by Dick Francis
Hanging from a hook on one wall was a large appointments calendar with an extensive square allocated to each day. Crystal had entered the basics of my father’s advance plans in the squares so that one could see at a glance what he would be doing on each day.
The program had started the previous Tuesday with “Candidate arrives. Office familiarization.” Wednesday’s schedule of “Drive around constituency” had been crossed off, and “Fetch son from Brighton” inserted instead and underneath that, “Dinner at Sleeping Dragon?” Nothing about being shot at on the way home.
The Quindle engagements and the infant school evening were listed for Thursday, and door-to-door canvassing and the Town Hall debate for Friday.
More of the same stretched ahead. If I hadn’t had the interest of attempting to foil seriously dangerous attacks on said candidate I would have suffered severe strain of the smiling muscles long before polling day.
How could he face it, I wondered. How could he enjoy it, as he clearly did?
“Tomorrow,” he said, pleased with his inspiration, “tomorrow we’ll go to Dorset County racecourse. Tomorrow will be for Ben. We’ll go to the races.”
My first reaction was joy, which he noted. Fast on joy’s heels came a sort of devastation that I couldn’t hope to be riding there, that I would spend the afternoon as an exile, envying my neighbor his ox and his ass and his saddle in the amateurs’ steeplechase; but I let only the joy show, I think.
“We’ll go in the Range Rover,” my father said decisively, pleased with his plan. “And Polly will come with us, won’t you, Poll?”
Polly said she would love to.
Did Polly ever lie?
We drank the coffee without stress, my father finally as calm as he’d achieved during this whole strange week. Polly went out through the back office to retrieve her car and drive home, which I understood was a house in a wood outside the town, and my father and I, bolting everything securely, climbed the steep little staircase and slept undisturbed until Saturday morning.
Mervyn leaned in heavy annoyance on the bell at breakfast time and of course frowned heavily over the change of destination. How did George ever hope to be successful in a marginal seat if he neglected the door-to-door persuasion routine, which was of paramount importance? The Dorset County racecourse, sin of sins, was outside the Hoopwestern catchment area.
Never mind, my father soothed him, the many Hoopwestern voters who went to the races might approve.
Mervyn, unconvinced, shut his mouth grimly for half an hour, but as the day expanded decided to salvage at least crumbs from what he considered the ruins of canvassing’s best weekend opportunity and got busy on the telephone, with the result that we were invited to lunch with the racecourse stewards and were otherwise showered with useful tickets. Mervyn, from long experience, knew everyone of influence in the county.
He blamed me, of course, for the switch, and perhaps with reason. If he’d had his way he would have been dancing happy attendance on Orinda, walking backwards in her presence. What he would have done with A. L. Wyvern I couldn’t guess, but presumably he was used to the enigmatic shadow, as the Anonymous Lover had been deceased Dennis Nagle’s best friend also. They played golf.
Mervyn’s disappointments, I thought, shrugging off his ill will, were just too bad. In his life’s terms, success lay in getting his candidate elected or, if not elected, a close runner-up. Mervyn was not about to ruin his own reputation as agent out of tetchiness with Juliards, father or son.
The chilly atmosphere in the offices was lightened by an unexpected visit from the woman who ran the charity shop next door. She and Mervyn knew each other well, but she was fascinated to meet the new candidate, she said; she had seen us come and go, she wanted to shake hands with George, she’d heard his son was a doll, she wondered if we would like a homemade apple pie.
She put her offering on my father’s desk.
“Kind of you, Amy,” Mervyn said, and in his manner I read that not only had he known his neighbor a long time but he’d undervalued her for probably the whole period.
Amy was one of those people easy to undervalue; an apologetic, unassuming middle-aged widow (Polly said) who received gifts of unwanted junk, spruced them up a bit to sell, and would never have dipped into the till before passing on the proceeds to the charity that maintained her. Amy was fluffy, honest and halfway to stupid: also kind and talkative. One day of unadulterated Amy, I thought, would last a lifetime.
