Wild Horses

by Dick Francis

  WILD HORSES

  Dick Francis

  We are spirits clad in veils; Man by man was never seen; All our deep communing fails to remove the shadowy screen.

  Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813-1893)

  CHAPTER ONE

  Dying slowly of bone cancer, the old man, shrivelled now, sat as ever in his great armchair, tears of lonely pain sliding down crepuscular cheeks.

  That Tuesday, his last, his stringy grip on my wrist tightened convulsively in a long silence while I watched his mouth tremble and move in abortive struggles to speak.

  “Father.” The words finally wavered out; a whisper, desperate, driven by ultimate need. “Father, I must make my confession. I must ask ... absolution.”

  In great surprise and with compassion I said, “But... I'm not a priest.”

  He paid no attention. The feeble voice, a truer measure of affairs than the fiercely clutching hand, simply repeated, “Father... forgive me.”

  “Valentine,” I said reasonably, “I'm Thomas. Thomas Lyon. Don't you remember? I've come to read to you.”

  He could no longer see newsprint or anything straight ahead, though peripheral vision partly remained. I called in more or less every week, both to keep him up to date with the racing columns in the newspapers and also to let his beleaguered and chronically tired old sister go out for shopping and gossip.

  I hadn't actually read to him on that day. When I arrived he'd been suffering badly from one of his intermittent bouts of agony, with Dorothea, his sister, feeding him a teaspoon of liquid morphine and giving him whisky and water to help the numbness work faster.

  He hadn't felt well enough for the racing papers.

  “Just sit with him,” Dorothea begged. “How long can you stay?”

  “Two hours.”

  She'd kissed me gratefully on the cheek, stretching on tiptoes, and had hurried away, plump in her late seventies, forthright in mind.

  I sat as usual on a tapestry stool right beside the old man, as he liked the physical contact, as if to make up for sight.

  The fluttery voice persisted, creeping effortfully into the quiet room, determined and intimate. “I confess to God Almighty and to Thee, my Father, that I have sinned exceedingly ... and I must confess ... before ... before ...”

  “Valentine,” I repeated more sharply, “I'm not a priest.”

  It was as if he hadn't heard. He seemed to be focusing all the energy left in him into one extraordi­nary spiritual gamble, a last throw of hell-defeating dice on the brink of the abyss.

  “I ask pardon for my mortal sin ... I ask peace with God...”

  I protested no more. The old man knew he was dying; knew death was near. In earlier weeks he had discussed with equanimity, and even with humour, his lack of a future. He had reminisced about his long life. He'd told me he had left me all his books in his will. Never had he made any mention of even the most rudimentary religious belief, except to remark once that the idea of life after death was a load of superstitious twaddle.

  I hadn't known he was a Roman Catholic.

  “I confess,” he said, “... that I killed him ... God, forgive me. I humbly ask pardon ... I pray to God Almighty to have mercy on me ...”

  “I left the knife with Deny and I killed the Cornish boy and I've never said a word about that week and I accuse myself ... and I lied about everything ... mea culpa ... I've done such harm ... I destroyed their lives ... and they didn't know, they went on liking me ... I despise myself ... all this time. Father, give me a penance ... and say the words ... say them ... ego te absolve ... I forgive your sins in the name of the Father ... I beg you ... I beg you...”

  I had never heard of the sins he was talking about. His words tumbled out as if on the edge of delirium, making no cohesive sense. I thought it most likely that his sins were dreams; that he was confused, imagining great guilt where none lay.

  There was no mistaking, however, the frantic nature of his repeated plea.

  “Father, absolve me. Father, say the words ... say them, I beg you.”

  I couldn't see what harm it would do. He was desperate to die in peace. Any priest would have given him absolution: who was I cruelly to withhold it? I was not of his faith. I would square it later, I thought, with my own immortal soul.

  So I said what he wanted. Said the words, dredging them from memory. Said them in Latin, as he would clearly understand them, because they seemed less of a lie that way than in bald English.

