by Dick Francis
Charles smiled. ‘Mrs Cross sleeps in curlers and face cream. She’d never have let you see her at seven o’clock in the morning, short of an earthquake. She thinks you’re a lovely young man. She tells me so, every time you come.’
‘For God’s sakes.’
‘Will you be back here, tonight?’ he said.
‘I don’t know yet.’
He folded his napkin, looking down at it. ‘I’m glad that you came, yesterday.’
I looked at him. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Well, you want me to say it, so I’ll say it And I mean it.’ I paused a fraction, searching for the simplest words that would tell him what I felt for him. Found some. Said them. ‘This is my home.’
He looked up quickly, and I smiled twistedly, mocking myself, mocking him, mocking the whole damned world.
Highalane Park was a stately home uneasily coming to terms with the plastic age. The house itself opened to the public like an agitated virgin only half a dozen times a year, but the parkland was always out for rent for game fairs and circuses, and things like the May Day jamboree.
They had made little enough effort on the roadside to attract the passing crowd. No bunting, no razzamatazz, no posters with print large enough to read at ten paces; everything slightly coy and apologetic. Considering all that, the numbers pouring on to the showground were impressive. I paid at the gate in my turn and bumped over some grass to park the car obediently in a row in the roped-off parking area. Other cars followed, neatly alongside.
There were a few people on horses cantering busily about in haphazard directions, but the roundabouts on the fairground to one side were silent and motionless, and there was no sight of any balloons.
I got out of the car and locked the door, and thought that one-thirty was probably too early for much in the way of action.
One can be so wrong.
A voice behind me said, ‘Is this the man?’
I turned and found two people advancing into the small space between my car and the one next to it: a man I didn’t know, and a little boy, whom I did.
‘Yes,’ the boy said, pleased. ‘Hallo.’
‘Hallo, Mark,’ I said. ‘How’s your Mum?’
‘I told Dad about you coming.’ He looked up at the man beside him.
‘Did you now?’ I thought his being at Highalane was only an extraordinary coincidence, but it wasn’t.
‘He described you,’ the man said. ‘That hand, and the way you could handle horses … I knew who he meant, right enough.’ His face and voice were hard and wary, with a quality that I by now recognized on sight: guilty knowledge faced by trouble. ‘I don’t take kindly to you poking your nose around my place.’
‘You were out,’ I said mildly.
‘Aye, I was out And this nipper, here, he left you there all alone.’
He was about forty, a wiry man with evil intentions stamped clearly all over him.
‘I knew your car, too,’ Mark said proudly. ‘Dad says I’m clever.’
‘Kids are observant,’ his father said, with nasty relish.
‘We waited for you to come out of a big house,’ Mark said. ‘And then we followed you all the way here.’ He beamed, inviting me to enjoy the game. ‘This is our car, next to yours.’ He patted the maroon Daimler alongside.
The telephone call, I thought fleetingly. Not Chico. Peter Rammileese, checking around.
‘Dad says,’ Mark chatted on happily, ‘that he’ll take me to see those roundabouts while our friends take you for a ride in our car.’
His father looked down at him sharply, not having expected so much repeated truth, but Mark, oblivious, was looking at a point behind my back.
I glanced round. Between the Scimitar and the Daimler stood two more people. Large unsmiling men from a muscular brotherhood. Brass knuckles and toecaps.
‘Get into the car,’ Rammileese said, nodding to his, not to mine. ‘Rear door.’
Oh sure, I thought. Did he think I was mad? I stooped slightly as if to obey and then instead of opening the door scooped Mark up bodily, with my right arm, and ran.
Rammileese turned with a shout Mark’s face, next to mine, was astonished but laughing. I ran about twenty paces with him, and set him down in the path of his furiously advancing father, and then kept on going, away from the cars and towards the crowds in the centre part of the showground.
Bloody hell, I thought. Chico was right. These days we only had to twitch an eyelid for them to wheel out the heavies. It was getting too much.
