Dick Francis - Straight

At York some of the saddling boxes were open to public view, some were furnished with doors. Nicholas Loder seemed to favor the privacy and took Dozen Roses inside away from my eyes.

Harley and Martha Ostermeyer, coming to see the horses saddled, were full of beaming anticipation. They had backed the winner of the University Trophy and had wagered all the proceeds on my, that was to say, my brother’s horse.

“You won’t get much return,” I warned them. “It’s favorite.”

“We know that, dear,” Martha said happily, looking around. “Where is he? Which one?”

“He’s inside that box,” I pointed, “being saddled.”

“Harley and I have had a marvelous idea,” she said sweetly, her eyes sparkling.

“Now, Martha,” Harley said. He sounded faintly alarmed as if Martha’s marvelous ideas weren’t always the best possible news.

“We want you to dine with us when we get back to London,” she finished.

Harley relaxed, relieved. “Yes. Hope you can.” He clearly meant that this particular marvelous idea was passable, even welcome. “London at weekends is a graveyard.”

With a twitching of an inward grin I accepted my role as graveyard alleviator and, in the general good cause of cementing Ostermeyer-Shandy-Franklin relations, said I would be very pleased to stay to dinner. Martha and Harley expressed such gratification as to make me wonder whether when they were alone they bored each other to silence.

Dozen Roses emerged from his box with his saddle on and was led along toward the parade ring. He walked well, I thought, his good straight hocks encouraging lengthy strides, and he also seemed to have woken up a good deal, now that the excitement was at hand.

In the horse’s wake hurried Nicholas Loder and his friend Rollo, and it was because they were crowding him, I thought, that Dozen Roses swung round on his leading rein and pulled backward from his lad, and in straightening up again hit the Rollo man a hefty buffet with his rump and knocked him to his knees.

Martha with instinctive kindness rushed forward to help him, but he floundered to his feet with a curse that made her blink. All the same she bent and picked up a thing like a blue rubber ball which had fallen out of his jacket and held it toward him, saying “You dropped this, I think.”

He ungraciously snatched it from her, gave her an unnecessarily fierce stare as if she’d frightened the horse into knocking him over, which she certainly hadn’t, and hurried into the parade ring after Nicholas Loder. He, looking back and seeing me still there, reacted with another show of fury.

“What perfectly horrid people,” Martha said, making a face. “Did you hear what that man said? Disgusting! Fancy saying it aloud!”

Dear Martha, I thought, that word was everyday coinage on racecourses. The nicest people used it: it made no one a villain. She was brushing dust off her gloves fastidiously as if getting rid of contamination and I half expected her to go up to Rollo and in the tradition of the indomitable American female to tell him to wash his mouth out with soap.

Harley had meanwhile picked something else up off the grass and was looking at it helplessly. “He dropped this too,” he said. “I think.”

Martha peered at his hands and took the object out of them.

“Oh, yes,” she said with recognition, “that’s the other half of the baster. You’d better have it, Derek, then you can give it back to that obnoxious friend of your trainer, if you want to.”

I frowned at what she’d given me, which was a rigid plastic tube, semitransparent, about an inch in diameter, nine inches long, open at one end and narrowing to half the width at the other.

“A baster,” Martha said again. “For basting meat when it’s roasting. You know them, don’t you? You press the bulb thing and release it to suck up the juices which you then squirt over the meat.”

I nodded. I knew what a baster was.

“What an extraordinary thing to take to the races,” Martha said wonderingly.

“Mm,” I agreed. “He seems an odd sort of man altogether.” I tucked the plastic tube into an inside jacket pocket, from which its nozzle end protruded a couple of inches, and we went first to see Dozen Roses joined with his jockey in the parade ring and then up onto the stands to watch him race.

The jockey was Loder’s chief stable jockey, as able as any, as honest as most. The stable money was definitely on the horse, I thought, watching the forecast odds on the information board change from 2/1 on to 5/2 on. When a gambling stable didn’t put its money up front, the whisper went round and the price eased dramatically. The whisper where it mattered that day had to be saying that Loader was in earnest about the “trot-up,” and Alfie’s base imputation would have to wait for another occasion.

Perhaps as a result of his year-by-year successes, Loder’s stable always, it was well-known in the racing world, attracted as owners serious gamblers whose satisfaction was more in winning money than in winning races; and that wasn’t the truism it seemed, because in steeplechasing the owners tended to want to win the races more than the money. Steeplechasing owners only occasionally made a profit overall and realistically expected to have to pay for their pleasure.

Wondering if the Rollo man was one of the big Loder gamblers, I flicked back the pages of the race-card and looked up his name beside the horse of his that had won the sprint. Owner, Mr. T. Rollway, the card read. Rollo for short to his friends. Never heard of him, I thought, and wondered if Greville had.

Dozen Roses cantered down to the start with at least as much energy and enthusiasm as any of the seven other runners and was fed into the stalls without fuss. He’d been striding out well, I thought, and taking a good hold of the bit. An old hand at the game by now, of course, as I was also, I thought dryly.

I’d ridden in several Flat races in my teens as an amateur, learning that the hardest and most surprising thing about the unrelenting Flat race crouch over the withers was the way it cramped one’s lungs and affected one’s breathing. The first few times I’d almost fallen off at the finish from lack of oxygen. A long time ago, I thought, watching the gates fly open in the distance and the colors spill out, long ago when I was young and it all lay ahead.

If I could find Greville’s diamonds, I thought, I would in due course be able to buy a good big yard in Lambourn and start training free of a mortgage and on a decent scale, providing of course I could get owners to send me horses, and I had no longer any doubt that one of these years, when my body packed up mending fast, as everyone’s did in the end, that I would be content with the new life, even though the consuming passion I still felt for race-riding couldn’t be replaced by anything tamer.

Dozen Roses was running with the pack, all seven bunched after the first three furlongs, flying along the far side of the track at more than cruising speed but with acceleration still in reserve.

If I didn’t find Greville’s diamonds, I thought, I would just scrape together whatever I could and borrow the rest, and still buy a place and set my hand to the future. But not yet, not yet.

Dozen Roses and the others swung left-handed into the long bend round the far end of the track, the bunch coming apart as the curve element hit them. Turning into the straight five furlongs from the winning post, Dozen Roses was in fourth place and making not much progress. I wanted him quite suddenly to win and was surprised by the strength of the feeling; I wanted him to win for Greville, who wouldn’t care anyway, and perhaps also for Clarissa, who would. Sentimental fool, I told myself. Anyway, when the crowd started yelling home their fancy I yelled for mine also, and I’d never done that before as far as I could remember.