Rat Race

by Dick Francis

  ‘Do my best…’

  The larger man arrived with the grip, and I stowed it in the forward luggage locker between the engine wall and the forward bulkhead of the cabin. By the time the baggage door was securely fastened Colin Ross had found his empty seat and strapped himself into it. Goldenberg with heavy grunts moved out again so that I could get back to my lefthand place. The larger man, who was apparently the dilatory trainer Bob Smith, said his hellos and goodbyes to the passengers, and stood watching afterwards while I started the engine and taxied back to the other end of the strip to turn into wind for take-off.

  The flight north was uneventful: I went up the easy way under the Amber One airway, navigating on the radio beacons at Daventry, Lichfield and Oldham. Manchester control routed us right round the north of their zone so that I had to drop down southwards towards Haydock racecourse, and there it was, just as Larry had said, near the interchange of the two giant roads. We touched down on the grass strip indicated in the centre of the course, and I taxied on and parked where the Major told me to, near the rails of the track itself, a mere hundred yards from the grandstand.

  The passengers disembarked themselves and their belongings and Colin Ross looked at his watch. A faint smile hovered and was gone. He made no comment. He said merely, ‘Are you coming in to the races?’

  I shook my head. ‘Think I’ll stay over here.’

  ‘I’ll arrange with the man on the gate to let you into the paddock, if you change your mind.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said in surprise. ‘Thanks very much.’

  He nodded briefly and set off without waiting for the others, ducking under the white-painted rails and trudging across the track.

  ‘Pilots’ perks,’ Kenny said, taking his raincoat from my hand and putting his arm forward for the saddle. ‘You want to take advantage.’

  ‘Maybe I will,’ I said, but I didn’t mean to. Horse racing began and ended with the Derby as far as I was concerned, and also I was a non-gambler by nature.

  Anne Villars said in her deceptively gentle voice, ‘You do understand that we’re all going on to Newmarket after the races, and not back to Newbury?’

  ‘Yes,’ I assured her. ‘That’s what I was told.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘If we don’t go to jail,’ Kenny said under his breath. Golden-berg looked at me sharply to see if I’d heard that, and I gave no sign of it. Whatever they were about, it was as little my concern as who killed Cock Robin.

  Major Tyderman pushed at his moustache with a hand rigid with nervous energy and said, ‘Last race at four thirty. Need a drink after that. Ready to start back at, say, five fifteen. That all right with you?’

  ‘Perfectly, Major,’ I nodded.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Good.’ His gaze was flicking from one to another of his travelling companions, assessing and suspicious. His eyes narrowed fiercely at Kenny Bayst, opened and narrowed again rapidly on Goldenberg, relaxed on Anne Villars and went cold on the vanishing back of Colin Ross. The thoughts behind the outward physical reactions were unguessable, and when he finally looked back at me he didn’t really see me, he was busy with the activity inside his head.

  ‘Five fifteen,’ he repeated vaguely. ‘Good.’

  Kenny said to me, ‘Don’t waste your money in the three thirty, sport;’ and Goldenberg raised his fist with a face going purple with anger and nearly hit him.

  Anne Villars’ voice rapped into him, the steel sticking through the cream with a vengeance, the top-brass quality transcendent and withering.

  ‘Control your temper, you stupid man.’

  Goldenberg’s mouth literally dropped open, to reveal a bottom row of unappetising brown stained teeth. His raised fist lowered slowly, and he looked altogether foolish.

  ‘As for you,’ she said to Kenny, ‘I told you to keep your tongue still, and that was your last chance.’

  ‘Are you sacking me?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll decide that at the end of the afternoon.’

  Kenny showed no anxiety about keeping his job, and I realised that in fact what he had been doing was trying to provoke them into getting rid of him. He’d got himself into nutcrackers and while they squeezed he couldn’t get out.

  I became mildly curious to see what would happen in the three thirty. It would help to pass the afternoon.

  They straggled off towards the stands, Kenny in front, the Major and Goldenberg together, with Annie Villars several paces behind. The Major kept stopping and looking back and waiting for her, but every time just as she reached him he turned and went off again in front, so that as a piece of courtesy, the whole thing was wasted. He reminded me vividly of an aunt who had taken me for childhood walks in just that way. I remembered quite clearly that it had been infuriating.

