Dick Francis: Whip Hand

He gave me a brief flashing upward glance, and there was a small twitch to his mouth. And perhaps it was not the best way of referring to a man's beautiful daughter.

'I have known you, Sid,' he said, 'to walk into tigers' cages more than once.'

'A tigress, then,' I amended, with a touch of humour.

He pounced on it. 'So you'll come?'

'No… Some things, honestly, are too much.' He sighed and sat back in his chair, looking at me over the gin. I didn't care for the blank look in his eyes, because it meant he was still plotting.

' Dover sole?' he suggested smoothly. 'Shall I call the waiter? We might eat soon, don't you think?'

He ordered sole for both of us, and off the bone, out of habit. I could eat perfectly well in public now, but there had been a long and embarrassing period when my natural hand had been a wasted, useless deformity, which I'd self-consciously hidden in pockets. At about the time I finally got used to it, it had been smashed up again, and I'd lost it altogether. I guessed life was like that. You gained and you lost, and if you saved anything from the ruins, even if only a shred of self-respect, it was enough to take you through the next bit.

The waiter told us our table would be ready in ten minutes and went quietly away, hugging menus and order pad to his dinner jacket and grey silk tie. Charles glanced at his watch and then gazed expansively round the big, light, quiet room, where other couples, like us, sat in beige armchairs and sorted out the world.

'Are you going to Kempton this afternoon?' he said.

I nodded. 'The first race is at two-thirty.'

'Are you working on a job?' As an inquiry, it was a shade too bland.

'I'm not coming to Aynsford,' I said. 'Not while Jenny's there.'

After a pause, he said, 'I wish you would, Sid.'

I merely looked at him. His eyes were following the track of a bar waiter delivering drinks to distant customers: and he was taking a great deal too much time thinking out his next sentence.

He cleared his throat and addressed himself to nowhere in particular. 'Jenny has lent some money… and her name, I'm afraid… to a business enterprise which would appear to be fraudulent.'

'She's done what? I said.

His gaze switched back to me with suspicious speed, but I interrupted him as he opened his mouth.

'No,' I said. 'If she's done that, it's well within your province to sort it out.'

'It's your name she's used, of course,' Charles said. 'Jennifer Halley.'

I could feel the trap closing round me. Charles studied my silent face and with a tiny sigh of relief let go of some distinct inner anxiety. He was a great deal too adept, I thought bitterly, at hooking me.

'She was attracted to a man,' he said dispassionately. 'I didn't especially like him, but then I didn't like you, either, to begin with… and I have found that error of judgement inhibiting, as a matter of fact, because I no longer always trust my first instincts.'

I ate a peanut. He had disliked me because I was a jockey, which he saw as no sort of husband for his well-bred daughter: and I had disliked him right back as an intellectual and social snob. It was odd to reflect that he was now probably the individual I valued most in the world.

He went on, 'This man persuaded her to go in for some sort of mail order business… all frightfully up-market and respectable, at least on the surface. A worthy way of raising money for charity… you know the sort of thing. Like Christmas cards, only in this case I think it was a sort of wax polish for antique furniture. One was invited to buy expensive wax, knowing that most of the profits would go to a good cause.'

He looked at me sombrely. I simply waited, without much hope.

'The orders rolled in,' he said. 'And the money with them, of course. Jenny and a girl friend were kept busy sending off the wax.'

'Which Jenny,' I guessed, 'had bought ready, in advance?'

Charles sighed. 'You don't need to be told, do you?'

'And Jenny paid for the postage and packing and advertisements and general literature?'

He nodded. 'She banked all the receipts into a specially opened account in the name of the charity. Those receipts have all been drawn out, the man has disappeared, and the charity, as such, has been found not to exist.'

I regarded him in dismay.

'And Jenny's position?' I said.

'Very bad, I'm afraid. There may be a prosecution. And her name is on everything, and the man's nowhere.'

My reaction was beyond blasphemy. Charles observed my blank silence and nodded slowly in sympathy.

'She has been exceedingly foolish,' he said.

'Couldn't you have stopped her? Warned her?'

He shook his head regretfully. 'I didn't know about it until she came to Aynsford yesterday in a panic. She has done it all from that flat she's taken in Oxford.'

We went in to lunch, and I couldn't remember, afterwards, the taste of the sole.

'The man's name is Nicholas Ashe,' Charles said, over the coffee. 'At least that's what he said.' He paused briefly. 'My solicitor chap thinks it would be a good idea if you could find him.'

I drove to Kempton with visual and muscular responses on auto-pilot and my thoughts uncomfortably on Jenny.

Divorce itself, it seemed, had changed nothing. The recent antiseptic drawing of the line, the impersonal court to which neither of us had gone (no children, no maintenance disputes, no flicker of reconciliation, petition granted, next case please) seemed to have punctuated our lives not with a full stop but with hardly a comma. The legal position had not proved a great liberating open door. The recovery from emotional cataclysm seemed a long slow process, and the certificate was barely an aspirin.

Where once we had clung together with delight and passion, we now, if we chanced to meet, ripped with claws. I had spent eight years in loving, losing and mourning Jenny, and although I could wish my feelings were dead, they weren't. The days of indifference still seemed a weary way off.

If I helped her in the mess she was in, she would give me a rotten time. If I didn't help her, I would give it to myself. Why, I thought violently, in impotent irritation, had the silly bitch been so stupid.

There was a fair attendance at Kempton for a weekday in April, though as often before I regretted that in Britain the nearer a racecourse was to London, the more vulnerable it became to stay-away crowds. City-dwellers might be addicted to gambling, but not to fresh air and horses. Birmingham and Manchester, in days gone by, had lost their racecourses to indifference, and Liverpool had survived only through the Grand National. Most times it took a course in the country to burst at the seams and run out of racecards; the thriving plants still growing from the oldest roots.

Outside the weighing room there was the same old bunch of familiar faces carrying on chats which had been basically unchanged for centuries. Who was going to ride what, and who was going to win, and there should be a change in the rules, and what so-and-so had said about his horse losing, and wasn't the general outlook grim, and did you know young fella-me-lad has left his wife? There were the scurrilous stories and the slight exaggerations and the downright lies. The same mingling of honour and corruption, of principle and expediency. People ready to bribe, people with the ready palm. Anguished little hopefuls and arrogant big guns. The failures making brave excuses, and the successful hiding the anxieties behind their eyes. All as it had been, and was, and would be, as long as racing lasted.

I had no real right any longer to wander in the space outside the weighing room, although no one ever turned me out. I belonged in the grey area of ex-jockeys: barred from the weighing room itself but tolerantly given the run of much else. The cosy inner sanctum had gone down the drain the day half a ton of horse landed feet first on my metacarpals. Since then I had come to be glad simply to be still part of the brotherhood, and the ache to be riding was just part of the general regret. Another ex-champion had told me it took him twenty years before he no longer yearned to be out there on the horses, and I'd said thanks very much.