by Dick Francis
‘Besides,’ Alessandro added, ‘my father would not spend the money if a threat would do instead.’
As usual when referring to his father’s modus operandi, he took it entirely for granted and saw nothing in it but logic.
‘Do you ever think objectively about your father?’ I asked. ‘About how he achieves his ends, and about whether the ends themselves are of any merit?’
He looked puzzled. ‘No …’ he said uncertainly.
‘Where did you go to school, then?’ I said, changing tack.
‘I didn’t go to school,’ he said. ‘I had two teachers at home. I did not want to go to school. I did not want to be ordered about and to have to work all day …’
‘So your two teachers spent a lot of time twiddling their thumbs?’
‘Twiddling …? Oh, yes. I suppose so. The English one used to go off and climb mountains and the Italian one chased the local girls.’ There was no humour, however, in his voice. There never was. ‘They both left when I was fifteen. They left because I was then riding my two horses all day long and my father said there was no point in paying for two tutors instead of one riding master … so he hired one old Frenchman who had been an instructor in the cavalry, and he showed me how to ride better. I used to go and stay with a man my father knew and go hunting on his horse … and that is when I rode a bit in races. Four or five races. There were not many for amateurs. I liked it, but I didn’t feel as I do now … And then, one day at home when I was saying I was bored, my father said, “Very well, Alessandro, say what you want and I will get it for you,” and into my head came Archangel, and I just said, just like that, without really thinking, “I want to win the English Derby on Archangel …” and he just laughed, how he sometimes does, and said, so I should.’ He paused. ‘After that, I asked him if he meant it, because the more I thought about it the more I knew there was nothing on earth I wanted more. Nothing on earth I wanted at all. He kept saying, “All in good time,” but I was impatient to come to England and start, so when he had finished some business, we came.’
For about the tenth time he twisted round in his seat to look out of the back window. Carlo was still there, faithfully following.
‘Tomorrow,’ I said, ‘he can follow us again, to Liverpool. After Buckram for you tomorrow we have five other horses running at the meeting, and I’m staying there for the three days. I won’t be coming with you to Teesside for Lancat.’
He opened his mouth to protest, but I said, ‘Vic Young is going up with Lancat. He will do all the technical part. It’s the big race of the afternoon, as you know, and you’ll be riding against very experienced jockeys. But all you’ve got to do is get quietly up on that colt, point it in the right direction, and tell it where to accelerate. And if it wins, for God’s sake don’t brag about how brilliant you are. There’s nothing puts backs up quicker than a boastful jockey, and if you want the Press on your side, which you most certainly do, you will give the credit to the horse. Even if you don’t feel in the least modest, it will pay to act it.’
He digested this with a stubborn look which gradually softened into plain thoughtfulness. I deemed I might as well take advantage of a receptive mood, so I went on with the pearls of wisdom.
‘Don’t despair if you make a right mess of any race. Everyone does, sometime. Just admit it to yourself. Never fool yourself, ever. Don’t get upset by criticism … and don’t get swollen-headed from praise … and keep your temper on a racecourse, all of the time. You can lose it as much as you like on the way home.’
After a while he said, ‘You have given me more instructions on behaviour than on how to win races.’
‘I trust your social manners less than your horsemanship.’
He worked it out, and didn’t know whether to be pleased or not.
After the glitter of Doncaster, Catterick Bridge racecourse disappointed him. His glance raked the simple stands, the modest weighing room, the small-meeting atmosphere, and he said bitterly, ‘Is this … all?’
‘Never mind,’ I said, though I hadn’t myself known what to expect. ‘Down there on the course are seven important furlongs, and they are all that matters.’
The parade ring itself was attractive with trees dotted all around. Alessandro came out there in yellow and blue silks, one of a large bunch of apprentices, most of whom looked slightly smug or self-conscious or nervous, or all of them at once.