  “Ego te absolve,” I said.

  I felt a shiver through my body. Superstition, I thought.

  I remembered more words. They floated on my tongue. “Ego te absolve a peccatis tuis, In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.”

  I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

  The greatest blasphemy of my life to date. God forgive me my sin, I thought.

  The dreadful tension subsided in the old man. The rheumy near-blind eyes closed. The grip on my wrist loosened: the old hand fell away. His face relaxed. He faintly smiled, and then grew still.

  Alarmed, I felt for a pulse under his jaw and was relieved to feel the threadlike beat. He didn't move under my touch. I shook him a little, but he didn't wake. After five minutes I shook him again, more strongly, without results. Indecisively then I got up from my seat beside him and, crossing to the telephone, dialled the number prominently written on a notepad nearby, to get through to his doctor.

  The medicine man was less than pleased.

  “I've told the old fool he should be in hospital,” he said. “I can't keep running out to hold his hand. Who are you, anyway? And where's Mrs Pannier?”

  “I'm a visitor,” I said. “Mrs Pannier is out shopping.”

  “Is he groaning?” demanded the doctor.

  “He was, earlier. Mrs Pannier gave him some pain­killer before she went out. Then he was talking. Now he's in a sort of sleep from which I can't seem to wake him.”

  The doctor growled a smothered curse and crashed his receiver into its cradle, leaving me to guess his intentions.

  I hoped that he wouldn't send a wailing ambulance with busy figures and stretchers and all the rough paraphernalia of making the terminally ill feel worse. Old Valentine had wanted to die quietly in his own bed. Waiting there, I regretted my call to the doctor, thinking that I'd probably set in motion, in my anxiety, precisely what Valentine had most wanted to avoid.

  Feeling stupid and remorseful, I sat opposite the steadily sleeping man, no longer on a stool beside him but in a more comfortable armchair.

  The room was warm. He wore blue cotton pyjamas, with a rug over his knees. He sat near the window, bare branched trees outside giving promise of a spring he wouldn't know.

  The study-like room, intensely his own, charted an unusual journey through time that had begun in heavy manual labour and ended in journalism. Born the son of a farrier, he'd been apprenticed to the forge in childhood, working the bellows for his father, skinny arms straining, young eyes excited by the noise and the fire. There had never been any question that he would follow in the trade, nor had he in fact veered towards anything else until his working pattern had long been settled.

  Framed fading photographs on his walls showed a young Valentine with the biceps and pectorals of a giant, a prize-winning wielder of brute power with the wide happy grin of an innocent. But the idyll of the village smithy under the chestnut tree had already long gone. Valentine in his maturity had driven from job to job with his tools and portable brazier in a mobile working van.

  He had for years shod a stable full of racehorses trained by my grandfather. He'd looked after the feet of the ponies I'd been given to ride. He had seemed to me to be already a wise man of incredible age, though I knew now he'd
been barely sixty-five when I was ten.

  His education had consisted of reading (the racing newspapers), writing (bills for his customers) and arithmetic (costing the work and materials so that he made a profit). Not until his forties had his mental capacity expanded to match his muscles. Not until, he'd told me during the past debilitated weeks, not decisively until in his job he was no longer expected to make individual shoes to fit the hooves of horses, but to trim the hooves to fit mass-produced uniform shoes. No longer was he expected to hammer white-hot iron bars into shape, but to tap softer metals cold.

  He had begun to read history and biography, at first all to do with racing but later with wider horizons. He had begun in shy anonymity to submit observations and anecdotes to the newspapers he daily studied. He wrote about horses, people, events, opinions. One of the papers had given him a regular column with a regular salary and room to grow a reputation. While still plying his original trade, Valentine had become an honoured institution in print, truly admired and enjoyed for his insights and his wit.

  As physical strength waned, his journalistic prowess had grown. He'd written on into his eighties, written into semi-blindness, written indeed until four weeks earlier, when the cancer battle had entered the stage of defeat.

