Reflex Read online

  I would have been more than happy never to have come into his focus, but as I was passing one of the reporters shot out a hand and fastened it on my arm.

  “Philip,” he said, “you can tell us. You’re always on the business end of a camera.”

  “Tell you what?” I said, hovering in midstride, and intending to walk on.

  “How do you photograph a wild horse?”

  “Point and click,” I said pleasantly.

  “No, Philip,” he said, exasperated. “You know Mr. den Relgan, don’t you?”

  I inclined my head slightly and said, “By sight.”

  “Mr. den Relgan, this is Philip Nore. Jockey, of course.” The reporter was unaccustomedly obsequious: I’d noticed den Relgan often had that effect. “Mr. den Relgan wants photographs of all his horses, but one of them rears up all the time when he sees a camera. How would you get him to stand still?”

  “I know one photographer,” I said, “who got a wild horse to stand still by playing a tape of a hunt in full cry. The horse just stood and listened. The pictures were great.”

  Den Relgan smiled superciliously as if he didn’t want to hear good ideas that weren’t his own, and I nodded with about as much fervor and went on into the weighing room thinking that the Jockey Club must have been mad. The existing members of the Jockey Club were for the most part forward-looking people who put good will and energy into running a huge industry fairly. That they were also self-electing meant in practice that they were almost all aristocrats or upper class, but the ideal of service bred into them worked pretty well for the good of racing. The old autocratic change-resistant bunch had died out, and there were fewer bitter jokes nowadays about boneheads at the top. All the more surprising that they should have beckoned to a semi-phony like den Relgan.

  Harold was inside the weighing room talking to Lord White, which gave me a frisson like seeing a traffic warden standing next to one’s wrongly parked car; but it appeared that Lord White, powerful steward of the Jockey Club, was not enquiring into the outcome of the Sandown Pattern ’Chase, nor into any other committed sins. He was telling Harold that there was a special trophy for Sharpener’s race, and, should he happen to win it, both Harold and I, as well as the owner, would be required to put in an appearance and receive our gifts.

  “It wasn’t advertised as a sponsored race,” Harold said, surprised.

  “No . . . but Mr. den Relgan has generously made this gesture. And incidentally it will be his daughter who does the actual presentations.” He looked directly at me. “Nore, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You heard all that? Good. Fine.” He nodded, turned, and left us, crossing to speak to another trainer with a runner in the same race.

  “How many trophies does it take,” Harold said under his breath, “to buy your way into the Jockey Club?” And in a normal voice he added, “Victor’s here.”

  I said anxiously, “But Sharpener will do his best.”

  Harold looked amused. “Yes, he will. This time. Win that pot if you can. It would really give Victor a buzz, taking Ivor den Relgan’s cup. They can’t stand each other.”

  “I didn’t know they knew—”

  “Everyone knows everyone,” Harold said, shrugging. “I think they belong to the same gaming club.” He lost interest and went out of the weighing room, and I stood for a few aimless moments watching Lord White make his way towards yet another trainer to pass on the instructions.

  Lord White, in his fifties, was a well-built goodlooking man with thick light-gray hair progressively turning the color of his name. He had disconcertingly bright blue eyes and a manner that disarmed anyone advancing on him with a grievance; and it was he, although not senior steward, who was the true leader of the Jockey Club, elected not by votes but by the natural force born in him.

  An upright man, widely respected, whose nickname Driven Snow (spoken only behind his back) had been coined, I thought, only partly through admiration and mostly to poke fun at the presence of so much noticeable virtue.

  I went off to the changing room and on into the business of the day, and was guiltily relieved to find Steve Millace had not made the journey. No beseeching eyes and general helplessness to inveigle me into yet another round of fetching and carrying and visiting the sick. I changed into Tishoo’s colors and thought only about the race, which was for novices over hurdles.

