Rat Race

by Dick Francis

‘Indeed,’ I agreed, ‘you do.’

  He seemed to give himself a little mental and physical shake, and turned with sudden energy towards the door.

  ‘Right,’ he said briskly. ‘Then I need a word with Mr Harley.’

  ‘Did you get a word with Major Tyderman?’ I asked.

  After the merest hiatus he said again, ‘That is not your concern.’

  ‘Perhaps you have seen him already?’

  Silence.

  ‘Perhaps, though, he is away from home?’

  More silence. Then he turned to me in stiff exasperation. ‘It is not your business to question me like this. I cannot answer you any more. It is I who am here to enquire into you, not the other way round.’ He shut his mouth with a snap and gave me a hard stare. ‘And they even warned me,’ he muttered.

  ‘I hope you find the Major,’ I said politely, ‘before he plants any more little devices in inconvenient places.’

  He snorted and strode before me out of the crew room and along to Harley’s office. Harley knew what he was there for and had been predictably furious with me ever since Friday.

  ‘Mr Shore admits the contraventions,’ the Board of Trade said.

  ‘He’d be hard pushed not to,’ Harley said angrily, ‘considering every R.A.F. base across the country told him about the low cloud base at Cambridge.’

  ‘In point of fact,’ agreed the Board of Trade, ‘he should then have returned immediately to Manchester which was then still within the legal limit, and waited there until conditions improved, instead of flying all the way to East Anglia and leaving himself with too small a fuel margin to go to any cloud-free airport. The proper course was certainly to turn back right at the beginning.’

  ‘And to hell with Colin Ross’ I said conversationally.

  Their mouths tightened in chorus. There was nothing more to be said. If you jumped red traffic lights and broke the speed limit rushing someone to hospital to save his life, you would still be prosecuted for the offences. Same thing exactly. Same impasse. Humanity versus law, an age-old quandary. Make your choice and lie on it.

  ‘I’m not accepting any responsibility for what you did,’ Harley said heavily. ‘I will state categorically, and in court if I have to, that you were acting in direct opposition to Derry-downs’ instructions, and that Derrydowns disassociates itself entirely from your actions.’

  I thought of asking him if he’d like a basin for the ritual washing of hands. I also thought that on the whole I’d better not.

  He went on, ‘And of course if there is any fine involved you will pay it yourself.’

  Always my bad luck, I reflected, to cop it when the firm was too nearly bankrupt to be generous. I said merely, ‘Is that all, then? We have a charter, if you remember…’

  They waved me away in disgust and I collected my gear and flew off in the Aztec to take a clutch of businessmen from Elstree to The Hague.

  By the time, the previous Friday, that Colin and I had locked Nancy’s Cherokee and ensured that no one would touch it, the first cohorts of the local press had come galloping up with ash on their shirt fronts, and the Board of Trade, who neither slumbered nor slept, were breathing heavily down the S.T.D.

  Aircraft radios are about as private as Times Square: it appeared that dozens of ground-based but air-minded Midlands enthusiasts had been listening in to my conversation with Birmingham radar and had jammed the switchboard at Cambridge ringing up to find out if Colin Ross was safe. Undaunted, they had conveyed to Fleet Street the possibility of his loss. His arrival in one piece was announced on a television news broadcast forty minutes after we landed. The great British media had pulled out every finger they possessed. Nancy and Annie Villars had answered questions until their throats were sore and had finally taken refuge in the Ladies Cloaks. Colin was used to dealing with the press, but by the time he extricated himself from their ever increasing news hungry numbers he too was pale blue from tiredness.

  ‘Come on,’ he said to me. ‘Let’s get Nancy out and go home.’

  ‘I’ll have to ring Harley…’

  Harley already knew and was exploding like a firecracker. Someone from Polyplanes, it appeared, had telephoned at once to inform him with acid sweetness that his so highly qualified chief pilot had broken every law in sight and put Derrydowns thoroughly in the cart. The fact that his best customer was still alive to pay another day didn’t seem to have got through to Harley at all. Polyplanes had made him smart, and it was all my fault.

  I stayed in Cambridge by promising to foot the bill for hangarage again, and went home with Nancy and Colin.