  And this was the old man, amusing, wise and revered, who had poured out in panic an apparently unbearable secret.

  “I killed the Cornish boy”

  He must have meant, I thought, that he was blaming himself for an error in his shoeing, that by some mischance a lost nail in a race had caused a fatal accident to a jockey.

  Not for nothing had Valentine adopted often enough the doctrine of doing things thoroughly, quoting now and then the fable of the horseshoe nail. For want of a nail the kingdom was lost ... little oversights led to great disasters.

  A dying mind, I thought again, was scrambling old small guilts into mountainous terrors. Poor old Valentine. I watched him sleep, the white hair scanty on his scalp, big blotchy freckles brown in his skin.

  For a long time, no one came. Valentine's breathing grew heavier, but not to the point of snoring. I looked round the familiar room, at the horses' photographs I'd come to know well in the past few months, at the framed awards on the dark green wall, the flower-printed curtains, the worn brown carpet, the studded leather chairs, the basic portable typewriter on an unfussy desk, the struggling potted plant.

  Nothing had changed from week to week: only the old man's tenure there was slipping away.

  One wall, shelved from floor to ceiling, held the books that I supposed would soon be mine. There were years and years of form books listing thousands upon thousands of bygone races, with a small red dot inked in beside the name of every horse Valentine had fitted with racing shoes for the test.

  Winners, hundreds of them, had been accorded an exclamation mark.

  Below the form books there were many volumes of an ancient encyclopaedia and rows of glossily jacketed life stories of recently dead racing titans, their bustling, swearing vigour reduced to pale paper memories. I'd met many of those people. My grandfather was among them. Their world, their passions, their achievements were passing into oblivion and already the young jockeys I'd star-gazed at ten were grandfathers.

  I wondered who would write Valentine's life story, a worthy subject if ever there was one. He had steadfastly refused to write it himself, despite heavy prompting from all around. Too boring, he'd said. Tomorrow's world, that was where interest lay.

  Dorothea came back apologetically half an hour late and tried without success to rouse her brother. I told her I'd phoned the doctor fruitlessly, which didn't surprise her.

  “He says Valentine should be in hospital,” she said.

  “Valentine refuses to go. He and the doctor swear at each other.” She shrugged resignedly. “I expect the doctor will come in time. He usually does.”

  “Will have to leave you,” I said regretfully. “I'm already overdue at a meeting.” I hesitated. “Are you by any chance Roman Catholic?” I asked. “I mean ... Valentine said something about wanting a priest.”

  “A priest?” She looked astounded. “He was rambling on all morning ... his mind is going ... but the old bugger would never ask for a priest.”

  “I just thought... perhaps ... last rites?”

  Dorothea gave me a look of sweet sisterly exasperation.

  “Our mother was Roman Catholic, but not Dad. Lot of nonsense, he used to say. Valentine and I grew up outside the Church and were never the worse for it. Our mother died when he was sixteen and I was eleven. A mass was said for her. Dad took us to that but it made him sweat, he said. Anyway, Valentine's not much of a sinner except for swearing and such, and I know that being so weak as he is he wouldn't want to be bothered by a priest.”

  “I just thought I'd tell you,” I said.

  “You're a dear to come here, Thomas, but I know you're mistaken.” She paused. “My poor dear boy is very ill now, isn't he?” She looked down at him in concern. “Much worse?”

  “I'm afraid so.”

  “Going.” She nodded, and tears came into her eyes. “We've known it would come, but when it happens ... oh, dear.”

  “He's had a good life.”

  She disregarded the inadequate words and said forlornly, “I'll be so alone.”

  “Couldn't you live with your son?”

  “No!” She straightened herself scornfully. “Paul is forty-five and pompous and domineering, though I hate to say it, and I don't get on with his wife. They have three obnoxious teenagers who switch on deafening radios all the time until the walls vibrate.” She broke off and smoothed her brother's unresponsive head fondly. “No. Me and Valentine, we set up home here together when his Cathy died and my Bill passed on. Well, you know all that ... and we always liked each other, Valentine and me, and I'll miss him. I'll miss him something awful, but I'll stay here.” She swallowed. “I'll get used to being alone, same as I did after Bill went.”

