Reflex (13 page)

“He's interested. He says we'll both go down and look the place over, and then if it's OK he'll send the writer, and a photographer.”

I said diffidently, “I've taken pictures of Lambourn . . . If you'd like to . . .”

She interrupted with a shake of her head. “We'd need professional work. Sorry and all that. But my boss says if you don't mind we'll call at your apartment or whatever, if you'd be willing to help us with directions and general information.”

“Yes . . . I'd be willing.”

“That's great.” She gave me a sudden smile that was more like a pat on the back than a declaration of friendship. She knows she's bright, I thought. She's used to being brighter than most. She's not as good as Jeremy Folk at concealing that she knows it.

“Can we come on Friday?” she said.

L
ance Kinship was wandering around at the head of a retinue of cameramen, sound recordists and general dogbodies when I arrived at Newbury racecourse on the following day, Wednesday. We heard in the changing room that he was taking stock shots for a film with the blessing of the management and that jockeys were asked to cooperate. Not, it was said, to the point of grinning into the camera lens at every opportunity, but just to not treading on the crew if one found them underfoot.

I slung my Nikon around my neck inside my raincoat and unobtrusively took a few pictures of the men taking pictures.

Technically speaking, cameras were not welcome at race meetings except in the hands of recognized photographers, but most racecourses didn't fidget unduly about the general public taking snaps anywhere except in the members' enclosure. And because I'd been doing it for so long, most racecourse managers looked tolerantly upon my own efforts. Only at Royal Ascot was the crackdown on amateurs complete: the one meeting where people had to park their cameras at the entrance, like gunslingers riding into a bullet-free town.

Lance Kinship looked as if he had tried hard not to seem like a film director. In place of his olive suede jacket, now presumably having its bloodstains removed at the cleaners, he wore a brownish tweed suit topped by a brown trilby set at a conservative angle and accompanied by checked shirt, quiet tie, and raceglasses. He looked, I thought, as if he'd cast himself as an uppercrust extra in his own film.

He was telling his crew what to do with indecisive gestures. It was only in the tenseness with which they listened to him, their eyes sliding his way every time he spoke, that one saw any authority. I took a couple of shots of that reaction; the eyes all looking towards him from averted heads. I reckoned that when printed those pictures might quite clearly show men obeying someone they didn't like.

At one point, around by the saddling boxes, where the crew were filming the trainers fitting on the saddles before the first race, Lance Kinship turned his head in the instant I pressed the button, and stared straight into my lens.

He strode across to me looking annoyed.

“What are you doing?” he said, though it must have been obvious.

“I was just interested,” I said inoffensively.

He looked at my boots, my white breeches and the red and yellow shirt which I wore under the raincoat.

“A jockey,” he said, as if to himself. He peered through his black-framed spectacles at my camera. “A Nikon.” He raised his eyes to my face and frowned with half-recognition.

“How's the nose?” I said politely.

He grunted, finally placing me.

“Don't get into the film,” he said. “You're not typical. I don't want Nikon-toting jocks lousing up the footage. Right?”

“I'll be careful,” I said.

He seemed on the point of telling me to go away altogether, but he glanced from side to side and took note that a few racegoers were listening, and decided against
it. With a brief disapproving nod he went back to his crew, and presently they moved off and began taking pictures of the saddled horses walking into the parade ring.

The chief cameraman carried his big movie camera on his shoulder and mostly operated it from there. An assistant walked one step behind, carrying a tripod. One sound recorder carried the charcoal sausage-shaped boom and a second fiddled endlessly with knobs on an electric box. A young man with frizzy hair operated a clapper board, and a girl took copious notes. They trailed around all afternoon getting in everyone's way and apologizing like mad so that no one much minded.

They were down at the start when I lined up on a scatty novice 'chaser for Harold, and thankfully absent from the eighth fence, where the novice 'chaser put his forefeet into the open ditch on the take-off side and crossed the birch almost upside down. Somewhere during this wild somersault I fell out of the saddle, but by the mercy of heaven when the half-ton of horse crashed to the ground I was not underneath it.

