by Dick Francis
Wykeham gave Abseil a carrot from a deep pocket, and closed him back into his twilight.
Wykeham slapped his hand on the next box along. ‘That’s Kinley’s box usually. It’s empty now. I don’t like keeping him in that corner box, it’s dark and boring for him.’
‘It won’t be for much longer, I hope,’ I said, and suggested going round to see the ‘bombs’.
Wykeham had seen them earlier, and pointed them out to me, and as expected they were the bottom parts of cardboard containers, each four inches square in shape, the top parts burned away. They were both the same, with gaudy red and yellow pictured flames still visible on the singed surfaces, and the words GOLDEN BOMB in jazzy letters on the one under the harrow.
‘We’d better leave them there for the police,’ I said.
Wykeham agreed, but he said fireworks would convince the police even more that it was the work of boys.
We went back into the house, where Wykeham telephoned the police and received a promise of attention, and I got through to Dawson, asking him to tell the princess I was down at Wykeham’s and would go to Sandown from there.
Wykeham and I had breakfast and drove up to the Downs in his big-wheeled pick-up to see the second lot exercise, and under the wide cold windy sky he surprised me by saying apropos of nothing special that he was thinking of taking another assistant. He’d had assistants in the past, I’d heard, who’d never lasted long, but there hadn’t been one there in my time.
‘Are you?’ I said. ‘I thought you couldn’t stand assistants.’
‘They never knew anything,’ he said. ‘But I’m getting old … It’ll have to be someone the princess likes. Someone you get on with, too. So if you think of anyone, let me know. I don’t know who’s around so much these days.’
‘All right,’ I said, but with misgivings. Wykeham, for all his odd mental quirks, was irreplaceable. ‘You’re not going to retire, are you?’
‘No, I’m not. Never. I wouldn’t mind dying up here, watching my horses.’ He laughed suddenly, in his eyes a flash of the vigour that had been there always not so long ago, when he’d been a titan. ‘I’ve had a great life, you know. One of the best.’
‘Stick around,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Maybe next year,’ he said, ‘we’ll win the Grand National.’
Wykeham’s four runners at Sandown were in the first three races and the fifth, and I didn’t see the princess until she came down to the parade ring for Helikon’s race, which was the third on the card.
Beatrice was with her, and also Litsi, and also Danielle, who after the faintest of greetings was busy blanking me out, it seemed, by looking carefully at the circling horses. The fact that she was there, that she was still trying, was something, I supposed.
‘Good morning,’ the princess said, when I bowed to her. ‘Dawson said Wykeham telephoned early … again.’ There was a shade of apprehension in her face, which abruptly deepened at what she read in my own.
She walked a little away from her family, and I followed.
‘Again?’ she said, not wanting to believe it. ‘Which ones?’
‘One,’ I said. ‘Col.’
She absorbed the shock with a long blink.
‘The same way … as before?’ she said.
‘Yes. With the bolt.’
‘My poor horse.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘I will not tell my husband,’ she said. ‘Please tell none of them, Kit.’
‘It will be in the newspapers tomorrow or on Monday,’ I said, ‘probably worse than before.’
‘Oh …’ The prospect affected her almost as much as Col’s death. ‘I will not add to the pressure on my husband,’ she said fiercely. ‘He cannot sign this wretched contract. He will die, you know, if he does. He will not survive the disgrace in his own mind. He will wish to die … as all these years, although his condition is such a trial to him, he has wished to live.’ She made a small gesture with her gloved hand. ‘He is … very dear to me, Kit.’
I heard in my memory my grandmother saying, ‘I love the old bugger, Kit,’ of my pugnacious grandfather, an equal declaration of passion for a man not obviously lovable.
That the princess should have made it was astonishing, but not as impossible as before the advent of Nanterre. A great deal, I saw, had changed between us in the last eight days.
To save his honour, to save his life, to save their life together … My God, I thought, what a burden. She needed Superman, not me.
‘Don’t tell him about Col,’ she said again.
‘No, I won’t.’
