by Dick Francis
He hadn’t signed it. He wouldn’t know how to, we had so little affection for each other. He had despised me from childhood for liking school, and had mocked me unmercifully all the way to college. He showed his jolly side only to my two older brothers, who had had what he considered a healthy contempt for education: one of them had gone into the Merchant Navy and the other lived next door and worked alongside my father for the farmer who owned the cottages.
When in the end I had turned my back on all the years of learning and taken to racing my family had again all disapproved of me, though I guessed they would have been pleased enough if I’d chosen it all along. I’d wasted the country’s money, my father said; I wouldn’t have been given all those grants if they’d known that as soon as I was out I’d go racing. That was probably true. It was also true that since I’d been racing I’d paid enough in taxes to send several other farm boys through college on grants.
I put my parents’ letter under Rosalind’s photograph. Even she had been unable to reach their approval, because they thought I should have married a nice girl from my own sort of background, not the student daughter of a colonel.
They had rigid minds. It was doubtful now if they would ever be pleased with me, whatever I did. And if I got my licence back, as like as not they would think I had somehow cheated again.
You couldn’t take aspirins for that sort of pain. It stayed there, sticking in knives. Trying to escape it I went into the kitchen, to see if there was anything to eat. A tin of sardines, one egg, the dried up remains of some port salut.
Wrinkling my nose at that lot I transferred to the sitting-room and looked at the television programmes.
Nothing I wanted to see.
I slouched in the green velvet armchair and watched the evening slowly fade the colours into subtle greys. A certain amount of pace edged its way past the dragging gloom of the last four days. I wondered almost academically whether I would get my licence back before or after I stopped wincing at the way people looked at me, or spoke to me, or wrote about me. Probably the easiest course would be to stay out of sight, hiding myself away.
Like I was hiding away at that minute, by not going to the Jockeys’ Fund dance.
The tickets were on the mantel. Tickets for Tony and Poppy, and for me and the partner I hadn’t got around to inviting. Tickets which were not going to be used, which I had paid twelve fund raising guineas for.
I sat in the dark for half an hour thinking about the people who would be at the Jockeys’ Fund dance.
Then I put on my black tie and went to it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I went prepared to be stared at.
I was stared at.
Also pointed out and commented on. Discreetly, however, for the most part. And only two people decisively turned their backs.
The Jockeys’ Fund dance glittered as usual with titles, diamonds, champagne and talent. Later it might curl round the edges into spilled drinks, glassy eyes, raddled make-up and slurring voices, but the gloss wouldn’t entirely disappear. It never did. The Jockeys’ Fund dance was one of the great social events of the steeplechasing year.
I handed over my ticket and walked along the wide passage to where the lights were low, the music hot, and the air thick with smoke and scent. The opulent ballroom of the Royal County Hotel, along the road from Ascot racecourse.
Around the dancing area there were numbers of large circular tables with chairs for ten or twelve round each, most of them occupied already. According to the chart in the hall, at table number thirty-two I would find the places reserved for Tony and me, if in fact they were still reserved. I gave up looking for table thirty-two less than half way down the room because whenever I moved a new battery of curious eyes swivelled my way. A lot of people raised a hello but none of them could hide their slightly shocked surprise. It was every bit as bad as I’d feared.
A voice behind me said incredulously, ‘Hughes!’
I knew the voice. I turned round with an equal sense of the unexpected. Roberta Cranfield. Wearing a honey-coloured silk dress with the top smothered in pearls and gold thread and her copper hair drawn high with a trickle of ringlets down the back of her neck.
‘You look beautiful,’ I said.
Her mouth opened. ‘Hughes!’
‘Is your father here?’
‘No,’ she said disgustedly. ‘He wouldn’t face it. Nor would Mother. I came with a party of neighbours but I can’t say I was enjoying it much until you turned up.’
‘Why not?’
