by Dick Francis
‘Who?’ said Luke-John, opening his eyes.
‘The chap who’s doing it.’
Luke-John looked at him broodingly. ‘As long as he can’t sue, that’s all that matters. Take this down to the lawyers and make sure they don’t let it out of their sight.’
Derry departed with a folded carbon copy of the article and Luke-John permitted himself a smile.
‘Up to standard, if I may say so.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Who told you all this?’
‘Couple of little birds.’
‘Come off it, Ty.’
‘Promised,’ I said. ‘They could get their faces pushed in, one way or another.’
‘I’ll have to know. The Editor will want to know.’
I shook my head. ‘Promised.’
‘I could scrub the article altogether …’
‘Tut, Tut,’ I said. ‘Threats, now?’
He rubbed his larynx in exasperation. I looked round the vast busy floor space, each section, like the Sports Desk, collecting and sorting out its final copy. Most of the feature stuff went down to the compositors on Fridays, some even on Thursdays, to be set up in type. But anything like a scoop stayed under wraps upstairs until after the last editions of the Saturday evening papers had all been set up and gone to press. The compositors were apt to make the odd ten quid by selling a red hot story to reporters on rival newspapers. If the legal department and the Editor both cleared my article, the print shop wouldn’t see it until too late to do them any good. The Blaze held its scandalous disclosures very close to its chest.
Derry came back from the lawyers without the article.
‘They said they’d have to work on it. They’ll ring through later.’
The Blaze lawyers were of Counsel standard on the libel laws. They needed to be. All the same they were true Blaze men with ‘publish and be damned’ engraved on their hearts. The Blaze accountants allowed for damages in their budget as a matter of course. The Blaze’s owner looked upon one or two court cases a year as splendid free advertising, and watched the sales graphs rise. There had however been four actions in the past six months and two more were pending. A mild memo had gone round, saying to cool it just a fraction. Loyal for ever, Luke-John obeyed even where he disapproved.
‘I’ll take this in to the Editor,’ he remarked. ‘See what he says.’
Derry watched his retreating back with reluctant admiration.
‘Say what you like, the sports pages sell this paper to people who otherwise wouldn’t touch it with gloves on. Our Luke-John, for all his stingy little ways, must be worth his weight in gumdrops.’
Our Luke-John came back and went into a close huddle with a soccer correspondent. I asked Derry how the funeral had been, on the Wednesday.
‘A funeral’s a funeral.’ He shrugged. ‘It was cold. His wife wept a lot. She had a purple nose, blue from cold and red from crying.’
‘Charming.’
He grinned. ‘Her sister told her to cheer up. Said how lucky it was Bert took out all that extra insurance.’
‘He did what?’
‘Yeah. I thought you’d like that. I chatted the sister up a bit. Two or three weeks ago Bert trebled his life insurance. Told his wife they’d be better off when he retired. Sort of self-help pension scheme.’
‘Well, well,’ I said.
‘So it had to be an accident,’ Derry nodded. ‘In front of witnesses. The insurance company might not have paid up if he’d fallen out of the window with no one watching.’
‘I wonder if they’ll contest it.’
‘Don’t see how they can, when the inquest said misadventure.’
The Editor’s secretary came back with my piece. The Editor’s secretary was an expensive package tied up with barbed wire. No one, reputedly, had got past the prickles to the goodies.
The Editor had scrawled ‘O.K. on the lawyer’s say so’ across the top of the page. Luke-John stretched out a hand for it, nodded in satisfaction, and slid it into the lockable top drawer of his desk, talking all the while to the soccer man. There was no need for me to stay longer. I told Derry I’d be at home most of the day if they wanted me and sketched a goodbye.
I was half-way to the door when Luke-John called after me.
‘Ty … I forgot to tell you. A woman phoned, wanted you.’
‘Mrs Woodward?’
‘Uhuh. Let’s see, I made a note … oh, yes, here it is. A Miss Gail Pominga. Would you ring her back. Something about Tally magazine.’