Alessandro didn’t. His face held no emotion whatsoever. I had expected him to be excited, but he wasn’t. He watched Pullitzer plod round the parade ring as if he were of no more interest to him than a herd of cows. He settled into the saddle casually, and without haste gathered the reins to his satisfaction. Vic Young stood holding Pullitzer’s rug and gazing up at Alessandro doubtfully.
‘Jump him off, now,’ he said admonishingly. ‘You’ve got to keep him up there as long as you can.’
Alessandro met my eyes over Vic’s head. ‘Ride the way you’ve planned,’ I said, and he nodded.
He went away without fuss on to the course and Vic Young, watching him go, exclaimed to me, ‘I never did like that snooty little sod, and now he doesn’t look as though he’s got his heart in the job.’
‘Let’s wait and see,’ I said soothingly. And he waited. And we saw.
Alessandro rode the race exactly as he’d said he would. Drawn number five of sixteen runners he made his way over to the rails in the first two furlongs, stayed steadfastly in fifth or sixth place for the next three, moved up slightly after that, and in the last sixty yards found an opening and some response from Pullitzer, and shot through the leading pair of apprentices not more than ten strides from the post. The colt won by a length and a half, beginning to waver.
He hadn’t been backed and he wasn’t much cheered, but Alessandro didn’t seem to need it. He slid off the horse in the unsaddling enclosure and gave me a cool stare quite devoid of the arrogant self-satisfaction I had been expecting. Then suddenly his face dissolved into the smile I’d only seen him give that once to Margaret, a warm, confident, uncomplicated expression of delight.
‘I did it,’ he said, and I said, ‘You did it beautifully,’ and he could certainly see that I was as pleased as he was.
Pullitzer’s win was not popular with the lads. No one had had a penny on it, and when Vic got back and reported that the old horse must have developed a lot with age as Alessandro hadn’t ridden to instructions, they were all quick to deny him any credit. As he seldom talked to any of them, however, I doubted whether he knew.
He was highly self-contained when he came to Rowley Lodge the following morning. Etty had gone down to the Flat on Racecourse side with the first lot to give them some longish steady canters, which, because of the distance I had to drive, I couldn’t stay to watch. She seemed content to be left in charge for the three days, and had assured me that Lancat and Lucky Lindsay (bound for a two-year-old five-furlongs with an experienced northern jockey) would arrive safely at Teesside on the Saturday.
Alessandro came with me in the Jensen, with Carlo following as before. On the way we mostly discussed the tactics he would need on Buckram and Lancat, and again there was that odd lack of excitement, only this time more marked. Where I would have expected him to be strung up and passionate, he was totally relaxed. Now that he was actually racing, it seemed as if his impatient fever had evaporated.
Buckram didn’t win for him, but not because he didn’t ride the race he had meant to. Buckram finished third because two other horses were faster, and Alessandro accepted it with surprising resignation.
‘He did his best,’ he explained simply. ‘But we couldn’t get there.’
‘I saw,’ I said; and that was that.
During the rest of the three-day meeting I came to know a great many more racing people and began to get the feel of the industry. I saddled our other four runners, which Tommy Hoylake rode, and congratulated him when one of them won.
‘Funny thing,’ he said, ‘the horses are as forward this year as I’
ve ever known them.’
‘Is that good or bad?’ I asked.
‘Are you kidding? But the next trick will be to keep them going till September.’
‘My father will be back to do that,’ I assured him.
‘Oh … yes. I suppose he will,’ Tommy said without the enthusiasm I would have expected, and took himself off to weigh out for the next race.
On Saturday Lancat cruised home by four lengths at Teesside at twenty-five to one, which increased my season’s winnings from two thousand to four thousand five hundred. And that, I imagined, would be the last of the easy pickings: Lancat was the third winner from the stable out of nine runners, and no one was any longer going to suppose that Rowley Lodge was in the doldrums.
Alessandro’s and Vic Young’s accounts of what had happened at Teesside were predictably different.
Alessandro said, ‘You remember, in the trial, that I made up a lot of ground … but I did it too soon, because I had been left behind, and then he got tired … Well, he did produce that burst of speed again, just as we thought, and it worked well. I got him going a little before the last furlong pole and he simply zoomed past the others. It was terrific.’
