Bonecrack

by Dick Francis

  The steam had all blown off. Etty breathed sharply through her nose, shrugged her shoulders, and produced a small resigned smile.

  ‘Oh well … worse things happen at sea.’

  She had very blue eyes, and light brown hair that went frizzy when the weather was damp. Middle age had roughened her skin without wrinkling it, and, as with most undersexed women, there was much in her face that was male. She had thin lips and bushy unkempt eyebrows, and the handsomeness of her youth was only something I remembered. Etty seemed a sad, wasted person to many who observed her, but to herself she was fulfilled, and was busily content.

  She stamped away in her jodhpurs and boots and we heard her voice raised at some luckless boy caught in wrongdoing.

  Rowley Lodge needed Etty Craig. But it needed Alessandro Rivera like a hole in the head.

  He came late that afternoon.

  I was out in the yard looking round the horses at evening stables. With Etty alongside I had got as far round as bay five, from where we would go round the bottom yard before working up again towards the house.

  One of the fifteen-year-old apprentices nervously appeared as we came out of one box and prepared to go into the next.

  ‘Someone to see you, sir.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Don’t know, sir.’

  ‘An owner?’

  ‘Don’t know, sir.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Up by the drive, sir.’

  I looked up, over his head. Beyond the yard, out on the gravel, there was parked a large white Mercedes with a uniformed chauffeur standing by the bonnet.

  ‘Take over, Etty, would you?’ I said.

  I walked up through the yard and out into the drive. The chauffeur folded his arms and his mouth like barricades against fraternization. I stopped a few paces away from him and looked towards the inside of the car.

  One of the rear doors, the one nearest to me, opened. A small black-shod foot appeared, and then a dark trouser leg, and then, slowly straightening, the whole man.

  It was clear at once who he was, although the resemblance to his father began and ended with the autocratic beak of the nose and the steadfast stoniness of the black eyes. The son was a little shorter, and emaciated instead of chubby. He had sallow skin that looked in need of a sun-tan, and strong thick black hair curving in springy curls round his ears. Over all he wore an air of disconcerting maturity, and the determination in the set of his mouth would have done credit to a steel trap. Eighteen he might be, but it was a long time since he had been a boy.

  I guessed that his voice would be like his father’s: definite, unaccented, and careful.

  It was.

  ‘I am Rivera,’ he announced. ‘Alessandro.’

  ‘Good evening,’ I said, and intended it to sound polite, cool, and unimpressed.

  He blinked.

  ‘Rivera,’ he repeated. ‘I am Rivera.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Good evening.’

  He looked at me with narrowing attention. If he expected from me a lot of grovelling, he was not going to get it. And something of this message must have got across to him from my attitude, because he began to look faintly surprised and a shade more arrogant.

  ‘I understand you wish to become a jockey,’ I said.

  ‘Intend.’

  I nodded casually. ‘No one succeeds as a jockey without determination,’ I said, and made it sound patronizing.

  He detected the flavour immediately. He didn’t like it. I was glad. But it was a small pin-pricking resistance that I was showing, and in his place I would have taken it merely as evidence of frustrated surrender.

  ‘I am accustomed to succeed,’ he said.

  ‘How very nice,’ I replied drily.

  It sealed between us an absolute antagonism. I felt him shift gear into overdrive, and it seemed to me that he was mentally gathering himself to fight on his own account a battle he believed his father had already won.

  ‘I will start at once,’ he said.

  ‘I am in the middle of evening stables,’ I said matter-of-factly. ‘If you will wait, we will discuss your position when I have finished.’ I gave him the politeness of an inclination of the head which I would have given to anybody, and without waiting around for him to throw any more of his slight weight about, I turned smoothly away and walked without haste back to Etty.

  When we had worked our way methodically round the whole stable, discussing briefly how each horse was progressing, and planning the work programme for the following morning, we came finally to the four outside boxes, only three busy now, and the fourth full of Moonrock’s absence.

  The Mercedes still stood on the gravel, with both Rivera and the chauffeur sitting inside it. Etty gave them a look of regulation curiosity and asked who they were.

  ‘New customer,’ I said economically.

  She frowned in surprise. ‘But surely you shouldn’t have kept him waiting!’

  ‘This one,’ I reassured her with private, rueful irony, ‘will not go away.’

  But Etty knew how to treat new clients, and making them wait in their car was not it. She hustled me along the last three boxes and anxiously pushed me to return to the Mercedes. Tomorrow, no doubt, she would not be so keen.

  I opened the rear door and said to him, ‘Come along in to the office.’

  He climbed out of the car and followed me without a word. I switched on the fan heater, sat in Margaret’s chair behind the desk, and pointed to the swivel armchair in front of it. He made no issue of it, but merely did as I suggested.

  ‘Now,’ I said in my best interviewing voice, ‘you want to start tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In what capacity?’

  He hesitated. ‘As a jockey.’

  ‘Well, no,’ I said reasonably. ‘There are no races yet. The season does not start for about four weeks.’

  ‘I know that,’ he said stiffly.