It had been the sort of ambush that might have worked if Mark hadn’t been there: one kidney punch and into the car before I’d got my breath. But they’d needed Mark, I supposed, to identify me, because although they knew me by name, they didn’t by sight. They weren’t going to catch me on the open showground, that was for sure, and when I went back to my car it would be with a load of protectors. Maybe, I thought hopefully, they would see it was useless, and just go away.
I reached the outskirts of the show-jumping arena, and looked back from over the head of a small girl sucking an ice-cream cornet. No one had called off the heavies. They were still doggedly in pursuit. I decided not to see what would happen if I simply stood my ground and requested the assorted families round about to save me from being frog-marched to oblivion and waking up with my head kicked in in the streets of Tunbridge Wells. The assorted families, with dogs and Grannies and prams and picnics, were more likely to dither with their mouths open and wonder what it had all been about, once it was over.
I went on, deeper into the show, circling the ring, bumping into children as I looked over my shoulder, and seeing the two men always behind me.
The arena itself was on my left, with show-jumping in progress inside, and ring-side cars encircling it outside. Behind the cars there was the broad grass walk-way along which I was going, and, on my right, the outer ring of the stalls one always gets at horse-shows. Tented shops selling saddlery, riding clothes, pictures, toys, hot dogs, fruit, more saddles, hardwear, tweeds, sheepskin slippers … an endless circle of small traders.
Among the tents, the vans: ice-cream vans, riding associations’ caravans, a display of crafts, a fortune teller, a charity jumble shop, mobile cinema showing films of sheep dogs, a drop-sided juggernaut spilling out kitchen equipment in orange and yellow and green. Crowds along the fronts of all of them and no depth of shelter inside.
‘Do you know where the balloons are?’ I asked someone, and he pointed, and it was to a stall selling gas balloons of brilliant colours: children buying them and tying them to their wrists.
Not those, I thought. Surely not those. I didn’t stop to explain, but asked again, further on.
‘The balloon race? In the next field, I think, but it isn’t time yet.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. The posters had announced a three o’clock start, but I’d have to talk to John Viking well before that, while he was willing to listen.
What was a balloon race, I wondered? Surely all balloons went at the same speed, the speed of the wind.
My trackers wouldn’t give up. They weren’t running, and nor was I. They just followed me steadily, as if locked on to a target by a radio beam; minds taking literally an order to stick to my heels. I’d have to get lost, I thought, and stay lost until after I’d found John Viking, and maybe then I’d go in search of helpful defences like show secretaries and first-aid ladies, and the single policeman out on the road directing traffic.
I was on the far side of the arena by that time, crossing the collecting ring area with children on ponies buzzing around like bees, looking strained as they went in to jump, and tearful or triumphant as they came out.
Past them, past the commentating box … ‘Jane Smith had a clear round, the next to jump is Robin Daly on Traddles’… past the little private grandstand for the organizers and big-wigs – rows of empty folding seats – past an open-sided refreshment tent, full, and so back to the stalls.
I did a bit of dodging in and out of those, and round the backs,
ducking under guy ropes and round dumps of cardboard boxes. From inside the depths of a stall hung thickly outside with riding jackets I watched the two of them go past, hurrying, looking about them, distinctly anxious.
They weren’t like the two Trevor Deansgate had sent, I thought. His had been clumsier, smaller, and less professional. These two looked as if this sort of work was their daily bread; and for all the comparative safety of the show ground, where as a last resort I could get into the arena itself and scream for help, there was something daunting about them. Rent-a-thugs usually came at so much per hour. These two looked salaried, if not actually on the Board.
I left the riding jackets and dodged into the film about sheep dogs, which I dare say would have been riveting but for the shepherding going on outside, with me as the sheep.
I looked at my watch. After two o’clock. Too much time was passing. I had to try another sortie outside and find my way to the balloons.
