Come to Grief

by Dick Francis

“Because.”

  “Because you’re too bloody proud.”

  Because it’s too private, I thought.

  I was wearing one of those dreadful hospital gowns like a barber’s smock that fastened at the back of the neck and shapelessly covered the body. A white flap covered my left shoulder, upper arm, elbow and what remained below. Tentatively India lifted and turned back the flap so that we both could see my elbow and the short piece of forearm.

  “You hate it, don’t you?” India said.

  “Yes.”

  “I would hate it, too.”

  I can’t bear this, I thought. I can bear Ellis unscrewing my hand and mocking me. I can’t bear love.

  India picked up the electric arm.

  “What do I do?” she asked.

  I said with difficulty, nodding again at the locker, “Talcum powder.”

  “Oh.” She picked up the white tinful of comfort for babies. “In the arm, or on you?”

  “On me.”

  She sprinkled powder on my forearm. “Is this right? More?”

  “Mm.”

  She smoothed the powder all over my skin. Her touch sent a shiver right down to my toes.

  “And now?”

  “Now hold it so that I can put my arm into it.”

  She concentrated. I put my forearm into the socket, but the angle was wrong.

  “What do I do?” she asked anxiously.

  “Turn the thumb towards you a bit. Not too far. That’s right. Now push up while I push down. That top bit will slide over my elbow and grip—and keep the hand on.”

  “Like that?” She was trembling.

  “Like that,” I said. The arm gripped where it was designed to.

  I sent the messages. We both watched the hand open and close.

  India abruptly left my side and walked over to where she’d left her purse, picking it up and crossing to the door.

  “Don’t go,” I said.

  “If I don’t go, I’ll cry.”

  I thought that might make two of us. The touch of her fingers on the skin of my forearm had been a caress more intimate than any act of sex. I felt shaky. I felt more moved than ever in my life.

  “Come back,” I said.

  “I’m supposed to be in the office.”

  “India,” I said, “please . . .” Why was it always so impossible to plead? “Please . . .” I looked down at my left hand. “Please don’t write about this.”

  “Don’t write about it?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I won‘t, but why not?”

  “Because I don’t like pity.”

  She came halfway back to my side with tears in her eyes.

  “Your Jenny,” she said, “told me that you were so afraid of being pitied that you would never ask for help.”

  “She told you too much.”

  “Pity,” India said, coming a step nearer, “is actually about as far from what I feel for you as it’s possible to get.”

  I stretched out my left arm and fastened the hand on her wrist.

  She looked at it. I tugged, and she took the last step to my side.

  “You’re strong,” she said, surprised.

  “Usually.”

  I pulled her nearer. She saw quite clearly what I intended, and bent her head and put her mouth on mine as if it were not the first time, as if it were natural.

  A pact, I thought.

  A beginning.

  Time drifted when she’d gone.

  Time drifted to the midday news.

  A nurse burst into my quiet room. “Don’t you have your television on? You’re on it.”

  She switched on knobs, and there was my face on the screen, with a newsreader’s unemotional voice saying, “Sid Halley is recovering in hospital.” There was a widening picture of me looking young and in racing colors: a piece of old film taken years ago of me weighing in after winning the Grand National. I was holding my saddle in two hands and my eyes were full of the mystical wonder of having been presented with the equivalent of the Holy Grail.

  The news slid to drought and intractable famine.

  The nurse said, “Wait,” and twiddled more knobs, and another channel opened with the news item and covered the story in its entirety.

  A woman announcer whose lugubrious voice I had long disliked put on her portentous-solemn face and intoned: “Police today found the body of Ellis Quint in his car, deep in the New Forest in Hampshire....”

  Frozen, I heard her saying, as if from a distance, “Foul play is not suspected. It is understood that the popular broadcaster left a note for his father, still unconscious after an accidental blow to the head on Sunday night. Now over to our reporter in Hampshire, Buddy Bowes.”

  Buddy Bowes, microphone in hand, filled the foreground of the screen with, slightly out of focus in the distance behind him, woodland and activity and a rear view of a white car.

