Longshot

by Dick Francis

  “Wow.” He turned it over and looked at his own face. “It’s really cool.”

  He began to pack all the small things back into the flat tin and remarked that fishhooks wouldn’t be much good away from rivers.

  “You can catch birds on fishhooks. They take bait like fish.”

  He stared at me. “Have you eaten birds?”

  “Chickens are birds.”

  “Well . . . ordinary birds?”

  “Pigeons? Four and twenty blackbirds? You eat anything if you’re hungry enough. All our ancestors lived on whatever they could get hold of. It was normal, once.”

  Normal for him was a freezer full of pizzas. He had no idea what it was like to be primevally alone with nature, and it was unlikely he would ever find out, for all his present interest.

  I’d spent a month once on an island without any kit or anything modern at all, knowing only that there was water and that I would be collected at the end, and even with those certainties and all the craft I’d ever learned, I’d had a hard job lasting out; and it was then that I’d discovered for myself that survival was a matter of mind rather than body.

  The travel agency, on my urgent advice, had decided against offering holidays of that sort.

  “What about a group?” they said. “Not one alone.”

  “A group eats more,” I pointed out. “The tensions are terrible. You’d have a murder.”

  “All right. Full camping kit then, with essential stores and radios.”

  “And choose the leader before they set out.”

  Even so, few of the “marooned” holidays had passed off without trouble, and in the end the agency had abandoned them.

  Gareth replaced the coil of fine wire in the tin and said, “I suppose this wire is for all the traps in the books?”

  “Only the simplest ones.”

  “Some of those traps are really sneaky.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “There you are, a harmless rabbit hopping along about your business and you don’t see the wire hidden in dead leaves and you trip over it and suddenly pow! You’re all tied up in a net or squashed under logs. Have you done all that?”

  “Yes, lots of times.”

  “I like the idea of the bow and arrows better,” he said.

  “Yes, well, I put in the instructions of how to make them effectively because our ancestors had them, but it’s not easy to hit anything if it’s moving. Impossible if it’s small. It’s not the same as using a custom-made bow shooting metal arrows at a nice round stationary target, like in archery competitions. I’ve always preferred traps.”

  “Didn’t you ever hit anything with a bow and arrow?”

  I smiled. “I shot an apple off a tree in our garden once when I was small because I was only allowed to eat wind-falls, and there weren’t any. Bad luck that my mother was looking out of the window.”

  “Mothers!”

  “Tremayne says you see yours sometimes.”

  “Yes, I do.” He glanced up at me quickly and down again. “Did Dad tell you my mother isn’t Perkin’s mother?”

  “No,” I said slowly. “I guess we haven’t come to that bit yet.”

  “Perkin and Jane’s mother died years ago. Jane’s my sister—well, half sister really. She’s married to a French trainer and they live in Chantilly, which is a sort of French Newmarket. It’s good fun, staying with Jane. I go summers. Couple of weeks.”

  “Do you speak French?”

  He grinned. “Some. I always seem to come home just when I’m getting the hang of it. What about you?”

  “French a bit, but Spanish more, only I’m rusty in both now too.”

  He nodded and fiddled for a bit putting the insulating tape back on the tin.

  I watched him, and in the end he said, “My mother’s on television quite a lot. That’s where Dad means I see her.”

  “Television! Is she an actress?”

  “No. She cooks. She does one of those afternoon programs sometimes.”

  “A cook?” I could hardly believe it. “But your father doesn’t care about food.”

  “Yeah, that’s what he says, but he’s been eating what you’ve made, hasn’t he? But I think she used to drive him barmy always inventing weird fancy things he didn’t like. I didn’t care that much except that I never got what I liked either, so when she left us we sort of relapsed into what we did like, and we stayed like that. Only recently I’ve been wishing I could make custard and I tried but I burned the milk and it tasted awful. Did you know you could burn milk? So, anyway, she’s married to someone else now. I don’t like him though. I don’t bother with them much.”

