Longshot

by Dick Francis

  “That’s right,” Tremayne said, reading my thought. “Perkin doesn’t work for me. Mackie does. Perkin never wanted to be a trainer and he has his own life. Gareth ... well ... Gareth might take over from me one day, but he’s too young to know what he’ll want. But when Perkin married Mackie he brought me a damned smart assistant, and it’s worked out very well.”

  Mackie looked pleased at his audible sincerity and it seemed the arrangement was to Perkin’s liking also.

  “This house is huge,” Tremayne said, “and as Perkin and Mackie couldn’t afford much of a place of their own yet, we divided it, and they have their private half. You’ll soon get the hang of it.” He finished his drink and went to pour himself another. “You can have the dining room to work in,” he said to me over his shoulder. “Tomorrow I’ll show you where to find the cuttings, videotapes and form books, and you can take what you like into the dining room. We’ll fix up the video player there.”

  “Fine,” I said. Food in the dining room would be better, I thought.

  Tremayne said, “As soon as it thaws I’ll take you racing. You’ll soon pick it up.”

  “Pick it up?” Perkin repeated, surprised. “Doesn’t he know about racing?”

  “Not a lot,” I said.

  Perkin raised ironic eyebrows. “It’s going to be some book.”

  “He’s a writer,” Tremayne said, a touch defensively. “He can learn.”

  I nodded to back him up. It was true that I had learned the habits and ways of life of dwellers in far places, and didn’t doubt I could do the same to the racing fraternity at home in England. To listen, to see, to ask, to understand, to check; I would use the same method that I’d used six times before, and this time without needing an interpreter. Whether I could present Tremayne’s life and times in a shape others would enjoy, that was the real, nagging, doubtful question.

  Gareth at long last blew in with a gust of cold air and, stripping off an eye-dazzling psychedelic padded jacket, asked his father, “What’s for supper?”

  “Anything you like,” Tremayne said, not minding.

  “Pizza, then.” His gaze stopped on me. “Hello, I’m Gareth.”

  Tremayne told him my name and that I would be writing the biography and staying in the house.

  “Straight up?” the boy said, his eyes widening. “Do you want some pizza?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Ten minutes,” he said. He turned to Mackie. “Do you two want some?”

  Mackie and Perkin simultaneously shook their heads and murmured that they’d be off to their own quarters, which appeared to be what Gareth and Tremayne expected.

  Gareth was perhaps five foot six with a strong echo of his father’s self-confidence and a voice still half broken, coming out hoarse and uneven. He gave me an all-over glance as if assessing what he’d got to put up with for the length of my visit and seemed neither depressed nor elated.

  “I heard the weather news at Coconut’s,” he told his father. “Today’s been the coldest for twenty-five years. Coconut’s father’s horses have their duvet rugs on under the jute.”

  “So have ours,” Tremayne said. “Did they forecast more snow?”

  “No, just cold for a few more days. East winds from Siberia. Have you remembered to send my school fees?”

  Tremayne clearly hadn’t.

  “If you’ll just sign the check,” his son said, “I’ll give it to them myself. They’re getting a bit fussed.”

  “The checkbook’s in the office,” Tremayne said.

  “Right.” Gareth took his Joseph’s coat with him out of the door and almost immediately returned. “I suppose there isn’t the faintest chance,” he said to me, “that you can cook?”

  4

  In the morning I went downstairs to find the family room dark but lights on in the kitchen.

  It wasn’t a palatial kitchen like Fiona’s but did contain a big table with chairs all around it as well as a solid-fuel cooker whose warmth easily defeated the pre-dawn refrigeration. I had been hoping to borrow a coat from Tremayne to go out to watch the horses, but on a chair I found my boots, gloves and ski suit with a note attached by a safety pin, “Thanks ever so much.”

  Smiling, I unpinned the note and put on the suit and boots, and Tremayne, in a padded jacket, cloth cap and yellow scarf came in blowing on his bare hands and generally bringing the arctic indoors.