  In the event there were no great problems but no repeat either of the previous day’s joys. Tishoo galloped willingly enough into fourth place at the finish, which pleased his woman owner, and I carried my saddle to the scales to be weighed in, and so back to my changing-room peg to put on Victor Brigg’s colors for Sharpener. Just another day’s work. Each day unique in itself, but in essence the same. On two thousand days, or thereabouts, I had gone into changing rooms and put on colors and passed the scales and ridden the races. Two thousand days of hope and effort and sweat and just and unjust rewards. More than a job: part of my fabric.

  I put on a jacket over Victor Briggs’ colors, because there were two other races to be run before Sharpener’s, and went outside for a while to see what was happening in general; and what was happening in particular was Lady White with a scowl on her thin aristocratic face.

  Lady White didn’t know me especially, but I, along with most other jump jockeys, had shaken her hand as she stood elegantly at Lord White’s side at two parties they had given to the racing world. They had been large every-one-invited affairs three or four years apart, held at Cheltenham racecourse during the March meeting; and they had been Lord White’s own idea, paid for by him, and given, one understood, because of his belief that everyone in jump racing belonged at heart to a brotherhood of friends, and should meet as such to enjoy themselves. Old Driven Snow at his priceless best, and like everyone else I’d gone to the parties and enjoyed them.

  Lady White was hugging her mink around her and almost glaring from under a wide-brimmed brown hat. Her intensity was such that I followed her gaze and found it fixed on her paragon of a husband, who was himself talking to a girl.

  Lord White was not simply talking to the girl but reveling in it, radiating flirtatious fun from his sparkling eyes to his gesturing fingertips. I looked sardonically back from this picture telling the old old story and found Lady White’s attention still balefully fixed on it, and I thought in amusement, “Oh dear,” as one does. The pure white lord, that evening, would be in for an unaristocratic ticking off.

  Ivor den Relgan was still holding court in a clutch of journalists, among whom were two racing writers and three gossip columnists from the larger daily papers. Ivor den Relgan was definitely a gossip man’s man.

  Bart Underfield was loudly telling an elderly married couple that Osborne should know better than to run Sharpener in a three-mile ’chase when any fool knew that the horse couldn’t go further than two. The elderly couple nodded, impressed.

  I gradually became aware that a man standing near me was also, like Lady White, intently watching Lord White and the girl. The man near me was physically unremarkable; an average man no longer young, not quite middleaged, with dark thinning hair and black-framed glasses. He was wearing gray trousers, olive-green jacket, suede, not tweed, well-cut. When he realized that I was looking at him, he gave me a quick annoyed glance and moved away; and I thought no more about him for another hour.

  Victor Briggs, when I joined him in the parade ring before Sharpener’s race, was heavily pleasant and made no reference to the issue hanging between us. Harold had boosted himself into a state of confidence and was standing with his long legs apart, his hat tipped back on his head, and his binoculars swinging rhythmically from one hand.

  “A formality,” he was saying. “Sharpener’s never been better, eh, Philip? Gave you a good feel on the Downs, didn’t he? Worked like a train.” His robust voice floated easily over several nearby owner-trainer-jockey groups who were all suffering from their own prerace tensions and could have done without Harold’s.


  “Jumping out of his skin,” Harold said, booming. “Never been better. He’ll run the legs off ’em, today, eh, Victor?”

  The only good thing one could say about Harold’s bursts of overconfidence was that if in the event they proved to be misplaced he would not relapse into acrimony and gloom. Failures were apt to be expansively forgiven with “it was the weight that beat him, of course” and were seldom held to be the jockey’s fault, even when they were.

  Sharpener himself reacted to Harold’s optimism in a thoroughly positive way, and encouraged also perhaps by my confidence left over from the two winners the day before, ran a faultless race with energy and courage, so that for the third time at that meeting my mount returned to applause.

  Harold was metaphorically by this time two feet off the ground, and even Victor allowed his mouth a small smile.

  Ivor den Relgan manfully shaped up to the fact that his fancy trophy had been won by a man he disliked, and Lord White fluttered around the girl he’d been talking to, clearing a passage for her through the throng.

