Wild Horses

by Dick Francis

  “What you think is a good film,” he interrupted, “and what I think is a film truthful to my book, are totally opposite. All you care about is how much money it makes.”

  I took a large bracing mouthful of post-prandial cognac (to hell with the non-alcohol ethos) and decided to explain a few basic facts of movie life to the unrealistic idealist opposite me, his prim round glasses gleaming over earnest brown eyes and his small mouth contracting further in pique.

  “I'm a name,” he insisted. “My readers expect subtlety, understatement and psychological depth. What you're giving them is sex and violence.”

  “Have another vodka and cranberry juice?”

  “Howard,” I said, “don't you understand what you agreed to? O'Hara put together a package that brought finance from one of the top seven studios. However much one may regret it, they don't fund moody films to play in art houses. They are strictly in the business for profit. The bottom line, Howard.”

  “Obscene,” he said, disapprovingly.

  I said, “O'Hara's chief bargaining promise with the big-seven movie company was that we would, between us, produce a film that at least wouldn't lose them money. Your own soft-focus view of an ancient scandal obviously worked fine as a novel, and there's much of that that I've insisted on retaining. I've fought for you, whatever you may think.”

  “What, precisely, have you retained?” he demanded, hurting.

  “You wrote the whole first quarter as a semi-ghost story about the dream lovers of the wife who ended up hanged.”

  “Her dreams and illusions are in the screenplay,” I reminded him. “Her lovers are jockeys, the way you wrote them. But who were the real jockeys? Did they ride the horses her husband trained?”

  “They were in her mind.”

  “But why did she hang, Howard? Was she topped by one of the dream lovers? Did she do it herself? Did her husband kill her?”

  After a pause he said, “No one knows.”

  “I know they don't,” I said. “At least, no one ever told. But an ending of no explanation at all isn't going to get people paying to see the film.”

  He said sarcastically, “That bottom line again.”

  “I'll give you the dream lovers,” I said. “And you'll allow me an earthly explanation.”

  “That's not fair.”

  I gazed at him. He was old enough to know that few things were fair. Most five-year-olds had already discovered it.

  “What we are dealing with here,” I said, changing tack, “is three versions of the same story.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We have the story you wrote in your book. We have the story we're shooting in the film. And somewhere out of sight, way back in history, is what actually happened. Three views of the same facts.”

  Howard didn't argue.

  I said, “By Sunday, Howard, I'd like you to come up with a rational explanation of the wife's death.”

  “But it's already Thursday evening!” he exclaimed, horrified.

  “You've had literally years to work it out.”

  “But no one knows!”

  “Then guess.”

  “I can't,” he protested belligerently, “I've tried.”

  “Then I'll do it,” I said. “I'll work with you on the necessary scenes. We'll use most of your script as written, but your inconclusive ending is impossible.”

  “But it's what happened. There wasn't any ending to the story.”

  “For the film, there has to be.”

  “Don't you care about the facts?”

  “Perhaps, if we look closely enough,” I said, only half meaning it, “we might ourselves uncover those facts. What if we actually could find out what really happened?”

  “You can't,” Howard said flatly. “No one knows.”

  “No one's saying. That's different.” I paused. “What did Jackson Wells tell you, when you went to see him?”

  O'Hara had asked Howard the same thing, he'd told me, and Howard, to O'Hara's utter disbelief, had said he hadn't consulted Jackson Wells at all. Howard hadn't thought it necessary. Howard didn't want to risk unwelcome anti-climactic disclosures from Jackson Wells that might upset his lyrical tale of the dream lovers and the semi-mystical death.

  Moncrieff, strolling into the bar, seeing us, and crossing without hesitation to join us, saved Howard from having to answer.

  Howard and Moncrieff disliked each other without making much overt display of it. Moncrieff, no reader of novels, thought Howard a prissy, impractical, pseudo-intellectual nuisance on the set. Howard's expression made no attempt to disguise his disparagement of Moncrieff s unkempt appearance with the small straggly beard that was halfway between an artistic statement and a lazy approach to shaving.