It was easy not to listen to every word in the flow, but she did grab our attention at one point.
“Someone broke a pane of glass in our window on Wednesday night and I’ve had a terrible job getting it mended.” She told us at far too much length how she’d managed it. “A policeman called, you know, and asked if the window had been broken by a rifle bullet but I said of course not, I clean the floor first thing when I arrive every morning because, of course, I don’t live upstairs like you can here. There’s only a bathroom and one small room I use for storage, though sometimes I do let a homeless person sleep there in an emergency. Anyway, of course I didn’t find a bullet. I told the policeman, Joe it was, whose mother drives a school bus, and he came in for a look ’round and made a note or two. I saw it in the paper about the gun going off and maybe someone was shooting at Mr. Juliard, you never feel safe these days, do you? And then, just now when I was dusting an old whatnot that I can’t seem to sell to anybody, I came to this bump, and I pulled it out, and I wonder if this was what Joe was looking for, so do you think I should tell him?”
She plunged a hand into a pocket in her drab, droopy cardigan and put down on the desk, beside the apple pie, a squashed-looking piece of metal that had certainly flown at high speed from a .22 rifle.
“I do think,” my father said carefully, “that you should tell your friend Joe, whose mother drives a school bus, that you’ve found the little lump of metal stuck in a whatnot.”
“Do you really?”
“Yes, I do.”
Amy picked up the bullet, squinted at it, and polished it a bit on her cardigan. So much for residual fingerprints, I thought.
“All right, then,” Amy said cheerfully, putting the prize back in her pocket. “I was sure you would know what I should do.”
She invited him to look around her shop, but he cravenly sent me instead, and so I found myself staring at an ugly six-foot-high cane-and-wicker whatnot that had stood near the window and had stopped the slug.
“I call it an étagère these days,” Amy said sadly. “But still nobody wants it. I don’t suppose you ... ?”
“No,” I said. And nor did I want any of the silver spoons or children’s toys or secondhand clothes neatly and cleanly arranged to do good.
I retrieved the Range Rover from its safe haven, picked up my father and (following Mervyn’s ungracious directions) found Polly’s unexpectedly grand house in the woods. She sat on the rear seat for our journey to the races, and with a touch of glee, detailed a few telephone calls she had made; a touch of persuasion here, a dangle of carrot there.
“Mr. Anonymous Lover Wyvern,” she said, “received a lovely last-minute invitation to play golf in the county’s top pro-am event of the year, an offer he’d have to have been ice to refuse. So off he was due to go with his precious clubs, and that was him out of the way.”
“How did you manage it?” my father asked admiringly.
“Inducements,” she said darkly. “And, shortly af terwards, Orinda got invited to the stewards’ box at the races....”
“That’s where we’re going too!” exclaimed my father.
“You don’t say!” Polly teased him. “Benedict,” she admonished me, “I’m giving you Orinda without the lover, so don’t waste the day.”
“But what can he do?” my father protested. “He knows,” Polly said. “How he’ll do it, I can’t tell, but trust your son.” She switched her attention back to me. “Orinda knows bugger all about racing. She’s going today for the snob value of a duke, w
ho’s one of the stewards. You’ll have to contend with that. Think you can do it?”
I said a bit helplessly, “I don’t know.” Polly’s forthright language always disconcerted me, although everyday lurid stable talk passed my ears unnoticed.
“Go for shit,” she said.
Orinda was already into lobster mousse with diced cucumber when we reached the stewards’ luncheon room, and although she looked outraged at our arrival she could do little but choke and recover with sips of wine, patted delicately on the back by the duke at her side.
The duke rose and gave Polly a conspiratorial kiss on the cheek, and I saw how Orinda had been hooked and reeled in.
Orinda wore a white linen suit with a green silk scarf tied and floating from a black lizard handbag that swung from the back of her chair. Sleek, matte-skinned, her presence easily eclipsed every other woman in the room, especially Polly, who had dressed as usual, as if not sure of the event or the season.