He lay prostrate for a few moments, winded and panting, giving me plenty of time to grasp hold of the reins and save his lad the frustrating job of catching him loose. Some horses I loved and some I didn't. This was a clumsy stubborn delinquent with a hard mouth, just starting what was likely to be a long career of bad jumping. I'd schooled him at home several times and knew him too well. If he met a fence right, he was safe enough, but if he met it wrong he ignored signals to change his stride; and every horse met a fence wrong now and then, however skillful his rider. I reckoned every time he completed a race, I'd be lucky.

Resignedly I waited until he was on his feet and prancing about a bit, then remounted him and trotted him back to the stands, and made encouraging remarks to the downcast owner and honest ones to Harold.

“Tell him to cut his losses and buy a better horse.”

“He can't afford it.”

“He's wasting the training fees.”

“I dare say,” Harold said. “But we're not telling him, are we?”

I grinned at him. “No, I guess not.”

I took my saddle into the weighing room and Harold went off to join the owner in a consolatory drink. Harold needed the training fees. I needed the riding fees. The owner was buying a dream and kidding himself. It happened every day, all the time, in racing. It was only occasionally that the dream came superbly, soul-fillingly true, and when that happened you saw points of light like stars in the owner's eyes. Thank God for the owners, I thought. Without them racing wouldn't exist.

When I was changing back into street clothes someone came and told me there was a man outside asking for the jockey with the camera. I went to see, and found Lance Kinship trudging up and down and looking impatient.

“Oh there you are,” he said, as if I'd seriously kept him waiting. “What's your name?”

“Philip Nore.”

“Well, Phil, what do you say? You took some photographs today. If they're any good I'll buy them from you. How's that?”

“Well . . .” I was nonplussed. “Yes, if you like.”

“Good. Where's your camera? Get it then, get it. The crew is over by the winning post. Take some photographs of them shooting the finish of the next race. Right? Right?”

“Yes,” I said dazedly.

“Come on then. Come on.”

I fetched the camera from the changing room and found him still waiting for me but definitely in a hurry. I would have to get over there and assess the best angles, he explained, and I'd only have one chance because the crew would be moving out to the parking lot presently to film the racegoers going home.

He had apparently tried to get the regular racing photographer to do the present job, but they had said they were too busy.

“I remembered you. Worth trying, I thought. With that camera, you at least have to be able to focus. Right?”

We were walking fast. He broke now and then into a sort of trotting stride, and his breathing gradually grew shorter. His mental energy however was unflagging.

“We need these pics for publicity. Right?”

“I see,” I said.

His words and manner were so much at variance with his appearance that the whole expedition seemed to me powerfully unreal. Urgent film producers (who might or might not provide cocaine for sniffing at parties) were surely not accustomed to look the country gentleman, nor tweeded country gentlemen to speak with slovenly vowels and glottalstop consonants. The “right?” he was so fond of was pronounced without its final “t.”

I would have thought, if he wanted publicity pictures, that he would have brought a photographer of his own; and I asked him.

“Sure,” he said. “I had one lined up. Then he died. Didn't get around to it again. Then today, saw you. Reminded me. Asked the news photographers. No dice. Thought of you, right? Asked them about you. They said you were good, you could do it. You may be lousy. If your pics are no good, I don't buy, right?”

He panted across the course to the winning post on the far side, and I asked him which photographer had died.

“Fellow called Millace. Know him?”

“I knew him,” I said.

“He said he'd do it. Died in a car crash. Here we are. You get on with it. Take what you want. Got color film in there, have you?”

I nodded and he nodded, and he turned away to give instructions to the crew. They again listened to him with the slightly averted heads, and I wandered away. Lance
Kinship was not immediately likeable, but I again had a strong feeling that his crew felt positive discontent. He wouldn't buy photographs showing that response, I thought dryly, so I waited until the crew were not looking at him, and shot them absorbed in their work.

Lance Kinship's breathing returned to normal and he himself merged again into the racing background as if he'd been born there. An actor at heart, I thought; but unlike an actor he was dressing a part in real life, which seemed odd.

“What film are you making?” I asked.

