Nerve Read online

  I reflected as I watched the quick, neat way they flipped the things into the baskets, ready to take the dirty ones home, clean them and return them laundered and polished on the following day, that possibly they did deserve the very large fees we had to pay them for the service. I knew I would loathe, after a day of travelling and of dressing jockeys, to have to face those hampers and bags when I reached home; take out the grubby piles and set to work. Ugh.

  I had often seen Art paying his valet, counting through a wad of notes. At the height of the season it always a-mounted to over twenty pounds each week. My own valet, Young Mike (in his middle forties), twitched my helmet up from the bench and smiled at me as he went by. He earned more than most of the dozen or so jockeys he regularly looked after, and decidedly more than I did. But all the same … ugh!

  Tick-Tock, whistling the latest hit tune between his teeth, sat on the bench and pulled on a pair of very fancy yellow socks. On top of those went smooth, slim-toed shoes reaching up to the ankle bone. He shook down the slender legs of his dark tweed trousers (no turn-ups), and feeling my gaze upon him looked up and grinned at me across the room.

  He said, ‘Look your fill on the “Tailor and Cutter’s” dream boy.’

  ‘My father in his time,’ I said blandly, ‘was a Twelve Best Dressed man.’

  ‘My grandfather had vicuna linings in his raincoats.’

  ‘My mother,’ I said, dredging for it, ‘has a Pucci shirt.’

  ‘Mine,’ he said carefully, ‘cooks in hers.’

  At this infantile exchange we regarded each other with high good humour. Five minutes of Tick-Tock’s company were as cheering as rum punch in a snowstorm, and some of his happy-go-lucky enjoyment of living always rubbed off on to the next man. Let Art die of shame, let the murk spread in Grant Oldfield’s soul; surely nothing could be really wrong in the racing world, I thought, while young Ingersoll ticked so gaily.

  He waved his hand at me, adjusted his Tyrolean trilby, said ‘See you tomorrow,’ and was gone.

  But all the same there was something wrong in the racing world. Very wrong. I didn’t know what; I could see only the symptoms, and see them all the more clearly perhaps, since I had been only two years in the game. Between trainers and jockeys there seemed to be an all-round edginess, sudden outbursts of rancour, and an ebbing and flowing undercurrent of resentment and distrust. There was more to it, I thought, than the usual jungle beneath the surface of any fiercely competitive business, more to it than the equivalent of grey-flannel-suit manoeuvring in the world of jodhpurs and hacking jackets; but Tick-Tock, to whom alone I had in any way suggested my misgivings, had brushed the whole thing aside.

  ‘You must be on the wrong wavelength, pal,’ he said. ‘Look around you. Those are smiles you can see, boy. Smiles. It’s an O.K. life by me.’

  The last few pieces of kit were disappearing into the hampers and some of the lids were already down. I drank a second cup of sugarless tea, lukewarm, and eyed the moist looking pieces of fruit cake. As usual it took a good deal of resolution not to eat one. Being constantly hungry was the one thing I did not enjoy about race riding, and September was always a bad time of the year, with the remains of the summer’s fat still having to be starved off. I sighed, averted my eyes from the cake, and tried to console myself that in another month my appetite would have shrunk back to its winter level.

  Young Mike shouted down the room from the doorway through which he had been staggering with a hamper, ‘Rob, there’s a copper here to see you.’

  I put down the cup and went out into the weighing room. A middle-aged, undistinguished-looking policeman in a peaked cap was waiting for me with a notebook in his hand.

  ‘Robert Finn?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘I understand from Lord Tirrold that you saw Arthur Mathews put the pistol against his temple and pull the trigger?’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed.

  He made a note: then he said, ‘It’s a very straightforward case of suicide. There won’t be any need for more than one witness at the inquest, apart from the doctor, and that will probably be Mr Kellar. I don’t think we will need to trouble you any further.’ He smiled briefly, shut the notebook and put it in his pocket.

  ‘That’s all?’ I asked rather blankly.