  I sighed, shut the baggage doors and tidied up the aeroplane. Annie Villars had been smoking thin brown cigars. Goldenberg had been eating indigestion tablets, each from a square wrapper. The Major had left his Sporting Life in a tumbled heap on the floor.

  While I was fiddling around with the debris, two more aeroplanes flew in, a four seat high winged Cessna and a six seat twin engined Aztec.

  I watched their touchdowns with an uncritical eye, though I wouldn’t have given the Aztec pilot a gold medal for his double bounce. Several small men disgorged themselves and made a dart like a flock of starlings across the track towards the paddock. They were followed by three or four larger and slower-moving people slung around with binoculars and what I later learned to be bags for carrying sets of racing colours. Finally out of each aircraft popped the most leisurely of all the inmates, a man dressed very much as I was, in dark trousers, white shirt, neat dark tie.

  They strolled towards each other and lit cigarettes. After a while, not wanting to seem unsociable, I wandered across to join them. They turned and watched me come, but with no welcome in unsmiling faces.

  ‘Hello,’ I said moderately. ‘Nice day.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said one.

  ‘You think so?’ said the other.

  They offered me fish-eyed stares but no cigarette. I had grown hardened to that sort of thing. I turned half away from them and read the names of the firms they flew for, which were painted on the tails of their aircraft. It was the same name on both. Polyplane Services.

  How dreary of them, I thought, to be so antagonistic. I gave them the benefit of a very small doubt and made one more approach.

  ‘Have you come far?’

  They didn’t answer. Just gave me the stares, like two cod.

  I laughed at them as if I thought their behaviour pathetic, which in fact I did, and turned on my heel to go back to my own territory. When I’d gone ten steps one of them called after me, ‘Where’s Larry Gedge?’ He didn’t sound as if he liked Larry any better than me.

  I decided not to hear: if they really wanted to know, they could come and ask nicely. It was their turn to cross the grass.

  They didn’t bother. I wasn’t particularly sorry. I had long ago learned that pilots were not all one great happy brotherhood. Pilots could be as bloodyminded to each other as any group on earth.

  I climbed back into my seat in the Cherokee and sorted out my maps and flight plans for the return journey. I had four hours to do it in and it took me ten minutes. After that I debated whether to go over to the stands and find some lunch, and decided I wasn’t hungry. After that I yawned. It was a habit.

  I had been depressed for so long that it had become a permanent state of mind. Expectations might lift the edge of the cloud every time one took a new job, but life never turned out to be as good as the hopes. This was my sixth job since I’d gone to learn flying with stars in my eyes, my fourth since the stars had faded for good. I had thought that taxi flying might be interesting, and after crop spraying, which I’d been doing last, anything would be; and perhaps it would indeed be interesting, but if I’d thought it might be free of gripe and bad temper I’d been kidding myself. For here it all was, as usual. Squabbling passengers an
d belligerent competitors and no discernible joy anywhere.

  There was a small buffet on the side of the fuselage and the jar and sound of someone stepping up on to the wing. The slightly open door was pushed wide with a crash, and into its Gpace appeared a girl, bending at the waist and knees and neck so that she could look inside and across at me.

  She was slim and dark haired and she was wearing large square sunglasses. Also she had a blue linen dress and long white boots. She looked great. The afternoon instantly improved.

  ‘You lousy bloody skunk,’ she said.

  It really was one of those days.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘Wrong man.’ She took off the sunglasses and folded them away in the white handbag which hung from her shoulder by a thick red, white and blue cord.

  ‘Think nothing of it.’

  ‘Where’s Larry?’

  ‘Gone to Turkey.’

  ‘Gone?’ she said blankly. ‘Do you mean literally gone already, or planning to go, or what?’

  I looked at my watch. ‘Took off from Heathrow twenty minutes ago, I believe.’

  ‘Damn,’ she said forcibly. ‘Bloody damn.’

  She straightened up so that all I could see of her was from the waist down. A pleasant enough view for any poor aviator. The legs looked about twenty-three years old and there was nothing wrong with them.