  He sounded as if he’d said all he wanted to on the subject and seemed relieved to go back to simple things like staying alive, asking to see inside kit number two, the black pouch.

  “You’re not bored?” I said.

  “Can’t wait.”

  I handed it to him and let him open its three zipped and Velcroed pockets, to lay the contents again on the bed. Although the pouch itself was waterproof, almost every item inside it was further wrapped separately in a small plastic bag, fastened with a twist tie; safe from sand and insects. Gareth undid and emptied some of the bags and frowned over the contents.

  “Explain what they are,” he said. “I mean, twenty matchbooks are for lighting fires, right, so what are the cotton-wool balls doing with them?”

  “They burn well. They set fire to dry leaves.”

  “Oh. The candle is for light, right?”

  “And to help light fires. And wax is useful for a lot of things.”

  “What’s this?” He pointed to a short fat spool of thin yellow thread.

  “That’s Kevlar fiber. It’s a sort of plastic, strong as steel. Six hundred yards of it. You can make nets of it, tie anything, fish with it, twist it into fine unbreakable rope. I didn’t come across it in time to put it in the books.”

  “And this? This little jar of whitish liquid packed with the sawn-off paintbrush.”

  I smiled. “That’s in the Wilderness book. It’s luminous paint.”

  He stared.

  “Well,” I said reasonably, “if you have a camp and you want to leave it to go and look for food or firewood, you want to be able to find your way back again, don’t you? Essential. So as you go, you paint a slash of this on a tree trunk or a rock, always making sure you can see one slash from another, and then you can find your way back even in the dark.”

  “Cool,” he said.

  “That little oblong metal thing with the handle,” I said, “that’s a powerful magnet. Useful but not essential. Good for retrieving fishhooks if you lose them in the water. You tie the magnet on a string and dangle it. Fishhooks are precious.”

  He held up a transparent film case, one of about six in the pouch. “More fishhooks in here,” he said. “Isn’t this what film comes in? I thought they were black.”

  “Fuji films come in these clear cases. As you can see what’s inside, I use them all the time. They weigh nothing. They’re everything-proof. Perfect. These other cases contain more needles and thread, safety pins, aspirins, water-purifying tablets, things like that.”

  “What’s this knobbly-looking object? Oh, it’s a telescope!” He laughed and weighed it in his hand.

  “Two ounces,” I said, “but eight by twenty magnification.”

  He passed over as mundane a flashlight that was also a ball-point pen, the light in the tip for writing, and wasn’t enthralled by a whistle, a Post-it pad or a thick folded wad of aluminum foil. (“For wrapping food to cook in the embers,” I said.) What really fascinated him was a tiny blow-torch which shot out a fierce blue flame hot enough to melt solder.

  “Cool,” he said again. “That’s really ace.”

  “Infallible for lighting fires,” I said, “as long as the butane lasts.”

  “You said in the books that fire comes first.”

  I nodded. “A fire makes you feel better. Less alone. And you need fire for boiling
river water to make it OK to drink, and for cooking, of course. And signaling where you are, if people are looking for you.”

  “And to keep warm.”

  “That too.”

  Gareth had come to the last thing, a pair of leather gloves, which he thought were sissy.

  “They give your hands almost double grip,” I said. “They save you from cuts and scratches. And apart from that they’re invaluable for collecting stinging nettles.”

  “I’d hate to collect stinging nettles.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. If you boil the leaves they’re not bad to eat, but the best things are the stalks. Incredibly stringy. You can thrash them until they’re supple enough for lashing branches together, for making shelters and also racks to keep things off the ground away from damp and animals.”

  “You know so much,” he said.

  “I went camping in my cradle. Literally.”

  He methodically packed everything back as he’d found it and asked what it weighed altogether.

  “About two pounds. Less than a kilo.”

  A thought struck him. “You haven’t got a compass!”