“Stock shots,” he said uninformatively. “Background.”

I left it, and walked around the crew looking for useful angles for pictures. The horses came out onto the course and cantered down to the start, and the frizzy-haired boy with the clapper board, who happened to be close to me, said with sudden and unexpected fierceness, “You'd think he was God Almighty. You'd think this was an epic, the way he frigs about. We're making commercials. Half a second on screen, flash off. Huh!”

I half smiled. “What's the product?”

“Some sort of brandy.”

Lance Kinship came towards me and told me it was important that he should be included in my photographs, and that I should take them from where he would be prominently in shot.

The frizzy-haired boy surreptitiously raised his eyebrows into comical peaks, and I assured Lance Kinship with a trembling straight face that I would do my absolute best.

I did by good luck get one or two reasonable pictures, but no doubt George Millace and his inner eye and his motor-drive camera would have outstripped me by miles. Lance Kinship gave me a card with his address and told me again that he would buy the pictures if he liked them, right?

He didn't say for how much, and I didn't like to ask.

I would never be a salesman.

Taking photographs for a living, I thought ruefully, would find me starving within a week.

 

Reaching home I switched on the lights and drew the curtains, and sat by the kitchen table going again through George Millace's rubbish box, thinking of his talents and his cruel mind, and wondering just how much profit he had made from his deadly photographs.

It was true that if he'd left any more pictures in that box I wanted to decipher them. The urge to solve the puzzles was overpowering. But if I learned any more secrets, what would I do with them . . . and what ought I to do with those I already had?

In a fairly typical manner I decided to do pretty well nothing. To let events take their course. To see what happened.

Meanwhile there were those tantalizing bits that looked so pointless . . .

I lifted out the black plastic light-proof envelope, which was of about the same size as the box and lying at the bottom of it, under everything else. I looked again at its contents, as I had in Steve Millace's house, and saw again the page-sized piece of clear plastic, and also, what hadn't registered before, two sheets of paper of about the same size.

I looked at them briefly and closed them again into their light-proof holder, because it had suddenly occurred to me that George might not have stored them like that unless it was necessary. That plastic and that paper might bear latent images . . . which I might already have destroyed by exposing them to light.

The piece of plastic and the sheets of paper didn't actually look to me like photographic materials at all. They looked like a piece of plastic and two sheets of typing paper. If they bore latent images, I didn't know how to develop them. If they didn't, why had George kept them in a light-proof envelope?

I sat staring vaguely at the silent black plastic and thinking about developers. To bring out the image on any particular type of film or any type of paper one had to use the right type of developer, the matched mixture of chemicals made for the task. All of which meant that unless I knew the make and type of the plastic and of the two sheets of paper I couldn't get any further.

A little pensively I pushed the black envelope aside and took up the strips of blank negatives, which at least didn't have the built-in difficulty of being still sensitive to light. They had already been developed. They just looked as if they had held no latent images to bring out.

They were thirty-five-millimeter color film negatives, and there were a lot of them, some simply blank and others blank with uneven magenta blotches here and there. The negatives were in strips, mostly of six. I laid them all out end to end and made the first interesting discovery.

All the plain blank negatives had come from one film, and those with magenta blotches from another. The frame numbers along the top of each strip ran consecutively from one to thirty-six in each case. Two films of thirty-six exposures each.

I knew what make of film they were, because each manufacturer placed the frame numbers differently, but I didn't suppose that that was important. What might be important, however, was the very nature of color negatives.

While slide films—transparencies—appeared to the eye in their true lifelike colors, negative film appeared in the reciprocal colors: and to get back to the true colors one had of course to make a print from the negative.

The primary colors of light were blue, green and red. The reciprocal colors, in which they appeared on a negative, were yellow, magenta and cyan. Negatives therefore would have looked like mixtures of yellow, deep pink (magenta) and greeny-blue (cyan), except that to get good whites and highlights all manufacturers gave their
negatives an overall pale orange cast. Color negatives therefore always looked a pale clear orange at the edges. The overall orange color also had the effect of masking the yellow sections so that they didn't show to the eye as yellow bits of negative, but as orange.