Dick Francis: Shattered

Four of us drove together to Cheltenham races on the day that Martin Stukely died there from a fall in a steeplechase.

It was December 31, the eve of the year 2000. A cold midwinter morning. The world approaching the threshold of the future.

Martin himself, taking his place behind the steering wheel of his BMW, set off before noon without premonition, collecting his three passengers from their Cotswold Hills bases on his way to his afternoon’s work. A jockey of renown, he had confidence and a steady heart.

By the time he reached my sprawling house on the hillside above the elongated tourist-attracting village of Broadway, the air in his spacious car swirled richly full of smoke from his favorite cigar, the Montecristo No. 2, his substitute for eating. At thirty-four he was spending longer and longer in a sauna each day, but was all the same gradually losing the metabolic battle against weight.

Genes had given him a well-balanced frame in general, and an Italian mother in particular had passed on a love of cooking, and vivacity.

He quarreled incessantly with Bon-Bon, his rich, plump and talkative wife, and on the whole ignored his four small children, often frowning as he looked at them as if not sure exactly who they were. Nevertheless his skill and courage and rapport with horses took him as often as always into the winner’s circle, and he drove to Cheltenham calmly discussing his mounts’ chances that afternoon in two fast hurdle races and one longer ’chase. Three miles of jumping fences brought out the controlled recklessness that made him great.

He picked me up last on that fateful Friday morning, as I lived nearest to Cheltenham’s racetrack.

Already on board, and by his side, sat Priam Jones, the trainer whose horses he regularly rode. Priam was expert at self-aggrandizement but not quite as good as he believed at knowing when a horse in his care had come to a performance peak. That day’s steeplechaser, Tallahassee, was, according to my friend Martin on the telephone, as ready as he would ever be to carry off the day’s gold trophy, but Priam Jones, smoothing his white late-middle-age thinning hair, told the horse’s owner in a blasé voice that Tallahassee might still do better on softer ground.

Lounging back beside me on the rear seat, with the tip of one of Martin’s cigars glowing symmetrically to ash, Tallahassee’s owner, Lloyd Baxter, listened without noticeable pleasure, and I thought Priam Jones would have done better to keep his premature apologies in reserve.

It was unusual for Martin to be the one who drove Tallahassee’s owner and trainer anywhere. Normally he took other jockeys, or me alone: but Priam Jones from arrogance had just wrecked his own car in a stupid rash of flat tires, thanks to his having tried to ignore head-on a newly installed deterrent no-parking set of rising teeth. It was the town’s fault, he insisted. He would sue.

Priam had taken it for granted, Martin told me crossly, that he — Martin — would do the driving, and would not only take Priam himself but would also chauffeur the horse’s owner, who was staying overnight with Priam for the Cheltenham meeting, having flown down from the north of England to the local Staverton airfield in a small rented air taxi.

I disliked Lloyd Baxter as thoroughly as he disliked me. Martin had warned me of the Priam tire situation (“Keep your sarcastic tongue behind your splendid teeth”) and had begged me also to swamp the grumpy, dumpy millionaire owner with anesthetizing charm in advance, in case Priam Jones’s fears materialized and the horse drew a blank.

I saw Martin’s face grinning at me in the rearview mirror as he listened to me sympathize with the flat tires. He more than paid any debt he owed me by ferrying me about when he could, as I’d lost my driver’s license for a year through scorching at ninety-five miles an hour around the Oxford bypass (fourth ticket for speeding) to take him and his broken leg to see his point-of-death old retired gardener. The gardener’s heart had then thumped away insecurely for six further weeks — one of life’s little ironies. My loss of license now had three months to run.

The friendship between Martin and myself, unlikely at first sight, had sprung fully grown in an instant four or more years ago, result of a smile crinkling around his eyes, echo, I gathered, of my own.

We had met in the jury room of the local crown court, chosen for jury duty to hear a fairly simple case of domestic murder. The trial lasted two and a half days. Over mineral water afterwards, I’d learned about the tyranny of weight. Though my life had nothing to do with horses, or his with the heat and chemistry of my own days, we shared, perhaps, the awareness of the physical ability that we each needed for success in our trade.

In the jury room Martin had asked with merely polite curiosity, “What do you do for a living?”

“I blow glass.”

“You do what?”

“I make things of glass. Vases, ornaments, goblets. That sort of thing.”

“Good grief.”

I smiled at his astonishment. “People do, you know. People have made things of glass for thousands of years.”

“Yes, but...” he considered, “you don’t look like someone who makes ornaments. You look... well... tough.”

I was four years younger than he and three inches taller, and probably equal in muscles.

“I’ve made horses,” I said mildly. “Herds of them.”

“The Crystal Stud Cup,” he asked, identifying one of flat racing’s more elaborate prizes. “Did you make that?”

“Not that one, no.”

“Well... Do you have a name ? Like, say, Baccarat?”

I smiled lopsidedly. “Not so glamorous. It’s Logan, Gerard Logan.”

“Logan Glass.” He nodded, no longer surprised. “You have a place on the High Street in Broadway, side by side with all those antique shops. I’ve seen it.”

I nodded. “Sales and workshop.”

He hadn’t seemed to take any special notice, but a week later he’d walked into my display gallery, spent an intense and silent hour there, asked if I’d personally made all the exhibits (mostly) and offered me a ride to the races. As time went by we had become comfortably accustomed to each other’s traits and faults. Bon-Bon used me as a shield in battle and the children thought me a bore because I wouldn’t let them near my furnace.

For half the races that day at Cheltenham things went as normal. Martin won the two-mile hurdle race by six lengths and Priam Jones complained that six lengths was too far. It would ruin the horse’s position in the handicap.

Martin shrugged, gave an amused twist to his eyebrows and went into the changing room to put on Lloyd Baxter’s colors of black and white chevrons, pink sleeves and cap. I watched the three men in the parade ring, owner, trainer and jockey, as they took stock of Tallahassee walking purposefully around in the hands of his groom. Tallahassee stood at odds of six to four with the bookmakers for the Coffee Forever Gold Trophy: the clear favorite.

Lloyd Baxter (ignoring his trainer’s misgivings) had put his money on the horse, and so had I.