Longshot

by Dick Francis

  Before we went we met in the family room, Tremayne pretending nonchalance and looking unexpectedly sophisticated in his dinner jacket: gray hair smooth in wings, strong features composed, bulky body slimmed by ample expert tailoring. Perkin’s jacket by contrast looked a shade too small for him and in hugging his incipient curves diminished the difference between the sizes of father and son.

  Gareth’s appearance surprised everyone, especially Tremayne: he made a bravado entrance to cover shyness in a dinner jacket no one knew he had, and he looked neat, personable and much older than fifteen.

  “Where did you get that?” his father asked, marveling.

  “Picked it off a raspberry bush.” He smiled widely. “Well, actually, Sam said I was the same height as him now and he happened to have two. So he’s lent it to me. OK?”

  “It’s great,” Mackie said warmly, herself shapely in a shimmering black dress edged with velvet. “And John’s jacket, I see, survived the plunge into the ditch.”

  The ditch seemed a long time ago: two weeks and three days back to the lonely silent abandoned struggle in the attic, to the life that seemed now to be the dream, with Shellerton the reality. Shellerton the brightly lit stage, Chiswick the darkened amphitheater where one sat watching from the balcony.

  “Don’t get plastered tonight, John,” Tremayne said. “I’ve a job for you in the morning.”

  “Do you know how to avoid a hangover forever?” Gareth asked me.

  “How?” I said.

  “Stay drunk.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said, laughing.

  Tremayne, happy with life, said, “You feel confident riding Drifter now, don’t you?”

  “More or less,” I agreed.

  “Tomorrow you can ride Fringe. I own a half-share in him. He’s that five-year-old in the corner box. You can school him over hurdles.”

  I must have looked as astonished as I felt. I glanced at Mackie, saw her smiling, and knew she and Tremayne must have discussed it.

  “Second lot,” Tremayne said. “Ride Drifter first lot as usual.”

  “If you think so,” I said a shade weakly.

  “If you stay here a bit longer,” Tremayne said, “and if you ride schooling satisfactorily, I don’t see why you shouldn’t eventually have a mount in an amateur race, if you put your mind to it.”

  “Cool,” Gareth said fervently.

  “I shouldn’t think he wants to,” Perkin remarked as I hadn’t answered in a rush. “You can’t make him.”

  An offer I couldn’t refuse, Dee-Dee had said; and I’d thought only of money. Instead he was holding out like a carrot a heart-stopping headlong plunge into a new dimension of existence.

  “Say you will,” Gareth begged.

  Here goes impulse again, I thought. To hell with the helium balloon, it could wait a bit longer.

  “I will.” I looked at Tremayne. “Thank you.”

  He nodded, beaming and satisfied, saying, “We’ll apply for your permit next week.”

  We all loaded into the Volvo and went down to Shellerton Manor where everyone trooped in to see Harry. Tired but cheerful, he held court from his chair and accepted Mackie’s heartfelt kiss with appreciative good humor.

  “I’m so glad you’re alive,” she said, with a suspicion of tears, and he stroked her arm and said lightly that he was too, on the whole.

  “What did it feel like?” Perkin said curiously, glancing at the bandaged leg.

  “It happened too fast to feel much,” Harry said, smiling lopsidedly. “If John hadn’t been there I’d have died without knowing it, I dare say.”

  “Don’t!” Fiona exclaimed. “I can’t bear even to think of it. Tremayne, off you go or you’ll be late. John and I will pick up Erica and see you soon.” She swept them out, following them, fearing perhaps that they would add to Harry’s fatigue, and he and I looked at each other across the suddenly empty room in a shared fundamental awareness.

  “Do you know who did it?” he asked, weariness and perhaps despair returning, stress visible.

  I shook my head.

  “Couldn’t be someone I know.” He meant that he didn’t want it to be. “They meant to kill me, dammit.”

  “Dreary thought.”

  “I don’t want to guess. I try not to. It’s pretty awful to know someone hates me enough ...” He swallowed. “That hurts more than my leg.”

