Reflex (3 page)

Daylight, confused by getting the wrong signals from
me, and perhaps feeling some of my turmoil and fury in the telepathic way that horses do, began to waver in the stride before take-off, putting in a small jerky extra stride where none was needed.

God, boy, I thought, I'm bloody sorry, but down you go, if I can make you: and I kicked him at the wrong moment and twitched hard on the bit in his mouth while he was in midair, and shifted my weight forward in front of his shoulder.

He landed awkwardly and stumbled slightly, dipping his head down to recover his balance. It wasn't really enough . . . but it would have to do. I whisked my right foot out of the stirrup and over his back, so that I was entirely on his left side, out of the saddle, clinging onto his neck.

It's almost impossible to stay on, from that position. I clung to him for about three bucking strides and then slid down his chest, irrevocably losing my grip and bouncing onto the grass under his feet. A flurry of thuds from his hooves, and a roll or two, and the noise and the galloping horses were gone.

I sat on the quiet ground and unbuckled my helmet, and felt absolutely wretched.

 

“Bad luck,” they said briefly in the weighing room. “Rotten luck”: and got on with the rest of the day. I wondered if any of them guessed, but maybe they didn't. No one nudged or winked or looked sardonic. It was my own embarrassed sense of shame which kept me staring mostly at the floor.

“Cheer up,” Steve Millace said, buttoning some orange and blue colors. “It's not the end of the world.” He picked up his whip and his helmet. “Always another day.”

“Yeah.”

He went off to ride, and I changed gloomily back into street clothes. So much, I thought, for the sense of excitement in which I'd arrived. So much for winning, for
half a dozen mythical trainers climbing over themselves to secure my services for the Gold Cup. So much for a nice boost to the finances, which were wilting a bit after buying a new car. On all fronts, depression.

I went out to watch the race.

Steve Millace, with more courage than sense, drove his horse at leg-tangling pace into the second last fence and crashed on landing. It was the sort of hard fast fall which cracked bones, and one could see straight away that Steve was in trouble. He struggled up as far as his knees, and then sat on his heels with his head bent forward and his arms wrapped round his body, as if he was hugging himself. Arm, shoulder, ribs . . . something had gone.

His horse, unhurt, got up and galloped away, and I stood watching while two first aid men gingerly helped Steve into an ambulance. A bad day for him, too, I thought, on top of all his family troubles. What on earth made us do it? What ever drove us to persist, disregarding injury and risk and disappointment? What lured us continually to speed, when we could earn as much sitting in an office?

I walked back to the weighing room feeling the bits of me that Daylight had trodden on beginning to stiffen with bruises. I'd be crimson and black the next day, which was nothing but usual. The biffs and bangs of the trade had never bothered me much, and nothing I'd so far broken had made me frightened about the next fall. I normally had, in fact, a great feeling of physical well-being, of living in a strong and supple body, of existing as an efficient coordinated athletic whole. Nothing obtrusive. It was there. It was health.

Disillusion, I thought, would be the killer. If the job no longer seemed worth it, if people like Victor Briggs soured it beyond acceptance, at that point one would give up. But not yet. It was still the life I wanted; still the life I was far from ready to leave.

Steve came into the changing room in boots, breeches,
undervest, clavicle rings, bandage and sling, with his head inclined stiffly to one side.

“Collarbone,” he said crossly. “Bloody nuisance.” Discomfort was making his thin face gaunt, digging hollows in his cheeks and around his eyes, but what he clearly felt most was annoyance.

His valet helped him to change and dress, touching him with the gentleness of long practice and pulling off his boots smoothly so as not to jar the shoulder. A crowd of other jockeys around us jostled and sang and made jokes, drank tea and ate fruitcake, slid out of colors and pulled on trousers, laughed and cursed and hurried. Knocking-off time, the end of the working week, back again Monday.

“I suppose,” Steve said to me, “you couldn't possibly drive me home?” He sounded tentative, as if not sure our friendship stretched that far.

“Yes, I should think so,” I said.

