Spring Fever
Women’s Own magazine unexpectedly asked me for a suitable story. (Five thousand words, please.)
They would leave the actual content to me, they said, but they would prefer a story geared to their women readers.
Spring Fever, which I very much enjoyed writing, was the result.
Looking back, Mrs Angela Hart could identify the exact instant in which she fell irrationally in love with her jockey.
Angela Hart, plump, motherly, and fifty-two, watched the twenty-four-year-old man walk into the parade ring at Cheltenham races in her gleaming pink and white colours, and she thought: ‘How young he is, how fit, how lean... how brave.’
He crossed the bright turf to join her for the usual few minutes of chit-chat before taking her horse away to its two-mile scurry over hurdles, and she looked at the way the weather-tanned flesh lay taut over the cheekbones and agreed automatically that yes, the spring sunshine was lovely, and that yes, the drier going should suit her Billyboy better than the rain of the past few weeks.
It was a day like many another. Two racehorses having satisfactorily replaced the late and moderately lamented Edward Hart in Angela’s affections, she contentedly spent her time in going to jump meetings to see her darlings run, in clipping out mentions of them from the racing pages of newspapers and in telephoning her trainer, Clement Scott, to enquire after their health.
She was a woman of kindness and good humour, but suffered from a dangerous belief that everyone was basically as well-intentioned as herself. Like children who pat tigers, she expected a purr of appreciation in return for her offered friendship, not to have her arm bitten off.
Derek Roberts, jockey, saw Mrs Angela Hart prosaically as the middle-aged owner of Billyboy and Hamlet, a woman to whom he spoke habitually with a politeness born from needing the fees he was paid for riding her horses. His job, he reckoned, involved pleasing the customers before and after each race as much as doing his best for them in the event, and as he had long years ago discovered that most owners were pathetically pleased when a jockey praised their horses, he had slid almost without cynicism into a way of conveying optimism even when not believing a word of it.
When he walked into the parade ring at Cheltenham, looking for Mrs Hart and spotting her across the grass in her green tweed coat and brown fur hat, he was thinking that as Billyboy hadn’t much chance in today’s company he’d better prepare the old duck for the coming disappointment and at the same time insure himself against being blamed for it.
‘Lovely day,’ he said, shaking her hand. ‘Real spring sunshine.’
‘Lovely.’ After a short silence, when she said nothing more, he tried again.
‘Much better for Billyboy, now all that rain’s drying out.’
‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right.’
She wasn’t as talkative as usual, he thought. Not the normal excited chatter. He watched Billyboy plod round the ring and said encouragingly, ‘He should run well today... though the opposition’s pretty hot, of course.’
Mrs Hart, looking slightly vague, merely nodded. Derek Roberts, shrugging his mental shoulders, gave her a practised, half-genuine smile and reckoned (mistakenly) that if she had something on her mind, and didn’t want to talk, it was nothing to do with him.
A step away from them, also with his eyes on the horse, stood Billyboy’s trainer, Clement Scott. Strong, approaching sixty, a charmer all his life, he had achieved success more through personality than any deep skill with horses. He wore good clothes. He could talk.
Underneath the attractive skin there was a coldness which was apparent to his self-effacing wife, and to his grown and married children, and eventually to anyone who knew him well. He was good company, but lacked compassion. All bonhomie on top: ruthlessly self-seeking below.
Clement Scott was old in the ways of jockeys and owners, and professionally he thought highly of the pair before him: of Derek, because he kept the owners happy and rode well enough besides, and of Angela because her first interest was in the horses themselves and not in the prize money they might fail to win.
Motherly sentimental ladies, in his opinion, were the least critical and most forgiving of owners, and he put up gladly with their gushing telephone calls because they also tended to pay his bills on receipt. Towards Angela, nicely endowed with a house on the edge of Wentworth golf course, he behaved with the avuncular roguishness that had kept many a widow faithful to his stable in spite of persistent rumours that he would probably cheat them if given half a chance.
Angela, like many another lady, didn’t believe the rumours. Clement, dear naughty Clement, who made owning a racehorse such satisfying fun, would never in any case cheat her.
Angela stood beside Clement on the stands to watch the race, and felt an extra dimension of anxiety; not simply, as always, for the safe return of darling Billyboy, but also, acutely, for the man on his back. Such risks he takes, she thought, watching him through her binoculars. Before that day she had thought only of whether he’d judged the pace right, or taken an available opening, or ridden a vigorous finish. During that race her response to him crossed conclusively from objectivity to emotion, a change which at the time she only dimly perceived.
Derek Roberts, by dint of not resting the horse when it was beaten, urged Billyboy forwards into fourth place close to the winning post, knowing that Angela would like fourth better than fifth or sixth or seventh. Clement Scott smiled to himself as he watched. Fourth or seventh, the horse had won no prize money, but that lad Derek, with his good looks and his crafty ways, he certainly knew how to keep the owners sweet.
Her race glasses clutched tightly to her chest, Angela Hart breathed from the relief of pulse-raising tensions. She thought gratefully that fourth place wasn’t bad in view of the hot opposition, and Billyboy had been running on at the end, which was a good sign... and Derek Roberts had come back safely.
With her trainer she hastened down to meet the returning pair, and watched Billyboy blow through his nostrils in his usual post-race sweating state, and listened to Derek talking over his shoulder to her while he undid the girth buckles on the saddle.
‘...Made a bit of a mistake landing over the third last, but it didn’t stop him... He should win a race pretty soon, I’d say.’
He gave her the special smile and a sketchy salute and hurried away to weigh-in and change for the next race, looping the girths round the saddle as he went. Angela watched until he was out of sight and asked Clement when her horses were running next.
‘Hamlet had a bit of heat in one leg this morning,’ he said, ‘and Billyboy needs two weeks at least between races.’ He screwed up his eyes at her, teasing. ‘If you can’t wait that long to see them again, why don’t you come over one morning and watch their training gallops?’
She was pleased. ‘Does Derek ride the gallops?’
‘Sometimes,’ he said.
It was on the following day that Angela, dreamily drifting around her house, thought of buying another horse.
She looked up Derek Robert’s number, and telephoned. Find you another horse?’ he said. ‘Yeah... sure... I think another horse is a grand idea, but you should ask Mr Scott...’
‘If Clement finds me a horse,’ Angela said, ‘will you come with me to see it? I’d really like your opinion before I buy.’