Nerve Page 6

  ‘My dear chap,’ he greeted me, shaking me warmly by the hand. ‘Glad to see you’re here in good time. Has Gordon been looking after you? That’s right. Now, what are you drinking?’

  ‘Nothing just now,’ I said.

  ‘Oh? Oh well, never mind. Perhaps afterwards? You got the list of questions all right?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Have you thought out some answers?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Good, good. That’s fine,’ he said.

  Gordon handed him a well-filled glass and offered him the sandwiches. The assistants helped themselves. It dawned on me that the refreshments provided for the entertainment of visitors probably served all of them as their main evening meal.

  Kemp-Lore looked at his watch. ‘Our other guest is cutting it rather fine.’ As he spoke the telephone rang. Gordon answered it, listened briefly, said ‘He’s here, Maurice,’ and opened the door.

  Kemp-Lore went out first, followed by Gordon and either Dan or Paul, who looked very much alike. It was a more impressive welcoming committee than had been accorded me: I smiled to think of what my mother would have said.

  A sports-jacketed assistant offered me sandwiches.

  ‘No?’ he said. ‘Oh, well, a lot of people feel like that beforehand. You’ll be very hungry afterwards.’ He put two sandwiches carefully together and stretched open his mouth to bite them.

  The voice of Kemp-Lore could be heard coming back along the corridor talking with someone who spoke in a harsh voice with a nasal twang. I wondered idly who the other guest would be and whether I knew him. At the doorway Kemp-Lore stood respectfully back to let his guest precede him into the room. My spirits sank. Paunch and horn-rims well to the fore, Mr John Ballerton allowed himself to be ushered in.

  Kemp-Lore introduced all the television men to him. ‘And Rob Finn, of course, you know?’ he said.

  Ballerton nodded coldly in my direction without meeting my eyes. Evidently it still rankled with him that I had seen him sicking up beside Art’s body. Perhaps he knew that I had not kept it a secret from the other jockeys.

  ‘It’s time we went up to the studio, I think,’ Kemp-Lore said, looking enquiringly at Gordon, who nodded.

  We all filed out into the corridor, and as I passed the table I noticed the sandwich plates now held nothing but crumbs and a few straggly pieces of cress.

  The smallish studio held a chaotic-looking tangle of cameras trailing their thick cables over the floor. To one side there was a shallow carpet-covered platform on which stood three low-slung chairs and a coffee table. A tray with three cups, cream jug and sugar basin shared the table with three empty balloon brandy glasses, a silver cigarette box and two large glass ash-trays.

  Kemp-Lore took Ballerton and me towards this arrangement.

  ‘We want to look as informal as possible,’ he said pleasantly. ‘As if we had just had dinner and were talking over coffee and brandy and cigars.’

  He asked Ballerton to sit in the left-hand chair and me in the right, and then took his place between us. Set in front and slightly to one side stood a monitor set with a blank screen; and in a semicircle a battery of cameras converged their menacing black lenses in our direction.

  Gordon and his assistants spent some time checking their lights, which dazed us with a dazzling intensity for a few moments, and then tested for sound while the three of us made stilted conversation over the empty cups. When he was satisfied, Gordon came over to us. ‘You all need make-up,’ he said. ‘Maurice, you’ll see to yours as usual? Then Mr Ballerton and Mr Finn, I’ll show you where to go, if you will follow me?’

  He led us to a small room off one corner of the studio. There were two girls there in pink overalls and bright smiles.

  ‘It won’t take long,’ they said, smoothing coloured cream into our skins. ‘Just a little darkener under the eyes … that’s right. Now powder …’ They patted the powder on with pads of cotton wool, carefully flicking off the excess. ‘That’s all.’

  I looked in the mirror. The make-up softened and blurred both the outlines of the face and texture of the skin. I didn’t much care for it.

  ‘You’d look ill on television without it,’ the girls assured us. ‘You need make-up to look natural and healthy.’

  Ballerton frowned and complained as one of them powdered the bald patch on his head. The girl insisted politely. ‘It’ll shine too much otherwise, you see,’ she said, and went on patting his head with the cotton wool.