I couldn’t see them. I slithered among the crowd, asking for directions.
‘Up at the end, mate,’ a decisive man told me, pointing. ‘Past the hot dogs, turn right, there’s a gate in the fence. You can’t miss it.’
I nodded my thanks and turned to go that way, and saw one of my trackers coming towards me, searching the stalls with his eyes and looking worried.
In a second he would see me … I looked around in a hurry and found I was outside the caravan of the fortune-teller. There was a curtain of plastic streamers, black and white, over the open doorway, and behind that a shadowy figure. I took four quick strides, brushed through the plastic strips, and stepped up into the van.
It was quieter inside and darker, with daylight filtering dimly through lace-hung windows. A Victorian sort of decor; mock oil lamps and chenille tablecloths. Outside, the tracker went past, giving the fortune-teller no more than a flickering glance. His attention lay ahead. He hadn’t seen me come in.
The fortune-teller, however, had, and to her I represented business.
‘Do you want your whole life, dear, the past and everything, or just the future?’
‘Er …’ I said. ‘I don’t really know. How long does it take?’
‘A quarter of an hour, dear, for the whole thing.’
‘Let’s just have the future.’
I looked out of the window. A part of my future was searching among the ring-side cars, asking questions and getting a lot of shaken heads.
‘Sit on the sofa beside me here, dear, and give me your left hand.’
‘It’ll have to be the right,’ I said absently.
‘No, dear.’ Her voice was quite sharp. ‘Always the left.’
Amused, I sat down and gave her the left. She felt it, and looked at it, and raised her eyes to mine. She was short and plump, dark-haired, middle-aged, and in no way remarkable.
‘Well, dear,’ she said after a pause, ‘it will have to be the right, though I’m not used to it, and we may not get such good results.’
‘I’ll risk it,’ I said; so we changed places on the sofa, and she held my right hand firmly in her two warm ones, and I watched the tracker move along the row of cars.
‘You have suffered,’ she said.
As she knew about my left hand, I didn’t think much of that for a guess, and she seemed to sense it. She coughed apologetically.
‘Do you mind if I use a crystal?’ she said.
‘Go ahead.’
I had vague visions of her peering into a large ball on a table, but she took a small one, the size of a tennis ball, and put it in the palm of my hand.
‘You are a kind person,’ she said. ‘Gentle. People like you. People smile at you wherever you go.’
Outside, twenty yards away, the two heavies had met to consult. Not a smile, there, of any sort.
‘You are respected by everyone.’
Regulation stuff, designed to please the customers.
Chico should hear it, I thought. Gentle, kind, respected … he’d laugh his head off.
She said doubtfully, ‘I see a great many people, cheering and clapping. Shouting loudly, cheering you … does that mean anything to you, dear?’
I slowly turned my head. Her dark eyes watched me calmly.
‘That’s the past,’ I said.
‘It’s recent,’ she said. ‘It’s still there.’
I didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe in fortune-tellers. I wondered if she had seen me before, on a racecourse or talking on television. She must have.
She bent her head again over the crystal which she held on my hand, moving the glass gently over my skin.
‘You have good health. You have vigour. You have great physical stamina … There is much to endure.’
Her voice broke off, and she raised her head a little, frowning. I had a strong impression that what she had said had surprised her.
After a pause, she said, ‘I can’t tell you any more.’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m not used to the right hand.’
‘Tell me what you see,’ I said.
She shook her head slightly and raised the calm dark eyes.
‘You will live a long time.’
I glanced out through the plastic curtain. The trackers had moved off out of sight.
‘How much do I owe you?’ I said. She told me, and I paid her, and went quietly over to the doorway.
‘Take care, dear,’ she said. ‘Be careful.’
I looked back. Her face was still calm, but her voice had been urgent. I didn’t want to believe in the conviction that looked out of her eyes. She might have felt the disturbance of my present problem with the trackers, but no more than that I pushed the curtain gently aside and stepped from the dim world of hovering horrors into the bright May sunlight, where they might in truth lie in wait.