  “This is a sad ending,” Buddy Bowes said, appearing at least to show genuine regret, “to a fairy-tale life. Ellis Quint, thirty-eight, who gave pleasure to millions with his appearances on television, will also be remembered as the dashing champion amateur steeplechase jockey whose courage and gallantry inspired a whole generation to get out there and achieve. In recent months he has been troubled by accusations of cruelty to animals from his long-time colleague and supposed friend, Sid Halley, ex-professional top jockey. Quint was due to appear in court yesterday to refute those charges....”

  There was a montage of Ellis winning races, striding about in macho riding boots, wowing a chat-show audience, looking glowingly alive and handsome.

  “Ellis will be mourned by millions,” Buddy Bowes finished. “And now back to the studio . . .”

  The nurse indignantly switched off the set. “They didn’t say anything about your being shot.”

  “Never mind.”

  She went away crossly. The reputation Ellis had manufactured for me couldn’t be reversed in a night, whatever The Pump might now say. Slowly perhaps. Perhaps never.

  Ellis was dead.

  I sat in the quiet white room.

  Ellis was dead.

  An hour later a hospital porter brought me a letter that he said had been left by hand on the counter of the hospital’s main reception desk and overlooked until now.

  “Overlooked since when?”

  Since yesterday, he thought.

  When he’d gone I held the envelope in the pincer fingers and tore it open with my teeth.

  The two-page letter was from Ellis, his handwriting strong with life.

  It said:Sid, I know where you are. I followed the ambulance. If you are reading this, you are alive and I am dead. I didn’t think you would catch me. I should have known you would.

  If you’re wondering why I cut off those feet, don’t you ever want to break out? I was tired of goody-goody. I wanted the dark side. I wanted to smash. To explode. To mutilate. I wanted to laugh at the fools who fawned on me. I hugged myself. I mocked the proles.

  And that scrunch.

  I did that old pony to make a good program. The kid had leukemia. Sob-stuff story, terrific. I needed a good one. My ratings were slipping.

  Then I lusted to do it again. The danger. The risk, the difficulty. And that scrunch. I can’t describe it. It gives me an ecstasy like nothing else. Cocaine is for kids. Sex is nothing. I’ve had every woman I ever wanted. The scrunch of bones is a million-volt orgasm.

  And then there’s you. The only one I’ve ever envied. I wanted to corrupt you, too. No one should be unbendable.

  I know all you fear is helplessness. I know you. I wanted to make you helpless in Owen Yorkshire’s office but all you did was sit there watching your hand turn blue. I could feel you willing me to be my real self but my real self wanted to hear your wrist bones crunch to dust. I wanted to prove that no one was good. I wanted you to crumble. To be like me.

  And then, you’ll think I’m crazy, I was suddenly glad you weren’t sobbing and whining and I was proud of you that you really were how
you are, and I felt happy and higher than a kite. And I didn’t want you to die, not like that, not for nothing. Not because of me.

  I see now what I’ve done. What infinite damage.

  My father did that last colt. I talked him into it.

  It’s cost my mother’s life. If my father lives they’ll lock him up for trying to kill you. They should have let me hang, back in June, when I tried with my tie.

  They say people want to be caught. They go on and on sinning until someone stops them.

  The letter ended there except for three words much lower down the page:You win, Sid.

  The two sheets of paper lay on the white bedclothes. No one else would see them, I thought.

  I remembered Rachel saying how odd it would be to be dead. To be a space.

  The whole white room was a space.

  Good and evil, he had been my friend. An enemy: but finally a friend.

  The sour, cruel underside of him receded.

  I had the win, but there was no one standing in the stirrups to share it with.

  Regret, loss, acceptance and relief; I felt them all.

  I grieved for Bllis Quint.

  Turn the page for a special excerpt of ...

  TO THE HILT

  by Dick Francis

  Available in paperback from Berkley Books!

  I don’t think my stepfather much minded dying. That he almost took me with him wasn’t really his fault.