  Home.

  A dangerous, evocative word. And the trouble was, it felt like home. Only the third time I’d been there, and it was already familiar, cosy, undemanding, easy… It was no good feeling I belonged there, because I didn’t.

  Saturday morning I spent talking to the police face to face in Cambridge and the Board of Trade in London on the telephone. Both forces cautiously murmured that they might perhaps ask Major Rupert Tyderman to help them with their enquiries. Saturday afternoon I flew Colin back to Haydock without incident, Saturday night I again stayed contentedly at Newmarket, Sunday I took him to Buckingham, changed over to the Aztec, and flew him to Ostend. Managed to avoid Harley altogether until I got back Sunday evening, when he lay in wait for me as I taxied down to the hangar and bitched on for over half an hour about sticking to the letter of the law. The gist of his argument was that left to herself Nancy would have come down safely somewhere over the flat land of East Anglia. Bound to have done. She wouldn’t have hit any of the radio masts or power station chimneys which scattered the area and which had stuck up into the clouds like needles. They were all marked there, disturbing her, on the map. She had known that if she had to go down at random she had an average chance of hitting one. The television mast at Mendlesham stretched upwards for more than a thousand feet… But, said Harley, she would have missed the lot. Certain to have done.

  ‘What would you have felt like, in her position?’ I asked.

  He didn’t answer. He knew well enough. As pilot, as businessman, he was a bloody fool.

  On Tuesday morning he told me that Colin had telephoned to cancel his trip to Folkestone that day, but that I would still be going in the Six, taking an owner and his friends there from Nottingham.

  I imagined that Colin had changed his intention to ride at Folkestone and gone to Pontefract instead, but it wasn’t so. He had, I found, flown to Folkestone. And he had gone in a Polyplane.

  I didn’t know he was there until after the races when he came back to the airport in a taxi. He climbed out of it in his usual wilted state, surveyed the row of parked aircraft, and walked straight past me towards the Polyplane.

  ‘Colin,’ I said.

  He stopped, turned his head, gave me a straight stare. Nothing friendly in it, nothing at all.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I said puzzled. ‘What’s happened?’

  He looked away from me, along to the Polyplane. I followed his glance. The pilot was standing there smirking. He was the one who had refused to help Kenny Bayst, and he had been smirking vigorously all afternoon.

  ‘Did you come with him?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, I did.’ His voice was cold. His eyes also.

  I said in surprise, ‘I don’t get it…’

  Colin’s face turned from cold to scorching. ‘You… you… I don’t think I can bear to talk to you.’

  A feeling of unreality clogged my tongue. I simply looked at him in bewilderment.

  ‘You’ve properly bust us up… Oh, I dare say you didn’t mean to… but Nancy has lit off out of the house and I left Midge at home crying…’

  I was appalled. ‘But why? On Sunday morning when we left, everything was fine…’

  ‘Yesterday,’ he said flatly. ‘Nancy found out yesterday, when she went to the airfield for a practice session. It absolutely overthrew her. She came home in a dreadful mood and raged round the house practically throwing things and
this morning she packed a suitcase and walked out… neither Midge nor I could stop her and Midge is frantically distressed…’ He stopped, clenched his jaw, and said with shut teeth, ‘Why the hell didn’t you have the guts to tell her yourself?’

  ‘Tell her what?’

  ‘What?’ He thrust his hand into the pocket of his faded jeans and brought out a folded wad of newspaper. ‘This.’

  I took it from him. Unfolded it. Felt the woodenness take over in my face; knew that it showed.

  He had handed me the most biting, the most damaging, of the tabloid accounts of my trial and conviction for negligently putting the lives of eighty seven people in jeopardy. A one-day wonder to the general public; long forgotten. But always lying there in the files, if anyone wanted to dig it up.

  ‘That wasn’t all,’ Colin said. ‘He told her also that you’d been sacked from another airline for cowardice.’

  ‘Who told her?’ I said dully. I held out the cutting. He took it back.

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Yes, it does.’

  ‘He had no axe to grind. That’s what convinced her.’

  ‘No axe… did he say that?’