But Vic Young said, ‘He left it nearly too late. Got shut in. The others could ride rings round him, of course. That Lancat must be something special, winning in spite of being ridden by an apprentice having only his third race.’
During the next week we had eight more runners, of which Alessandro rode three. Only one of his was in an apprentice race, and none of them won. In one race he was quite clearly outridden in a tight finish by the champion jockey, but all he said about that was that he would improve, he supposed, with practice.
The owners of all three horses turned up to watch, and raised not a grumble between them. Alessandro behaved towards them with sense and civility, though I gathered from an unguarded sneer that he let loose when he thought no one was looking that he was acting away like crazy.
One of the owners was an American, who turned out to be one of the subscribers to the syndicate which had bought out my shops. It amused him greatly to find I was Neville Griffon’s son, and he spent some time in the parade ring before the race telling Alessandro that this young fellow here, meaning me, could teach everyone he knew a thing or two about how to run a business.
‘Never forgot how you summed up your recipe for success, when we bought you out: “Put an eyecatcher in the window, and deal fair.” We’d asked you, remember? And we were expecting a whole dose of the usual management-school jargon, but that was all you said. Never forgot it.’
It was his horse on which Alessandro lost by a head, but he had owned racehorses for a long time and knew what he was seeing, and he turned to me on the stands immediately they had passed the post, and said, ‘Never a disgrace to be beaten by the champion … and that boy of yours, he’s going to be good.’
The following week, Alessandro rode in four races and won two of them, both against apprentices. On the second occasion he beat the previous season’s star apprentice discovery on the home ground at Newmarket, and the Press began to ask questions. Four wins in three weeks had put him high on the apprentice list … Where had he come from, they wanted to know. One or two of them spoke to Alessandro himself, and to my relief he answered them quietly. Strictly eyes down, even if tongue in cheek. The old habitual arrogance was kept firmly out of sight.
He usually came to the races in the Jensen, but Carlo never gave up following. The arrangement had become routine.
He talked quite a lot on the journeys. Talked naturally, unselfconsciously, without strain. Mostly we discussed the horses and their form and possibilities in relation to the opposition, but sometimes I had another glimpse or two of his extraordinary home life.
He had not seen his mother since he was about six, when she and his father had had a last appalling row which had seemed to him to go on for days. He said he had been frightened because they were both so violent, and he hadn’t understood what it was all about. She kept shouting one word at his father, taunting him, he said, and he had remembered it, though for years he didn’t know what it meant. Sterile, he said. That had been the word. His father was sterile. He had had some sort of illness shortly after Alessandro’s birth, to which his mother had constantly referred. He couldn’t remember her features, only her voice beginning sentences to his father, bitterly and often, with, ‘Since your illness …’
He had never asked his father about it, he added. It would be impossible, he said, to ask.
I reflected that if Alessandro was the only son Enso could ever have, it explained in some measure the obsessive side of his regard for him. Alessandro was special to Enso in a psychologically disturbing way, and Enso, with well-developed criminal characteristics, was not a normal character in the first place.
As Alessandro’s riding successes became more than coincidences, Etty unbent to him a good deal: and Margaret unbent even more. For a period of about four days there was an interval of peaceful, constructive teamwork in a friendly atmosphere. Something which, looking back to the day of his arrival, one would have said was as likely as snow in Singapore.
Four days, it lasted. Then he arrived one morning with a look of almost apprehension, and said that his father was coming to England. Was flying over, that same afternoon. He had telephoned, and he hadn’t sounded pleased.
Chapter Thirteen
Enso moved in to the Forbury Inn and the very next day the prickles were back in Alessandro’s manner. He refused to go to Epsom with me in the Jensen: he was going with Carlo.
‘Very well,’ I said calmly, and had a distinct impression that he wanted to say something, to explain, to entreat … perhaps something like that … but that loyalty to his father was preventing it. I smiled a bit ruefully at him and added, ‘But any day you like, come with me.’
