Flying Finish

by Dick Francis

  ‘No.’

  He hesitated, but to my relief he left it, and when Gabriella asked, told her we had been arguing as to who should pay the bill. We shared it between us, but we didn’t leave for some time after that. We talked, I remember, about loyalty: at first about personal loyalty, and then political.

  Gabriella said that Milan had many communists, and she thought that for a Roman Catholic to be a communist was like an Arab saying he wanted to be ruled by Israel.

  ‘I wonder who they would be loyal to, if Russia invaded Italy?’ Patrick said.

  ‘That’s a big if,’ I said smiling. ‘Pretty impossible with Germany, Austria and Switzerland in between, not to mention the Alps.’

  Gabriella shook her head. ‘Communists begin at Trieste.’

  I was startled and amused at the same time, hearing an echo of my die-hard father. ‘Wogs begin at Calais.’

  ‘Of course they do,’ Patrick said thoughtfully. ‘On your doorstep.’

  ‘But cheer up,’ she said laughing. ‘Yugoslavia also has mountains, and the Russians will not be arriving that way either.’

  ‘They won’t invade any more countries with armies,’ I agreed mildly. ‘Only with money and technicians. Italian and French and British communists can rely on never having to choose which side to shoot at.’

  ‘And can go on undermining their native land with a clear conscience,’ Patrick nodded smiling.

  ‘Let’s not worry about it,’ I said, watching the moving shadows where Gabriella’s smooth hair fell across her cheek. ‘Not tonight,’

  ‘It will never touch us, anyway,’ Patrick agreed. ‘And if we stay here much longer Gabriella’s sister will lock us out.’

  Reluctantly we went out into the cold street. When we had gone ten paces Patrick exclaimed that he had left his overnight bag behind, and went back for it, striding quickly.

  I turned to Gabriella, and she to me. The street lights were reflected in her welcoming eyes, and the solemn mouth trembled on the edge of that transfiguring smile. There wasn’t any need to say anything. We both knew. Although I stood with my body barely brushing hers and put my hands very gently on her arms just below the shoulders, she rocked as if I’d pushed her. It was the same for me. I felt physically shaken by a force so primitive and volcanic as to be frightening. How could just touching a girl, I thought confusedly, just touching a girl I’d been longing to touch all afternoon and all evening, sweep one headlong into such an uncivilised turbulence. And on a main street in Milan, where one could do nothing about it.

  She let her head fall forward against my shoulder, and we were still standing like that, with my cheek on her hair, when Patrick came back with his bag. Without a word, smiling resignedly, he pulled her round, tucked her arm into his, and said briefly, ‘Come on. You’ll get run in if you stay here much longer like that.’ She looked at him blindly for a moment, and then laughed shakily. ‘I don’t understand why this has happened,’ she said.

  ‘Struck by the Gods,’ said Patrick ironically. ‘Or chemistry. Take your pick.’

  ‘It isn’t sensible.’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  He began to walk down the road, pulling her with him. My feet unstuck themselves from the pavement and re-attached themselves to my watery legs and I caught them up. Gabriella put her other arm through mine, and we strolled the mile and a half to where her sister lived, gradually losing the heavy awareness of passion and talking normally and laughing, and finally ending up on her doorstep in a fit of giggles.

  Lisabetta, Gabriella’s sister, was ten years older and a good deal fatter, though she had the same smooth olive skin and the same shaped fine dark eyes. Her husband, Giulio, a softly flabby man approaching forty with a black moustache, bags under his eyes, and less hair than he’d once had, lumbered ungracefully out of his arm-chair when we went into his sitting room and gave us a moderately enthusiastic welcome.

  Neither he nor Lisabetta spoke English or French so while the two girls made yet more coffee, and Patrick talked to Giulio, I looked around with some interest at Gabriella’s home. Her sister had a comfortable four bedroomed flat in a huge recently built tower, and all the furnishings and fabrics were uncompromisingly modern. The floors were some sort of reconstituted stone heated from underneath and without carpet or rugs, and there were blinds, not curtains, to cover the windows. I thought the total effect rather stark, but reflected idly that Milan in mid-summer must be an oven, and the flat had been planned for the heat.

