by Dick Francis
The door behind me opened as I turned. There were two people there, the girl and an older woman. When I took a step towards them the woman made a sharp movement of the arm, to keep me away. Raising her voice she said, “What do you want?”
“Well . . . I’m looking for someone called Samantha.”
“So I hear. What for?”
“Are you,” I said slowly, “Samantha?”
She looked me up and down with the suspicion I was by now used to. A comfortably sized lady, gray-brown wavy hair to her shoulders.
“What do you want?” she said again, unsmiling.
I said, “Would the name Nore mean anything to you? Philip Nore, or Caroline Nore?”
To the girl the names meant nothing, but in the woman there was a fast sharpening of attention.
“What exactly do you want?” she demanded.
“I’m . . . Philip Nore.”
The guarded expression turned to incredulity. Not exactly to pleasure, but certainly to acknowledgment.
“You’d better come in,” she said. “I’m Samantha Bergen.”
I went up the steps and through the front door, and didn’t have, as I’d half expected, the feeling of coming home.
“Downstairs,” she said, leading the way and looking over her shoulder, and I followed her through the hall and down the stairs, which in all those London houses led to the kitchen and to the door out to the garden. The girl followed after me, looking mystified and still wary.
“Sorry not to have been more welcoming,” Samantha said, “but you know what it is these days. So many burglaries. You have to be careful. And strange young men coming to the door asking for Samantha . . .”
“Yes,” I said.
She went through a doorway into a large room, which looked more like a country kitchen than most kitchens in the country. A row of pine-covered cupboards on the right. A big table, with chairs. A red-tiled floor. French windows to the garden. A big basket-chair hanging on a chain from the ceiling. Beams. Bits of gleaming copper.
Without thinking I walked across the red floor and sat in the hanging basket chair, tucking my feet under me, out of sight.
Samantha Bergen stood there looking astounded.
“You are!” she said. “You are Philip. Little Philip. He always used to sit there like that, with his feet up. I’d forgotten. But seeing you do it . . . good gracious heavens.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, half stammering and standing up again, steadying the swinging chair. “I just . . . did it.”
“My dear man,” she said. “It’s all right. It’s extraordinary to see you, that’s all.” She turned to the girl but said still to me, “This is my daughter, Clare. She wasn’t born when you stayed here.” And to her daughter she said, “I looked after a friend’s child now and then. Heavens . . . it must be twenty-two years since the last time. I don’t suppose I ever told you.”
The girl shook her head but looked less mystified and a good deal more friendly. They were both of them attractive in an unforced sort of way, both of them wearing jeans and sloppy jerseys and unpainted Tuesday afternoon faces. The girl was slimmer and had darker and shorter hair, but they both had large gray eyes, straight noses, and unaggressive chins. Both were self-assured; and both undefinably intelligent.
The work I had interrupted lay spread out on the table. Galley proofs and drawings and photographs, the makings of a book. When I glanced at it, Clare said, “Mother’s cook book,” and Samantha said, “Clare is a publishers’ assistant,” and they invited me to sit down again.
We sat around the table, and I told them about looking for Amanda, and the off-chance which had brought me to their door.
Samantha regretfully shook her head. “An off-chance is all it was,” she said. “I never saw Caroline after she took you away the last time. I didn’t even know she had a daughter. She never brought her here.”
“Tell me about her,” I said. “What was she like?”
“Caroline? So pretty you wanted to hug her. Full of light and fun. She could get anyone to do anything. But . . .” she stopped.
“But what?” I said. “And please do be frank. She’s been dead for twelve years, and you won’t hurt my feelings.”
“Well . . . she took drugs.” Samantha looked at me anxiously, and seemed relieved when I nodded. “Cocaine. LSD. Marijuana. Almost anything. She tried the lot. She told me she didn’t want you around when she and her friends were all high. She begged me to look after you for a few days . . . it always turned into a few weeks . . . and you were such a quiet little mouse . . . you were quite good company, actually. I never minded, when she brought you.”
“How often?” I said slowly.
“How often did she bring you? Oh . . . half a dozen times. You were about four the first time . . . and about eight at the end, I suppose. I told her I couldn’t take you again, as Clare was imminent.”
“I’ve always been grateful to you,” I said.
“Have you?” She seemed pleased. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d remember . . . but I suppose you must have done, as you’re here.”
“Did you know anyone called Chloe or Deborah or Miranda?” I said.
“Deborah Baederbeck? Went to live in Brussels?”
“I don’t know.”
Samantha shook her head dubiously. “She wouldn’t know anything about your Amanda. She must have been in Brussels for . . . oh . . . twenty-five years.”
Clare made some tea and I asked Samantha if my mother had ever told her anything about my father.
“No, nothing,” she said positively. “An absolutely taboo subject, I gathered. She was supposed to have an abortion, and didn’t. Left it too late. Just like Caroline, absolutely irresponsible.” She made a comical face. “I suppose you wouldn’t be here if she’d done what she promised her old dragon of a mother.”
“She made up for it by not registering my birth.”
“Oh God.” She chuckled with appreciation. “I must say that’s typical Caroline. We went to the same school. I’d known her for years. We’d not long left when she got landed with you.”
