Reflex (5 page)

“Why is she insisting?”

“I don't know. She instructs my grandfather. She
doesn't take his advice. He's old and he's fed up with her, and so is my uncle, and they've shoved the whole mess onto me.”

“Three detectives couldn't find Amanda.”

“They didn't know where to look.”

“Nor do I,” I said.

He considered me. “You'd know.”

“No.”

“Do you know who your father is?” he said.

I
sat with my head turned towards the window, looking out at the bare calm line of the Downs. A measurable silence passed. The Downs would be there forever.

I said, “I don't want to get tangled up in a family I don't feel I belong to. I don't like their threads falling over me like a web. That old woman can't claw me back just because she feels like it, after all these years.”

Jeremy Folk didn't answer directly, and when he stood up some of the habitual gaucheness had come back into his movements, though not yet into his voice.

“I brought the reports we received from the three firms of detectives,” he said. “I'll leave them with you.”

“No, don't.”

“It's useless,” he said. He looked again around the room. “I see quite plainly that you don't want to be involved. But I'm afraid I'm going to plague you until you are.”

“Do your own dirty work.”

He smiled. “The dirty work was done about thirty years ago, wasn't it? Before either of us was born. This is just the muck floating back on the tide.”

“Thanks a bunch.”

He pulled a long bulging envelope out of the inside pocket of his country tweed and put it carefully down on the table. “They're not very long reports. You could just read them, couldn't you?”

He didn't expect an answer, or get one. He just moved vaguely towards the door to indicate that he was ready to leave, and I went downstairs with him and saw him out to his car.

“By the way,” he said, pausing awkwardly halfway into the driving seat, “Mrs. Nore really is dying. She has cancer of the spine. Nothing to be done. She'll live maybe six weeks, or maybe six months. They can't tell. So . . . er . . . no time to waste, don't you know?”

 

I spent the bulk of the day contentedly in the darkroom, developing and printing the black-and-white shots of Mrs. Millace and her troubles. They came out clear and sharp so that one could actually read the papers on the floor, and I wondered casually just where the borderline fell between positive vanity and simple pleasure in a job efficiently done. Perhaps it had been vanity to mount and hang the silver birches . . . but apart from the content the large size of the print had been a technical problem, and it had all come out right . . . and what did a sculptor do, throw a sack over his best statue?

Jeremy Folk's envelope stayed upstairs on the table where he'd put it; unopened, contents unread. I ate some tomatoes and cheese when I grew hungry, and cleared up the darkroom, and at six o'clock locked my doors and walked up the road to see Harold Osborne.

Sunday evenings he expected me for a drink, and each Sunday from six to seven we talked over what had happened in the past week and discussed plans for the week ahead. For all his unpredictable up-and-down moods Harold was a man of method, and he hated anything to interrupt these sessions, which he referred to as our military briefings. His wife during that hour answered the
telephone and took messages for him to ring back, and they had once had a blazing row with me because she had burst in to say their dog had been run over and killed.

“You could have told me in twenty minutes,” he yelled. “Now how the hell am I going to concentrate on Philip's orders for the Schweppes?”

“But the dog,” she wailed.

“Damn the dog.” He'd ranted at her for several minutes and then he'd gone out into the road and wept over the body of his mangled friend. Harold, I supposed, was everything I wasn't: moody, emotional, flamboyant, full of rage and love and guile and gusto. Only in our basic belief in getting things right were we alike, and that tacit agreement let us work together in underlying peace. He might scream at me violently, but he didn't expect me to mind, and because I knew him well, I didn't. Other jockeys and trainers and several reporters had said to me often in varying degrees of exasperation or humor, “I don't know how you put up with it,” and the answer was always the true one: “Easily.”

On that particular Sunday the sacrosanct hour had been interrupted before it could begin, because Harold had a visitor. I walked through his house from the stable entrance and went into the comfortable cluttered sitting room-office, and there in one of the armchairs was Victor Briggs.

“Philip!” Harold said, welcoming and smiling. “Pour yourself a drink. We're just going to run through the videotape of yesterday. Sit down. Are you ready? I'll switch on.”

