Nerve Page 18

  ‘Yes.’

  I found sitting in the swaying taxi very uncomfortable. My arms and shoulders ached unceasingly and if I leaned back too heavily the raw bits didn’t like it. After a while I gave it up, and finished the journey sitting on the floor with my head and my hands in Joanna’s lap.

  I was of course quite used to being knocked about. I followed, after all, an occupation in which physical damage was a fairly frequent though unimportant factor; and, especially during my first season, when I was a less efficient jockey and most of the horses I rode were the worst to be had, there was rarely a time when some area of my body was not black and blue. I had broken several of the smaller bones, been kicked in tender places, and dislocated one or two joints. On my general sense of well-being, and on my optimism that I wouldn’t crash un-mendably, none of these things had made the slightest dent. It seemed that in common with most other jockeys I had been born with the sort of resilient constitution which could take a bang and be ready for business, if not the following day, at least a good deal quicker than the medical profession considered normal.

  Practice had given me a certain routine for dealing with discomfort, which was mainly to ignore it and concentrate on something else: but this system was not operating very well that evening. It didn’t work, for instance, when I sat for a while in a light armchair in Joanna’s warm room with my elbows on my knees, watching my fingers gradually change colour from yellowy white to smudgy charcoal, to patchy purple, and finally to red.

  It began as a tingle, faint and welcome, soon after we had got back and Joanna had turned both her powerful heaters on. She had insisted at once on removing my clammy trousers and also my pants, and on my donning her black trews, which were warm but not long enough by several inches. It was odd, in a way, letting her undress me, which she did matter-of-factly and without remark; but in another way it seemed completely natural, a throwback to our childhood, when we had been bathed together on our visits to each other’s houses.

  She dug out some rather powdery-looking aspirins in a bottle. There were only three of them left, which I swallowed. Then she made some black coffee and held it for me to drink. It was stiff with brandy.

  ‘Warming,’ she said laconically. ‘Anyway, you’ve stopped shivering at last.’

  It was then that my fingers tingled and I told her.

  ‘Will it be bad?’ she said prosaically, putting down the empty coffee mug.

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘You won’t want me to sit and watch you then,’ she said.

  I shook my head. She took the empty mug into the kitchen and was several minutes coming back with a full one for herself.

  The tingle increased first to a burning sensation and then to a feeling of being squeezed in a vice, tighter and tighter, getting more and more agonising until it felt that at any minute my fingers would disintegrate under the pressure. But there they were, harmlessly hanging in the warm air, with nothing to show for it except that they were turning slowly puce.

  Joanna came back from the kitchen and wiped the sweat off my forehead.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  She nodded, and gave me a faint edition of the intimate smile that had had my heart doing flip-flaps from boyhood, and drank her coffee.

  When the pulse got going, it felt as though my hands had been taken out of the vice, laid on a bench, and were being rhythmically hammered. It was terrible. And it went on too long. My head drooped.

  When I looked up she was standing in front of me, watching me with an expression which I couldn’t read. There were tears in her eyes.

  ‘Is it over?’ she said, blinking to disguise them.

  ‘More or less.’

  We both looked at my hands, which were now a fierce red all over.

  ‘And your feet?’ she asked.

  ‘They’re fine,’ I said. Their awakening had been nothing.

  ‘I’d better wash those grazes on your back,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘In the morning.’

  ‘There’s a lot of dirt in them,’ she protested.

  ‘It’s been there so long already that a few more hours won’t hurt,’ I said. ‘I’ve had four anti-tetanus injections in the last two years, and there’s always penicillin … and I’m too tired.’

  She didn’t argue. She unzipped and helped me take off the anorak, and made me get into her bed, still incongruously dressed in her black trews and blue cardigan and looking like a second-rate ballet dancer with a hangover. The sheets were rumpled from her lying in them before I had woken her up, and there was still a dent in her pillow where her head had been. I put mine there too, with an odd feeling of delight. She saw me grin, and correctly read my mind.