There was a flicker in the black eyes, but he turned away without answering and walked off to where Carlo was waiting: and when we arrived at Epsom I found that Enso had travelled with him as well.
Enso was waiting for me outside the weighing room, a shortish chubby figure standing harmlessly in the April sunshine. No silenced pistol. No rubber-faced henchmen. No rope round my wrists, needles in my arm. Yet my scalp contracted and the hairs on my legs rose on end.
He held in his hand the letter I had written him, and the hostility in his puffy lidded eyes beat anything Alessandro had ever conjured up by a good twenty lengths.
‘You have disobeyed my instructions,’ he said, in the sort of voice which would have sent bolder men than I scurrying for shelter. ‘I told you that Alessandro was to replace Hoylake. I find that he has not done so. You have given my son only crumbs. You will change that.’
‘Alessandro’, I said, with as unmoved an expression as I could manage, ‘has had more opportunities than most apprentices get in their first six months.’
The eyes flashed with a thousand-kilowatt sizzle. ‘You will not talk to me in that tone. You will do as I say. Do you understand? I will not tolerate your continued disregard of my instructions.’
I considered him. Where on the night he had abducted me he had been deliberate and cool, he was now fired by some inner strong emotion. It made him no less dangerous. More, possibly.
‘Alessandro is riding a very good horse in the Dean Swift Handicap this afternoon,’ I said.
‘He tells me this race is not important. It is the Great Metropolitan which is important. He is to ride in that race as well.’
‘Did he say he wanted to?’ I asked curiously, because our runner in the Great Met was the runaway Traffic, and even Tommy Hoylake regarded the prospect without joy.
‘Of course,’ Enso insisted, but I didn’t wholly believe him. I thought he had probably bullied Alessandro into saying it.
‘I’m afraid,’ I said with insincere regret, ‘that the owner could not be persuaded. He insists that Hoylake should ride. He is adamant.’
Enso smouldered, but abandoned the lost cause. H
e said instead, ‘You will try harder in future. Today, I will overlook. But there is to be no doubt, no shadow of doubt, do you understand, that Alessandro is to ride this horse of yours in the Two Thousand Guineas. Next week he is to ride Archangel, as he wishes. Archangel.’
I said nothing. It was still as impossible for Alessandro to be given the ride on Archangel as ever it was, even if I wanted to, which I didn‘t. The merchant banker was never going to agree to replacing Tommy Hoylake with an apprentice of five weeks’ experience, not on the starriest Derby prospect he had ever owned. And for my father’s sake also, Archangel had to have the best jockey he could. Enso took my continuing silence for acceptance, began to look less angry and more satisfied, and finally turned his back on me in dismissal.
Alessandro rode a bad race in the Handicap. He knew the race was the Derby distance, and he knew I was giving him practice at the mile and a half because I hoped he would win the big apprentice race of that length two days later: but he hopelessly misjudged things, swung really wide at Tattenham Corner, failed to balance his mount in and out of the dip, and never produced the speed that was there for the asking.
He wouldn’t meet my eyes when he dismounted, and after Tommy Hoylake won the Great Met (as much to Traffic’s surprise as to mine) I didn’t see him for the rest of the day.
Alessandro rode four more races that week, and in none of them showed his former flair. He lost the apprentices’ race at Epsom by a glaringly obvious piece of mistiming, letting the whole field slip him half a mile from home and failing to reach third place by a neck, though travelling faster than anything else at the finish.
At Sandown on the Saturday the two owners he rode for both told me after he trailed in mid-field on their fancied and expensive three-year-olds that they did not agree that he was as good as I had made out, that my father would have known better, and that they would like a different jockey next time.
I relayed these remarks to Alessandro by sending into the changing room for him and speaking to him in the weigh room itself. I was now given little opportunity to talk to him anywhere else. He was wooden in the mornings and left the instant he dismounted, and at the races he was continuously flanked by Enso and Carlo, who accompanied him everywhere like guards.
