Bonecrack

by Dick Francis

  The horses had cantered a straight mile away from the stands, circled, lined up, and started back at a flat gallop. Unused to holding race glasses and to watching races head-on from a mile away, I couldn’t for a long time see Tommy at all, even though I knew vaguely where to look for him: drawn number twenty-one, almost midfield. I put the glasses down after a while and just watched the mass making its distant way towards the stands, a multi-coloured charge dividing into two sections, one each side of the course. Each section narrowed until the centre of the track was bare, and it looked as though two separate races were being held at the same time.

  I heard his name on the commentary before I spotted the colours.

  ‘And now on the stands’ side it’s Pease Pudding coming to take it up. With two furlongs to go, Pease Pudding on the rails with Gossamer next and Badger making up ground now behind them, and Willy Nilly on the far side followed by Thermometer, Student Unrest, Manganeta …’ He rattled off a long string of names to which I didn’t listen.

  That he had been fit enough to hit the front two furlongs from home was all that mattered. I honestly didn’t care from that moment whether he won or lost. But he did win. He won by a short head from Badger, holding his muzzle stubbornly in front when it looked impossible that he shouldn’t be caught, with Tommy Hoylake moving rhythmically over the withers and getting out of him the last milligram of balance, of stamina, of utter bloody-minded refusal to be beaten.

  In the winner’s unsaddling enclosure Major Barnette looked more stunned than stratospheric, but Tommy Hoylake jumped down with the broadest of grins and said, ‘Hey, what about that, then? He had the goods in the parcel after all.’

  ‘So he did,’ I said, and told the discountenanced Pressmen that anyone could win the Lincoln any old day of the week: any old day, given the horse, the luck, the head lad, my father’s stable routine, and the second-best jockey in the country.

  About twenty people having suddenly developed a close friendship with Major Barnette, he drifted off more or less at their suggestion to the bar to lubricate their hoarse-from-cheering throats. He asked me lamely to join him, but as I had caught his eye just when, recovering from his surprise, he had been telling the world that he always knew Pease Pudding had it in him, I saved him embarrassment and declined.

  When the crowd round the unsaddling enclosure had dispersed and the fuss had died away, I somehow found myself face to face with Alessandro, who had been driven to Doncaster that day, and the previous day, by a partially revitalized chauffeur.

  His face was as white as his yellowish skin could get, and his black eyes were as deep as pits. He regarded me with a shaking, strung-up intensity, and seemed to have difficulty in actually saying what was hovering on the edge. I looked back at him without emotion of any sort, and waited.

  ‘All right,’ he said jerkily, after a while. ‘All right. Why don’t you say it? I expect you to say it.’

  ‘There’s no need,’ I said neutrally. ‘And no point.’

  Some of the jangle drained out of his face. He swallowed with difficulty.

  ‘I will say it for you, then,’ he said. ‘Pease Pudding would not have won if you had let me ride him.’

  ‘No, he wouldn’t,’ I agreed.

  ‘I could see,’ he said, still with a shake in his voice, ‘that I couldn’t have ridden like that. I could see …’

  Humility was a torment for Alessandro.

  I said, in some sort of compassion, ‘Tommy Hoylake has no more determination than you have, and no better hands. But what he does have is a marvellous judgement of pace and tremendous polish in a tight finish. Your turn will come, don’t doubt it.’

  Even if his colour didn’t come back, the rest of the rigidity disappeared. He looked more dumbfounded than anything else.

  He said slowly, ‘I thought … I thought you would … what is it Miss Craig says …? Rub my nose in it.’

  I smiled at the sound of the colloquialism in his careful accent.

  ‘No, I wouldn’t do that.’

  He took a deep breath and involuntarily stretched his arms out sideways.

  ‘I want …’ he said, and didn’t finish it.

  You want the world, I thought. And I said, ‘Start on Wednesday.’