  “Ah, there you are,” he said, puffing. “Good. Bob Watson brought up your clothes when he came to feed. Ready?” I nodded.

  “I’ll just get my gloves.” He checked also that I had gloves. “It’s as cold as I’ve ever known it. We won’t stay out long, the wind’s terrible. Come along.”

  As we went through the hall I asked him about the feeding.

  “Bob Watson comes at six,” he said briefly. “All horses in training get an early-morning feed. High protein. Keeps them warm. Gives them energy. A thoroughbred on a high-protein diet generates a lot of heat. Just as well in weather like this. You rarely find a bucket of water frozen over in a horse’s box, however cold it is outside. Mind you,” he said, “we do our best to stop draughts round the doors, but you have to give them fresh air. If you don’t, if you mollycoddle them too much, you get viruses flourishing.”

  As we stepped out into the open, the wind pulled his last words away and sucked the breath out of our lungs and I reckoned we were still dealing with perhaps ten degrees of frost, plus chill factor, the same as the evening before. It wouldn’t go on freezing for as long as in nineteen sixty-three, I thought: that had been the coldest winter since seventeen forty.

  A short walk took us straight into the stable yard, dark the night before and dimly seen, now lit comprehensively and bustling with activity.

  “Bob Watson,” Tremayne said, “is no ordinary head lad. He has all sorts of skills, and takes pride in them. Any odd job, carpentering, plumbing, laying concrete, anything to improve the yard and working conditions, he suggests it and mostly does it himself.”

  The object of this eulogy came to meet us, noticing I wore the ski suit, acknowledging my thanks.

  “All ready, guv’nor,” he said to Tremayne.

  “Good. Bring them out, Bob. Then you’d better be off, if you’re going to Reading.”

  Bob nodded and gave some sort of signal and from many open doors came figures leading horses, riders in hard helmets, horses in rugs. In the lights and the dark, with plumes of steam swirling as they breathed, with the circling movements and the scrunching of icy gravel underfoot, the great elemental creatures raised in me such a sense of enjoyment and excitement that I felt for the first time truly enthusiastic about what I’d set my hand to. I wished I could paint, but no canvas, and not even film, could catch the feeling of primitive life or the tingle and smell of the frosty yard.

  Bob moved through the scene giving a leg-up to each lad and they resolved themselves into a line, perhaps twenty of them, and processed away through a far exit, horses stalking on long strong legs, riders hunched on top, heads bobbing.

  “Splendid,” I said to Tremayne, almost sighing.

  He glanced at me. “Horses get to you, don’t they?”

  “To you too? Still?”

  He nodded and said, “I love them,” as if such a statement were no more than normal, and in the same tone of voice went on, “As the jeep’s in the ditch we’ll have to go up to the gallops on the tractor. All right with you?”

  “Sure,” I said, and got my introduction to the training of steeplechasers perched high in a cab over chain-wrapped wheels which Tremayne told me had been up to the Downs with his groundsman once already that morning to harrow the tracks and make them safe for the horses to walk on. He drove the tractor himself with the facility of long custom, spending most of his time not looking where he was going but at anything else visible around him.

  His house and stables, I discovered, were right on the edge of the grassy uplands, so that the horses had merely to cross one public road to be already on a d
ownland track, and the road surface itself had been thinly covered with unidentified muck to make the icy crossing easier.

  Tremayne waited until his whole string was safely over before following them at enough distance not to alarm them, then they peeled off to the right while we lumbered onwards and upwards over frozen rutted mud, making for a horizon that slowly defined itself out of shadows as the firmament grew lighter.

  Through the wind Tremayne remarked that perfectly still mornings on the long east-west sweep of downland across Berkshire and Wiltshire were as rare as honest beggars. Apart from that, the day broke clear and high with a pale-gray washed sky that slowly turned blue over the rolling snow-dusted hills. When Tremayne stopped the tractor and the silence and isolation crept into the senses, it was easy to see that this was what it had looked like up here for thousands of years, that this primordial scene before our present eyes had also been there before man.

