Reflex Read online

  He had come to the races that day with dark-blue hair. The onset of a mild apoplexy could be observed in the parade ring all about us, but Harold behaved as if he hadn’t noticed, on the basis that owners who paid their bills could be as eccentric as they liked.

  “Philip darling,” said the pop star, “bring this baby back for Daddy.”

  He must have learned it out of old movies, I thought. Surely not even pop musicians talked like that anymore. He reverted to biting his nails and I got up on Pamphlet and rode out to see what I could do about the tenner each way.

  I was not popularly supposed to be much good over hurdles, but maybe Pamphlet had winning on his mind that day as much as I did. He soared around the whole thing with bursting joie-de-vivre, even to the extent of passing the favorite on the run-in, and we came back to bear hugs from the blue hair (for the benefit of television) and an offer to me of a spare ride in the fifth race, from a worried-looking small-time trainer. Stable jockey hurt . . . would I mind? I wouldn’t mind, I’d be delighted. Fine, the valet has the colors, see you in the parade ring. Great.

  Steve was still brooding by my peg.

  “Was the shed burned?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “The shed. The deep freeze. Your Dad’s photos.”

  “Oh, well, yes it was . . . but Dad’s stuff wasn’t in there.”

  I stripped off the pop star’s orange and pink colors and went in search of the calmer green and brown of the spare ride.

  “Where was it, then?” I said, returning.

  “I told Mum what you said about people maybe not liking Dad’s pictures of them, and she reckoned that you thought all the burglaries were really aimed at the photos, not at her fur and all that, and that if so she didn’t want to leave those transparencies where they could still be stolen, so on Monday she got me to move them next door, to her neighbor’s. And that’s where they are now, in a sort of outhouse.”

  I buttoned the green-and-brown shirt, thinking it over.

  “Do you want me to visit her in the hospital?” I said.

  Almost on my direct route home. No great shakes. He fell on it, though, with embarrassing fervor. He had come to the races, he said, with the pub-keeper from the Sussex village where he lived in digs near the stable he rode for, and if I would visit his mother he could go home with the pub-keeper, because otherwise he had no transport, because of his collarbone. I hadn’t exactly meant I would see Mrs. Millace alone, but on reflection I didn’t mind.

  Having shifted his burden Steve cheered up a bit and asked if I would telephone him when I got home.

  “Yes,” I said absently. “Did your father often go to France?”

  “France?”

  “Ever heard of it?” I said.

  “Oh . . .” He was in no mood to be teased. “Of course he did. Longchamps, Auteuil, St. Cloud. Everywhere.”

  “And around the world?” I said, packing lead into my weightcloth.

  “Huh?” He was decidedly puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “What did he spend his money on?”

  “Lenses, mostly. Telephotos as long as your arm. Any new equipment.”

  I took my saddle and weightcloth over to the trial scales and added another flat pound of lead. Steve got up and followed me.

  “What do you mean, what did he spend his money on?”

  I said, “Nothing. Nothing at all. Just wondered what he liked doing, away from the races.”

  “He just took pictures. All the time, everywhere. He wasn’t interested in anything else.”

  In time I went out to ride the green-and-brown horse and it was one of those days, which happened so seldom, when absolutely everything went right. In unqualified euphoria I dismounted once again in the winners’ enclosure, and thought that I couldn’t possibly give up the life; I couldn’t possibly. Not when winning put you higher than heroin.

  My mother had likely died of heroin.

  Steve’s mother lay alone in a glass-walled side ward, isolated but indecently exposed to the curious glances of any stranger walking past. There were curtains, which might have shielded her from public gaze, but they were not pulled across. I hated the system which denied privacy to people in the hospital: who on earth, if they were ill or injured, wanted their indignities gawped at?

  Marie Millace lay on her back with two flat pillows under her head and a sheet and a thin blue blanket covering her. Her eyes were shut. Her brown hair, greasy and in disarray, straggled on the pillow. Her face was dreadful.

  The raw patches of Saturday night were now covered by extensive dark scabs. The cut eyelid, stitched, was monstrously swollen and black. The nose was crimson under some shaping plaster-of-paris, which had been stuck onto forehead and cheeks with white sticky tape. Her mouth, open and also swollen, looked purple. All the rest showed deep signs of bruising: crimson, gray, black and yellow. Fresh, the injuries had looked merely nasty: it was in the healing process that their true extent showed.

  I’d seen people in that state before, and worse than that, damaged by horses’ galloping hooves; but this, done out of malice to an inoffensive lady in her own home, was differently disturbing. I felt not sympathy but anger: Steve’s “I’ll kill the bastards” anger.

  She heard me come in, and opened her less battered eye a fraction as I approached. What I could see of her expression looked merely blank, as if I was the last person she would have expected.

  “Steve asked me to come,” I said. “He couldn’t get here because of his shoulder. He can’t drive . . . not for a day or two.”

  The eye closed.

