by Dick Francis
‘When I bred him I was hoping for a point-to-point horse for the boys,’ Roncey said. ‘So we ran him all one season in point-to-points and apart from one time Pat fell off he didn’t get beat. Then last year we thought we would have a go in hunter chases as well, and he went and won the Foxhunters’ at Cheltenham.’
‘I remember that,’ I said.
‘Yes. So last year we tried him in open handicaps, smallish ones …’
‘And he won four out of six,’ I concluded for him.
‘It’s your job to know, I suppose. Pat,’ he shouted. ‘Put him back in his box.’ He turned to me again. ‘Like to see the others?’
I nodded, and we followed Pat and the other two horses across the yard and round the corner from which Peter had originally appeared.
Behind a ramshackle barn stood a neat row of six well-kept wooden horse boxes with shingle roofs and newly painted black doors. However run down the rest of the farm might be, the stable department was in tip top shape. No difficulty in seeing where the farmer’s heart lay: with his treasure.
‘Well now,’ Roncey said. ‘We’ve only the one other racehorse, really, and that’s Klondyke, that I was riding just now. He ran in hunter ’chases in the spring. Didn’t do much good, to be honest.’ He walked along to the second box from the far end, led the horse in and tied it up. When he took the saddle off I saw that Klondyke was a better shape than Tiddely Pom, which was saying little enough, but the health in his coat was conspicuous.
‘He looks well,’ I commented.
‘Eats his head off,’ said Roncey dispassionately, ‘and he can stand a lot of work, so we give it him.’
‘One-paced,’ observed Pat regretfully over my shoulder. ‘Can’t quicken. Pity. We won just the two point-to-points with him. No more.’
There was the faintest glimmer of satisfaction in the laconic voice, and I glanced at him sideways. He saw me looking and wiped the expression off his face but not before I had seen for certain that he had mixed feelings about the horses’ successes. While they progressed to National Hunt racing proper, he didn’t. Older amateur riders had been engaged, and then professionals. The father-son relationship had needles in it.
‘What do you have in the other boxes?’ I asked Roncey, as he shut Klondyke’s door.
‘My old grey hunter at the end, and two hunter mares here, both in foal. This one, Piglet, she’s the dam of Tiddely Pom of course; she’s in foal to the same sire again.’
Unlikely, I thought, that lightning would strike twice.
‘You’ll sell the foal,’ I suggested.
He sniffed. ‘She’s in the farm accounts.’
I grinned to myself. Farmers could train their horses and lose the cost in the general farm accounts, but if they sold one it then came under the heading of income and was taxed accordingly. If Roncey sold either Tiddely Pom or his full brother, nearly half would go to the Revenue.
‘Turn the mares out, Joe,’ he said to his third rider, a patient looking old man with skin like bark, and we watched while he set them loose in the nearest field. Peter was standing beside the gate with Pat: bigger, more assured, with far fewer knots in his personality.
‘Fine sons,’ I said to Roncey.
His mouth tightened. He had no pride in them. He made no reply at all to my fishing compliment, but instead said, ‘We’ll go into the house and you can ask me anything you want to know. For a magazine, you said?’
I nodded.
‘Pat,’ he shouted. ‘You give these three horses a good strapping and feed them and let Joe get on with the hedging. Peter, you’ve got work to do. Go and do it.’
Both his boys gave him the blank acquiescing look which covers seething rebellion. There was a perceptible pause before they moved off with their calm accepting faces. Lids on a lot of steam. Maybe one day Roncey would be scalded.
He led the way briskly back across the yard and into the kitchen. The meat still lay there dripping. Roncey by-passed it and gestured me to follow him through the far door into a small dark hall.
‘Madge?’ he shouted. ‘Madge?’
Father had as little success as son. He shrugged in the same way and led me into a living room as well worn and untidy as the rest of the place. Drifts of clutter, letters, newspapers, clothing, toys and indiscriminate bits of junk lay on every flat surface, including the chairs and the floor. There was a vase of dead and desiccated chrysanthemums on a window sill, and some brazen cobwebs networked the ceiling. Cold ash from the day before filled the grate. A toss-up I thought, whether one called the room lived-in or squalid.