‘You must be joking. Just look around. At a rough guess fifty people are rubber-necking at you. Doesn’t it make you cringe inside? Anyway, I’ve had quite enough of it myself this evening, and I didn’t even see the damned race, let alone get myself warned off.’ She stopped. ‘Come and dance with me. If we’re hoisting the flag we may as well do it thoroughly.’
‘On one condition,’ I said.
‘What’s that?’
‘You stop calling me Hughes.’
‘What?’
‘Cranfield, I’m tired of being called Hughes.’
‘Oh!’ It had obviously never occurred to her. ‘Then… Kelly… how about dancing?’
‘Enchanted, Roberta.’
She gave me an uncertain look. ‘I still feel I don’t know you.’
‘You’ve never bothered.’
‘Nor have you.’
That jolted me. It was true. I’d disliked the idea of her. And I didn’t really know her at all.
‘How do you do?’ I said politely. ‘Come and dance.’
We shuffled around in one of those affairs which look like formalised jungle rituals, swaying in rhythm but never touching. Her face was quite calm, remotely smiling. From her composure one would have guessed her to be entirely at ease, not the target of turned heads, assessing glances, half hidden whispers.
‘I don’t know how you do it,’ she said.
‘Do what?’
‘Look so… so matter of fact.’
‘I was thinking exactly the same about you.’
She smiled, eyes crinkling and teeth gleaming, and incredibly in the circumstances she looked happy.
We stuck it for a good ten minutes. Then she said we would go back to her table, and made straight off to it without waiting for me to agree. I didn’t think her party would be pleased to have me join them, and half of them weren’t.
‘Sit down and have a drink, my dear fellow,’ drawled her host, reaching for a champagne bottle with a languid hand. ‘And tell me all about the bring-back-Cranfield campaign. Roberta tells me you are working on a spot of reinstatement.’
‘I haven’t managed it yet,’ I said deprecatingly.
‘My dear chap…’ He gave me an inspecting stare down his nose. He’d been in the Guards, I thought. So many ex-Guards’ officers looked at the world down the sides of their noses: it came of wearing those blinding hats. He was blond, in his forties, not unfriendly. Roberta called him Bobbie.
The woman the other side of him leaned over and drooped a heavy pink satin bosom perilously near her brimming glass.
‘Do tell me,’ she said, giving me a thorough gaze from heavily made up eyes, ‘What made you come?’
‘Natural cussedness,’ I said pleasantly.
‘Oh.’ She looked taken aback. ‘How extraordinary.’
‘Joined to the fact that there was no reason why I shouldn’t.’
‘And are you enjoying it?’ Bobbie said. ‘I mean to say, my dear chap, you are somewhat in the position of a rather messily struck off doctor turning up four days later at the British Medical Association’s grandest function.’
I smiled. ‘Quite a parallel.’
‘Don’t needle him Bobbie,’ Roberta protested.
Bobbie removed his stare from me and gave it to her instead. ‘My dear Roberta, this cookie needs no little girls rushing to his defence. He’s as tough as old oak.’
A disapproving elderly man on the far side of the pink bosom said under hi
s breath ‘Thick skinned, you mean.’
Bobbie heard, and shook his head. ‘Vertebral,’ he said. ‘Different altogether.’ He stood up. ‘Roberta, my dear girl, would you care to dance?’
I stood up with him.
‘No need to go, my dear chap. Stay. Finish your drink.’
‘You are most kind,’ I said truthfully. ‘But I really came tonight to have a word with one or two people… If you’ll excuse me, I’ll try to find them.’
He gave me an odd formal little inclination of the head, halfway to a bow. ‘Come back later, if you’d care to.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘Very much.’
He took Roberta away to dance and I went up the stairs to the balcony which encircled the room. There were tables all round up there too, but in places one could get a good clear view of most people below. I spent some length of time identifying them from the tops of their heads.
There must have been about six hundred there, of whom I knew personally about a quarter. Owners, trainers, jockeys, Stewards, pressmen, two or three of the bigger bookmakers, starters, judges, Clerks of Courses and all the others, all with their wives and friends and chattering guests.
