by Dick Francis
‘Shall I close the curtains?’
‘Whichever you like.’
She screwed my pulse rate up another notch by stretching up to close them, and then in the mid-day dusk she came to bed.
At three she drove me back to the station, but a train pulled out as we pulled in. We sat in the car for a while, talking, waiting for the next one.
‘Do you come home here every night?’ I asked.
‘Quite often not. Two of the other teachers share a flat, and I sleep on their sofa a night or two every week, after parties, or a theatre, maybe.’
‘But you don’t want to live in London all the time?’
‘D’you think it’s odd, that I stay with Harry and Sarah? Quite frankly, it’s because of money. Harry won’t let me pay for living here. He says he wants me to stay. He’s always been generous. If I had to pay for everything myself in London my present standard of living would go down with a reverberating thump.’
‘Comfort before independence,’ I commented mildly.
She shook her head. ‘I have both.’ After a considering pause she said, ‘Do you live with your wife? I mean, have you separated, or anything?’
‘No, we’ve not separated.’
‘Where does she think you are today?’
‘Interviewing someone for my Tally article.’
She laughed. ‘You’re a bit of a bastard.’
Nail on the head. I agreed with her.
‘Does she know you have … er … outside interests? Has she ever found you out?’
I wished she would change the subject. However, I owed her quite a lot, at least some answers, which might be the truth and nothing but the truth, but would certainly not be the whole truth.
‘She doesn’t know,’ I said.
‘Would she mind?’
‘Probably.’
‘But if she won’t … sleep with you … well, why don’t you leave her?’
I didn’t answer at once. She went on, ‘You haven’t any children, have you?’ I shook my head. ‘Then what’s to stop you? Unless, of course, you’re like me.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Staying where the living is good. Where the money is.’
‘Oh …’ I half laughed, and she misunderstood me.
‘How can I blame you,’ she sighed, ‘When I do it myself? So your wife is rich …’
I thought about what Elizabeth would have been condemned to without me: to hospital ward routine, hospital food, no privacy, no gadgets, no telephone, lights out at nine and lights on at six, no free will at all, for ever and ever.
‘I suppose you might say,’ I agreed slowly, ‘that my wife is rich.’
Back in the flat I felt split in two, with everything familiar feeling suddenly unreal. Half my mind was still down in Surrey. I kissed Elizabeth and thought of Gail. Depression had clamped down like drizzle in the train and wouldn’t be shaken off.
‘Some man wants to talk to you,’ Elizabeth said. ‘He telephoned three times. He sounded awfully angry.’
‘Who?’
‘I couldn’t understand much of what he said. He was stuttering.’
‘How did he get our number?’ I was irritated, bored; I didn’t want to have to deal with angry men on the telephone. Moreover our number was ex-directory, precisely so that Elizabeth should not be bothered by this sort of thing.
‘I don’t know. But he did leave his number for you to ring back, it was the only coherent thing he said.’
Elizabeth’s mother handed me a note pad on which she had written down the number.
‘Victor Roncey,’ I said.
‘That’s right,’ agreed Elizabeth with relief. ‘That sounds like it.’
I sighed, wishing that all problems, especially those of my own making, would go away and leave me in peace.
‘Maybe I’ll call him later,’ I said. ‘Right now I need a drink.’
‘I was just going to make some tea,’ said Elizabeth’s mother reprovingly, and in silent fury I doubled the quantity I would normally have taken. The bottle was nearly empty. Gloomy Sunday.
Restlessly I took myself off into my writing room and started the clean unscribbled-on retype for Tally, the mechanical task eventually smoothing out the rocky tensions of my guilt-ridden return home. I couldn’t afford to like Gail too much, and I did like her. To come to love someone would be too much hell altogether. Better not to visit Gail again. I decided definitely not to. My body shuddered in protest, and I knew I would.
Roncey rang again just after Elizabeth’s mother had left.
‘What the devil do you mean about this … this trash in the paper? Of course my horse is going to run. How dare you … how dare you suggest there’s anything shady going on?’
