Flying Finish Read online

  ‘You can afford to do that in comfort. You don’t have to do it on a horse transport.’

  Like so many other people, he took it for granted that I had money. I hadn’t. I had only my salary from Anglia, and what I could earn by being frankly, almost notoriously, a shamateur jockey. Every penny I got was earmarked. From my father I took only my food and the beetle-infested roof over my head, and neither expected nor asked for anything else.

  ‘I imagine I would like a horse transport,’ I said equably. ‘What are the chances?’

  ‘Oh,’ Simon laughed. ‘You’ve only to ask. I can’t see him turning you down.’

  But Yardman very nearly did turn me down, because he couldn’t believe I really meant it.

  ‘My dear boy, now think carefully, I do beg you. Anglia Bloodstock is surely a better place for you? However well you might do here, there isn’t any power or any prestige … We must face facts, we must indeed.’

  ‘I don’t particularly care for power and prestige.’

  He sighed deeply. ‘There speaks one to whom they come by birth. Others of us are not so fortunate as to be able to despise them.’

  ‘I don’t despise them. Also I don’t want them. Or not yet.’

  He lit a dark cigar with slow care. I watched him, taking him in. I hadn’t met him before, and as he came from a different mould from the top men at Anglia I found that I didn’t instinctively know how his mind worked. After years of being employed by people of my own sort of background, where much that was understood never needed to be stated, Yardman was a foreign country.

  He was being heavily paternal, which somehow came oddly from a thin man. He wore black-rimmed spectacles on a strong beaky nose. His cheeks were hollowed, and his mouth in consequence seemed to have to stretch to cover his teeth and gums. His lips curved downwards strongly at the corners, giving him at times a disagreeable and at times a sad expression. He was bald on the crown of his head, which was not noticeable at first sight, and his skin looked unhealthy. But his voice and his fingers were strong, and as I grew to acknowledge, his will and character also.

  He puffed slowly at the cigar, a slim fierce looking thing with an aroma to match. From behind the glasses his eyes considered me without haste. I hadn’t a clue as to what he was thinking.

  ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘I’ll take you on as an assistant to Searle, and we’ll see how it goes.’

  ‘Well … thank you,’ I answered. ‘But what I really came to ask for was Peters’s job.’

  ‘Peters’s …’ His mouth literally fell open, revealing a bottom row of regular false teeth. He shut it with a snap. ‘Don’t be silly, my boy. You can’t have Peters’s job.’

  ‘Searle says he has left.’

  ‘I dare say, but that’s not the point, is it?’

  I said calmly, ‘I’ve been in the Transport Section of Anglia for more than five years, so I know all the technical side of it, and I’ve ridden horses all my life, so I know how to look after them. I agree that I haven’t any practical experience, but I could learn very quickly.’

  ‘Lord Grey,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I don’t think you realise just what Peters’s job was.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ I said. ‘He travelled on the planes with the horses and saw they arrived safely and well. He saw that they passed the Customs all right at both ends and that the correct people collected them, and where necessary saw that another load of horses was brought safely back again. It is a responsible job and it entails a lot of travelling and I am seriously applying for it.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ he said with some impatience. ‘Peters was a travelling head groom.’

  ‘I know.’

  He smoked, inscrutable. Three puffs. I waited, quiet and still.

  ‘You’re not … er … in any trouble, at Anglia?’

  ‘No. I’ve grown tired of a desk job, that’s all.’ I had been tired of it from the day I started, to be exact.

  ‘How about racing?’

  ‘I have Saturdays off at Anglia, and I take my three weeks annual holiday in separate days during the winter and spring. And they have been very considerate about extra half-days.’

  ‘Worth it to them in terms of trade, I dare say.’ He tapped off the ash absentmindedly into the inkwell. ‘Are you thinking of giving it up?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Mm … if you work for me, would I get any increase in business from your racing connections?’

  ‘I’d see you did,’ I said.

  He turned his head away and looked out of the window. The river tide was sluggishly at the ebb, and away over on the other side a row of cranes stood like red meccano toys in the beginnings of dusk. I couldn’t even guess then at the calculations clicking away at high speed in Yardman’s nimble brain, though I’ve often thought about those few minutes since.