  “Yes.” I hesitated. “It was maybe not hate. More like a move in a chess game. And it went wrong, don’t forget. The strong presumption of guilt has changed to a stronger presumption of innocence. Entirely and diametrically the wrong result. That can’t be bad.”

  “I’ll hang on to that.”

  I nodded. “Better than a funeral.”

  “Anything is.” He dredged up a smile. “I’ve got a neighbor coming in to be with me tonight while you’re all out. I feel a bit of a coward.”

  “Rubbish. Bodyguards make good sense.”

  “Do you want a permanent job?”

  Fiona returned, pulling on a fluffy white wrap over her red silk dress, saying she really didn’t want to go to the dinner and being persuaded again by her husband. He would be fine, he said, his friend would be there in a moment and good-bye, have a good time, give Tremayne the evening of his life.

  Fiona drove her own car, the twin of Harry’s (still lost) and settled Erica Upton in the front beside her when we collected her on a westerly detour. The five-star novelist gave me an unfathomable glimmer when I closed the car door for her and remarked that she’d had a long chat with Harry that afternoon on the telephone.

  “He told me to lay off you, as you’d saved his life,” she announced baldly. “A proper spoilsport.”

  I said in amusement, “I don’t suppose you’ll obey him.”

  I heard the beginning of a chuckle from the front seat, quickly stifled. The battle lines, it seemed, had already been drawn. Hostilities however were in abeyance during arrival at the racecourse, disrobing, hair tidying and first drinks. Half the racing world seemed to have embraced the occasion, for which after the last race that afternoon there had been much speedy unrolling of glittering black and silver ceiling-to-floor curtaining, transforming the workaday interior of the grandstand into something ephemerally magnificent.

  “Theatrical,” Erica said disapprovingly of the decor, and so it was, but none the worse for that. It lifted the spirits, caused conversation, got the party going. Background music made a change from bookies’ cries. Fiona looked at the seating plan and said to meet at table six. People came and surrounded her and Erica, and I drifted away from them and around, seeing a few people I knew by sight and hundreds I didn’t. Like being at a gravediggers’ convention, I thought, when one had marked out one’s first plot.

  My thoughts ran too much on death.

  Bob Watson was there, dapper in a dark-gray suit, with Ingrid shyly pretty in pale blue.

  “Couldn’t let down the guv’nor,” Bob said cheerfully. “Anyway, he gave us the tickets.”

  “Jolly good,” I said inanely.

  “You’re riding Fringe tomorrow,” he said, halfway between announcement and question. “Schooling. The guv’nor just told me.”

  “Yes.”

  “Fringe will look after you,” he said inscrutably, looking around. “Done this place up like an Egyptian brothel, haven’t they?”

  “I don’t really know.”

  “Oh, very funny.”

  Ingrid giggled. Bob quelled her with a look, but I noticed slightly later and indeed all evening that she stuck very closely to his side, which could have been interpreted as her own insecurity if I hadn’t remembered Mackie saying that meek little Ingrid never gave Bob much chance to stray with the likes of Angela Brickell and God help him if he did.

  Sam Yaeger, ever an exhibitionist, had come in a white dinner jacket, having lent Gareth his black. He also had a frilled white shirt, a black shoestring tie and a definite air of strain under the confident exterior. Doone, it appeared, had more or less accus
ed him straight out of sabotaging his own boathouse.

  “He says I had the tools, the knowledge, the opportunity and the location, and he looked up those races I rode at Ascot and worked out that I could have had time between the first two and the last to drive to Maidenhead and remove Harry’s car. I asked why should I bother to do that when presumably if I had set the trap I would expect Harry’s car still to be there after the races, and he just wrote down my answer as if I’d made a confession.”

  “He’s persistent.”

  “He listens to you,” Sam said. “We’ve all noticed. Can’t you tell him I didn’t bloody do it?”

  “I could try.”

  “And he whistled up his cohorts after you’d gone,” Sam complained, “and they came with wet-suits and grappling irons and a heavy magnet and dredged up a lot of muck from the dock. An old broken bicycle frame, some rusted railings, an old disintegrating metal gate ... it had all been lying here and there on the property. They clammed up after a bit and wouldn’t show me everything, but he thinks I put it all in the water hoping Harry would get tangled in it.”