  When the horse-box brought Pease Pudding back to Rowley Lodge that night the whole stable turned out to greet him. Etty’s face was puckered with a different emotion from worry, and she fussed over the returning warrior like a mother hen. The colt himself clattered stiff-legged down the ramp into the yard and modestly accepted the melon-sized grins and the earthy comments (you did it, you old bugger) which were directed his way.

  ‘Surely every winner doesn’t get this sort of reception,’ I said to Etty, after I’d come out of the house to investigate the bustle. I had reached the house half an hour before the horse, and found everything quiet: the lads had finished evening stables and gone round to the hostel for their tea.

  ‘It’s the first of the season,’ she said, her eyes shining in her good plain face. ‘And we didn’t expect … well, I mean … without Mr Griffon and everything …’

  ‘I told you to have more faith in yourself, Etty.’

  ‘It’s bucked the lads up no end,’ she said, ducking the compliment. ‘Everyone was watching on TV. They made such a noise in the hostel they must have heard them at the Forbury Inn …’

  The lads were all spruced up for their Saturday evening out. When they’d seen Pease Pudding safely stowed away, they set off in a laughing and cheering bunch to make inroads into the stocks of the Golden Lion; and until I saw the explosive quality of their pleasure, I hadn’t realized the extent of their depression. But they had after all, I reflected, read the papers. And they were used to believing my father rather than their own eyes.

  ‘Mr Griffon will be so pleased,’ Etty said, with genuine, unsophisticated certainty.

  But Mr Griffon, predictably, was not.

  I drove down to see him the following afternoon and found several of the Sunday newspapers in the waste basket. He greeted me with a face that made agate look like putty, and was watchfully determined that I shouldn’t have a chance of crowing.

  He needn’t have worried. Nothing made for worse future relations in any field whatsoever than crowing over losers; and if I knew nothing else, I knew how to negotiate for the best long-term results.

  I congratulated him on the win.

  He didn’t quite know how to deal with that, but at least it got him out of the embarrassment of having to admit he’d been made to look foolish.

  ‘Tommy Hoylake rode a brilliant race,’ he stated, and ignored the fact that he had given him directly opposite instructions.

  ‘Yes, he did,’ I agreed wholeheartedly, and repeated that all the rest of the credit lay with Etty and with his own stable routine, which we had faithfully followed.

  He unbent a little more, but I found, slightly to my dismay, that in contrast I admired Alessandro for the straightforwardness of his apology, and for the moral courage which had nerved him to offer it. Moral courage was not something I had ever associated with Alessandro, before that moment.

  Since my last visit, my father’s room had taken on the appearance of an office. The regulation bedside locker had been replaced by a much larger table which pushed around easily on huge wheel castors, like the bed. On the table was the telephone on which he had broadcast so much blight, also a heap of Racing Calendars, copies of the Sporting Life, entry forms, a copy of Horses in Training, the three previous years’ form books and, half hidden, the reports from Etty in her familiar schoolgirl handwriting.

  ‘What, no typewriter?’ I said flippantly, and he said stiffly that he was arranging for a local girl to come in and take dictation some time in the next week.

  ‘Fine,’ I said encouragingly; but he refused to be friendly. He saw the winning of the Lincoln as a serious threat to his authority, and his manner said plainly that that authority was not passing to me or even to Etty, while he could do anyth
ing to prevent it.

  He was putting himself in a very ambivalent position. Every winner would be to him personally excruciating, yet at the same time he needed it desperately from the financial angle. Too much of his fortune for safety was still invested in half shares: and if the horses all ran as badly as it seemed he would like them to, their value would curl up like dahlias in a frost.

  Understanding him was one thing: sorting him out, quite another.

  ‘I can’t wait for you to get back,’ I said, but that didn’t work either. It seemed that the bones were not mending as fast as had been hoped, and the reminder of the delay simply switched him into a different sort of aggravation.

  ‘Some tommy-rot about elderly bones taking longer to knit,’ he said irritably. ‘All these weeks … and they can’t say when I can get out of all these confounded pulleys. I told them I want a plaster cast I can walk on … damn it, enough people have them … but they say there are lots of cases where it isn’t possible, and that I’m one of them.’

