‘I very much hope not,’ I said. I wondered whether his antipathy to his elder sons extended to the smaller ones; whether he would risk their safety or happiness for the sake of running Tiddely Pom in the Lamplighter. Maybe he would. The stubborn streak ran through his character like iron in granite.
When he had calmed down to somewhere near reason I asked him if he’d mind telling me how he’d got my telephone number.
‘I had the devil’s own job, if you want to know. All that ex-directory piffle. The enquiries people refused point blank to tell me, even though I said it was urgent. Stupid, I call it, but I wasn’t to be put off by that. If you want to know, your colleague on the paper told me. Derrick Clark.’
‘I see,’ I said resignedly, thinking it unlike Derry to part so easily with my defences. ‘Well, thank you. Did the Tally photographer find you all right?’
‘He came on Friday. I hope you haven’t said anything in Tally about...’ His anger was on its way up again.
‘No,’ I said decisively. ‘Nothing like that at all.’
‘When can I be sure?’ He sounded suspicious.
‘That edition of Tally is published on the Tuesday before the Lamplighter.’
‘I’ll ask for an advance copy from the Editor. Tomorrow. I’ll demand to see what you’ve written.’
‘Do that,’ I agreed. Divert the buck to Arnold Shankerton. Splendid.
He rang off still not wholly pacified. I dialled Derry’s number and prepared to pass the ill temper along to him.
‘Roncey?’ He said indignantly. ‘Of course I didn’t give your number to Roncey.’ His baby girl was exercising her lungs loudly in the background. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said, who did you give it to?’
‘Your wife’s uncle.’
‘My wife hasn’t got any uncles.’
‘Oh Christ. Well, he said he was your wife’s uncle, and that your wife’s aunt had had a stroke, and that he wanted to tell you, but he’d lost your number.’
‘Lying crafty bastard,’ I said with feeling. ‘And he accused me of misrepresenting facts.’
‘I’m sorry, Ty.’
‘Never mind. Only check with me first, next time, huh? Like we arranged.’
‘Yeah. Sure. Sorry.’
‘How did he get hold of your number, anyway?’
‘It’s in the Directory of the British Turf, unlike yours. My mistake.’
I put the receiver back in its special cradle near to Elizabeth’s head and transferred to the armchair, and we spent the rest of the evening as we usually did, watching the shadows on the goggle box. Elizabeth never tired of it, which was a blessing, though she complained often about the shut-downs in the day time between all the child-orientated programmes. Why couldn’t they fill them, she said, with interesting things for captive adults.
Later I made some coffee and did the vapour rubs and other jobs for Elizabeth, all with a surface of tranquil domesticity, going through my part with my thoughts somewhere else, like an actor at the thousandth performance.
On the Monday morning I took my article to the Tally offices and left the package at the reception desk, virtuously on the deadline.
After that I caught the race train to Leicester, admitting to myself that although it was technically my day off I did not want to stay in the flat. Also the Huntersons’ raffle horse Egocentric was to have its pre-Lamplighter warm-up, which gave me an excellent overt reason for the journey.
Raw near-mist was doing its best to cancel the proceedings and only the last two fences were visible. Egocentric finished fourth without enough steam left to blow a whistle, and the jockey told the trainer that the useless bugger had made a right bloody shambles of three fences on the far side and couldn’t jump for peanuts. The trainer didn’t believe him and engaged a different jockey for the Lamplighter. It was one of those days.
The thin Midland crowd of cloth caps and mufflers strewed the ground with betting slips and newspapers and ate a couple of hundredweight of jellied eels out of little paper cups. I adjourned to the bar with a colleague from the Sporting Life, and four people commented on my non-starters with varying degrees of belief. Not much of a day. One, on the whole, to forget.
The journey home changed all that. When I forget it, I’ll be dead.
7
Thanks to having left before the last race I had a chance in the still empty and waiting train of a forward facing window-seat in a non-smoker. I turned the heating to ‘hottest’, and opened the newspaper to see what Spyglass had come up with in the late editions.
‘Tiddely Pom will run, trainer says. But is your money really safe?’
Amused, I read to the end. He’d cribbed most of my points and rehashed them. Complimentary. Plagiary is the sincerest form of flattery.
The closed door to the corridor slid open and four bookmakers’ clerks lumbered in, stamping their feet with cold and discussing some luckless punter who had lost an argument over a betting slip.
‘I told him to come right off it, who did he think he was kidding? We may not be archangels, but we’re not the ruddy mugs he takes us for.’
They all wore navy blue overcoats which after a while they shed on to the luggage racks. Two of them shared a large packet of stodgy looking sandwiches and the other two smoked. They were all in the intermediate thirty-forties, with London-Jewish accents in which they next discussed their taxi drive to the station in strictly non Sabbath day terms.
‘Evening,’ they said to me, acknowledging I existed, and one of them gestured with his cigarette to the non-smoking notice on the window and said, ‘O.K. with you, chum?’
I nodded, hardly taking them in. The train rocked off southwards, the misty day turned to foggy night, and five pairs of eyeballs fell gently shut.
The door to the corridor opened with a crash. Reluctantly I opened one eye a fraction, expecting the ticket collector. Two men filled the opening, looking far from bureaucratic. Their effect on my four fellow travellers was a spine-straightening mouth-opening state of shock. The larger of the newcomers stretched out a hand and pulled the blinds down on the insides of the corridor-facing windows. Then he gave the four clerks a contemptuous comprehensive glance, jerked his head towards the corridor and said with simplicity, ‘Out.’
I still didn’t connect any of this as being my business, not even when the four men meekly took down their navy blue overcoats and filed out into the train. Only when the large man pulled out a copy of the Blaze and pointed to my article did I have the faintest prickle on the spine.
‘This is unpopular in certain quarters,’ remarked the larger man. Thick sarcastic Birmingham accent. He pursed his lips, admiring his own heavy irony. ‘Unpopular.’
He wore grubby overalls from shoes to throat, with above that a thick neck, puffy cheeks, a small wet mouth and slicked down hair. His companion, also in overalls, was hard and stocky with wide eyes and a flat topped head.
‘You shouldn’t do it, you shouldn’t really,’ the large man said. ‘Interfering and that.’
He put his right hand into his pocket and it reappeared with a brass ridge across the knuckles. I glanced at the other man. Same thing.
I came up with a rush, grabbing for the communication cord. Penalty for improper use, twenty-five pounds. The large man moved his arm in a professional short jab and made havoc of my intention.
They had both learned their trade in the ring, that much was clear. Not much else was. They mostly left my head alone, but they knew where and how to hit to hurt on the body, and if I tried to fight off one of them, the other had a go. The most I achieved was a solid kick on the smaller man’s ankle which drew from him four letters and a frightening kidney punch. I collapsed on to the seat. They leant over me and broke the Queensberry Rules.