by Dick Francis
It had been at one of the points of no prospects that Jonathan had sent the cable.
CATCH THE NEXT FLIGHT. GOOD JOB IN ENGLISH RACING POSSIBLE IF YOU INTERVIEW HERE IMMEDIATELY. JONATHAN
I’d turned up that night on his Californian doorstep sixteen hours later, and early the next morning he had sent me off to see “a man I met at a party.” A man, it transpired, of middle height, middle years and middling gray hair: a man I knew instantly by sight. Everyone in racing, worldwide, knew him by sight. He ran his racing as a big business, taking his profits in the shape of bloodstock, selling his stallions for up to a hundred times more than they’d earned on the track.
“Luke Houston,” he said neutrally, extending his hand.
“Yes, sir,” I said, retrieving some breath. “Er, William Derry.”
He offered me breakfast on a balcony overlooking the Pacific, eating grapefruit and boiled eggs and giving me smiling genial glances which were basically as casual as X-rays.
“Warrington Marsh, my racing manager in England, had a stroke four days ago,” he said. “Poor guy, he’s doing well—I have bulletins every A.M.—but it is going to be some time, a long time, I’m afraid, before he’ll be active again.” He gestured to my untouched breakfast. “Eat your toast.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell me why I should give you his job. Temporarily, of course.”
Good grief, I thought. I hadn’t the experience or the connections of the stricken revered maestro. “I’d work hard,” I said.
“You know what it entails?”
“I’ve seen Warrington Marsh everywhere, on the racecourse, at the sales. I know what he does . . . but not the extent of his authority.”
He cracked his second egg. “Your brother says you’ve gotten a lot of general know-how. Tell me about it.”
I listed the jobs, none of which sounded any more impressive than they had in fact been.
He said, “College degrees?” pleasantly.
“No. I left school at seventeen and didn’t go to university.”
“Private income?” he said. “Any?”
“My godfather left some money for my schooling. There’s still enough for food and clothes. Not enough to live on.”
He drank some coffee and hospitably poured me a second cup.
“Do you know which trainers I have horses with in the British Isles?”
“Yes, sir. Shell, Thompson, Miller, and Sandlache in England and Donavan in Ireland.”
“Call me Luke,” he said. “I prefer it.”
“Luke,” I said.
He stirred sweetener into his coffee.
“Could you handle the finance?” he said. “Warrington always has full responsibility. Do millions frighten you?”
I looked out at the vast blue ocean and told the truth. “I think they do in a way, yes. It’s too easy in the upper reaches to think of a zero or two as not mattering one way or another.”
“You need to spend to buy good horses,” he said. “Could you do it?”
“Yes.”
“Go on,” he said mildly.
“Buying potentially good horses isn’t the problem. Looking at a great yearling, seeing it move, knowing its breeding is as near perfect as you can predict, and being able to afford it, that’s almost easy. It’s picking the excellent from among the second rank and the unknowns, that’s where the judgment comes in.”
“Could you guarantee that every horse you bought for me, or advised my trainers to buy, would win?”
“No, I couldn’t,” I said. “They wouldn’t.”
“What percentage would you expect to win?”
“About fifty percent. Some would never race, others would disappoint.”
He unaggressively, quietly, slowly and without pressure asked me questions for almost an hour, sorting out what I’d done, what I knew, how I felt about taking ultimate powers of decision over trainers who were older than myself, how I felt about dealing with the racing authorities, what I’d learned about bookkeeping, banking and money markets, whether I could evaluate veterinarian and nutritive advice. By the end I felt inside out, as if no cranny of my mind stayed gently unprobed. He would choose someone older, I thought.
“How do you feel,” he said finally, “about a steady job, nine to five, weekends off, pension at the end of it?”
I shook my head from deep instinct, without thinking it out. “No,” I said.
“That came from the heart, fella,” he observed.
“Well . . .”