  ‘Yes, that’s all. When a man kills himself as publicly as this there’s no question of accident or homicide. The only thing for the coroner to decide is the wording of his verdict.’

  ‘Unsound mind and so on?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Thank you for waiting, though it was your stewards’ idea, not mine. Good afternoon, then.’ He nodded at me, turned, and walked across towards the stewards’ room.

  I collected my hat and binoculars and walked down to the racecourse station. The train was already waiting and full, and the only seat I could find was in a compartment packed with bookmakers’ clerks playing cards on a suitcase balanced across their knees. They invited me to join them, and between Luton and St Pancras I fear I repaid their kindness by winning from them the cost of the journey.

  Two

  The flat in Kensington was empty. There were a few letters from the day’s second post in the wire basket on the inner side of the door, and I fished them out and walked through into the sitting-room, sorting out the two which were addressed to me.

  As usual, the place looked as if it had lately received the attentions of a minor tornado. My mother’s grand piano lay inches deep in piano scores, several of which had cascaded to the floor. Two music-stands leant at a drunken angle against the wall with a violin bow hooked on to one of them. The violin itself was propped up in an armchair, with its case open on the floor beside it. A ’cello and another music-stand rested side by side like lovers along the length of the sofa. An oboe and two clarinets lay on a table beside another untidy pile of music, and round the room and on all the bedroom chairs which filled most of the floor space lay a profusion of white silk handkerchiefs, rosin, coffee cups and batons.

  Running a practised eye over the chaos I diagnosed the recent presence of my parents, two uncles and a cousin. As they never travelled far without their instruments, it was safe to predict that the whole circus was within walking distance and would return in a very short while. I had, I was thankful to realise, struck the interval.

  I threaded a path to the window and looked out. No sign of returning Finns. The flat was at the top of a house two or three streets back from Hyde Park, and across the rooftops I could see the evening sunlight striking on the green dome of the Albert Hall. The Royal Institute of Music, where one of my uncles taught, rose in a solid dark mass beside it. The large airy apartment which was the headquarters of the Finn family was held by my father to be an economy, as it was within walking distance of where so many of them from time to time worked.

  I was the odd one out. The talents with which both my parents’ families had been lavishly endowed had not descended to me. This had become painfully clear to them when at the age of four I had failed to distinguish between the notes of an oboe and a cor anglais. To the uninitiated there may not seem to be much difference between them, but my father happened to be an oboist of international reputation, against whom other oboists were measured. Also, high musical talent, if it exists, is apparent in a child from an extremely early age, earlier than any other form of inborn ability, and at three years (when Mozart began composing), concertos and symphonies made less impression on me than the noise of the men emptying the dustbins.

  By the time I was five my shattered parents had reluctantly faced the fact that the child they had bred by mistake (I had caused an important American tour to be cancelled) was unmusical. Unmusical, that is, in their pure sense. I was not tone deaf and soaring flights of melody had drawn from me childish tears, but I never had, and still have not, their complete understanding, intellectual, emotional, technical and spiritual, of the effect of putting certain sounds in certain orders.

  My mother never being one to do thi
ngs by halves, I had henceforth been shuffled off from London between school terms to a succession of long holidays on farms, ostensibly for my health, but in reality, I knew later, to free my parents for the complicated and lengthy concert tours in which they were engaged. I grew up into a sort of truce with them, in which it was tacitly agreed that as they had not intended to have a child in the first place, and as he had proved to be less than a (musical) credit to them in the second, the less we saw of each other the better.

  They disapproved of my venture into jockeyship for no other reason than that racing had nothing to do with music. It was no use my pointing out that the one thing I had learned on the various holiday farms was how to ride (for I was enough my father’s son for farming itself to bore me stiff), and that my present occupation was directly due to their actions in the past. To what they did not want to hear my acute-eared parents were sublimely deaf.

