Longshot (31 page)

“You know how to pierce,” I said, wincing.

She began to say something else but never completed it. Instead our heads turned in unison towards the dancers, among whom battle seemed already to have started. There was a crash and a scream and bizarrely against the unrelentingly cheerful music two figures could be seen fighting.

Sam ... and Nolan.

Sam had blood on his white jacket and down the white ruffles. Nolan’s shirt was ripped open, showing a lot of hairy chest. They were both reeling about exchanging swinging blows not ten feet from table six and I stood up automatically, more in defense than interference.

Perkin tried to pull them apart and got smartly knocked down by Nolan, quick and tough with his fists as with his riding. I stepped without thinking onto the polished square and tried words instead.

“You stupid fools,” I said: not the most inventive sentence ever.

Nolan took his attention off Sam for a split second, lashed out expertly at my face and whirled back to his prime target in time to parry Sam’s wildly lunging arm and kick him purposefully between the legs. Sam’s head came forward. Nolan’s fist began a descent onto the back of Sam’s vulnerable neck.

With instinct more than thought I barged into Nolan bodily, pushing him off line. He turned a face of mean-eyed fury in my direction and easily transferred his hatred.

I was vaguely aware that the dance floor had cleared like morning mist and also acutely conscious that Nolan knew volumes more about bare-knuckle fisticuffs than I did.

Racing people were extraordinary, I thought. Far from piling into Nolan in a preventive heap, they formed an instant ring around us and, as the band came to a straggling sharp-flat unscheduled halt, Lewis’s drunken aristocratic voice could be heard drawling, “Five to four the field.”

Everyone laughed. Everyone except Nolan. I doubted if he’d heard. He was high on the flooding wave from the bursting dam of his dark nature, all the anxiety, guilt, hate and repressions sweeping out in a reckless torrent, no longer containable.

In a straight fight I wasn’t going to beat him. All I would be was a punchbag for his escaping fury, the entity he saw as a new unbearable threat to his dominance in Tremayne’s stable; the interloper, usurper, legitimate target.

I turned my back on him and took a step or two away. All I knew about fighting was ruse and trickery. I could see from the onlooking faces that he was coming for me, and at what speed, and when I felt the air behind me move and heard the brush of his clothes I went down fast on one knee and whirled and punched upward hard into the bottom of his advancing rib cage and then shifted my weight into his body and upward so as to lift him wholesale off the floor, and before he’d got that sorted out I had one of his wrists in my hand and he ended up on his feet with me behind him, his arm in a nice painful lock and my mouth by his ear.

“You stupid shit,” I said intensely. “The Jockey Club are here. Don’t you care about your permit?”

For answer he kicked back and caught me on a shin.

“Then I’ll ride all your horses,” I said unwisely.

I gave him a hard releasing shove in the general direction of Sam, Perkin and an openmouthed Gareth and at last watched a dozen restraining hands clutch and keep him from destroying himself entirely, but he struggled against them and turned his vindictive face my way and shouted in still exploding rage,
“I’ll kill you.”

I stood unmoving and listened to those words, and thought of Harry.

I
apologized to Tremayne.

“Nolan started it,” Mackie said.

She peered anxiously at the reddening bruise on Perkin’s cheek, a twin to one on mine.

Perkin sat in angry confusion at table six while the racing crowd, entertaining skirmish over, drifted away and got the band restarted.

Nolan was nowhere in sight. Sam took off his stained jacket, wiped his bloody nose, sucked his knuckles and began making jokes as a form of released tension.

“I bumped into him, that’s all I did,” he proclaimed with tragicomic gestures. “Well, say I then took Fiona off him and maybe I told him to go find himself another filly and the next thing was he got a pincer hold on my ear and was bopping me one on the nose and there I was bleeding fit to fill the Frenchy furrows so naturally I gave him one back.”

He collected an appreciative audience which definitely didn’t include Tremayne. The shambles at the end of his splendid evening was aggravating him sorely and he propelled Fiona into a seat at the table with some of the disgruntled force he’d shown in Ronnie Curzon’s office.

Fiona said anxiously, “But, Tremayne, Sam meant it as a joke.”

