Rat Race (13 page)

‘Can’t stand that fellow Fossel…’

‘Why do you ride for him then?’

‘Got no choice, have I? Small matter of a retainer…’

‘… What chance you got on Candlestick?’

‘Wouldn’t finish in the first three if it started now…’

‘Hey,’ said Kenny Bayst, leaning forward and tapping me on the shoulder. ‘Got something that might interest you, sport.’ He pulled a sheet of paper out of his trouser pocket. ‘How about this, then?’

I took the paper and looked at it. It was a leaflet, high quality printing on good glossy paper. An invitation to all racegoers to join the Racegoers’ Accident Fund.

‘I’m not a racegoer,’ I said.

‘No, read it. Go on,’ he urged. ‘It came in the post this morning. I thought you’d be interested, so I brought it.’

I read down the page. ‘Up to one thousand pounds for serious personal injury, five thousand pounds for accidental death. Premium five pounds. Double the premium double the insurance. The insurance everyone can afford. Stable lads, buy
security for your missus. Jockeys: out of work but in the money. Race crowds, protect yourself against road accidents on the way home. Trainers who fly to meetings, protect yourself against bombs!’

‘Damn it,’ I said.

Kenny laughed. ‘I thought you’d like it.’

I handed the leaflet back, smiling. ‘Yeah. The so-and-sos.’

‘Might not be a bad idea, at that.’

Colin’s hired car drove up and decanted the usual spent force. He climbed wearily into his seat, clipped shut his belt, and said ‘Wake me at Cambridge.’

‘How did it go?’ Kenny asked.

‘Got that sod Export home by a whisker… But as for Uptight,’ he yawned, “They might as well send him to the knackers. Got the slows right and proper, that one has.’

We woke him at Cambridge. It was a case of waking most of them, in point of fact. They stretched their way onto the tarmac, shirt necks open, ties hanging loose, jackets on their arms. Colin had no jacket, no tie: for him, the customary jeans, the rumpled sweat shirt, the air of being nobody, of being one in a crowd, instead of a crowd in one.

Nancy and Midge had come in the Aston Martin to pick us up.

‘We brought a picnic,’ Nancy said, ‘as it’s such a super evening. We’re going to that place by the river.’

They had also brought swimming trunks for Colin and a pair of his for me. Nancy swam with us, but Midge said it was too cold. She sat on the bank wearing four watches on her left arm and stretching her long bare legs in the sun.

It was cool and quiet and peaceful in the river after the hot sticky day. The noise inside my head of engine throb calmed to silence. I watched a moorhen gliding along by the reeds, twisting her neck cautiously to fasten me with a shiny eye, peering suspiciously at Colin and Nancy floating away ahead. I pushed a ripple towards her with my arm. She rode on it like a cork. Simple being a moorhen, I thought. But it wasn’t
really. All of nature had its pecking order. Everywhere, someone was the pecked.

Nancy and Colin swam back. Friendly eyes, smiling faces. Don’t get involved, I thought. Not with anyone. Not yet.

The girls had brought cold chicken and long crisp cos lettuce leaves with a tangy sauce to dip them in. We ate while the sun went down, and drank a cold bottle of Chablis, sitting on a large blue rug and throwing the chewed bones into the river for the fishes to nibble.

When she had finished Midge lay back on the rug and shielded her eyes from the last slanting rays.

‘I wish this could go on for ever,’ she said casually. ‘The summer, I mean. Warm evenings. We get so few of them.’

‘We could go and live in the south of France, if you like,’ Nancy said.

‘Don’t be silly… Who would look after Colin?’

They smiled, all three of them. The unspoken things were all there. Tragic. Unimportant.

The slow dusk drained all colours into shades of grey. We lazed there, relaxing, chewing stalks of grass, watching the insects flick over the surface of the water, talking a little in soft summer evening murmuring voices.

‘We both lost a stone in Japan, that year we went with Colin…’

‘That was the food more than the heat.’

‘I never did get to like the food…’

‘Have you ever been to Japan, Matt?’

‘Used to fly there for B.O.A.C.’

‘B.O.A.C.?’ Colin was surprised. ‘Why ever did you leave?’

‘Left to please my wife. Long time ago, now, though.’

‘Explains how you fly.’

‘Oh sure…’

‘I like America better,’ Midge said. ‘Do you remember Mr Kroop in Laurel, where you got those riding boots made in a day?’