  ‘It’s the first time you’ve got into my bed,’ she said. ‘And it’ll be the last.’

  ‘Have a heart, Joanna,’ I said.

  She perched herself on the edge of the mattress and looked down at me.

  ‘It’s no good for cousins,’ she said.

  ‘And if we weren’t cousins?’

  ‘I don’t know …’ she sighed. ‘But we are.’

  She bent down to kiss me good night on the forehead.

  I couldn’t help it; I put my arms up round her shoulders and pulled her down on to my chest and kissed her properly, mouth to mouth. It was the first time I had ever done it, and into it went all the pent-up and suppressed desire I had ever felt for her. It was too hungry, too passionate, much too desperate. I knew it, but I couldn’t stop it. For a moment she seemed to relax and melt and kiss me back, but it was so brief and passing that I thought I had imagined it, and afterwards her body grew rigid.

  I let her go. She stood up abruptly and stared at me, her face scrubbed of any emotion. No anger, no disgust; and no love. She turned away without speaking and went across the room to the sofa, where she twisted a blanket around herself and lay down. She stretched out her hand to the table light and switched it off.

  Her voice reached me across the dark room, calm, self-controlled. ‘Good night, Rob.’

  ‘Good night, Joanna,’ I said politely.

  There was dead silence.

  I rolled over on to my stomach and put my face in her pillow.

  Thirteen

  I don’t know whether she slept or not during the next four hours. The room was quiet. The time passed slowly.

  The pulse in my hands went on throbbing violently for a while, but who cared? It was comforting, even if it hurt. I thought about all the fat red corpuscles forcing their way through the shunken capillaries like water gushing along dry irrigation ditches after a drought. Very nice. Very life-giving. By tomorrow afternoon, I thought – correction, this afternoon – they might be fit for work. They’d got to be, that was all there was about it.

  Some time after it was light I heard Joanna go into her narrow bathroom-kitchen where she brushed her teeth and made some fresh coffee. The warm roasted smell floated across to me. Saturday morning, I thought. Midwinter Cup day. I didn’t leap out of bed eagerly to greet it; I turned over slowly from my stomach on to one side, shutting my eyes against the stiffness which afflicted every muscle from neck to waist, and the sharp soreness of my back and wrists. I really didn’t feel very well.

  She came across the room with a mug of steaming coffee and put it on the bedside table. Her face was pale and expressionless.

  ‘Coffee,’ she said unnecessarily.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘How do you feel?’ she asked, a little too clinically.

  ‘Alive,’ I said.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Oh, go on,’ I said. ‘Either slosh me one or smile … one or the other. But don’t stand there looking tragic, as if the Albert Hall had burned down on the first night of the Proms.’

  ‘Damn it, Rob,’ she said, her face crinkling into a laugh.

  ‘Truce?’ I asked.

  ‘Truce,’ she agreed, still smiling. She even sat down again on the edge of the
bed. I shoved myself up into a sitting position, wincing somewhat from various aches, and brought a hand out from under the bedclothes to reach for the coffee.

  As a hand it closely resembled a bunch of beef sausages. I produced the other one. It also was swollen. The skin on both felt very tender, and they were still unnaturally red.

  ‘Blast,’ I said. ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘About eight o’clock,’ she said. ‘Why?’

  Eight o’clock. The race was at two-thirty. I began counting backwards. I would have to be at Ascot by at the latest one-thirty, preferably earlier, and the journey down, going by taxi, would take about fifty minutes. Allow an hour for hold-ups. That left me precisely four and a half hours in which to get fit enough to ride, and the way I felt, it was a tall order.

  I began to consider ways and means. There were the Turkish baths, with heat and massage; but I had lost too much skin for that to be an attractive idea. There was a work-out in a gym; a possibility, but rough. There was a canter in the park – a good solution on any day except Saturday, when the Row would be packed with little girls on leading-reins – or better still a gallop on a racehorse at Epsom, but there was neither time to arrange it nor a good excuse to be found for needing it.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Joanna.

  I told her.