“I’ll give you a year and a ceiling beyond which you’re not to spend. I’ll be looking over your shoulder, but I won’t interfere unless you get in a fix. Want to take it?”
I drew a deep breath and said, “Yes.”
He leaned smilingly forward to shake my hand. “I’ll send you a contract,” he said. “But go right on home now and take over at once. Things can fall apart too fast with no one in charge. So you go straight to Warrington’s house, see his wife, Nonie—I’ll call her you’re coming—and you operate from his office there until you find a place of your own. Your brother told me you’re a wanderer, but I don’t mind that.” He smiled again. “Never did like tame cats.”
Like so much else in American life the contract, when it swiftly followed me over the Pond, was in complete contrast to the relaxed approach of the man who’d offered it. It set out in precise terms what I must do, what I had discretion to do, what I must not do. It stated terms of reference I’d never thought of. He had given me a great deal of freedom in some ways and none at all in others; but that, I supposed, was fair enough. He wouldn’t want to stake his whole British operation on an unknown without enforceable safeguards. I took it to a solicitor, who read it and whistled and said it had been drawn up by corporation lawyers who were used to munching managers as snacks.
“But do I sign it?” I said.
“If you want the job, yes. It’s tough, but as far as I can see, fair.”
That had been eight months ago. I had come home to widespread and understandable disbelief that such a plum should have fallen my way. I had survived Nonie Marsh’s resentment and Warrington’s incoherent unhelpfulness; had sold several of Luke’s unpromising two-year-olds without great loss, had cajoled the trainers into provisionally accepting me and done nothing sweat-makingly disastrous. Despite all the decisions and responsibility, I’d enjoyed every minute.
Cassie appeared in the doorway.
“Aren’t you going to get out of that bath?” she demanded. “Just sitting there smiling.”
“Life’s good.”
“And you’ll be late.”
I stood up in the water and as she watched me straighten she said automatically, “Mind your head.” I stepped out onto the floor, and kissed her, dripping down her neck.
“For God’s sake get dressed,” she said. “And you need a shave.” She gave me a towel. “The coffee’s hot, and we’re out of milk.”
I flung a few clothes on and went downstairs, dodging beams and low doorways on the way. The cottage we’d rented in the village of Six Mile Bottom (roughly six miles south of Newmarket) had been designed for seventeenth-century man, who hadn’t suffered the dietetic know-how of the twentieth. And would seven feet, I wondered, ducking into the kitchen, be considered normal in the twenty-fifth?
We had lived in the cottage all summer and in spite of its low ceilings it suited us fine. There were apples now in the garden, and mists in the mornings, and sleepy wasps trying to find warm cracks in the eaves. Red tiled floors and rugs downstairs, dining-room surrendered to office, sitting room cozy around an as-yet-untried hearth; red-checked curtains, rocking chairs, corn dollies and soft lights. A townspeople’s country toy, but enough, I sometimes thought, to make one want to put down roots.
Bananas Frisby had found it for us. Bananas, longtime friend, who kept a pub in the village. I’d called in there one day on my way to Newmarket and told him I was stuck for somewhere to live.
“What’s wrong with your
old boat?”
“I’ve grown out of it.”
He gave me a slow glance. “Mentally?”
“Yeah. I’ve sold it. And I’ve met a girl.”
“And this one,” he suggested, “isn’t ecstatic about rubbing down dead varnish?”
“Far from.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” he said, and indeed he called me a week later at Warrington’s house and said there was a tarted-up cottage down the road from him that I could go and look at: the London-based owners didn’t want to sell but could do with some cash, and they’d be willing to let it to someone who wouldn’t stay forever.
“I told them you’d the wanderlust of an albatross,” he said. “I know them, they’re nice people, don’t let me down.”
