Дик Фрэнсис - Break In

‘I do notice,’ I said.

‘But?’

‘Well... if I don’t race, I don’t earn. Almost worse, if I miss a race on a horse and it wins, the happy owner may put up that winning jockey the next time, so I can lose not just the one fee but maybe the rides on that horse for ever.’

She looked almost disappointed. ‘So it’s purely economic, this refusal to look filleted ribs in the face?’

‘At least half.’

‘And the rest?’

‘What you feel for your job. What Joe feels for his. Much the same.’

She nodded, and after a pause said, ‘Aunt Casilia wouldn’t do that, though. Keep another jockey on, after you were fit again.’

‘No, she never has. But your aunt is special.’

‘She said,’ Danielle said reflectively, ‘that I wasn’t to think of you as a jockey.’

‘But I am.’

‘That’s what she said this morning on the way to Towcester.’

‘Did she explain what she meant?’

‘No. I asked her. She said something vague about essences.’ She yawned. ‘Anyway, this evening she told Uncle Roland all about those horrid men with knives, as she put it, and although he was scandalised and said she shouldn’t get involved in such sordid brawls, she seemed quite serene and unaffected. She may look like porcelain, but she’s quite tough. The more I get to know her, the more, to be honest, I adore her.’

The road from Chiswick to Eaton Square, clogged by day with stop — go traffic, was at two-fifteen in the morning regrettably empty. Red lights turned green at our approach and even sticking rigidly to the speed limit didn’t much seem to lengthen the journey. We slid to a halt outside the princess’s house far too soon.

Neither of us made a move to spring at once out of the car: we sat rather for a moment letting the day die in peace.

I said, ‘I’ll see you then, on Saturday.’

‘Yes,’ she sighed for no clear reason. ‘I guess so.’

‘You don’t have to,’ I said.

‘Oh no,’ she half laughed. ‘I suppose I meant... Saturday’s some way off.’

I took her hand. She let it lie in mine, passive, waiting.

‘We might have,’ I said, ‘a lot of Saturdays.’

‘Yes, we might.’

I leaned over and kissed her mouth, tasting her pink lipstick, feeling her breath on my cheek, sensing the tremble somewhere in her body. She neither drew back nor clutched forward, but kissed as I’d kissed, as an announcement, as a promise perhaps; as an invitation.

I sat away from her and smiled into her eyes, and then got out of the car and went round to open her door.

We stood briefly together on the pavement.

‘Where are you sleeping?’ she said. ‘It’s so late.’

‘In a hotel.’

‘Near here?’

‘Less than a mile.’

‘Good... you won’t have far to drive.’

‘No distance.’

‘Goodnight, then,’ she said.

‘Goodnight.’

We kissed again, as before. Then, laughing, she turned away, walked across the pavement and let herself through the princess’s porticoed front door with a latchkey: and I drove away thinking that if the princess had disapproved of her jockey making approaches to her niece, she would by now have let both of us know.

I slept like the dead for five hours, then rolled stiffly out of bed, blinked blearily at the heavy cold rain making a mess of the day, and pointed the Mercedes towards Bletchley.

The Golden Lion was warm and alive with the smells of breakfast, and I ate there while the desk processed my bill. Then I telephoned the AA for news of my car (ready Monday) and to Holly to check that the marked Flag copies had been delivered as promised (which they had: the feed-merchant had telephoned) and after that I packed all my gear into the car and headed straight back towards the hotel I’d slept in.

No problem, they said helpfully at reception, I could retain my present room for as long as I wanted, and yes, certainly, I could leave items in the strongroom for safe-keeping.

Upstairs I put Jay Erskine’s Press Club pass and Owen Watts’s credit cards into an envelope and wrote ‘URGENT DELIVER TO MR LEGGATT IMMEDIATELY’ in large letters on the outside. Then I put the video recordings and all of the journalists’ other possessions, except their jackets, into one of the hotel’s laundry bags, rolling it into a neat bundle which downstairs was fastened with sticky-tape and labelled before vanishing into the vault.

After that I drove to Fleet Street, parked where I shouldn’t, ran through the rain to leave the envelope for Sam Leggatt at the Flag front desk, fielded the car from under the nose of a traffic warden, and went lightheartedly to Ascot.

It was a rotten afternoon there in many ways. Sleet fell almost ceaselessly, needle-sharp, ice-cold and slanting, soaking every jockey to the skin before the start and proving a blinding hazard thereafter. Goggles were useless, caked with flying mud; gloves slipped wetly on the reins; racing boots clung clammily to waterlogged feet. A day for gritting one’s teeth and getting round safely, for meeting fences exactly right and not slithering along on one’s nose on landing. Raw November at its worst.

The crowd was sparse, deterred before it started out by the visible downpour and the drenching forecast, and the few people standing in the open were huddled inside dripping coats looking like mushrooms with their umbrellas.

Holly and Bobby both came but wouldn’t stay, arriving after I’d won the first race more by luck than inspiration, and leaving before the second. They took the money out of the money-belt, which I returned to the valet with thanks.

Holly hugged me. ‘Three people telephoned, after I’d talked to you, to say they were pleased about the apology,’ she said. ‘They’re offering credit again. It’s made all the difference.’

‘Take care how you go with running up bills,’ I said.

‘Of course we will. The bank manager haunts us.’

I said to Bobby, ‘I borrowed some of that money. I’ll repay it next week.’

‘It’s all yours, really.’ He spoke calmly in friendship, but the life-force was again at a low ebb. No vigour. Too much apathy. Not what was needed.

Holly looked frozen and was shivering. ‘Keep the baby warm,’ I said. ‘Go into the trainers’ bar.’

‘We’re going home.’ She kissed enter me with cold lips. ‘We would stay to watch you, but I feel sick. I feel sick most of the time. It’s the pits.’

Bobby put his arm round her protectively and took her away under a large umbrella, both of them leaning head down against the icy wind, and I felt depressed for them, and thought also of the risks that lay ahead, before they could be safe.

The princess had invited to her box the friends of hers that I cared for least, a quartet of aristocrats from her old country, and as always when they were there I saw little of her. With two of them she came in red oilskins down to the parade ring before the first of her two runners, smiling cheerfully through the freezing rain and asking what I thought of her chances, and with the other two she repeated the enquiry an hour and a half later.

In each case I said, ‘Reasonable.’ The first runner finished reasonably fourth, the second runner, second. Neither time did she come down to the unsaddling enclosure, for which one couldn’t blame her, and nor did I go up to her box, partly because it was a perfunctory routine when those friends were there, but mostly on account of crashing to the ground on the far side of the course in the last race. By the time I got in and changed, she would be gone.

Oh well, I thought dimly, scraping myself up; six rides, one winner, one second, one fourth, two also-rans, one fall. You can’t win four every day, old son. And nothing broken. Even the stitches had survived without leaking. I waited in the blowing sleet for the car to pick me up, and took off my helmet to let the water run through my hair, embracing in a way the wild day, feeling at home. Winter and horses, the old song in the blood.