“To my mother's house? Near Ascot.”

“OK.”

“I'll get someone to fetch my car tomorrow,” he said. “Goddamn nuisance.”

I took a photograph of him and his valet, who was pulling off the second boot.

“What do you ever do with all them snaps?” the valet said.

“Put them in a drawer.”

He gave a heaven-help-us jerk of the head. “Waste of time.”

Steve glanced at the Nikon. “Dad said once he'd seen some of your pics. You would put him out of business one of these days, he said.”

“He was laughing at me.”

“Yeah. Maybe. I don't know.” He inched one arm into his shirt and let the valet fasten the buttons over the other. “Ouch,” he said, wincing.

George Millace had seen some pictures I'd had in my
car, catching me looking through them as I sat in the parking lot at the end of a sunny spring day, waiting for the friend I'd given a lift to to come out of the racecourse.

“Proper little Cartier Bresson,” George had said, faintly smiling. “Let's have a look.” He'd put his arm through the open window and grasped the stack, and short of a tug-o'-war I couldn't have prevented him. “Well, well,” he said, going through them methodically. “Horses on the Downs, coming out of a mist. Romantic muck.” He handed them back. “Keep it up, kid. One of these days you might take a photograph.”

He'd gone off across the parking lot with the heavy camera bag hanging from his shoulder, hitching it from time to time to ease its weight: the only photographer I knew with whom I didn't feel at home.

Duncan and Charlie, in the three years I'd lived with them, had patiently taught me all I could learn. No matter that when I was first dumped on them I was only twelve: Charlie had said from the start that as I was there I could sweep the floors and clean up in the darkroom, and I'd been glad to. The rest had come gradually and thoroughly, and I'd finished by regularly doing all of Duncan's printing, and the routine half of Charlie's. “Our lab assistant” Charlie called me. “He mixes our chemicals,” he would say. “A wizard, with a hypodermic. Mind now, Philip, only one point four milliliters of benzol alcohol.” And I'd suck the tiny amounts accurately into the syringe and add them to the developer, and feel as if I were perhaps of some use in the world after all.

The valet helped Steve into his jacket and gave him his watch and wallet, and we went at Steve's tender pace out to my car.

“I promised to give Mum a hand with clearing up that mess, when I got back. What a bloody hope.”

“She's probably got neighbors.” I eased him into the modern Ford and went round to the driving seat. Started
up in the closing dusk, switched on the lights and drove off in the direction of Ascot.

“I can't get used to the idea of Dad not being there,” Steve said.

“What happened?” I asked. “I mean, you said he drove into a tree . . .”

“Yes.” He sighed. “He went to sleep. At least, that's what everyone reckons. There weren't any other cars, nothing like that. There was a bend, or something, and he didn't go around it. Just drove straight ahead. He must have had his foot on the accelerator . . . The front of the car was smashed right in.” He shivered. “He was on his way home from Doncaster. Mum's always warned him about driving on the highway at night when he's had a long day, but this wasn't the highway. He was much nearer home.”

He sounded tired and depressed, which no doubt he was, and in brief sideways glances I could see that for all my care the car's motion was hurting his shoulder.

“He'd stopped for half an hour at a friend's house,” Steve said. “And they'd had a couple of whiskies. It was all so stupid. Just going to sleep . . .”

We drove for a long way in silence, he with his problems, and I with mine.

“Only last Saturday,” Steve said. “Only a week ago.”

Alive one minute, dead the next . . . the same as everybody.

“Turn left here,” Steve said.

We turned left and right and left a few times and came finally to a road bordered on one side by a hedge and on the other by neat detached houses in shadowy gardens.

In the middle distance along there things were happening. There were lights and people. An ambulance with its doors open, its blue light flashing on top. A police car. Policemen. People coming and going from one of the houses, hurrying. Every window uncurtained, spilling out light.

“My
God
,” Steve said. “That's
their
house. Mum's and Dad's.”

I pulled up outside, and he sat unmoving, staring, stricken.

“It's Mum,” he said. “It must be. It's Mum.”