Bananas personally owned his almost equally old pub, which was very slowly crumbling under his policy of neglect. Bananas had no family, no heirs, no incentive to preserve his worldly goods; so when each new patch of damp appeared inside his walls he bought a luxurious green potted plant to hide it. Since I’d known him the shiny-leafed camouflage had multiplied from three to eight: and there was a vine climbing now through the windows. If anyone ever remarked about the dark patches on the walls, Bananas said the plants had caused them, and strangers never realized it was the other way around.
Bananas’ main pride and joy was the small restaurant, next door to the bar, in which he served cuisine minceur of such perfection that half the passing jockeys of England ate there religiously. It had been over his dried, crisp, indescribable roast duck that I’d first met him, and like a mark well hooked had become an addict. Couldn’t count the délices I’d paid for since.
He was already up as usual when I waved to him on my way to the gallops: sweeping out, cleaning up, opening his windows wide to get rid of the overnight fug. A fat man himself he nonetheless had infinite energy and ran the whole place with the help of two women, one in the bar and one in the kitchen, both of whom he bossed around like a feudal lord. Betty in the kitchen cooked stolidly under his eagle eye and Bessie in the bar served drinks with speed bordering on sleight-of-hand; Bananas was head waiter and every other sort of waiter, collecting orders, delivering food, presenting bills, cleaning and relaying tables, all with a deceptive show of having all day to chat. I’d watched him at it so often that I knew his system; he practically never wasted time by going into the kitchen. Food appeared from Betty through a vast serving hatch shielded from the public view, and dirty dishes disappeared down a gentle slide.
“Who washes up?” I’d said once in puzzlement.
“I do,” Bananas said. “After closing time I feed it all through the washer.”
“Don’t you ever sleep?”
“Sleep’s boring.”
He needed, it seemed, only four hours a night.
“And why work so hard? Why not have more help?”
He looked at me pityingly. “Staff cause as much work as they do,” he said. And I’d found out later that he closed the restaurant every year toward the end of November and took off to the West Indies, returning in late March when the flat racing stirred back to life. He hated the cold, he said; he worked at a gallop for eight months for four months’ palm trees and sun.
That morning on the Limekilns, Simpson Shell was working his best young prospect and looking smug. The eldest of Luke Houston’s five trainers, he had been least resigned to me and he still had hang-ups which showed on his face every day.
“Morning, William,” he said, frowning.
“Morning, Sim.” I watched with him the rangy colt upon whom the Houston hope of a Classic next season was faintly pinned. “He’s moving well,” I said.
“He always does.” The voice was slighting and impatient. I smiled to myself. Neither compliments nor soft soap, he was saying, were going to change his opinion of the upstart who had overruled him in the matter of selling two two-year-olds. He had told me he disagreed strongly with my weeding-out policy, even though I’d put it to him beforehand and discussed every dud to be discarded. “Warrington never did that,” he’d thundered, and he’d warned me he was writing to Luke to complain. I never heard the result. Either he’d never written or Luke had backed me up; but it had consolidated his Derry-wards hostility, not least because, although I had saved Luke Houston a stack of pointless training fees, I had at the same time deprived Simpson Shell. He was waiting, I knew, for the duds to win for their new owners so that he could crow, and it was my good luck that so far they hadn’t.
Like all Luke’s trainers he trained for many other owners besides. Luke’s horses at present constituted about a sixth of his string, which was too high a percentage for him to risk losing them altogether: so he was civil to me, but only just.
I asked him about a filly who had had some heat in her leg the previous evening, and he grumpily said it was better. He hated me to take a close interest in his eight Houston horses, yet I guessed that if I didn’t another letter would be winging to California complaining that I was neglecting my duties. Sim Shell, I thought ruefully, couldn’t be pleased.
Over in the Bury Road, Mort Miller, younger, neurotic, fingers snapping like firecrackers, told me that Luke’s ten darlings were eating well and climbing the walls with eagerness to slaughter the opposition. Mort had considered the sale of three no-gooders a relief, saying he hated the lazy so-and-sos and grudged them their oats. Mort’s horses were always as strung up as he was, but they certainly won when it mattered.
