by Dick Francis
She looked up at me fiercely. “You’re lying. You know damned well they’re good.”
She closed the Lambourn file and drummed her fingers on it. “I can’t see why we can’t use these,” she said. “But it’s not my decision, of course.”
She fished into her large brown handbag and came up with cigarettes and a lighter. She put a cigarette to her mouth and lit it, and I noticed with surprise that her fingers were trembling. What on earth, I wondered, could have made her nervous? Something had disturbed her deeply, because all the glittery extrovert surface had vanished, and what I saw was a dark-haired young woman concentrating acutely on the thoughts in her head.
She took several deep inhaling breaths of smoke, and looked unseeingly at her fingers, which went on trembling.
“What’s the matter?” I said at last.
“Nothing.” She gave me a quick glance and looked away, and said, “I’ve been looking for something like you.”
“Something?” I echoed, puzzled.
“Mm.” She tapped off some ash. “Mother told you, didn’t she, that I wanted to be a publisher?”
“Yes, she did.”
“Most people smile, because I’m still young. But I’ve worked in publishing for five years . . . and I know what I’m doing.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“No . . . but I need . . . I want . . . I need to make a book that will establish my own personal reputation in publishing. I need to be known as the person who produced such-and-such a book. A very successful book. Then my future will be assured. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“So I’ve been looking for that book for a year or two now. Looking and despairing, because what I want is exceptional. And now . . .” She took a deep breath. “Now I’ve found it.”
“But,” I said, puzzled, “Lambourn’s not news, and anyway I thought it was your boss’s book . . .”
“Not that, you fool,” she said. “This.” She put her hand on the Jockey’s Life folder. “The pictures in here. They don’t need a text. They tell the story on their own.” She drew on the cigarette. “Arranged in the right order . . . presented as a way of living . . . as an autobiography, a social comment, an insight into human nature . . . as well as how an industry works . . . it’ll make a spectacular change from flowers and fish.”
“The flowers sold about two million copies, didn’t they?”
“You don’t believe me, do you?” she demanded. “You simply don’t see . . .” She broke off and frowned. “You haven’t had any of these photographs published before, have you? In papers or magazines, or anywhere?”
I shook my head. “Nowhere. I’ve never tried.”
“You’re amazing. You have this talent, and you don’t use it.”
“But . . . everyone takes photographs.”
“Sure they do. But not everyone takes a long series of photographs which illustrate a whole way of life.” She tapped off the ash. “It’s all there, isn’t it? The hard work, the dedication, the bad weather, the humdrum, the triumphs, the pain . . . I’ve only looked through these pictures once, and in no sort of order and I know what your life’s like. I know it intimately. Because that’s how you’ve photographed it. I know your life from inside. I see what you’ve seen. I see the enthusiasm in those owners. I see their variety. I see what you owe to the stable lads. I see the worry of trainers, it’s everywhere. I see the laughter in jockeys, and the stoicism. I see what you’ve felt. I see what you’ve understood about people. I see people in a way I hadn’t before, because of what you’ve seen.”
“I didn’t know,” I said slowly, “that these pictures were quite so revealing.”
“Look at this last one,” she said, pulling it out. “This picture of a man in an overall pulling the boot off this boy with the broken shoulder . . . you don’t need any words to say the man is doing it as gently as he can, or that it hurts . . . you can see it all, in every line of their bodies and faces.” She replaced the picture in the folder and said seriously, “It’s going to take me some time to set things up the way I want. Will you give me your assurance that you won’t go straight off and sell these pictures to someone else?”
“Of course,” I said.
“And don’t mention any of this to my boss when he comes back. I want this to be my book, not his.”
I half smiled. “All right.”
“You may have no ambition,” she said sharply. “But I have.”
“Yes.”
“And my ambition won’t do you any harm either,” she said. “If the book’s a seller . . . and it will be . . . you’ll get royalties.” She paused. “You can have an advance, anyway, as soon as the contracts are signed.”
“Contracts . . .”
“Contracts, naturally,” she said. “And keep these pictures safe, will you? I’ll come back for them soon, on my own.”
She thrust the folder into my hands and I replaced it in the filing cabinet, so that when her energetic young boss returned it was only the views of Lambourn that he saw. He said without too much excitement that they would do well enough, and shortly afterwards he and Clare bore them away.
When they’d gone I thought that Clare’s certainty about her book would evaporate. She would remember that most of the people she knew despised horse people. She would work out that a book of pictures taken by a jockey about his life would have a very limited appeal, and she would write apologetically, or briskly, and say that after all, on reflection . . .
I shrugged. I had no expectations. When the letter came, that would be that.
11
I went into Swindon to collect the films I’d left there for processing on my way to Wincanton the previous morning, and spent the rest of that Friday printing the shots of Lance Kinship and his crew.
Apart from those showing clearly the crew’s unease in his company, which I didn’t intend in any case to show him, I thought that quite likely he might approve. I’d been fortunate in the way the crew had arranged themselves into natural patterns, and there was Kinship himself looking frantically upper-class in his racing tweeds directing them with a conductor’s gestures, and in one sequence the horses behind them were all coming head on satisfactorily towards the winning post.