“Did she take drugs then? At school?”
“Heavens, no.” She frowned, thinking. “Afterwards. We all did. I don’t mean she and I together. But our generation . . . we all tried it, I should think, some time or other, when we were young. Pot mostly.”
Clare looked surprised, as if mothers didn’t do that sort of thing.
I said, “Did you know the friends she got high with?”
Samantha shook her head. “Never met any of them. Caroline called them friends in the plural, but I always thought of it as one friend, a man.”
“No,” I said. “Sometimes there were more. People lying on floor cushions half asleep, with the room full of haze. All enormously peaceful.”
They were the people with words like “skins” and “grass” and “joints,” which never seemed to mean what my childish brain expected; and it was one of them who had given me a cigarette and urged me to suck in the smoke. Suck it into your lungs, he’d said, and then hold your breath while you count ten. I’d coughed all the smoke out before I counted two, and he’d laughed and told me to try again. Three or four small drags, I’d had.
The result, which I’d dreamed of occasionally afterwards rather than actively remembered, was a great feeling of tranquility. Relaxed limbs, quiet breathing, slight lightness of head. My mother had come home and slapped me, which put an end to all that. The friend who’d initiated me never reappeared. I hadn’t met hash again until I was twenty, when I’d been given a present of some greeny-yellow Lebanese resin to sprinkle onto tobacco.
I’d smoked some, and given some away, and never bothered again. The results, to me, weren’t worth the trouble and expense. They would have been, a doctor friend had told me, if I’d had asthma. Marijuana was terrific for asthmatics, he’d said, sadly. Pity they couldn’t smoke it on the National Health.
We drank the tea Clare had made, and Samantha asked wha
t I did in the way of a job.
“I’m a jockey.”
They were incredulous. “You’re too tall,” Samantha said, and Clare said, “People just aren’t jockeys.”
“People are,” I said. “I am. And jockeys don’t have to be small. Six-footers have been known.”
“Extraordinary thing to be,” Clare said. “Pretty pointless, isn’t it?”
“Clare!” Samantha said, protesting.
“If you mean,” I said equably, “that being a jockey contributes nothing useful to society, I’m not so sure.”
“Proceed,” Clare said.
“Recreation gives health. I provide recreation.”
“And betting?” she demanded. “Is that healthy?”
“Sublimation of risk-taking. Stake your money, not your life. If everyone actually set out to climb Everest, just think of the rescue parties.”
She started to smile and converted it into a chewing motion with her lips. “But you yourself . . . take the risks.”
“I don’t bet.”
“Clare will tie you in knots,” her mother said. “Don’t listen to her.”
Clare however shook her head. “I would think your little Philip is as easy to tie in knots as a stream of water.”
Samantha gave her a surprised glance and asked me where I lived.
“In Lambourn. It’s a village in Berkshire. Out on the Downs.”
Clare frowned and looked at me with sharpened concentration.
“Lambourn . . . isn’t that the village where there are a lot of racing stables, rather like Newmarket?”
“That’s right.”
“Hm.” She thought for a minute. “I think I’ll just ring up my boss. He’s doing a book on British villages and village life. He was saying this morning the book’s still a bit thin—asked me if I had any ideas. He has a writer chap doing it. Going to villages, staying a week and writing a chapter. He’s just done one on a village that produces its own operas. Look, do you mind if I give him a call?”
“Of course not.”
She was on her feet and going across to a telephone extension on the kitchen worktop before I’d even answered. Samantha gave her a fond motherly look, and I thought how odd it was to find Samantha in her late forties, when I’d always imagined her perpetually young. From under the unrecognizable exterior, though, the warmth, the directness, the steady values and the basic goodness came across to me as something long known; and I was reassured to find that those half-buried impressions had been right.
“Clare will bully you into things,” she said. “She bullied me into doing this cook book. She’s got more energy than a power station. She told me when she was about six that she was going to be a publisher and she’s well on her way. She’s already second-in-command to the man she’s talking to. She’ll be running the whole firm before they know where they are.” She sighed with pleased resignation, vividly illuminating the trials and prides of mothering a prodigy.
The prodigy herself, who looked normal enough, finished talking on the telephone and came back to the table nodding.
“He’s interested. He says we’ll both go down and look the place over, and then if it’s OK he’ll send the writer, and a photographer.”
I said diffidently, “I’ve taken pictures of Lambourn . . . If you’d like to . . .”
She interrupted with a shake of her head. “We’d need professional work. Sorry and all that. But my boss says if you don’t mind we’ll call at your apartment or whatever, if you’d be willing to help us with directions and general information.”
“Yes . . . I’d be willing.”
“That’s great.” She gave me a sudden smile that was more like a pat on the back than a declaration of friendship. She knows she’s bright, I thought. She’s used to being brighter than most. She’s not as good as Jeremy Folk at concealing that she knows it.
“Can we come on Friday?” she said.
