Binny muttered something blackly of which the only audible word was ‘amateurs’.
‘I think that what Binny really means,’ said Moira sweetly and distinctly, ‘is that Ro, like most amateurs, always tries very hard to win, and won’t listen to propositions to the contrary.’
Binny’s face turned a dark red. Jossie practically giggled. Moira looked at me with limpid blue eyes as if not quite aware of what she’d said, and I chewed around helplessly for a sensible answer.
‘Like most jockeys,’ I said finally.
‘You’re so nice, Ro,’ she said. ‘You think everyone’s honest.’
I tended, like most accountants, to think exactly the opposite, but as it happened I had never much wondered about Binny. To train a horse like Tapestry should have been enough, without trying to rig his results.
Binny himself had decided to misunderstand what Moira had said, and was pretending that he hadn’t seen the chasm that was opening at his feet. Moira gave him a mischievous glance and allowed him no illusions about her power to push him in.
‘Binny dear,’ she said, ‘I’ll never desert the man who trained a Gold Cup winner for me. Not as long as he keeps turning out my horses beautifully fit, and I choose who rides them.’
Jossie cleared her throat in the following silence and said encouragingly to Binny, ‘I expect you had a good bet in the Gold Cup? My father always puts a bit on in the Cup and the National. Too awful if you win, and you haven’t. Makes you look such an ass, he says.’
If she had tried to rub salt into his raw wounds, it appeared she couldn’t have done a better job. Moira Longerman gave a delighted laugh.
‘You naughty girl,’ she said, patting Jossie’s arm. ‘Poor Binny had so little faith, you see, that not only did he not back Tapestry to win, but I’ve heard he unfortunately laid it to lose. Such a pity. Poor Binny, winning the Gold Cup and ending up out of pocket.’
Binny looked so appalled that I gathered the extent of her information was a nasty shock to him.
‘Never mind,’ Moira said kindly. ‘What’s past is past. And if Ro rides Tapestry next Wednesday, all will be well.’
Binny looked as if everything would be very far from well. I wondered idly if he could possibly have already arranged that Tapestry should lose on Wednesday. On his first outing after a Gold Cup win, any horse would start at short odds. Many a bookmaker would be grateful to know for certain that he wouldn’t have to pay out. Binny could already have sold that welcome information, thinking that I wasn’t around to upset things. Binny was having a thoroughly bad time.
I reflected that I simply couldn’t afford to take Wednesday off. The mountains of undone work made me feel faintly sick.
‘Ro?’ Moira said persuasively.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Nothing I’d like better in the world.’
‘Oh goody!’ Her eyes sparkled with pleasure. ‘I’ll see you at Ascot, then. Binny will ring you, of course, if there’s a change of plan.’
Binny scowled.
‘Tell me all,’ Jossie demanded as we walked across to the trainers’ stand to watch the next race. ‘All this drama about you being kidnapped.’
I told her briefly, without much detail.
‘Do you mean they just popped you on a boat and sailed off with you to the Med?’
‘That’s right.’
‘What a lark.’
‘It was inconvenient,’ I said mildly.
‘I’ll bet.’ She paused. ‘You said you escaped. How did you do that?’
‘Jumped overboard.’
Her mouth twisted with sympathy. I reflected that it was only four days since that frantic swim. It seemed another world.
Jossie was of the real, sensible world, where things were understandable, if not always pleasant. Being with her made me feel a great deal more settled, more normal, and safer.
‘How about dinner,’ I said, ‘on the way home?’
‘We’ve got two cars,’ she said.
‘Nothing to prevent them both stopping at the same place.’
‘How true.’
She was again wearing swirly clothes: a soft rusty red, this time. There was nothing tailored about her, and nothing untidy. An organised girl, amusing and amused.
‘There’s a fair pub near Oxford,’ I said.
‘I’ll follow you, then.’
I changed in due course for Notebook’s race, and weighed out, and gave my lightest saddle to the Axwood travelling head lad, who was waiting for it by the door.
‘Carrying overweight, are you?’ he said sardonically.
‘Four pounds.’
He made an eyes-to-heaven gesture, saying louder than words that trainers should put up professionals in novice hurdle races, not amateurs who couldn’t do ten stone six. I didn’t mention that on Gold Cup day I’d weighed eight pounds more.
When I went out to the parade ring, he and Jossie were waiting, while a lad led the noble Notebook round and round, now wearing my saddle over a number cloth. Number thirteen. So who was superstitious?
‘He bucks a bit,’ said the travelling head lad, with satisfaction.
‘When you get home,’ Jossie said to him, ‘please tell my father I’m stopping on the way back for dinner with Roland. So that he doesn’t worry about car crashes.’
‘Right.’
‘Dad fusses,’ Jossie said.
The travelling head lad gave me another look which needed no words, and which speculated on whether I would get her into bed. I wasn’t so sure that I cared all that much for the travelling head lad.
A good many people had already gone home, and from the parade ring one could see a steady drift to the gate. There were few things as disheartening, I thought, as playing to a vanishing audience. On the other hand, if one made a frightful mess, the fewer who saw it, the better.
‘They said “jockeys get mounted” half an hour ago,’ Jossie said.
‘Two seconds,’ I said. ‘I was listening.’
The travelling head lad gave me a leg up. Notebook gave a trial buck.
‘Stay out of trouble,’ Jossie said.
‘It’s underneath me,’ I said, feeling the noble animal again try to shoot me off.
She grinned unfeelingly. Notebook bounced away, hiccupped sideways down to the start, and then kept everyone waiting while he did a circus act on his hind legs. ‘Bucks a bit’, I thought bitterly. I’d fall off before the tapes went up, if I wasn’t careful.
The race started, and Notebook magnanimously decided to take part, setting off at an uncoordinated gallop which involved a good deal of head-shaking and yawing from side to side. His approach to the first hurdle induced severe loss of confidence in his rider, as he seemed to be trying to jump it sideways, like a crab.
As I hadn’t taken the precaution of dropping him out firmly at the back, always supposing I could actually have managed it, as he was as strong as he was wilful, his diagonal crossing of the flight of hurdles harvested a barrage of curses from the other jockeys. ‘Sorry’ was a useless word in a hurdle race, particularly from an unfit amateur who should have known better than to be led astray by a pretty girl. I yanked Notebook’s head straight at the next hurdle with a force which would have had the Cruelty to Animals people swooning. He retaliated by screwing his hindquarters sideways in mid-air and landing on all four feet at once, pointing east-north-east to the rails.
This manoeuvre at least dropped him out into last place, which he tried to put right by running away with me up the stretch in front of the stands. As we fought each other on the way outwards round the mile-and-half circuit I understood the full meaning of the trainer’s orders to his jockey. ‘Stay on, and stay out of trouble.’ My God.
I was not in the least surprised that Notebook had finished last of twenty-six at Newbury. He would have been last of a hundred and twenty-six, if his jockey had had any sense. Last place on Notebook was not exactly safe, but if one had to be anywhere on him, last place was wisest. No one, however, had got the message through to the horse.