There was something near the cracking point in his voice. His face was twisted with terrible anxiety, and his eyes in the reflected light looked wide and very young.

“Stay here,” I said practically. “I'll go and see.”

H
is mum lay on the sofa in the sitting room, quivering and coughing and bleeding. Someone had attacked her pretty nastily, splitting her nose and mouth and eyelid and leaving her with bright raw patches on cheek and jaw. Her clothes were torn here and there, her shoes were off, and her hair stuck out in straggly wisps.

I had seen Steve's mother at the races from time to time: a pleasant well-dressed woman nearing fifty, secure and happy in her life, plainly proud of her husband and son. As the grief-stricken, burgled, beaten-up person on the sofa, she was unrecognizable.

There was a policeman sitting on a stool beside her, and a policewoman, standing, holding a bloodstained cloth. Two ambulance men hovered in the background, with a stretcher propped upright against one wall. A neighborly looking woman stood around looking grave and worried. The room itself was a shambles, with papers and smashed furniture littering the floor. On the wall, the signs of jam and cakes, as Steve had said.

When I walked in, the policeman turned his head. “Are you the doctor?”

“No . . .” I explained who I was.

“Steve.” His mother said. Her mouth trembled, and her hands. “Steve's hurt.” She could hardly speak, yet the fear for her son came across like a fresh torment, overshadowing anything she'd yet suffered.

“It's not bad, I promise you,” I said hastily. “He's here, outside. It's just his collarbone. I'll get him straight away.”

I went outside and told him, and helped him out of the car. He was hunched and stiff, but seemed not to feel it.

“Why?” he said, uselessly, going up the path. “Why did it happen? What for?”

The policeman indoors was asking the same question.

“You were just saying, when your son came home, that there were two of them, with stockings over their faces. Is that right?”

She nodded slightly. “Young,” she said. The word came out distorted through her cut, swollen lips. She saw Steve and held her hand out to him, to hold his own hand tight. He himself, at the sight of her, grew still paler and even more gaunt.

“White youths or black?” the policeman said.

“White.”

“What were they wearing?”

“Jeans.”

“Gloves?”

She closed her eyes and whispered, “Yes.”

“Mrs. Millace, please try to answer,” the policeman said. “What did they want?”

“Safe,” she said, mumbling.

“What?”

“Safe. We haven't got a safe. I told them.” A pair of tears rolled down her cheeks. “ ‘Where's the safe?' they said. They hit me.”

“There isn't a safe here,” Steve said furiously. “I'd like to kill them.”

“Yes, sir,” the policeman said. “Just keep quiet, sir, if you wouldn't mind.”

“One . . . smashed things,” Mrs. Millace said. “The other just hit me.”

“Bloody
animals
,” Steve said.

“Did they say what they wanted?” the policeman asked.

“Safe.”

“Yes, but is that all? Did they say they wanted money? Jewelry? Silver? Gold coins? What exactly did they say they wanted, Mrs. Millace?”

She frowned slightly, as if thinking. Then, forming the words with difficulty, she said, “All they said was, ‘Where is the safe?' ”

“I suppose you do know,” I said to the policeman, “that this house was also burgled yesterday?”

“Yes, I do, sir. I was here yesterday myself.” He looked at me assessingly for a few seconds and turned back to Steve's mother.

“Did these two young men in stocking masks say anything about being here yesterday? Try to remember, Mrs. Millace.”

“I don't . . . think so.”

“Take your time,” he said. “Try to remember.”

She was silent for a long interval, and two more tears appeared. Poor lady, I thought. Too much pain, too much grief, too much outrage: and a good deal of courage.

At last she said, “They were . . . like bulls. They shouted. They were rough. Rough voices. They . . . shoved me. Pushed. I opened the front door. They shoved in. Pushed me . . . in here. Started . . . smashing things. Making this mess. Shouting, ‘Where is the safe? Tell us, where is the safe?' Hit me.” She paused. “I don't think . . . they said anything . . . about yesterday.”

