‘Yes, I suppose so,’ I said.
I left him standing there, trying to convince himself that he was in no way responsible for Art’s death.
Back in the changing-room the discussion on what to do with Art’s clothes had been ended by his valet taking charge of them, and Grant Oldfield, I was glad to find, had finished dressing and gone home. Most of the other jockeys had gone also, and the valets were busy tidying up the chaos they had left behind, sorting dirty white breeches into kit bags, and piling helmets, boots, whips and other gear into large wicker hampers. It had been a dry sunny day, and for once there was no mud to wash off.
I reflected as I watched the quick, neat way they flipped the things into the baskets, ready to take the dirty ones home, clean them and return them laundered and polished on the following day, that possibly they did deserve the very large fees we had to pay them for the service. I knew I would loathe, after a day of travelling and of dressing jockeys, to have to face those hampers and bags when I reached home; take out the grubby piles and set to work. Ugh.
I had often seen Art paying his valet, counting through a wad of notes. At the height of the season it always a-mounted to over twenty pounds each week. My own valet, Young Mike (in his middle forties), twitched my helmet up from the bench and smiled at me as he went by. He earned more than most of the dozen or so jockeys he regularly looked after, and decidedly more than I did. But all the same... ugh!
Tick-Tock, whistling the latest hit tune between his teeth, sat on the bench and pulled on a pair of very fancy yellow socks. On top of those went smooth, slim-toed shoes reaching up to the ankle bone. He shook down the slender legs of his dark tweed trousers (no turn-ups), and feeling my gaze upon him looked up and grinned at me across the room.
He said, ‘Look your fill on the “Tailor and Cutter’s” dream boy.’
‘My father in his time,’ I said blandly, ‘was a Twelve Best Dressed man.’
‘My grandfather had vicuna linings in his raincoats.’
‘My mother,’ I said, dredging for it, ‘has a Pucci shirt.’
‘Mine,’ he said carefully, ‘cooks in hers.’
At this infantile exchange we regarded each other with high good humour. Five minutes of Tick-Tock’s company were as cheering as rum punch in a snowstorm, and some of his happy-go-lucky enjoyment of living always rubbed off on to the next man. Let Art die of shame, let the murk spread in Grant Oldfield’s soul; surely nothing could be really wrong in the racing world, I thought, while young Ingersoll ticked so gaily.
He waved his hand at me, adjusted his Tyrolean trilby, said ‘See you tomorrow,’ and was gone.
But all the same there was something wrong in the racing world. Very wrong. I didn’t know what; I could see only the symptoms, and see them all the more clearly perhaps, since I had been only two years in the game. Between trainers and jockeys there seemed to be an all-round edginess, sudden outbursts of rancour, and an ebbing and flowing undercurrent of resentment and distrust. There was more to it, I thought, than the usual jungle beneath the surface of any fiercely competitive business, more to it than the equivalent of grey-flannel-suit manoeuvring in the world of jodhpurs and hacking jackets; but Tick-Tock, to whom alone I had in any way suggested my misgivings, had brushed the whole thing aside.
‘You must be on the wrong wavelength, pal,’ he said. ‘Look around you. Those are smiles you can see, boy. Smiles. It’s an O.K. life by me.’
The last few pieces of kit were disappearing into the hampers and some of the lids were already down. I drank a second cup of sugarless tea, lukewarm, and eyed the moist looking pieces of fruit cake. As usual it took a good deal of resolution not to eat one. Being constantly hungry was the one thing I did not enjoy about race riding, and September was always a bad time of the year, with the remains of the summer’s fat still having to be starved off. I sighed, averted my eyes from the cake, and tried to console myself that in another month my appetite would have shrunk back to its winter level.
Young Mike shouted down the room from the doorway through which he had been staggering with a hamper, ‘Rob, there’s a copper here to see you.’
I put down the cup and went out into the weighing room. A middle-aged, undistinguished-looking policeman in a peaked cap was waiting for me with a notebook in his hand.
‘Robert Finn?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I understand from Lord Tirrold that you saw Arthur Mathews put the pistol against his temple and pull the trigger?’
‘Yes,’ I agreed.
He made a note: then he said, ‘It’s a very straightforward case of suicide. There won’t be any need for more than one witness at the inquest, apart from the doctor, and that will probably be Mr. Kellar. I don’t think we will need to trouble you any further.’ He smiled briefly, shut the notebook and put it in his pocket.
‘That’s all?’ I asked rather blankly.
‘Yes, that’s all. When a man kills himself as publicly as this there’s no question of accident or homicide. The only thing for the coroner to decide is the wording of his verdict.’
‘Unsound mind and so on?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Thank you for waiting, though it was your stewards’ idea, not mine. Good afternoon, then.’ He nodded at me, turned, and walked across towards the stewards’ room.
I collected my hat and binoculars and walked down to the racecourse station. The train was already waiting and full, and the only seat I could find was in a compartment packed with bookmakers’ clerks playing cards on a suitcase balanced across their knees. They invited me to join them, and between Luton and St Pancras I fear I repaid their kindness by winning from them the cost of the journey.
Two
The flat in Kensington was empty. There were a few letters from the day’s second post in the wire basket on the inner side of the door, and I fished them out and walked through into the sitting-room, sorting out the two which were addressed to me.
As usual, the place looked as if it had lately received the attentions of a minor tornado. My mother’s grand piano lay inches deep in piano scores, several of which had cascaded to the floor. Two music-stands leant at a drunken angle against the wall with a violin bow hooked on to one of them. The violin itself was propped up in an armchair, with its case open on the floor beside it. A ’cello and another music-stand rested side by side like lovers along the length of the sofa. An oboe and two clarinets lay on a table beside another untidy pile of music, and round the room and on all the bedroom chairs which filled most of the floor space lay a profusion of white silk handkerchiefs, rosin, coffee cups and batons.
Running a practised eye over the chaos I diagnosed the recent presence of my parents, two uncles and a cousin. As they never travelled far without their instruments, it was safe to predict that the whole circus was within walking distance and would return in a very short while. I had, I was thankful to realise, struck the interval.
I threaded a path to the window and looked out. No sign of returning Finns. The flat was at the top of a house two or three streets back from Hyde Park, and across the rooftops I could see the evening sunlight striking on the green dome of the Albert Hall. The Royal Institute of Music, where one of my uncles taught, rose in a solid dark mass beside it. The large airy apartment which was the headquarters of the Finn family was held by my father to be an economy, as it was within walking distance of where so many of them from time to time worked.
I was the odd one out. The talents with which both my parents’ families had been lavishly endowed had not descended to me. This had become painfully clear to them when at the age of four I had failed to distinguish between the notes of an oboe and a cor anglais. To the uninitiated there may not seem to be much difference between them, but my father happened to be an oboist of international reputation, against whom other oboists were measured. Also, high musical talent, if it exists, is apparent in a child from an extremely early age, earlier than any other form of inborn ability, and at three years (when Mozart began composing), concertos and symphonies made less impression on me than the noise of the men emptying the dustbins.