11
There was no longer any need to ask where the balloons were. No one could miss them. They were beginning to rise like gaudy monstrous mushrooms, humped on the ground, spread all over an enormous area of grassland beyond the actual showground. I had thought vaguely that there would be two or three balloons, or at most six, but there must have been twenty.
Among a whole stream of people going the same way, I went down to the gate and through into the far field, and realized that I had absolutely underestimated the task of finding John Viking.
There was a rope, for a start, and marshals telling the crowd to stand behind it. I ducked those obstacles at least, but found myself in a forest of half-inflated balloons, which billowed immensely all around and cut off any length of sight.
The first clump of people I came to were busy with a pink and purple monster into whose mouth they were blowing air by means of a large engine-driven fan. The balloon was attached by four fine nylon ropes to the basket, which lay on its side, with a young man in a red crash helmet peering anxiously into its depth.
‘Excuse me,’ I said to a girl on the edge of the group. ‘Do you know where I can find John Viking?’
‘Sorry.’
The red crash helmet raised itself to reveal a pair of very blue eyes. ‘He’s here somewhere,’ he said politely. ‘Flies a Stormcloud balloon. Now would you mind getting the bell out, we’re busy.’
I walked along the edge of things, trying to keep out of their way. Balloon races, it seemed, were a serious business and no occasion for light laughter and social chat. The intent faces leant over ropes and equipment, testing, checking, worriedly frowning. No balloons looked much like stormclouds. I risked another question.
‘John Viking? That bloody idiot. Yes, he’s here. Flies a Stormcloud.’ He turned away, busy and anxious.
‘What colour is it?’ I said.
‘Yellow and green. Look, go away, will you?’
There were balloons advertising whisky and marmalade and towns, and even insurance companies. Balloons in brilliant primary colours and pink-and-white pastels, balloons in the sunshine rising from the green grass in glorious jumbled rainbows. On an ordinary day, a scene of delight, but to me,
trying to get round them to ask fruitlessly at the next clump gathered anxiously by its basket, a frustrating silky maze.
I circled a soft billowing black and white monster and went deeper into the centre. As if at a signal, there arose in a chorus from all around a series of deep-throated roars, caused by flames suddenly spurting from the large burners which were supported on frames above the baskets. The flames roared into the open mouths of the half-inflated balloons, heating and expanding the air already there and driving in more. The gleaming envelopes swelled and surged with quickening life, growing from mushrooms to toadstools, the tops rising slowly and magnificently towards the hazy blue sky.
‘John Viking? Somewhere over there.’ A girl swung her arm vaguely. ‘But he’ll be as busy as we are.’
As the balloons filled they began to heave off the ground and sway in great floating masses, bumping into each other, still billowing, still not full enough to live with the birds. Under each balloon the flames roared, scarlet and lusty, with the little clusters of helpers clinging to the baskets to prevent them escaping too soon.
With the balloons off the ground, I saw a yellow and green one quite easily; yellow and green in segments, like an orange, with a wide green band at the bottom. There was one man already in the basket, with about three people holding it down, and he, unlike everyone else in sight, wore not a crash helmet but a blue denim cap.
I ran in his direction, and even as I ran there was the sound of a starter’s pistol. All around me the baskets were released, and began dragging and bumping over the ground; and a great cheer went up from the watching crowd.
I reached the bunch of people I was aiming for and put my hand on the basket.
‘John Viking?’
No one listened. They were deep in a quarrel. A girl in a crash helmet, skiing jacket, jeans and boots stood on the ground, with the two helpers beside her looking glum and embarrassed.
‘I’m not coming. You’re a bloody madman.’
‘Get in, get in dammit. The race has started.’
He was very tall, very thin, very agitated.
‘I’m not coming.’