  ‘I think you are being unwise, my dear boy. Youth … youth …’ He sighed, straightened his shoulders and turned the beaky nose back in my direction. His shadowed greenish eyes regarded me steadily from deep sockets, and he told me what Peters had been earning; fifteen pounds a trip plus three pounds expenses for each overnight stop. He clearly thought that that would deter me; and it nearly did.

  ‘How many trips a week?’ I asked, frowning.

  ‘It depends on the time of year. You know that, of course. After the yearling sales, and when the brood mares come over, it might be three trips. To France, perhaps even four. Usually two, sometimes none.’

  There was a pause. We looked at each other. I learned nothing.

  ‘All right,’ I said abruptly. ‘Can I have the job?’

  His lips twisted in a curious expression which I later came to recognise as an ironic smile.

  ‘You can try it,’ he said. ‘If you like.’

  Chapter Two

  A job is what you make it. Three weeks later, after Christmas, I flew to Buenos Aires with twelve yearlings, the four from Anglia and eight more from different bloodstock agencies, all mustered together at five o’clock on a cold Tuesday morning at Gatwick. Simon Searle had organised their arrival and booked their passage with a charter company; I took charge of them when they unloaded from their various horseboxes, installed them in the plane, checked their papers through the Customs, and presently flew away.

  With me went two of Yardman’s travelling grooms, both of them fiercely resenting that I had been given Peters’s job over their heads. Each of them had coveted the promotion, and in terms of human relationships the trip was a frost-bitten failure. Otherwise, it went well enough. We arrived in Argentina four hours late, but the new owners’ horseboxes had all turned up to collect the cargo. Again I cleared the horses and papers through the Customs, and made sure that each of the five new owners had got the right horses and the certificates to go with them. The following day the plane picked up a load of crated furs for the return journey, and we flew back to Gatwick, arriving on Friday.

  On Saturday I had a fall and a winner at Sandown Races, Sunday I spent in my usual way, and Monday I flew with some circus ponies to Germany. After a fortnight of it I was dying from exhaustion; after a month I was acclimatised. My body got used to long hours, irregular food, non-stop coffee, and sleeping sitting upright on bales of hay ten thousand feet up in the sky. The two grooms, Timmie and Conker, gradually got over the worst of their anger, and we developed into a quick, efficient, laconic team.

  My family were predictably horrified by my change of occupation and did their best to pry me away from it. My sister anxiously retracted the words I knew I’d earned, my father foresaw the earldom going to the cousin after all, aeroplanes being entirely against nature and usually fatal, and my mother had hysterics over what her friends would say.

  ‘It’s a labourer’s job,’ she wailed.

  ‘A job is what you make it.’

  ‘What will the Filyhoughs think?’

  ‘Who the hell cares what they think?’

  ‘It isn’t a suitable job for you.’ She wrung her han
ds.

  ‘It’s a job I like. It suits me, therefore it is suitable.’

  ‘You know that isn’t what I mean.’

  ‘I know exactly what you mean, Mother, and I profoundly disagree with you. People should do work they like doing; that’s all that should decide them. Whether it is socially O.K. or not shouldn’t come into it.’

  ‘But it does,’ she cried, exasperated.

  ‘It has for me for nearly six years,’ I admitted, ‘but not any more. And ideas change. What I am doing now may be the top thing next year. If I don’t look out half the men I know will be muscling in on the act. Anyway, it’s right for me, and I’m going on with it.’

  All the same she couldn’t be won over, and could only face her own elderly convention-bound circle by pretending my job was ‘for the experience, you know,’ and by treating it as a joke.

  It was a joke to Simon Searle too, at first.

  ‘You won’t stick it, Henry,’ he said confidently. ‘Not you and all that dirt. You with your spotless dark suits and your snowy white shirts and not a hair out of place. One trip will be enough.’

  After a month, looking exactly the same, I turned up for my pay packet late on Friday afternoon, and we sauntered along to his favourite pub, a tatty place with stained glass doors and a chronic smell of fug. He oozed on to a bar stool, his bulk drooping around him. A pint for him, he said. I bought it, and a half for me, and he drank most of his off with one much practised swallow.