  ‘You don’t mean it?’ she said. ‘You aren’t seriously thinking of racing today?’

  ‘I seriously am.’

  ‘You’re not fit to,’ she said.

  ‘That’s the point. That’s what we are discussing, how best to get fit,’ I said.

  ‘That isn’t what I mean,’ she protested. ‘You look ill. You need a long, quiet day in bed.’

  ‘I’ll have it tomorrow,’ I said, ‘today I am riding Template in the Midwinter Cup.’ She began more forcibly to try to dissuade me, so I told her why I was going to ride. I told her everything, all about Kemp-Lore’s anti-jockey obsession and all that had happened on the previous evening before she found me in the telephone box. It took quite a time. I didn’t look at her while I told her about the tack-room episode, because for some reason it embarrassed me to describe it, even to her, and I knew then quite certainly that I was not going to repeat it to anyone else.

  When I had finished she looked at me without speaking for half a minute – thirty solid seconds – and then she cleared her throat and said, ‘Yes, I see. We’d better get you fit, then.’

  I smiled at her.

  ‘What first?’ she said.

  ‘Hot bath and breakfast,’ I said. ‘And can we have the weather forecast on?’ I listened to it every morning, as a matter of routine.

  She switched on the radio, which was busy with some sickening matinee music, and started tidying up the room, folding the blanket she had slept in and shaking the sofa cushions. Before she had finished the music stopped, and we heard the eight-thirty news headlines, followed by the forecast.

  ‘There was a slight frost in many parts of the country last night,’ said the announcer smoothly, ‘and more is expected tonight, especially in exposed areas. Temperatures today will reach five degrees centigrade, forty-one Fahrenheit, in most places, and the north-easterly wind will moderate slightly. It will be bright and sunny in the south. Further outlook: colder weather is expected in the next few days. And here is an announcement. The stewards at Ascot inspected the course at eight o’clock this morning and have issued the following statement. “Two or three degrees of frost were recorded on the racecourse last night, but the ground on both sides of the fences was protected by straw, and unless there is a sudden severe frost during the morning, racing is certain.” ’

  Joanna switched off. She said, ‘Are you absolutely determined to go?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said.

  ‘Well … I’d better tell you … I watched that programme last night on television. Turf Talk.’

  ‘Did you now!’ I said, surprised.

  ‘I sometimes do, since you were on it. If I’m in. Anyway I watched last night.’

  ‘And?’ I prompted.

  ‘He,’ she said, neither of us needing help to know who she meant, ‘he talked about the Midwinter Cup nearly all the time; potted biographies of the horses and trainers, and so on. I was waiting to hear him mention you, but he didn’t. He just went on and on about how superb Template is; not a word about you. But what I thought you’d like to know is that he said that as it was such an important race he personally would be commentating the finish today, and that he personally would also interview the winning jockey afterwards. If only you can win, he’ll have to describe you doing it, which would be a bitter enough pill, and then congratulate you publicly in full view of several million people.’

  I gazed at her, awestruck.

  ‘That’s a great thought,’ I said.

  ‘Like he interviewed you after that race on Boxing Day,’ she added.

  ‘That was the race that sealed my fate with him, I imagine.’ I said. ‘And you seem to have done some fairly extensive viewing, if I may say so.’

  She looked taken aback. ‘Well … didn’t I see you sitting unobtrusively at the back of a concert I gave in Birmingham one night last summer?’

  ‘I thought those lights were supposed to dazzle you,’ I said.

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ she said.

  I pushed back the bedclothes. The black trews looked even more incongruous in the daylight.

  ‘I’d better get going,’ I said. ‘What do you have in the way of disinfectant and bandages, and a razor?’

  ‘Only a few minute bits of Elastoplast,’ she said apologetically, ‘and the razor I de-fuzz my legs with. There’s a chemist two roads away though, who will be open by now. I’ll make a list.’ She wrote it on an old envelope.

  ‘And A.P.C. tablets,’ I said. ‘They are better than just aspirins.’

