I didn’t give a damn that everyone would say (and did say) that if the favourite and second favourite hadn’t fallen, I wouldn’t have had a chance. I didn’t care a fig that it would go down in history as a ‘bad’ Gold Cup. I lived through such a peak of ecstasy on the lengthy walk round from the winning post to the unsaddling enclosure that nothing after, I thought, could ever match it.
It was impossible... and it had happened. Mrs Longerman’s accountant had brought her a tax-free capital gain.
A misty hour later, changed into street clothes, with champagne flowing in the weighing room and all the hands I’d ever want slapping me on the shoulder, I was still so wildly happy that I wanted to run up the walls and laugh aloud and turn hand-springs. Speeches, presentations, Moira Longerman’s excited tears, Binny’s incredulous embarrassment, all had passed in a jumble which I would sort out later. I was high on the sort of glory wave which would put poppies out of business.
Into this ball of a day came a man in a St John’s Ambulance uniform, asking for me.
‘You Roland Britten?’ he said.
I nodded over a glass of bubbles.
‘There’s a jockey wanting you. In the ambulance. Says he won’t go off to hospital before he’s talked to you. Proper fussed, he is. So would you come?’
‘Who is it?’ I asked, putting my drink down.
‘Budley. Fell in the last race.’
‘Is he badly hurt?’
We walked out of the weighing room and across the crowded stretch of tarmac towards the ambulance which stood waiting just outside the gates. It was five minutes before the time for the last race of the day, and thousands were scurrying about, making for the stands, hurrying to put on the last bet of the meeting. The ambulance man and I walked in the counter-current of those making for the car-park before the greater rush began.
‘Broken leg,’ said the ambulance man.
‘What rotten luck.’
I couldn’t imagine what Bobby Budley wanted me for. There had been nothing wrong with his last annual accounts and we’d had them agreed by the Inspector of Taxes. He shouldn’t have had any urgent problems.
We reached the back doors of the white ambulance, and the St John’s man opened them.
‘He’s inside,’ he said.
Not one of the big ambulances, I thought, stepping up. More like a white van, with not quite enough headroom to stand upright. They were short of regular ambulances, I supposed, on race days.
Inside there was a stretcher, with a figure on it under a blanket. I went a step towards it, head bent under the low roof.
‘Bobby?’ I said.
It wasn’t Bobby. It was someone I’d never seen before. Young, agile, and in no way hurt. He sprang upwards off the stretcher shedding dark grey blanket like a cloud.
I turned to retreat. Found the ambulance man up beside me, inside the van. Behind him the doors were already shut. His expression was far from gentle and when I tried to push him out of the way he kicked my shin.
I turned again. The stretcher case was ripping open a plastic bag which seemed to contain a hand-sized wad of damp cotton wool. The ambulance man caught hold of one of my arms and the stretcher case the other, and despite fairly desperate heavings and struggles on my part they managed between them to hold the damp cotton wool over my nose and mouth.
It’s difficult to fight effectively when you can’t stand up straight and every breath you draw is pure ether. The last thing I saw in a greying world was the ambulance man’s peaked cap falling off. His light brown hair tumbled out loose into a shaggy mop and turned him from an angel of mercy into a straightforward villain.
I had left racecourses once or twice before on a stretcher, but never fast asleep.
Awake in the noisy dark I could make no sense of it.
Why should they take me? Did it have anything to do with winning the Gold Cup? And if so, what?
It seemed to me that I had grown still colder, and still sicker, and that the peripheral noises of creaks and rushing sounds had grown louder. There was also now an uncoordinated feeling of movement: yet I was not in a lorry.
Where, then? In an aeroplane?
The sickness suddenly identified itself into being not the aftermath of ether, as I’d vaguely thought, but a familiar malaise I’d suffered on and off from childhood.
I was seasick.
On a boat.
3
I was lying, I realised, on a bunk. The tight net across the open side on my right was to prevent me from falling off. The rushing noises were from the waves washing against the hull. The creaks and rattles were the result of a solid body being pushed by an engine through the resistance of water.
To have made at least some sense of my surroundings was an enormous relief. I could relate myself to space again, and visualise my condition. On the other hand, sorting out the most disorientating part of the mystery left me feeling more acutely the physical discomforts. Cold. Hands tied to legs. Muscles stiff from immobility: and knowing I was on a boat, and knowing boats always made me sick, was definitely making me feel a lot sicker.
Ignorance was a great tranquilliser, I thought. The intensity of a pain depended on the amount of attention one gave it, and one never felt half as bad talking to people in daylight as alone in the dark. If someone would come and talk to me I might feel less cold and less miserable and less quite horribly sick.
No one came for a century or so.
The motion of the boat increased, and my queasiness with it. I could feel my weight rolling slightly from side to side, and had an all too distinct impression that I was also pitching lengthwise, first toe down, then head down, as the bows lifted and fell with the waves.
Out at sea, I thought helplessly. It wouldn’t be so rough on a river.
I tried for a while with witticisms like ‘Press-ganged, by God’, and ‘Shanghaied!’ and ‘Jim lad, Long John Silver’s got you’, to put a twist of lightness into the situation. Not a deafening success.
In time also I gave up trying to work out why I was there. I gave up feeling apprehensive. I gave up feeling cold and uncomfortable. Finally I was concentrating only on not actually vomiting, and the fact that I’d eaten nothing since breakfast was all that helped.
Breakfast...? I had lost all idea of time. I didn’t know how long I’d been unconscious, or even how long I’d lain awake in the dark. Unconscious long enough to be shipped from Cheltenham to the coast, and to be carried on board. Awake long enough to long for sleep.
The engine stopped.
The sudden quiet was so marvellous that I only fully realised then how exhausting had been the assault of noise. I actively feared that it would start again. And was this, I wondered, the basis of brainwashing?
There was a new noise, suddenly, from overhead. Dragging sounds, and then metallic sounds, and then, devastatingly, a shaft of daylight.
I shut my dark-adjusted eyes, wincing, and opened them again slowly. Above my head the shaft had grown to a square. Someone had opened a hatch.
Fresh air blew in like a shower, cold and damp. Without much enthusiasm I glanced around, seeing a small world through a wide meshed white net.
I was in what one might call the sharp end. In the bows. The bunk where I lay grew narrower at my feet, the side walls of the cabin angling to meet in the centre, like an arrowhead.
The bunk was about two feet wide, and had another bunk above it. I was lying on a cloth-covered mattress; navy blue.
Most of the rest of the cabin was taken up by two large open-topped built-in varnished wooden bins. For stowing sails, I thought. I was in the sail locker of a sailing boat.