  He caught me grinning at him and it clearly made him furious, raising a dark flush under the sun-tone make-up. There was no question of his ever sharing a rueful joke at his own expense, and I should have known it. I sighed to myself. This made twice that I had seen him at what he considered a disadvantage, and though I had not meant at all to antagonise him, it seemed that I had made a thorough job of it.

  We went back into the studio and Kemp-Lore beckoned to us to take our places in the chairs on the platform.

  ‘I’ll just run through the order of the programme,’ he said, ‘so that you will know what to expect. After the introductory music I am going to talk to you first, John, along the lines we discussed. After that, Rob will tell us what his sort of life entails. We have some film of a race you rode in, Rob, which we are using as an illustration, and I plan to fit that in fairly near the beginning of our talk. It will be thrown on to that screen over there.’ He pointed.

  ‘For the last few minutes, John will have a chance to comment on what you have said and we might have a final word or two from you. We’ll see how it goes. Now, the great thing is to talk naturally. I’ve explained that too much rehearsal spoils the spontaneity of a programme like this, but it means that a lot of the success of the next quarter of an hour depends on you. I’m sure you will both do splendidly.’ He finished his pep talk with a cheerful grin, and I did in fact feel confidence flowing into me from him.

  One of the sports-jacketed assistants stepped on to the shallow platform with a coffee pot in one hand and a brandy bottle in the other. He poured hot black coffee into the three cups, and put the pot down on the tray. Then he uncorked the brandy and wet the bottom of the balloon glasses.

  ‘No expense spared,’ he said cheerfully. He produced three cigars from the breast pocket of the sports jacket and offered them to us. Ballerton accepted one and sniffed it and rolled it between his fingers, curving his bad-tempered mouth into what passed with him for a smile.

  ‘Two minutes,’ shouted a voice.

  The spotlights flashed on, dazzling as before, blacking out everything in the studio. For a moment the monitor set showed a close-up of the coffee cups: then it went dark and the next picture on it was an animated cartoon advertising petrol. It was tuned now to what was actually being transmitted.

  ‘Thirty seconds. Quiet please. Quiet please,’ Gordon said.

  A hush fell over the whole area. I glanced at the monitor set in front of us. It was busy with a silent advertisement for soap flakes. Dimly seen beyond the lights, Gordon stood with his hand raised. There was dead silence. Steam rose gently from the three coffee cups. Everyone waited. Kemp-Lore beside me arranged his features in the well-known smile, looking straight ahead at the round black lens of the camera. The smile stayed in position for ten seconds without wavering.

  On the monitor set the superimposed horses galloped and faded. Gordon’s hand swept down briskly. The camera in front of Kemp-Lore developed a shining red eye and he began to speak, pleasantly, intimately, straight into a million sitting-rooms.

  ‘Good evening … tonight I am going to introduce you to two people who are both deeply involved with National Hunt racing, but who look at it, so to speak, from opposite poles. First, here is Mr John Ballerton …’ He gave him a good build-up but overdid the importance. There were about forty-nine other members of the National Hunt Committee, including Kemp-Lore’s own father, all at least as active and devoted as the fat man now basking in praise.

  Skilfully guided by Kemp-Lore, he t
alked about his duties as one of the three stewards at a race meeting. It involved, he said, hearing both sides if there was an objection to a winner and awarding the race justly to the more deserving, and yes, summoning jockeys and trainers for minor infringements of the rules and fining them a fiver or a tenner a time.

  I watched him on the monitor set. I had to admit he looked a solid, sober, responsible citizen with right on his side. The aggressive horn rims gave him, on the screen, a definite air of authority; also for the occasion his habitually sour expression had given way to a rather persuasive geniality. No one watching the performance Kemp-Lore coaxed out of him would have suspected him to be the bigoted, pompous bully we knew on the racecourse. I understood at last how he had come to be voted on to the National Hunt Committee.

  Before I expected it, Kemp-Lore was turning round to me. I swallowed convulsively. He smiled at the camera.