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘I won’t be long.’

  When she had gone I got out of bed and went into the bathroom. It’s easy enough to say, but it wasn’t all that easy to do, since I felt as if some over-zealous laundress had fed me several times through a mangle. It was exasperating, I thought bitterly, how much havoc Kemp-Lore had worked on my body by such simple means. I turned on the taps, took off the trews and socks, and stepped into the bath. The blue cardigan had stuck to my back and the shirt bandages to my wrists, so I lay down in the hot water without tugging at them and waited for them to soak off.

  Gradually the heat did its customary work of unlocking the worst of the cramps, until I could rotate my shoulders and turn my head from side to side without feeling that I was tearing something adrift. Every few minutes I added more hot water, so that by the time Joanna came back I was up to my throat in it and steaming nicely, warm to the backbone and beyond.

  She had dried my trousers and pants overnight, and she pressed them for me while I eased myself out of the blue cardigan and reluctantly got out of the bath. I put on the trousers and watched her setting out her purchases on the kitchen table, a dark lock of hair falling forward into her eyes and a look of concentration firming her mouth. Quite a girl.

  I sat down at the table and she bathed the grazes with disinfectant, dried them, and covered them with large pieces of lint spread with zinc-and-castor-oil ointment which she stuck on with adhesive tape. She was neat and quick, and her touch was light.

  ‘Most of the dirt came out in the bath luckily,’ she observed, busy with the scissors. ‘You’ve got quite an impressive set of muscles, haven’t you? You must be strong … I didn’t realise.’

  ‘At the moment I’ve got an impressive set of jellies,’ I sighed. ‘Very wobbly, very weak.’ And aching steadily, though there wasn’t any point in saying so.

  She went into the other room, rummaged in a drawer, and came back with another cardigan. Pale green, this time; the colour suited my state of health rather well, I thought.

  ‘I’ll buy you some new ones,’ I said, stretching it across my chest to do up the fancy buttons.

  ‘
Don’t bother,’ she said, ‘I loathe both of them.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, and she laughed.

  I put the anorak on again on top of the jersey and pushed the knitted cuffs up my forearms. Joanna slowly unwound the blood-stained bandages on my wrists. They still stuck a bit in spite of the soaking, and what lay underneath was a pretty disturbing sight, even to me, now that we could see it in daylight.

  ‘I can’t deal with this,’ she said positively. ‘You must go to a doctor.’

  ‘This evening,’ I said. ‘Put some more bandages on, for now.’

  ‘It’s too deep,’ she said. ‘It’s too easy to get it infected. You can’t ride like this, Rob, really you can’t.’

  ‘I can,’ I said. ‘I’ll dunk them in a bowl of Dettol for a while, and then you wrap them up again. Nice and flat, so they won’t show.’

  ‘Don’t they hurt?’ she said.

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Silly question.’ She sighed, and fetched a bowl full of warm water, pouring in Dettol so that it turned a milky white, and I soaked my wrists in it for ten minutes.

  ‘That’s fixed the infection,’ I said. ‘Now … nice and flat.’

  She did as I asked, fastening the ends of the bandages down with little gold safety pins. When she had finished the white cuffs looked tidy and narrow, and I knew they would be unnoticeable under racing colours.

  ‘Perfect,’ I said appreciatively, pulling down the anorak sleeves to cover them. ‘Thank you, Florence.’

  ‘And Nightingale to you, too,’ she said, making a face at me. ‘When are you going to the police?’

  ‘I’m not. I told you,’ I said. ‘I’m not going at all. I meant what I said last night.’

  ‘But why not; why not?’ She didn’t understand. ‘You could get him prosecuted for assault or for causing grievous bodily harm, or whatever the technical term is.’

  I said, ‘I’d rather fight my own battles … and anyway, I can’t face the thought of telling the police what happened last night, or being examined by their doctors, and photographed; or standing up in court, if it came to that, and answering questions about it in public, and having the whole rotten lot printed in gory detail in the papers. I just can’t face it, that’s all.’