Reflex (7 page)

“Wasn't he angry?”

“Not as I noticed.”

“He must have been,” I said.

Kenny shrugged again.

“At the very least,” I said, “he was five horses short, and no trainer with his size stable can afford that.”

“He didn't say nothing.” The second bucket was nearly full, and Kenny turned off the tap. “He didn't seem to care much about losing them. Something pissed him off a bit later, though.”

“What did?”

Kenny looked uninterested and picked up the buckets. “Don't know. He was right grumpy. Some of the owners got fed up and left.”

“So did you,” I said.

“Yeah.” He started walking across the yard with water sloshing gently at each step. I went with him, warily keeping a dry distance. “What's the point of staying when a place is going down the drain?”

“Were Yaxley's horses in good shape when they went off to the farm?” I asked.

“Sure.” He looked slightly puzzled. “Why are you asking?”

“No real reason. Someone mentioned those horses . . . and Mr. Osborne said you looked after them. I was just interested.”

“Oh.” He nodded. “They had the vet in court, you know, to say the horses were fine the day before they died.
He went to the farm to give one of them some antitetanus jabs, and he said he looked them all over, and they were OK.”

“Did you go to the trial?”

“No. Read it in the
Sporting Life
.” He reached the row of boxes and put the buckets down outside one of the doors. “That all, then?”

“Yes. Thanks, Kenny.”

“Tell you something . . .” He looked almost surprised at his own sudden helpfulness.

“What?”

“That Mr. Yaxley,” he said. “You'd've thought he'd been pleased getting all that cash, even if he had lost his horses, but he came into Underfield's yard one day in a right proper rage. Come to think of it, it was after that that Underfield went sour. And Yaxley, of course, quit racing and we never saw no more of him. Not while I was there, we didn't.”

 

I walked thoughtfully home, and when I got there the telephone was ringing.

“Jeremy Folk,” a familiar voice said.

“Oh, not again,” I protested.

“Did you read those reports?”

“Yes, I did. And I'm not going looking for her.”

“Be a good fellow,” he said.

“No.” I paused. “To get you off my back, I'll help you a bit. But you must do the looking.”

“Well . . .” He sighed. “What sort of help?”

I told him of my conclusions about Amanda's age, and also suggested he should get the dates of the various tenancies of Pine Woods Lodge from the real estate agents.

“My mother was probably there thirteen years ago,” I said. “And now it's all yours.”

“But I
say
 . . .” he almost wailed. “You simply can't stop there.”

“I simply can.”

“I'll get back to you.”

“Just leave me alone,” I said.

 

I drove into Swindon to take the color film to the processors, and on the way thought about the life and times of Bart Underfield.

I knew him in the way one got to know everyone in racing if one lived long enough in Lambourn. We met occasionally in the village shops and in other people's houses, as well as at the races. We exchanged “Good mornings” and “Hard lucks” and a variety of vague nods. I had never ridden for him because he had never asked me; and he'd never asked me, I thought, because he didn't like me.

He was a small busy man full of importance, given to telling people confidentially what other more successful trainers had done wrong. “Of course Walwyn shouldn't have run such-and-such at Ascot,” he would say. “The distance was all wrong, one could see it a mile off.” Strangers thought him very knowledgeable. Lambourn thought him an ass.

No one had suggested, however, that he was such an ass as to deliver his five best horses to the slaughter. Everyone had undoubtedly felt sorry for him, particularly as Elgin Yaxley had not spent the insurance money on buying new and equal animals, but had merely departed altogether, leaving Bart a great deal worse off.

Those horses, I reflected, had undoubtedly been good, and must always have earned more than their keep, and could have been sold for high prices. They had been insured above their market value, certainly, but not by impossible margins if one took into account the prizes they couldn't win if they were dead. It was the fact that there seemed to be little profit in killing them that had finally baffled the suspicious insurers into paying up.

That . . . and no trace of a link between Elgin Yaxley and Terence O'Tree.

In Swindon the processors, who knew me well, said I was lucky, they were just going to feed a batch through, and if I cared to hang about I could have my negatives back in a couple of hours. I did some shopping and in due course picked up the developed films, and went home.

In the afternoon I printed the colored versions of Mrs. Millace, and sent them off with the black-and-white lot to the police; and in the evening I tried—and failed—to stop thinking in uncomfortable circles about Amanda and Victor Briggs and George Millace.

By far the worst thoughts concerned Victor Briggs and Harold's ultimatum. The jockey life suited me fine in every way, physically, mentally, financially. I'd put off for years the thought that one day I would have to do something else: the “one day” had always been in the mists of the future, not staring me brutally in the face.

The only thing I knew anything about besides horses was photography, but there were thousands of photographers all over the place . . . Everyone took photographs, every family had a camera, the whole Western world was awash in photographers . . . and to make a living at it one had to be exceptionally good.