He gave me the slip of paper with the telephone number. I went across to the under-populated News Desk and picked up the receiver. My hands were steady. My pulse wasn’t.
‘The Western School of Art. Can I help you?’
‘Miss Pominga …’
Miss Pominga was fetched. Her voice came on the line, as cool and uninvolved as at the railway station.
‘Are you coming on Sunday?’ Crisp. Very much to the point.
‘I want to.’ Understatement. ‘It may not be possible to get away.’
‘Well … I’ve been asked out to lunch.’
‘Go, then,’ I said, feeling disappointment lump in my chest like a boulder.
‘Actually, if you are coming I will stay at home.’
Damn Elizabeth’s mother, I thought. Damn her and her cold.
‘I want to come. I’ll come if I possibly can,’ I said.
There was a short silence before she said, ‘When can you let me know for sure?’
‘Not until Sunday, really. Not until I go out to catch the train.’
‘Hmm …’ She hesitated, then said decisively, ‘Ring me in any case, whether you can come or whether you can’t. I’ll fix it so that I can still go to lunch if you aren’t coming.’
‘That’s marvellous,’ I said, with more feeling than caution.
She laughed. ‘Good. Hope to see you, then. Any time after ten. That’s when Harry and Sarah go off to golf.’
‘It would be eleven-thirty or so.’
She said ‘All right,’ and ‘Goodbye,’ and disconnected. I went home to write up Colly Gibbons for Tally and to have lunch with Elizabeth and Mrs Woodward. It was fish again: unspecified variety and not much flavour. I listened to Elizabeth’s sporadic conversation and returned her smiles and hoped fiercely not to be there with her forty-eight hours later. I ate automatically, sightlessly. By the end of that meal, treachery tasted of salt.
6
Time was running short, Tally-wise. With their deadline only two days ahead I went to Heathbury Park races on Saturday to meet Dermot Finnegan, an undistinguished jockey with an undistinguished mount in the Lamplighter.
For a while I couldn’t understand a word he said, so impenetrable was his Irish accent. After he had sipped unenthusiastically at a cup of lunch counter coffee for ten minutes he relaxed enough to tell me he always spoke worse when he was nervous, and after that we got by with him having to repeat some things twice, but not four or five times, as at the beginning.
Once past the language barrier, Dermot unveiled a resigned wit and an accepting contented way of life. Although by most standards his riding success was small, Dermot thought it great. His income, less than a dustman’s, seemed to him princely compared with the conditions of his childhood. His father had fed fourteen children on the potatoes he had grown on two and a half exhausted acres. Dermot, being neither the strong eldest nor the spoilt youngest, had usually had to shove for his share and hadn’t always got it. At nineteen he tired of the diet and took his under-developed physique across the sea to Newmarket, where an Irish accent, irrespective of previous experience, guaranteed him an immediate job in the labour-hungry racing industry.
He had ‘done his two’ for a while in a flat racing stable, but couldn’t get a ride in a flat race because he hadn’t been apprenticed. Philosophically he moved down the road to a stable which trained jumpers as well, where the ‘Governor’ gave him a chance in a couple of hurdle races. He still worked in the same sta
ble on a part-time basis, and the ‘Governor’ still put him up as his second string jockey. How many rides? He grinned, showing spaces instead of teeth. Some seasons, maybe thirty. Two years ago, of course, it was only four, thanks to breaking his leg off a brainless divil of a knock-kneed spalpeen.
Dermot Finnegan was twenty-five, looked thirty. Broken nosed and weatherbeaten, with bright sharp blue eyes. His ambition, he said, was to take a crack at Aintree. Otherwise he was all right with what he had: he wouldn’t want to be a classy top jockey, it was far too much responsibility. ‘If you only ride the scrubbers round the gaffs at the back end of the season, see, no one expects much. Then they gets a glorious surprise if you do come in.’
He had ridden nineteen winners in all, and he could remember each of them in sharp detail. No, he didn’t think he would do much good in the Lamplighter, not really, as he was only in it because his stable was running three. ‘I’ll be on the pacemaker, sure. You’ll see me right up there over the first, and maybe for a good while longer, but then my old boy will run out of steam and drop out of the back door as sudden as an interrupted burglar, and if I don’t have to pull him up it’ll be a bloody miracle.’
