All over. Tiddely Pom hadn’t won. What did I expect?
The crowd parted suddenly like the Red Sea and through the gap struggled a large, untidy earth mother surrounded by planets. Madge Roncey and her sons.
She walked purposefully across the comparatively empty unsaddling enclosure and greeted her husband with a gentle pat on the arm. He was astounded to see her and stood stock still with his mouth open and Tiddely Pom’s girth buckles half undone. I went across to join them.
‘Hullo,’ Madge said. ‘Wasn’t that splendid?’ The faraway look in her eyes had come a few kilometres nearer since fact had begun to catch up on fantasy. She wore a scarlet coat a shade too small. Her hair floated in its usual amorphous mass. She had stockings on. Laddered.
‘Splendid,’ I agreed.
Roncey gave me a sharp look. ‘Still fussing?’
I said to Madge, ‘What happened down at the start?’
She laughed. ‘There was a fat little man there going absolutely berserk and screaming that he would stop Tiddely Pom if it was the last thing he did.’
Roncey swung round and stared at her. ‘He started hanging on to Tiddely Pom’s reins,’ she went on, ‘and he wouldn’t let go when the starter told him to. It was absolutely crazy. He was trying to kick Tiddely Pom’s legs. So I just ducked under the rails and walked across and told him it was our horse and would he please stop it, and he was frightfully rude...’ A speculative look came into her eye. ‘He used some words I didn’t know.’
‘For God’s sake,’ said Roncey irritably. ‘Get on with it.’
She went on without resentment, ‘He still wouldn’t let go so I put my arms round him and lifted him up and carried him off and he was so surprised he dropped the reins, and then he struggled to get free and I let him fall down on the ground and rolled him under the rails, and then the boys and I sat on him.’
I said, trying to keep a straight face, ‘Did he say anything after that?’
‘Well, he hadn’t much breath,’ she admitted judiciously. ‘But he did say something about killing you, as a matter of fact. He didn’t seem to like you very much. He said you’d smashed everything and stopped him getting to Tiddely Pom, and as a matter of fact he was so hysterical he was jolly nearly in tears.’
‘Where is he now?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know exactly. When I let him get up, he ran away.’
Roncey gave me a mean look. ‘So it took my wife to save my horse, not the Blaze.’
‘Oh no, dear,’ she said placidly. ‘If Mr Tyrone hadn’t been looking after him, the little man would have been able to reach him sooner, and if I hadn’t come back from the Isle of Wight because I thought it would be quite safe if no one knew, and we all wanted to see the race, if I hadn’t been there at the starting gate, someone else would have taken the little man away. Lots of people were going to. It was just that I got to him first.’ She gave me a sweet smile. ‘I haven’t had so much fun for years.’
The day fragmented after that into a lot of people saying things to me that I didn’t really hear. Pieces still stick out: Dermot Finnegan being presented with a small replica of the Lamplighter Gold Cup and looking as if he’d been handed the Holy Grail. Willie Ondroy telling me that Charlie Boston had been slung off the racecourse, and Eric Youll outlining the Stewards’ plan for warning him off permanently, which would mean the withdrawal of his betting licence and the closing of all his shops.
Derry telling me he had been through to Luke-John, whose bookmaker friend had taken all of Charlie Boston’s fifty thousand and was profoundly thankful Tiddely Pom hadn’t won.
Collie Gibbons asking me to go for a drink. I declined. I was off drink. He had his wife with him, and not an American colonel in sight.
Pat Roncey staring at me sullenly, hands in pockets. I asked if he’d passed on my own telephone number along with the whereabouts of Tiddely Pom. Belligerently he tried to justify himself: the man had been even more keen to know where I lived than where the horse was. What man? The tall yellowish man with some sort of accent. From the New Statesman, he’d said. Didn’t Pat know that the New Statesman was the one paper with no racing page? Pat did not.
Sandy Willis walking past leading Zig Zag, giving me a worried smile. Was the horse all right, I asked. She thought so, poor old boy. She muttered a few unfeminine comments on the jockey who had thrown the race away. She said she’d grown quite fond of Tiddely Pom, she was glad he’d done well. She’d won a bit on him, as he’d come in second. Got to get on, she said, Zig Zag needed sponging down.
The Huntersons standing glumly beside Egocentric while their trainer told them their raffle horse had broken down badly and wouldn’t run again for a year, if ever.
That message got through to me razor sharp and clear. No Egocentric racing, no Huntersons at the races. No Gail at the races. Not even that.
I’d had enough. My body hurt. I understood the full meaning of the phrase sick at heart. I’d been through too many mangles, and I wasn’t sure it was worth it. Vjoersterod was dead, Bert Checkov was dead, the non-starter racket was dead... until someone else tried it, until the next wide boy came along with his threats and his heavies. Someone else could bust it next time. Not me. I’d had far, far more than enough.
I wandered slowly out on to the course and stood beside the water jump, looking down into the water. Couldn’t go home until the race train went, after the last race. Couldn’t go home until I’d phoned in to Luke-John for a final check on what my column would look like the next day. Nothing to go home to, anyway, except an empty flat and the prospect of an empty future.
Footsteps swished towards me through the grass. I didn’t look up. Didn’t want to talk.
‘Ty,’ she said.
I did look then. There was a difference in her face. She was softer; less cool, less poised. Still extraordinarily beautiful. I badly wanted what I couldn’t have.
‘Ty, why didn’t you tell me about your wife?’
I shook my head. Didn’t answer.
She said, ‘I was in the bar with Harry and Sarah, and someone introduced us to a Major Gibbons and his wife, because he had been in your Tally article too, like Harry and Sarah. They were talking about you... Major Gibbons said it was such a tragedy about your wife... I said, what tragedy... and he told us...’
She paused. I took a deep difficult breath: said nothing.
‘I said it must be some help that she was rich, and he said what do you mean rich, as far as I know she hasn’t a bean because Ty is always hard up with looking after her, and he’d be reasonably well off if he put her in a hospital and let the country pay for her keep instead of struggling to do it himself...’
She turned half away from me and looked out across the course. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
I swallowed and loosened my mouth. ‘I don’t like... I didn’t want... consolation prizes.’
After a while she said, ‘I see.’ It sounded as if she actually did.
There was a crack in her cool voice. She said, ‘If it was me you’d married, and I’d got polio... I can see that you must stay with her. I see how much she needs you. If it had been me... and you left me...’ She gave a small laugh which was half a sob. ‘Life sure kicks you in the teeth. I find a man I don’t want to part with... a man I’d live on crumbs with... and I can’t have him... even a little while, now and then.’