  Several children came and went, all indistinguishable to my eyes. Seven of them, there should be, I remembered. Four boys, three girls, Patrick had said. Although it was nearly midnight, none of them seemed to have gone to bed. They had all been waiting to see Patrick and tumbled about him like puppies.

  When Lisabetta had poured the coffee and one of the children had handed it round Giulio asked Patrick a question, looking at me.

  ‘He wants to know what your job is,’ Patrick said.

  ‘Tell him I look after the horses.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘Nothing else.’

  Giulio was unimpressed. He asked another question.

  Smiling faintly, Patrick said, ‘He wants to know how much you earn?’

  ‘My pay for a single trip to Milan is about one fifth of yours.’

  ‘He won’t like that.’

  ‘Nor do I.’

  He laughed. When he translated Giulio scowled.

  Patrick and I slept in a room which normally belonged to two of the boys, now doubling with the other two. Gabriella shared a third bedroom with the two elder girls, while the smallest was in with her parents. There were toys all over the place in our room, and small shoes kicked off and clothes dumped in heaps, and the unchanged sheets on the boys’ beds were wrinkled like elephant skins from their restless little bodies. Patrick had from long globe trotting habit come equipped with pyjamas, slippers, washing things, and a clean shirt for the morning. I eyed this splendour with some envy, and slept in my underpants.

  ‘Why,’ said Patrick in the dark, ‘won’t you tell them you have a title?’

  ‘It isn’t important.’

  ‘It would be to Giulio.’

  ‘That’s the best reason for not telling him.’

  ‘I don’t see why you’re so keen to keep it a secret.’

  ‘Well, you try telling everyone you’re an earl’s son, and see what happens.’

  ‘I’d love it. Everyone would be bowing and scraping in all directions. Priorities galore. Instant service. A welcome on every mat.’

  ‘And you’d never be sure if anyone liked you for yourself.’

  ‘Of course you would.’

  ‘How many head grooms have you brought here before?’ I asked mildly.

  He drew in a breath audibly and didn’t answer.

  ‘Would you have offered me this bed if Timmie had kept his big mouth shut?’

  He was silent.

  I said, ‘Remind me to kick your teeth in in the morning.’

  But the morning, I found, was a long way off. I simply couldn’t sleep. Gabriella’s bed was a foot away from me on the far side of the wall, and I lay and sweated for her with a desire I hadn’t dreamed possible. My body literally ached. Cold controlled Henry Grey, I thought helplessly. Grey by name and grey by nature. Cold controlled Henry Grey lying in a child’s bed in a foreign city biting his arm to stop himself crying out. You could laugh at such hunger: ridicule it away. I tried that, but it didn’t work. It stayed with me hour after wretched hour, all the way to the dawn, and I would have been much happier if I’d been able to go to sleep and dream about her instead.

  She had kissed me good night in the passage outside her door, lightly, gaily, with Patrick and Lisabetta and about six children approvingly looking on. And she had stopped and retreated right there because it was the same as in the street outside the restaurant; even the lightest touch could start an earthquake. There just wasn’t room for an earthquake in that crowded fla
t.

  Patrick lent me his razor without a word, when we got up.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘You were quite right. I would not have offered to take you with me if the Welshman hadn’t said …’

  ‘I know.’ I put on my shirt and buttoned the cuffs.

  ‘All the same I still wouldn’t have asked you if I hadn’t thought you looked all right.’

  I turned towards him, surprised.

  ‘What you need, Henry, is a bit more self-confidence. Why ever shouldn’t people like you for yourself? Gabriella obviously does. So do I.’

  ‘People often don’t.’ I pulled on my socks.

  ‘You probably don’t give them half a chance.’ With which devastatingly accurate shot he went out of the door, shrugging his arms into his authoritative Captain’s uniform.

  Subdued by the raw steely morning, the three of us went back to the airport. Gabriella had dark shadows under her eyes and wouldn’t look at me, though I could think of nothing I had done to offend her. She spoke only to Patrick, and in Italian, and he, smiling briefly, answered her in the same language. When we arrived at the airport, she asked me, hurriedly, not to come and talk to her at the gift counter, and almost ran away from me without saying good-bye. I didn’t try to stop her. It would be hours before we got the horses loaded, and regardless of what she asked, I intended to see her again before I left.