  When I’d weighed in and handed my saddle to my valet, and combed my hair and gone out to the prizegiving, the scene had sorted itself out into a square table with a blue cloth bearing one large silver object and two smaller ones surrounded by Lord White, the girl, Ivor den Relgan, Victor and Harold.

  Lord White said through a hand microphone to the small watching crowd that Miss Dana den Relgan would present the trophies so kindly given by her father; and it cannot have been only in my mind that the cynical speculation arose. Was it the Dad that Lord White wanted in the Jockey Club, or Dad’s daughter? Perish the thought. Lord White with a girlfriend? Impossible.

  At close quarters it was clear that he was attracted beyond sober good sense. He touched her continually under the guise of arranging everyone suitably for the presentations, and he was vivacious where normally staid. It all remained just within the acceptable limits of roguishly avuncular behavior, but discreet it was not.

  Dana den Relgan was enough, I supposed, to excite any man she cared to respond to; and to Lord White she was responding with sweetness. Slender and graceful and not very tall, she had a lot of blonde-flecked hair curling casually onto her shoulders. There was also a curving mouth, wide spread eyes, excellent skin, and a quality of being smarter than her looks would suggest. Her manner was observably more restrained than Lord White’s, as if she didn’t dislike his attentions but thought them too obvious, and she presented the trophies to Victor and Harold and myself without much conversation.

  To me she said merely, “Well done,” and gave me the small silver object (which turned out to be a saddle-shaped paper-weight) with the bright surface smile of someone who isn’t really looking at you and is going to forget you again within five minutes. Her voice, from what I heard of it, held the same modified American accent as her father’s, but in her it lacked the patronizing quality and was, to me at least, attractive. A pretty girl but not mine. Life was full of them.

  While Victor and Harold and I compared trophies, the average-looking man in spectacles reappeared, walking quietly up to Dana den Relgan’s shoulder and speaking softly into her ear. She turned away from the presentation table and began slowly to move off with him, smiling a little, and listening to what he was saying.

  This apparently harmless proceeding had the most extraordinary effect upon den Relgan, who stopped looking fatuously pleased with himself in one five-hundredth of a second and flung himself into action. He almost ran after his daughter, gripped the inoffensive-looking man by the shoulder and threw him away from her with such force that he staggered and went down on one knee.

  “I’ve told you to keep away from her,” den Relgan said, looking as if kicking a man when he was down was something he had no reservations about; and Lord White muttered, “I say,” and, “Oh dear,” and looked embarrassed.

  “Who is that man?” I asked of no one in particular, and it was Victor Briggs, surprisingly, who answered.

  “Film director. Fellow called Lance Kinship.”

  “And why the fuss?”

  Victor Briggs knew the answer, but it took a fair amount of internal calculation before he decided to part with it. “Cocaine,” he said finally. “White powder, for sniffing straight up the nose. Very fashionable. All these stupid little girls . . . their noses will collapse when the bone dissolves, and then where will they be?”

  Both Harold and I looked at him with astonishment; it was the longest speech I’d ever heard him make, and certainly the only one containing any private opinion.

  “Lance Kinship supplies it,” he said. “He gets asked to parties for what he takes along.”

  Lance Kinship was up on his feet and brushing dirt off his trousers; setting his glasses firmly on his nose and looking murderous.

  “If I want to talk to Dana, I’ll talk to her,” he said.

  “Not while I’m there, you won’t.”

  Den Relgan’s Jockey Club manners were in tatters and the bedrock under the camouflage was plainly on view. A bully, I thought; a bad enemy, even if his cause was just.

  Lance Kinship seemed unintimidated. “Little girls don’t always have their daddies with them,” he said nastily; and den Relgan hit him; a hard sharp efficient crunch on the nose.

  Noses bleed easily, and there was a good deal of gore. Lance Kinship tried to wipe it away with his hands and succeeded only in smearing it all over his face. It poured down on his mouth and chin, and fell in big splashing drops on his olive suede jacket.