Kessel was there, hosting a party of twelve almost exactly beneath where I stood. I wondered if his anger had cooled since Monday, and decided if possible not to put it to the test. He had reputedly sent Squelch off to Pat Nikita, a trainer who was a bitter rival of Cranfield’s, which had been rubbing it in a bit. The report looked likely to be true, as Pat Nikita was among the party below me.
Cranfield and Nikita regularly claimed each other’s horses in selling races and were apt to bid each other up spitefully at auctions. It was a public joke. So in choosing Nikita as his trainer, Kessel was unmistakably announcing worldwise that he believed Cranfield and I had stopped his horse. Hardly likely to help convince anyone that we hadn’t.
At one of the most prominent tables, near the dancing space, sat Lord Ferth, talking earnestly to a large lady in pale blue ostrich feathers. All the other chairs round the table were askew and unoccupied, but while I watched the music changed to a latin rhythm, and most of the party drifted back. I knew one or two of them slightly, but not well. The man I was chiefly looking for was not among them.
Two tables away from Lord Ferth sat Edwin Byler, gravely beckoning to the waiter to fill his guests’ glasses, too proud of his home-made wealth to lift the bottle himself. His cuddly little wife on the far side of the table was loaded with half the stock of Hatton Garden and was rather touchingly revelling in it.
Not to be going to ride Edwin Byler’s string of super horses… The wry thrust of regret went deeper than I liked.
There was a rustle behind me and the smell of Roberta’s fresh flower scent. I turned towards her.
‘Kelly…?’
She really looked extraordinarily beautiful.
‘Kelly… Bobbie suggested that you should take me in to supper.’
‘That’s generous of him.’
‘He seems to approve of you. He said…’ She stopped abruptly. ‘Well, never mind what he said.’
We went down the stairs and through an archway to the supper room. The light there was of a heartier wattage. It didn’t do any damage to Roberta.
Along one wall stretched a buffet table laden with aspic-shining cold meats and oozing cream gateaux. Roberta said she had dined at Bobbie’s before coming on to the dance and wasn’t hungry, but we both collected some salmon and sat down at one of the twenty or so small tables clustered into half of the room.
Six feet away sat three fellow jockeys resting their elbows among a debris of empty plates and coffee cups.
‘Kelly!’ One of them exclaimed in a broad northern voice. ‘My God. Kelly. Come over here, you old so and so. Bring the talent with you.’
The talent’s chin began its familiar upward tilt.
‘Concentrate on the character, not the accent,’ I said.
She gave me a raw look of surprise, but when I stood up and picked up her plate, she came with me. They made room for us, admired Roberta’s appearance, and didn’t refer to anyone being warned off. Their girls, they explained, were powdering their noses, and when the noses reappeared, immaculate, they all smiled goodbye and went back to the ballroom.
‘They were kind.’ She sounded surprised.
‘They would be.’
She fiddled with her fork, not looking at me. ‘You said the other day that my mind was in chains. Was that what you meant… that I’m inclined to judge people by their voices… and that it’s wrong?’
‘Eton’s bred its rogues,’ I said. ‘Yes.’
‘Cactus. You’re all prickles.’
‘Original sin exists,’ I said mildly. ‘So does original virtue. They both crop up regardless. No respecters of birth.’
‘Where did you go to school?’
‘In Wales.’
‘You haven’t a Welsh accent. You haven’t any accent at all. And that’s odd really, considering you are only…’ Her voice trailed away and she looked aghast at her self-betrayal. ‘Oh dear… I’m sorry.’
‘It’s not surprising,’ I pointed out. ‘Considering your father. And anyway, in my own way I’m just as bad. I smothered my Welsh accent quite deliberately. I used to practise in secret, while I was still at school, copying the B.B.C. news’ announcers. I wanted to be a Civil Servant, and I was ambitious, and I knew I wouldn’t get far if I sounded like the son of a Welsh farm labourer. So in time this became my natural way of talking. And my parents despise me for it.’