Victor Briggs gave me several nods of approval and a handshake. No gloves, I thought. Cold pale dry hands with nothing aggressive in the grasp. Without the broad-brimmed hat he had thick glossy straight black hair which was receding slightly above the eyebrows to leave a center peak; and without the heavy navy overcoat, a plain dark suit. Indoors he still wore the close-guarded expression as
if afraid his thoughts might show, but there was overall a distinct air of satisfaction. Not a smile, just an atmosphere.

I opened a can of Coca-Cola and poured some into a glass.

“Don't you drink?” Victor Briggs asked.

“Champagne,” Harold said. “That's what he drinks, don't you, Philip?” He was in great good humor, his voice and presence amplifying the warm russet colors of the room, resonant as brass.

Harold's reddish-brown hair sprang in wiry curls all over his head, as untamable as his nature. He was fifty-two at that time and looked ten years younger, a big burly six feet of active muscle commanded by a strong but ambiguous face, his features more rounded than hawkish.

He switched on the video machine and sat back in his armchair to watch Daylight's debacle in the Sandown Pattern 'Chase, as pleased as if he'd won the Grand National. A good job no stewards were peering in, I thought. There was no mistaking the trainer's joy in his horse's failure.

The recording showed me on Daylight going down to the start, and lining up, and setting off: odds-on favorite at four to one on, said the commentator; only got to jump round to win. Immaculate leaps over the first two fences. Strong and steady up past the stands. Daylight just in the lead, dictating the pace, but all five runners closely bunched. Round the top bend, glued to the rails . . . faster downhill. The approach to the third fence . . . everything looking all right . . . and then the jump in the air and the stumbling landing, and the figure in red and blue silks going over the horse's neck and down under the feet. A groaning roar from the crowd, and the commentator's unemotional voice, “Daylight's down at that fence, and now in the lead is Little Moth . . .”

The rest of the race rolled on into a plodding undistinguished finish, and then came a rerun of Daylight's fall, with afterthought remarks from the commentator. “You can see the horse try to put in an extra stride, throwing
Philip Nore forward. The horse's head ducks on landing, giving his jockey no chance . . . poor Philip Nore clinging on . . . but hopeless . . . horse and jockey both unhurt.”

Harold stood up and switched the machine off. “Artistic,” he said, beaming down. “I've run through it twenty times. It's impossible to tell.”

“No one suspected,” Victor Briggs said. “One of the stewards said to me ‘what rotten bad luck.' ” There was a laugh somewhere inside Briggs, a laugh not quite breaking the surface but quivering in the chest. He picked up a large envelope, which had lain beside his gin and tonic, and held it out to me. “Here's my thank you, Philip.”

I said matter-of-factly, “It's kind of you, Mr. Briggs. But nothing's changed. I don't like to be paid for losing. I can't help it.”

Victor Briggs put the envelope down again without comment, and it wasn't he who was immediately angry, but Harold.

“Philip,” he said loudly, towering above me. “Don't be such a bloody prig. There's a great deal of money in that envelope. Victor's being very generous. Take it and thank him, and shut up.”

“I'd . . . rather not.”

“I don't care what you'd bloody rather. You're not so squeamish when it comes to committing the crime, are you, it's just the thirty pieces of silver you turn your pious nose up at. You make me sick. And you'll take that bloody money if I have to ram it down your throat.”

“Well, you will,” I said.

“I will what?”

“Have to ram it down my throat.”

Victor Briggs actually laughed, though when I glanced at him his mouth was tight shut as if the sound had escaped without his approval.

“And,” I said slowly, “I don't want to do it any more.”

“You'll do what you're bloody told,” Harold said.

Victor Briggs rose purposefully to his feet, and the two
of them, suddenly silent, stood looking down at me.

It seemed that a long time passed, and then Harold said in a quiet voice which held a great deal more threat than his shouting, “You'll do what you're told, Philip.”

I stood up in my turn. My mouth had gone dry, but I made my voice sound as neutral, as calm, as unprovoking as possible.

“Please . . . don't ask me for a repeat of yesterday.”