  My mother sent me a postcard—“Perhaps I’d better tell you your stepfather has had a heart attack”—that I read in disbelief outside the remote Scottish post office where I went every two weeks to collect my letters. The postcard had lain there unread for approximately ten days.

  Somewhat distractedly, though my stepfather and I were hardly intimate, I went back into the cluttered little shop and begged use of the telephone.

  “You’ll be reimbursing us as usual, Mr. Kinloch?”

  “Of course.”

  Dour old Donald Cameron, nodding, lifted a flap of counter and allowed me through to his own jealously protected and wall-mounted instrument. Since the official public telephone, which was thoughtfully provided outside for the few surrounding inhabitants, survived vandalism for roughly thirty minutes each time it was mended, old Donald was accustomed to extending to customers the courtesy of his own phone. Since he charged an extra fee for its use, I privately reckoned it was Donald himself who regularly disabled the less profitable technology on his doorstep.

  “Mother?” I said, eventually connected to her in London. “This is Al.”

  “Alexander,” she corrected automatically, not liking my abbreviation, “are you in Scotland?”

  “I am, yes. What about the old man?”

  “Your stepfather,” she said reprovingly, “is resting.”

  “Er . . . where is he resting?” In the hospital? In peace?

  “In bed,” she said.

  “So he is alive?”

  “Of course he’s alive.”

  “But your postcard . . .”

  “There’s nothing to panic about,” she said calmly. “He had some chest pains and spent a week in the clinic for stabilization and tests, and now he is home with me, resting.”

  “Do you want me to come?” I asked blankly. “Do you need any help?”

  “He has a nurse,” she said.

  My mother’s unvarying composure, I sometimes thought, stemmed from a genuine deficiency of emotion. I had never seen her cry, had never heard tears in her voice, not even after her first husband, my father, had been killed in a shooting accident out on the moors. To me, at seventeen, his sudden loss had been devastating. My mother, dry-eyed, had told me to pull myself together.

  A year later, still cool at the ceremony, she had married Ivan George Westering, baronet, brewer, pillar of the British Jockey Club, my stepfather. He was not domineering—had been generous, even—but he disapproved of the way I lived. We were polite to each other.

  “How ill is he?” I asked.

  “You can come if you like,” my mother said. “It’s entirely up to you.”

  Despite the casual voice, the carefully maintained distance, it sounded closer to a plea than I was used to.

  “I’ll arrive tomorrow,” I said, making up my mind.

  “If you’re sure?” She betrayed no relief, however; no welcome.

  “I’m sure.”

  “Very well.”

  I paid the phone call’s ransom into Donald’s stringy, outstretched palm and returned to my laden, ancient, and battered four-wheel-drive outside. It had good gears, good brakes, good tires, and little remaining color on its thin metal flanks. It contained, at that moment, food for two weeks, a big cylinder of butane gas, supplies of batteries, bottled water, and insect killer, and three brown cardboard boxes, parcel delivery, replenishing the tools of my trade.

  I painted pictures. I lived in a broken-down, long-deserted bothy without electricity, out on a windy Scottish mountainside. My hair grew to my shoulders. I played the bagpipes. My many and fairly noble relations thought me weird.

  Some are born weird; some achieve it; others have weirdness thrust upon them. I preferred solitude and paint to out-thinking salmon and shooting for food; I had only half-inherited the country skills and courtesies of my ancestors. I was the twenty-nine-year-old son of the (dead) fourth son of an earl, and I had no unearned wealth. I had three uncles, four aunts, and twenty-one cousins. Someone in such a large (and conventional) family had to be weird, and it seemed I’d been elected.

  I didn’t mind. Mad Alexander. Messes about with paints. And not even oils, my dear, but those frightfully common acrylics.

  If Michelangelo could have laid his hands on acrylics, I said, he would have joyfully used them. Acrylics were endlessly versatile and never faded. They out virtued oils by furlongs.

  Don’t be ridiculous, Alexander.