  ‘What I meant was, do you want to work in the stable? Do you want to look after two horses, as the others do?’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I will ride the horses at exercise two or three times a day. Every day. I will not clean their boxes or carry their food. I only wish to ride.’

  Highly popular, that was going to be, with Etty and the other lads. Apart from all else, I was going to have a shop floor-management confrontation, or in plain old terms, a mutiny, on my hands in no time at all. None of the other lads was going to muck out and groom a horse for the joy of seeing Rivera ride it.

  However, all I said was, ‘How much experience, exactly, have you had so far?’

  ‘I can ride,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Racehorses?’

  ‘I can ride.’

  This was getting nowhere. I tried again. ‘Have you ever ridden in any sort of race?’

  ‘I have ridden in amateur races.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In Italy, and in Germany.’

  ‘Have you won any?’

  He gave me a black stare. ‘I have won two.’

  I supposed that that was something. At least it suggested that he could stay on. Winning itself, in his case, had no significance. His father was the sort to buy the favourite and nobble the opposition.

  ‘But you want now to become a professional?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I’ll apply for a licence for you.’

  ‘I can apply myself.’

  I shook my head. ‘You will have to have an apprentice licence, and I will have to apply for it for you.’

  ‘I do not wish to be an apprentice.’

  I said patiently, ‘Unless you become an apprentice you will be unable to claim a weight allowance. In England in flat races the only people who can claim weight allowances are apprentices. Without a weight allowance the owners of the horses will all resist to the utmost any suggestion that you should ride. Without a weight allowance, in fact, you might as well give up the whole idea.’

&
nbsp; ‘My father …’ he began.

  ‘Your father can threaten until he’s blue in the face,’ I interrupted. ‘I cannot force the owners to employ you, I can only persuade. Without a weight allowance, they will never be persuaded.’

  He thought it over, his expression showing nothing.

  ‘My father’, he said, ‘told me that anyone could apply for a licence and that there was no need to be apprenticed.’

  ‘Technically, that is true.’

  ‘But practically, it is not.’ It was a statement more than a question: he had clearly understood what I had said.

  I began to speculate about the strength of his intentions. It certainly seemed possible that if he read the Deed of Apprenticeship and saw to what he would be binding himself, he might simply step back into his car and be driven away. I fished in one of Margaret’s tidy desk drawers, and drew out a copy of the printed agreement.

  ‘You will need to sign this,’ I said casually, and handed it over.

  He read it without a flicker of an eyelid, and considering what he was reading, that was remarkable.

  The familiar words trotted through my mind: ‘ … the Apprentice will faithfully, diligently and honestly serve the Master and obey and perform all his lawful commands … and will not absent himself from the service of the Master, nor divulge any of the secrets of the Master’s business … and shall deliver to the Master all such monies and other things that shall come into his hands for work done … and will in all matters and things whatsoever demean and behave himself as a good true and faithful Apprentice ought to do …’

  He put the form down on the desk and looked across at me.

  ‘I cannot sign that.’

  ‘Your father will have to sign it as well,’ I pointed out.

  ‘He will not.’

  ‘Then that’s an end to it,’ I said, relaxing back in my chair.

  He looked down at the form. ‘My father’s lawyers will draw up a different agreement,’ he said.

  I shrugged. ‘Without a recognizable apprenticeship deed you won’t get an apprentice’s licence. That form there is based on the articles of apprenticeship common to all trades since the Middle Ages. If you alter its intentions, it won’t meet the licensing requirements.’

  After a packed pause he said, ‘That part about delivering all monies to the Master … does that mean I would have to give to you all money I might earn in races?’ He sounded incredulous, as well he might.

  ‘It does say that,’ I agreed, ‘but it is normal nowadays for the Master to return half of the race earnings to the apprentice. In addition, of course, to giving him a weekly allowance.’

  ‘If I win the Derby on Archangel, you would take half. Half of the fee and half of the present?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘It’s wicked!’

  ‘You’ve got to win it before you start worrying,’ I said flippantly, and watched the arrogance flare up like a bonfire.

  ‘If the horse is good enough, I will.’

  You kid yourself, mate, I thought; and didn’t answer.

  He stood up abruptly, picked up the form, and without another word walked out of the office, and out of the house, out of the yard, and into his car. The Mercedes purred away with him down the drive, and I stayed sitting back in Margaret’s chair, hoping I had seen the last of him, wincing at the energy of my persisting headache, and wondering whether a treble brandy would restore me to instant health.

  I tried it.

  It didn’t.

  There was no sign of him in the morning, and on all counts the day was better. The kicked two-year-old’s knee had gone up like a football but he was walking pretty soundly on it, and the cut on Lucky Lindsay was as superficial as Etty had hoped. The elderly cyclist, the evening before, had accepted my apologies and ten pounds for his bruises and had left me with the impression that we could knock him down again, any time, for a similar supplement to his income. Archangel worked a half-speed six furlongs on the Sidehill gallop, and in me a night’s sleep had ironed out some creases.

  But Alessandro Rivera did come back.

  He rolled up the drive in the chauffeur-driven Mercedes just as Etty and I finished the last three boxes at evening stables, timing it so accurately that I wondered if he had been waiting and watching from out on Bury Road.