Elizabeth had been right: he was stuttering still, at seven in the evening. He took a lot of calming down to the point of admitting that nowhere in the article was it suggested that he personally had anything but good honest upright intentions.
‘The only thing is, Mr Roncey, as I said in the article, that some owners have in the past been pressurized into not running their horses. This may even happen to you. All I was doing was giving punters several good reasons why they would be wiser to wait until half an hour before big races to put their money on. Better a short starting price than losing their money in a swindle.’
‘I’ve read it,’ he snapped. ‘Several times. And no one, believe me, is going to put any pressure on me.’
‘I very much hope not,’ I said. I wondered whether his antipathy to his elder sons extended to the smaller ones; whether he would risk their safety or happiness for the sake of running Tiddely Pom in the Lamplighter. Maybe he would. The stubborn streak ran through his character like iron in granite.
When he had calmed down to somewhere near reason I asked him if he’d mind telling me how he’d got my telephone number.
‘I had the devil’s own job, if you want to know. All that ex-directory piffle. The enquiries people refused point blank to tell me, even though I said it was urgent. Stupid, I call it, but I wasn’t to be put off by that. If you want to know, your colleague on the paper told me. Derrick Clark.’
‘I see,’ I said resignedly, thinking it unlike Derry to part so easily with my defences. ‘Well, thank you. Did the Tally photographer find you all right?’
‘He came on Friday. I hope you haven’t said anything in Tally about …’ His anger was on its way up again.
‘No,’ I said decisively. ‘Nothing like that at all.’
‘When can I be sure?’ He sounded suspicious.
‘That edition of Tally is published on the Tuesday before the Lamplighter.’
‘I’ll ask for an advance copy from the Editor. Tomorrow. I’ll demand to see what you’ve written.’
‘Do that,’ I agreed. Divert the buck to Arnold Shankerton. Splendid.
He rang off still not wholly pacified. I dialled Derry’s number and prepared to pass the ill temper along to him.
‘Roncey?’ He said indignantly. ‘Of course I didn’t give your number to Roncey.’ His baby girl was exercising her lungs loudly in the background. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said, who did you give it to?’
‘Your wife’s uncle.’
‘My wife hasn’t got any uncles.’
‘Oh Christ. Well, he said he was your wife’s uncle, and that your wife’s aunt had had a stroke, and that he wanted to tell you, but he’d lost your number.’
‘Lying crafty bastard,’ I said with feeling. ‘And he accused me of misrepresenting facts.’
‘I’m sorry, Ty.’
‘Never mind. Only check with me first, next time, huh? Like we arranged.’
‘Yeah. Sure. Sorry.’
‘How did he get hold of your number, anyway?’
‘It’s in the Directory of the British Turf, unlike yours. My mistake.’
I put the receiver back in its special cradle near to Elizabeth’s head and transferred to the armchair, and we spent the rest of the e
vening as we usually did, watching the shadows on the goggle box. Elizabeth never tired of it, which was a blessing, though she complained often about the shut-downs in the day time between all the child-orientated programmes. Why couldn’t they fill them, she said, with interesting things for captive adults.
Later I made some coffee and did the vapour rubs and other jobs for Elizabeth, all with a surface of tranquil domesticity, going through my part with my thoughts somewhere else, like an actor at the thousandth performance.
On the Monday morning I took my article to the Tally offices and left the package at the reception desk, virtuously on the deadline.
After that I caught the race train to Leicester, admitting to myself that although it was technically my day off I did not want to stay in the flat. Also the Huntersons’ raffle horse Egocentric was to have its pre-Lamplighter warm-up, which gave me an excellent overt reason for the journey.
Raw near-mist was doing its best to cancel the proceedings and only the last two fences were visible. Egocentric finished fourth without enough steam left to blow a whistle, and the jockey told the trainer that the useless bugger had made a right bloody shambles of three fences on the far side and couldn’t jump for peanuts. The trainer didn’t believe him and engaged a different jockey for the Lamplighter. It was one of those days.