  ‘You’re lucky to have a leg at all,’ I pointed out. ‘At first they thought they would have to take it off.’

  ‘Better if they had,’ he snorted. ‘Then I would have been back at Rowley Lodge by now.’

  I had brought some more champagne, but he refused to drink any. Afraid it might look too much like a celebration, I supposed.

  Gillie gave me an uncomplicated hug, and it was she who said, ‘I told you so.’

  ‘So you did,’ I agreed contentedly. ‘And since I won two thousand pounds on your convictions, I’ll take you to the Empress.’

  The tatty black, however, was tight.

  ‘Just look,’ she wailed, pressing into her abdomen with her fingers, ‘I wore it only ten days ago and it was perfectly all right. And now, it’s impossible.’

  ‘I’m not over addicted to flat-chested ladies with hip bones sticking up like Monts Blancs,’ I said comfortingly.

  ‘No … but voluptuous plenty can go too far.’

  ‘Grapefruit, then?’

  She sighed, considered, went to fetch a cream trench coat which covered a multitude of bulges, and said cheerfully, ‘Whoever could do justice to Pease Pudding on a grapefruit?’

  We toasted the victory in Château Figeac 1964, but out of respect for the tatty black seams ate melon and steak and averted our eyes strong mindedly from the puddings.

  Gillie said over the coffee that owing to the continued shortage of orphans she was more or less having time off thrust upon her, and couldn’t I think again and let her come to Newmarket.

  ‘No,’ I said, more positively than I intended.

  She looked a little hurt, which was unusual enough in her to bother me considerably.

  ‘You remember those bruises I had, about five weeks ago?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Well … they were the beginning of a rather unpleasant argument I am still having with a man who has a strong line in threats. So far I have resisted some of the threats, and at present there’s a sort of stalemate.’ I paused. ‘I don’t want to upset that balance. I don’t want to give him any levers. I’ve no wife, no children, and no near relatives except a father well protected in hospital. There’s no one the enemy can threaten … no one for whose sake I will do anything he says. But you see … if you come to Newmarket, there would be.’

  She looked at me for a long time, taking it in, but the hurt went away at once.

  Finally she said, ‘Archimedes said that if he could find somewhere to stand he could shift the world.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘With a lever,’ she said, smiling. ‘You uneducated goose.’

  ‘Let’s not give Archimedes a foothold.’

  ‘No.’ She sighed. ‘Set your tiny mind at rest. I’ll pay you no visits until invited.’

  Back at the flat, lying side by side in bed and reading the Sunday papers in companionable quiet, she said, ‘You do see what follows from allowing him no levers?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘More bruises.’

  ‘Not if I can help it.’

  She rolled her head on the pillow and looked at me. ‘You know damn well. You’re no great fool.’

  ‘It won’t come to that,’ I said.

  She turned back to the Sunday Times. ‘There’s an advertisement here for travel on a cargo boat to Australia … Would you feel safer if I went on a cruise on a cargo boat to Australia? Would you like me to go?’

  ‘Yes, I would,’ I said. ‘And no, I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Just an offer.’

  ‘Declined.’

  She smiled. ‘Don’t leave this address lying about, then.’

  ‘I haven’t.’

  She put the paper down. ‘Just how much of a lever do you suppose I am?’

  I threw the Observer on to the floor. ‘I’ll show you, if you like.’

  ‘Please do,’ she said; and switched off the light.

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘I would like you to come in my car to the races,’ I said to Alessandro on Wednesday morning, when he turned up for the first lot. ‘Give Carlo a day off.’

  He looked back dubiously to where Carlo sat as usual in the Mercedes, staring watchfully down the yard.

  ‘He says I talk with you too much. He will object.’