  Neither of them had the least understanding of the other's function. Moncrieff, endlessly creative within the effects of lighting, needed to be given the actors, the scene and the intention of the storyline, but his enormous input was a moonshot outside the range of Howard's comprehension. Each of them, being acclaimed as individualists, wholly believed that it was he who was indispensable to any chance of esteem for the finished film.

  As Nash Rourke tended to think the same, also O'Hara, also myself and also the film editor who would cut some of his own opinions into our work, it was unlikely that anyone would end up wholly satisfied, even if the public approved. Howard, though he didn't seem to appreciate it, at least had more control of his own work than most authors.

  “What about those dream lovers, then?” Moncrieff asked abrasively.

  Howard became predictably defensive. “The wife imagines them. You don't need to worry about it.”

  “Oh, yes, he does,” I corrected mildly. “She may be imagining the jockeys, but we, the onlookers, are going to see them standing in her bedroom.”

  Howard looked aghast, to Moncrieff's amusement.

  “One at a time,” I explained. “She sees one in her bedroom. Another time, she sees another. And another. We have three tall ultra-handsome unknowns coming to dress up as the dream lovers. They won't look like real jockeys. They don't speak, and don't worry, Howard, they won't get into bed. The wife watches her husband from her bedroom window as he rides out with his string of horses to their morning exercise, then she turns into the room and conjures up her dream jockey lover. Moncrieff will light the jockey to make it clear that he's imaginary. Another day the wife will wave to her husband, and then turn and imagine a different lover.”

  Moncrieff nodded. “Easy.”

  “She dances with the third lover. Slowly, orgasmically. She's transported,” I said.

  Moncrieff happily nodded again.

  “So there you are, Howard,” I said. “The lovers are how you wrote them. No sex.”

  “All highly unlikely,” Moncrieff laughed. “Any jockey worth his salt would have her nightie off before her husband was out of the stable yard.”

  “She hanged,” I said. “No dream.”

  Both of them stared, silenced.

  Why did she hang, I wondered. The further we went with the filming, the more I wanted to know, yet until then it had been the results of that death, the accusations against her husband, and his handling of them, that had been the focus both of Howard's book and, more especially, of our film version.

  I gave a mental shrug. I hadn't time for any inept detective work, trying to unearth a secret twenty-six years buried. I had only to bully Howard into inventing a good reason and giving Nash a huge satisfactory last scene in which he discovered the truth – Howard's version of the truth - to end the film in perhaps cynical heroism.

  “What made you write the book?” I asked Howard.

  “You know what did. A newspaper article.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  He looked surprised and, as usual, displeased. “Yes, I suppose so,” he said grudgingly, “but not here.”

  “What paper was it in?”

  “I don't see that it matters.”

  Howard himself, in the ensuin
g pause, seemed to agree that he'd been unnecessarily ungracious.

  “The Daily Cable,” he said. “It was an obituary of the member of the Jockey Club that I called Gibber in the book.”

  I nodded. That much I knew. “What was Gibber's real name?”

  “Visborough.” He spelled it.

  “And who wrote the obituary?” I asked.

  “I've no idea,” Howard replied, still obstructively but this time with a surprise that gave his statement credence.

  “Didn't you follow it up?” I asked.

  “Of course not.” Howard became condescending. “You've no idea how a creative author writes. The inconclusiveness of the obituary was its own inspiration. I received the idea from the obituary and the book grew in my mind.”

  “So,” Moncrieff said, “you never even tried to find out what really happened?”

  “Of course not. But I didn't alter the account given in the obituary, not like O'Hara and Thomas have made me alter things for the film.” He was acridly bitter. “My readers will hate the film.”

  “No, they won't,” I said, “and hundreds of thousands of new readers will buy your paperbacks.”

  He liked that idea, however he might carp. He preened, smirking. Moncrieff s dislike of him visibly grew.

  Howard had had enough of Moncrieff, and of me too, no doubt. He got to his feet and left us, making no pretence of social civility.

