I went into Swindon to collect the films I’d left there for processing on my way to Wincanton the previous morning, and spent the rest of that Friday printing the shots of Lance Kinship and his crew.
Apart from those showing clearly the crew’s unease in his company, which I didn’t intend in any case to show him, I thought that quite likely he might approve. I’d been fortunate in the way the crew had arranged themselves into natural patterns, and there was Kinship himself looking frantically upper-class in his racing tweeds directing them with a conductor’s gestures, and in one sequence the horses behind them were all coming head on satisfactorily towards the winning post.
There were also several close-ups of Kinship with the crew in blurred focus behind him, and a couple of slightly surrealistic views which I’d taken from directly behind the cameraman, in which the camera itself looked large with Kinship’s sharply focused figure standing in a stray shaft of sunlight in the middle field. The total effect, looking through them all, was a record of a substantial operator in command of his job, and that, I presumed, was what he’d wanted. No matter that the product had been two seconds in a commercial, the production itself looked an epic.
In the evening I captioned the dried prints with typed strips of thin paper taped onto the backs, and feeling faintly foolish added the words Copyright Philip Nore, in the way I’d seen Charlie do, all those long years ago. Charlie seemed almost to be leaning over my shoulder, reminding me to keep control of my work.
Work.
The very word filled me with disquiet. It was the first time I’d actively thought of my photographs in those terms.
No, I thought, I’m a jockey.
When I woke early on Saturday morning, I waited for Harold to telephone and tell me to get sick, and it wouldn’t have been much trouble as I already felt sick with waiting.
He called at a quarter to ten.
“Are you well?” he said.
“Christ.”
“You’d better be,” he said. “Victor rang just now. I didn’t wait to hear what he meant to say. I told him straight away that Chainmail’s future depended on his being handled right in all his races.”
“What happened?”
“Victor said an easy race wouldn’t hurt him, so I told him what you said. Word for word. And I told him you’d said you would ride your bloody guts out for him as long as we’re trying to win.” Harold’s voice boomed down the wire with cheerfulness. “And do you know what Victor said? He said tell the pious bastard that that’s just what I’ll expect.”
“Do you mean . . . ?”
“I mean,” Harold bellowed, “he’s changed his mind. You can win on Chainmail if you can. In fact you’d better.”
“But Chainmail isn’t . . .”
“Damn it, do you want to ride the horse or don’t you?”
“I do.”
“Right, then. See you at Ascot.” He slammed the receiver down, informing me that he didn’t think I’d been properly grateful for his efforts with Victor; but if he had promised Victor that Chainmail would win—and it seemed only too likely that he had—I would be in a worse fix than ever.
At Ascot I sought out Harold’s head traveling lad, who had as usual come with the horses, and asked how Chainmail was feeling that day.
“Bucking and kicking fit to murder.”
“And Daylight?”
“Placid as an old cow.”
“Where have the lads put their money?”
He gave me a sharp sideways look. “A bit on both of them. Why, shouldn’t they?”
“Sure,” I said casually. “They should. But you know how it is . . . sometimes the lads know more about a horse’s chances than the trainer does.”
He grinned. “I’ll say. But today . . .” He shrugged. “A bit on both. Not the week’s wages, mind. Just some beer money, like.”
“Thanks.” I nodded and went off to the weighing room with at least no added anxieties. The lads wouldn’t be staking even beer money without what they considered to be a good reason. The legs, stomachs and spirits of both horses could be held to be normal. One didn’t ask more.
I saw Victor Briggs standing in a group of one on the area of grass outside the weighing-room door. Always the same clothes: the broad-brimmed hat, the thick navy overcoat, the black leather gloves. Always the same expression: the wiped-clean slate. He saw me, and no doubt he also saw the falter in my stride as I wondered whether I could possibly walk right past him without speaking.
I couldn’t.
“Good morning, Mr. Briggs.”
“Morning.” His voice was curt, but no more. He didn’t seem to want me to stop for conversation, so after a slight hesitation I went on towards the weighing room. As I passed him he said grittily, “I’ll see your guts.”
I stopped and turned my head. His face was still expressionless. His eyes looked cold and hard. I stopped myself from swallowing, and said merely, “All right,” and went on again, wishing I’d never made that stupidly flamboyant promise.