  Tremayne prosaically told me that if we had continued up over the next brow we would have been close to the fences and hurdles of his schooling ground where his horses learned to jump. Today, he said, they would be doing only half-speed gallops on the all-weather track, and he led the way on foot from the tractor across a stretch of powdery snow to a low mound from where we could see a long dark ribbon of ground winding away down the hill and curving out of sight at the bottom.

  “They’ll come up here towards us,” he said. “The all-weather surface is wood chips. Am I telling you what you already know?”

  “No,” I said. “Tell me everything.”

  He grunted noncommittally and raised a pair of binoculars powerful enough to see into the riders’ minds. I looked where he was looking, but it took me much longer to spot the three dark shapes moving over the dark track. They seemed to be taking a long time to come up head-on towards us but the slowness was merely an illusion. Once they drew near and passed us their speed was vivid, stirring, a matter of muscles stretching and hooves thudding urgently on the quiet surface.

  Two or three at a time they all came up in their turn. “Both of those are Fiona’s,” Tremayne said from behind the binoculars, giving me a commentary as a pair of chestnuts scurried past, and, “The one on the left of this next three is my Grand National winner, Top Spin Lob.”

  With interest I watched the pride of the stable go past us and begin to pull up as he reached the brow of the rise, but beside me Tremayne was stiffening in dismay and saying, “What the hell—”

  I looked back down the hill in the direction of his binoculars but could see only three more horses coming up the track, two in front, one behind. It wasn’t until they were almost upon us that I realized that the one at the rear had no rider.

  The three horses passed us and began to slow down and Tremayne said “Shit” with fervor.

  “Did the lad fall off?” I asked inanely.

  “No doubt he did,” Tremayne said forcefully, watching through his glasses, “but he’s not one of mine.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean,” Tremayne said, “that’s not my horse. Just look at him. That’s not my rug. That horse isn’t saddled and has no bridle. Can’t you see?”

  When I looked, when he’d told me what to look for, then I could see. Tremayne’s horses had fawn rugs with horizontal red and blue stripes, rugs which covered the ribs and hindquarters but left the legs free for full movement. The rug of the riderless horse was brownish-gray, much thicker, and fastened by straps running under the belly and around in front of the shoulders.

  “I suppose you’ll think me crazy,” I said to Tremayne, “but maybe that’s the horse that was loose in the lane last night when we crashed. I mean, I saw it for only a split second, really, but it looked like that. Dark, with that sort of rug.”

  “Almost every racehorse wears that sort of rug at night in the winter,” Tremayne said. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, though. In a minute, I’ll find out.”

  He swung his binoculars back to where another couple of his string were putting on their show and calmly watched them before referring again to the stranger.

  “They’re the last,” he said as they sped past us. “Now let’s see what’s what.”

  He began to walk up beside the gallop in the direction of the horses and I followed, and we soon came over the brow to where his whole string was circling on snowy grass, steam swelling in clouds from their breath after their exertions. They were silhouetted against the eastern sun, their shapes now black, now gleaming. Brilliant, freezing, moving; unforgettable morning.

  Away to the left, apart from the string, the riderless horse made his own white sun-splashed plume, his nervousness apparent, his herding instincts propelling him towards his kin, his wild nature urging flight.

  Tremayne reached his horses and spoke to his lads.

  “Anyone know whose horse that is?”

  They shook their heads.

  “Walk on back to the yard then. Go back down the all-weather track. No one else is using it this morning. Take care crossing the road.”

  They nodded and began to form into a line as they had in the stables, walking off in self-generated mist towards the end of the gallop.

  Tremayne said to me, “Go back to the tractor, will you? Don’t make any sudden moves. Don’t alarm this fellow.” His eyes slid in the direction of the loose horse. “In the tractor’s cab you’ll find a rope. Bring it back here. Move slowly when you’re coming into sight.”

  “Right,” I said.

  He nodded briefly and as I turned to go on the errand he reached into a pocket and produced a few horse-feed cubes which he held out to the runaway, speaking to him directly.