“I'd like to
kill
them,” Steve said.

“Third time,” mumbled his mother.

“What was that, Mrs. Millace?” the policeman said.

“Third time burgled. Happened . . . two years ago.”

“You can't just let her lie there,” Steve said violently.
“Asking all these questions . . . . Haven't you got a doctor?”

“It's all right, Steve dear,” the neighborly woman said, moving forward as if to give comfort. “I've rung Dr. Williams. He said he would come at once.” Caring and bothered, she was nonetheless enjoying the drama, and I could envisage her looking forward to telling it to all her friends. “I was over here helping your mother earlier, Steve dear,” she said, rushing on, “but of course I went home—next door, as you know, dear—to get tea for my family, and then I heard all this shouting and it seemed all wrong, dear, so I was just coming back to see, and calling out to your mother to ask if she was all right, and those two dreadful young men just burst out of the house, dear, just
burst
out, so of course I came in here . . . and well . . . your poor mother . . . so I rang for the police and for the ambulance, and Dr. Williams . . . and everybody.” She looked as if she would like at least a pat on the back for all this presence of mind, but Steve was beyond such responses.

The policeman was equally unappreciative. He said to her, “And you still can't remember any more about the car they drove off in?”

Defensively she said, “It was dark outside.”

“A lightish colored car, medium sized. Is that all?”

“I don't notice cars much.”

No one suggested that this was a car she should have noticed. Everyone thought it.

I cleared my throat and said diffidently to the policeman, “I don't know if it would be of any use, and of course you may want your own man or something, but I've a camera in my car, if you want photographs of all this.”

He raised his eyebrows and considered and said yes; so I fetched both cameras and took two sets of pictures, in color and in black and white, with close-ups of Mrs. Millace's damaged face and wide-angle shots of the room.
Steve's mother bore the flashlight without complaint, and none of it took very long.

“Professional, are you, sir?” the policeman said.

I shook my head. “Just had a lot of practice.”

He told me where to send the photographs when they were printed, and the doctor arrived.

“Don't go yet,” Steve said to me, and I looked at the desperation in his face, and stayed with him through all the ensuing bustle, sitting on the stairs out in the hall.

“I don't know what to do,” he said, joining me there. “I can't drive like this, and I'll have to go and see that she's all right. They're taking her to the hospital for the night. I suppose I can get a taxi . . .”

He didn't actually ask it, but the question was there. I stifled a small sigh and offered my services, and he thanked me as if I'd thrown him a lifebelt.

 

I found myself finally staying the night, because when we got back from the hospital he looked so exhausted that one simply couldn't drive away and leave him. I made us a couple of omelettes as by that time, ten o'clock, we were both starving, neither of us having eaten since breakfast; and after that I picked up some of the mess.

He sat on the edge of the sofa looking white and strained and not mentioning that his fracture was hurting quite a bit. Perhaps he hardly felt it, though one could see the pain in his face. Whenever he spoke, it was of his mother.

“I'll kill them,” he said. “Those
bastards
.”

More guts than sense, I thought; same as usual. By the sound of things, if nine-stone-seven Steve met up with the two young bulls, it would be those bastards who'd do the killing.

I had started at the far end of the room, picking up a lot of magazines, newspapers and old letters, and also the base and lid of a flat ten-by-eight-inch box which had once held photographic printing paper.

“What shall I do with all this?” I asked Steve.

“Oh, just pile it anywhere,” he said vaguely. “Some of it came out of that rack over there by the television.”

A wooden-slatted magazine rack, empty, lay on its side on the carpet.

“And that's Dad's rubbish box, that battered old orange thing. He kept it in that rack with the papers. Never threw it away, just left it there, year after year. Funny really.” He yawned. “Don't bother too much. Mum's neighbor will do it.”

I picked up a small batch of oddments; a transparent piece of film about three inches wide by eight long, several strips of 35-mm color negatives, developed but blank, and an otherwise pleasant picture of Mrs. Millace spoiled by splashes of chemical down the hair and neck.