  “He's an oaf,” Moncrieff said, “and he's belly-aching all over the place, to anyone who will listen, about the bastardising of his masterpiece. A few dream lovers won't shut him up.”

  “Who has he been belly-aching to?” I asked.

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes, it does. His contract forbids him to make adverse criticism of the film in public until six months after it has had a general release. If he's talking to the actors and the crews, that's one thing. If he's complaining to strangers, say in the bar here, I'll have to shut him up.”

  “But can you?” Moncrieff asked with doubt.

  “There are prickly punitive clauses in his contract. I had a sight of it, so I'd know what I could ask of him, and what I couldn't.”

  Moncrieff whistled softly through his teeth. “Did O'Hara write the contract?”

  “Among others. It's pretty standard in most respects. Howard's agent agreed to it, and Howard signed it.” I sighed. “I'll remind him tactfully tomorrow.”

  Moncrieff tired of the subject. “About tomorrow,” he said. “Still the six-thirty dawn call out in the stable yard?”

  “Definitely. The horses have to be exercised. I told all the stable lads this evening we'd be shooting them mounting and riding out through the gate to the exercise ground. They'll be wearing their normal clothes: jeans, anoraks, crash helmets. I reminded them not to look at the cameras. We'll take the overall scene of the lads mounting. Nash will come out of the house and be given a leg-up onto his mount. We'll rehearse it a couple of times, not more. I don't want to keep the horses circling too long. When Nash is mounted and comfortable the assistant trainer can lead the string out through the gate. Nash waits for them to go, and follows, last. As he leaves, he'll look backwards and up to the window from where his wife is supposedly watching. You've arranged for a camera crew up there to do the wife's point of view? Ed will be up there, supervising.”

  Moncrieff nodded.

  I said, “We'll cut the main shot once Nash is through the gate. I hope we won't have to do many retakes, but when we're satisfied, the string can go on and get their regular exercise, and Nash can come back and dismount. We're going to be repeating the whole thing on Saturday. We'll need a new view from the wife's room and different jackets et cetera on Nash and the lads. We'll need close shots of hooves on the gravel, that sort of thing.”

  Moncrieff nodded. “And Sunday?”

  “The Jockey Club people are letting us film out on the gallops, as there won't be many real horses-in-training working that day. You and I will go out by car on the roads on Saturday with a map for you to position the cameras. I know already where best to put them.”

  “So you should, if you were brought up here.”

  “Mm. Sunday afternoon, the horses go to Huntingdon racecourse. I hope to hell we have three fine mornings.”

  “What if it rains?”

  “If it's just drizzle, we go ahead with filming. Horses do go out in all weathers, you know.”

  “You don't say.”

  “Tomorrow afternoon,” I said, “we'll be indoors up in the enquiry-room set again, like today. The schedule you've got is unchanged. There are more exchanges between Gibber, Nash and others. Apart from the wide establishing shots, it's mostly short close-ups of them speaking. The usual thing. We'll complete Nash's shots first. If the others don't fluff their lines too much, we might get through most of it tomorrow. Otherwise we'll have to carry on on Saturday afternoon as well.”

  Moncrieff and I finished our drinks and went our separate ways, I upstairs to my room to make an arranged phone call to O'Hara in London.

  “How did the Jockey Club scene go?” he asked immediately.

  “Nash wowed them.”

  “Good, then.”

  “I think ... well, we'll have to see the rushes tomorrow ... but I think it was a sit-up-and-take-notice performance.”

  “Good boy.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “No, I meant ... well, never mind. How's everything else?”

  “All right, but,” I paused, “we need a better ending.”

  “I agree that the proposed ending's too weak. Hasn't Howard any ideas?”

  “He likes the weak ending.”

  “Lean on him,” O'Hara said.

  “Yes. Um, you know he based his book on the obituary of the man he called Gibber? His real name was Visborough.” I spelled it, as Howard had done. “Well, could you get me a copy of that obituary? It was published in the Daily Cable, Howard says. It must have been at least three years ago. Howard doesn't know who wrote it. He never followed anything up in any way. He says simply that the obituary, and especially its inconclusiveness, was what jolted his imagination into writing the book.”