Her gaze rested on Beatrice.
‘I won’t tell other people,’ I said. ‘But it may not stay a secret on the racecourse. Dusty and the lads who came with Wykeham’s horses all know, and they’ll tell other lads … it’ll spread, I’m afraid.’
She nodded slightly, unhappily, and switched her attention from Beatrice to Helikon, who happened to be passing. She watched him for several seconds, turning her head after him as he went.
‘What do you think of him?’ she asked, her defence mechanism switching on smoothly. ‘What shall I expect?’
‘He’s still a bit hot-headed,’ I said, ‘but if I can settle him, he should run well.’
‘But not another Kinley?’ she suggested.
‘Not so far.’
‘Do your best …’
I said as usual that I would, and we rejoined the others as if all we’d been talking about was her hurdler.
‘Have you noticed who’s still staring?’ Danielle said, and I answered that indeed I had, those eyes followed me everywhere.
‘Doesn’t it get on your nerves?’ Danielle asked.
‘What nerves?’ Litsi said.
‘Are you talking about Mr Allardeck?’ Beatrice demanded. ‘I can’t think why you don’t like him. He looks perfectly darling.’
The perfectly darling man was projecting his implacable thoughts my way from a distance signalling unmistakable invasion of psychological territory, and I thought uneasily again about the state of mind that was compelling him to do it. The evil eye, I thought: and no shield from it that I could see.
The time came to mount, and hot-headed Helikon and I went out onto the track. He was nervous as well as impetuous; not a joy to ride. I tried to get him to relax on the way to the start, but as usual it was like trying to relax a coil of barbed wire. The princess had bought him as a yearling and had great hopes for him, but although he jumped well enough, neither Wykeham nor I had been able to straighten out his kinks.
There were twenty or more runners, and Helikon and I set off near the front because if he were bumped in the pack he’d be frightened into stopping; yet I also had to keep a tight hold, as he could take charge and decamp.
He went through the routine of head-tossing against the restraint, but I had him anchored and running fairly well, and by the third flight of hurdles I thought the worst was over, we could now settle a little and design a passable race.
It wasn’t his day. At the fourth flight the horse nearest ahead put his foot through the obstacle and went down with a crash, slithering along the ground on his side. Helikon fell over him, going down fast, pitching me off: and I didn’t actually see the subsequent course of events all that clearly, though it was a pile-up worthy of a fog on a motorway. Five horses, I found afterwards, hit the deck at that jump. One of them seemed to land smack on top of me; not frightfully good for one’s health.
SIXTEEN
I lay on the grass, assessing things.
I was conscious and felt like a squashed beetle, but I hadn’t broken my legs, which I always feared most.
One of the other jockeys from the mêlée squatted beside me and asked if I was all right, but I couldn’t answer him on acount of having no breath.
‘He’s winded,’ my colleague said to someone behind me, and I thought, ‘Just like Litsi at Bradbury, heigh ho.’ My colleague unbuckled my helmet and pushed it off, for which I couldn’t thank hi
m.
Breath came back, as it does. By the time the ambulance arrived along with a doctor in a car, I’d come to the welcome conclusion that nothing was broken at all and that it was time to stand up and get on with things. Standing, I felt hammered and sore in several places, but one had to accept that, and I reckoned I’d been lucky to get out of that sort of crash so lightly.
One of the other jockeys hadn’t been so fortunate and was flat out, white and silent, with the first-aid men kneeling anxiously beside him. He woke up slightly during the ambulance ride back to the stands and began groaning intermittently which alarmed his attendants but at least showed signs of life.
When we reached the first-aid room and the ambulance’s rear doors were opened, I climbed out first, and found the other jockey’s wife waiting there, pregnant and pretty, screwed up with anxiety.
‘Is Joe all right?’ she said to me, and then saw him coming out on the stretcher, very far from all right. I saw the deep shock in her face, the quick pallor, the dry mouth … the agony.
That was what had happened to Danielle, I thought. That was much what she’d seen, and that was what she’d felt.