  “It’s not in there,” I agreed. I opened a drawer in the chest of drawers and found it for him: a slim liquid-filled compass set in a clear oblong of plastic which had inch and centimeter measures along the sides. I showed him how it aligned with maps and made setting a course relatively easy, and told him I always carried it in my shirt pocket to have it handy.

  “But it was in the drawer,” he objected.

  “I’m not likely to get lost in Shellerton.”

  “You could up on the Downs,” he said seriously.

  I doubted it, but said I would carry it to please him, which earned the sideways look it deserved.

  Putting everything on top of the chest of drawers, I reflected how little time I’d spent in that room amid the mismatched furniture and faded fabrics. I hadn’t once felt like retreating to be alone there, though for one pretty accustomed to solitude it was odd to find myself living in the lives of all these people, as if I’d stepped into a play that was already in progress and been given a walk-on part in the action. I would spend another three weeks there and exit, and the play would go on without me as if I hadn’t been on stage at all. Meanwhile, I felt drawn in and interested and unwilling to miss any scene.

  “This room used to be Perkin’s,” Gareth observed, as if catching a swirl of my thought. “He took all his own stuff with him when they divided the house. It used to be terrif in here.” He shrugged. “You want to see my room?”

  “I’d love to.”

  He nodded and led the way. He and I shared the bathroom which lay between us, and along the hallway lay Tremayne’s suite, into which he was liable to vanish with a brisk slam of the door.

  Gareth’s room was all pre-adolescent. He slept on a platform with a pull-out desk below and there were a good many white space-age fitments liberally plastered with posters of pop stars and sportsmen. Prized objects filled shelves. Clothes adorned the floor.

  I murmured something encouraging but he swept his lair with a disparaging scrutiny and said he was going to do the whole thing over, Dad willing, in the summer.

  “Dad got this room done for me after Mum left, and it was top ace at the time. Guess I’m getting too old for it now.”

  “Life’s like that,” I said.

  “Always?”

  “It looks like it.”

  He nodded as if he’d already discovered that changes were inevitable and not always bad, and in undemanding accord we shut the door on his passing phase and went down to the family room, where we found Tremayne asleep.

  Gareth retreated without disturbing him and beckoned me to follow him through to the central hall. There he walked across and knocked briefly on Mackie and Perkin’s door, which after an interval was opened slowly by Perkin.

  “Can we come in for five mins?” Gareth said. “Dad’s asleep in his chair. You know what he’s like if I wake him.”

  Perkin yawned and opened his door wider though without excessive willingness, particularly on my account. He led the way into his sitting room, where it was clear he and Mackie had been spending a lazy afternoon reading the Sunday newspapers.

  Mackie started to get up when she saw me and then relaxed again as if to say I was now family, not a visitor, and could fend for myself. Perkin told Gareth there was Coke in the fridge if he wanted some. Gareth didn’t.

  I remembered with a small jerk that it was in this room, Perkin and Mackie’s sitting room, that Olympia had died. I couldn’t help but glance around, wondering just where it had happened, where Mackie and Harry had found Nolan standing over the girl without underclothes in a scarlet dress, with Lewis—drunk or not—in a chair.

  There was nothing left of that violent scene now in the pleasant big room, no residual shudder in the comfortable atmosphere, no regrets or grief. The trial was over, Nolan was free, Olympia was ashes.

  Gareth, unconcerned, asked Perkin, “Can I show John your workroom?”

  “Don’t touch anything. I mean anything.”

  “Cross my heart.”

  With me still obediently in tow he crossed Perkin and Mackie’s inner hall and opened a door which led into a completely different world, one incredibly fragrant with the scent of untreated wood.

  The room where Perkin created his future antiques was of generous size, like all the rooms in the entire big house, but also no larger than the others. It was extremely tidy, which in a way I wouldn’t have expected, with a polished wood-block floor swept spotless, not a shaving or speck of sawdust in sight.