‘Mm…’

‘And we kept driving round that shopping centre there and getting lost in the one way streets…’

‘Super that week was…’

‘Wish we could go again…’

There was a long regretful silence. Nancy sat up with a jerk and slapped her leg.

‘Bloody mosquitoes.’

Colin scratched lazily and nodded. ‘Time to go home.’

We wedged back into the Aston Martin. Colin drove. The twins sat on my legs, leaned on my chest and twined their arms behind my neck for balance. Not bad, not bad at all. They laughed at my expression.

‘Too much of a good thing,’ Nancy said.

When we went to bed they both kissed me goodnight, with identical soft lips, on the cheek.

Breakfast was brisk, businesslike, and accompanied throughout by telephone calls. Annie Villars rang to ask if there was still a spare seat on the Cherokee.

‘Who for?’ Colin asked cautiously. He made a face at us. ‘Bloody Fenella,’ he whispered over the mouthpiece. ‘No, Annie, I’m terribly sorry, I’ve promised Nancy…’

‘You have?’ Nancy said. ‘First I’ve heard of it.’

He put the receiver down. ‘I rescue you from Chanter, now it’s your turn.’

‘Rescue my foot. You’re in and out of the weighing room all day. Fat lot of good that is.’

‘Do you want to come?’

‘Take Midge,’ she said. ‘It’s her turn.’

‘No, you go,’ Midge said. ‘Honestly, I find it tiring. Especially as it’s one of those rush from course to course days. I’ll go along to the meeting here next week. That will do me fine.’

‘Will you be all right?’

‘Naturally I will. I’ll lie in the sun in the garden and think of you all exhausting yourselves racing round in circles.’

When it turned out that there were two other empty seats as well, in spite of Nancy being there, Annie Villars gave Colin a
reproachful look of carefully repressed annoyance and said it would have been useful to have had along Fenella to share the cost. Why else did Colin think she had suggested it?

‘I must have miscounted,’ said Colin happily. ‘Too late to get her now.’

We flew to Bath without incident, Nancy sitting in the right-hand seat beside me and acting as co-pilot. It was clear that she intensely enjoyed it, and there was no pain in it for me either. I could see what Larry had meant about practising short landings, as the Bath runways were incredibly short, but we got down in fair order and parked alongside the opposition’s Cessna.

Colin said ‘Lock the aeroplane and come into the races. You can’t forever stand on guard.’

The Polyplane pilot was nowhere to be seen. I hoped for the best, locked up, and walked with the others into the racecourse next door.

The first person we saw was Acey Jones, balancing on his crutches with the sun making his pale head look fairer than ever.

‘Oh yes. Colin,’ Nancy said. ‘Do you want me to send a fiver to the Accident Insurance people? You remember, the leaflet which came yesterday? That man reminded me… he got a thousand pounds from the fund for cracking his ankle. I heard him say so, at Haydock.’

‘If you like,’ he agreed. ‘A fiver won’t break the bank. May as well.’

‘Bobbie Wessex is sponsoring it,’ Annie commented.

‘Yes,’ Nancy nodded. ‘It was on the leaflet.’

‘Did you see the bit about the bombs?’ I asked.

Annie and Nancy both laughed. ‘Someone in insurance has got a sense of humour, after all.’

Annie hustled off to the weighing room to see her runner in the first race, and Colin followed her, to change.

‘Lemonade?’ I suggested to Nancy.

‘Pints of it. Whew, it’s hot.’

We drank it in a patch of shade, out on the grass. Ten yards
away, loud and clear, Eric Goldenberg was conducting a row with Kenny Bayst.

‘… And don’t you think, sport, that you can set your guerrillas on me and expect me to do you favours afterwards, because if you think that you’ve got another think coming.’

‘What guerrillas?’ Goldenberg demanded, not very convincingly.

‘Oh come off it. Set them to cripple me. At Redcar.’

‘Must have been those bookmakers you swindled while you were busy double crossing us.’

‘I never double crossed you.’

‘Don’t give me that crap,’ Goldenberg said heavily. ‘You know bloody well you did. You twisty little bastard.’

‘If you think that, why the frigging hell are you asking me to set up another touch for you now?’

‘Bygones are bygones.’

‘Bygones bloody aren’t.’ Kenny spat on the ground at Goldenberg’s feet and removed himself to the weighing room. Goldenberg watched him go with narrowed eyes and a venomous twist to his mouth. The next time I saw him he was holding a well-filled glass and adding substantially to his paunch, while muttering belligerently to a pasty slob who housed all his brains in his biceps. The slob wasn’t one of the two who had lammed into Kenny at Redcar. I wondered if Goldenberg intended mustering reinforcements.

