SEVEN
It wasn’t Icicle I had trouble with.
Icicle jumped adequately but without inspiration and ran on doggedly at one pace up the straight, more by good luck than anything else hanging on to finish second.
‘Dear old slowcoach,’ the princess said to him proudly in the unsaddling enclosure, rubbing his nose. ‘What a gentleman you are.’
It was the hurdler afterwards that came to grief: an experienced racer but unintelligent. The one horse slightly ahead and to the right of us hit the top of the second hurdle as he rose to the jump and stumbled on to his nose on landing, and my horse, as if copying, promptly did exactly the same.
As falls went, it wasn’t bad. I rolled like a tumbler on touching the ground, a circus skill learned by every jump jockey, and stayed curled, waiting for all the other runners to pass. As standing up in the middle of a thundering herd was the surest way to get badly injured, staying on the ground, where horses could more easily avoid one, was almost the first lesson in survival. The bad thing about falls near the start of hurdle races, however, was that the horses were going faster than in steeplechases, and were often bunched up together, with the result that they tended not to see a fallen rider until they were on top of him, by which time there was nowhere else to put their feet.
I was fairly used to hoof-shaped bruises. In the quiet that came after the buffeting I stood slowly and stiffly up with the makings of a new collection, and found the other fallen jockey doing the same.
‘You all right?’ I said.
‘Yeah. You?’
I nodded. My colleague expressed a few obscene opinions of his former mount and a car came along to pick us up and deliver us to the ambulance room to be checked by the doctor on duty. In the old days jockeys had got away easily with riding with broken bones, but nowadays the medical inspections had intensified to safeguard the interests not altogether of the men injured but of the people who bet on them. Appeasing the punter was priority stuff.
Bruises didn’t count. Doctors never stopped one from riding for those, and in any case bruises weren’t visible when very new. I proved to the local man that all the bits of me that should bend, did, and all the bits that shouldn’t bend, didn’t, and got passed fit to ride again from then on.
One of the two volunteer nurses went to answer a knock on the door and came back slightly bemused to say I was wanted outside by a woman who said she was a princess.
‘Right,’ I said, thanking the doctor and turning to go.
‘Is she?’ the nurse asked dubiously.
‘A princess? Yes. How often do you come to race meetings?’
‘Today’s my first.’
‘She’s been leading owner three times in the past six jumping seasons, and she’s a right darling.’
The young nurse grinned. ‘Makes you sick.’
I went outside to find the right darling looking first worried and then relieved at my reappearance. She was certainly not in the habit of enquiring after my health by waiting around outside ambulance room doors, and of course it wasn’t my actual well-being which mattered at that point, but my being well enough to drive the niece to work.
The niece was also there and also relieved and also looking at her watch. I said I would change into street clothes and be ready shortly, and the princess kissed the niece and patted my arm, and went away saying she would see me at Newbury on the morrow.
I changed, found the niece waiting outside the weighing room, and took her to my car. She was fairly fidgeting with an impatience which slightly abated when she found the car was a Mercedes, but changed to straight anxiety when she saw me wince as I edged into the driving seat.
‘Are you OK? You’re not going to pass out, or anything, are you?’ she said.
‘I shouldn’t think so.’
I started the car and extricated ourselves from the close-packed rows. A few other cars were leaving, but not enough to clog the entrance or the road outside. We would have a clear run, barring accidents.
‘I guess I thought you’d be dead,’ the niece said without emotion. ‘How does anyone survive being trampled that way by a stampede?’
‘Luck,’ I said succinctly.
‘My aunt was sure relieved when you stood up.’
I made an assenting noise in my throat. ‘So was I.’
‘Why do you do it?’ she said.
‘Race?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I like it.’
‘Like getting trampled?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘That doesn’t happen all that often.’
We swooped down the hill from the moor and sped unhindered along roads that in the summer were busy with holiday crises. No swaying overloaded caravans being towed that day, no children being sick at the roadside, no radiators boiling and burst, with glum groups on the verges waiting for help. Devon roads in November were bare and fast and led straight to the motorways which should take us to Chiswick with no problems.
‘Tell me truthfully,’ she said, ‘why do you do it?’
I glanced at her face, seeing there a quality of interest suitable for a newsgatherer. She had also large grey eyes, a narrow nose, and a determined mouth. Good-looking in a well-groomed way, I thought.