Inside the changing room someone was telling a funny story about two statues, and Steve Millace was flexing his mending arm and complaining that the doctor wouldn’t pass him fit to ride, and someone else was voicing the first rumor of a major racing upheaval. I took off my street clothes and listened to all three at once.
“So these two naked statues, the man and the woman, they had been standing looking at each other in this park for a hundred years . . .”
“I told him I’d got all the movement back. It’s not fair . . .”
“Is it true the Jockey Club is forming a new committee . . .”
“So an angel comes to visit them, and says that as they’ve stood there patiently through such ages of summers and winters, they will be rewarded by half an hour of human life to do what they have been wanting to do most . . .”
“Look, I can swing my arm around in a circle. What do you think?”
“A committee for appointing paid stewards, or something.”
“So these two statues come to life, and look at each other and laugh a bit, and say ‘Shall we?’ and ‘Yes, let’s,’ and then they nip off behind some bushes, and there’s a lot of rustling . . .”
“I could hold any horse. I told him so, but the sod wouldn’t listen.”
“. . . like paying the senior steward a salary.”
“After a quarter of an hour they come out from behind the bushes all hot and flustered and happy, and the angel says they’ve only used half the time, why don’t they start all over again . . .”
“How long do collarbones usually take, anyway?”
“I heard Lord White has agreed to the scheme . . .”
“So the statues giggle a bit and the man statue says to the girl statue, ‘OK, let’s do it again, only this time we’ll do it the other way round. I’ll hold down the effing pigeon, and you shit on it.”
Amid the burst of laughter I heard the man discussing the racing upheaval say, “. . . and Ivor den Relgan is to be chairman.”
I turned to him. “What did you say?”
“I don’t know if it’s true . . . one of the gossip writers told me Ivor den Relgan’s been appointed to set up a committee to appoint paid stewards.”
I frowned. “That gives den Relgan an awful lot of power all of a sudden, doesn’t it?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know.”
He might not, but others did. During the afternoon one could almost see the onward march of the rumor as uneasy surprise spread from one Jockey Club face to the next. The only group seeming unaffected by the general reaction were the ill-assorted bunch of people attracting the glances of everyone else: Lord White, Lady White, Ivor den Relgan, Dana den Relgan.
They stood outside the weighing room in weak November sunshine, the women both dressed in mink. Lady White, always thin, looked gaunt and plain and unhappy. Dana den Relgan glowed with health, laughed with bright teeth, twinkled her eyes at Lord White, and cast patronizing glances at his Lady.
Lord White basked in the light of Dana’s smile, shedding years like snakeskins. Ivor den Relgan smirked at the world in general and smoked a cigar with proprietorial gestures, as if Ascot racecourse were his own. He wore again the belted camel overcoat and the swept-back grayish hair, and commanded attention as his natural right.
Harold appeared at my elbow, following my gaze.
“Ghengis Khan,” he said, “is setting out to rule the world.”
“This committee?”
“Wouldn’t you say,” Harold asked acidly, “that asking someone like den Relgan to chair a committee of his own choosing is a paint job?”
“Cosmetic . . . or camouflage?”
“Both. What they’re really doing is saying to den Relgan ‘OK, you choose anyone you like as stewards, and we’ll pay them.’ It’s incredible.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Old Driven Snow,” Harold said, “is so besotted with that girl that he’ll give her father anything.”
“Was it all Lord White’s idea?”
Harold grimaced wolfishly. “Be your age, Philip. Just who has been trying for years to muscle into the Jockey Club? And just who has a knockout of a daughter who is now old enough to play up to old Driven Snow? Ivor den Relgan has at last got his lever into the door to power in racing, and once he’s inside the citadel and making decisions the old guard will have a hopeless job trying to get him out.”
“You really care,” I said wonderingly.
“Of course I do. This is a great sport, and at the moment, free. Who the hell wants the top management of racing to be carved up and manipulated and sold and tainted like some other sports we could mention. The health of racing is guaranteed by having unpaid aristocrats working for the love of it. Sure, they make stupid fuck-ups occasionally, but we get them put right. If den Relgan appoints paid stewards, for whom do you think those stewards will be working? For us? For racing? Or for the interests of Ivor den Relgan?”
I listened to his passion and his conviction and felt the tremor of his extreme dismay.
“Surely,” I said, “the Jockey Club won’t let it happen.”