‘What do you think of Kenny Bayst?’ I asked Nancy.

‘The big little Mister I-Am from Down Under,’ she said. ‘He’s better than he used to be, though. He came over here thinking everyone owed him a living, as he’d had a great big successful apprenticeship back home.’

‘Would he lose to order?’

‘I expect so.’

‘Would he agree to lose to order, take the money, back himself, and try to win?’

She grinned. ‘You’re learning fast.’

We watched Colin win the first race. Annie Villars’ horse
finished third from last. She stood glumly looking at its heaving sides while Kenny’s successor made the best of explaining away his own poor showing.

‘Annie should have kept Kenny Bayst,’ Nancy said.

‘He wanted out.’

‘Like Colin doesn’t want in,’ she nodded. ‘Annie’s being a bit of a fool this season.’

Before the third race we went back to the aeroplane. The Polyplane pilot was standing beside it, peering in through the windows. He was not the stand off merchant from Redcar, but his colleague from Haydock.

‘Good afternoon,’ Nancy said.

‘Good afternoon, Miss Ross.’ He was polite in the way that is more insolent than rudeness. Not the best method, I would have thought, of seducing Colin’s custom back from Derry-downs. He walked away, back to his Cessna, and I went over the Cherokee inch by inch looking for anything wrong. As far as I could see, there was nothing. Nancy and I climbed aboard and I started the engine to warm it up ready to take off.

Colin and Annie arrived in a hurry and loaded themselves in, and we whisked off across southern England to Shoreham. Colin and Annie again jumped into a waiting taxi and vanished. Nancy stayed with me and the Cherokee, and we sat on the warm grass and watched little aeroplanes landing and taking off, and talked now and then without pressure about flying, racing, life in general.

Towards the end of the afternoon she asked ‘Will you go on being a taxi pilot all your life?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t look far ahead any more.’

‘Nor do I,’ she said.

‘No.’

‘We’ve been happy, these last few weeks, with Midge being so much better. I wish it would last.’

‘You’ll remember it.’

‘That’s not the same.’

‘It’s only special because of what’s coming,’ I said.

There was a long pause while she thought about it. At length she asked, disbelievingly, ‘Do you mean that it is because Midge is dying that we are so happy now?’

‘Something like that.’

She turned her head; considered me. ‘Tell me something else. I need something else.’

‘Comfort?’

‘If you like.’

I said ‘You’ve all three been through the classic progression, these last two years. All together, not just Midge herself. Shock, disbelief, anger and in the end acceptance…’ I paused. ‘You’ve come through the dark tunnel. You’re out in the sun the other end. You’ve done most of your grieving already. You are a most extraordinarily strong family. You’ll remember this summer because it will be something worth remembering.’

‘Matt…’

There were tears in her eyes. I watched the bright little dragonfly aeroplanes dart and go. They could heal me, the Ross family, I thought. Their strength could heal me. If it would take nothing away from them. If I could be sure.

‘What was Colin’s wife like?’ I asked, after a while.

‘Oh…’ She gave a laugh which was half a sniff. ‘A bit too much like Fenella. He was younger then. He didn’t know how to duck. She was thirty-three and bossy and rich, and he was twenty and madly impressed by her. To be honest, Midge and I thought she was fabulous too. We were seventeen and still wet behind the ears. She thought it would be marvellous being married to a genius, all accolades and champagne and glamour. She didn’t like it when it turned out to be mostly hard work and starvation and exhaustion… so she left him for a young actor who’d just had rave notices for his first film, and it took Colin months to get back to being himself from the wreck she’d made of him.’

‘Poor Colin.’ Or lucky Colin. Strong Colin. Months… it was taking me years.

‘Yeah…’ She grinned. ‘He got over it. He’s got some
bird now in London. He slides down to see her every so often when he thinks Midge and I aren’t noticing.’

‘I must get me a bird,’ I said idly. ‘One of these days.’

‘You haven’t got one?’

I shook my head. I looked at her. Straight eyebrows, straight eyes, sensible mouth. She looked back. I wanted to kiss her. I didn’t think she would be angry.

‘No,’ I said absentmindedly. ‘No bird.’

Take nothing away from them. Nothing from Midge.

‘I’ll wait a while longer,’ I said.