‘Sit down if you can find somewhere,’ Roncey said. ‘Madge lets the boys run wild in the house. Not firm enough. I won’t have it outside, of course.’
‘How many do you have?’
‘Boys? Five.’
‘And a daughter?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said abruptly. ‘Five boys.’
The thought didn’t please him. ‘Which magazine?’
‘Tally.’ I said. ‘They want background stories to the Lamplighter, and I thought I would give the big stables a miss and shine a bit of the spotlight on someone else for a change.’
‘Yes, well,’ he said defensively, ‘I’ve been written up before, you know.’
‘Of course,’ I said soothingly.
‘About the Lamplighter, too. I’ll show you.’ He jumped up and went over to a knee-hole desk, pulled out one of the side drawers bodily, and brought it across to where I sat at one end of the sofa. He put the drawer in the centre, swept a crumpled jersey, two beaten up dinky cars and a gutted brown paper parcel on to the floor, and seated himself in the space.
The drawer contained a heap of clippings and photographs all thrust in together. No careful sticking into expensive leather folders, like the Huntersons.
My mind leapt to Gail. I saw Roncey talking to me but I was thinking about her body. Her roundnesses. Her fragrant pigmented skin. Roncey was waiting for an answer and I hadn’t heard what he’d asked.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘I asked if you know Bert Checkov.’ He was holding a lengthy clipping with a picture alongside and a bold headline, ‘Back Tiddely Pom NOW.’
‘Yes … and no,’ I said uncertainly.
‘How do you mean?’ he said brusquely. ‘I should have thought you would have known him, being in the same business.’
‘I did know him. But he died. Last Friday.’
I took the clipping and read it while Roncey went through the motions of being shocked, with the indifference uppermost in his voice spoiling the effect.
Bert Checkov had gone to town with Tiddely Pom’s chances in the Lamplighter. The way he saw it, the handicapper had been suffering from semi-blindness and mental blocks to put Tiddely Pom into the weights at ten stone seven, and all punters who didn’t jump on the bandwaggon instantly needed to be wet nursed. He thought the ante-post market would open with generous odds, but urged everyone to hurry up with their shirts, before the bookmakers woke up to the bonanza. Bert’s pungent phraseology had given Roncey’s horse more boost than a four stage rocket.
‘I didn’t know he’d written this,’ I admitted. ‘I missed it.’
‘He rang me up only last Thursday and this was in the paper on Friday. That must have been the day you said he died. In point of fact I didn’t expect it would appear. When he telephoned he was, to my mind, quite drunk.’
‘It’s possible,’ I conceded.
‘I wasn’t best pleased about it either.’
‘The article?’
‘I hadn’t got my own money on, do you see? And there he went, spoiling the price. When I rang up my bookmaker on Friday he wouldn’t give me more than a hundred to eight, and today they’ve even made him favourite at eight to one, and there’s still nearly three weeks to the race. Fair enough he’s a good horse, but he’s not Arkle. In point of fact I don’t understand it.’
‘You don’t understand why Checkov tipped him?’
He hesitated.
‘Not to that extent, then, let’s say.’
‘But you do hope to win?’
‘Hope,’ he said. ‘Naturally, I hope to win. But it’s the biggest race we’ve ever tried … I don’t expect to win, do you see?’
‘You’ve as good a chance as any,’ I said. ‘Checkov had his column to fill. The public won’t read half-hearted stuff, you have to go all out for the positive statement.’
He gave me a small tight smile laced with a sneer for the soft option. A man with no patience or sympathy for anyone else’s problems, not even his sons’.
The sitting-room door opened and a large woman in a sunflower dress came in. She had thick fair down on her legs but no stockings, and a pair of puffed ankles bulged over the edges of some battered blue bedroom slippers. Nevertheless she was very light on her feet and she moved slowly, so that her progress seemed to be a weightless drift: no mean feat considering she must have topped twelve stone.