Later in the afternoon I watched him start out on some prospective ten-year-old dog-meat in a novice chase. Horse and rider disappeared with a flurry of legs into the second open ditch, and when I went to check on his injuries some time after the second race I met Dermot coming out of the ambulance room wearing a bandage and a grin.
‘It’s only a scratch’ he assured me cheerfully. ‘I’ll be there for the Lamplighter sure enough.’
Further investigation led to the detail of a finger nail hanging on by a thread. ‘Some black divil’ had leant an ill-placed hoof on the Finnegan hand.
To complete the Tally round-up I spent the last half of the afternoon in the Clerk of the Course’s office, watching him in action.
Heathbury Park, where the Lamplighter was to be held a fortnight later, had become under his direction one of the best organised courses in the country. Like the handicapper, he was ex-forces, in his case R.A.F., which was unusual in that the racing authorities as a rule leant heavily towards the Army and the Navy for their executives.
Wing Commander Willy Ondroy was a quiet effective shortish man of forty-two who had been invalided out after fracturing his skull in a slight mishap with a Vulcan bomber. He still, he said, suffered from blackouts, usually at the most inconvenient, embarrassing and even obscene moments.
It wasn’t until after racing had finished for the day that he was really ready to talk, and even then he dealt with a string of people calling into his office with statistics, problems and keys.
The Lamplighter was his own invention, and he was modestly proud of it. He’d argued the Betting Levy Board into putting up most of the hefty stake money, and then drawn up entry conditions exciting enough to bring a gleam to the hardest-headed trainer’s eye. Most of the best horses would consequently be coming. They should draw an excellent crowd. The gate receipts would rise again. They’d soon be able to afford to build a warm modern nursery room, their latest project, to attract young parents to the races by giving them somewhere to park their kids.
Willy Ondroy’s enthusiasm was of the enduring, not the bubbling kind. His voice was as gentle as the expression in his amber eyes, and only the small self-mockery in his smile gave any clue to the steel within. His obvious lack of any need to assert his authority in any forceful way was finally explained after I’d dug, or tried to dig, into his history. A glossed over throw-away phrase about a spot of formation flying turned out to be his version of three years as a Red Arrow, flying two feet away from the jet pipe of the aircraft in front. ‘We did two hundred displays in one year,’ he said apologetically. ‘Entertaining at air shows. Like a concert party on Blackpool pier, no difference really.’
He had been lucky to transfer to bombers when he was twenty-six, he said. So many R.A.F. fighter and formation pilots were grounded altogether when their reaction times began to slow. He’d spent eight years on bombers, fifteen seconds knowing he was going to crash, three weeks in a coma, and twenty months finding himself a civilian job. Now he lived with his wife and twelve-year-old twins in a house on the edge of the racecourse, and none of them wanted to change.
I caught the last train when it was moving and made a start on Dermot and Willy Ondroy on the way back to London.
Mrs Woodward departed contentedly at a quarter to seven, and I found she had for once left steaks ready in the kitchen. Elizabeth was in good spirits. I mixed us a drink each and relaxed in the armchair, and only after a strict ten minutes of self denial asked her casually if her mother had telephoned.
‘No, she hasn’t.’ She wouldn’t have.
‘So you don’t know if she’s coming?’
‘I expect she’ll ring, if she doesn’t.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said. Damn her eyes, couldn’t she at least settle it, one way or another?
Trying to shut my mind to it I worked on the Tally article: cooked the supper: went back to Tally: stopped to settle Elizabeth for the night; and returned to the typewriter until I’d finished. It was then half past two. A pity, I thought, stretching, that I wrote so slowly, crossed out so much. I put the final version away in a drawer with only the fair copy to be typed the next day. Plenty of time for that even if I spent the rest of it on the primrose path making tracks for Gail.
I despised myself. It was five before I slept.
Elizabeth’s mother came. Not a sniffle in sight.