  ‘And now,’ he said with the air of one producing a treat, ‘here is Rob Finn. This is a young steeplechase jockey just scratching the surface of his career. Few of you will have heard of him. He has won no big races, nor ridden any well-known horses, and that is why I have invited him here tonight to meet you, to give us all a glimpse of what it is like to try to break in to a highly competitive sport …’

  The red light was burning on the camera pointing at me. I smiled at it faintly. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth.

  ‘First,’ he went on, ‘here is a piece of film which shows Finn in action. He is the rider with the white cap, fourth from last.’

  We watched on the monitor set. I was all too easy to pick out. It was one of the first races I ever rode in, and my inexperience showed sorely. During the few seconds the film lasted the white cap lost two places, and as an illustration of an unsuccessful jockey it could not have been bettered.

  The film faded out and Kemp-Lore said, smiling, ‘How did you set about starting to be a jockey, once you had decided on it?’

  I said, ‘I knew three farmers who owned and trained their own horses, and I asked them to let me try my hand in a race.’

  ‘And they did?’

  ‘Yes, in the end,’ I agreed. I could have added, ‘After I had promised to return the riding fees and not even ask for expenses’; but the method I had used to persuade a string of farmers to give me rides was strictly against the rules.

  ‘Usually,’ Kemp-Lore said, turning towards the camera, which immediately glowed with its red eye, ‘jumping jockeys either start as amateur steeplechase riders or as apprentices on the flat, but I understand that you did neither of these things, Rob?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I started too old to be an apprentice and I couldn’t be an amateur because I had earned my living riding horses.’

  ‘As a stable lad?’ He put it in the form of a question but from his intonation he clearly expected me to say yes. It was, after all, by far the commonest background of jockeys riding as few races as I had been doing.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  He was waiting for me to go on, his eyebrows a fraction raised in a tinge of surprise mingled with what looked like the beginning of apprehension. Well, I thought in amusement, you wouldn’t listen when I said I was hardly typical, so if my answers are not what you expect, it’s entirely your own fault.

  I said, ‘I was away from England for some years, wandering round the world, you know? Mainly in Australia and South America. Most of the time I got jobs as a stockman, but I spent a year in New South Wales working as a hand in a travelling rodeo. Ten seconds on the bucking bronc: that sort of thing.’ I grinned.

  ‘Oh.’ The eyebrows rose another fraction, and there was a perceptible pause before he said, ‘How very interesting.’ He sounded as if he meant it. He went on, ‘I wish we had more time to hear about your experiences, but I want to give viewers a picture of the economics of a jockey in your position … trying to make a living on a race or two a week. Now, your fee is ten guineas a time, that’s right? …’

  He took me at some length through my finances, which didn’t sound too good when dissected into travelling expenses, valets’ fees, replacement of kit, and so on. It emerged quite clearly that my net income over the last two years was less than I could have earned driving a delivery van, and that my future prospects were not demonstrably much better. I could almost feel the thought clicking into the viewers’ heads that I was a fool.

  Kemp-Lore turned deferentially to Ballerton. ‘John, have you any comment to make on what we have been hearing from Rob?’

  A trace of purely malicious pleasure crept into Ballerton’s man-of-authority smile.

  ‘All these young jockeys complain too much,’ he stated in his harsh voice, ignoring the fact that I had not complained at all. ‘If they aren’t very good at their job they shouldn’t expect to be highly paid. Racehorse owners don’t want to waste their money and their horses’ chances by putting up jockeys in whom they have no confidence. I speak as an owner myself, of course.’

  ‘Eh … of course,’ said Kemp-Lore. ‘But surely every jockey has to make a start? And there must always be large numbers of jockeys who never quite reach the top grade, but who have a living to make, and families to support.’

  ‘They’d be better off in a factory, earning a fair wage on a production line,’ said Ballerton, with heavy, reasonable-sounding humour. ‘If they can’t endure the fact that they are unsuccessful without snivelling about how poor they are, they ought to get out of racing altogether. Not many of them do,’ he added with an unkind chuckle, ‘because they like wearing those bright silks. People turn to look at them as they go by, and it flatters their little egos.’