A mass of fine light brown hair hung in an amorphous cloud round her head, from which a pair of dreamy eyes surveyed the world as though half asleep. Her face was soft and rounded, not young, but still in a way immature. Her fantasy life, I guessed uncharitably, was more real to her than the present. She had been far away in the past hour, much further than upstairs.
‘I didn’t know you were in,’ she said to Roncey.
He stood up several seconds after me. ‘Madge, this is James Tyrone. I told you he was coming.’
‘Did you?’ She transferred her vague gaze to me. ‘Carry on, then.’
‘Where have you been?’ Roncey said. ‘Didn’t you hear me calling?’
‘Calling?’ She shook her head. ‘I was making the beds, of course.’ She stood in the centre of the room, looking doubtfully around at the mess. ‘Why didn’t you light the fire?’
I glanced involuntarily at the heap of ashes in the grate, but she saw them as no obstacle at all. From a scratched oak box beside the hearth she produced three firelighters and a handful of sticks. These went on top of the ashes, which got only a desultory poke. She struck a match, lit the firelighters, and made a wigwam of coal. The new fire flared up good temperedly on the body of the old while Madge took the hearth brush and swept a few cinders out of sight behind a pile of logs.
Fascinated, I watched her continue with her housework. She drifted across to the dead flowers, opened the window, and threw them out. She emptied the water from the vase after them, then put it back on the window sill and shut the window.
From behind the sofa where Roncey and I sat she pulled a large brown cardboard box. On the outside was stencilled Kellogg’s Cornflakes, 12 x Family Size and on the inside it was half filled with the same sort of jumble which was lying around the room. She wafted methodically around in a large circle taking everything up and throwing it just as it came into the box, a process which took approximately three minutes. She then pushed the box out of sight again behind the sofa and plumped up the seat cushions of two armchairs on her way back to the door. The room, tidy and with the brightly blazing fire, looked staggeringly different. The cobwebs were still there but one felt it might be their turn tomorrow. Peter was right. Ma had got the time and motion kick completely buttoned up; and what did it matter if the motive was laziness.
Roncey insisted that I should stay to lunch and filled in the time beforehand with a brisk but endless account of all the horses he had ever owned. Over lunch, cold beef and pickles and cheese and biscuits served at two-thirty on the kitchen table, it was still he who did all the talking. The boys ate steadily in silence and Madge contemplated the middle distance with eyes which saw only the scenes going on in her head.
When I left shortly afterwards Pat asked for a lift into Bishops Stortford and braved his father’s frown to climb into the front seat of the van. Roncey shook hands firmly as before and said he hoped to receive a free copy of Tally. ‘Of course,’ I said. But Tally were notoriously mean: I would have to send it myself.
He waved me out of the yard and told Pat brusquely to come straight back on the four o’clock bus, and we were barely out through the sagging gateposts before Pat unburdened himself of a chunk of bottled resentment.
‘He treats us like children … Ma’s no help, she never listens …’
‘You could leave here,’ I pointed out. ‘You’re what – nineteen?’
‘Next month. But I can’t leave and he knows it. Not if I want to race. I can’t turn professional yet, I’m not well enough known and no one would put me up on their horses. I’ve got to start as an amateur and make a name for myself, Pa says so. Well I couldn’t be an amateur if I left home and got an ordinary job somewhere, I couldn’t afford all the expenses and I wouldn’t have any time.’
‘A job in a stable …’ I suggested.
‘Do me a favour. The rules say you can’t earn a salary in any capacity in a racing stable and ride as an amateur, not even if you’re a secretary or an assistant or anything. It’s bloody unfair. And don’t say I could get a job as a lad and do my two and have a professional licence, of course I could. And how many lads ever get far as jockeys, doing that? None. Absolutely none. You know that.’
I nodded.
‘I do a lad’s work now, right enough. Six horses, we’ve got, and I do the bloody lot. Old Joe’s the only labour we’ve got on the whole farm, except us, believe it or not. Pa’s always got a dozen jobs lined up for him. And I wouldn’t mind the work, and getting practically no pay, I really wouldn’t, if Pa would let me ride in anything except point-to-points, but he won’t, he says I haven’t enough experience, and if you ask me he’s making bloody sure I never get enough experience … I’m absolutely fed up, I’ll tell you straight.’