  I fetched a chair from against the wall and put it by the bed, to sit beside her. The eye opened again; and then her hand, which had been lying on the blanket, slowly stretched out towards me. I took it, and she gripped me hard, holding on fiercely, seeking, it seemed, support and comfort and reassurance. The spirit of need ebbed after a while, and she let go of my hand and put her own weakly back on the blanket.

  “Did Steve tell you,” she said, “about the house?”

  “Yes, he did. I’m so sorry.” It sounded feeble. Anything sounded feeble in the face of such knocks as she’d taken.

  “Have you seen it?” she said.

  “No. Steve told me about it at the races. At Kempton, this afternoon.”

  Her speech was slurred and difficult to understand; she moved her tongue as if it were stiff inside the swollen lips.

  “My nose is broken,” she said, fluttering her fingers on the blanket.

  “Yes,” I said. “I broke mine once. They put a plaster on me, too, just like yours. You’ll be as good as new in a week.”

  Her silent response couldn’t be interpreted as anything but dissent.

  “You’ll be surprised,” I said.

  There was the sort of pause that occurs at hospital bedsides. Perhaps it was there that the ward system scored, I thought: when you’d run out of platitudes you could always discuss the gruesome symptoms in the next bed.

  “George said you took photographs, like him,” she said.

  “Not like him,” I said. “George was the best.”

  No dissent at all, this time. Discernibly the intention of a smile.

  “Steve told me you’d had George’s boxes of transparencies moved out before the fire,” I said. “That was lucky.”

  Her smile, however, disappeared, and was slowly replaced by distress.

  “The police came today,” she said. A sort of shudder shook her, and her breathing grew more troubled. She could get no air through her nose so the change was audible and rasped in her throat.

  “They came here?” I asked.

  “Yes. They said . . . Oh God . . .” Her chest heaved and she coughed.

  I put my hand flatly over hers on the blanket and said urgently, “Don’t get upset. You’ll make everything hurt worse. Just take three slow deep breaths. Four or five, if you need them. Don’t talk until you can make it cold.”

  She lay silent for a while until the heav
y breathing slackened. I watched the tightened muscles relax under the blanket, and eventually she said, “You’re much older than Steve.”

  “Eight years,” I agreed, letting go of her hand.

  “No. Much . . . much older.” There was a pause. “Could you give me some water?”

  There was a glass on the locker beside her bed. Water in the glass, angled tube for drinking. I steered the tube to her mouth, and she sucked up a couple of inches.

  “Thanks.” Another pause, then she tried again, this time much more calmly. “The police said . . . The police said it was arson.”

  “Did they?”

  “You’re not . . . surprised?”

  “After two burglaries, no.”

  “Paraffin,” she said. “Five-gallon drum. Police found it in the hall.”

  “Was it your paraffin?”

  “No.”

  Another pause.

  “The police asked . . . if George had any enemies.” She moved her head restlessly. “I said of course not . . . and they asked . . . if he had anything someone would want . . . enough . . . enough . . . oh . . .”

  “Mrs. Millace,” I said matter-of-factly. “Did they ask if George had any photographs worth burglary and burning?”

  “George wouldn’t . . .” she said intensely.

  George had, I thought.

  “Look,” I said slowly, “you might not want me to . . . you might not trust me . . . but if you like I could look through those transparencies for you, and I could tell you if I thought there were any which could possibly come into the category we’re talking about.”

  After a while she said only, “Tonight?”

  “Yes, certainly. Then if they’re OK you can tell the police they exist . . . if you want to.”

  “George isn’t a blackmailer,” she said. Coming from the swollen mouth the words sounded extraordinary, distorted but passionately meant. She was not saying, “I don’t want to believe George would blackmail anyone,” but “George didn’t.” Yet she hadn’t been sure enough to give the transparencies to the police. Emotionally sure. Rationally unsure. In a nonsensical way, that made sense.

  She hadn’t much left except that instinctive faith. It was beyond me entirely to tell her it was misplaced.

  I collected the three metal boxes from the neighbor, who had been told, it appeared, that they contained just odds and ends the burglars had missed, and I was given in exchange a conducted tour of the burned mess next door.

  Even in the dark one could see that there was nothing to salvage. Five gallons of paraffin had made no mistake. The house was a shell, roofless, windowless, acrid and creaking; and it was to this savage destruction that Marie would have to return.

  I drove home with George’s life’s work and spent the rest of the evening and half of the night projecting his slides onto the flat white wall of my sitting room.

  His talent had been stupendous. Seeing his pictures there together, one after the other, and not scattered in books and newspapers and magazines across a canvas of years, I was struck continually by the speed of his vision. He had caught life over and over and over again at the moment when a painter would have composed it: nothing left out, nothing disruptive let in. An absolute master.

  The best of his racing pictures were there, some in color, some in black and white, but there were also several stunning series on unexpected subjects like card players and alcoholics and giraffes and sculptors in action and hot Sundays in New York. These series stretched back almost to George’s youth, the date and place being written on each mount in tiny fine-nibbed letters.

  There were dozens of portraits of people: some posed in a studio, mostly not. Again and again he had caught the fleeting expression which exposed the soul, and even if he had originally taken twenty shots to keep but one, the ones he had kept were collectively breathtaking.