  I paid my uncle (the present earl, known as “Himself”) a painting a year as rent for the ruin I inhabited on his estate. The painting was done to his choice. He mostly asked for portraits of his horses or dogs. I quite liked to please him.

  Outside the post office, on that dry, cloudy, cold morning in September, I sat in my old jeep-type jalopy and did my paperwork, opening my letters, answering them, and sending off the replies. There were two checks that day for work delivered, which I sent to the bank, and an order from America for six more paintings to be done at once—like yesterday. Ridiculous, mad Alexander, in his weird way, actually, quietly prospered; I kept that fact to myself.

  The paperwork done, I drove my wheels northward, at first along a recognizable road, then a roughly graveled stretch, then up a long, rutted and indistinct tract that led nowhere but to my unnamed home in the Monadhliath mountains. “Between Loch Ness and Aviemore,” I usually explained, and no, I hadn’t seen the monster.

  Whoever in the mists of time had first built my bothy had chosen its position well: it backed straight into an elbowed granite outcrop that sheltered it from the north and east, so that winter blizzards mostly leapfrogged over the top. In front lay a sort of small, stony plateau that on the far side dropped away steeply, giving me long views of valleys and rocky hills and of a main road far below.

  The only problem with the road, which served to remind me that an outside world existed, was that my dwelling was visible from it, so that far too often I found strangers on my doorstep, hikers equipped with shorts, maps, half-ton walking boots, and endless energy. There was nowhere left in the world unpene trated by inquisitive legs.

  On the day of my mother’s postcard, I returned to find four of the species poking around without inhibitions. Male. Blue, scarlet, orange backpacks. Glasses. English regional voices.

  The days when I’d offered tea, comforts, and conversation were long gone. Irritated by the invasion, I drove onto the plateau, stopped the engine, removed my keys from the ignition, and walked toward my front (and only) door.

  The four men stopped peering into things and arranged themselv
es into a ragged line ahead of me across my path.

  “There’s no one in,” one of them called. “It’s all locked up.”

  I replied without heat, “What do you want?”

  “Him as lives here,” one said loudly.

  “Maybe that’s you,” said another.

  I felt the first tremble of something wrong. Their manner wasn’t the awkwardness of trespassers caught in the act. There was no shuffling from foot to foot. They met my eyes not with placating apology, but with fierce concentration.

  I stopped walking and said again, “What do you want?”

  The first speaker said, “Where is it?”

  I felt a strong primitive impulse to turn tail and run, and wished afterward that I’d listened to the wisdom of prehistory, but somehow one doesn’t easily equate knobbly-kneed hikers with danger.

  I said, “I don’t know what you mean,” and I made the mistake of turning my back on them and retracing my steps toward the jeep.

  I heard their heavy feet scrunching on the stony ground behind me but still didn’t truly believe in disaster until they clutched and spun me around and purposefully and knowledgeably punched. I had a sort of splintered composite view of intent malevolent faces, of gray daylight reflecting on their incongruous glasses, of their hard, bombarding fists and of a wildly slanting horizon of unhelpful mountains as I doubled forward over a debilitating pain in the abdomen. Neck chop. Jabs to the ribs. Classic pattern. Over and over. Thud, merciless thud.

  I was wearing jeans, shirt, and sweater: they might as well have been gossamer for all the protection they offered. As for meaningful retaliation, read nonexistent. I couldn’t find breath. I swung at them in anger but fought an octopus. Bad news.

  One of the men kept saying insistently, “Where is it? Where is it?” but his colleagues made it impossible for me to answer.

  I wondered vaguely if by “it” they meant money, of which I carried little. They were welcome to it, I thought groggily, if they would stop their actions. I unintentionally dropped my small bunch of keys and lost it to a hand that grabbed it up with triumph.

  Somehow or other I ended with my back against the jeep: no further retreat. One of them snatched handfuls of my hair and banged my head against metal. I clawed blood down his cheek and got a head-butt in return that went straight from my skull to my knees, buckling them like butter.