‘Parents!’ She said despairingly. ‘Why can we never escape them? Whatever we are, it is because of them. I want to be me.’ She looked astonished at herself. ‘I’ve never felt like this before. I don’t understand…’
‘Well I do,’ I said, smiling. ‘Only it happens to most people around fifteen or sixteen. Rebellion, it’s called.’
‘You’re mocking me.’ But the chin stayed down.
‘No.’
We finished the salmon and drank coffee. A large loudly chattering party collected food from the buffet and pushed the two tables next to us together so that they could all sit at one. They were well away on a tide of alcohol and bonhomie, loosened and expansive. I watched them idly. I knew four of them, two trainers, one wife, one owner.
One of the trainers caught sight of me and literally dropped his knife.
‘That’s Kelly Hughes,’ he said disbelievingly. The whole party turned round and stared. Roberta drew a breath in distress. I sat without moving.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Drinking coffee,’ I said politely.
His eyes narrowed. Trevor Norse was not amused. I sighed inwardly. It was never good to antagonise trainers, it simply meant one less possible source of income: but I’d ridden for Trevor Norse several times already, and knew that it was practically impossible to please him anyway.
A heavy man, six feet plus, labouring under the misapprehension that size could substitute for ability. He was much better with owners than with horses, tireless at cultivating the one and lazy with the other.
His brainless wife said brightly, ‘I hear you’re paying Dexter’s lads’ wages, because you’re sure you’ll get your licence back in a day or two.’
‘What’s all that?’ Norse said sharply. ‘Where did you hear all that nonsense?’
‘Everyone’s talking about it, darling,’ she said protestingly.
‘Who’s everyone?’
She giggled weakly. ‘I heard it in the ladies, if you must know. But it’s quite true, I’m sure it is. Dexter’s lads told Daphne’s lads in the local pub, and Daphne told Miriam, and Miriam was telling us in the ladies…’
‘Is it true?’ Norse demanded.
‘Well, more or less,’ I agreed.
‘Good Lord.’
‘Miriam said Kelly Hughes says he and Dexter were framed, and that he’s finding out who did it.’ Mrs Norse giggled at me. ‘My dear, isn’t it all such fun.’
‘Do you know Roberta Cranfield?’ I said formally, and they all exclaimed over her, and she scattered on them a bright artificial smile, and we went back and tried another dance.
It wasn’t altogether a great idea because we were stopped half way round by Daddy Leeman of the Daily Witness who raked me over with avid eyes and yelled above music was it true I was claiming I’d been framed. He had a piercing voice. All the nearby couples turned and stared. Some of them raised sceptical eyebrows at each other.
‘I really can’t stand a great deal more of this,’ Roberta said in my ear. ‘How can you? Why don’t you go home now?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said contritely. ‘You’ve been splendid. I’ll take you back to Bobbie.’
‘But you…?’
‘I haven’t done what I came for. I’ll stay a bit longer.’
She compressed her mouth and started to dance again. ‘All right. So will I.’
We danced without smiling.’
‘Do you want a tombola ticket?’ I asked.
‘No.’ She was astonished.
‘You might as well. I want to go down that end of the room.’
‘Whatever for?’
‘Looking for someone. Haven’t been down that end at all.’
‘Oh. All right, then.’
She stepped off the polished wood on to the thick dark carpet, and threaded her way to the clear aisle which led down to the gaily decorated tombola stall at the far end of the ballroom.
I looked for the man I wanted, but I didn’t see him. I met too many other eyes, most of which hastily looked away.
‘I hate them.’ Roberta said fiercely. ‘I hate people.’
I bought her four tickets. Three of them were blanks. The fourth had a number which fitted a bottle of vodka.
‘I don’t like it much,’ she said, holding it dubiously.