Flying finish / Бурный финиш. Книга для чтения на английском языке

He didn’t answer. It was too much to expect him to get up meekly while I waited, and as I wanted to avoid too decisive a clash with him if I could I turned away and went back alone, squelching slightly, to the aircraft. He came as I had thought he would, but with less than two minutes in hand to emphasize his independence[104]. The engines were already running when he climbed aboard, and we were moving as soon as the doors were shut.

As usual during take-off and landing, Billy stood holding the heads of two horses and I of the other two. After that, with so much space on the half loaded aircraft, I expected him to keep as far from me as he could, as he had done all day. But Billy by then was eleven hours away from Yardman’s restraining influence and well afloat on airport beer[105]. The crew were all up forward in the cockpit, and fat useless John was sex-bent for Paris.

Billy had me alone, all to himself.

Billy intended to make the most of it[106].

Chapter Four

‘Your kind ought not to be allowed[107]’, he said, with charming directness. He had to say it very loudly, also, on account of the noise of the aircraft.

I sat on a hay bale with my back against the rear wall of the cabin and looked at him as he stood ten feet in front of me with his legs apart for balance.

‘Your kind, of course,’ I shouted back, ‘are the salt of the earth.’

He took a step forward and the plane bumped hard in an air pocket. It lurched him completely off his balance and he fell rolling on to his side. With sizzling fury, though it wasn’t I who had pushed him, he raised himself up on one knee and thrust his face close to mine.

‘– you,’ he said.

At close quarters I could see how very young he was. His skin was still smooth like a child’s and he had long thick eyelashes round those vast pale blue-grey searchlight eyes. His hair, a fairish brown, curled softly close to his head and down the back of his neck, cut short and in the shape of a helmet. He had a soft, full-lipped mouth and a strong straight nose. A curiously sexless face. Too unlined to be clearly male, too heavily boned to be female.

He wasn’t so much a man, not even so much a person, as a force. A wild, elemental, poltergeist force trapped barely controllably in a vigorous steel-spring body. You couldn’t look into Billy’s cold eyes from inches away and not know it. I felt a weird unexpected primitive tingle away down somewhere in my gut, and at the same time realised on a conscious level that friendliness and reason couldn’t help, there that would be no winning over, ever, of Billy.

He began mildly enough.

‘Your sort,’ he yelled. ‘You think you own the bloody earth. You soft lot of out-of-date nincompoops[108], you and your lah-di-dah bloody Eton.’

I didn’t answer. He put his sneering face even nearer.

‘Think yourself something special, don’t you? You and your sodding ancestors.’

‘They aren’t very usual,’ I yelled in his ear.

‘What aren’t?’

‘Sodding ancestors.’

He had no sense of humour. He looked blank.

‘You didn’t spring from an acorn,’ I said resignedly. ‘You’ve had as many ancestors as I have.’

He stood up and took a step back. ‘Bloody typical,’ he shouted, ‘making fun of people you look down on.’

I shook my head, got to my feet, and went along the plane to check the horses. I didn’t care for useless arguments at the best of times, let alone those which strained the larynx. All four hurdlers were standing quiet in the boxes, picking peacefully at the haynets, untroubled by the noise. I patted their heads, made sure everything was secure, hesitated about going forward to the galley and cockpit for more friendly company, and had the matter settled for me by Billy.

‘Hey,’ he shouted. ‘Look at this.’ He was pointing downwards with one arm and beckoning me with sweeps of the other. There was anxiety on his face.

I walked back between the last box and the side wall of the aircraft, into the open space at the back, and across to Billy. As soon as I got near enough to see what he was pointing at, the anxiety on his face changed to spite.

‘Look at this,’ he shouted again, and jabbed his clenched fist straight at my stomach.

The only flicker of talent I had shown in a thoroughly mediocre and undistinguished career at Eton had been for boxing. I hadn’t kept it up afterwards, but all the same the defence reflex was still there even after eight years. Billy’s unexpected blow landed on a twisting target and my head did not go forward to meet a punch on the jaw. Or more likely in this case, I thought fleetingly, a chop on the back of the neck. Instead, I gave him back as good as I got[109], a short hard jolt to the lower ribs. He was surprised, but it didn’t stop him. Just the reverse. He seemed pleased.