  “Which he did.”

  “So I’m asking you how come you didn’t get spiked when you went down there after him?”

  “I learned how to jump into shallow water very young. So I didn’t go down far. Put my feet down cautiously after I was floating.”

  He stared. “How do you do that?”

  “Jump shallow? The second your feet touch the water you raise your knees and crumple into a ball. The water itself acts as a brake. You must have done it yourself sometime or other. And I had the air in my clothes to hold me up, don’t forget.”

  “Doone asked me if I’d left your jacket and boots in Harry’s car. Tricky bastard. I know now how Harry’s been feeling. You get that flatfoot looking to tie you in knots and it’s like being squeezed by coils and coils of a sodding boa constrictor. Everything you say, he takes it in the wrong way. And he looks so damned harmless. He got me so riled I lost a race this afternoon I should have won. Don’t say I said that. I don’t bloody know why we all tell you things. You don’t belong here.”

  “Perhaps that’s why.”

  “Yeah, perhaps.”

  He seemed to have let out sufficient steam and resentment for the moment and turned to flirt obligingly with a middle-aged woman who touched his arm in pleased anticipation. Owners, Tremayne had said, either loved or hated Sam’s manner: the women loved, the men put up with it in exchange for winners.

  Nolan, glowering routinely at Sam from a few feet away, switched his ill-humor to me.

  “I don’t want you treading on my effing toes,” he said forcefully. “Why don’t you clear off out of Shellerton?”

  “I will in a while.”

  “I told Tremayne there’ll be trouble if he gives you any of my rides.”

  “Ah.”

  “He has the effing gall to say I suggested it myself and he knows bloody well I was taking the piss.” He glared at me. “I don’t understand what Fiona sees in you. I told her you’re just a bag of shit with a pretty face who needs his arse kicked. You keep away from her horses, understand?”

  I understood that he like everyone else was suffering from the atmospheric blight cast by Angela Brickell, he perhaps most because the strain of his own trial and conviction was so recent. There was no way I was ever going to ride as well as he did and he surely knew it. Fiona would never jock him off, in racing’s descriptive phrase.

  He stomped away, his place almost immediately taken by his brother, who gave me a malicious imitation of a smile and said, “Nolan doesn’t expletive like you, dear heart.”

  “You don’t say.”

  Lewis was sober, so far. Also unaccompanied, like Nolan, though Harry had mentioned at one time that Lewis was married: his reclusive wife preferred to stay at home to avoid the fuss and fracas of Lewis drunk.

  “Nolan likes to be the center of attention and you’ve usurped his pinnacle,” Lewis said.

  “Rubbish.”

  “Fiona and Mackie look to you, now, not to him. And as for Tremayne, as for Gareth ...” He gave me a sly leer. “Don’t put your neck within my brother’s reach.”

  “Lewis!” His lack of fraternal feeling shocked me more than his suggestion. “You stuck your neck out for him, anyway.”

  “Sometimes I hate him,” he said with undoubted truth, and wheeled away as if he had said enough.

  Glasses in hand, the chattering groups mixed and mingled, broke and reformed, greeted each other with glad cries as if they hadn’t seen each other for years, not just that afternoon. Tremayne, large smile a permanence, received genuinely warm congratulations with believable modesty and Gareth, appearing eel-like at my elbow, said with gratification, “He deserves it, doesn’t he?”

  “He does.”

  “It makes you think a bit.”

  “What about?”

  “I mean, he’s just Dad.” He struggled to get it right. “Everyone’s two people, aren’t they?”

  I said with interest, “That’s profound.”

  “Get away.” He felt awkward at the compliment. “I’m glad for him, anyway.”

  He snaked off again and within minutes the throng began moving towards dinner, dividing into ten to a table, lowering bottoms onto inadequate chairs, fingering menus, peering at the print through candlelight, scanning their allotted neighbors. At table number six I found myself placed between Mackie and Erica Upton, who were already seated.

  Erica was inevitable, I supposed, though I suspected Fiona had switched a few place cards before I reached there: a certain bland innocence gave her away.

