I stayed where I was and listened while he went on and on moaning and weeping in desolation. I listened to him without emotion; for I had cried too, in the tack-room.
The hands crawled round the face of my watch.
At a quarter to nine, when nothing could any longer save his programme, and even a message explaining his absence could scarcely be telephoned through in time, Kemp-Lore’s decreasing sobs faded away altogether, and the cottage was quiet.
I got stiffly to my feet and went out into the front garden, breathing deeply in the clear air with an easing sense of release. The difficult day was over, and the stars were bright in the frosty sky. It was a lovely night.
I walked along to the bushes and started Kemp-Lore’s car, turning it and driving it back to the gate. Then for the last time I walked round the cottage to talk to him through the window, and he was standing there already, his face a pale blur behind the window frames.
‘My car,’ he said hysterically. ‘I heard the engine. You’re going to drive away in my car and leave me.’
I laughed. ‘No. You are going to drive it away yourself. As fast and as far as you like. If I were you, I’d drive to the nearest airport and fly off. No one is going to like you very much when they’ve read those letters in the morning, and it will be only a day or two before the newspapers get on to it. As far as racing goes, you will certainly be warned off. Your face is too well-known in Britain for you to hide or change your name or get another job. And as you’ve got all night and probably most of tomorrow before the storm breaks and people start eying you with sneers and contempt, you can pack up and skip the country quite easily, without any fuss.’
‘You mean... I can go? Just go?’ He sounded astounded.
‘Just go,’ I said, nodding. ‘If you go quickly enough, you’ll avoid the enquiry the Stewards are bound to hold, and you’ll avoid any charge they might think of slapping on you. You can get away to some helpful distant country where they don’t know you, and you can start again from scratch.’
‘I suppose I haven’t much choice,’ he muttered. His asthma was almost unnoticeable.
‘And find a country where they don’t have steeplechasing,’ I finished.
He moaned sharply, and crashed his fists down on the window frame.
I went round into the cottage and in the light of Joanna’s big torch unlocked the padlock and pushed open the door. He turned from the window and walked unsteadily towards me across the straw, shielding his ravaged face from the light. He went through the door, passed me without a glance, and stumbled down the path to his car; and I walked down the path behind him, shining the torch ahead. I propped the torch on top of the gate-post so as to leave my hands free in case I needed to use them, but there didn’t seemed to be much fight left in him.
He paused when he was sitting in his car, and with the door still wide open looked out at me.
‘You don’t understand,’ he said, his voice shaking.
‘When I was a boy I wanted to be a jockey. I wanted to ride in the Grand National, like my father. And then there was this thing about falling off... I’d see the ground rushing past under my horse and there would be this terrible sort of pain in my guts, and I sweated until I could pull up and get off. And then I’d be sick.’
He made a moaning noise and clutched his stomach at the memory. His face twisted. Then he said suddenly, fiercely, ‘It made me feel good to see jockeys looking worried. I broke them up all right. It made me feel warm inside. Big.’
He looked up at me with renewed rage, and his voice thickened venomously.
‘I hated you more than all the others. You rode too well for a new jockey and you were getting on too quickly. Everyone was saying “Give Finn the bad horses to ride, he doesn’t know what fear is.” It made me furious when I heard that. So I had you on my programme, remember? I meant to make you look a fool. It worked with Mathews, why not with you? But Axminster took you up and then Pankhurst broke his leg... I wanted to smash you so much that it gave me headaches. You walked about with that easy confidence of yours, as if you took your strength for granted, and too many people were getting to say you’d be champion one day...
‘I waited for you to have a fall that looked fairly bad, and then I used the sugar. It worked. You know it worked. I felt ten feet tall, looking at your white face and listening to everyone sniggering about you. I watched you find out how it felt. I wanted to see you writhe when everyone you cared for said... like my father said to all his friends... that it was a pity about you... a pity you were a snivelling little coward, a pity you had no nerve... no nerve...’
His voice died away, and his hollowed eyes were wide, unfocused, as if he were staring back into an unbearable past.
I stood looking down at the wreck of what could have been a great man. All that vitality, I thought; all that splendid talent wasted for the sake of hurting people who had not hurt him.
Such individuals could be understood, Claudius Mellit had said. Understood, and treated, and forgiven.
I could understand him in a way, I supposed, because I was myself the changeling in a family. But my father had rejected me kindly, and I felt no need to watch musicians suffer.
Treated... The treatment I had given him that day might not have cured the patient, but he would no longer spread his disease, and that was all I cared about.
Without another word I shut the car door on him and gestured to him to drive away. He gave me one more incredulous glance as if he still found it impossible that I should let him go, and began to fumble with the light switches, the ignition, and the gears.
I hoped he was going to drive carefully. I wanted him to live. I wanted him to live for years, thinking about what he had thrown away. Anything else would be too easy, I thought.
The car began to roll, and I caught a last glimpse of the famous profile, the eclipsed, exiled profile, as he slid away into the dark. The brake lights flashed red as he paused at the end of the lane, then he turned out into the road, and was gone. The sound of his engine died away.
I took the torch from the gate-post and walked up the path to the quiet cottage, to sweep it clean.
Forgiveness, I thought. That was something else again.
It would take a long time to forgive.