“Those were in Dad's rubbish box, I think,” Steve said, yawning again. “You might as well throw them away.”

I put them in the wastepaper basket, and added to them a nearly black black-and-white print, which had been torn in half, and some more color negatives covered in magenta blotches.

“He kept them to remind himself of his worst mistakes,” Steve said. “It doesn't seem
possible
that he isn't coming back.”

There was another very dark print in a paper folder, showing a shadowy man sitting at a table. “Do you want this?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Dad's junk.”

I put some women's magazines and a series on woodwork back in the magazine rack, and piled the letters on the table. The bulk of the mess left on the floor seemed to be broken china ornaments, the remnants of a spindly-legged sewing box, which had been thoroughly smashed, and a small bureau, tipped on its side, with cascades of writing paper falling out of the drawers. None of the damage seemed to have had any purpose beyond a frightening show of power, all of a piece with the pushing, shoving
and shouting that Mrs. Millace had described. A rampage designed to confuse and bewilder, and when they got no results from attacking her possessions, they'd started on her face.

I stood the bureau up again, shoveled most of the stuff back into it and collected together a heap of scattered tapestry patterns and dozens of skeins of wool. One began at last to see clear stretches of carpet.

“Bastards,”
Steve said. “I hate them. I'll kill them.”

“Why would they think your mother had a safe?”

“God knows. Perhaps they just go around ripping off new widows, screaming ‘safe' at them on the offchance. I mean, if she'd had one, she'd have told them where it was, wouldn't she? After losing Dad like that. And yesterday's burglary, while we were at the funeral. Such dreadful shocks. She'd have told them. I know she would.”

I nodded.

“She can't take any more,” he said. There were tears in his voice, and his eyes were dark with the effort of trying not to cry. It was he, I thought, who was closest to the edge. His mother would be tucked up with sympathy and sedation.

“Time for bed,” I said abruptly. “Come on. I'll help you undress. She'll be better tomorrow.”

 

I woke early after an uneasy night and lay watching the dingy November dawn creep through the window. There was a good deal about life that I didn't want to get up and face: a situation common, no doubt, to the bulk of mankind. Wouldn't it be marvelous, I thought dimly, to be pleased with oneself, to look forward to the day ahead, to not have to think about mean-minded dying grandmothers and one's own depressing dishonesty. Normally fairly happy-go-lucky, a taking-things-as-they-come sort of person, I disliked being backed into uncomfortable corners from which escape meant action.

Things had happened to me all my life. I'd never gone out looking. I had learned whatever had come my way, whatever was there. Like photography, because of Duncan and Charlie. And like riding, because of my mother's dumping me in a racing stable; and if she'd left me with a farmer, I would no doubt be making hay.

Survival for so many years had been a matter of accepting what I was given, of making myself useful, of being quiet and agreeable and no trouble, of repression and introversion and self-control, that I was now, as a man, fundamentally unwilling to make a fuss or fight.

I had taught myself for so long not to want things that weren't offered to me that I now found very little to want. I had made no major decisions. What I had, had simply come.

Harold Osborne had offered me the cottage, along with the job of stable jockey. I'd accepted. The bank had offered a mortgage. I'd accepted. The local garage had suggested a certain car. I'd bought it.

I understood why I was as I was. I knew why I just drifted along, going where the tide took me. I knew why I was passive, but I felt absolutely no desire to change things, to stamp about and insist on being the master of my own fate.

I didn't want to look for my half-sister, and I didn't want to lose my job with Harold. I could simply drift along as usual doing nothing very positive . . . and yet for some obscure reason that instinctive course was seeming increasingly unattractive.

Irritated, I put my clothes on and went downstairs, peering in at Steve on the way and finding him sound asleep.

Someone had perfunctorily swept the kitchen floor since the funeral-day burglary, pushing into a heap a lot of broken crockery and spilled groceries. The evening before I'd discovered the coffee and sugar dumped in the dust, but there was milk along with the eggs in the
refrigerator, and I drank some of that. Then, to pass the time, I wandered around, just looking.