  “You don't ask much!”

  “The Daily Cable must have a cuttings library. You'll certainly be able to get that obituary. Could you fax it to me here at Bedford Lodge? If I knew exactly what started Howard's imagination working in the first place, perhaps I could help him find an explosive denouncement.”

  “You'll have the obituary tomorrow,” O'Hara promised.

  “How's your friend?” he asked.

  “What friend?”

  'The one who's dying.'

  “Oh.” I paused. “He died during last night.”

  “Bad luck.”

  “He was old. Eighty something. A blacksmith turned top racing journalist, grand old character, great unusual life. Pity we can't make a film of him.”

  “Films of good people don't have much appeal.”

  “Ain't that the truth.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Valentine Clark,” I said. “The Daily Cable might do an obituary of him too, you never know. He wrote for the Racing Gazette. Everyone in racing knew him. And ... um ... he knew the real trainer, Jackson Wells, the basis of the character that Nash is playing.”

  “Did he?” O'Hara's attention sharpened down the line. “So you surely asked him what he knew of the hanging?”

  “Yes, I did. He knew no more than anyone else. The police dropped the case for lack of leads. Valentine said Jackson Wells's wife was an unmemorable mouse. He couldn't tell me anything helpful. It was all so very long ago.”

  O'Hara almost laughed. “It was very long ago for you, Thomas, because you're young. I'll bet twenty-six years is yesterday to Jackson Wells himself.”

  “I... er ...” I said diffidently, “I did think of going to see him.”

  “Jackson Wells?”

  “Yes. Well, Valentine, my dead friend, he was originally a blacksmith, as I told you. He
used to shoe my grandfather's horses regularly, and he did say he'd also sometimes shod the horses Jackson Wells trained. So perhaps I could make some excuse ... following Valentine's death ... to make a nostalgic visit to Jackson Wells. What do you think?”

  “Go at once,” O'Hara said.

  “He won't want to talk about the wife who hanged. He has a new life now and a second wife.”

  “Try, anyway,” O'Hara said.

  “Yes, I thought so. But he lives near Oxford ... it'll take me half a day.”

  “Worth it,' O'Hara said. 'I'll OK the extra time.”

  “Goodnight,” he said. “I've a lady waiting.”

  “Good luck.”

  He cursed me - “You son of a bitch” - and dis­connected.

  I'd always loved early mornings in racing stables. I'd been down in my grandfather's yard dawn by dawn for years, half my day lived before the first school bell. I tended, for the film, to make the horses more of a priority in my attention than perhaps I should have, moving about the yard, in close contact with the creatures I'd grown up among, and felt at home with.

  I'd ridden as an amateur jockey in jump races from the age of sixteen, with most of my family expecting horses in some way to be my life for ever, but fate and finance - or lack of it - had found me at twenty engaged in organising horses in Arizona for the cavalry in a Western drama. By twenty-one I'd become the director of a bad minor film about rodeo riders, but that had led to the same post in a noble native-American saga that had modestly hit the jackpot. After that I'd spent a year working for film editors, learning their craft, followed by another year on soundtracks and music, and by twenty-six I'd been let loose as director on an unconsidered romance between a boy and a puma that had made astonishing profits. O'Hara had been the producer: I had never since been long out of work. “The boy's lucky,” O'Hara would say, selling my name. “You can't buy luck. Trust me.”

  For this present film I'd suggested to O'Hara early in the pre-production stage that this time we should buy, not rent or borrow for fees, our stableful of horses.

  “Too expensive,” he'd objected automatically.

  “Not necessarily,” I'd contradicted. “We can buy cheap horses. There are hundreds that have never done well in races, but they look like good thoroughbreds, and that's what's important. Also we won't have any problems with insurance or recompense for injuries, we can travel them where and when we like, and we can work them without anxious owners fluttering round to fuss about their feed or exercise. We can sell them again, at the end.”