‘Nothing’s wrong with him,’ Sue protested. She looked me over carefully. ‘Nothing at all.’
‘What did you mean, then?’ Elizabeth was smiling still, but she wanted an answer.
‘Oh... only that this Ty is so quiet, and that one...’ she pointed to the paper, ‘bursts the eardrums.’ She put her head on one side, summing me up, then turned to Elizabeth with the best of motives and said: ‘This one is so gentle... that one is tough.’
‘Gentle nothing,’ I said, seeing the distress under Elizabeth’s laugh. ‘When you aren’t here, Sue, I throw her round the room and black her eyes regularly on Fridays.’ Elizabeth relaxed, liking that. ‘Stay for a drink,’ I suggested to Sue, ‘Now that I’ve fetched it.’
She went, however, back to her half-baked Yorkshire pudding, and I avoided discussing what she had said by going out to the kitchen and rustling up some omelettes for lunch. Elizabeth particularly liked them, and could eat hers with the new feeding gadget, up to a point. I helped her when her wrist tired, and made some coffee and fixed her mug in its holder.
‘Do you really know where the horse is?’ she asked.
‘Tiddely Pom? Yes, of course.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Dark and deadly secret, honey,’ I said. ‘I can’t tell anyone, even you.’
‘Oh go on,’ she urged. ‘You know I won’t tell either.’
‘I’ll tell you next Sunday.’
Her nose wrinkled. ‘Thanks for nothing.’ The pump heaved away, giving her breath. ‘You don’t think anyone would try to... well... make you tell. Where he is, I mean.’ More worry, more anxiety. She couldn’t help it. She was always on the edge of a precipice, always on the distant look out for anything which would knock her over.
‘Of course not, honey. How could they?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said; but her eyes were full of horrors.
‘Stop fussing,’ I said with a smile. ‘If anyone threatened me with anything really nasty, I’d say quick enough where he is. No horse is worth getting in too deep for.’ Echoes of Dembley. The matrix which nurtured the germ. No one would sacrifice themselves or their families for the sake of running a horse.
Elizabeth detected the truth in my voice and was satisfied. She switched on the television and watched some fearful old movie which bored me to death. Three o’clock came and went. Even if I’d gone to Virginia Water, I would have been on the way back again. And I’d had Friday night. Rare, unexpected Friday night. Trouble was, the appetite grew on what it fed on, as someone else once said. The next Sunday was at the wrong end of a telescope.
Drinks, supper, jobs for Elizabeth, bed. No one else called, no one telephoned. It crossed my mind once or twice as I lazed in the armchair in our customary closed-in little world, that perhaps the challenge implicit in my column had stirred up, somewhere, a hive of bees.
Buzz buzz, busy little bees. Buzz around the Blaze. And don’t sting me.
I spent all Monday in and around the flat. Washed the van, wrote letters, bought some socks, kept off race trains from Leicester.
Derry telephoned twice to tell me (a) that Tiddely Pom was flourishing, and (b) the Roncey children had sent him a stick of peppermint rock.
‘Big deal,’ I said.
‘Not bad kids.’
‘You’ll enjoy fetching them.’
He blew a raspberry and hung up.
Tuesday morning I walked to the office. One of those brownish late November days, with saturated air and a sour scowl of fog to come. Lights shone out brightly at 11 a.m. People hurried along Fleet Street with pinched, mean eyes working out whose neck to scrunch on the next rung of the ladder, and someone bought a blind man’s matches with a poker chip.
Luke-John and Derry wore moods to match.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked mildly.
‘Nothing’s happened,’ Derry said.
‘So?’
‘So where’s our reaction?’ Luke-John enquired angrily. ‘Not a letter. No one’s phoned, even. Unless,’ he brightened, ‘Unless Charlie Boston’s boys have called on you with a few more threats?’
‘They have not.’
Relapse into gloom for the Sports Desk. I alone wasn’t sorry the article had fallen with a dull thud. If it had. I thought it was too soon to be sure. I said so.
‘Hope you’re right, Ty,’ Luke-John said sceptically. ‘Hope it hasn’t all been a coincidence... Bert Checkov and the non-starters... hope the Blaze hasn’t wasted its time and money for nothing on Tiddely Pom...’
‘Charlie Boston’s boys were not a coincidence.’
‘I suppose not.’ Luke-John sounded as though he thought I might have misunderstood what the Boston boys had said.
‘Did your friend in Manchester find out any more about Charlie B?’ I asked.
Luke-John shrugged. ‘Only that there was some talk about his chain of betting shops being taken over by a bigger concern. But it doesn’t seem to have happened. He is still there, anyway, running the show.’
‘Which bigger concern?’
‘Don’t know.’
To pass the time we dialled four of the biggest London book-making businesses which had chains of betting shops all over the country. None of them admitted any immediate interest in buying out Charlie Boston. But one man was hesitant, and when I pressed him, he said, ‘We did put out a feeler, about a year ago. We understood there was a foreign buyer also interested. But Boston decided to remain independent and turned down both offers.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, and Luke-John commented that that took us a long way, didn’t it. He turned his attention crossly to a pile of letters which had flooded in contradicting one of the football writers, and Derry began to assess the form for the big race on Boxing Day. All over the vast office space the Tuesday picking of teeth and scratching of scabs proceeded without haste, the slow week still slumbering. Tuesday was gossip day. Wednesday, planning. Thursday, writing. Friday, editing. Saturday, printing. Sunday, Blaze away. And on Mondays the worked-on columns lit real fires or wrapped fish and chips. No immortality for a journalist.
Tuesday was also Tally day. Neither at home nor at the office had a copy come for me by post. I went downstairs to the next-door magazine stand, bought one, and went back inside the Blaze.
The pictures were off-beat and rather good, the whole article well presented. One had to admit that Shankerton knew his stuff. I forgave him his liberties with my syntax.
I picked up Derry’s telephone and got through to the Tally despatch department. As expected, they didn’t send free copies to the subjects of any articles: not their policy. Would they send them? Oh sure, give us the addresses, we’ll let you have the bill. I gave them the six addresses, Huntersons, Ronceys, Sandy Willis, Collie Gibbons, Dermot Finnegan, Willie Ondroy.
Derry picked up the magazine and plodded through the article, reading at one third Luke-John’s wide angled speed.
‘Deep, deep,’ he said ironically, putting it down. ‘One hundred and fifty fathoms.’
‘Sixty will go in tax.’
‘A hard life,’ Derry sighed. ‘But if you hadn’t picked on Roncey, we would never have cottoned on to this non-starter racket.’
Nor would I have had any cracked ribs. With them, though, the worst was over. Only coughing, sneezing, laughing, and taking running jumps were sharply undesirable. I had stopped eating Elizabeth’s pills. In another week, the cracks would have knitted.