My father shook hands all around, his innate, unmistakable power turning every head his way, even in a roomful of powerful men. Orinda hated him.
“My son, Benedict,” he said, introducing me: but it was he who claimed their eyes.
The duke, hesitantly, said to me, “Haven’t I met you before? Haven’t you ridden against my son Edward?”
“Yes, sir. At Towcester last Easter. He won.” The duke had a remembering smile. “You finished third! It was Eddie’s birthday. We had an impromptu party to celebrate. You were there.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Nothing like racing, is there? Best thing on earth, Eddie says.”
My father looked sharply at my face.
“Best thing,” I said.
“Mind you,” the duke said to my father, “for all these young men, it’s only a hobby. Amateurs can’t make a living at it. The best amateurs used to be able to turn pro but for some reason it’s hardly ever done these days. Eddie needs a job. Amateurs can’t ride forever. I expect your Benedict knows all that. A good fellow, your Benedict, Eddie says. Sit down, Mr. Juliard. It’s an excellent lunch.”
He seated my father on the other side of him from Orinda, whose enjoyment of the day had waned to twilight, even though the sun outside shone brightly. She pushed away her unfinished mousse as if she could no longer taste it and had difficulty, with rigid facial muscles, in smiling at her host.
A stocky man of perhaps sixty, the duke looked less patrician than industrious, a worldly-wise business-man, a managing director more than a figurehead chairman. His son Eddie, a good fellow himself, had once said he envied the time I could give to racing: his own father insisted he work for his living. Well, I thought ruefully, Vivian Durridge and my own father had more than evened us up. Eddie’s father owned horses, which the son could ride in races, and mine didn’t.
Polly and I were seated several places down the lengthy, white-clothed dining table on the other side from the uncomfortable Orinda, and placidly ate our mousse and cucumber, which was, as the duke said, excellent, even though, now I’d been let off near-starvation, I would have preferred a large salami pizza.
There was some sort of curried chicken next. As time ran out towards the first race, the duke, looking at his watch, told my father that as chief steward for the day, he (the duke) would have to leave the party now in order to carry out his duties. As if by accident he saw the near panic on Orinda’s face at being left without a buffer zone between herself and her beastly usurper, and found an irresistible and apparently spur-of-the-moment solution.
With a flick of a glance at Polly, who was looking particularly bland, the duke said to Orinda kindly, “Now, Mrs. Nagle, I am truly concerned that you should enjoy and understand our splendid sport of steeplechasing, and as I’ll be busily occupied I can think of no one better to entrust you to than young Benedict there. He knows all about racing, in spite of his age, and he will take you ‘round and show you everything, and we will all meet up here again after, say, the second race. So, Benedict,” he spoke to me loudly down the table, “be a good fellow and take Mrs. Nagle down to see the horses walk ’round the parade ring. Watch the race with her. Answer her questions, right?”
I said “Yes, sir” faintly, and the duke, nodding benignly, more or less pushed Orinda into my arms. I sensed her begin to stiffen and refuse but the duke made urging motions towards the door as if there were no possibility of a change of his plans, and over my shoulder, as I followed the white linen suit into the passage outside, I caught glimpses of astonishment on my father’s face and a wide grin on Polly’s.
Orinda marched along the passage and down the stairs at the end into the open air, and there she stopped dead and said, “This is ridiculous.”
“Yes,” I said.
“What do you mean, ‘yes’?”
“I mean, you’re not going to listen to me because you hate my father, which is pretty unreasonable when you look at it, but I’d probably feel the same way, so if you like I’ll just leave you here and go and look at the horses, which is actually what I want to do anyhow.”
She said irritably, inconsequentially, “I’m old enough to be your mother.”
“Easily,” I said. Hardly tactful.
In spite of her fury she almost laughed. “You’re supposed to say I couldn’t be.”
“Sorry.”
“Mervyn says you’re only seventeen.”