I had spent all morning trying to reconcile myself to her nonappearance at ten-fifteen, her usual time of arrival. As on past occasions, I had turned a calm and everyday face to Elizabeth and found I had consciously to stifle irritation at little tasks for her that normally I did without thought.
At ten-seventeen the door bell rang, and there she was, a well groomed good-looking woman in her mid-fifties with assisted tortoiseshell hair and a health farm figure. When she showed surprise at my greeting I knew I had been too welcoming. I damped it down a little to more normal levels and saw that she felt more at home with that.
I explained to her, as I had already done to Elizabeth, that I still had people to interview for Tally, and by ten-thirty I was walking away down the mews feeling as though a safety valve was blowing fine. The sun was shining too. After a sleepless night, my conscience slept.
Gail met me at Virginia Water, waiting outside in the estate car. ‘The train’s late,’ she said calmly, as I sat in beside her. No warm, loving, kissing hello. Just as well, I supposed.
‘They work on the lines on Sunday. There was a delay at Staines.’
She nodded, let in the clutch, and cruised the three quarters of a mile to her uncle’s house. There she led the way into the sitting-room and without asking poured two beers.
‘You aren’t writing today,’ she said, handing me the glass.
‘No.’
She gave me a smile that acknowledged the purpose of my visit. More businesslike about sex than most women. Certainly no tease. I kissed her mouth lightly, savouring the knowledge that the deadline of the Huntersons’ return was three full hours ahead.
She nodded as if I’d spoken. ‘I approve of you,’ she said.
‘Thanks.’
She smiled, moving away. Her dress that day was of a pale cream colour which looked wonderful against the gilded coffee skin. She was no darker, in fact, than many southern Europeans or heavily sun-tanned English: her mixed origin was distinct only in her face. A well proportioned, attractive face, gathering distinction from the self assurance within. Gail, I imagined, had had to come to terms with herself much earlier and more basically than most girls. She had done almost too good a job.
A copy of the Sunday Blaze lay on the low table, open at the sports page. Editors or sub-editors write all the headlines, and Luke-John had come up with a beauty. Across the top of my page, big and bold, it said ‘Don’t back Tiddely Pom—YET’. Underneath, he’d lef
t in word for word every paragraph I’d written. This didn’t necessarily mean he thought each word was worth its space in print, but was quite likely because there weren’t too many advertisements that week. Like all newspapers, the Blaze lived on advertising: if an advertiser wanted to pay for space, he got it, and out went the deathless prose of the columnists. I’d lost many a worked on sentence to the late arrival of spiels on Whosit’s cough syrup or Wammo’s hair tonic. It was nice to see this intact.
I looked up at Gail. She was watching me.
‘Do you always read the sports page?’ I asked.
She shook her head. ‘Curiosity,’ she said. ‘I wanted to see what you’d written. That article … it’s disturbing.’
‘It’s meant to be.’
‘I mean, it leaves the impression that you know a great deal more than you’ve said, and it’s all bad, if not positively criminal.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s always nice to hear one has done exactly what one has intended.’
‘What usually happens when you write in this way?’
‘Repercussions? They vary from a blast from the racing authorities about minding my own business to abusive letters from nut cases.’
‘Do wrongs get righted?’
‘Very occasionally.’
‘Sir Galahad,’ she mocked.
‘No. We sell more papers. I apply for a raise.’
She laughed with her head back, the line of her throat leading tautly down into her dress. I put out my hand and touched her shoulder, suddenly wanting no more talk.
She nodded at once, smiling, and said, ‘Not on the rug. More comfortable upstairs.’
Her bedroom furnishings were pretty but clearly Sarah’s work. Fitted cupboards, a cosy armchair, book shelves, a lot of pale blue carpet, and a single bed.
At her insistence, I occupied it first. Then while I watched, like the time before, she took off her clothes. The simple, undramatised, unselfconscious undressing was more ruthlessly arousing than anything one could ever pay to see. When she had finished she stood still for a moment near the window, a pale bronze naked girl in a shaft of winter sun.