One also had to work exceptionally hard. The photographers I knew on the racecourse were always running about: scurrying from the start to the last fence and from there up to the unsaddling enclosure before the winner got there, and then down the course again for the next race, and six times, at least, every afternoon, five or six days a week. Some of their pictures they rushed off to news agencies who might offer them to newspapers, and some they sent to magazines, and some they flogged to the owners of the horses, and some to sponsors handing over cups.

If you were a racing photographer the pictures didn't come to you, you had to go out looking. And when you'd got them, the customers didn't flock to your door, you had to go out selling. It was all a lot different from Duncan and Charlie, who had mostly done still-life things like
pots and pans and clocks and garden furniture for advertisements.

There were very few full-time successful racing photographers. Fewer than ten, probably. Of those perhaps four were outstanding; and one of those four had been George Millace.

If I tried to join their ranks, the others wouldn't hinder me, but they wouldn't help me either. I'd be out there on my own, stand or fall.

I wouldn't mind the running about, I thought; it was the selling part that daunted. Even if I considered my pictures good enough, I couldn't push.

And what else?

Setting up as a trainer was out. I hadn't the capital, and training racehorses was no sort of life for someone who liked stretches of silent time and being alone. Trainers talked to people from dawn to bedtime and lived in a whirl.

What I wanted, and instinctively knew that I would always need, was to continue to be self-employed. A regular wage packet looked like chains. An illogical feeling, but overwhelming. Whatever I did, I would have to do it on my own.

The habit of never making decisions would have to be broken. I could drift, I saw, into jobs which had none of the terrific satisfactions of being a jockey. I had been lucky so far, but if I wanted to find contentment in the next chapter I would have for once to be positive.

Damn
Victor Briggs, I thought violently.

Inciting jockeys to throw races was a warning-off defense, but even if I could manage to get Victor Briggs warned-off, the person who would most suffer would be Harold. And I'd lose my job anyway, as Harold would hardly keep me on after that, even if we didn't both lose our licenses altogether because of the races I'd thrown in the past. I couldn't prove Victor Brigg's villainy without having to admit Harold's and my own.

Cheat or retire. A stark choice . . . absolutely comfortless.

 

Nothing changed much on the Tuesday, but when I went to Kempton on Wednesday to ride Pamphlet, the weighing room was electric with two pieces of gossip.

Ivor den Relgan had been made a member of the Jockey Club, and Steve Millace's mother's house had burned down.

“I
vor den Relgan?” I heard the name on every side, repeated in varying tones of astonishment and disbelief. “A member of the Jockey Club! Incredible!”

The Jockey Club, that exclusive and gentlemanly body, had apparently that morning voted into its fastidious ranks someone they had been holding at arm's length for years, a rich self-important man from no one knew where, who had spread his money about in racing and done a certain amount of good in a way that affronted the recipients.

He was supposed to be of Dutch extraction. Extraction, that is, from some unspecified ex-Dutch colony. He spoke with an accent that sounded like a mixture of South African, Australian and American, a conglomerate mid-globe amalgam of vowels and consonants which could have been attractive but came out as patronizing. He, the voice seemed to say, was a great deal more sophisticated than the stuffy British upper crust. He sought not favors from the entrenched powers, but admiration. It was they, he implied, who would prosper if they took his advice. He offered it to them free, frequently, in letters to the
Sporting Life
.

Until that morning the Jockey Club had indeed
observably taken his advice on several occasions while steadfastly refusing to acknowledge he had given it. I wondered fleetingly what had brought them to such a turnaround; what had caused them suddenly to embrace the anathema.

Steve Millace was in the changing room, waiting by my peg.

The strain in him that was visible from the doorway was at close quarters overpowering. White-faced, shaking, he stood with his arm in a black webbing sling and looked at me from sunken desperate eyes.

“Have you heard?” he said.

I nodded.

“It happened on Monday night. Well, yesterday morning, I suppose . . . about three o'clock. By the time anyone noticed, the whole place had gone.”

“Your mother wasn't there?”

“They'd kept her in the hospital. She's still there. It's too much for her. I mean . . .” He was trembling. “Too much.”

I made some sincerely sympathetic noises.

“Tell me what to do,” he said; and I thought, he's elected me as some sort of elder brother, an unofficial advice bureau.

“Didn't you say something about aunts?” I asked. “At the funeral?”

He shook his head impatiently. “They're Dad's sisters. Older sisters. They've never liked Mum.”

“All the same . . .”

“They're
cats
,” he said, exploding. “I rang them . . . they said what a shame.” He mimicked their voices venomously. “ ‘Tell poor dear Marie she can get quite a nice little bungalow near the seaside with the insurance money.' They make me sick.”