  There was a gasp somewhere out in the dark studio at this ungentlemanly blow below the belt, and I saw out of the corner of my eye that the red spot on the camera pointing at me was glowing. What expression it had initially caught on my face I did not know, but I raised a smile for Mr Ballerton then, as sweet and cheerful and forgiving a smile as ever turned the other cheek. It was made easier by the certain knowledge that wearing bright shirts was if anything an embarrassment to me, not a gratification.

  Kemp-Lore’s head switched to me. ‘And what do you say to that, Rob?’

  I spoke truthfully, vehemently, and straight from the heart, ‘Give me a horse and a race to ride it in, and I don’t care if I wear silks or … or … pyjamas. I don’t care if there’s anyone watching or not. I don’t care if I don’t earn much money, or if I break my bones, or if I have to starve to keep my weight down. All I care about is racing … racing … and winning, if I can.’

  There was a small silence.

  ‘I can’t explain it,’ I said.

  Both of them were staring at me. John Ballerton looked as if a squashed wasp had revived and stung him, and his earlier animosity settled and deepened into a scowl. And Kemp-Lore? There was an expression on his face that I could not read at all. There were only a few empty seconds before he turned smoothly back to his camera and slid the familiar smile into place, but I felt irrationally that something important had taken place in them. I found it oddly disturbing not to have the slightest clue to what it was.

  Kemp-Lore launched into his usual review of the following week’s racing, and was very soon closing the programme with the customary words, ‘See you all next week at the same time …’

  The image on the monitor faded on Kemp-Lore’s smile and changed to another soap advertisement. The hot spotlight flicked off and my eyes began to get used to not being dazzled.

  Gordon strode up beaming. ‘A very good programme. It came over well. Just what they like, an argument with an edge to it. Well done, well done, Mr Ballerton, Mr Finn. Splendid.’ He shook us both by the hand.

  Kemp-Lore stood up and stretched and grinned around at us all. ‘Well, John. Well, Rob. Thank you both very much.’ He bent down, picked up my brandy glass and handed it to me. ‘Drink it,’ he said, ‘you deserve it.’ He smiled warmly. He crackled with released tension.

  I smiled back and drank the brandy, and ref
lected again how superlative he was at his job. By encouraging Ballerton to needle me he had drawn from me, for the ears of a few million strangers, a more soul-baring statement than I would ever have made privately to a close friend.

  A good deal of back-slapping followed, and more plates of sandwiches were dealt with downstairs in the reception room before I left the television building and went back to Kensington. In view of the approval which had been generously, if undeservedly heaped upon Ballerton and me after the show, I wondered why it was that I felt more apprehensive than I had before it started.

  Six

  Three weeks and a day after the broadcast, Pip Pankhurst broke his leg. His horse, falling with him and on him at the last hurdle of the second race on a dreary, drizzly mid-November Saturday afternoon, made a thorough job of putting the champion jockey out of action for the bulk of the ’chasing season.

  The first-aid men beside the hurdle were slow to move him into the ambulance for the good reason that a sharp arrow of shin bone was sticking out at a crazy angle through a tear in the thin leather racing boot; and they finally managed to lift him on to a stretcher, one of them told me later, only because Pip slid off into a dead faint.

  From the stands I saw only the white flag waving, the ambulance creeping down over the bumpy ground, and the flat, ominously unmoving figure of Pip on the ground. It would be untrue to say that I went down the stairs to the weighing-room with a calm heart. However sincere my pity for his plight might be, the faint chance that I might take his place in the following race was playing hop, skip and jump with my pulse.

  It was the big race of the day, the big race of the week, a three-mile chase with a substantial prize put up by a firm of brewers. It had attracted a good number of top horses and had been well discussed on the sports pages of all the day’s papers. Pip’s mount, which belonged to Lord Tirrold, was the rising star of the Axminster stable; a stringy six-year-old brown gelding with nothing much to recommend him at first sight, but intelligent, fast, and a battler. He had all the qualities of a world beater, and his best years lay ahead. At present he was still reckoned ‘promising.’ He was called Template.