The circuit at Towcester went out downhill from the stands, flattened into a straight stretch on the far side, and ended with a stamina-sapping uphill pull to the finishing straight and the winning post. Some of the world’s slowest finishes had been slogged out there on muddy days at the end of three mile ’chases. Notebook however set off downhill on firm going at a graceless rush, roller-coastered over the most distant hurdles, and only began to lose interest when he hit the sharply rising ground on the way back.
By that time the nineteen other runners were ahead as of right, as Notebook’s stop-go and sideways type of jumping lost at every flight the lengths he made up on the flat.
I suppose I relaxed a little. He met the next hurdle all wrong, ignored my bid to help him, screwed wildly in mid-air, and landed with his nose on the turf and all four feet close together behind it. Not radically different from six other landings, just more extreme.
Being catapulted off at approximately thirty miles an hour is a kaleidoscopic business. Sky, trees, rails and grass somersaulted around my vision in a disjointed jumble, and if I tucked my head in it was from instinct, not thought. The turf smacked me sharply in several places, and Notebook delivered a parting kick on the thigh. The world stopped rolling, and half a ton of horse had not come crashing down on top of me. Life would go on.
I sat up slowly, all breath knocked out, and watched the noble hindquarters charge heedlessly away.
An ambulance man ran towards me, in the familiar black St. John’s uniform. I felt a flood of panic. A conditioned reflex. He had a kind face: a total stranger.
‘All right, mate?’ he said.
I nodded weakly.
‘You came a proper purler.’
‘Mm.’ I unclipped my helmet, and pulled it off. Speech was impossible. My chest heaved from lack of air. He put a hand under one of my armpits and helped me as far as my knees, and from there, once I could breathe properly, to my feet.
‘Bones O.K.?’
I nodded.
‘Just winded,’ he said cheerfully.
‘Mm.’
A Land Rover arrived beside us with a jerk, and the vet inside it said that as there were no injured horses needing his attention, he could offer me a lift back to the stands.
‘You fell off,’ Jossie observed, as I emerged with normal breath and clean bill of health from the doctor in the First Aid room.
I smiled, ‘Granted.’
She gave me a sideways glance from the huge eyes.
‘I thought all jockeys were frightfully touchy about being told they fell off,’ she said. ‘All that guff about it’s the horse that falls, and the jockey just goes down with the ship.’
‘Quite right,’ I said.
‘But Notebook didn’t actually fall, so you fell off.’ Her voice was lofty, teasing.
‘I don’t dispute it.’
‘No, aren’t you boring.’ She smiled. ‘They caught Notebook in the next parish, so while you change I’ll go along to the stables and see he’s O.K., and I’ll meet you in the car park.’
‘Fine.’
I changed into street clothes, fixed with the valet to take my saddles, helmet, and other gear to Ascot for the following Wednesday, and walked the short distance to the car park.
The crowds had gone, and only the stragglers like me were leaving now in twos and threes. The cars still remaining stood singly, haphazardly scattered instead of in orderly rows.
I looked into the back of mine, behind the front seats.
No one there.
I wondered with a shiver what I would have done if there had been. Run a mile, no doubt. I stood leaning on my car waiting for Jossie, and no one looked in the least like trying to carry me off. A quiet spring-like Saturday evening in the Northamptonshire countryside, as friendly as beer.
10
She followed me in her pale blue Midget to the pub on the south side of Oxford, and chose a long cold drink with fruit on the top and a kick in the tail.
‘Dad has schooled Notebook until he’s blue in the face,’ she said, pursing her lips to the straw which stuck up like a mast from the log-jam of fruit.
‘Some of them never learn,’ I said.
She nodded. Polite transaction achieved, I thought: she had obliquely apologised for the horse’s frightful behaviour, and I had accepted that her father had done his best to teach him to jump. Some trainers, but not those of William Finch’s standing, seemed to think that the best place for a green novice to learn to jump was actually in a race: rather like urging a child up the Eiger without showing him how to climb.
‘What made you become an accountant?’ she said. ‘It’s such a dull sort of job.’
‘Do you think so?’
She gave me the full benefit of the big eyes. ‘You obviously don’t,’ she said. She tilted her head a little, considering. ‘You don’t look boring and stuffy, and you don’t act boring and stuffy, so give.’
‘Judges are sober, nurses are dedicated, miners are heroes, writers drink.’
‘Or in other words, don’t expect people to fit the image?’
‘As you say,’ I said.
She smiled. ‘I’ve known Trevor since I was six.’
A nasty one. Trevor, without any stretch of imagination, could fairly be classed as stuffy and boring.
‘Carry on,’ she said. ‘Why?’
‘Security. Steady employment. Good pay. The usual inducements.’
She looked at me levelly. ‘You’re lying.’
‘What makes you think so?’
‘People who risk their necks for nothing in jump races are not hell-bent on security, steady employment, and money.’
‘Because of me Mum, then,’ I said flippantly.
‘She bossed you into it?’
‘No.’ I hesitated, because in fact I never had told anyone why I’d grown up with a fiery zeal as powerful as a vocation. Jossie waited with quizzical expectation.
‘She had a rotten accountant,’ I said. ‘I promised her that when I grew up I would take over. As corny as that.’
‘And did you?’
‘No. She died.’
‘Sob story.’
‘Yes, I told you. Pure corn.’
She stirred the fruit with her straw, looking less mocking. ‘You’re afraid I’ll laugh at you.’
‘Sure of it,’ I said.
‘Try me, then.’
‘Well... she was a rotten businesswoman, my Mum. My father got killed in a pointless sort of accident, and she was left having to bring me up alone. She was about thirty. I was nine.’ I paused. Jossie was not actually laughing, so I struggled on. ‘She rented a house just off the sea-front at Ryde and ran it as a holiday hotel, half a step up from a boarding house. Comfortable, but no drinks licence; that sort of thing. So she could be there when I got home from school, and in the holidays.’
‘Brave of her,’ Jossie said. ‘Go on.’
‘You can guess.’
She sucked down to the dregs of her glass and made a bubbling noise through the straw. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘She was good at cooking and welcoming people and lousy at working out how much to charge.’
‘She was also paying tax on money she should have claimed as expenses.’
‘And that’s bad?’
‘Crazy.’
‘Well, go on,’ she said encouragingly. ‘Digging a story out of you is worse than looking for mushrooms.’
‘I found her crying sometimes, mostly in the winter when there weren’t any guests. It’s pretty upsetting for a kid of ten or so to find his mother crying, so you can say I was upset. Protective also, probably. Anyway, at first I thought it was still because of losing Dad. Then I realised she always cried when she’d been seeing Mr Jones, who was her accountant. I tried to get her to open up on her troubles, but she said I was too young.’