“He should have had more sense.” Tremayne’s voice was rough. Gareth, next to Perkin, looked at his father with apprehension, knowing the portents.

“Nolan’s been through a lot,” Fiona said excusingly.

“Nolan’s a violent man,” Tremayne stated with fierce irritation. “You don’t go poking a stick at a rattlesnake if you don’t want to get bitten.”

“Tremayne!” She was alarmed at his brusqueness, which he immediately softened.

“My dear girl, I know he’s your cousin. I know he’s been through a lot, I know you’re fond of him, but he and Sam shouldn’t be in the same room together just now.” He looked from her to me. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“John was splendid!” Mackie exclaimed, and Perkin scowled.

Erica grinned at me like a witch, saying, “You’re much too physical for the literati.”

“Let’s go home,” Tremayne said abruptly. He stood, kissed Fiona, picked up the box containing his silver bowl and waited for obedience from his sons, his daughter-in-law and his prospective biographer. We stood. We followed him meekly. He made a stately, somewhat forbidding exit, his displeasure plainly visible to all around, his mien daring unkind souls to snigger.

No one did. Tremayne was held in genuine respect and I saw more sympathy than smirks: yet he in many respects was the stoker of the ill-feeling between his warring jockeys, and putting me among them wasn’t a recipe for a cease-fire.

“Perhaps I’d better not ride schooling in the morning,” I suggested, as we reached the gate to the car park.

“Are you scared?” he demanded, stopping dead.

I stopped beside him as the other three went on ahead.

“Nolan and Sam don’t like it, that’s all,” I said.

“You bloody well ride. I’ll get you that permit. I’ll tame Nolan by threats. Understand?”

I nodded.

He stared at me intently. “Is that why Nolan said he would kill you? Besides your making a public fool of him?”

“I think so.”

“Do you want to ride in a race or two, or don’t you?”

“I do.”

“School Fringe tomorrow, then. And as for now, you’d better go back with Fiona. Make sure she gets home safe. Harry won’t want Nolan pestering her and he’s quite capable of it.”

“Right.”

He nodded strongly and went on towards his Volvo, and I returned to find Fiona arguing with Nolan in the entrance hall. She and Erica beside her saw me with relief, Nolan with fresh fury.

“I was afraid you’d gone,” Fiona said.

“Thank Tremayne.”

Nolan said angrily, “Why is this bag of slime always hanging about?”

He made no move, though, to attack me.

“Harry asked him to see me home,” Fiona said placatingly. “Get some rest, Nolan, or you won’t be fit for Groundsel tomorrow.”

He heard, as I did, the faint threat in the cousinly concern, and at least it gave him an excuse for a face-saving exit. Fiona watched his retreating back with a regret neither Erica nor I shared.

 

 

I RODE DRIFTER with the first lot in the morning and crashed off onto the wood chippings halfway up the gallop.

Tremayne showed a modicum of anxiety but no sympathy, and the anxiety was for the horse. He sent a lad after it to try to catch it and with disgust watched me limp towards him rubbing a bruised thigh.

“Concentrate,” he said. “What the hell do you think you were doing?”

“He swerved.”

“You weren’t keeping him straight. Don’t make excuses, you weren’t concentrating.”

The lad caught Drifter and brought him to join us. “Get up,” Tremayne said to me testily.

I wriggled back into the saddle. I supposed he was right about not concentrating: a touch of the morning afters.

They’d all gone to bed the night before when I’d returned from a last noggin with Harry. I’d walked up from the village under a brilliantly starry sky, breathing cold shafts of early-morning air, thinking of murder. Sleep had come slowly with anxiety dreams. I felt unsettled, not refreshed.

I rode Drifter back with the rest of the string and went into breakfast half expecting to be told I wouldn’t be allowed to ride Fringe. Tremayne’s own mood appeared to be a deepening depression over the evening’s finale, and I was sorry because he deserved to look back with enjoyment.

He was reading a newspaper when I went in, and scowling heavily.

“How did they get hold of this so damned fast?”

“What?”

“This.” He pushed the opened paper violently across the table and I read that a brace of brawling jockeys had climaxed the prestigious award dinner with a bloody punch-up. Ex-champion Yaeger and amateur champion Nolan Everard (recently convicted of manslaughter) had been restrained by friends. Tremayne Vickers had said “no comment.” The sponsor was furious. The Jockey Club were “looking into it.” End of story.

