by Dick Francis
The top of the rise meant nothing to Traffic. He swerved violently to the left and set off sideways towards Bury Hill, not even having the sense to make straight for the stable but swinging too far north and missing it by half a mile. On he charged, his hooves thundering relentlessly over the turf, carrying Alessandro inexorably away in the general direction of Lowestoft.
Stifling the unworthy thought that I wouldn’t care all that much if he plunged straight on into the North Sea, I reflected with a bit more sense that if Traffic damaged himself, Rowley Lodge’s foundations would feel the tremor. I set off at a trot after him as he disappeared into the distance, but when I reached the Bury St Edmunds Road there was no sign of him. I crossed the road and reined in there, wondering which direction to take.
A car came slowly towards me with a shocked-looking driver poking his head out of the window.
‘Some bloody madman nearly ploughed straight into me,’ he yelled. ‘Some bloody madman on the road on a mad horse.’
‘How very upsetting,’ I shouted back sympathetically, but he glared at me balefully and nearly ran into a tree.
I went on along the road, wondering whether it would be a dumped-off Alessandro I saw first, and if so, how long it would take to find and retrieve the wayward Traffic.
From the next rise there was no sign of either of them: the road stretched emptily ahead. Beginning to get anxious, I quickened Cloud Cuckoo-land until we were trotting fast along the soft ground edging the tarmac.
Past the end of the Limekilns, still no trace of Alessandro. The road ran straight, down and up its inclines. No Alessandro. It was a good two miles from the training ground that I finally found him.
He was standing at the crossroads, dismounted, holding Traffic’s reins. The colt had evidently run himself to a standstill, as he drooped there with his head down, his sides heaving, and sweat streaming from him all over. Flecks of foam spattered his neck, and his tongue lolled exhaustedly out.
I slid down from Cloud Cuckoo-land and ran my hand down Traffic’s legs. No tenderness. No apparent strain. Sighing with relief, I straightened up and looked at Alessandro. His face was stiff, his eyes expressionless.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
He lifted his chin. ‘Of course.’
‘He’s a difficult horse,’ I remarked.
Alessandro didn’t answer. His self-pride might have received a big blow, but he was not going to be so soft as to accept any comfort.
‘You’d better walk back with him,’ I said. ‘Walk until he’s thoroughly cooled down. And keep him out of the way of the cars.’
Alessandro tugged the reins and Traffic sluggishly turned, not moving his legs until he absolutely had to.
‘What’s that?’ Alessandro said, pointing to a mound in the grass at the corner of the crossroads where he had been standing. He shoved Traffic further away so that I could see; but I had no need to.
‘It’s the boy’s grave,’ I said.
‘What boy?’ He was startled. The small grave was known to everyone in Newmarket, but not to him. The mound, about four feet long, was outlined with overlapping wire hoops, like the edges of lawns in parks. There were some dirty-looking plastic daffodils entwined in the hoops, and a few dying flowers scattered in the centre. Also a white plastic drinking mug which someone had thrown there. The grave looked forlorn, yet in a futile sort of way, cared for.
‘There are a lot of legends,’ I said. ‘The most likely is that he was a shepherd boy who went to sleep in charge of his flock. A wolf came and killed half of them, and when he woke up he was so remorseful that he hanged himself.’
‘They used to bury suicides at crossroads,’ Alessandro said, nodding. ‘It is well known.’
There didn’t seem to be any harm in trying to humanize him, so I went on with the story.
‘The grave is always looked after, in a haphazard sort of way. It is never overgrown, and fresh flowers are often put there … No one knows exactly who puts them there, but it is supposed to be the gipsies. And there is also a legend that in May the flowers on the grave are in the colours that will win the Derby.’
Alessandro stared down at the pathetic little memorial.
‘There are no black flowers,’ he said slowly: and Archangel’s colours were black, pale blue and gold.
‘The gipsies will solve that if they have to,’ I said drily: and thought that they would opt for an easier-to-stage nap selection.