  I hung around the airport all the morning with Conker and Timmie, and about twelve Patrick came and found me and with a wide grin said I was in luck, traffic at Gatwick was restricted because of deep snow, and unessential freight flights were suspended for another day.

  ‘You’d better telephone the studs again, and tell them we are taking the mares to England tomorrow at eight,’ he said. ‘Weather permitting.’

  Gabriella received the news with such a flash of delight that my spirits rose to the ionosphere. I hesitated over the next question, but she made it easy for me.

  ‘Did you sleep well?’ she asked gravely, studying my face.

  ‘I didn’t sleep at all.’

  She sighed, almost blushing. ‘Nor did I.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said tentatively, ‘if we spent the evening together, we could sleep tonight.’

  ‘Henry!’ She was laughing. ‘Where?’

  Where proved more difficult than I had imagined, as she would not consider a hotel, as we must not sleep there, but go back to her sister’s before midnight. One must not be shameless, she said. She could not stay out all night. We ended up, of all unlikely places, inside the D.C.4, lying in a cosy nest hollowed in a heap of blankets stacked in the luggage bay alongside the galley.

  There, where no one would ever find us, and with a good deal of the laughter of total happiness, we spent the whole of the evening in the age-old way: and were pleased and perhaps relieved to find that we suited each other perfectly.

  Lying quietly cradled in my arms, she told me hesitantly that she had had a lover before, which I knew anyway by then, but that it was odd making love anywhere except in bed. She felt the flutter in my chest and lifted her head up to peer at my face in the dim reflected moonlight.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’ she said.

  ‘It so happens that I have never made love in bed.’

  ‘Where then?’

  ‘In the grass.’

  ‘Henry! Is that the custom in England?’

  ‘Only at the end of parties in the summer.’

  She smiled and put her head down contentedly again, and I stroked her hair and thought how wholesome she was, and how dreadful in comparison seemed the half-drunk nymphs taken casually down the deb-dance garden path. I would never do that again, I thought. Never again.

  ‘I was ashamed, this morning,’ she said, ‘of wanting this so much. Ashamed of what I had been thinking all night.’

  ‘There is no shame in it.’

  ‘Lust is one of the seven deadly sins.’

  ‘Love is a virtue.’

  ‘They get very mixed up. Are we this evening being virtuous or sinful?’ She didn’t sound too worried about it.

  ‘Doing what comes naturally.’

  ‘Then it’s probably sinful.’

  She twisted in my arms, turning so that her face was close to mine. Her eyes caught a sheen in the soft near-darkness. Her teeth rubbed gently against the bare skin on the point of my shoulder.

  ‘You taste of salt,’ she said.

  I moved my hand over her stomach and felt the deep muscles there contract. Nothing, I thought, shaken by an echoing ripple right down my spine, nothing was so impossibly potent as being wanted in return. I kissed her, and she gave a long soft murmuring sigh which ended oddly in a laugh.

  ‘Sin,’ she said, with a smile in her voice, ‘is O.K.’

  We went back to her sister’s and slept soundly on each side of the wall. Early in the morning, in her dressing-gown, with tousled hair and dreaming eyes, she made coffee for Patrick and me before we set off for the airport.

  ‘You’ll come back?’ she said almost casually, pouring my cup.

  ‘As soon as I can.’

  She knew I meant it. She kissed me good-bye without clinging, and Patrick also. ‘For bringing him,’ she said.

  In the taxi on the way to the airport Patrick said, ‘Why don’t you just stay here with her? You easily could.’

  I didn’t answer him until we were turning into the airport road.

  ‘Would you? Stay, I mean.’

  ‘No. But then, I need to keep my job.’

  ‘So do I. For different reasons, perhaps. But I need to keep it just the same.’

  ‘It’s none of my business,’ he said, ‘but I’m glad.’

  We loaded the Italian mares and flew them to snowy England without another hitch. I soothed them on their way and thought about Gabriella, who seemed to have established herself as a warming knot somewhere under my diaphragm.