  ‘I believe so. What does it matter?’

  ‘Was it a Polyplane pilot who told her? The one, for instance, who is flying you today?’ Getting his own back, I thought, for :he way I’d threatened him at Redcar.

  Colin’s mouth opened.

  ‘No axe to grind,’ I said bitterly. That’s a laugh. They’ve been trying to prise you loose from Derrydowns all summer and now it looks as if they’ve done it.’

  I turned away from him, my throat physically closing. I didn’t think I could speak. I expected him to walk on, to walk away, to take himself to Polyplanes and my future to the trash can.

  Instead of that he followed me and touched my arm.

  ‘Matt…’

  I shook him off. ‘You tell your precious sister,’ I said thickly, that because of the rules I broke leading her back to Cambridge last Friday I am going to find myself in court again, and convicted and fined and in debt again… and this time I did it with my eyes open… not like that…’ I pointed to the newspaper clipping with a hand that trembled visibly, ‘when I had to take the rap for something that was mostly not my fault.’

  ‘Matt!’ He was himself appalled.

  ‘And as for the cowardice bit, she’s got her facts wrong… Oh, I’ve no doubt it sounded convincing and dreadful… Polyplanes had a lot to gain by upsetting her to the utmost… but I don’t see… I don’t see why she was more upset than just to persuade you not to fly with me…’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell her yourself?’

  I shook my head. ‘I probably might have done, one day. I didn’t think it was important.’

  ‘Not important!’ He was fierce with irritation. ‘She seems to have been building up some some sort of hero image of you, and then she discovered you had clay feet in all directions… Of course you should have told her, as you were going to marry her. That was obviously what upset her most…’

  I was speechless. My jaw literally dropped. Finally I said foolishly, ‘Did you say marry…’

  ‘Well, yes, of course,’ he said impatiently, and then seemed struck by my state of shock. ‘You were going to marry her, weren’t you?’

  ‘We’ve never… even talked about it.’

  ‘But you must have,’ he insisted. ‘I overheard her and Midge discussing it on Sunday evening, after I got back from Ostend. ‘When you are married to Matt,’ Midge said. I heard her distinctly. They were in the kitchen, washing up. They were deciding you would come and live with us in the bungalow… They were sharing out the bedrooms…’ His voice tailed off weakly. ‘It isn’t… it isn’t true?’

  I silently shook my head.

  He looked at me in bewilderment. ‘Girls,’ he said. ‘Girls.’

  ‘I can’t marry her,’ I said numbly. ‘I’ve hardly enough for a licence…”

  ‘That doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It does to me.’

  ‘It wouldn’t to Nancy,’ he said. He did a sort of double take. ‘Do you mean… she wasn’t so far out… after all?’

  ‘I suppose… not so far.’

  He looked down at the cutting in his hand, and suddenly screwed it up. ‘It looked so bad,’ he said with a tinge of apology.

  ‘It was bad,’ I said.

  He looked at my face. ‘Yes. I see it was…’

  A taxi drew up with a jerk and out piled my passengers, all gay and flushed with a winner and carrying a bottle of champagne.

  ‘I’ll explain to her,’ Colin said. ‘I’ll get her back…’ His expression was suddenly horrified. Shattered.

  ‘Where has she gone?’ I asked.

  He screwed up his eyes as if in pain.

  ‘She said…’ He swallowed. ‘She went… to Chanter.’

  I sat all evening in the caravan wanting to smash something. Smash the galley Smash the windows. Smash the walls.

  Might have felt better if I had.

  Chanter…

  Couldn’t eat, couldn’t think, couldn’t sleep.

  Never had listened to my own advice: don’t get involved. Should have stuck to it, stayed frozen. Icy. Safe.

  Tried to get back to the Arctic and not feel anything, but it was too late. Feeling had come back with a vengeance and of an intensity I could have done without. I hadn’t known I loved her. Knew I liked her, felt easy with her, wanted to be with her often and for a long time to come. I’d thought I could stop at friendship, and didn’t realise how far, how deep I had already gone.