I turned Cloud Cuckoo-land in the direction of home and walked away. When presently I looked back, Alessandro was walking Traffic quietly along the side of the road, a thin straight figure in his clean clothes and bright blue and white cap. It was a pity, I thought, that he was as he was. With a different father, he might have been a different person.
But with a different father, so would I. And who wouldn’t.
I thought about it all the way back to Rowley Lodge. Fathers, it seemed to me, could train, feed or warp their young plants, but they couldn’t affect their basic nature. They might produce a stunted oak or a luxuriant weed, but oak and weed were inborn qualities, which would prevail in the end. Alessandro, on such a horticultural reckoning, was like a cross between holly and deadly nightshade; and if his father had his way the red berries would lose out to the black.
Alessandro bore Etty’s strongly implied scorn with a frozen face, but few of the other lads teased him on his return, as they would have done to one of their own sort. Most of them seemed to be instinctively afraid of him, which to my mind showed their good sense, and the other, less sensitive types had drifted into the defence mechanism of ignoring his existence.
George took Traffic off to his box, and Alessandro followed me into the office. His glance swept over Margaret, sitting at her desk in a neat navy blue dress with the high curls piled as elaborately as ever, but he saw her as no bar to giving me the benefit of the thoughts that he, evidently, had also had time for on the way back.
‘You should not have made me ride such a badly trained horse,’ he began belligerently.
‘I didn’t make you. You chose to.’
‘Miss Craig told me to ride it to make a fool of me.’
True enough.
‘You could have refused,’ I said.
‘I could not.’
‘You could have said that you thought you needed more practice before taking on the worst ride in the yard.’
His nostrils flared. So self-effacing an admission would have been beyond him.
‘Anyway,’ I went on, ‘I personally don’t think riding Traffic is going to teach you most. So you won’t be put on him again.’
‘But I insist,’ he said vehemently.
‘You insist what?’
‘I insist I ride Traffic again.’ He gave me the haughtiest of his selection of stares, and added, ‘Tomorrow.’
‘Why?’
‘Because if I do not, everyone will think it is because I cannot, or that I am afraid to.’
‘So you do care’, I said matter-of-factly, ‘what the others think of you.’
‘No, I do not.’ He denied it strongly.
‘Then why ride the horse?’
He compressed his strong mouth stubbornly. ‘I will answer no more questions. I will ride Traffic tomorrow.’
‘Well, OK,’ I said casually. ‘But I’m not sending him on the Heath tomorrow. He’ll hardly need another canter. Tomorrow he’ll only be walking round the cinder track in the paddock, which will be very boring for you.’
He gave me a concentrated, suspicious, considering stare, trying to work out if I was meaning to undermine him. Which I was, if one can call taking the point out of a Grand Gesture undermining.
‘Very well,’ he said grudgingly. ‘I will ride him round the paddock.’
He turned on his heel and walked out of the office. Margaret watched him go with a mixed expression I couldn’t read.
‘Mr Griffon would never stand for him talking like that,’ she said.
‘Mr Griffon doesn’t have to.’
‘I can see why Etty can’t bear him,’ she said. ‘He’s insolent. There’s no other word for it. Insolent.’ She handed me three opened letters across the desk. ‘These need your attention, if you don’t mind.’ She reverted to Alessandro: ‘But all the same, he’s beautiful.’
‘He’s no such thing,’ I protested mildly. ‘If anything, he’s ugly.’
She smiled briefly. ‘He’s absolutely loaded with sex appeal.’
I lowered the letters. ‘Don’t be silly. He has the sex appeal of a bag of rusty nails.’
‘You wouldn’t notice,’ she said judiciously. ‘Being a man.’
I shook my head. ‘He’s only eighteen.’
‘Age has nothing to do with it,’ she said. ‘Either you’ve got it, or you haven’t got it, right from the start. And he’s got it.’
I didn’t pay much attention: Margaret herself had so little sex appeal that I didn’t think her a reliable judge. When I’d read through the letters and agreed with her how she should answer them, I went along to the kitchen for some coffee.
