Дик Фрэнсис: Knock Down

I tried to comfort myself with the thought that horses didn’t usually go far when they got loose from their stable. Only as far as the nearest succulent grass. They wandered and stopped, wandered and stopped, and only if something frightened them would they decamp at a gallop. The trouble was they were so easily frightened.

There was grass enough on the village green, but no two-year-old. I stopped again on the far side, listening.

Nothing.

Worried and dry mouthed I went on towards the junction with the main road, where the village swept abruptly out into the three-lane double highway of the A23.

How could I, I thought, how could I have been so stupid as not to bolt the stable door. I couldn’t remember not doing it, but then I couldn’t remember doing it either. It was one of those routine actions one did automatically. I couldn’t imagine not flicking the bolt when I left the box. I’d been doing it all my working life. I was not insured against my own negligence. How could I possibly... how could I ever... have been stupid enough not to bolt that door?

Even after midnight there was too much traffic on the Brighton road. Definitely not a place for horses.

I reined in again, and almost immediately my ‘chaser lifted his head, pricked his ears, and whinnied. He twisted to the right, towards the oncoming headlights, and whinnied again. Somewhere out of sight he could hear or sense another horse, and not for the first time I envied that extra-human perception.

Hurrying, I set off southwards along the green edge, hoping against hope that it was the right horse ahead and not a lay-by full of gypsy ponies.

In the distance there was suddenly a horrific screech of tyres, some wildly scything headlights, a sickening bang and a crash of breaking glass.

My mount let out a whinny that was more a shriek. His rider felt sick.

Oh God, I thought. Oh dear God.

I slowed to a walk and found I was trembling. There were shouts ahead and cars pulling up, and I rubbed my hand over my face and wished I didn’t have to face the next bit. Not the next hour, the next day or the next year.

Then, unbelievably, a shape detached itself from the jumble of light and dark ahead. A shape moving very fast, straight towards me, and clattering.

Hooves drummed on the hard surface with the abandon of hysteria. The two-year-old raced past at a forty-mile-an-hour full-stretched gallop, going as if the Triple Crown depended on it.

Swamped with relief that at least he was still undamaged, and blotting out fears for the car which had crashed, I swung my ‘chaser round and set off in pursuit.

It was an unequal contest: an ageing jumper against a hot-blooded sprinter. But my anxiety was spur enough for my mount. He was infected by it and aroused, and achieved a pace that was madness on that sort of surface.

The two-year-old, sensing us behind him, could have taken up the challenge and raced harder, but in fact he seemed to be reassured, not galvanised by the approach of another horse, and although he showed no sign of stopping he allowed me gradually to move alongside.

I came up on his outside, with him on my left. He had worn no headcollar in the stable and although I had brought a halter it would have taken a circus stunt man to put it on at such a gallop, let alone an unfit ex-jockey with three fused vertebrae and a shoulder which came apart with one good tug.

We were nearly back to the fork in the village. Straight ahead lay a major roundabout with crossing traffic, and the thought of causing a second accident was too appalling. Whatever the risk to the two-year-old, he had simply got to be directed into the village.

I squeezed my ‘chaser to the left until my leg was brushing the younger horse’s straining side, and I kicked my toe gently into his ribs. I did it three or four times to give him the message, and then when we came to the fork kicked him most insistently and pulled my own mount quite sharply onto him, leaning to the left.

The two-year-old veered into the fork without losing his balance and as positively as if he had been ridden. He fled ahead again into the village, no doubt because once off the main road I had instinctively slowed down. One couldn’t take the narrow bends flat out.

The two-year-old discovered it the hard way. He skidded round the corner to the green, fought to keep his feet under him, struck sparks from his scrabbling shoes, tripped over the six inch high edge of the turf, and fell sprawling in a flurry of legs. Dismounting and grabbing the ‘chaser’s reins I ran towards the prostrate heap. My knees felt wobbly. He couldn’t, I prayed, have torn a tendon here on the soft green grass, with so much agonising danger all behind him.

He couldn’t.

He hadn’t. He was winded. He lay for a while with his sides heaving, and then he stood up.

I had put the halter on him while he was down, and now led him and the chaser, one in each hand, along the lane to the yard. Both of them steamed with sweat and blew down their nostrils; and the hack having been bridled dropped foamy saliva from his mouth; but neither of them walked lame.

The moonlight was calming, quiet and cool. In the yard I hitched the ‘chaser to a railing and led the two-year-old back to his box, and realised there for the first time that he was no longer wearing his rug. Somewhere on his escapade he had rid himself of it. I fetched another and buckled it on. By rights I should have walked him round for another half hour to cool him down, but I hadn’t time. I went out, shut his door, and slammed home the bolt, and simply could not understand how I could have left it undone.

I backed the car out of the garage and drove through the village and down the main road. There was a fair crowd now at the scene of the crash, and people waving torches to direct the traffic. When I pulled on to the grass and stopped one of the self-elected traffic directors told me to drive on, there were enough onlookers already. I told him I lived nearby and perhaps could help, and left him to move along the next fellow.

Across in the north-bound lane also the traffic was on the move, as the wreckage was all on the near side. With something like dread I crossed over and joined the group at the heart of things. Car headlights threw them into sharp relief, bright on one side, dark on the other. All men, all on their feet. And one girl.

It was her car that was most smashed. One side of it seemed to have hit the metal post of the advance signpost to the village and the backside of it had been rammed by a dark green Rover which stood askew across the roadway spilling water from its dented radiator and frosty fragments from its windscreen.

The owner of the Rover was stamping about in loquacious fury, shouting about women drivers and that it was not his fault.

The girl stood looking at the orange remains of an MGB GT which had buried itself nose first into the ditch. She wore a long dress of a soft floaty material, white with a delicate black pattern and silver threads glittering in the lights. She had silver shoes and silver-blonde hair which hung straight to her shoulders, and she was bleeding.

At first I was surprised that she was standing there alone, that the masculine onlookers were not wrapping her in rugs, binding up her wounds and generally behaving protectively, but when I spoke to her I saw why. She was in icy command of herself, as cool and silver as the moonlight. Despite the oozing cut on her forehead and the smears she had made trying to wipe it, despite the much heavier stain on her right arm and the scarlet splashes down the front of the pretty dress, she somehow repelled help. And she was not as young as she looked at first sight.

‘She cut right across me,’ the Rover driver was shouting. ‘Swerved right across me. I didn’t have a chance. She went to sleep. That’s what she did. And now she gives us all this crap about a horse. I ask you. A horse! Swerved to avoid a horse. She went to sleep. She dreamed the horse. The silly bitch .’