I had been asked the same question many times by other newsgatherers, and I gave the standard answer.
‘I do it because I was born to it. I was brought up in a racing stable and I can’t remember not being able to ride. I can’t remember not wanting to ride in races.’
She listened with her head on one side and her gaze on my face.
‘I guess I never met a jockey until now,’ she said reflectively. ‘And we don’t have much jump racing in America.’
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘In England there are probably more jump races than Flat. Just as many, anyway.’
‘So why do you do it?’
‘I told you,’ I said.
‘Yeah.’
She turned her head away to look out at the passing fields.
I raced, I thought fancifully, as one might play a violin, making one’s own sort of music from coordinated muscles and intuitive spirit. I raced because the partnership with horses filled my mind with perfections of cadence and rhythmic excitement and intensities of communion: and I couldn’t exactly say aloud such pretentious rubbish.
‘I feel alive,’ I said, ‘on a horse.’
She looked back, faintly smiling. ‘My aunt says you read their thoughts.’
‘Everyone close to horses does that.’
‘But some more than others?’
‘I don’t really know.’
She nodded. ‘That makes sense. My aunt says you read the thoughts of people also.’
I glanced at her briefly. ‘Your aunt seems to have said a lot.’
‘My aunt,’ she said neutrally, ‘wanted me to understand, I think, that if I went in your car I should arrive unmolested.’
‘Good God.’
‘She was right, I see.’
‘Mm.’
Molesting Danielle de Brescou, I thought, would be my quickest route to unemployment. Not that in other circumstances and with her willing cooperation I would have found it unthinkable. Danielle de Brescou moved with understated long-legged grace and watched the world from clear eyes, and if I found the sheen and scent of her hair and skin fresh and pleasing, it did no more than change the journey from a chore to a pleasure.
Between Exeter and Bristol, while dusk dimmed the day, she told me that she had been in England for three weeks and was staying with her uncle and aunt while she found herself an apartment. She had come because she’d been posted to London by the national broadcasting company she worked for: she was the bureau coordinator, and as it was only her second week there it was essential not to be late.
‘You won’t be late,’ I assured her.
‘No… Do you always drive at eighty miles an hour?’
‘Not if I’m in a real hurry.’
‘Very funny.’
She told me Roland de Brescou, the princess’s husband, was her father’s eldest brother. Her father had emigrated to California from France as a young man and had married an American girl, Danielle being their only child.
‘I guess there was a family ruckus when Dad left home, but he never told me the details. He’s been sending greetings cards lately though, nostalgic for his roots, I guess. Anyway, he told Uncle Roland I was coming to London and the princess wrote me to say come visit. I hadn’t met either of them before. It’s my first trip to Europe.’
‘How do you like it?’
She smiled. ‘How would you like being cosseted in a sort of mansion in Eaton Square with a cook and maids and a butler? And a chauffeur. All last week the chauffeur drove me to work and picked me up after. Same thing yesterday. Aunt Casilia says it’s not safe here after midnight on the subway, the same as it isn’t in New York. She fusses worse than my own mother. But I can’t live with them for too long. They’re both sweet to me. I like her a lot and we get along fine. But I need a place of my own, near the office. And I’ll get a car. I guess I’ll have to.’
‘How long will you be in England?’ I asked.
‘Don’t know. Three years, maybe. Maybe less. The company can shift you around.’
She said I didn’t need to tell her much about myself on account of information from her aunt.
She said she knew I lived in Lambourn and came from an old racing family and had a twin sister married to a racehorse trainer in Newmarket. She said she knew I wasn’t married. She left the last observation dangling like a question mark, so I answered the unasked query.
‘Not married. No present girlfriend. A couple in the past.’
I could feel her smile.
‘And you?’ I asked.
‘Same thing.’
We drove for a good while in silence on that thought, and I rather pensively wondered what the princess would say or think if I asked her niece out to dinner. The close but arms-length relationship I’d had with her for so many years would change subtly if I did, and perhaps not for the better.
Between Bristol and Chiswick, while we sped with headlights on up the M4 motorway, Danielle told me about her job, which was, she said, pretty much a matter of logistics: she sent the camera crews and interviewers to wherever the news was.
‘Half the time I’m looking at train schedules and road maps to find the fastest route, and starting from when we did, and taking the road we’re on right now, I expected to be late.’ She glanced at the speedometer. ‘I didn’t dream of ninety.’