The remains of the night’s work lay littered about: the various dregs of brandy, cold milk, coffee, and masses of scribbled-on bits of paper. It had taken me most of the night to do the entries; a night I would far rather have spent lying warmly in Gillie’s bed.
The entries had been difficult, not only because I had never done them before, and had to read the conditions of each race several times to make sure I understood them, but also because of Alessandro. I had to make a balance of what I would have done without him, and what I would have to let him ride if he were still there in a month’s time.
I was taking his father’s threats seriously. Part of the time I thought I was foolish to do so; but that abduction a week ago had been no playful joke, and until I was certain Enso would not let loose a thunderbolt it was more prudent to go along with his son. I still had nearly a month before the Flat season started, still nearly a month to see a way out. But, just in case, I had put down some of the better prospects for apprentice races, and had duplicated the entries in many open races, because if two ran there would be one for Alessandro. Also I entered a good many in the lesser meetings, particularly those in the north: because whether he liked it or not, Alessandro was not going to start his career in a blaze of limelight. After all that I dug around in the office until I found the book in which old Robinson had recorded all the previous years’ entries, and I checked my provisional list against what my father had done. After subtracting about twenty names, because I had been much too lavish, and shuffling things around a little, I made the total number of entries for that week approximately the same as those for the year before, except that I still had more in the north. But I wrote the final list on to the official yellow form, in block letters as requested, and double checked again to make sure I hadn’t entered two-year-olds in handicaps, or fillies in colts-only, and made any other such give-away gaffs.
When I gave the completed form to Margaret to record and then post, all she said was, ‘This isn’t your father’s writing.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘He dictated the entries. I wrote them down.’
She nodded non-committally, and whether she believed me or not I had no idea.
Alessandro rode Pullitzer competently next day at first lot, and kept himself to himself. After breakfast he returned with a stony face that forbade comment, and when the main string had started out for the Heath, was given a leg-up on to Traffic. Looking back from the gate I saw the fractious colt kicking away at shadows as usual, and noticed that the two other lads detailed to stay in and walk their charges were keeping well away from him.
When we returned an hour and a quarter later, George was holding Traffic’s reins, the other lads had dismounted, and Alessandro was lying on the ground in an unconscious heap.
Chapter Seven
‘Traffic just bucked him off, sir,’ one of the lads said. ‘Just bucked him clean off, sir. And he hit his head on the paddock rail, sir.’
‘Just this minute, sir,’ added the other anxiously.
They were both about sixteen, both apprentices, both tiny, neither of them very bold. I thought it unlikely they would have done anything purposely to upset Traffic further and bring the stuck-up Alessandro literally down to earth, but one never knew. What I did know was that Alessandro’s continuing health was essential to my own.
‘George,’ I said, ‘put Traffic away in his box, and Etty …’ She was at my shoulder, clicking her tongue but not looking over-sorry, ‘Is there anything we can use as a stretcher?’
‘There’s one in the tackroom,’ she said, nodding, and told Ginge to go and get it.
The stretcher turned out to be a minimal affair of a piece of grubby green canvas slung between two unevenly shaped poles, which looked as though they might once have been a pair of oars. By the time Ginge returned with it my heartbeat had descended from Everest: Alessandro was alive and not in too deep a coma, and Enso’s pistol would not yet be popping me off in revenge to kingdom come.
As far as I could tell, none of his bones was broken, but I took exaggerated care over lifting him on to the stretcher. Etty disapproved: she would have had George and Ginge lift him up by his wrists and ankles and sling him on like a sack of corn. I, more moderately, told George and Ginge to lift him gently, carry him down to the house, and put him on the sofa in the owners’ room. Following, I detoured off into the office and asked Margaret to telephone for a doctor.
Alessandro was stirring when I went into the owners’ room. George and Ginge stood looking down at him, one elderly and resigned, one young and pugnacious, neither of them feeling any sympathy with the patient.
‘OK,’ I said to them. ‘That’s the lot. The doctor’s coming for him.’
Both of them looked as if they would like to say a lot, but they ambled out tight-lipped and aired their opinions in the yard.