  “Come on, now, fella. Nice and easy. Come along now, you must be hungry ...” His voice was calm and cajoling, absolutely without threat.

  I walked away without haste and retrieved the rope from the cab, and by the time I cautiously returned over the brow into Tremayne’s sight he was standing close to the horse, feeding him cubes with his left hand and holding a bunch of mane with his right.

  I stopped, then went forward again slowly. The horse quivered, his head turning my way, his alarm transmitting like electricity. With small movements I made a big loop in one end of the supple old rope and tied a running bowline, then went slowly forward holding the rope open, not in a small circle that might frighten the horse more but in a big loop drooping almost to my knees.

  Tremayne watched and continued to talk soothingly, feeding horse cubes one by one. I walked cautiously forwards, suppressing anything that could seem like doubt or anxiety, and paused again a step or two away from the horse.

  “There’s a good fella,” Tremayne said to him, and to me in the same tone, “If you can put the rope over his head, do it.”

  I took the last two paces and without stopping walked alongside the horse on the far side from Tremayne so that the horse’s head came as if naturally into and through the dangling loop. Tremayne moved his hand with the horse cubes away from the black muzzle just long enough for the rope to pass, and then still without abruptness I pulled the slack through the bowline until the noose was snug but not tight around the horse’s neck.

  “Good,” Tremayne said. “Give me the rope. I’ll walk him down to my yard. Can you drive the tractor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wait until I’m out of sight at the bottom. We don’t want him bolting from fright. I couldn’t hold him if he did.”

  “Right.”

  Tremayne fished a few more cubes out of his pocket and offered them as before but tugged gently on the rope at the same time. Almost as if making up his mind, as if settling for food and captivity, the great creature moved off with him peacefully, and the two of them trailed down to the dark strip of wood chips and plodded towards home.

  Food and warmth, I thought. Maybe I had a lot in common with that horse. What had I settled for, but a form of captivity?

  I shrugged. What was done was done, as Tremayne would say. I went down to the tractor and in due cour
se drove it back and parked it where it had been before we started out.

  In the now sunlit kitchen Tremayne was standing by the table, talking crossly into a telephone.

  “You’d have thought someone would have noticed by now that they’re missing a horse!” He listened a bit, then said, “Well, I’ve one here that’s surplus to requirements, so let me know.” He put the receiver down with destructive force. “No one’s told the police, would you believe it?”

  He took off his coat, scarf and cap and hung them on a single peg, revealing a big diamond-patterned golfing sweater over a boldly checked open-necked shirt. The same eye-clutter as in the family room; same taste.

  “Coffee?” he said, going towards the Aga. “You won’t mind getting your own breakfast, will you? Look around, take anything you want.” He slid the heavy kettle onto the hot plate and went along to a refrigerator which disgorged sliced bread, a tub of yellowish spread and a pot of marmalade. “Toast?” he said, putting two slices in a wire mesh holder which he slid under the second hot plate lid of the cooker. “There’s cornflakes, if you’d rather. Or cook an egg.”

  Toast would be fine, I said, and found myself delegated to making sure it didn’t burn while he put through two more phone calls, both fairly incomprehensible to my ears.

  “Plates,” he said, pointing to a cupboard, and I found those and mugs also and, in a drawer, knives, forks and spoons. “Hang your jacket in the cloakroom, next door.”

  He went on talking; positive, decisive. I hung my jacket, made the coffee and more toast. He put the receiver down with another crash and went out into the hall.

  “Dee-Dee,” he shouted. “Coffee.”

  He came back and sat down to eat, waving to me to join him, which I did, and presently in the doorway appeared a slight brown-haired woman who wore jeans and a huge gray sweater reaching to her knees.

  “Dee-Dee,” Tremayne said around a mouthful of toast, “this is John Kendall, my writer.” To me he added, “Dee-Dee’s my secretary.”

  I stood up politely and she told me unsmilingly to sit down. My first impression of her as she went across to the Aga to make her own coffee was that she was like a cat, ultra soft-footed, fluid in movement and totally self-contained.