“It is happening. The ones at the top are all so used to being led by Lord White that they’ve agreed to his proposal for this committee without thinking it through. They take it for granted he’s virtuous and well-meaning and dead honest. And so he is. But he’s also infatuated. And that’s damn bloody dangerous.”
We watched the group of four. Lord White made continual small gestures which involved laying his hand on Dana’s arm, or across her shoulders, or against her cheek. Her father watched with an indulgent smile and a noticeable air of satisfaction; and poor Lady White seemed to shrink even further into her mink. When she eventually walked away, not one of the others seemed to notice her go.
“Someone,” Harold said grimly, “has got to do something to stop all this. And before it goes too far.”
He saw Victor Briggs standing as usual alone in the distance and strode off to join him, and I watched Lord White and Dana flirt together like two joyful hummingbirds, and thought that today she was responding to him with much less discretion than she had at Kempton.
I turned away, troubled, and found Lance Kinship coming slowly towards me, his gaze flicking rapidly from me to the den Relgans and back again. It struck me that he wanted to talk to me without den Relgan noticing he was there, and with an inward smile I went to meet him.
“I’ve got your pictures in the car,” I said. “I brought them in case you were here.”
“Have you? Good, good. I want to talk to that girl.” He flicked another quick glance. “Can you get near her? Give her a message? Without that man hearing. Without either of them hearing. Can you?”
“I might try,” I said.
“Right. Good. You tell her, then, that I’ll meet her after the third race in one of the private boxes.” He told me the number. “You tell her to come up there. Right?”
“I’ll try,” I said again.
“Good. I’ll watch you. From over there.” He pointed. “When you’ve given her the message, you come and tell me. Right?”
I nodded, and with another quick peek at Dana he scuttled away. His clothes that day were much as they had been at Newbury, except that he’d ruined the overall true-blue impression with some pale green socks. A pathetic man, I thought. Making himself out to be what he wasn’t. Neither a significant film producer nor bred in the purple. They asked him to parties, Victor Briggs had said, because of what he brings. A sad ineffectual man buying his way into the big time with little packets of white powder.
I looked from him to den Relgan, who was using Dana, instead, for much the same purpose. Nothing sad or pathetic, though, about Ivor den Relgan. A bully boy on the march, power hungry and complacent, a trampler of little men.
I went up to him, and in an ingratiating voice, which after years of buttering up owners I could regrettably do quite convincingly, thanked him again for the gifts he had scattered at Kempton.
“The silver saddle . . . thought I must tell you,” I said. “Great to have around, just to look at.”
“So glad,” he said, his gaze passing over me without interest. “My daughter selected it.”
“Splendid taste,” Lord White said fondly, and I said directly to Dana, “Thank you very much.”
“So glad,” she murmured also with an almost identical lack of interest.
“Please do tell me,” I said, “whether it is unique, or whether it is one of many.”
I moved a step or two so that to answer she had to turn away from the two men, and almost before she had finished replying that it was the only one she’d seen, but she couldn’t be certain . . . I said to her quietly, “Lance Kinship is here, wanting to see you.”
“Oh.” She glanced quickly to the two men, returned Lord White’s automatic smile with a dazzling one of her own, and softly said to me, “Where?”
“After the third race in a private box.” I gave her the number.
“So glad you liked the saddle,” she said clearly, turning back towards Lord White. “Isn’t it fun,” she said to him, “to give pleasure?”
“My dear girl,” he said roguishly, “you give pleasure just by being yourself.”
Enough to bring angels to tears, I thought.
I wandered away and by a roundabout route arrived at Lance Kinship’s side. “She got the message,” I said, and he said, “Good,” and we arranged for me to give him his pictures outside the weighing room during the running of the last race.
Daylight’s race was third on the card, and Chainmail’s fourth. When I went out for the third I was stopped on my way from weighing room to parade ring by a pleasant-mannered woman who I realized with delayed shock was Marie Millace.
Marie Millace with scarcely a trace showing of the devastation of her face. Mrs. Millace on her feet, dressed in brown, pale and ill-looking, but healed.
“You said there wouldn’t be a mark,” she said, “and there isn’t.”
“You look great.”
“Can I talk to you?”
I looked to where all the other jockeys I’d started out with were already filing into the parade ring. “Well . . . how about later? How about . . . um . . . after the fourth race? After I’ve changed. Somewhere warm.”