  There was still no sign of them down in the street, nor of the uncle who lived with us who played the ’cello, nor the visiting uncle and cousin, violin and clarinet

  I opened my two letters. The first informed me that my income tax returns were overdue. I slit the second envelope with a smiling and complacent anticipation of enjoyment, which just shows how often life can get up and slap you when you least expect it. In a familiar childish hand the letter said:

  Dearest Rob,

  I am afraid this may come as a surprise to you, but I am getting married. He is Sir Morton Henge, who you may have heard of, and he is very sweet and kind and no cracks from you about him being old enough to be my father etc. I don’t think I had better ask you to the reception, do you? Morton doesn’t know about you and you will be a great dear not to let on to anybody about us, if you don’t mind. I shall never forget you, dearest Rob, and all the sweet times we had together. Thank you for everything, and goodbye.

  Your loving Paulina.

  Sir Morton Henge, middle aged widower and canning tycoon. Well, well. I wondered sardonically how his serious-minded son, whom I knew slightly, would enjoy the prospect of a cuddly twenty-year-old model for a stepmother. But being in a lopsided way able to laugh at Paulina’s catch made it no less of a blow.

  In the eighteen months since I had first met her she had progressed from mousy-haired obscurity to blonde blossoming on the cover of at least one glossy magazine a week. In the last month her radiant eyes had smiled at me (and eight million other men) from a cigarette advertisement in every underground station in London. I had known that it was inevitable that one day she would forsake me if she struck gold in her profession, and our whole relationship had from the start been based on that assumption; but a future without her happy inanity and her generous love-making seemed all of a sudden more bleak than I had expected.

  I went through to my bedroom and putting down Paulina’s letter on the chest of drawers, caught sight of myself in the oval mirror on the wall above it. That is the face, I thought, that she has been pleased to see beside her on her pillow, but which was no match for a title and a canning fortune. Looking objectively at my reflection I noted the black hair, black eyebrows and lashes, brown eyes … not a distinguished face, nor handsome; too thin perhaps. Not bad, not good. Just a face.

  I turned away and looked around the little sloping-ceilinged room which had been converted for me from a lumber room when I came home from my travels. There was very little in it; a bed, the chest of drawers, an armchair and a bedside table with a lamp on it. One picture, an impressionistic sketch of racing horses, hung on the wall facing my bed. There were no other ornaments, few books, no clutter. In six years of wandering round the world I had become so used to living with a minimum of possessions that although I had now occupied this little room on and off for two years, I had amassed nothing to put in it.

  A clothes cupboard had been built for me across one end of the room. I opened the door and tried to look at its contents as Paulina must have looked, the twice she had been there. One good dark grey suit, one evening jacket with black trousers, one hacking jacket, two pairs of grey slacks, and a pair of jodhpurs. I took off the suit I was wearing and hung it at the end of the meagre row, a tweed mixture of browns. They were enough for me, those clothes. They covered every situation. Sir Morton Henge probably counted his suits in dozens and had a manservant to look after them. I shrugged my shoulders. There was no profit in this melancholy stocktaking. Paulina was gone, and that was that.

  Picking up a pair of black sneakers, I shut the cupboard door and changed into jeans and an old checked shirt. That done, I contemplated the desert of time between then and the next day’s racing. The trouble with me was that steeplechasing had got into my blood like a drug addiction, so that all the normal pleasures of life, and even Paulina herself, had become merely ways of passing as quickly as possible the hours away from it.

  My stomach gave an extra twist, which I would like to have believed was due to romantic desolation at my blasted love life, but which I knew very well was only the effect of not having eaten for twenty-three hours. Admitting wryly that being jettisoned had not spoiled my appetite, I made for the kitchen. Before I reached it, however, the front door of the flat banged open and in trooped my parents, uncles and cousin.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ said my mother, presenting a smooth sweet-smelling cheek for a kiss. It was her usual greeting to everyone from impresarios to back row chorus singers, and when applied to me still utterly lacked any maternal quality. She was not a motherly person in any way. Tall, slender, and immensely chic in a style that looked casual but was the result of much thought and expenditure, she was becoming more and more a ‘presence’ as she approached fifty. As a woman I knew her to be passionate and temperamental; as an artist to be a first-class interpretative vehicle for the genius of Haydn, whose piano concertos she poured out with magical, meticulous, ecstatic precision. I had seen hardened music critics leave her performances with tears in their eyes. So I had never expected a broad motherly bosom to comfort my childish woes, nor a sock-darning, cake-making mum to come home to.

