Дик Фрэнсис - Break In

He was almost as old as my grandfather, and gradually, through their eyes, I was coming to see the whole of racing is a sort of stream that rolled onwards through time, the new generations rising and the old floating slowly away. Racing had a longer history than almost any other sport and changed less, and sometimes I had a powerful feeling of repeating in my own person the experience of generations of jockeys before me and of being a transient speck in a passing pageant; vivid today, talked about, feted, but gone tomorrow, a memory fading into a footnote, until no one alive had seen me race or cared a damn whether I’d won or lost.

Dead humbling, the whole thing.

Bernina, named after the mountain to the south of St Moritz, had by four years old produced none of the grandeur of the Alps, and to my mind was never going to. She could, however, turn in a respectable performance in moderate company, which was all she was faced with on that occasion, and I hoped very much to win on her, as much for the princess’s sake as my own. I understood very well that she liked to be able to please the various hosts around the country who offered her multiple invitations, and was always slightly anxious for her horses to do well where she felt they might contribute to her overnight bread and butter. I thought that if people like the Inscombes didn’t enjoy her company for its own sake they wouldn’t keep on asking her to stay. The princess’s inner insecurities were sometimes astonishing.

Bernina, without any of the foregoing complications of intent, took me out of the parade ring and down to the start in her best immoderate fashion which included a display of extravagant head-shaking and some sideways dancing on her toes. These preliminaries were a good sign: on her off days she went docilely to the starting gate, left it without enthusiasm and took her time about finishing. Last time out she’d had me hauled in front of the Stewards and fined for not trying hard enough to win, and I’d said they should have understood that a horse that doesn’t want to race won’t race; and that mares have dull days like anyone else. They listened, unimpressed. Pay the fine, they said.

The princess had insisted on reimbursing me for that little lot, where other owners might have raged. ‘If she wouldn’t go, she wouldn’t go,’ she’d said with finality. ‘And she’s my horse, so I’m responsible for her debts.’ Owners didn’t come more illogical or more generous than the princess.

I’d told her never to let her friends back Bernina on the days she went flat-footed to the start, and she’d acknowledged the advice gravely. I hoped, sitting on top of the bravura performance going on in Devon, that she, the Inscombes and the niece would all be at that moment trekking to the bookmakers or the Tote. The mare was feeling good, and, beyond that, competitive.

The event was a two-mile hurdle race, which meant eight jumps over the sort of fencing used for penning sheep: hurdles made of wood and threaded with gorse or brushwood, each section unattached to the hurdle on either side, so that if a horse hit one, it could be knocked over separately. Good jumpers flowed over hurdles easily, rising little in the air but bending up their forelegs sharply; the trick was to get them to take off from where the hurdle could be crossed in mid-stride.

Bernina, graciously accepting my guidance in that matter, went round the whole course without touching a twig. She also attacked the job of beating her opponents with such gusto that one mightn’t have blamed the Stewards this time for testing her for dope, such was the contrast.

She would, if she’d had serious talent, have won by twenty lengths, especially as the chief danger had fallen in a flurry of legs about halfway round. As it was, she made enough progress, when I gave her an encouraging kick between the last two hurdles, to reach the last jump upsides of the only horse still in front, and on the run-in she produced a weak burst of speed for just long enough to pass and demoralise her tiring opponent.

Accepting my congratulatory pats on her victorious neck as totally her due, she pulled up and pranced back to the winners’ enclosure, and skittered about there restlessly, sweating copiously and rolling her eyes, up on a high like any other triumphant performer.

The princess, relieved and contented, kept out of the way of the powerful body as I unbuckled the girths and slid my saddle off on to my arm. She didn’t say much herself as the Inscombes were doing a good deal of talking, but in any case she didn’t have to. I knew what she thought and she knew I knew: we’d been through it all a couple of hundred times before.

The niece said, ‘Wow,’ a little thoughtfully.

I glanced briefly at her face and saw that she was surprised: I didn’t know what she was surprised at, and didn’t have time to find out as there was the matter of weighing in, changing, and weighing out for the next race. Icicle, the princess’s other runner, didn’t go until the fourth race, but I had two other horses to ride before that.

Those two, undisgraced, finished fifth and second, and were both for a local trainer who I rode for when I could: besides Wykeham I also often rode for a stable in Lambourn, and when neither of them had a runner, for anyone else who asked. After, that is, having looked up the offered horse in the form book. Constant fallers I refused, saying Wykeham wouldn’t give his approval. Wykeham was a handy excuse.

Icicle, like his name, was the palest of greys; also long-backed, angular and sweet-natured. He had been fast and clever over hurdles, the younger horses’ sport, but at a mature eight years and running over bigger fences, was proving more cautious than carefree, more dependable than dazzling, willing but no whirlwind.

I went out to the parade ring again in the princess’s colours and found her and the friends deep in a discussion that had nothing to do with horses but which involved a good deal of looking at watches.

‘The train from Exeter is very fast,’ Mrs Inscombe was saying comfortingly; and the niece was giving her a bright look of stifled impatience.

‘Most unfortunate,’ Mr Inscombe said in a bluff voice. ‘But the train, that’s the thing.’

The princess said carefully as if for the tenth time, ‘But my dears, the train goes too late...’ She broke off to give me an absent-minded smile and a brief explanation.

‘My niece Danielle was going to London by car with friends but the arrangement has fallen through.’ She paused. ‘I suppose you don’t know anyone who is driving straight from here to London after this race?’

‘Sorry, I don’t,’ I said regretfully.

I looked at the niece: at Danielle. She looked worriedly back. ‘I have to be in London by six-thirty,’ she said. ‘In Chiswick. I expect you know where that is? Just as you reach London from the west?’

I nodded.

‘Could you possibly ask,’ she waved a hand towards the busy door of the weighing room, ‘in there?’

‘Yes, I’ll ask.’

‘I have to be at work.’

I must have showed surprise, because she added, ‘I work for a news bureau. This week I’m on duty in the evenings.’

Icicle stalked methodically round the parade ring with two and a half miles of strenuous jumping ahead of him. After that, in the fifth race, I would be riding another two miles over hurdles.

After that...

I glanced briefly at the princess, checking her expression, which was benign, and I thought of the fine she’d paid for me when she didn’t have to.

I said to Danielle, ‘I’ll take you myself straight after the fifth race... if, er, that would be of any use to you.’

Her gaze intensified fast on my face and the anxiety cleared like sunrise.

‘Yes,’ she said decisively. ‘It sure would.’