  Lord White, hating the whole thing, stretched out an arm towards Kinship and held out a huge white handkerchief as if with tongs. Kinship grabbed it without thanks and soaked it scarlet as he tried to staunch the flow.

  “First aid room, don’t you think?” Lord White said, looking around. “Er . . . Nore,” he said, his gaze alighting. “You know where the first aid room is, don’t you? Take this gentleman there, would you? Awfully good of you . . .” He waved me towards the errand, but when I put a hand out towards the olive-green sleeve, to guide Kinship in the direction of cold compresses and succor, he jerked away from me.

  “Bleed, then,” I said.

  Unfriendly eyes behind the black frames glared out at me, but he was too busy mopping to speak.

  “I’ll show you,” I said. “Follow if you want.”

  I set off past the parade ring towards the green-painted hut where the motherly ladies would be waiting to patch up the damaged, and not only did Kinship follow, but den Relgan also. I heard his voice as clearly as Kinship did, and there was no doubt about the message.

  “If you come near Dana again, I’ll break your neck.”

  Kinship again didn’t answer.

  Den Relgan said, “Did you hear, you vicious little shit?”

  We had gone far enough for there to be plenty of people blocking us from the view of the group outside the weighing room. I heard a scuffle behind me and looked over my shoulder in time to see Kinship aim a hard karate kick at den Relgan’s crotch and land deftly on target. Kinship turned back to me and gave me another unfriendly stare over the reddening handkerchief, which he had held uninterruptedly to his nose.

  Den Relgan was making choking noises and clutching himself. The whole fracas was hardly what one expected as the outcome of a decorous racecourse presentation on a Thursday afternoon.

  “In there,” I said to Kinship, jerking my head, and he gave me a final reptilian glance as the first aid room opened its doors. Den Relgan said “aaah . . .” and walked around in a small circle half doubled over, one hand pressed hard under the lower front of his camel-hair coat.

  A pity George Millace had gone to his fathers, I thought. He of all people would have relished the ding-dong, and he, unlike everyone else, would have been there with his lens sharply focused, pointing the right way and taking inexorable notes at three-point-five frames per second. Den Relgan could thank George’s couple of scotches and a tree in the wrong place that he wouldn’t find his tangle with Kinshi
p illustrating in the daily papers the edifying news of his elevation to the Jockey Club.

  Harold and Victor Briggs were still where I’d left them, but Lord White and Dana den Relgan had gone.

  “His lordship took her off to calm her nerves,” Harold said dryly. “The old goat’s practically dancing around her, silly fool.”

  “She’s pretty,” I said.

  “Wars have been fought for pretty girls,” said Victor Briggs.

  I looked at him with renewed astonishment and received in return the usual stonewall closed-in expression. Victor might have unexpected hidden depths, but that was just what they still were, hidden.

  When I left the weighing room to set off for home I was apologetically intercepted by the tall loitering figure of Jeremy Folk.

  “I don’t believe it,” I said.

  “I did . . . er . . . warn you.”

  “So you did.”

  “Could I . . . um . . . have a word with you?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Ah yes . . . well . . .”

  “The answer’s no,” I said.

  “But you don’t know what I’m going to ask.”

  “I can see that it’s something I don’t want to do.”

  “Um,” he said. “Your grandmother asks you to visit her.”

  “Absolutely not,” I said.

  There was a pause. People around us were going home, calling goodnights. It was four o’clock. Goodnights started early in the racing world.

  “I went to see her,” Jeremy said. “I told her you wouldn’t look for your sister for money. I told her she would have to give you something else.”

  I was puzzled. “Give me what?”

  Jeremy looked vaguely around from his great height and said, “You could find her, couldn’t you, if you really tried?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But you might.”

  I didn’t answer, and his attention came gently back to my face.

  “Your grandmother agreed,” he said, “that she had a flaming row with Caroline . . . your mother . . . and chucked her out when she was pregnant.”