  She bent down again. Nothing wrong with the rest of her, either.

  ‘When will he be back?’

  ‘He had a three year contract.’

  ‘Oh, hell.’ She stared at me in dismay for a few seconds, then said, ‘Can I come in there and talk to you for a minute?’

  ‘Sure,’ I agreed, and moved my maps and stuff off Golden-berg’s seat. She stepped down into the cockpit and slid expertly into place. By no means her first entrance into a light aircraft. I wondered about Larry. Lucky Larry.

  ‘I suppose he didn’t give you… a parcel… or anything… to give me, did he?’ she said gloomily.

  ‘Nothing, I’m afraid.’

  ‘He’s an absolute beast then… er, is he a friend of yours?’

  ‘I’ve met him twice, that’s all.’

  ‘He’s pinched my hundred quid,’ she said bitterly.

  ‘He pinched…?’

  ‘He bloody has. Not to mention my handbag and keys and everything.’ She stopped and compressed her mouth in anger. Then she added, ‘I left my handbag in this aeroplane three weeks ago, when we flew to Doncaster. And Larry has been saying ever since that he’ll bring it on the next trip to the races and give it to Colin to give to me, and for three solid weeks he’s kept on forgetting it. I suppose he knew he was going to Turkey and he thought if he could put it off long enough he would never have to give my bag back.’

  ‘Colin… Colin Ross?’ I asked. She nodded abstractedly.

  ‘Is he your husband?’

  She looked startled, then laughed. ‘Good Lord, no. He’s my brother. I saw him just now in the paddock and I said, ‘Has he brought my handbag?’ and he shook his head and started to say something, but I belted off over here in a fury without stopping to listen, and I suppose he was going to tell me it wasn’t Larry who had come in the plane.… Oh damn it, I hate being robbed. Colin would have lent him a hundred quid if he was that desperate. He didn’t have to pinch it.’

  ‘It was a lot of money to have in a handbag,’ I suggested.

  ‘Colin had just given it to me, you see. In the plane. Some owner had handed him a terrific present in readies, and he gave me a hundred of it to pay a bill with, which was really sweet of him, and I can hardly expect him to give me another hundred just because I was silly enough to leave the first one lying about…’ Her voice tailed off in depression.

  ‘The bill,’ she added wryly, ‘Is for flying lessons.’

  I looked at her with interest. ‘How far have you got?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve got my licence,’ she said. ‘These were instrument flying lessons. And radio navigation, and all that jazz. I’ve done about ninety-five hours, altogether. Spread over about four years, though, sad to say.’

  That put her in the experienced-beginner class and the dangerous time bracket. After eighty hours flying, pilots are inclined to think they know enough. After a hundred hours, they are sure they don’t. Between the two, the accident rate is at its peak.

  She asked me several questions about the aeroplane, and I answered them. Then she said, ‘Well, there’s no point in sitting here all afternoon,’ and began to lever herself out on to the wing. ‘Aren’t you coming over to the races?’

  ‘No,’ I shook my head.

  ‘Oh come on,’ she said. ‘Do.’

  The sun was shining and she was very pretty. I smiled and said ‘O.K.,’ and followed her out on to the grass. It is profitless now to speculate on the different course things would have taken if I’d stayed where I was.

  I collected my jacket from the rear baggage compartment and locked all the doors and set off with her across the track. The man on the gate duly let me into the paddock and Colin Ross’s sister showed no sign of abandoning me once we were inside. Instead she diagnosed my almost total ignorance and seemed to be pleased to be able to start dispelling it.

  ‘You see that brown horse over there,’ she said, steering me towards the parade ring rails, ‘That one walking round the far end, number sixteen, that’s Colin’s mount in this race. It’s come out a bit light but it looks well in its coat.’

  ‘It does?’

  She looked at me in amusement. ‘Definitely.’

  ‘Shall I back it, then?’

  ‘It’s all a joke to you.’

  ‘No,’ I protested.

  ‘Oh yes indeed,’ she nodded. ‘You’re looking at this race meeting in the way I’d look at a lot of spiritualists. Disbelieving and a bit superior.’