I eased the car back to eighty-eight. A car passed us effortlessly. Danielle shook her head. ‘I guess it’ll take a while,’ she said. ‘How often do you get speeding tickets?’
‘I’ve had three in ten years.’
‘Driving like this every day?’
‘Pretty much.’
She sighed. ‘In dear old US of A we think seventy is sinful. Have you ever been there?’
‘America?’ I nodded. ‘Twice. I rode there once in the Maryland Hunt Cup.’
‘That’s an amateurs’ race,’ she said without emphasis, careful, it seemed, not to appear to doubt my word.
‘Yes. I started as an amateur. It seemed best to find out if I was any good before I committed my future to what I do.’
‘And if it hadn’t worked out?’
‘I had a place at college.’
‘And you didn’t take it?’ she said incredulously.
‘No. I started winning, and that was what I wanted most. I tried for the place at college only in case I couldn’t make it as a jockey. Sort of insurance.’
‘What subject?’
‘Veterinary science.’
It shocked her. ‘You mean you passed up being a veterinarian to be a jockey?’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Why not?’
‘But… but…’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘All athletes… sportsmen… whatever… find themselves on the wrong side of thirty-five with old age staring them point blank in the face. I might have another five years yet.’
‘And then?’
‘Train them, I suppose. Train horses for others to ride.’ I shrugged. ‘It’s a long way off.’
‘It came pretty close this afternoon,’ Danielle said.
‘Not really.’
‘Aunt Casilia says the Cresta Run is possibly more dangerous than the life of a jump jockey. Possibly. She wasn’t sure.’
‘The Cresta Run is a gold medal or the fright of a lifetime, not a career.’
‘Have you been down it?’
‘Of course not. It’s dangerous.’
She laughed. ‘Are all jockeys like you?’
‘No. All different. Like princesses.’
She took a deep breath, as if of sea air. I removed my attention from the motorway for a second’s inspection of her face, for whatever her aunt might think of my ability to read minds I never seemed to be able to do it with any young woman except Holly… I was aware also that I wanted to, that without it, any loving was incomplete. I thought that if I hadn’t had Holly I might have married one of the two girls I’d most liked: as it was, I hadn’t reached the living-in stage with either of them.
I hadn’t wanted to marry Holly, nor to sleep with her, but I’d loved her more deeply. It seemed that sex and telepathy couldn’t co-exist in me, and until or unless they did, I probably would stay single.
‘What are you thinking?’ Danielle asked.
I smiled wryly. ‘About not knowing what you were thinking.’
After a pause she said, ‘I was thinking that when Aunt Casilia said you were exceptional, I can see what she meant.’
‘She said what?’
‘Exceptional. I asked her in what way, but she just smiled sweetly and changed the subject.’
‘Er… when was that?’
‘On our way down to Devon this morning. She’s been wanting me to go racing with her ever since I came over, so today I did, because she’d arranged that ride back for me, although she herself was staying with the Inscombes tonight for some frantically grand party. She hoped I would love racing like she does, I think. Do you think sometimes she’s lonesome, travelling all those miles to racemeets with just her chauffeur?’
‘I don’t think she felt lonesome until you came.’
‘Oh!’
She fell silent for a while, and eventually I said prosaically, ‘We’ll be in Chiswick in three minutes.’
‘Will we?’ She sounded almost disappointed. ‘I mean, good. But I’ve enjoyed the journey.’
‘So have I.’
My inner vision was suddenly filled very powerfully with the presence of Holly, and I had a vivid impression of her face, screwed up in deep distress.
I said abruptly to Danielle, ‘Is there a public telephone anywhere near your office?’
‘Yeah, I guess so.’ She seemed slightly puzzled by the urgency I could hear in my voice. ‘Sure… use the one on my desk. Did you remember something important?’
‘No… er, I…’ I drew back from the impossibility of rational explanation. ‘I have a feeling,’ I said lamely, ‘that I should telephone my sister.’
‘A feeling?’ she asked curiously. ‘You looked as if you’d forgotten a date with the President, at least.’
I shook my head. ‘This is Chiswick. Where do we go from here?’
She gave me directions and we stopped in a parking space labelled ‘Staff Only’ outside a warehouse-like building in a side street. Six-twenty on the clock; ten minutes to spare.
‘Come on in,’ Danielle said. ‘The least I can do is lend you a phone.’