  Dorothea, like many elderly women, it seemed to me, had a resolute independence that survived where youth quaked. With help once daily from the district nurse, she'd cared for her failing brother, taking on ever more personal tasks for him, exhausting herself to give him comfort and painkillers when he lay awake in the night. She might mourn him when he'd gone, but her dark-rimmed eyes showed she was much overdue on rest.

  She sat down tiredly on the tapestry stool and held her brother's hand. He breathed slowly, shallowly, the sound rasping. Fading daylight from the window beside Valentine fell softly on the aged couple, light and shadow emphasising the rounded commitment of the one and the skeletal dependence of the other, the hovering imminence of death as plain as if the scythe had hung above their heads.

  I wished I had a camera. Wished indeed for a whole camera crew. My normal day-to-day life involved the catching of emotion on the wing, the recording of ephemeral images to illumine a bedrock of truth. I dealt with unreality to give illusion the insight of revelation.

  I directed films.

  Knowing that one day I would use and re-create the quiet drama before me, I looked at my watch and asked Dorothea if I might use her telephone.

  “Of course, dear. On the desk.”

  I reached Ed, my earnest assistant, who as usual sounded flustered in my absence.

  “It can't be helped,” I said. “I'm running late. Is everyone there? Well, get some drinks sent over. Keep them happy, but don't let Jimmy have more than two G and Ts, and make sure we have enough copies of the script alterations. Right? Good. See you.”

  I regretted having to leave Dorothea at such a time, but in fact I'd squeezed my visit into a day's schedule that had made no provision for it, keeping the promise I'd given week after week.

  Three months back, in the preliminary pre-production stage of the film I was currently engaged on, I'd called to see Valentine as a brief matter of courtesy, a gesture to tell him I remembered him in the old days in my grandfather's time, and had always admired, even if from a distance,
his emergence as a sage.

  “Sage my foot!” He'd disclaimed the flattery but enjoyed it all the same. “I can't see very well these days, boy. How about reading to me for a bit?”

  He lived on the outer edge of Newmarket, the town long held to be the home and heart of the horseracing industry worldwide. “Headquarters”, the racing press called it. Fifteen hundred of the thoroughbred elite rocketed there over the windswept training gallops and over the wide difficult tracks, throwing up occasional prodigies that passed their glorious genes to flying generations of the future. An ancient wealth-producing business, the breeding of fast horses.

  I was on the point of leaving when the front doorbell rang, and to save Dorothea's tired feet I went to answer it.

  A short thirtyish man stood there looking at his watch, impatient.

  “Can I help you?” I asked.

  He gave me a brief glance and called past me, “Dorothea?”

  Regardless of fatigue, she appeared from Valentine's room and said miserably, “He's ... in a coma, I think. Come in. This is Thomas Lyon who's been reading to Valentine, like I told you.”

  As if on an afterthought, she finished the introduc­tion, flapping a hand and saying, “Robbie Gill, our doctor.”

  Robbie Gill had red hair, a Scots accent, no small-talk and a poor bedside manner. He carried a medical bag into Valentine's room and snapped it open. He rolled up the ill man's eyelids with his thumb and pensively held one of the fragile wrists. Then he silently busied himself with stethoscope, syringes and swabs.

  “We'd better get him to bed,” he said finally. No mention, I was glad to notice, of transportation to hospital.

  “Is he - ?” Dorothea asked anxiously, leaving the question hovering, not wanting an affirmative answer.

  “Dying?” Robbie Gill said it kindly enough in his brusque way. “In a day or two, I'd say. Can't tell. His old heart's still fairly strong. I don't really think he'll wake again, but he might. It partly depends on what he wants.”

  “How do you mean, what he wants?” I asked, surprised.