  “I did ask to sit next to you,” Erica remarked, as if reading my thoughts as I sat down, “once I knew you’d be here.”

  “Er ... why?”

  “Do you have so little self-confidence?”

  “It depends who I’m with.”

  “And by yourself?.”

  “In a desert, plenty. With pencil and paper, little.”

  “Quite right.”

  “And you?” I asked.

  “I don’t answer that sort of question.”

  I listened to the starch in her voice, observed it in the straightness of her backbone, recognized the ramrod will that made no concessions to hardship.

  “I could take you across a desert,” I said.

  She gave me a long piercing inspection. “I hope that’s not an accolade.”

  “An assessment,” I said.

  “You’ve found your courage since I met you last.”

  She had a way of leaving one without an answer. She turned away, satisfied, to talk to Nolan on her other side, and I, abandoned, found Mackie on my right smiling with enjoyment.

  “She’s met her match,” she said.

  I shook my head regretfully. “If I could write like her ... or ride like Sam or Nolan ... if I could do anything that well, I’d be happy.”

  Her smile sweetened. “Try cooking.”

  “Dammit ...”

  She laughed. “I hear the power of your bananas flambé made Gareth oversleep.”

  Perkin, on her other side, murmured something to get her attention and for a while I watched Tremayne make the best of our table having been graced by the sponsor’s wife, a gushing froth of a lady in unbecoming lemon. He would clearly have preferred to be talking to Fiona on his other side, but the award was having to be paid for with polite-ness. He glanced across the table, saw me smiling, interpreted my thought and gave me a slow ironic blink.

  He soldiered manfully through the salmon soufflé and the beef Wellington while Lewis on the lady’s other side put away a tumblerful of vodka poured from a half-bottle in his pocket. Fiona watched him with a frown: Lewis’s drinking, even to my eyes, was increasingly without shame. Almost as if, having proclaimed himself paralytic in court, he was setting about proving it over and over again.

  Glumly fidgeting between Lewis and Perkin, Gareth ate everything fast and looked bored. Perkin with brotherly bossin
ess told him to stop kicking the table leg and Gareth uncharacteristically sulked. Mackie made a placatory remark and Perkin snapped at her too.

  She turned her head my way and with a frown asked, “What’s wrong with everyone?”

  “Tension.”

  “Because of Harry?” She nodded to herself. “We all pretend, but no one can help wondering ... This time it’s much worse. Last time at least we knew how Olympia died. Angela Brickell’s on everyone’s nerves. Nothing feels safe anymore.”

  “You’re safe,” I said. “You and Perkin. Think about the baby.”

  Her face cleared as if automatically: the thought of the baby could diminish to trivia the grimmest forebodings.

  Perkin on her other side was saying contritely, “Sorry, darling, sorry,” and she turned to him with ever-ready forgiveness, the adult of the pair. I wondered fleetingly if Perkin, as a father, would be jealous of his child.

  Dinner wound to a close: speeches began. Cultured gents, identified for me by Mackie as being the Himalayan peaks of the Jockey Club, paid compliments to Tremayne from an adjacent table and bowed low to the sponsor. He, the lemon lady’s husband, eulogized Tremayne, who winced only slightly over Top Spin Lob being slurred to Topsy Blob, and a minion in the livery of Castle Houses brought forth a tray bearing the award itself, a silver bowl rimmed by a circle of small galloping horses, an award actually worthy of the occasion.

  Tremayne was pink with gratification. He accepted the bowl. Everyone cheered. Photos flashed. Tremayne made a brief speech of all-around thanks: thanks to the sponsors, to his friends, his staff, his jockeys, to racing itself. He sat down, overcome. Everyone cheered him again and clapped loudly. I began to wonder how many of them would buy Tremayne’s book. I wondered whether after that night Tremayne would need the book written.

  “Wasn’t that great?” Mackie exclaimed, glowing.

  “Yes, indeed.”

  The background music became dance music. People moved about, flocking around Tremayne, patting his back. Perkin took Mackie to shuffle on the square of dance floor adjoining the table. Nolan took Fiona, Lewis got drunker, Gareth vanished, the sponsor retrieved his lady: Erica and I sat alone.