I stood up stiffly out of the car, and she said with contrition, ‘I guess I shouldn’t have let you drive all this way.’
‘It’s not much further than going home.’
‘You lie in your teeth. We passed the exit to Lambourn fifty miles back.’
‘A bagatelle.’
She watched me lock the car door. ‘Seriously, are you OK?’
‘It’s nothing that a hot bath won’t put right.’
She nodded and turned to lead the way into the building, which proved to have glass entrance doors into a hallway furnished with armchairs, potted plants and a uniformed guard behind a reception desk. She and he signed me into a book, gave me a pass to clip to my clothes, and ushered me through a heavy door that opened to an electronic buzz.
‘Sorry about the fortress syndrome,’ Danielle said. ‘The company is currently paranoid about bombs.’
We went down a short corridor into a wide open office inhabited by six or seven desks, mostly with people behind them showing signs of packing up to go home. There was also a sea of green carpet, a dozen or so computers, and on one long wall a row of television screens above head height, all showing different programmes and none of them emitting a sound.
Danielle and the other inhabitants exchanged a few ‘Hi’s, and ‘How’re you doing’s, and no one questioned my presence. She took me across the room to her own domain, an area of two large desks set at right angles with a comfortable-looking swivelling chair serving both. The desk tops bore several box files, a computer, a typewriter, a stack of newspapers and a telephone. On the wall behind the chair there was a large chart on which things could be written in chinagraph and rubbed off: a chart with columns labelled along the top as SLUG, TEAM, LOCATION, TIME, FORMAT.
‘Sit down,’ Danielle said, pointing to the chair. She picked up the receiver and pressed a lighted button on the telephone. ‘OK. Make your call.’ She turned to look at the chart. ‘Let’s see what’s been happening in the world since I left it.’ She scanned the segments. Under SLUG someone had written ‘Embassy’ in large black letters. Danielle called across the room, ‘Hank, what’s this embassy story?’ and a voice answered, ‘Someone painted “Yanks Go Home” in red on the US embassy steps and there’s a stink about security.’
‘Good grief.’
‘You’ll need to do a follow-up for Nightline.’
‘Right… has anyone interviewed the Ambassador?’
‘We couldn’t reach him earlier.’
‘Guess I’ll try again.’
‘Sure. It’s your baby, baby. All yours.’
Danielle smiled vividly down at me, and I recognised with some surprise that her job was of far higher status than I’d guessed, and that she herself came alive also when she was working.
‘Make your call,’ she said again.
‘Yes.’
I pressed the buttons and at the first ring Holly picked up the receiver.
‘Kit,’ she said immediately, full of stress.
‘Yes,’ I said.
Holly’s voice had come explosively out of the telephone, loudly enough to reach Danielle’s ears.
‘How did she know?’ she asked. Then her eyes widened. ‘She was waiting… you knew.’
I half nodded. ‘Kit,’ Holly was saying. ‘Where are you? Are you all right? Your horse fell…’
‘I’m fine. I’m in London. What’s the matter?’
‘Everything’s worse. Everything’s terrible. We’re going to lose… lose the yard… everything… Bobby’s out walking somewhere…’
‘Holly, remember the telephone,’ I said.
‘What? Oh, the bugs? I simply don’t care any more. The telephone people are coming to look for bugs in the morning, they’ve promised. But what does it matter? We’re finished… It’s over.’ She sounded exhausted. ‘Can you come? Bobby wants you. We need you. You hold us together.’
‘What’s happened?’ I asked.
‘It’s the bank. The new manager. We went to see him today and he says we can’t even have the money for the wages on Friday and they’re going to make us sell up… he says we haven’t enough security to cover all we owe them… and we’re just slipping further into debt because we aren’t making enough profit to pay the interest on the loan for those yearlings, and do you know how much he’s charging us for that now? Seven per cent over base rate. Seven. That’s about seventeen per cent right now. And he’s adding the interest on, so now we’re paying interest on the interest… it’s like a snowball… it’s monstrous… it’s bloody unfair.’
A shambles, I thought. Banks were never in the benefaction business.
‘He admitted it was because of the newspaper articles,’ Holly said wretchedly. ‘He said it was unfortunate… unfortunate!… that Bobby’s father wouldn’t help us, not even a penny… I’ve caused Bobby all this trouble… it’s because of me…’
‘Holly, stop it,’ I said. ‘That’s nonsense. Sit tight and I’ll come. I’m at Chiswick. It will take me an hour and a half.’