The thin Midland crowd of cloth caps and mufflers strewed the ground with betting slips and newspapers and ate a couple of hundredweight of jellied eels out of little paper cups. I adjourned to the bar with a colleague from the Sporting Life, and four people commented on my non-starters with varying degrees of belief. Not much of a day. One, on the whole, to forget.
The journey home changed all that. When I forget it, I’ll be dead.
7
Thanks to having left before the last race I had a chance in the still empty and waiting train of a forward facing window-seat in a non-smoker. I turned the heating to ‘hottest’, and opened the newspaper to see what Spyglass had come up with in the late editions.
‘Tiddely Pom will run, trainer says. But is your money really safe?’
Amused, I read to the end. He’d cribbed most of my points and rehashed them. Complimentary. Plagiary is the sincerest form of flattery.
The closed door to the corridor slid open and four bookmakers’ clerks lumbered in, stamping their feet with cold and discussing some luckless punter who had lost an argument over a betting slip.
‘I told him to come right off it, who did he think he was kidding? We may not be archangels, but we’re not the ruddy mugs he takes us for.’
They all wore navy blue overcoats which after a while they shed on to the luggage racks. Two of them shared a large packet of stodgy looking sandwiches and the other two smoked. They were all in the intermediate thirty-forties, with London-Jewish accents in which they next discussed their taxi drive to the station in strictly non Sabbath day terms.
‘Evening,’ they said to me, acknowledging I existed, and one of them gestured with his cigarette to the non-smoking notice on the window and said, ‘O.K. with you, chum?’
I nodded, hardly taking them in. The train rocked off southwards, the misty day turned to foggy night, and five pairs of eyeballs fell gently shut.
The door to the corridor opened with a crash. Reluctantly I opened one eye a fraction, expecting the ticket collector. Two men filled the opening, looking far from bureaucratic. Their effect on my four fellow travellers was a spine-straightening mouth-opening state of shock. The larger of the newcomers stretched out a hand and pulled the blinds down on the insides of the corridor-facing windows. Then he gave the four clerks a contemptuous comprehensive glance, jerked his head towards the corridor and said with simplicity, ‘Out.’
I still didn’t connect any of this as being my business, not even when the four men meekly took down their navy blue overcoats and filed out into the train. Only when the large man pulled out a copy of the Blaze and pointed to my article did I have the faintest prickle on the spine.
‘This is unpopular in certain quarters,’ remarked the larger man. Thick sarcastic Birmingham accent. He pursed his lips, admiring his own heavy irony. ‘Unpopular.’
He wore grubby overalls from shoes to throat, with above that a thick neck, puffy cheeks, a small wet mouth and slicked down hair. His companion, also in overalls, was hard and stocky with wide eyes and a flat topped head.
‘You shouldn’t do it, you shouldn’t really,’ the large man said. ‘Interfering and that.’
He put his right hand into his pocket and it reappeared with a brass ridge across the knuckles. I glanced at the other man. Same thing.
I came up with a rush, grabbing for the communication cord. Penalty for improper use, twenty-five pounds. The large man moved his arm in a professional short jab and made havoc of my intention.
They had both learned their trade in the ring, that much was clear. Not much else was. They mostly left my head alone, but they knew where and how to hit to hurt on the body, and if I tried to fight off one of them, the other had a go. The most I achieved was a solid kick on the smaller man’s ankle which drew from him four letters and a frightening kidney punch. I collapsed on to the seat. They leant over me and broke the Queensberry Rules.
It crossed my mind that they were going to kill me, that maybe they weren’t meaning to, but they were killing me. I even tried to tell them so, but if any sound came out, they took no notice. The larger one hauled me bodily to my feet and the small one broke my ribs.
When they let go I crumpled slowly on to the floor and lay with my face against cigarette butts and the screwed up wrappings of sandwiches. Stayed quite motionless, praying to a God I had no faith in not to let them start again.
The larger one stooped over me.
‘Will he cough it?’ the smaller one said.
‘How can he? We ain’t ruptured nothing, have we? Careful, aren’t I? Look out the door, time we was off.’
