Dick Francis - Wild Horses

‘Trust me,’ I said.

Nash gave me one of the smiles an alligator would be proud of, the sort that in his Westerns had the baddies flinging themselves sideways in shoot-outs.

‘Tomorrow,’ I said, ‘is the opening day of the main Flat racing season in England.’

‘I know it.’

‘They run the Lincoln Handicap on Saturday.’

Nash nodded. ‘At Doncaster. Where’s Doncaster?’

‘Seventy miles north of here. Less than an hour by helicopter. Do you want to go?’

Nash stared. ‘You’re bribing me!’

‘Sure.’

‘What about insurance?’

‘I cleared it with O’Hara.’

‘Be damned!’ he said.

He stood up abruptly in amused good humour and began measuring his distances in paces round the set.

‘It says in the script,’ he said, ‘that I stand on the mat. Is this the mat, this thing across the open end of the table?’

‘Yes. It’s actually a bit of carpet. Historically the person accused at a Newmarket horse racing enquiry had to stand there, on the carpet, and that’s the origin of the phrase, to be carpeted.’

‘Poor bastards.’

He stood on the carpet and quietly said his lines, repeating and memorising them, putting in pauses and gestures, shifting his weight as if in frustration and finally marching the inside distance of the horseshoe to lean menacingly over the top chair, which would contain Cibber, the inquisitor.

‘And I yell,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I agreed.

With the fury at that point silent, he murmured the shout of protest, and in time returned to his former seat beside me.

‘What happened to those people in real life?’ he asked. ‘Howard swears what he’s written are the true events. O’Hara tells me you’re sure they’re not, because no one’s screaming foul. So what really did happen?’

I sighed. ‘Howard’s guessing. Also he’s playing safe. For a start, none of the people who were really involved are called by their real names in his book. And I don’t honestly know more than anyone else, because it all happened in this town twenty-six years ago, when I was only four. I can’t remember even hearing about it then, and in any case the whole thing fizzled out. The trainer you’re playing was a man called Jackson Wells. His wife was found hanged in one of the boxes in his stable yard, and a lot of people thought he’d done it. His wife had had a lover. His wife’s sister was married to a member of the Jockey Club. That’s about as far as the known facts go. No one could ever prove Jackson Wells had hanged his wife and he swore he hadn’t.’

‘Howard says he’s still alive.’

I nodded. ‘The scandal finished him in racing. He could never prove he hadn’t hanged his wife and although the Jockey Club didn’t actually take away his licence, people stopped sending him horses. He sold his place and bought a farm in Oxfordshire, I think, and got married again. He must be nearly sixty now, I suppose, There apparently hasn’t been any reaction at all from him, and Howard’s book’s been out over a year.’

‘So he won’t come bursting onto the set here swinging a noose to lynch me.’

‘Believe in his innocence,’ I said.

‘Oh, I do.’

‘Our film is fiction,’ I said. ‘The real Jackson Wells was a middle-ability man with a middle-sized training stable and no outstanding personality. He wasn’t the upper-class powerful figure in Howard’s book, still less was he the tough, wronged, resourceful conqueror we’ll make of you before we’re done.’

‘O’Hara promised an up-beat ending.’

‘He’ll get it.’

‘But the script doesn’t say who did hang the wife, only who didn’t.’

I said, ‘That’s because Howard doesn’t know and can’t make up his mind what to invent. Haven’t you read Howard’s book?’

‘I never read the books scripts are written from. I find it’s too often confusing and contradictory.’

‘Just as well,’ I said, smiling. ‘In Howard’s book your character is not having an affair with his wife’s sister.’

‘Not?’ He was astonished. He’d spent a whole busy day tumbling about in bedclothes half naked with the actress playing his wife’s sister. ‘However did Howard agree to that? ’

I said, ‘Howard also agreed that Cibber, the sister-in-law’s husband, should find out about the affair so that Cibber could have an overpowering reason for his persecution of your character; in fact, for the scene you’re playing here tomorrow.’

Nash said disbelievingly, ‘And none of that was in Howard’s book?’

I shook my head. O’Hara had leaned on Howard from the beginning to spice up the story, in essence warning him ‘No changes, no movie.’ The shifts of mood and plotline that I’d recently introduced were as nothing compared with O’Hara’s earlier manipulations. With me, Howard was fighting a rearguard action, and with luck he would lose that too.

Nash said bemusedly, ‘Is the real Cibber still alive as well? And how about the wife’s sister?’

‘About her, I don’t know. The real Cibber died three or so years ago. Apparently someone dug up this old story about him, which is what gave Howard the idea for his book. But the real Cibber didn’t persecute Jackson Wells as relentlessly as he does in the film. The real Cibber had little power. It was all a pretty low-key story, in reality. Nothing like O’Hara’s version.’

‘Or yours.’

‘Or mine.’

Nash gave me a straight look verging on the suspicious and said, ‘What are you not telling me about more script changes?’

I liked him. I might even trust him. But I’d learned the hard way once that nothing was ever off the record. The urge to confide had to be resisted. Even with O’Hara, I’d been reticent.

‘Devious,’ O’Hara had called me. ‘An illusionist.’

‘It’s what’s needed.’

‘I’ll not deny it. But get the conjuring right.’

Conjurors never explained their tricks. The gasp of surprise was their best reward.

‘I’ll always tell you,’ I said to Nash, ‘what your character would be feeling in any given scene.’

He perceived the evasion. He thought things over in silence for a long full minute while he decided whether or not to demand details I might not give. In the end, what he said was, ‘Trust is a lot to ask.’

I didn’t deny it. After a pause he sighed deeply as if in acceptance, and I supposed he’d embraced blind faith as a way out if the whole enterprise should fail. ‘One should never trust a director... ’

In any case he bent his head to his script, reading it again swiftly, then he stood up, left the pages on the table and repeated the whole scene, speaking the lines carefully, forgetting them only once, putting in the pauses, the gestures, the changes of physical balance, the pouncing advance down the horseshoe and the over-towering anger at the end.

Then, without comment, he went through the whole thing again. Even without much sound, the emotion stunned: and he’d put into the last walk-through even the suggestion that he could be a killer, a murderer of wives, however passionately he denied it.

This quiet, concentrated mental vigour, I saw, was what had turned a good actor into a mega-star.

I hadn’t been going to shoot the scene in one long take, but his performance changed my mind. He’d given it a rhythm and intensity one couldn’t get from cutting. The close shot of Cibber’s malevolence could come after.

‘Thanks for this,’ Nash said, breaking off.

‘Anything.’

His smile was ironic. ‘I hear I’m the green light around here.’

‘I ride on your coat tails.’

‘You,’ he said, ‘do not need to grovel.’