I began taking off my street clothes to change into colors, aware that to Steve the day's work was irrelevant.

“Philip,” he said imploringly. “You saw her. All
bashed about . . . and without Dad . . . and now the whole house . . . Please . . .
please
 . . . help me.”

“All right,” I said resignedly. What else could one say? “When I've finished riding, we'll work something out.”

He sat down on the bench as if his legs wouldn't hold him and just stayed there staring into space while I finished changing and went to weigh out.

Harold was by the scales as usual, waiting to take my saddle when I'd been weighed. Since Monday he'd made no reference to the life-altering decision he'd handed me, and perhaps he took my silence not for spirit-tearing indecision but tacit acceptance of a return to things past. At any rate it was with a totally normal manner that he said, as I put the saddle over his arm, “Did you hear who's been elected to the Jockey Club?”

“Yeah.”

“They'll take Genghis Khan next.”

He walked out to put the saddle on Pamphlet, and in due course I joined him in the parade ring, where the horse walked nonchalantly around and his pop star owner bit his nails with concentration.

Harold had gleaned some more news. “I hear that it was the Great White Chief who insisted on den Relgan joining the club.”

“Lord White?” I was surprised.

“Old Driven Snow himself.”

Pamphlet's youngish owner flicked his fingers and said, “Hey, man, how's about a little sweet music on this baby?”

“A tenner each way,” Harold suggested, having learned the pop star's language. The pop star was using the horse for publicity and would only let it run when its race would be televised: and he was, as usual, wholly aware of the positions of the cameras, so that if they should chance to point his way he would not be carelessly obscured behind Harold or me. I admired his expertise in this respect, and indeed his whole performance, because offstage, so to
speak, he was apt to relapse into middle-class suburban. The jazzed-up working-class image was all a fake.

He had come to the races that day with dark-blue hair. The onset of a mild apoplexy could be observed in the parade ring all about us, but Harold behaved as if he hadn't noticed, on the basis that owners who paid their bills could be as eccentric as they liked.

“Philip darling,” said the pop star, “bring this baby back for Daddy.”

He must have learned it out of old movies, I thought. Surely not even pop musicians talked like that anymore. He reverted to biting his nails and I got up on Pamphlet and rode out to see what I could do about the tenner each way.

I was not popularly supposed to be much good over hurdles, but maybe Pamphlet had winning on his mind that day as much as I did. He soared around the whole thing with bursting joie-de-vivre, even to the extent of passing the favorite on the run-in, and we came back to bear hugs from the blue hair (for the benefit of television) and an offer to me of a spare ride in the fifth race, from a worried-looking small-time trainer. Stable jockey hurt . . . would I mind? I wouldn't mind, I'd be delighted. Fine, the valet has the colors, see you in the parade ring. Great.

Steve was still brooding by my peg.

“Was the shed burned?” I asked.

“What?”

“The shed. The deep freeze. Your Dad's photos.”

“Oh, well, yes it was . . . but Dad's stuff wasn't in there.”

I stripped off the pop star's orange and pink colors and went in search of the calmer green and brown of the spare ride.

“Where was it, then?” I said, returning.

“I told Mum what you said about people maybe not liking Dad's pictures of them, and she reckoned that you thought all the burglaries were really aimed at the photos,
not at her fur and all that, and that if so she didn't want to leave those transparencies where they could still be stolen, so on Monday she got me to move them next door, to her neighbor's. And that's where they are now, in a sort of outhouse.”

I buttoned the green-and-brown shirt, thinking it over.

“Do you want me to visit her in the hospital?” I said.

Almost on my direct route home. No great shakes. He fell on it, though, with embarrassing fervor. He had come to the races, he said, with the pub-keeper from the Sussex village where he lived in digs near the stable he rode for, and if I would visit his mother he could go home with the pub-keeper, because otherwise he had no transport, because of his collarbone. I hadn't exactly meant I would see Mrs. Millace alone, but on reflection I didn't mind.

Having shifted his burden Steve cheered up a bit and asked if I would telephone him when I got home.

“Yes,” I said absently. “Did your father often go to France?”

“France?”

“Ever heard of it?” I said.

“Oh . . .” He was in no mood to be teased. “Of course he did. Longchamps, Auteuil, St. Cloud. Everywhere.”

“And around the world?” I said, packing lead into my weightcloth.

“Huh?” He was decidedly puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“What did he spend his money on?”

“Lenses, mostly. Telephotos as long as your arm. Any new equipment.”

I took my saddle and weightcloth over to the trial scales and added another flat pound of lead. Steve got up and followed me.

“What do you mean, what did he spend his money on?”

I said, “Nothing. Nothing at all. Just wondered what he liked doing, away from the races.”