She mentioned a particular bar, and we agreed on it, and I went on to the ring where Harold and Victor Briggs waited. Neither of them said anything to me, nor I to them. Everything of importance had already been said and for the unimportant there was no appetite. Harold gave me a leg up onto Daylight, and I nodded to him and Victor and got a grade-one blank Briggs stare in return.
There was no certainty that day that Daylight would win. With much stronger opponents, he wasn’t even favorite, let alone odds-on.
I cantered down to the starting gate thinking about courage, which was not normally a word I found much in my mind. The process of getting a horse to go fast over jumps seemed to me merely natural, and something I very much liked doing. One knew theoretically that there would be falls and injuries, but the risk of them seldom affected the way I rode. I had no constant preoccupation with my own safety.
On the other hand I’d never been reckless, as some were, as Steve Millace was, and perhaps my aim had been a little too much to bring myself and the horse back together, and not enough to throw my heart over the fence and let the horse catch up if he could.
It was the latter style of riding that Victor Briggs would expect on that day. My own fault, I thought. And moreover I’d have to do it twice.
On Daylight it turned out to be fairly easy, as his jumping style held good enough though I could sense his surprise at the change of mental gears in his rider. The telepathic quality of horses, that remarkable extra sense, picked up instantaneously the strength of my intention, and although I knew horses did tune in in that way, it freshly amazed me. One got used to a certain response from horses, because it was to oneself they were responding. When one’s own cast of mind changed radically, so did the horse’s response.
Daylight and I therefore turned in what was for us a thoroughly uncharacteristic performance, leaving more to luck than judgment. He was accustomed to measure his distance from a fence and alter his stride accordingly; but infected by my urgency he began not to do that but simply to take off when he was vaguely within striking distance of getting over. We hit the tops of three fences hard, which was unheard of for him, and when we came to the last and met it right we raced over it as if it had been but a shadow on the ground.
Hard as we tried, we didn’t win the race. Although we persevered to the end, a stronger, faster, fitter—whatever—horse beat us into second place by three lengths.
In the unsaddling enclosure I unbuckled the girths while Daylight panted and rocketed around in a highly excitable state, which was a world away from his “placid cow” image; and Victor Briggs watched without giving a thought surface life.
“Sorry,” I said to Harold, as he walked in with me to the scales.
He grunted, and said merely, “I’ll wait for your saddle.”
I nodded, went into the changing room for a change of lead weights in the weight cloth and returned to the scales to check out for Chainmail.
“Don’t kill yourself,” Harold said, taking my saddle. “It won’t prove anything except that you’re a bloody fool.”
I smiled at him. “People die crossing the road.”
“What you’re doing is no accident.”
He walked off with the saddle and I noticed that he had not in fact instructed me to return to a more sober style of his second runner. Perhaps he too, I reflected, wanted Victor to run his horses straight, and if this was the only way to achieve that, well . . . so be it.
With Chainmail things were different to the extent that the four-year-old hurdler was unstable to begin with, and what I was doing to him was much like urging a juvenile delinquent to go mugging. The rage within him, which made him fight against the jockey and duck out at the jumps and bite other horses, needed to be controlled by a calm mind and steady handling: or so I’d always thought.
On that day he didn’t get it. He got a rider prepared to overlook every aggressive act except that of ducking out, and when he tried that at the third hurdle he got such a fierce slash from my whip that I could almost feel him thinking resentfully, “Hey, that’s not like you,” and it wasn’t.
He fought and scrambled and surged and flew. I went with him to his ultimate speed, to total disregard of good sense. I did without any reservation ride my bloody guts out for Victor Briggs.
It wasn’t enough. Chainmail finished third in a field of fourteen. Undisgraced. Better, probably, than one would realistically have expected. Beaten only by a length and a neck. But still third.
Victor Briggs unsmilingly watched me pull the saddle off his second stamping, tossing, hepped-up horse. I wrapped the girths around the saddle and paused for a moment face to face with him. He said nothing at all, nor did I. We looked with equal blankness into each other’s eyes for a space of seconds, and then I went on, past him, away to the scales.
When I had changed and come out again, he was nowhere in sight. I had needed two winners to save my job, and got none. Recklessness wasn’t enough. He wanted winners. If he couldn’t have certain winners, he’d want certain losers. Like before. Like three years ago. Like when I and my soul were young.
With a deep feeling of weariness I went to meet Marie Millace in the appointed bar.