormous relief, and we had rarely even mentioned the subject since. Her early upbringing seemed to have easily reconciled her to a sexless existence. Her three years of thawing into a satisfying marriage might never have happened.
On the day after my trip to Virginia Water I set off as soon as Mrs Woodward came and drove the van north-east out of London and into deepest Essex. My quarry this time was a farmer who had bred gold dust in his fields in the shape of Tiddely Pom, ante-post favourite for the Lamplighter Gold Cup.
Weeds luxuriantly edged the pot-holed road which led from a pair of rotting gateless gateposts into Victor Roncey’s farmyard. The house itself, an undistinguished arrangement of mud-coloured bricks, stood in a drift of sodden unswept leaves and stared blankly from symmetrical grubby windows. Colourless paint peeled quietly from the woodwork and no smoke rose from the chimneys.
I knocked on the back door, which stood half open, and called through a small lobby into the house, but there was no reply. A clock ticked with a loud cheap mechanism. A smell of wellington boots richly acquainted with cowpat vigorously assaulted the nose. Someone had dumped a parcel of meat on the edge of the kitchen table from which a thread of watery blood, having by-passed the newspaper wrapping, was making a small pink pool on the floor.
Turning away from the house I wandered across the untidy yard and peered into a couple of outbuildings. One contained a tractor covered with about six years’ mud. In another, a heap of dusty-looking coke rubbed shoulders with a jumbled stack of old broken crates and sawn up branches of trees. A larger shed housed dirt and cobwebs and nothing else.
While I hovered in the centre of the yard wondering how far it was polite to investigate, a large youth in a striped knitted cap with a scarlet pom-pom came round a corner at the far end. He also wore a vast sloppy pale blue sweater, and filthy jeans tucked into heavyweight gum boots. Fair haired, with a round weatherbeaten face, he looked cheerful and uncomplicated.
‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘You want something?’ His voice was light and pleasant, with a touch of local accent.
‘I’m looking for Mr Roncey.’
‘He’s round the roads with the horses. Better call back later.’
‘How long will he be?’
‘An hour, maybe,’ he shrugged.
‘I’ll wait, then, if you don’t mind,’ I said, gesturing towards my van.
‘Suit yourself.’
He took six steps towards the house and then stopped, turned round, and came back.
‘Hey, you wouldn’t be that chap who phoned?’
‘Which chap?’
‘James Tyrone?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well for crying out loud why didn’t you say so? I thought you were a traveller … come on into the house. Do you want some breakfast?’
‘Breakfast?’
He grinned. ‘Yeah. I know it’s nearly eleven. I get up before six. Feel peckish again by now.’
He led the way into the house through the back door, did nothing about the dripping meat, and added to the wellington smell by clumping across the floor to the furthest door, which he opened.
‘Ma?’ he shouted. ‘Ma.’
‘She’s around somewhere,’ he said, shrugging and coming back. ‘Never mind. Want some eggs?’
I said no, but when he reached out a half-acre frying pan and filled it with bacon I changed my mind.
‘Make the coffee,’ he said, pointing.
I found mugs, powdered coffee, sugar, milk, kettle and spoons all standing together on a bench alongside the sink.
‘My Ma,’ he explained grinning, ‘is a great one for the time and motion bit.’
He fried six eggs expertly and gave us three each, with a chunk of new white bread on the side.
We sat at the kitchen table, and I’d rarely tasted anything so good. He ate solidly and drank coffee, then pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette.
‘I’m Peter,’ he said. ‘It isn’t usually so quiet around here, but the kids are at school and Pat’s out with Pa.’
‘Pat?’
‘My brother. The jockey of the family. Point-to-points, mostly, though. I don’t suppose you would know of him?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
‘I read your column,’ he said. ‘Most weeks.’
‘That’s nice.’
He considered me, smoking, while I finished the eggs. ‘You don’t talk much, for a journalist.’
‘I listen,’ I said.
He grinned. ‘That’s a point.’
‘Tell me about Tiddely Pom, then.’
‘Hell, no. You’ll have to get Pa or Pat for that. They’re crazy on the horses. I just run the farm.’ He watched my face carefully, I guessed for surprise, since in spite of being almost my height he was still very young.
‘You’re sixteen?’ I suggested.
‘Yeah.’ He sniffed, disgusted. ‘Waste of effort, though, really.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? Because of the bloody motorway, that’s why. They’ve nearly finished that bloody three lane monster and it passes just over there, the other side of our ten-acre field.’ He gestured towards the window with his cigarette. ‘Pa’s going raving mad wondering if Tiddely Pom’ll have a nervous breakdown when those heavy lorries start thundering past. He’s been trying to sell this plac
e for two years, but no one will have it, and you can’t blame them, can you?’ Gloom settled on him temporarily. ‘Then, see, you never know when they’ll pinch more of our land, they’ve had fifty acres already, and it doesn’t give you much heart to keep the place right, does it?’
‘I guess not,’ I said.
‘They’ve talked about knocking our house down,’ he went on. ‘Something about it being in the perfect position for a service station with restaurants and a vast car park and another slip road to Bishops Stortford. The only person who’s pleased about the road is my brother Tony, and he wants to be a rally driver. He’s eleven. He’s a nut.’
There was a scrunch and clatter of hooves outside, coming nearer. Peter and I got to our feet and went out into the yard, and watched three horses plod up the bumpy gravel drive and rein to a halt in front of us. The rider of the leading horse slid off, handed his reins to the second, and came towards us. A trim wiry man in his forties with thick brown hair and a mustard coloured moustache.
‘Mr Tyrone?’
I nodded. He gave me a brisk hard handshake in harmony with his manner and voice and then stood back to allow me a clear view of the horses.
‘That’s Tiddely Pom, that bay.’ He pointed to the third horse, ridden by a young man very like Peter, though perhaps a size smaller. ‘And Pat, my son.’
‘A fine looking horse,’ I said insincerely. Most owners expected praise: but Tiddely Pom showed as much high quality to the naked eye as an uncut diamond. A common head, slightly U-necked on a weak shoulder, and herring gutted into the bargain. He looked just as uncouth at home as he did on a racecourse.
‘Huh,’ snorted Roncey. ‘He’s not. He’s a doer, not a looker. Don’t try and butter me up, I don’t take to it.’
‘Fair enough,’ I said mildly. ‘Then he’s got a common head and neck, a poor shoulder and doesn’t fill the eye behind the saddle either.’
‘That’s better. So you do know what you’re talking about. Walk him round the yard, Pat.’
Pat obliged. Tiddely Pom stumbled around with the floppy gait that once in a while denotes a champion. This horse, bred from a thoroughbred hunter mare by a premium stallion, was a spectacular jumper endowed with a speed to be found nowhere in his pedigree. When an ace of this sort turned up unexpectedly it took the owner almost as long as the public to realise it. The whole racing industry was unconsciously geared against belief that twenty-two carat stars could come from tiny owner-trained stables. It had taken Tiddely Pom three seasons to become known, where from a big fashionable public stable he would have been newsworthy in his first race.