He brooded over his situation all the way into Bishops Stortford. A genuine grievance, I thought. Victor Roncey was not a father to help his sons get on.
4
They held the inquest on Bert Checkov on that Monday afternoon. Verdict: Misadventure. Dead drunk he was, said the girl typists who saw him fall. Dead drunk.
And after he hit the pavement, just dead.
When I went into the office on Tuesday morning, Luke-John and Derry were discussing whether or not to go to the funeral on the Wednesday.
‘Croxley,’ Derry said. ‘Where’s that?’
‘Near Watford,’ I said. ‘On the Metropolitan Line. A straight run into Farringdon Street.’
‘What Fleet Street needs,’ said Derry gloomily, ‘is a tube station a lot nearer than blooming Farringdon. It’s three quarters of a mile if it’s an inch.’
‘If you’re right, Ty, we can manage it easily,’ Luke-John said authoritatively. ‘We should all go, I think.’
Derry squinted at the small underground map in his diary. ‘Croxley. Next to Watford. What do you know?’
I’d had a girl at Watford once. The second one. I’d spent a lot of time on the Metropolitan Line while Elizabeth was under the impression I was extra busy in the Blaze. Guilt and deceit were old familiar travelling companions. From Watford, from Virginia Water, from wherever.
‘Ty,’ Luke-John was saying sharply.
‘Huh?’
‘The funeral is at two-thirty. An hour, say, to get there …?’
‘Not me,’ I said. ‘There’s this Tally article to be done. It’ll take me at least another two days in interviews.’
He shrugged. ‘I’d have thought …’
‘What depths have you plumbed so far?’ Derry asked. He was sitting with his feet up on the desk. No work in a Sunday paper on Tuesday.
‘The Roncey family,’ I said. ‘Tiddely Pom.’
Derry sniffed. ‘Ante-post favourite.’
‘Will he be your tip?’ I asked with interest.
‘Shouldn’t think so. He’s won a few races but he hasn’t beaten much of any class.’
‘Bert tipped him strongly. Wrote a most emphatic piece about catching the odds now before they shorten. He wrote it last Thursday; it must have been straight after the handicap was published in the racing c
alendar: and it was in his paper on Friday. Roncey showed me the clipping. He said Bert was drunk when he rang up.’
Luke-John sighed. Derry said decisively, ‘That does it, then. If Bert tipped him, I’m not going to.’
‘Why not?’
‘Bert’s heavy long-distance tips were nearly always non-starters.’
Luke-John stretched his neck until the tendons stood out like strings, and massaged his nobbly larynx. ‘Always the risk of that, of course. It happens to everyone.’
‘Do you mean that seriously?’ I asked Derry.
‘Oh sure. Sorry about your Tally article and all that,’ he grinned, ‘but I’d say just about the time it’s published you’ll find Tiddely Pom has been taken out of the Lamplighter.’
Derry twiddled unconcernedly with a rubber band and Luke-John shuffled absentmindedly through some papers. Neither of them felt the shiver travelling down my spine.
‘Derry,’ I said. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Of what?’
‘That Bert always tipped non-starters for big races.’
Derry snapped the band twice in his fingers. ‘To be precise, if you want me to be precise, Bert tipped a higher percentage of big-race non-starters than anyone else in the street, and he has been at his best in this direction, or worst, or at any rate his most consistent, during the past year. He’d blow some horse up big, tell everyone to back it at once, and then wham, a day or two before the race it would be scratched.’
‘I’ve never noticed,’ said Luke-John forbiddingly, as if it couldn’t have happened without.
Derry shrugged. ‘Well, it’s a fact. Now, if you want to know something equally useless about that puffed up Connersley of the Sunday Hemisphere, he has a weird habit of always tipping horses which start with his own initial, C. Delusions of grandeur, I imagine.’