  Pictures of France. Paris, St. Tropez, cycle racing, fish docks. No pictures of people sitting outside cafes, talking to who they shouldn’t.

  When I’d got to the end of the third box I sat for a while thinking of what George hadn’t photographed, or hadn’t in any case kept.

  No wars. No riots. No horrors. No mangled bodies or starving children or executions or cars bombed apart by terrorists.

  What had yelled from my wall for hours had been a satirical baring of the essence under the external; and perhaps George had felt the external satire of violence left him nothing to say.

  I was rather deeply aware that I was never going to see the world in quite the same way again: that George’s piercing view of things would intrude when I least expected it and nudge me in the ribs. But George had had no compassion. The pictures were brilliant. Objective, exciting, imaginative and revealing; but none of them kind.

  None of them either, in any way that I could see, could have been used as a basis for blackmail.

  I telephoned to Marie Millace in the morning, and told her so. The relief in her voice when she answered betrayed the existence of her doubts, and she heard it herself and immediately began a cover-up.

  “I mean,” she said, “of course, I knew George wouldn’t . . .”

  “Of course,” I said. “What shall I do with the pictures?”

  “Oh dear, I don’t know. No one will try to steal them now though, will they?” The mumbling voice was even less distinct over the wire. “What do you think?”

  “Well,” I said. “You can’t exactly advertise that although George’s pictures still exist no one needs to feel threatened. So I do think they may still be at risk.”

  “But that means . . . that means . . .”

  “I’m terribly sorry. I know it means that I agree with the police. That George did have something which someone desperately wanted destroyed. But please don’t worry. Please don’t. Whatever it was has probably gone with the house . . . and it’s all over.” And God forgive me, I thought.

  “Oh dear . . . George didn’t . . . I know he didn’t . . .”

  I could hear the distress rising again in the noise of her breathing.

  “Listen,” I said quickly. “About those transparencies. Are you listening?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think the best thing for now would be to put them into cold storage somewhere. Then when you feel better, you could get an agent to put on an exhibition of George’s work. The collection is marvelous, it really is. An exhibition would celebrate his talent, and make you a bit of money . . . and also reassure anyone who might be worrying that there was nothing to . . . er . . . worry about.”

  There was a silence, but I knew she was still there, because of the breathing.

  “George wouldn’t use an agent,” she said at last. “How could I find one?”

  “I know one or two. I could give you their names.”

  “Oh . . .” She sounded weak and there was another long pause. Then she said, “I know . . . I’m asking such a lot . . . but could you . . . put those transparencies into storage? I’d ask Steve . . . but you seem to know . . . what to do.”

  I said that I would, and when we disconnected I wrapped the three boxes in their plastic sheets and took them along to the local butcher, who already kept a box of my own in his walk-in freezer room. He cheerfully agreed to the extra lodgers, suggested a reasonable rental, and gave me a receipt.

  Back home I looked at the negative and the print of Elgir Yaxley talking to Terence O’Tree, and wondered what on earth I should do with them.

  If George had extorted from Elgin Yaxley all the profits from the murdered horses—and it looked as if he must have done, because of Bart Underfield’s gloominess and Yaxley’s own disappearance from racing—then it had to be Elgin Yaxley who was now desperate to find the photograph before anyone else did.

  If Elgin Yaxley had arranged the burglaries, the beating-up and the burning, should retribution not follow? If I gave the photograph to the police, with explanations, Elgin Yaxley would be in line for prosecution for most crimes on the statutes, not least perjury and defrauding
an insurance company of a hundred and fifty thousand.

  If I gave the photograph to the police, I was telling the world that George Millace had been a blackmailer.

  Which would Marie Millace prefer, I thought: never to know who had attacked her, or to know for sure that George had been a villain . . . and to have everyone else know it too.

  There was no doubt about the answer.

  I had no qualms about legal justice. I put the negative back where I’d found it, in its envelope stuck onto the back of the dark print in its paper mount. I put the mount back into the box of rubbish which still lay on the kitchen dresser, and I put the clear big print I’d make into a folder in the filing cabinet in the hall.

  No one knew I had them. No one would come looking. No one would burgle or burn my house, or beat me up. Nothing at all would happen from now on.

  I locked my doors and went to the races to ride Tishoo and Sharpener and to agonize over that other thorny problem, Victor Briggs.

  7

  Ivor den Relgan was again the big news, and what was more, he was there.

  I saw him immediately when I arrived, as he was standing just outside the weighing room door talking to two reporters. I was a face among many to him, but to me, as to everyone else whose business was racing, he was as recognizable as a poppy in corn.

  He wore, as he often did, an expensively soft camel-colored coat, buttoned and belted, and he stood bareheaded with graying hair neatly brushed, a stocky slightly pugnacious-looking man with an air of expecting people to notice his presence. A lot of people considered it a plus to be in his favor, but for some reason I found his self-confidence repellent, and his strong gravitational pull was something I instinctively resisted.