There were also several close-ups of Kinship with the crew in blurred focus behind him, and a couple of slightly surrealistic views which I’d taken from directly behind the cameraman, in which the camera itself looked large with Kinship’s sharply focused figure standing in a stray shaft of sunlight in the middle field. The total effect, looking through them all, was a record of a substantial operator in command of his job, and that, I presumed, was what he’d wanted. No matter that the product had been two seconds in a commercial, the production itself looked an epic.
In the evening I captioned the dried prints with typed strips of thin paper taped onto the backs, and feeling faintly foolish added the words Copyright Philip Nore, in the way I’d seen Charlie do, all those long years ago. Charlie seemed almost to be leaning over my shoulder, reminding me to keep control of my work.
Work.
The very word filled me with disquiet. It was the first time I’d actively thought of my photographs in those terms.
No, I thought, I’m a jockey.
When I woke early on Saturday morning, I waited for Harold to telephone and tell me to get sick, and it wouldn’t have been much trouble as I already felt sick with waiting.
He called at a quarter to ten.
“Are you well?” he said.
“Christ.”
“You’d better be,” he said. “Victor rang just now. I didn’t wait to hear what he meant to say. I told him straight away that Chainmail’s future depended on his being handled right in all his races.”
“What happened?”
“Victor said an easy race wouldn’t hurt him, so I told him what you said. Word for word. And I told him you’d said you would ride your bloody guts out for him as long as we’re trying to win.” Harold�
�s voice boomed down the wire with cheerfulness. “And do you know what Victor said? He said tell the pious bastard that that’s just what I’ll expect.”
“Do you mean . . . ?”
“I mean,” Harold bellowed, “he’s changed his mind. You can win on Chainmail if you can. In fact you’d better.”
“But Chainmail isn’t . . .”
“Damn it, do you want to ride the horse or don’t you?”
“I do.”
“Right, then. See you at Ascot.” He slammed the receiver down, informing me that he didn’t think I’d been properly grateful for his efforts with Victor; but if he had promised Victor that Chainmail would win—and it seemed only too likely that he had—I would be in a worse fix than ever.
At Ascot I sought out Harold’s head traveling lad, who had as usual come with the horses, and asked how Chainmail was feeling that day.
“Bucking and kicking fit to murder.”
“And Daylight?”
“Placid as an old cow.”
“Where have the lads put their money?”
He gave me a sharp sideways look. “A bit on both of them. Why, shouldn’t they?”
“Sure,” I said casually. “They should. But you know how it is . . . sometimes the lads know more about a horse’s chances than the trainer does.”
He grinned. “I’ll say. But today . . .” He shrugged. “A bit on both. Not the week’s wages, mind. Just some beer money, like.”
“Thanks.” I nodded and went off to the weighing room with at least no added anxieties. The lads wouldn’t be staking even beer money without what they considered to be a good reason. The legs, stomachs and spirits of both horses could be held to be normal. One didn’t ask more.
I saw Victor Briggs standing in a group of one on the area of grass outside the weighing-room door. Always the same clothes: the broad-brimmed hat, the thick navy overcoat, the black leather gloves. Always the same expression: the wiped-clean slate. He saw me, and no doubt he also saw the falter in my stride as I wondered whether I could possibly walk right past him without speaking.
I couldn’t.
“Good morning, Mr. Briggs.”
“Morning.” His voice was curt, but no more. He didn’t seem to want me to stop for conversation, so after a slight hesitation I went on towards the weighing room. As I passed him he said grittily, “I’ll see your guts.”
I stopped and turned my head. His face was still expressionless. His eyes looked cold and hard. I stopped myself from swallowing, and said merely, “All right,” and went on again, wishing I’d never made that stupidly flamboyant promise.
Inside the changing room someone was telling a funny story about two statues, and Steve Millace was flexing his mending arm and complaining that the doctor wouldn’t pass him fit to ride, and someone else was voicing the first rumor of a major racing upheaval. I took off my street clothes and listened to all three at once.
“So these two naked statues, the man and the woman, they had been standing looking at each other in this park for a hundred years . . .”
“I told him I’d got all the movement back. It’s not fair . . .”
“Is it true the Jockey Club is forming a new committee . . .”
“So an angel comes to visit them, and says that as they’ve stood there patiently through such ages of summers and winters, they will be rewarded by half an hour of human life to do what they have been wanting to do most . . .”
“Look, I can swing my arm around in a circle. What do you think?”
“A committee for appointing paid stewards, or something.”
“So these two statues come to life, and look at each other and laugh a bit, and say ‘Shall we?’ and ‘Yes, let’s,’ and then they nip off behind some bushes, and there’s a lot of rustling . . .”
“I could hold any horse. I told him so, but the sod wouldn’t listen.”
“. . . like paying the senior steward a salary.”
“After a quarter of an hour they come out from behind the bushes all hot and flustered and happy, and the angel says they’ve only used half the time, why don’t they start all over again . . .”
“How long do collarbones usually take, anyway?”
“I heard Lord White has agreed to the scheme . . .”