I put my arm round Joe’s wife and held her close, and told her Joe would be fine, he would be fine, and neither of us knew if he would.
Joe was carried into the first-aid room, the door closing behind him, but presently the doctor came out with kindness and told Joe’s wife they would be sending him to the hospital as soon as an outside ambulance could be brought.
‘You can come in and sit with him, if you like,’ he said to her, and to me added, ‘You’d better come in too, hadn’t you?’
I went in and he checked me over, and said, ‘What aren’t you telling me?’
‘Nothing.’
‘I know you,’ he said. ‘And everywhere I touch you, you stifle a wince.’
‘Ouch, then,’ I said.
‘Where is ouch?’
‘Ankle, mostly.’
He pulled my boot off and I said ‘ouch’ quite loudly but, as I’d believed, there were no cracked bits. He said to get some strapping and some rest, and added that I could ride on Monday, if I could walk and if I were mad enough.
He went back to tending Joe, and one of the nurses answered a knock on the door, coming back to tell me that I was wanted outside. I put my boot on again, ran my fingers through my hair and went out, to find Litsi and Danielle there, waiting.
Litsi had his arm round Danielle’s shoulders, and Danielle looked as if this were the last place on earth she wanted to be.
I was aware of my dishevelled state, of the limp I couldn’t help, of the grass stains and the tear in my breeches down my left thigh.
Litsi took it all in, and I smiled at him slightly.
‘The nitty gritty,’ I said.
‘So I see.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘Aunt Casilia sent us to see … how you were.’
It had taken a great deal of courage, I thought, for Danielle to be there, to face what might have happened again as it had happened in January. I said to Litsi, but with my eyes on Danielle, ‘Please tell her I’m all right. I’ll be riding on Monday.’
‘How can you ride?’ Danielle said intensely.
‘Sit in the saddle, put the feet in the stirrups, pick up the reins.’
‘Don’t be damn stupid. How can you joke … and don’t answer that. I know both the answers. Easily or with difficulty, whichever is funnier.’
She suddenly couldn’t help laughing, but it was partly hysterical, and it was against Litsi’s big shoulder she smothered her face.
‘I’ll come up to the box,’ I said to him, and he nodded, but before they could leave, the first-aid room door opened and Joe’s wife came out.
‘Kit,’ she said with relief, seeing me still there. ‘I’ve got to go to the ladies … my stomach’s all churning up … they say I can go to the hospital with Joe but if they come for him while I’m not here, they may take him without me … Will you wait here and tell them? Don’t let him go without me.’
‘I’ll see to it,’ I said.
She said ‘thanks’ faintly and half ran in the direction of relief, and Danielle, her eyes stretched wide said, ‘But that’s … just like me. Is her husband … hurt badly?’
‘It’s too soon to tell, I think.’
‘How can she stand it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I really don’t know. It’s much simpler from Joe’s side … and mine.’
‘I’ll go and see if she needs help,’ Danielle said abruptly, and, leaving Litsi’s shelter, set off after Joe’s wife.
‘Seriously,’ Litsi said, watching her go, ‘how can you joke?’
‘Seriously? Seriously not about Joe, nor about his wife, but about myself, why not?’
‘But… is it worth it?’
I said, ‘If you could paint as you’d like to, would you put up with a bit of discomfort?’
He smiled, his eyebrows rising. ‘Yes, I would.’
‘Much the same thing,’ I said. ‘Fulfilment.’
We stood in a backwater of the racecourse, with the stands and bustle out in the mainstream, gradually moving towards the next race. Dusty arrived at a rush, his eyes searching, suspicious.
‘I’ve wrenched my ankle,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to get Jamie for the fifth race, I know he’s free. But I’m cleared for Monday. Is Helikon all right?’
He nodded briskly a couple of times and departed, wasting no words.
Litsi said, ‘It’s a wonder you’re not worse. It looked atrocious. Aunt Casilia was watching through binoculars, and she was very concerned until she saw you stand up. She said then that you accepted the risks and one had to expect these things from time to time.’