  My father, who treated me always with polite friendliness, said as a form of greeting, ‘Did you have a good day?’ He always asked. I usually answered briefly yes or no, knowing that he was not really interested.

  I said, ‘I saw a man kill himself. No, it wasn’t a good day.’

  Five heads swivelled towards me.

  My mother said, ‘Darling, what do you mean?’

  ‘A jockey shot himself at the races. He was only six feet away from me. It was a mess.’ All five of them stood there looking at me with their mouths open. I wished I hadn’t told them, for it seemed even more horrible in memory than it had done at the time.

  But they were unaffected. The ’cello uncle shut his mouth with a snap, shrugged, and went on into the sitting-room, saying over his shoulder, ‘Well, if you will go in for these peculiar pursuits …’

  My mother followed him with her eyes. There was a bass twang as he picked up his instrument from the sofa, and as if drawn by an irresistible magnet the others drifted after him. Only my cousin stayed long enough to spare Art a thought, then he too went back to his clarinet.

  I listened to them re-tuning and setting up the music stands. They began to play a jigging piece for strings and woodwind that I particularly disliked. The flat was suddenly intolerable. I went out and down into the street and began to walk.

  There was only one place to go if I wanted a certain kind of peace, and I didn’t care to go there too often for fear of wearing out my welcome. But it was a full month since I had seen my cousin Joanna, and I needed some more of her company. Need. That was the only word for it.

  She opened the door with her usual air of good humoured invitation.

  ‘Well, hello,’ she said, smiling. I followed her into the big converted mews garage which served her as sitting-room, bedroom and rehearsal room all in one. Half of the roof was a sloping skylight, through which the remains of the evening sun still shone. The size and comparative bareness of the
room gave it unusual accoustic qualities; if one spoke ordinarily it was like any other room; if one sang, as Joanna did, there was a satisfying illusion of distance and some good amplification from concrete walls.

  Joanna’s voice was deep and clear and resonant. When she liked, in singing dramatic passages, she could colour it with the suggestion of graininess, a very effective hint of a crack in the bell. She could have made a fortune as a blues singer; but having been born a true classical Finn, so commercial a use of her talent was out of the question. Instead she preferred songs which were to me unmelodic and unrewarding, though she seemed to be amassing a fair-sized reputation with them among people who enjoyed that sort of thing.

  She had greeted me in a pair of jeans as old as my own and a black sweater streaked here and there with paint. On an easel stood a half-finished portrait of a man, with some brushes and paints on a table beside it.

  ‘I’m trying my hand at oils,’ she said, picking up a brush and making a tentative dab at the picture, ‘but it’s not going very well, damn it.’

  ‘Stick to charcoal, then,’ I said. She had drawn with flowing lines the racing horses which hung in my bedroom, short on anatomy, but full of life and movement.

  ‘I’ll finish this, at least,’ she said.

  I stood and watched her. She squeezed out some carmine.

  Without looking at me she said, ‘What’s the matter?’

  I didn’t answer. She paused with her brushes in the air and turned and regarded me calmly for some seconds.

  ‘There’s some steak in the kitchen,’ she said.

  A mind reader, my cousin Joanna. I grinned at her and went out into the long narrow lean-to where she both took her bath and did her cooking. It was rump steak, thick and dark. I grilled it with a couple of tomatoes and made some french dressing for a lettuce I found already prepared in a wooden bowl. When the steak was done I divided it on to two plates and took the whole lot back to Joanna. It smelt wonderful.