  When I commented on it Gareth said it was always like that. Perkin would use one tool at a time and put it away before he used another. Chisels, spokeshaves, things like that.

  “Dead methodical,” Gareth said. “Very fussy.”

  There was surprisingly a gas cooker standing against one wall. “He heats glue on that,” Gareth said, seeing me looking, “and other sorts of muck like linseed oil.” He pointed across the room. “That’s his lathe, that’s his saw-bench, that’s his sanding machine. I haven’t seen him working much. He doesn’t like people watching him, says it interferes with the feeling for what he’s doing.”

  Gareth’s voice held disbelief, but I thought if I had to write with people watching I’d get nothing worthwhile done either.

  “What’s he making at the moment?” I asked.

  “Don’t know.”

  He wandered around the room looking at sheets of veneer stacked against a wall and at little orderly piles of square-cut lengths from exotic black to golden walnut. “He makes legs with those,” Gareth said, pointing.

  He stopped by a long solid worktop like a butcher’s block and said to me over his shoulder, “I should think he’s just started on this.”

  I went across to look and saw a pencil drawing of a display cabinet of sharply spare and unusual lines, a piece designed to draw the eye to its contents, not itself.

  The drawing was held down by two blocks of wood, one, I thought, cherry, the other bleached oak, though I was better at living trees than dead.

  “He often slats one sort of wood into the other,” Gareth said. “Makes a sort of stripe. His things don’t actually look bad. People buy them all the time.”

  “I’m not surprised,” I said.

  “Aren’t you?” He seemed pleased, as if he’d been afraid I wouldn’t be impressed, but I was, considerably.

  As we turned to leave I said, “Was it in their sitting room that that poor girl died?”

  “Gruesome,” Gareth said, nodding. “I didn’t see her. Perkin did, though. He went in just after Mackie and Harry and found it all happening. And, I mean, disgusting ... there was a mess on the carpet where she’d been lying and by the time they were allowed to clean it up, they couldn’t. So they got a new carpet from insurance but Perkin acts as if the mess is still there and he’s moved a sofa to cover the place. Bonkers, I think.”

  I thought I mig
ht easily have done the same. Whoever would want to walk every day over a deathbed? We went back to the sitting room and one could see, if one knew, just which of the three chintz-covered sofas wasn’t in a logical place.

  We stayed only a short while before returning to the family room, where Tremayne was safely awake and yawning, getting ready to walk around his yard at evening stables. He invited me to go with him, which I did with pleasure, and afterwards I made cauliflower cheese for supper which Tremayne ate without a tremor.

  When he went out at bedtime for a last look around, he came back blowing on his hands cheerfully and smiling broadly.

  “It’s thawing,” he said. “Everything’s dripping. Thank God.”

  The world indeed turned from white to green during the night, bringing renewed life to Shellerton and racing.

  OUT IN THE melting woodlands, Angela Brickell spent her last night in the quiet undergrowth among the small scavenging creatures that had blessedly cleaned her bones. She was without odor and without horror, weather-scrubbed, long gone into everlasting peace.

  8

  Tremayne promoted me from Touchy to a still actively racing steeplechaser that Monday morning, a nine-year-old gelding called Drifter. I was also permitted to do a regular working gallop and by great good fortune didn’t fall off. Neither Tremayne nor Mackie made any comment on my competence or lack of it, only on the state of fitness of the horse. They were taking me for granted, I realized, and was flattered and glad of it.

  When we returned from the newly greenish-brownish Downs there was a strange car in the yard and a strange man drinking coffee in the kitchen; but strange to me only. Familiar to everyone else.

  He was young, short, thin, angular and bold, wearing self-assurance as an outer garment. He was also, I soon found, almost as foul-mouthed as Nolan but, unlike him, funny.

  “Hello, Sam,” Tremayne said. “Ready for work?”

  “Too sodding right. I’m as stiff as a frigging virgin.”

  I wondered idly how many virgins he had personally introduced to frigging: there was something about him that suggested it.