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘But what you’re actually seeing is a large export industry in the process of marketing its wares.’

  ‘I’ll remember that.’

  ‘And if the industry takes place out of doors on a nice fine sunny day with everyone enjoying themselves, well, so much the better. ’

  ‘Put that way,’ I agreed, ‘It’s a lot more jolly than a car factory,’

  ‘You will get involved,’ she said with certainty.

  ‘No.’ I was equally definite.

  She shook her head. ‘You will, you know, if you do much racecourse taxi work. It’ll bust through that cool shell of yours and make you feel something, for a change.’

  I blinked. ‘Do you always talk like that to total strangers?’

  ‘No,’ she said slowly, ‘I don’t.’

  The bright little jockeys flooded into the parade ring and scattered to small earnest owner-trainer groups where there were a lot of serious conversations and much nodding of heads. On the instructions of Colin Ross’s sister I tried moderately hard to take it all seriously. Not with much success.

  Colin Ross’s sister…

  ‘Do you have a name?’ I asked.

  ‘Often.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  She laughed. ‘It’s Nancy. What’s yours?’

  ‘Matt Shore.’

  ‘Hm. A flat matt name. Very suitable.’

  The jockeys were thrown up like confetti and landed in their saddles, and their spindly shining long-legged transportation skittered its way out on to the track. Two-year-olds, Nancy said.

  She walked me back towards the stands and proposed to smuggle me into the ‘Owners and Trainers’. The large official at the bottom of the flight of steps beamed at her until his eyes disappeared and he failed to inspect me for the right bit of cardboard.

  It seemed that nearly everyone on the small rooftop stand knew Nancy, and obvious that they agreed with the beaming official’s assessment. She introduced me to several people whose interest collapsed like a soufflé in a draught when they found I didn’t understand their opening bids.

  ‘He’s a pilot,’ Nancy explained apologeticall
y. ‘He flew Colin here today.’

  ‘Ah,’ they said. ‘Ah.’

  Two of my other passengers were there. Annie Villars was watching the horses canter past with an intent eye and a pursed mouth: the field marshall element was showing strongly, the feminine camouflage in abeyance. Major Tyderman, planted firmly with his legs apart and his chin tucked well back into his neck, was scribbling notes into his racecard. When he looked up he saw us, and made his way purposefully across.

  ‘I say,’ he said to me, having forgotten my name. ‘Did I leave my Sporting Life over in the plane, do you know?’

  ‘Yes, you did, Major.’

  ‘Blast,’ he said. ‘I made some notes on it.… Must get it, you know. Have to go across after this race.’

  ‘Would you like me to fetch it?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, that’s very good of you, my dear chap. But… no… couldn’t ask it. Walk will do me good.’

  ‘The aircraft’s locked, Major,’ I said. ‘You’ll need the keys.’ I took them out of my pocket and gave them to him.

  ‘Right.’ He nodded stiffly. ‘Good.’

  The race started away off down the track and was all over long before I sorted out the colours of Colin Ross. In the event, it wasn’t difficult. He had won.

  ‘How’s Midge?’ Annie Villars said to Nancy, restoring her giant raceglasses to their case.

  ‘Oh, much better, thank you. Getting on splendidly.’

  ‘I’m so glad. She’s had a bad time, poor girl.’

  Nancy nodded and smiled, and everyone trooped down the stairs to the ground.

  ‘Well now,’ Nancy said. ‘How about some coffee? And something to munch, perhaps?’

  ‘You must have others you’d prefer to be with… I won’t get into trouble, you know, on my own.’

  Her lips twitched. ‘Today I need a bodyguard. I elected you for the job. Desert me if you like, but if you want to please, stick.’

  ‘Not difficult,’ I said.

  ‘Great. Coffee, then.’

  It was iced coffee, rather good. Half way through the turkey sandwiches the reason why Nancy wanted me with her drifted up to the small table where we sat and slobbered all over her. She fended off what looked to me like a random assembly of long hair, beard, beads, fringes and a garment like a table cloth with a hole in it, and yelled to me through the undergrowth, ‘Buddy, your job starts right now.’