  I thought about her with love and without even the conventional sort of anxiety, for as she had said with a giggle, it would be a poor smuggler who couldn’t swallow her own contraband.

  Chapter Seven

  Stratford Races were off because of snow, which was just as well as Yardman squeezed in an extra trip on that day at very short notice. Seven three-year-olds to France, he said; but at loading time there were eight.

  I was held up on the way to Cambridge by a lorry which had skidded sideways and blocked the icy road, and when I reached the airport all the cargo had already arrived, with the box drivers stamping their feet to keep warm and cursing me fluently. Billy, and it was Billy again, not Conker and Timmie, stood about with his hands in his pocket and a sneer permanently fixed like epoxy resin, enjoying the disapproval I had brought on myself. He had not, naturally, thought of beginning the work before I arrived.

  We loaded the horses, he, I, and deaf old Alf, whom Billy had brought with him, and we worked in uncompanionable silence. There was a fourth groom on the trip, a middle-aged characterless man with a large straggly moustache and a bad cold, but he had come with one particular horse from an upper crust stud, and he refrained from offering to help with any others. Neither did he lend a hand on the journey, but sat throughout beside his own protégée, guarding it carefully from no visible danger. Billy dropped a handful of peat in my coffee and later poured his own, which was half full of sugar, over my head. I spent the rest of the journey in the washroom, awkwardly rinsing the stickiness out of my hair and vowing to get even with Billy one day when I hadn’t thousands of pounds worth of bloodstock in my care.

  During the unloading I looked closely at one inconspicuous brown mare, trying to memorise her thoroughly unmemorable appearance. She was definitely not a three-year-old, like all the others on the trip, and she was, I was sure, almost identical to the one we had taken to France the first day I flew with Billy. And very like the one we had brought back that afternoon on the second trip. Three mares, all alike … well, it was not impossible, especially as they had no distinct markings between
them, none at all.

  The special groom left us in Paris, escorting his own horse right through to its new home. He had been engaged, he said, to bring another horse back, a French stallion which his stud had bought, and we would be collecting him again the next week. We duly did collect him, the next Tuesday, complete with the stallion, a tight-muscled butty little horse with a fiery eye and a restless tail. He was squealing like a colt when we stored him on board, and this time there was some point in his straggly moustached keeper staying beside him all the way.

  Among the cargo there was yet another undistinguished brown mare. I was leaning on the starboard side of her box, gazing over and down at her, not able to see her very clearly against the peat she stood on and the brown horse on her other side, when Billy crept up behind me and hit me savagely across the shoulders with a spare tethering chain. I turned faster than he expected and got in two hard quick kicks on his thigh. His lips went back with the pain and he furiously swung his arm, the short chain flickering and bending like an angry snake. I dodged it by ducking into one of the cross-way alleys between the boxes, and the chain wrapped itself with a vicious clatter round the corner where I had been standing. Unhesitatingly I skipped through to the port side of the plane and went forward at top speed to the galley. Hiding figuratively under the engineer’s skirts may not have been the noblest course, but in the circumstances by far the most prudent, and I stayed with him, drinking coffee, until we were on the final approach to Cambridge.

  I did a good deal of hard thinking that night and I didn’t like my thoughts.

  In the morning I waited outside Yardman’s office, and fell into step with Simon as he shambled out to lunch.

  ‘Hullo,’ he said, beaming. ‘Where did you spring from? Come and have a warmer up at the Angel.’

  I nodded and walked beside him, shuffling on the thawing remains of the previous week’s snow. Our breaths shot out in small sharp clouds. The day was misty and overcast; the cold, raw, damp, and penetrating, exactly matched my mood.

  Simon pushed the stained glass and entered the fug; swam on to his accustomed stool, tugged free his disreputable corduroy jacket and hustled the willing barmaid into pouring hot water on to rum and lemon juice, a large glass each. There was a bright new modern electric fire straining at its kilowatts in the old brick fireplace, and the pulsating light from its imitation coal base lit warmly the big smiling face opposite me, and shone brightly on the friendliness in his eyes.