Alessandro opened his eyes, and for the first time looked a little vulnerable. He didn’t know what had happened, didn’t know where he was or how he had got there. The puzzlement formed new lines on his face; made it look younger and softer. Then his eyes focused on my face and in one bound a lot of memory came back. The dove dissolved into the hawk. It was like watching the awakening of a spastic, from loose-limbed peace up to tightness and jangle.
‘What happened?’ he asked.
‘Traffic threw you.’
‘Oh,’ he said more weakly than he liked. He shut his eyes and through his teeth emitted one heartfelt word. ‘Sod.’
There was a sudden commotion at the door and the chauffeur plunged into the room with Margaret trying to cling to one arm. He threw her effortlessly out of his way and shaped up to do the same to me.
‘What has happened?’ he demanded threateningly. ‘What are you doing to the son?’ His voice set up a shiver in my spine. If he wasn’t one of the rubber-faces, he sounded exactly like it.
Alessandro spoke from the sofa with tiredness in his voice: and he spoke in Italian, which thanks to a onetime girlfriend I more or less understood.
‘Stop, Carlo. Go back to the car. Wait for me. The horse threw me. Neil Griffon will not harm me. Go back to the car, and wait for me.’
Carlo moved his head to and fro like a baffled bull, but finally subsided and did as he was told. Three sotto voce cheers for the discipline of the Rivera household.
‘A doctor is coming to see you,’ I said.
‘I do not want a doctor.’
‘You’re not leaving that sofa until I’m certain there is nothing wrong with you.’
He sneered, ‘Afraid of my father?’
‘Think what you like,’ I said; and he obviously did.
The doctor, when he came, turned out to be the same one who had once diagnosed my mumps, measles and chicken-pox. Old now, with overactive lacrymal glands and hesitant speech, he did not in the least appeal to his present patient. Alessandro treated him rudely, and got back courtesy where he deserved a smart kick.
‘Nothi
ng much wrong with the lad,’ was the verdict. ‘But he’d better stay in bed today, and rest tomorrow. That’ll put you right, young man, eh?’
The young man glared back ungratefully and didn’t answer. The old doctor turned to me, gave me a tolerant smile and said to let him know if the lad had any after effects, like dizziness or headaches.
‘Old fool,’ said the lad audibly, as I showed the doctor out; and when I went back he was already on his feet.
‘Can I go now?’ he asked sarcastically.
‘As far and for as long as you like,’ I agreed.
His eyes narrowed. ‘You are not getting rid of me.’
‘Pity,’ I said.
After a short furious silence he walked a little unsteadily past me and out of the door. I went into the office and with Margaret watched through the window while the chauffeur bustled around, settling him comfortably into the back seat of the Mercedes; and presently, without looking back, he drove ‘the son’ away.
‘Is he all right?’ Margaret asked.
‘Shaken, not stirred,’ I said flippantly, and she laughed. But she followed the car with her eyes until it turned left down Bury Road.
He stayed away the following day but came back on the Thursday morning in time for the first lot. I was up in the top part of the yard talking to Etty when the car arrived. Her pleasant expression changed to the one of tight-lipped dislike which she always wore when Alessandro was near her, and when she saw him erupting athletically from the back seat and striding purposefully towards us she discovered something that urgently needed seeing to in one of the bays further down.
Alessandro noted her flight with a twist of scorn on his lips, and widened it into an irritating smirk as a greeting to me. He held out a small flat tin box, identical with the one he had presented before.
‘Message for you,’ he said. All the cockiness was back fortissimo, and I would have known even without the tin that he had again been to see his father. He had recharged his malice like a battery plugged into the mains.
‘Do you know what is in it, this time?’
He hesitated. ‘No,’ he said. And this time I believed him, because his ignorance seemed to annoy him. The tin was fastened round the edge with adhesive tape. Alessandro, with the superior smirk still in place, watched me pull it off. I rolled the tape into a small sticky ball and put it in my pocket: then carefully I opened the tin.