“He just took pictures. All the time, everywhere. He wasn't interested in anything else.”

In time I went out to ride the green-and-brown horse and it was one of those days, which happened so seldom, when absolutely everything went right. In unqualified euphoria I dismounted once again in the winners' enclosure, and thought that I couldn't possibly give up the life; I couldn't
possibly
. Not when winning put you higher than heroin.

My mother had likely died of heroin.

 

Steve's mother lay alone in a glass-walled side ward, isolated but indecently exposed to the curious glances of any stranger walking past. There were curtains, which might have shielded her from public gaze, but they were not pulled across. I hated the system which denied privacy to people in the hospital: who on earth, if they were ill or injured, wanted their indignities gawped at?

Marie Millace lay on her back with two flat pillows under her head and a sheet and a thin blue blanket covering her. Her eyes were shut. Her brown hair, greasy and in disarray, straggled on the pillow. Her face was dreadful.

The raw patches of Saturday night were now covered by extensive dark scabs. The cut eyelid, stitched, was monstrously swollen and black. The nose was crimson under some shaping plaster-of-paris, which had been stuck onto forehead and cheeks with white sticky tape. Her mouth, open and also swollen, looked purple. All the rest showed deep signs of bruising: crimson, gray, black and yellow. Fresh, the injuries had looked merely nasty: it was in the healing process that their true extent showed.

I'd seen people in that state before, and worse than that, damaged by horses' galloping hooves; but this, done out of malice to an inoffensive lady in her own home, was differently disturbing. I felt not sympathy but anger: Steve's “I'll kill the bastards” anger.

She heard me come in, and opened her less battered
eye a fraction as I approached. What I could see of her expression looked merely blank, as if I was the last person she would have expected.

“Steve asked me to come,” I said. “He couldn't get here because of his shoulder. He can't drive . . . not for a day or two.”

The eye closed.

I fetched a chair from against the wall and put it by the bed, to sit beside her. The eye opened again; and then her hand, which had been lying on the blanket, slowly stretched out towards me. I took it, and she gripped me hard, holding on fiercely, seeking, it seemed, support and comfort and reassurance. The spirit of need ebbed after a while, and she let go of my hand and put her own weakly back on the blanket.

“Did Steve tell you,” she said, “about the house?”

“Yes, he did. I'm so sorry.” It sounded feeble. Anything sounded feeble in the face of such knocks as she'd taken.

“Have you seen it?” she said.

“No. Steve told me about it at the races. At Kempton, this afternoon.”

Her speech was slurred and difficult to understand; she moved her tongue as if it were stiff inside the swollen lips.

“My nose is broken,” she said, fluttering her fingers on the blanket.

“Yes,” I said. “I broke mine once. They put a plaster on me, too, just like yours. You'll be as good as new in a week.”

Her silent response couldn't be interpreted as anything but dissent.

“You'll be surprised,” I said.

There was the sort of pause that occurs at hospital bedsides. Perhaps it was there that the ward system scored, I thought: when you'd run out of platitudes you could always discuss the gruesome symptoms in the next bed.

“George said you took photographs, like him,” she said.

“Not like him,” I said. “George was the best.”

No dissent at all, this time. Discernibly the intention of a smile.

“Steve told me you'd had George's boxes of transparencies moved out before the fire,” I said. “That was lucky.”

Her smile, however, disappeared, and was slowly replaced by distress.

“The police came today,” she said. A sort of shudder shook her, and her breathing grew more troubled. She could get no air through her nose so the change was audible and rasped in her throat.

“They came here?” I asked.

“Yes. They said . . . Oh God . . .” Her chest heaved and she coughed.

I put my hand flatly over hers on the blanket and said urgently, “Don't get upset. You'll make everything hurt worse. Just take three slow deep breaths. Four or five, if you need them. Don't talk until you can make it cold.”

She lay silent for a while until the heavy breathing slackened. I watched the tightened muscles relax under the blanket, and eventually she said, “You're much older than Steve.”

“Eight years,” I agreed, letting go of her hand.

“No. Much . . . much older.” There was a pause. “Could you give me some water?”

There was a glass on the locker beside her bed. Water in the glass, angled tube for drinking. I steered the tube to her mouth, and she sucked up a couple of inches.

“Thanks.” Another pause, then she tried again, this time much more calmly. “The police said . . . The police said it was arson.”

“Did they?”

“You're not . . . surprised?”

“After two burglaries, no.”

“Paraffin,” she said. “Five-gallon drum. Police found it in the hall.”

“Was it your paraffin?”

“No.”

Another pause.

“The police asked . . . if George had any enemies.” She moved her head restlessly. “I said of course not . . . and they asked . . . if he had anything someone would want . . . enough . . . enough . . . oh . . .”