  I jerked my head towards the office, and he followed me in. I switched on the heater, and sat down, as before; and so did he.

  He produced from an inner pocket the apprenticeship form and passed it towards me across the desk. I took it and unfolded it, and turned it over.

  There were no alterations. It was the deed in the exact form he had taken it. There were, however, four additions.

  The signatures of Alessandro Rivera and Enso Rivera, with an appropriate witness in each case, sat squarely in the spaces designed for them.

  I looked at the bold heavy strokes of both the Riveras’ signatures and the nervous elaborations of the witnesses. They had signed the agreement without filling in any of the blanks: without even discussing the time the apprenticeship was to run for, or the weekly allowance to be paid.

  He was watching me. I met his cold black eyes.

  ‘You and your father signed it like this,’ I said slowly, ‘because you have not the slightest intention of being bound by it.’

  His face didn’t change. ‘Think what you like,’ he said.

  And so I would. And what I thought was that the son was not as criminal as his father. The son had taken the legal obligations of the apprenticeship form seriously. But his father had not.

  Chapter Four

  The small private room in the North London hospital where my father had been taken after the crash seemed to be almost entirely filled with the frames and ropes and pulleys and weights which festooned his high bed. Apart from all that there was only a high-silled window with limp floral curtains and a view of half the back of another building and a chunk of sky, a chest-high washbasin with lever-type taps designed to be turned on by elbows, a bedside locker upon which reposed his lower teeth in a glass of water, and an armchair of sorts, visitors for the use of.

  There were no flowers glowing against the margarine-coloured walls, and no well-wishing cards brightening the top of the locker. He did not care for flowers, and would have dispatched any that came straight along to other wards, and I doubted that anyone at all would have made the error of sending him a glossy or amusing get-well, which he would have considered most frightfully vulgar.

  The room itself was meagre compared with what he would have chosen and could afford, but to me, during the first critical days, the hospital itself had seemed effortlessly efficient. It did, after all, as one doctor had casually explained to me, have to deal constantly with wrecked bodies prised out of crashes on the Al. They were used to it. Geared to it. They had a higher proportion of accident cases than of the normally sick.

  He had said he thought I was wrong to insist on private treatment for my father and that he would find time hanging less heavily in a public ward where there was a lot going on, but I had assured him that he did not know my father. He had shrugged and acquiesced, but said that the private rooms weren’t much. And they weren’t. They were for getting out of quickly, if one could.

  When I visited him that evening, he was asleep. The ravages of the pain he had endured the past week had deepened and darkened the lines around his eyes and tinged all his skin with grey, and he looked defenceless in a way he never did when awake. The dogmatic set of his mouth was relaxed, and with his eyes shut he no longer seemed to be disapproving of nineteen-twentieths of what occurred. A lock of grey-white hair curved softly down over his forehead, giving him a friendly gentle look which was hopelessly misleading.

  He had not been a kind father. I had spent most of my childhood fearing him and most of my teens loathing him, and only in the past very few years had I come to understand him. The severity with which he had used me had not after all been rejection and dislike, but lack of imagin
ation and an inability to love. He had not believed in beating, but he had lavishly handed out other punishments of deprivation and solitude, without realizing that what would have been trifling to him was torment to me. Being locked in one’s bedroom for three or four days at a time might not have come under the heading of active cruelty, but it had dumped me into agonies of humiliation and shame: and it had not been possible, although I had tried until I was the most repressed child in Newmarket, to avoid committing anything my father could interpret as a fault.

  He had sent me to Eton, which in its way had proved just as callous, and on my sixteenth birthday I ran away.

  I knew that he had never forgiven me. An aunt had relayed to me his furious comment that he had provided me with horses to ride and taught me obedience, and what more could any father do for his son?

  He had made no effort to get me back, and during all the years of my commercial success we had not once spoken to each other. In the end, after fourteen years’ absence, I had gone to the Ascot races knowing that he would be there, and wanting finally to make peace.

  When I said, ‘Mr Griffon …’, he had turned to me from a group of people, raised his eyebrows, and looked at me enquiringly. His eyes were cool and blank. He hadn’t known me.

  I had said, with more amusement than awkwardness, ‘I am your son … I am Neil.’

  Apart from surprise he had shown no emotion whatsoever, and on the tacit understanding that none would be expected on either side, he had suggested that any day I happened to be passing through Newmarket, I could call in and see him.

  I had called three or four times every year since then, sometimes for a drink, sometimes for lunch, but never staying; and I had come to see him from a much saner perspective in my thirties than I had at fifteen. His manner to me was still for the most part forbidding, critical and punitive, but as I no longer depended solely upon him for approval, and as he could no longer lock me in my bedroom for disagreeing with him, I found a perverse sort of pleasure in his company.

  I had thought, when I was called in a hurry to Rowley Lodge after the accident, that I wouldn’t sleep again in my old bed, that I’d choose any other. But in fact in the end I did sleep in it, because it was the room that had been prepared for me, and there were dust-sheets still over all the rest.