Dermot Finnegan was twenty-five, looked thirty. Broken nosed and weatherbeaten, with bright sharp blue eyes. His ambition, he said, was to take a crack at Aintree. Otherwise he was all right with what he had: he wouldn’t want to be a classy top jockey, it was far too much responsibility. ‘If you only ride the scrubbers round the gaffs at the back end of the season, see, no one expects much. Then they gets a glorious surprise if you do come in.’
He had ridden nineteen winners in all, and he could remember each of them in sharp detail. No, he didn’t think he would do much good in the Lamplighter, not really, as he was only in it because his stable was running three. ‘I’ll be on the pacemaker, sure. You’ll see me right up there over the first, and maybe for a good while longer, but then my old boy will run out of steam and drop out of the back door as sudden as an interrupted burglar, and if I don’t have to pull him up it’ll be a bloody miracle.’
Later in the afternoon I watched him start out on some prospective ten-year-old dog-meat in a novice chase. Horse and rider disappeared with a flurry of legs into the second open ditch, and when I went to check on his injuries some time after the second race I met Dermot coming out of the ambulance room wearing a bandage and a grin.
‘It’s only a scratch’ he assured me cheerfully. ‘I’ll be there for the Lamplighter sure enough.’
Further investigation led to the detail of a finger nail hanging on by a thread. ‘Some black divil’ had leant an ill-placed hoof on the Finnegan hand.
To complete the Tally round-up I spent the last half of the afternoon in the Clerk of the Course’s office, watching him in action.
Heathbury Park, where the Lamplighter was to be held a fortnight later, had become under his direction one of the best organised courses in the country. Like the handicapper, he was ex-forces, in his case R.A.F., which was unusual in that the racing authorities as a rule leant heavily towards the Army and the Navy for their executives.
Wing Commander Willy Ondroy was a quiet effective shortish man of forty-two who had been invalided out after fracturing his skull in a slight mishap with a Vulcan bomber. He still, he said, suffered from blackouts, usually at the most inconvenient, embarrassing and even obscene moments.
It wasn’t until after racing had finished for the day that he was really ready to talk, and even then he dealt with a string of people calling into his office with statistics, problems and keys.
The Lamplighter was his own invention, and he was modestly proud of it. He’d argued the Betting Levy Board into putting up most of the hefty stake money, and then drawn up entry conditions exciting enough to bring a gleam to the hardest-headed trainer’s eye. Most of the best horses would consequently be coming. They should draw an excellent crowd. The gate receipts would rise again. They’d soon be able to afford to build a warm modern nursery room, their latest project, to attract young parents to the races by giving them somewhere to park their kids.
Willy Ondroy’s enthusiasm was of the enduring, not the bubbling kind. His voice was as gentle as the expression in his amber eyes, and only the small self-mockery in his smile gave any clue to the steel within. His obvious lack of any need to assert his authority in any forceful way was finally explained after I’d dug, or tried to dig, into his history. A glossed over throw-away phrase about a spot of formation flying turned out to be his version of three years as a Red Arrow, flying two feet away from the jet pipe of the aircraft in front. ‘We did two hundred displays in one year,’ he said apologetically. ‘Entertaining at air shows. Like a concert party on Blackpool pier, no difference really.’
He had been lucky to transfer to bombers when he was twenty-six, he said. So many R.A.F. fighter and formation pilots were grounded altogether when their reaction times began to slow. He’d spent eight years on bombers, fifteen seconds knowing he was going to crash, three weeks in a coma, and twenty months finding himself a civilian job. Now he lived with his wife and twelve-year-old twins in a house on the edge of the racecourse, and none of them wanted to change.
I caught the last train when it was moving and made a start on Dermot and Willy Ondroy on the way back to London.
Mrs Woodward departed contentedly at a quarter to seven, and I found she had for once left steaks ready in the kitchen. Elizabeth was in good spirits. I mixed us a drink each and relaxed in the armchair, and only after a strict ten minutes of self denial asked her casually if her mother had telephoned.
‘No, she hasn’t.’ She wouldn’t have.
‘So you don’t know if she’s coming?’
‘I expect she’ll ring, if she doesn’t.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said. Damn her eyes, couldn’t she at least settle it, one way or another?
Trying to shut my mind to it I worked on the Tally article: cooked the supper: went back to Tally: stopped to settle Elizabeth for the night; and returned to the typewriter until I’d finished. It was then half past two. A pity, I thought, stretching, that I wrote so slowly, crossed out so much. I put the final version away in a drawer with only the fair copy to be typed the next day. Plenty of time for that even if I spent the rest of it on the primrose path making tracks for Gail.
I despised myself. It was five before I slept.
Elizabeth’s mother came. Not a sniffle in sight.
I had spent all morning trying to reconcile myself to her nonappearance at ten-fifteen, her usual time of arrival. As on past occasions, I had turned a calm and everyday face to Elizabeth and found I had consciously to stifle irritation at little tasks for her that normally I did without thought.
At ten-seventeen the door bell rang, and there she was, a well groomed good-looking woman in her mid-fifties with assisted tortoiseshell hair and a health farm figure. When she showed surprise at my greeting I knew I had been too welcoming. I damped it down a little to more normal levels and saw that she felt more at home with that.
I explained to her, as I had already done to Elizabeth, that I still had people to interview for Tally, and by ten-thirty I was walking away down the mews feeling as though a safety valve was blowing fine. The sun was shining too. After a sleepless night, my conscience slept.
Gail met me at Virginia Water, waiting outside in the estate car. ‘The train’s late,’ she said calmly, as I sat in beside her. No warm, loving, kissing hello. Just as well, I supposed.
‘They work on the lines on Sunday. There was a delay at Staines.’
She nodded, let in the clutch, and cruised the three quarters of a mile to her uncle’s house. There she led the way into the sitting-room and without asking poured two beers.
‘You aren’t writing today,’ she said, handing me the glass.
‘No.’
She gave me a smile that acknowledged the purpose of my visit. More businesslike about sex than most women. Certainly no tease. I kissed her mouth lightly, savouring the knowledge that the deadline of the Huntersons’ return was three full hours ahead.
She nodded as if I’d spoken. ‘I approve of you,’ she said.
‘Thanks.’
She smiled, moving away. Her dress that day was of a pale cream colour which looked wonderful against the gilded coffee skin. She was no darker, in fact, than many southern Europeans or heavily sun-tanned English: her mixed origin was distinct only in her face. A well proportioned, attractive face, gathering distinction from the self assurance within. Gail, I imagined, had had to come to terms with herself much earlier and more basically than most girls. She had done almost too good a job.
A copy of the Sunday Blaze lay on the low table, open at the sports page. Editors or sub-editors write all the headlines, and Luke-John had come up with a beauty. Across the top of my page, big and bold, it said ‘Don’t back Tiddely Pom — YET’. Underneath, he’d left in word for word every paragraph I’d written. This didn’t necessarily mean he thought each word was worth its space in print, but was quite likely because there weren’t too many advertisements that week. Like all newspapers, the Blaze lived on advertising: if an advertiser wanted to pay for space, he got it, and out went the deathless prose of the columnists. I’d lost many a worked on sentence to the late arrival of spiels on Whosit’s cough syrup or Wammo’s hair tonic. It was nice to see this intact.