“It’s rubbish,” Tremayne snorted. “I never said ‘no comment.’ No one asked me for any comment. The sponsor had left by the time it happened, so how can he be furious? So had the Jockey Club members. They went after the speeches. I talked to some of them as they were leaving. They congratulated me. Huh!”

“The fuss will die down,” I assured him.

“Makes me look a bloody fool.”

“Make a joke of it,” I suggested.

He stared. “I don’t feel like joking.”

“No one does.”

“It’s this business about Harry, isn’t it? Upsets everyone. Bloody Angela Brickell.”

I made the toast.

He said, “Are you fit enough to ride Fringe?”

“If you’ll let me.”

He studied me, some of his ill-feeling fading. “Concentrate, then.”

“Yes.”

“Look,” he said a touch awkwardly, “I don’t mean to take my bad temper out on you. If you hadn’t been here we’d all be in a far worse pickle. Best thing I ever did, getting you to come.”

In surprise I searched for words to thank him but was forestalled by the telephone ringing. Tremayne picked up the receiver and grunted “Hullo?”, not all his vexation yet dissipated.

His face changed miraculously to a smile. “Hello, Ronnie. Calling to find out how the book’s going? Your boy’s been working on it. What? Yes, he’s here. Hold on.” He passed me the receiver, saying unnecessarily, “It’s Ronnie Curzon.”

“Hello, Ronnie,” I said.

“How’s it going?”

“I’m riding a good deal.”

“Keep your mind on the pages. I’ve got news for you.”

“Good or bad?”

“My colleague in America phoned yesterday evening about your book.”

“Oh.” I felt apprehensive. “What did he say?”

“He says he likes Long Way Home very much indeed. He will gladly take it on, and he is certain he can place it with a good publisher.”

“Ronnie!” I swallowed, unable to get my breath. “Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. I always told you it was all right. Your English publisher is very enthusiastic. She told my American colleague the book is fine and he agrees. What more do you want?”

“Oh . . .”

“Come down from the ceiling. A first novel by an unknown British writer isn’t going to be given a huge advance.” He mentioned a sum which would pay my rent until I’d finished the helium balloon and leave some over for sandwiches. “If the book takes off like they hope it will, you’ll get royalties.” He paused. “Are you still there?”

“Sort of.”

He laughed. “It’s all beginning. I have faith in you.”

Ridiculously, I felt like crying. Blinked a few times instead and told him in a croaky voice that I’d met Erica Upton twice and had sat next to her at dinner.

“She’ll destroy you!” he said, horrified.

“I don’t think so. She wants a copy of the book when it’s published.”

“She’ll tear it apart. She likes making mincemeat of new writers.” He sounded despairing. “She does hatchet jobs, not reviews.”

“I’ll have to risk it.”

“Let me talk to Tremayne.”

“OK, and, Ronnie ... thanks.”

“Yes, yes . . .”

I handed back the receiver and heard Ronnie being agitated on the other end.

“Hold on,” Tremayne said, “she likes him.”

I distinctly heard Ronnie’s disbelieving
“What?”

“Also she’s very fond of her nephew, Harry, and on Wednesday John saved Harry’s life. I grant you she may write him a critical review, but she won’t demolish him.” Tremayne listened a bit and talked a bit and then gave me the receiver again.

“All right,” Ronnie said more calmly, “any chance you get, save her life too.”

I laughed, and with a sigh he disconnected.

“What happened?” Tremayne asked. “What did he tell you?”

“I’m going to be published in America. Well ... probably.”

“Congratulations.” He beamed, pleased for me, his glooms lifting. “But that won’t change things, will it? I mean here, between us. You will still write my book, won’t you?”

I saw his anxiety begin to surface and promptly allayed it.

“I will write it. I’ll do the very best I can and just hope it does you justice. And will you excuse me if I run and jump and do handsprings? I’m bursting ... Ronnie said it’s all beginning. I don’t know that I can bear it.” I looked at him. “Did you feel like this when Top Spin Lob won the National?”