Дик Фрэнсис: Decider

‘What smell?’ I asked.

Neil bent his knees and put his face near the floor. ‘It’s that horrid cleaning stuff in the water the pub man used to wash his lino tiles with, before you took them all up.’

‘Really?’

Neil straightened. ‘Can we go out of here?’ he asked.

We left hand in hand. ‘Do you know what ammonia is?’ I said.

‘You put it down drains,’ he explained.

‘Was it that smell?’

He thought it over. ‘Like ammonia but with scent in it.’

‘Disgusting,’ I said.

‘Absolutely.’

I smiled. Apart from the wondrous moment of Christopher’s birth I’d never been a good man for babies, but once the growing and emerging minds had begun expressing thoughts and opinions all their own, I’d been continuously entranced.

We watched the first race, with my lifting Neil up so that he could see the bright action over the hurdles.

One of the jockeys, I noticed in the racecard, was named Rebecca Stratton, and after the race, when the horses returned to be unsaddled, (R. Stratton unplaced), we happened to pass by while she was looping girths round her saddle and speaking over her shoulder to downcast owners before setting off back to the changing rooms.

‘He moved like a torpid stumblebum. Might try him in blinkers next time.’

She was tall with a flat body and a thin scrubbed face with high hard cheekbones, no compromise with femininity in sight. She walked not in a heel-down scurry like the male jockeys but in a sort of feline loping strut on her toes, as if she was not only aware of her own power but aroused by it. The only other woman I’d seen walk like that had been a lesbian.

‘What’s a torpid stumblebum?’ Neil asked, after she’d gone.

‘It means slow and clumsy.’

‘Oh.’

We met the others at the rallying point and I issued popcorn money all round.

‘Horse racing is boring,’ Toby said.

‘If you can pick a winner I’ll pay you Tote odds,’ I said.

‘What about me?’ Alan said.

‘Everyone.’

Brightening, they went off to look at the next race’s runners in the parade ring, with Christopher explaining to them how to read the form line in the racecard. Neil, staying close to me, said without hesitation that he would choose number seven.

‘Why seven, then?’ I asked, looking it up. ‘It’s never won a race in its life.’

‘My peg in the cloakroom at school is number seven.’

‘I see. Well, number seven is called Clever Clogs.’

Neil beamed.

The other four returned with their choices. Christopher had picked the form horse, the favourite. Alan had singled out Jugaloo because he liked its name. Edward chose a no-hoper because it looked sad and needed encouragement. Toby’s vote went to Tough Nut because it had been ‘kicking and bucking in the ring and winding people up’.

They all wanted to know my own choice, and I ran a fast eye over the list and said randomly, ‘Grandfather’, and then wondered at the mind’s subliminal tricks and thought it perhaps not so random after all.

Slightly to my relief, Toby’s Tough Nut not only won the race but had enough energy left for a couple of vicious kicks in the unsaddling enclosure. Toby’s boredom turned to active interest and, as often happened, the rest responded to his mood. The rain stopped. The afternoon definitely improved.

I took them all down the course later to watch the fourth race, a three-mile steeplechase, from beside one of those difficult jumps, an open ditch. This one, the second to last fence on the circuit, was attended by a racecourse employee looking damp in an orange fluorescent jacket, and by a St John’s Ambulance volunteer whose job it was to give first aid to any jockeys who fell at his feet. A small crowd of about thirty racegoers had made the trek down there beside ourselves, spreading out behind the inside rails of the track, both on the take-off and the landing sides of the fence.

The ditch itself — in steeplechasing’s past history a real drainage ditch with water in it — was in modern times, as at Stratton Park, no real ditch at all but a space about four feet wide on the take-off side of the fence. There was a large pole across the course on the approach side to give an eye-line to the horses, to tell them when to jump, and the fence itself, of dark birch twigs, was four feet six inches high and at least a couple of feet thick: all in all a regular jump presenting few surprises to experienced ’chasers.

Although the boys had seen a good deal of racing on television I’d never taken them to an actual meeting before, still less down to where the rough action filled the senses. When the ten-strong field poured over the fence on the first of the race’s two circuits, the earth quivered under the thudding hooves, the black birch crackled as the half-ton ’chasers crashed through the twigs, the air parted before the straining bunch risking life and limb off the ground at thirty miles an hour: the noise stunned the ears, the jockeys’ voices cursed, the coloured shirts flashed by kaleidoscopically... and suddenly they were gone, their backs receding, silence returning, the brief violent movement over, the vigour and striving a memory.

‘Wow!’ Toby said, awestruck. ‘You didn’t say it was like that .’

‘It’s only like that when you’re close to it,’ I said.

‘But it must be always like that for the jockeys,’ Edward said thoughtfully. ‘I mean, they take the noise with them all the way.’ Edward, ten, had led the pirate ambush up the oak. Misleadingly quiet, it was always he who wondered what it would be like to be a mushroom, who talked to invisible friends, who worried most about famine-struck children. Edward invented make-believe games for his brothers and read books and lived an intense inner life, as reserved as Alan, nine, was outgoing and ebullient.

The racecourse employee walked along the fence on the landing side, putting back into place with a short-handled paddle all the dislodged chunks of birch, making the obstacle look tidy again before the second onslaught.

The five boys waited impatiently while the runners continued round the circuit and came back towards the open ditch for the second and last time before racing away to the last fence and the sprint to the winning post. Each boy had picked his choice of winner and had registered it with me, and when people around us began yelling for their fancy the boys yelled also, Neil jumping up and down in excitement and screaming ‘Come on seven, come on seven, come on peg .’

I had put my own trust on Rebecca Stratton who was this time partnering a grey mare called Carnival Joy, and as they neared the fence she seemed to be lying second, to my mild surprise, my own expertise at picking winners being zero.

At the last minute the horse in front of her wavered out of a straight line, and I glimpsed the strain on the jockey’s face as he hauled on a rein to get himself out of trouble, but he was meeting the fence all wrong. His mount took off a stride too soon and landed right in the space between take-off pole and fence, where, frightened, it dumped its jockey and veered across into the path not only of Carnival Joy, but of all the runners behind.

Things happen fast at thirty miles an hour. Carnival Joy, unable to see a clear path ahead, attempted to jump both the fence and the horse on the take-off side, a near-impossible task. The grey’s hooves caught the loose horse so that its whole weight crashed chest first into the fence. Its jockey willynilly flew caterpaulting out forwards over the birch and in a flurry of arms and legs thudded onto the turf. Carnival Joy fell over the fence onto its head, somersaulted, came down on its side and lay there winded, lethally kicking in an attempt to get up.