“I’ll be eighteen in two weeks.”
“What will I do, if you just dump me here?”
“Well,” I said, “I won’t dump you. But if you want me to vanish, well, ‘round that corner you’ll find the parade ring, where the horses walk ’round before the race so that everyone can see what they’re putting their money on.”
“What if I want to bet?”
“Bookmakers or the Tote?”
“What’s going to win?”
I smiled at her with real goodwill. “If I knew, if anyone knew, I’d be rich.”
“And if you were rich?”
“I’d buy a string of racehorses, and ride them.”
I hadn’t expected the question, and the answer I’d given her came straight from the honesty of childhood. I wasn’t yet used to being adult. My mind, and also my voice and physical coordination, could switch disconcertingly sometimes back to fifteen, even in dreams to thirteen. Some days I could ski downhill with sharp turning certainty: other days I’d crash out on the first bend. Some days I’d move in total harmony with a horse’s gallop: other days I’d have gawky arms and legs. Always, so far always, I could shoot and hit the inner or the bull, a two-inch spot at a hundred yards.
Orinda said formally, “I’d be grateful if you’d accompany me to the parade ring.”
I nodded as if she were conceding nothing, and with minute body signs steered her to where the horses plodded around the ring, the sun shining on their coats, the smell and sound of them piercing my senses, the last four days setting up in me such an acute sense of loss that I wished myself anywhere on earth but on a racecourse.
“What’s the matter?” Orinda said.
“Nothing.”
“That’s not true.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
She had given me a perfect opening for what I wanted to say to her, but I miserably shrank from it. I hadn’t expected to feel so grindingly forlorn: an exile looking through a glass barrier at a life denied him.
I found a place .for us to stand against the rails of the parade ring, and I gave her my race card, as she had left her own upstairs. She needed spectacles from her handbag to see small print with, and help in identifying the runners from their number cloths.
“What do all these figures mean?” she asked, scratchily pointing to the card. “It’s double Dutch to me.”
“They tell you the horse’s age and how much weight he’s carrying in the race. Those very small figures tell you his results in the last races he’s run in.” I pointed. “F means fell, and P means he pulled up and didn’t finish.”
“Oh.” She
studied the card and read aloud the conditions of entry to the first race, a two-and-a-half-mile hurdle race for novices.
“A race for four-year-olds and upwards, which at the start of the season have not won a hurdle race ... but if they have won a hurdle race since the start of the season, they are to carry a 7-lb. penalty.” She looked up, disliking me. “What’s a 7-lb. penalty?”
“Extra weight. Most often flat thin sheets of lead carried in pockets in the weight cloth which lies over the horse’s back under the number cloth and saddle.” I explained that a jockey had to carry the weight allotted to his horse. “You get weighed before and after a race ...”
“Yes, yes, I’m not totally ignorant.”
“Sorry.”
She studied the race card. “There’s only one horse in this race carrying a 7-lb. penalty,” she announced. “Will he win?”
“He might if he’s very good.”
She turned the pages of the card, looking forward. “In almost every race a horse carries a penalty if it’s won recently.”
“Mm.”
“What’s the heaviest penalty you can get?”
I said, “I don’t think there’s any set limit, but in practice a 10-lb. penalty is the most a horse will be faced with. If he had to carry more than ten pounds extra in a handicap he almost certainly wouldn’t win, so the trainer wouldn’t run him.”
“But you could win with a 10-lb. penalty?”
“Yes, just about.”
“A lot to ask?”
“It depends how strong the horse is.”
She put her glasses away and wanted me to go with her to the Tote, where she backed the horse that had won on the first day of the season and earned himself an extra seven pounds of lead. “He must be the best,” she said.
Almost as tall as I was, Orinda walked always a pace ahead of me as if it were natural to her to have her escort in attendance to her rear. She was used to being looked at, and I did see that her clothes drew admiration, even if more geared to Ascot than a country meeting in the boondocks of rural far-from-all-crowds Dorset.