The door slid open and presently shut, but not for a long time was I reassured that they had completely gone. I lay on the floor breathing in coughs and jerky shallow breaths, feeling sick. For some short time it seemed in a weird transferred way that I had earned such a beating not for writing a newspaper article but because of Gail; and to have deserved it, to have sinned and deserved it, turned it into some sort of expurgation. Pain flowed through me in a hot red tide, and only my guilt made it bearable.
Sense returned, as sense does. I set about the slow task of picking myself up and assessing the damage. Maybe they had ruptured nothing: I had only the big man’s word for it. At the receiving end it felt as though they had ruptured pretty well everything, including self respect.
I made it up to the seat, and sat vaguely watching the lights flash past, fuzzy and yellow from fog. Eyes half shut, throat closing with nausea, hands nerveless and weak. No one focus of pain, just too much. Wait, I thought, and it will pass.
I waited a long time.
The lights outside thickened and the train slowed down. London. All change. I would have to move from where I sat. Dismal prospect. Moving would hurt.
The train crept into St. Pancras and stopped with a jerk. I stayed where I was, trying to make the effort to stand up and not succeeding, telling myself that if I didn’t get up and go I could be shunted into a siding for a cold uncomfortable night, and still not raking up the necessary propulsion.
Again the door slid open with a crash. I glanced up, stifling the beginnings of panic. No man with heavy overalls and knuckleduster. The guard.
Only when I felt the relief wash through me did I realise the extent of my fear, and I was furious with myself for being so craven.
‘The end of the line,’ the guard was saying.
‘Yeah,’ I said.
He came into the compartment and peered at me. ‘Been celebrating, have you sir?’ He thought I was drunk.
‘Sure,’ I agreed. ‘Celebrating.’
I made the long delayed effort and stood up. I’d been quite right about it. It hurt.
‘Look mate, do us a favour and don’t throw up in here,’ said the guard urgently.
I shook my head. Reached the door. Rocked into the corridor. The guard anxiously took my arm and helped me down on to the platform and as I walked carefully away I heard him behind me say to a bunch of porters, half laughing, ‘Did you see that one? Greeny grey and sweating like a pig. Must have been knocking it back solid all afternoon.’
I went home by taxi and took my time up the stairs to the flat. Mrs Woodward for once was in a hurry for me to come, as she was wanting to get home in case the fog thickened. I apologised. ‘Quite all right, Mr Tyrone, you know I’m usually glad to stay …’ The door closed behind her and I fought down a strong inclination to lie on my bed and groan.
Elizabeth said, ‘Ty, you look terribly pale,’ when I kissed her. Impossible to hide it from her completely.
‘I fell,’ I said. ‘Tripped. Knocked the breath out of myself, for a minute or two.’
She was instantly concerned; with the special extra anxiety for herself apparent in her eyes.
‘Don’t worry,’ I comforted her. ‘No harm done.’
I went into the kitchen and held on to the table. After a minute or two I remembered Elizabeth’s pain killing tablets and took the bottle out of the cupboard. Only two left. There would be. I swallowed one of them, tying a mental knot to remind me to ring the doctor for another prescription. One wasn’t quite enough, but better than nothing. I went back into the big room and with a fair stab at normality poured our evening drinks.
By the time I had done the supper and the jobs for Elizabeth and got myself undressed and into bed, the main damage had resolved itself into two or possibly three cracked ribs low down on my left side. The rest slowly subsided into a blanketing ache. Nothing had ruptured, like the man said.
I lay in the dark breathing shallowly and trying not to cough, and at last took time off from simply existing to consider the who and why of such a drastic roughing up, along with the pros and cons of telling Luke-John. He’d make copy of it, put it on the front page, plug it for more than it was worth, write the headlines himself. My feelings would naturally be utterly disregarded as being of no importance compared with selling papers. Luke-John had no pity. If I didn’t tell him and he found out later, there would be frost and fury and a permanent atmosphere of distrust. I couldn’t afford that. My predecessor had been squeezed off the paper entirely as a direct result of having concealed from Luke-John a red hot scandal in which he was involved. A rival paper got hold of it and scooped the Blaze. Luke-John never forgave, never forgot.