  ‘How’s the globe-trotting, then?’ He ran his tongue over his upper lip for the froth.

  ‘I like it.’

  ‘I’ll grant you,’ he said, smiling amicably, ‘that you haven’t made a mess of it yet.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Though of course since I do all the spade work for you at both ends, you bloody well shouldn’t.”

  ‘No,’ I agreed. He was, in truth, an excellent organiser, which was mainly why Anglia often dealt with Yardman Transport instead of Clarkson Carriers, a much bigger and better known firm. Simon’s arrangements were clear, simple, and always twice confirmed: agencies, owners and air-lines alike knew exactly where they stood and at what hours they were expected to be where. No one else in the business, that I had come across at any rate, was as consistently reliable. Being so precise myself, I admired his work almost as a work of art.

  He looked me over, privately amused. ‘You don’t go on trips dressed like that?’

  ‘I do, yes, more or less.’

  ‘What does more or less mean?’

  ‘I wear a sweater instead of my jacket, in and around the aircraft.’

  ‘And hang up your jacket on a hanger for when you land?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  He laughed, but without mockery. ‘You’re a rum sort of chap, Henry.’ He ordered more beer, shrugged when I refused, and drank deep again. ‘Why are you so methodical?’

  ‘It’s safer.’

  ‘Safer.’ He choked on his beer, coughing and laughing. ‘I suppose it doesn’t strike you that to many people steeplechasing and air transport might not seem especially safe?’

  ‘That wasn’t what I meant.’

  ‘What, then?’

  But I shook my head, and didn’t explain.

  ‘Tell me about Yardman,’ I said.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Well, where he came from … anything.’

  Simon hunched his great shoulders protectively around his pint, and pursed his lips.

  ‘He joined the firm after the war, when he left the Army. He was a sergeant in an infantry regiment, I think. Don’t know any details: never asked. Anyway he worked his way up through the business. It wasn’t called Yardman Transport then, of course. Belonged to a family, the Mayhews, but they were dying out … nephews weren’t interested, that sort of thing. Yardman had taken it over by the time I got there; don’t know how really, come to think of it, but he’s a bright lad, there’s no doubt of that. Take switching to air, for instance. That was him. He was pressing the advantages of air travel for horses whilst all the other transport agencies were going entirely by sea.’

  ‘Even though the office itself is on a wharf,’ I remarked.

  ‘Yes. Very handy once. It isn’t used much at all now since they clamped down on exporting horses to the Continent for meat.’

  ‘Yardman was in that?’

  ‘Shipping agent,’ he nodded. ‘There’s a big warehouse down the other end of the wharf where we used to collect them. They’d start being brought in three days before the ship came. Once a fortnight, on average. I can’t say I’m sorry it’s finished. It was a lot of work and a lot of mess and noise, and not much profit, Yardman said.’

  ‘It didn’t worry you, though, that they were going to be slaughtered?’

  ‘No more than cattle or pigs.’ He finished his beer. ‘Why should it? Everything dies sometime.’ He smiled cheerfully and gestured to the glasses. ‘Another?’

  He had one, I didn’t.

  ‘Has anyone heard any more of Peters?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘Not a murmur.’

  ‘How about his cards?’

  ‘Still in the office, as far as I know.’

  ‘It’s a bit odd, isn’t it?’

  Simon shrugged. ‘You never know, he might have wanted to duck someone, and did it thoroughly.’

  ‘But did anyone ever come looking for him?’

  ‘Nope. No police, no unpaid bookies, no rampaging females, no one.’

  ‘He just went to Italy and didn’t come back?’

  ‘That’s the size of it,’ Simon agreed. ‘He went with some brood mares to Milan and he should have come back the same day. But there was some trouble over an engine or something, and the pilot ran out of time and said he’d be in dead trouble if he worked too many hours. So they stayed there overnight and in the morning Peters didn’t turn up. They waited nearly all day, then they came back without him.’

  ‘And that’s all?’