10
Lance Kinship was wandering around at the head of a retinue of cameramen, sound recordists and general dogbodies when I arrived at Newbury racecourse on the following day, Wednesday. We heard in the changing room that he was taking stock shots for a film with the blessing of the management and that jockeys were asked to cooperate. Not, it was said, to the point of grinning into the camera lens at every opportunity, but just to not treading on the crew if one found them underfoot.
I slung my Nikon around my neck inside my raincoat and unobtrusively took a few pictures of the men taking pictures.
Technically speaking, cameras were not welcome at race meetings except in the hands of recognized photographers, but most racecourses didn’t fidget unduly about the general public taking snaps anywhere except in the members’ enclosure. And because I’d been doing it for so long, most racecourse managers looked tolerantly upon my own efforts. Only at Royal Ascot was the crackdown on amateurs complete: the one meeting where people had to park their cameras at the entrance, like gunslingers riding into a bullet-free town.
Lance Kinship looked as if he had tried hard not to seem like a film director. In place of his olive suede jacket, now presumably having its bloodstains removed at the cleaners, he wore a brownish tweed suit topped by a brown trilby set at a conservative angle and accompanied by checked shirt, quiet tie, and raceglasses. He looked, I thought, as if he’d cast himself as an uppercrust extra in his own film.
He was telling his crew what to do with indecisive gestures. It was only in the tenseness with which they listened to him, their eyes sliding his way every time he spoke, that one saw any authority. I took a couple of shots of that reaction; the eyes all looking towards him from averted heads. I reckoned that when printed those pictures might quite clearly show men obeying someone they didn’t like.
At one point, around by the saddling boxes, where the crew were filming the trainers fitting on the saddles before the first race, Lance Kinship turned his head in the instant I pressed the button, and stared straight into my lens.
He strode across to me looking annoyed.
“What are you doing?” he said, though it must have been obvious.
“I was just interested,” I said inoffensively.
He looked at my boots, my white breeches and the red and yellow shirt which I wore under the raincoat.
“A jockey,” he said, as if to himself. He peered through his black-framed spectacles at my camera. “A Nikon.” He raised his eyes to my face and frowned with half-recognition.
“How’s the nose?” I said politely.
He grunted, finally placing me.
“Don’t get into the film,” he said. “You’re not typical. I don’t want Nikon-toting jocks lousing up the footage. Right?”
“I’ll be careful,” I said.
He seemed on the point of telling me to go away altogether, but he glanced from side to side and took note that a few racegoers were listening, and decided against it. With a brief disapproving nod he went back to his crew, and presently they moved off and began taking pictures of the saddled horses walking into the parade ring.
The chief cameraman carried his big movie camera on his shoulder and mostly operated it from there. An assistant walked one step behind, carrying a tripod. One sound recorder carried the charcoal sausage-shaped boom and a second fiddled endlessly with knobs on an electric box. A young man with frizzy hair operated a clapper board, and a girl took copious notes. They trailed around all afternoon getting in everyone’s way and apologizing like mad so that no one much minded.
They were down at the start when I lined up on a scatty novice ’chaser for Harold, and thankfully absent from the eighth fence, where the novice ’chaser put his forefeet into the open ditch on the take-off side and crossed the birch almost upside down. Somewhere during this wild somersault I fell out of the saddle, but by the mercy of heaven when the half-ton of horse crashed to the ground I was not underneath it.
He lay prostrate for a few moments, winded and panting, giving me plenty of time to grasp hold of the reins and
save his lad the frustrating job of catching him loose. Some horses I loved and some I didn’t. This was a clumsy stubborn delinquent with a hard mouth, just starting what was likely to be a long career of bad jumping. I’d schooled him at home several times and knew him too well. If he met a fence right, he was safe enough, but if he met it wrong he ignored signals to change his stride; and every horse met a fence wrong now and then, however skillful his rider. I reckoned every time he completed a race, I’d be lucky.
Resignedly I waited until he was on his feet and prancing about a bit, then remounted him and trotted him back to the stands, and made encouraging remarks to the downcast owner and honest ones to Harold.
“Tell him to cut his losses and buy a better horse.”
“He can’t afford it.”
“He’s wasting the training fees.”
“I dare say,” Harold said. “But we’re not telling him, are we?”
I grinned at him. “No, I guess not.”
I took my saddle into the weighing room and Harold went off to join the owner in a consolatory drink. Harold needed the training fees. I needed the riding fees. The owner was buying a dream and kidding himself. It happened every day, all the time, in racing. It was only occasionally that the dream came superbly, soul-fillingly true, and when that happened you saw points of light like stars in the owner’s eyes. Thank God for the owners, I thought. Without them racing wouldn’t exist.
When I was changing back into street clothes someone came and told me there was a man outside asking for the jockey with the camera. I went to see, and found Lance Kinship trudging up and down and looking impatient.
“Oh there you are,” he said, as if I’d seriously kept him waiting. “What’s your name?”
“Philip Nore.”
“Well, Phil, what do you say? You took some photographs today. If they’re any good I’ll buy them from you. How’s that?”
“Well . . .” I was nonplussed. “Yes, if you like.”
“Good. Where’s your camera? Get it then, get it. The crew is over by the winning post. Take some photographs of them shooting the finish of the next race. Right? Right?”