  I shrugged. ‘All right,’ I said, and walked off to mount Cloud Cuckoo-land. We took the string down to Waterhall, where Alessandro rode a pipe opener on both Buckram and Lancat, and Etty grudgingly said that they both seemed to be going well for him. The thirty or so others that we took along there didn’t seem to be doing so badly either, and the Lincoln booster was still fizzing around in grins and good humour. The whole stable, that week, had come alive.

  Pullitzer had set off to Catterick early in the smaller of the stable’s two horse-boxes, accompanied by his own lad and the travelling head lad, Vic Young, who supervised the care of the horses while they were away from home. Second in command to Etty, he was a resourceful, quick-witted Londoner grown too heavy in middle age to ride most of the young stable inmates; but the weight came in useful for throwing around. Vic Young was a great one for getting his own way, and it was just good luck that his own way was usually to the stable’s advantage. He was, like all the best older lads, deeply partisan.

  When I went out after changing, ready to follow to the races, I found Alessandro waiting beside the Jensen, with Carlo glowering in the Mercedes six feet away.

  ‘I will come in your car,’ announced Alessandro firmly. ‘But Carlo will follow us.’

  ‘Very well,’ I nodded.

  I slid down into the driving seat and waited while he got in beside me. Then I started up, moved down the drive, and turned out of the gate with Carlo following in convoy.

  ‘My father ordered him to drive me everywhere …’ Alessandro explained.

  ‘And he doesn’t care to disobey your father,’ I finished for him.

  ‘That is right. My father also ordered him to make sure I am safe.’

  I slid a glance sideways.

  ‘Don’t you feel safe?’

  ‘No one would dare to hurt me,’ he said simply.

  ‘It would depend what there was to gain,’ I said, speeding away from Newmarket.

  ‘But my father …’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know. And I have no wish to harm you. None at all.’

  Alessandro subsided, satisfied. But I reflected that levers could work both ways, and Enso, unlike me, did have someone for whose sake he could be forced to do things against his will. Suppose, I daydreamed idly, that I abducted Alessandro and shut him up in the convenient cellar in the flat in Hampstead. I would then have Enso by the short and curlies in a neat piece of tit for tat.

  I sighed briefly. Too many problems that way. And since all I wanted from Enso was for him to get off my back and out of my life before my father came out of hospital, abducting Alessandro didn’t seem the quickest way of doing it. The quickest way to the dissolution of Rowley Lodge, more like. P
ity, though …

  Alessandro was impatient for the journey to be over, but was otherwise calmer than I had feared. Determination, however, shouted forth from the arrogant carriage of his head down to the slender hands which clenched and unclenched at intervals on his knees.

  I avoided an oncoming oil tanker whose driver seemed to think he was in France, and said casually, ‘You won’t be able to threaten the other apprentices with reprisals if you don’t get it all your own way. You do understand that, don’t you?’

  He looked almost hurt. ‘I will not do that.’

  ‘The habits of a lifetime,’ I said without censure, ‘are apt to rear their ugly heads at moments of stress.’

  ‘I will ride to win,’ he asserted.

  ‘Yes … But do remember that if you win by pushing someone else out of the way, the Stewards will take the race away from you, and you’ll gain nothing.’

  ‘I will be careful,’ he said, with his chin up.

  ‘That’s all that is required,’ I confirmed. ‘Generosity is not.’

  He looked at me with suspicion. ‘I do not always know if you are meaning to make jokes.’

  ‘Usually,’ I said.

  We drove steadily north.

  ‘Did it never occur to your father to buy you a Derby prospect, rather than to insert you into Rowley Lodge by force?’ I enquired conversationally, as we sped past Wetherby.

  He looked as if the possibility were new to him. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It was Archangel I wanted to ride. The favourite. I want to win the Derby, and Archangel is the best. And all the money in Switzerland would not buy Archangel.’

  That was true, because the colt belonged to a great sportsman, an eighty-year-old merchant banker, whose lifelong ambition it had been to win the great race. His horses had in years gone by finished second and third, and he had won every other big race in the Calendar, but the ultimate peak had always eluded him. Archangel was the best he had ever had, and time was running short.