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

With no more export trips to be flown until Thursday, I went the next day, Wednesday, to the races. Someone offered me a spare ride in the novice chase and for some reason it fretted me more than ever to have to refuse. ‘I can’t,’ I said, explaining thoroughly so that he wouldn’t think I was being rude. ‘I’m only allowed to ride in fifty open races a season, and I’m already over the forty mark, and I’ve got mounts booked for Cheltenham and the Whitbread and so on. And if I ride too much now I’ll be out of those, but thank you very much for asking me.’

He nodded understandingly and hurried off to find someone else, and in irritation two hours later I watched his horse canter home to a ten lengths win[126]. It was some consolation, however, when immediately afterwards I was buttonholed by a large shrewd-faced man I knew very slightly, the father of another well-occupied amateur jockey. Between them, father and son owned and trained half a dozen good hunter chasers which they ran only in amateur events with notoriously satisfactory results. But on this particular afternoon Mr Thackery, a large-scale farmer from Shropshire, showed signs both of worry and indecision.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ll not beat about the bush, I’m a blunt man, so I’m told. Now, what do you say to riding all my horses until the end of the season?’

I was astonished. ‘But surely Julian… I mean, he hasn’t had a bad fall or anything, has he?’

He shook his head. The worry stayed in place. ‘Not a fall. He’s got jaundice. Got it pretty badly, poor chap. He won’t be fit again for weeks. But we’ve a grand lot of horses this year and he won’t hear of them not running just because he can’t ride them. He told me to ask you, it’s his idea.’

‘It’s very good of him,’ I said sincerely. ‘And thank you, I’d like to ride for you very much, whenever I can.’

‘Good, then.’ He hesitated, and added, ‘Er… Julian told me to tell you, to ask you, if ten per cent of the prize money would be in order?’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘That will be fine.’

He smiled suddenly, his heavy face lightening into wrinkles which made him look ten years younger. ‘I wasn’t sure about asking you, I’ll tell you that, only Julian insisted on it. There’s no nonsense about Henry, he said, and I can see he’s right. He said Henry don’t drink much, don’t talk much, gets on with the job and expects to be paid for it. A pro at heart[127], he says you are. Do you want expenses?’

I shook my head. ‘Ten per cent for winning. Nothing else.’

‘Fair enough.’ He thrust out his hand and I shook it.

‘I’m sorry about Julian’s jaundice,’ I said.

Mr Thackery’s lips twitched. ‘He said if you said that, that he hoped for the sake of our horses you were being hypocritical.’

‘Oh, subtle stuff[128]’. I pondered. ‘Tell him to get up too soon and have a relapse.’

The next afternoon I went on a flight to New York.

With Billy.

The ice between us was as cold as the rarefied air outside the pressurized stratocruiser which took us. Yardman, I reflected, wasn’t showing much sense in pushing us off together so soon, and on a two-day journey at that[129].

The wide cold stare was somewhat marred by the blackish streaks and yellow smudges left by my fist, and Billy was distinctly warier than he had been on the French journeys. There were no elementary taunts this time; but at the end of everything he said to me he tacked on the words ‘Lord Grey,’ and made them sound like an insult.

He tried nothing so crude as punching to make my trip memorable; instead he smashed down one of the metal bars as I was fixing a guy chain during the loading. I looked up angrily, squeezing four squashed right fingers in my left hand, and met his watchful waiting eyes. He was looking down at me with interest, with faintly sneering calculation, to see what I would do.

If anyone else had dropped the bar, I would have known it was accidental. With Billy, apart from the force with which it had landed, I knew it wasn’t. But the day had barely begun, and the cargo was much too valuable to jeopardise for personal reasons[130], which I dare say he was counting on. When he saw that I was not going to retaliate, or at least not instantly, he nodded in satisfaction, picked up the bar with a small cold private smile, and calmly began putting it into place.

The loading was finished and the plane took off. There were thick dark red marks across my fingers an inch below the nails, and they throbbed all the way to America.

With us on that trip, looking after a full load of twelve horses, we took two other grooms, an elderly deaf one supplied by Yardman, and another man travelling privately with one particular horse. Owners occasionally sent their own grooms instead of entrusting their valued or difficult animals entirely to Yardman’s, and far from resenting it I had learned from Timmie and Conker to be glad of the extra help.