‘She’s right,’ I said.
He, in the sober suiting of civilisation, looked at the marks of the earth on the princess’s colours, looked at my torn green-stained breeches, and at the leg I was putting no weight on.
‘How do you face it, over and over again?’ he said. He saw my lips twitch and added, ‘Easily or with difficulty, whichever is funnier.’
I laughed. ‘I never expect it, for a start. It’s always an unpleasant surprise.’
‘And now that it’s happened, how do you deal with it?’
‘Think about something else,’ I said. Take a lot of aspirins and concentrate on getting back as soon as possible. I don’t like other jockeys loose on my horses, like now. I want to be on them. When I’ve taught them and know them, they’re mine.’
‘And you like winning.’
‘Yes, I like winning.’
The hospital ambulance arrived only moments before Danielle and Joe’s wife returned, and Litsi, Danielle and I stood with Joe’s wife while Joe was transferred. He was still half-conscious, still groaning, looking grey. The ambulance men helped his wife into the interior in his wake, and we had a final view of her face, young and frightened, looking back at us, before they closed the doors and drove slowly away.
Litsi and Danielle looked at me, and I looked at them; and there was nothing to say, really.
Litsi put his arm again round Danielle’s shoulders, and they turned and walked away; and I hobbled off and showered and changed my clothes after just another fall, in just a day in a working life.
When I went out of the weighing room to go to the princess’s box, Maynard Allardeck stepped into my way. He was looking, as always, splendidly tailored, the total English gentleman from Lock’s hat to hand-sewn shoes. He wore a silk striped tie and pigskin gloves, and his eyes were as near madness as I’d ever seen them.
I stopped, my spirits sinking.
Outside the weighing room, where we stood, there was a covered verandah with three wide steps leading down to the area used for unsaddling the first four in every race. There was a tarmac path across the grass there, giving access to the rest of the paddock.
The horses from the fifth race had been unsaddled and led away, and there was a scatter of people about, but not a crowd.
> Maynard stood between me and the steps, and to avoid him I would have to edge sideways and round him.
‘Fielding,’ he said with intensity; and he wasn’t simply addressing me by name, he was using the word as a curse, in the way the Allardecks had used it for vengeful generations. He was cursing my ancestry and my existence, the feudal spite like bile in his mouth, the irrational side of his hatred for me well in command.
He overtopped me by about four inches and outweighed me by fifty pounds, but he was twenty years older and unfit. Without the complication of a sprained ankle, I could have dodged him easily, but as it was, when I took a step sideways, so did he.
‘Mr Allardeck,’ I said neutrally, ‘Princess Casilia’s expecting me.’
He gave no sign of hearing, but when I took another sideways step he didn’t move. Nor did he move when I went past him, but two steps further on, at the top of the steps, I received a violent shove between the shoulders.
Unbalanced, I fell stumbling down the three steps, landing in a sprawl on the tarmac path. I rolled, half expecting Maynard to jump down on me, but he was standing on the top step, staring, and as I watched, he turned away, took three paces and attached himself to a small group of similar-looking men.
A trainer I sometimes rode for, who happened to be near, put a hand under my elbow and helped me to my feet.
‘He pushed you,’ he said incredulously. ‘I saw it. I can’t believe it. That man stepped right behind you and pushed.’
I stood on one leg and brushed off some of the debris from the path. ‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘But he pushed you! Aren’t you going to complain?’
‘Who to?’
‘But Kit …’ He slowly took stock of the situation. That’s Maynard Allardeck.’
‘Yeah.’
‘But he can’t go around attacking you. And you’ve hurt your leg.’
‘He didn’t do that,’ I said. ‘That’s from a fall in the third race.’
‘That was some mess …’ He looked at me doubtfully. ‘If you want to complain, I’ll say what I saw.’
I thanked him again and said I wouldn’t bother, which he still found inexplicable. I glanced briefly at Maynard who by then had his back to me as if unaware of my presence, and with perturbation set off again towards the princess’s box.