Victor Briggs narrowed his eyes. “Did the horse hurt you? He trod on you . . . you can see it on the video.”

I shook my head. “It's not that. It's the losing. You know I hate it. I just . . . don't want you to ask me . . . again.”

More silence.

“Look,” I said. “There are degrees. Of course I'll give a horse an easy race if he isn't a hundred per cent fit and a hard race would ruin him for next time out. Of course I'll do that, it only makes sense. But no more like Daylight yesterday. I know I used to . . . but yesterday was the last.”

Harold said coldly, “You'd better go now, Philip. I'll talk to you in the morning,” and I nodded, and left, and there were none of the warm handshakes which had greeted my arrival.

What would they do, I wondered. I walked in the windy dark down the road from Harold's house to mine as I had on hundreds of Sundays, and wondered if it would be for the last time. If he wanted to he could put other jockeys up on his horses from that day onwards. He was under no obligation to give me rides. I was classed as self-employed, because I was paid per race by the owners, and not per week by the trainer; and there were no such things as “unfair dismissal” enquiries for the self-employed.

I suppose it was too much to hope that they would let me get away with it. Yet for three years they had run the Briggs horses honestly, so why not in future? And if they
insisted on fraud, couldn't they get some other poor young slob just starting his career, and put the pressure on him when they wanted a race lost? Foolish wishes, all of them. I'd put my job down at their feet like a football and at that moment they were probably kicking it out of the stadium.

It was ironic. I hadn't known I was going to say what I had. It had just forced its own way out, like water through a new spring.

All those races I'd thrown away in the past, not liking it, but doing it . . . Why was it so different now? Why was the revulsion so strong now that I didn't think I
could
do a Daylight again, even if to refuse meant virtually the end of being a jockey?

When had I changed . . . and how could it have happened without my noticing? I didn't know. I just had a sense of having already traveled too far to turn back. Too far down a road where I didn't want to go.

 

I went upstairs and read the three detectives' reports on Amanda because it was better, on the whole, than thinking about Briggs and Harold.

Two of the reports had come from fairly large firms and one from a one-man outfit, and all three had spent a lot of ingenuity padding out very few results. Justifying their charges, no doubt. Copiously explaining what they had all spent so long not finding out: and all three, not surprisingly, had not found out approximately the same things.

None of them, for a start, could find any trace of her birth having been registered. They all expressed doubt and disbelief over this discovery, but to me it was no surprise at all. I had discovered that I myself was unregistered when I tried to get a passport, and the fuss had gone on for months.

I knew my name, my mother's name, my birthdate, and that I'd been born in London. Officially, however, I
didn't exist. “But here I am,” I'd protested, and I'd been told, “Ah yes, but you don't have a piece of paper to prove it, do you?” There had been affidavits by the ton and miles of red tape, and I'd missed the race I'd been offered in France by the time I got permission to go there.

Owing to my grandmother's vagueness about when she had received her daughter's letter, the detectives had all scoured Somerset House for records of Amanda Nore, aged between ten and twenty-five, possibly born in Sussex. In spite of the fairly unusual name, they had all completely failed.

I sucked my teeth, thinking that I could do better than that about her age.

She couldn't have been born before I went to live with Duncan and Charlie, because I'd seen my mother fairly often before that, about five or six times a year, and often for a week at a time, and I would have known if she'd had a child. The people she left me with used to talk about her when they thought I wasn't listening, and I gradually understood what I remembered their saying, though sometimes not for years afterwards; but none of them, ever, had hinted that she was pregnant.

That meant that I was at least twelve when Amanda was born; and consequently she couldn't at present be older than eighteen.

At the other end of things she couldn't possibly be as young as ten. My mother, I was sure, had died sometime between Christmas and my eighteenth birthday. She might have been desperate enough at that time to write to her own mother and send her the photograph. Amanda in the photograph had been three . . . so Amanda, if she was still alive, would be at least fifteen.

Sixteen or seventeen, most likely. Born during the three years when I hadn't seen my mother at all, when I'd lived with Duncan and Charlie.