I dropped in on Mort most days because it was he, for all his positive statements, who in fact asked my opinion most.
Once a week, usually fitting in with race meetings, I visited the other two trainers, Thompson and Sandlache, who lived thirty miles from each other on the Berkshire Downs, and about once a month I spent a couple of days with Donavan in Ireland. With them all I had satisfactory working arrangements, they on their part admitting that the two-year-olds I’d got rid of were of no benefit to themselves, and I promising that I would spend the money I’d saved on the training fees to buy extra yearlings in October.
I would be sorry, I thought, when my year was over.
Driving home from Mort’s I stopped in the town to collect a radio I’d been having repaired, and again to fill up with petrol, and again at Bananas’ pub to pick up some beer.
Bananas was in the kitchen prodding some marinating veal. Opening time still lay an hour ahead. Everything in the place was gleaming and fresh and the plants grew damply in their pots.
“There was a fellow looking for you,” Bananas said.
“What sort of fellow?”
“Big man. Didn’t know him. I told him where your cottage was.” He scowled at Betty, who was obliviously peeling grapes. “I told him you were out.”
“Did he say what he wanted?”
“Nope.”
He shed an apron and took his bulk into the bar. “Too early for you?” he said, easing behind the counter.
“Sort of.”
He nodded and methodically assembled his usual breakfast: a third of a tumbler of brandy topped up with two scoops of vanilla-walnut ice cream.
“Cassie went off to work,” he said, reaching for a spoon.
“You don’t miss much.”
He shrugged. “You can see that yellow car a mile off, and I was out front cleaning the windows.” He stirred the ice cream into the brandy and with gourmand enjoyment shoveled the first installment into his mouth. “That’s better,” he said.
“It’s no wonder you’re fat.”
He merely nodded. He didn’t care. He’d told me once that his size made his fat customers feel better and spend more, and that his fat customers in search of a miracle outnumbered the thin.
He was a natural eccentric, himself seeing nothing unusual in anything he did. In various late-night sessions he’d unbuttoned a little of his inner self, and under the surface geniality I’d had glimpses of a deep pessimism, a morose-ness which looked with despair at the inability of the human race to live harmoniously
on the beautiful earth. He had no politics, no god, no urge to agitate. Peoples, he said, were known to starve on rich fertile tropical earth; peoples stole their neighbors’ lands; peoples murdered peoples from racial hate: peoples tortured and killed in the name of freedom. It sickened him, he said. It had been going on from prehistory, and it would go on until the vindictive ape was wiped out.
“But you yourself seem happy enough,” I’d once said.
He’d looked at me darkly. “You’re a bird. Always on the wing. You’d be a sparrowhawk if you hadn’t such long legs.”
“And you?”
“The only option is suicide,” he said. “But right now it’s not necessary.” He’d deftly poured himself another brandy, and lifted the glass in a sort of salute. “Here’s to civilization, damn it.”
His real forenames, written over the pub doorway, were John James, but his nickname was a pudding. “Bananas Frisby,” a hot fluffy confection of eggs, rum, bananas and orange, was an item nearly always on his menu, and “Bananas” he himself had become. It suited his outer persona well, but his inner not at all.
“You know what?” he said.
“What?”
“I’m growing a beard.”
I looked at the faint shadow on the dark jaw. “It needs compost,” I said.
“Very funny. The days of the big fat slob are over. What you see is the start of the big fat distinguished innkeeper.” He took a large spoonful of ice cream and drank some of the liquid as a chaser, wiping the resulting white moustache off on the back of his hand.
He wore his usual working clothes: open-necked shirt, creaseless gray flannels, old tennis shoes. Thinning dark hair scattered his scalp haphazardly, with one straight lock falling over an ear; and as Frisby in the evenings wasn’t all that different from Frisby in the mornings I couldn’t see a beard transforming the image. Particularly not, I thought interestedly, while it grew.