  ‘That’s the lot,’ he agreed. ‘Just one of life’s little mysteries. What’s the matter, are you afraid Peters will reappear and take back his job?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘He was an awkward bastard,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Stood on his rights. Always arguing; that sort of chap. Belligerent. Never stood any nonsense from foreign customs officers.’ He grinned. ‘I’ll bet they’re quite glad to see you instead.’

  ‘I dare say I’ll be just as cussed in a year or two.’

  ‘A year or two?’ He looked surprised. ‘Henry, it’s all very well you taking Peters’s job for a bit of a giggle but you surely can’t mean to go on with it permanently?’

  ‘You think it would be more suitable if I was sitting behind a nice solid desk at Anglia?’ I asked ironically.

  ‘Yes,’ he said seriously. ‘Of course it would.’

  I sighed. ‘Not you too. I thought you at least might understand …’ I stopped wryly.

  ‘Understand what?’

  ‘Well … that who one’s father is has nothing to do with the sort of work one is best suited for. And I am not fitted for sitting behind a desk. I came to that conclusion my first week at Anglia, but I stayed there because I’d kicked up a fuss and insisted on getting an ordinary job, and I wasn’t going to admit I’d made a mistake with it. I tried to like it. At any rate I got used to it, but now … now … I don’t think I could face that nine-to-five routine ever again.’

  ‘Your father’s in his eighties, isn’t he?’ Simon said thoughtfully.

  I nodded.

  ‘And do you think that when he dies you will be allowed to go on carting horses round the world? And for how long could you do it without becoming an eccentric nut? Like it or not, Henry, it’s easy enough to go up the social scale, but damn difficult to go down. And still be respected, that is.’

  ‘And I could be respected sitting behind a desk at Anglia, transferring horses from owner to owner on paper, but not if I move about and do it on aeroplanes?’
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  He laughed. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘The world is mad,’ I said.

  ‘You’re a romantic. But time will cure that.’ He looked at me in a large tolerant friendship, finished his beer, and flowed down from the stool like a green corduroy amoeba.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘there’s time for another along the road at the Saracen’s Head.’

  At Newbury Races the following afternoon I watched five races from the stands and rode in one.

  This inactivity was not mine by choice, but thrust upon me by the Stewards. They had, by the time I was twenty, presented me with their usual ultimatum to regular amateur riders: either turn professional, or ride in only fifty open races each season. In other words, don’t undercut the trade: stop taking the bread and butter out of the professionals’ mouths. (As if jockeys ate much bread and butter, to start with.)

  I hadn’t turned professional when I was twenty because I had been both too conventional and not really good enough. I was still not good enough to be a top rank professional, but I had long been a fully employed amateur. A big fish in a small pond. In the new-found freedom of my Yardman’s job I regretted that I hadn’t been bolder at twenty. I liked steeplechasing enormously, and with full-time professional application I might just have made a decent success. Earth-bound on the stands at Newbury I painfully accepted that my sister had brought me to my senses a lot too late.

  The one horse I did ride was in the ‘amateurs only’ race. As there were no restrictions on the number of amateur events I could ride in, few were run without me. I rode regularly for many owners who grudged paying professional jockeys’ fees, for some who reckoned their horses stood more chance in amateur races, and for a few who genuinely liked my work.

  All of them knew very well that if I won either amateur or open races I expected ten per cent of the prize. The word had got around. Henry Grey rode for money, not love. Henry Grey was the shamateur to end all shamateurs. Because I was silent and discreet and they could trust my tongue, I had even been given cash presents by stewards: and solely because my father was the Earl of Creggan, my amateur permit survived.

  In the changing room that afternoon I found that however different I might feel, I could not alter my long set pattern. The easy bantering chat flowed round me and as usual it was impossible to join in. No one expected me to. They were used to me. Half of them took my aloofness to be arrogant snobbery, and the rest shrugged it off as ‘just Henry’s way.’ No one was actively hostile, and it was I, I, who had failed to belong. I changed slowly into my racing clothes and listened to the jokes and the warm earthy language, and I could think of nothing, not one single thing, to say.