‘The bank manager says we will have to tell the owners to take their horses away. He says we’re not the only trainers who’ve ever had to sell up… he says it happens, it’s quite common… he’s so hard-hearted I could kill him.’
‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Well, don’t do anything yet. Have a drink. Cook me some spinach or something, I’m starving. I’ll be on my way… See you soon.’
I put down the receiver with a sigh. I didn’t really want to drive on to Newmarket with stiffening bruises and an echoingly empty stomach, and I didn’t really want to shoulder all the Allardeck troubles again, but a pact was a pact and that was the end of it. My twin, my bond, and all that.
‘Trouble?’ Danielle said, watching.
I nodded. I told her briefly about the attacks in the Flag and their dire financial consequences and she came swiftly to the same conclusion as myself.
‘Bobby’s father is crass.’
‘Crass,’ I said appreciatively, ‘puts it in a nutshell.’
I stood up slowly from her chair and thanked her for the telephone.
‘You’re in no shape for all this,’ she said objectively.
‘Never believe it.’ I leaned forward and kissed her fragrant cheek. ‘Will you come racing again, with your aunt?’
She looked at me straightly. ‘Probably,’ she said.
‘Good.’
Bobby and Holly were sitting in silence in the kitchen, staring into space, and turned their heads towards me apathetically when I went in.
I touched Bobby on the shoulder and kissed Holly and said, ‘Come on, now, where’s the wine? I’m dying of various ills and the first thing I need is a drink.’
My voice sounded loud in their gloom. Holly got heavily to her feet and went over to the cupboard where they kept glasses. She put her hand out towards it and then let it fall again. She turned towards me.
‘I had my test results since you phoned,’ she said blankly. ‘I definitely am pregnant. This should have been the happiest night of our lives.’ She put her arms around my neck and began quietly to cry. I wrapped my arms round her and held her, and Bobby stayed sitting down, too defeated, it seemed, to be jealous.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘We’ll drink to the baby. Come on, loves, businesses come and go, and this one hasn’t gone yet, but babies are for ever, God rot their dear little souls.’
I disentangled her arms and picked out the glasses while she silently wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her jersey.
Bobby said dully, ‘You don’t understand,’ but I did, very well. There was no fight in him, the deflation was too great; and I’d had my own agonising disappointments now and then. It could take a great effort of will not to sit around and mope.
I said to Holly, ‘Put on some music, very loud.’
‘No,’ Bobby said.
‘Yes, Bobby. Yes,’ I said. ‘Stand up and yell. Stick two fingers up at fate. Break something. Swear your guts out.’
‘I’ll break your neck,’ he said with a flicker of savagery.
‘All right, then, do it.’
He raised his head and stared at me and then rose abruptly to his feet, power crowding back into his muscles and vigour and exasperation into his face.
‘All right then,’ he shouted, ‘I’ll break your f*cking Fielding neck.’
‘That’s better,’ I said. ‘And give me something to eat.’
Instead he went over to Holly and enfolded her and the two of them stood there half weeping, half laughing, entwined in privacy and back with the living. I resignedly dug in the freezer for something fast and unfattening and transferred it to the microwave oven, and I poured some red wine and drank it at a gulp.
Over the food Bobby admitted that he’d been too depressed to walk round at evening stables, so after coffee he and I both went out into the yard for a last inspection. The night was windy and cold and moonlit behind scurrying clouds. Everything looked normal and quiet, all the horses dozing behind closed doors, scarcely moving when we looked in on them, checking.
The boxes that had contained Jermyn Graves’s horses were still empty, and the string which led to the bell had been detached from the door and hung limply from its last guiding staple. Bobby watched while I attached it to the door again.
‘Do you think it’s still necessary?’ he asked dubiously.
‘Yes, I do,’ I said positively. ‘The feed-merchant will have paid in Graves’s cheque yesterday, but it won’t have been cleared yet. I wouldn’t trust Graves out of sight and I’d rig as many strings to the bell as we can manage.’
‘He won’t come back again,’ Bobby said, shaking his head.
‘Do you want to risk it?’
He stared at me for a while and then said, ‘No.’
We ran three more strings, all as tripwires across pathways, and made sure the bell would fall if any one of them was tugged. It was perhaps not the most sophisticated of systems, but it had twice proved that it worked.
It worked for the third time at one in the morning.