Дик Фрэнсис - Break In

I dreaded the prospect of those excitements being put away for ever: of Grandfather ill or dying. He wouldn’t retire before he had to, because his job was totally his life, but it was expected that at some point not too very far ahead I would return to live in that house and take over the licence. Grandfather expected it, the owners were prepared for it, the racing world in general thought it a foregone conclusion; and I knew that I was far from ready. I wanted four more years, or five, at the game I had a passion for. I wanted to race for as long as my body was fit and uninjured and anyone would pay me. Jump jockeys never went on riding as long as flat jockeys because crunching to the ground at thirty miles an hour upwards of thirty times a year is a young man’s sport, but I’d always thought of thirty-five as approximately hanging-up-the-boots time.

By the time I was thirty-five, Grandfather would be eighty-seven, and even for him... I shivered in the cold air and thrust the thought away. The future would have to be faced, but it wasn’t upon me yet.

To Grandfather’s great disgust I left him after stables and went back to the enemy house, to find the tail end of the same evening ritual still in progress. Graves’s horses were still in the fillies’ yard, and Bobby was feeling safer because Nigel had told him that Graves had at least twice mistaken other horses for his own when he’d called to see them on Sunday mornings.

I watched Bobby with his horses as he ran his hand down their legs to feel for heat in strained tendons, and peered at the progress of minor skin eruptions, and slapped their rumps as a friendly gesture. He was a natural-born horseman, there was no doubt, and the animals responded to him in the indefinable way that they do to someone they feel comfortable with.

I might find him a bit indecisive sometimes, and not a razor-brain, but he was in truth a good enough fellow, and I could see how Holly could love him. He had, moreover, loved her enough himself to turn his back on his ancestors and estrange himself from his powerful father, and it had taken strength, I reckoned, to do that.

He stood up from feeling a leg and saw me watching him, and with an instinct straight from the subconscious stretched to his full height and gave me a hawk-like look of vivid antagonism.

‘Fielding,’ he said flatly, as if the word itself was an accusation and a curse: a declaration of continuing war.

‘Allardeck,’ I replied, in the same way. I grinned slightly. ‘I was thinking, as a matter of fact, that I liked you.’

‘Oh!’ He relaxed as fast as he’d tensed, and looked confused. ‘I don’t know... for a moment... I felt...’

‘I know,’ I said, nodding. ‘Hatred.’

‘Your eyes were in shadow. You looked... hooded.’

It was an acceptable explanation and a sort of apology; and I thought how irrational it was that the deep conditioning raised itself so quickly to the surface, and in myself on occasions just the same, however I might try to stop it.

He finished the horses without comment and we walked back towards the house.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said then, with a touch of awkwardness. ‘Back there...’ He waved a hand. ‘I didn’t mean it.’

I asked curiously, ‘Do you ever think of Holly in that way? As a Fielding? If her eyes are in shadow, does she seem a menace?’

‘No, of course not. She’s different.’

‘How is she different?’

He glanced at my face and seemed to find it all right to explain. ‘You,’ he said, ‘are strong. I mean, in your mind, not just muscles. No one who’s talked to you much could miss it. It makes you... I don’t know... somehow people notice when you’re there, like in the weighing room, or somewhere. People would be able to say if you’d been at a particular race meeting or not, or at a party, even though you don’t try. I suppose I’m not making sense. It’s what’s made you a champion jockey, I should think, and it’s totally Fielding . Well, Holly’s not like that. She’s gentle and calm and she hasn’t an ounce of aggressiveness or ambition, and she doesn’t want to go out and beat the world on horses, so she isn’t really a Fielding at heart.’

‘Mm.’ It was a dry noise from the throat more than a word. Bobby gave me another quick glance. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’ll plead guilty to my inheritance, and also exonerate her from it. But she does have ambition.’

‘No.’ He shook his head positively.

‘For you,’ I said. ‘For you to be a lasting success. For you both to be. To prove you were right to get married.’

He paused with his hand on the knob of the door which led from the yard to the kitchen. ‘You were against it, like all the others.’

‘Yes, for various reasons. But not now.’

‘Not on the actual day,’ he said with fairness. ‘You were the only one that turned up.’

‘She couldn’t walk up that aisle by herself, could she?’ I said. ‘Someone had to go with her.’

He smiled as instinctively as before he’d hated.

‘A Fielding giving a Fielding to an Allardeck,’ he said. ‘I wondered at the time if there would be an earthquake.’

He opened the door and we went in. Holly, who bound us together, had lit the log fire in the sitting room and was trying determinedly to be cheerful.

We sat in armchairs and I told them about my morning travels, and also assured them of Grandfather’s non-involvement.

‘The marked copies of the Flag were on people’s mats at least by six,’ I said, ‘and they came from outside, not from Newmarket. I don’t know what time the papers get to the shops in Cambridge, but not a great deal before five, I shouldn’t think, and there couldn’t have been much time for anyone to buy twenty or so papers in Cambridge and deliver them, folded and marked, to addresses all over Newmarket, twenty miles away, before the newsboys here started on their rounds.’

‘London?’ Holly said. ‘Do you think someone brought them up direct?’

‘I should think so,’ I nodded. ‘Of course that doesn’t necessarily mean that it wasn’t someone from here who arranged it, or even did it personally, so we’re not much further ahead.’

‘It’s all so pointless,’ Holly said.

‘No one seems to have been looking out of their windows by six,’ I went on. ‘You’d think someone would be, in this town. But no one that I asked had seen anyone walking up to anyone’s door with a newspaper at that time. It was black dark, of course. They said they hardly ever see the newsboys themselves, in winter.’

The telephone on the desk beside Bobby’s chair rang, and Bobby stretched out a hand to pick up the receiver with a look of apprehension.

‘Oh... hello, Seb,’ he said. There was some relief in his voice, but not much.

‘Friend,’ Holly said to me. ‘Has a horse with us.’

‘You saw it, did you?’ Bobby made a face. ‘Someone sent you a copy...’ He listened, then said, ‘No, of course I don’t know who. It’s sheer malice. No, of course it’s not true. I’m here in business to stay, and don’t worry, your mare is very well and I was just now feeling her tendon. It’s cool and firm and doing fine. What? Father? He won’t guarantee a penny, he said so. Yes, you may well say he’s a ruthless swine... No, there’s no hope of it. In fact on the contrary he’s trying to squeeze out of me some money he lent me to buy a car about fourteen years ago. Yes, well... I suppose it’s that sort of flint that’s made him rich. What? No, not a fortune, it was a second-hand old banger, but my first. I suppose I’ll have to pay him in the end just to get his lawyers off my back.Yes, I told you, everything’s fine. Pay no attention to the Flag . Sure, Seb, any time. Bye.’