  Oh Nancy…

  I went to sleep in the end by drinking half of the bottle of whisky Kenny Bayst had given me, but it didn’t do much good. I woke up at six in the morning to the same dreary torment and with a headache on top.

  There were no flights that day to take my mind off it.

  Nancy and Chanter…

  At some point in the morning I telephoned from the coinbox in the customers’ lounge to the Art School in Liverpool, to ask for Chanter’s home address. A crisp secretarial female voice answered: very sorry, absolutely not their policy to divulge the private addresses of their staff. If I could write, they would forward the letter.

  ‘Could I speak to him, then, do you think?’ I asked: though what good that would do, Heaven alone knew.

  ‘I’m afraid not, because he isn’t here. The school is temporarily closed, and we are not sure when it will reopen.’

  ‘The students,’ I remembered. ‘Are on strike?’

  ‘That… er… is so,’ she agreed.

  ‘Can’t you possibly tell me how I could get in touch with Chanter?’

  ‘Oh dear . . You are the second person pressing me to help… but honestly, to tell you the truth we don’t know where he lives… he moves frequently and seldom bothers to keep us up to date.’ Secretarial disapproval and despair in the tidy voice. ‘As I told Mr Ross, with all the best will in the world, I simply have no idea where you could find him.’

  I sat in the crew room while the afternoon dragged by. Finished writing up all records by two thirty, read through some newly arrived information circulars, calculated I had only three weeks and four days to run before my next medical, worked out that if I bought four cups of coffee every day from Honey’s machine, I was drinking away one fifteenth of my total week’s spending money, decided to make it water more often, looked up when Harley came stalking in, received a lecture on loyalty (mine to him), heard that I was on the next day to take a Wiltshire trainer to Newmarket races, and that if I gave Polyplanes any more grounds for reporting me or the firm to the Board of Trade, I could collect my cards.

  ‘Do my best not to,’ I murmured. Didn’t please him.

  Looked at the door swinging shut behind his back.

  Looked at the clock. Three twenty two.

  Chanter and Nancy.

  Back in the caravan, the same as the evening before. Tried turning on the television. Some comedy abou
t American suburban life punctuated by canned laughter. Stood five minutes of it, and found the silence afterwards almost as bad.

  Walked half way round the airfield, cut down to the village, drank half a pint in the pub, walked back. Total, four miles. When I stepped into the caravan it was still only nine o’clock.

  Honey Harley was waiting for me, draped over the sofa with maximum exposure of leg. Pink checked cotton sun-dress, very low cut.

  ‘Hi,’ she said with self possession. ‘Where’ve you been?’

  ‘For a walk.’

  She looked at me quizzically. ‘Got the Board of Trade on your mind?’

  I nodded. That, and other things.

  ‘I shouldn’t worry too much. Whatever the law says or does, you couldn’t have just left the Rosses to flounder.’

  ‘Your uncle doesn’t agree.’

  ‘Uncle,’ she said dispassionately, ‘is a nit. And anyway, play your cards right, and even if you do get a fine, Colin Ross will pay it. All you’d have to do would be to ask.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘You’re daft,’ she said. ‘Plain daft.’

  ‘You may be right.’

  She sighed, stirred, stood up. The curvy body rippled in all the right places. I thought of Nancy: much flatter, much thinner, less obviously sexed and infinitely more desirable. I turned abruptly away from Honey. Like hitting a raw nerve, the thought of Chanter, with his hair and his fringes . . and his hands.

  ‘O.K., iceberg,’ she said, mistakenly, ‘Relax. Your virtue is quite safe. I only came down, to start with, to tell you there was a phone call for you, and would you please ring back.’

  ‘Who…?’ I tried hard to keep it casual.

  ‘Colin Ross,’ Honey said matter-of-factly. ‘He wants you to call some time this evening, if you can. I said if it was about a flight I could deal with it, but apparently it’s something personal.’ She finished the sentence half way between an accusation and a question and left me ample time to explain.

  I didn’t. I said, ‘I’ll go up now, then, and use the telephone in the lounge.’

  She shrugged. ‘All right.’

  She walked up with me, but didn’t quite have the nerve to hover close enough to listen. I shut the lounge door in front of her resigned and humorously rueful face.