“So the statues giggle a bit and the man statue says to the girl statue, ‘OK, let’s do it again, only this time we’ll do it the other way round. I’ll hold down the effing pigeon, and you shit on it.”
Amid the burst of laughter I heard the man discussing the racing upheaval say, “. . . and Ivor den Relgan is to be chairman.”
I turned to him. “What did you say?”
“I don’t know if it’s true . . . one of the gossip writers told me Ivor den Relgan’s been appointed to set up a committee to appoint paid stewards.”
I frowned. “That gives den Relgan an awful lot of power all of a sudden, doesn’t it?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know.”
He might not, but others did. During the afternoon one could almost see the onward march of the rumor as uneasy surprise spread from one Jockey Club face to the next. The only group seeming unaffected by the general reaction were the ill-assorted bunch of people attracting the glances of everyone else: Lord White, Lady White, Ivor den Relgan, Dana den Relgan.
They stood outside the weighing room in weak November sunshine, the women both dressed in mink. Lady White, always thin, looked gaunt and plain and unhappy. Dana den Relgan glowed with health, laughed with bright teeth, twinkled her eyes at Lord White, and cast patronizing glances at his Lady.
Lord White basked in the light of Dana’s smile, shedding years like snakeskins. Ivor den Relgan smirked at the world in general and smoked a cigar with proprietorial gestures, as if Ascot racecourse were his own. He wore again the belted camel overcoat and the swept-back grayish hair, and commanded attention as his natural right.
Harold appeared at my elbow, following my gaze.
“Ghengis Khan,” he said, “is setting out to rule the world.”
“This committee?”
“Wouldn’t you say,” Harold asked acidly, “that asking someone like den Relgan to chair a committee of his own choosing is a paint job?”
“Cosmetic . . . or camouflage?”
“Both. What they’re really doing is saying to den Relgan ‘OK, you choose anyone you like as stewards, and we’ll pay them.’ It’s incredible.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Old Driven Snow,” Harold said, “is so besotted with that girl that he’ll give her father anything.”
“Was it all Lord White’s idea?”
Harold grimaced wolfishly. “Be your age, Philip. Just who has been trying for years to muscle into the Jockey Club? And just who has a knockout of a daughter who is now old enough to play up to old Driven Snow? Ivor den Relgan has at last got his lever into the door to power in racing, and once he’s inside the citadel and making decisions the old guard will have a hopeless job trying to get him out.”
“You really care,” I said wonderingly.
“Of course I do. This is a great sport, and at the moment, free. Who the hell wants the top management of racing to be carved up and manipulated and sold and tainted like some other sports we could mention. The health of racing is guaranteed by having unpaid aristocrats working for the love of it. Sure, they make stupid fuck-ups occasionally, but we get them put right. If den Relgan appoints paid stewards, for whom do you think those stewards will be working? For us? For racing? Or for the interests of Ivor den Relgan?”
I listened to his passion and his conviction and felt the tremor of his extreme dismay.
“Surely,” I said, “the Jockey Club won’t let it happen.”
“It is happening. The ones at the top are all so used to being led by Lord White that they’ve agreed to his proposal for this committee without thinking it through. They take it for granted he’s virtuous and well-meaning and dead honest. And so he is. But he’s also infatuated. And that’s damn bloo
dy dangerous.”
We watched the group of four. Lord White made continual small gestures which involved laying his hand on Dana’s arm, or across her shoulders, or against her cheek. Her father watched with an indulgent smile and a noticeable air of satisfaction; and poor Lady White seemed to shrink even further into her mink. When she eventually walked away, not one of the others seemed to notice her go.
“Someone,” Harold said grimly, “has got to do something to stop all this. And before it goes too far.”
He saw Victor Briggs standing as usual alone in the distance and strode off to join him, and I watched Lord White and Dana flirt together like two joyful hummingbirds, and thought that today she was responding to him with much less discretion than she had at Kempton.
I turned away, troubled, and found Lance Kinship coming slowly towards me, his gaze flicking rapidly from me to the den Relgans and back again. It struck me that he wanted to talk to me without den Relgan noticing he was there, and with an inward smile I went to meet him.
“I’ve got your pictures in the car,” I said. “I brought them in case you were here.”
“Have you? Good, good. I want to talk to that girl.” He flicked another quick glance. “Can you get near her? Give her a message? Without that man hearing. Without either of them hearing. Can you?”
“I might try,” I said.
“Right. Good. You tell her, then, that I’ll meet her after the third race in one of the private boxes.” He told me the number. “You tell her to come up there. Right?”
“I’ll try,” I said again.
“Good. I’ll watch you. From over there.” He pointed. “When you’ve given her the message, you come and tell me. Right?”
I nodded, and with another quick peek at Dana he scuttled away. His clothes that day were much as they had been at Newbury, except that he’d ruined the overall true-blue impression with some pale green socks. A pathetic man, I thought. Making himself out to be what he wasn’t. Neither a significant film producer nor bred in the purple. They asked him to parties, Victor Briggs had said, because of what he brings. A sad ineffectual man buying his way into the big time with little packets of white powder.
