‘I’m very sorry, sir,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t help it.’
I knew he hadn’t had a penny on it, and the owner had not even bothered to come to see the horse run.
He looked at me broodingly without answering, and I thought that there was one trainer who would not employ me again in a hurry. Sometimes it is as bad to win unexpectedly as to lose on a certainty.
I unbuckled the girths, pulled the saddle off over my arm and stood waiting for the storm to break.
‘Well, go along and weigh in,’ he said abruptly. ‘And when you’re dressed I want to talk to you.’
When I came out of the changing-room he was standing just inside the weighing-room door talking to Lord Tirrold, whose horse he trained. They stopped talking and turned towards me as I went over to them, but I could not see their expressions clearly as they had their backs to the light.
James Axminster said, ‘What stable do you ride for most?’
I said, ‘I ride mainly for farmers who train their own horses. I haven’t a steady job with a public trainer, but I have ridden for several when they have asked me. Mr. Kellar has put me up a few times.’ And that, I thought a little wryly, is the true picture of the smallness of the impression I had made in the racing world.
‘I have heard one or two trainers say,’ said Lord Tirrold, speaking directly to Axminster, ‘that for their really bad horses they can always get Finn.’
Axminster grinned back at him. ‘Just what I did today, and look at the result! How am I going to convince the owner it was as much a surprise to me as it will be to him when he hears about it? I’ve told him often that the horse is pretty useless.’ He turned to me. ‘You have made me look a proper fool, you know.’
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ I said again: and I meant it.
‘Don’t look so glum about it. I’ll give you another chance; several, in fact. There’s a slow old plug you can ride for me on Saturday, if you’re not booked already for that race, and two or three others next week. After that... we’ll see.’
‘Thank you,’ I said dazedly. ‘Thank you very much.’ It was as if he had thrust a gold brick into my hands when I had expected a scorpion: if I acquitted myself at all well on his horses he might use me regularly as a second-string jockey. That would be, for me, a giant step up.
He smiled a warm, almost mischievous smile which crinkled the skin round his eyes and said, ‘Geranium in the handicap chase at Hereford on Saturday, then. Are you free?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And you can do the weight? Ten stone?’
‘Yes,’ I said. I’d need to lose another three pounds in the two days, but starvation had never seemed so attractive.
‘Very well. I’ll see you there.’
‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
He and Lord Tirrold turned away and went out of the weighing-room together, and I heard them laugh. I watched them go, the thin angular Lord Tirrold and the even taller trainer, a pair who had between them won almost every important event in the National Hunt calendar.
James Axminster was a big man in every sense. Six foot four and solidly bulky, he moved and spoke and made decisions with easy assurance. He had a big face with a prominent nose and a square-looking heavy lower jaw. When he smiled his lower teeth showed in front of the upper ones, and they were good strong teeth, evenly set and unusually white.
His stable was one of the six largest in the country: his jockey, Pip Pankhurst, had been champion for the past two seasons: and his horses, about sixty of them, included some of the best alive. To have been offered a toe-hold in this set-up was almost as frightening as it was miraculous. If I messed up this chance, I thought, I might as well follow Art into oblivion.
I spent most of the next day running round Hyde Park in three sweaters and a wind-cheater and resisting the temptation to drink pints of water to replace what I had sweated off. Some of the other jockeys used dehydrating pills to rid their bodies of fluid (which weighs more than fat and is easier to shift) but I had found, the only time I took some, that they left me feeling almost too weak to ride.
At about six o’clock I boiled three eggs and ate them without salt or bread, and then removed myself hurriedly, for my mother was entertaining some friends to dinner, and the girl who came to cook for us on these occasions was beginning to fill the kitchen with demoralisingly savoury smells. I decided to go to the pictures to take my mind off my stomach; but it wasn’t a great success as I chose the film somewhat carelessly, and found myself watching three men staggering on their parched way through a blazing desert sharing their rations into ever dwindling morsels.
After that I went to the Turkish Baths in Jermyn Street and spent the whole night there, sweating gently all evening and again when I woke in the morning. Then I went back to the flat and ate three more boiled eggs, which I no longer cared for very much, and at last made my way to Hereford.
The needle quivered when I sat on the scales with the lightest possible saddle and thin boots. It swung up over the ten stone mark and pendulumed down and finally settled a hair’s breadth on the right side.
‘Ten stone,’ said the clerk of the scales in a surprised voice. ‘What have you been doing? Sandpapering it off?’
‘More or less,’ I grinned.
In the parade ring James Axminster looked at the number boards where the weights the horses carried were recorded, if they differed from those printed in the race cards. He turned back to me.
‘No overweight?’ he asked.
‘No, sir,’ I said matter-of-factly, as if it were the easiest thing in the world.
‘Hm.’ He beckoned the lad who was leading round the slow old plug I was to ride and said, ‘You’ll have to kick this old mare along a bit. She’s lazy. A good jumper, but that’s about all.’
I was used to kicking lazy horses. I kicked, and the mare jumped: and we finished third.
‘Hm,’ said Axminster again as I unbuckled the girths. I took my saddle and weighed in — half a pound lighter — and changed into the colours of the other horse I had been engaged to ride that afternoon, and when I walked out into the weighing-room, Axminster was waiting for me. He had a paper in his hand. He gave it to me without a word.
It was a list of five horses running in various races during the following week. Against each horse’s name he had put the weight it had to carry and the race it was to run in. I read through them.
‘Well?’ he said. ‘Can you ride them?’
‘I can ride four of them,’ I said. ‘But I’m already booked for that novice chase on Wednesday.’
‘Is it important? Can you get off?’ he asked.
I would dearly have liked to say yes. The paper I held was an invitation to my personal paradise, and there was always the chance that if I refused one of his mounts, the man who got it might corner all the future ones.
‘I... no,’ I said, ‘I ought not to. It’s for the farmer who gave me my first few rides...’
Axminster smiled faintly, the lower teeth showing in front. ‘Very well. Ride the other four.’
I said, ‘Thank you, sir. I’d be glad to.’ He turned away, and I folded up the precious list and put it in my pocket.
My other ride later that afternoon was for Corin Kellar. Since Art’s death he had employed several different jockeys and moaned to them about the inconvenience of not having a first-class man always on call. As it was his treatment of Art which had driven a first-class man to leave him in the most drastic possible way, Tick-Tock and I considered him a case for psychiatry; but both of us were glad enough to ride his horses, and Tick-Tock had ridden more of them than anyone else.
‘If Corin asks you,’ I said as we collected our saddles and helmets ready to weigh out for the race, ‘will you accept Art’s job?’