I took the box out to Carol. She was still sitting on top of the desk, dangling the drying toes and reading through a woman’s magazine.
‘What have you found then?’
‘Do you lend these films to anyone who wants them?’
‘Hire, not lend. Sure.’
‘Who to?’
‘Anyone who asks. Usually it’s the owners of the horses. Often they want prints made to keep, so we make them.’
‘Do the Stewards often want them?’
‘Stewards? Well, see, if there’s any doubt about a race the Stewards see the film on the racecourse. That van the old man and our Alfie’s got develops it on the spot as soon as it’s collected from the cameras.’
‘But sometimes they send for them afterwards?’
‘Sometimes, yeah. When they want to compare the running of some horse or other.’ Her legs suddenly stopped swinging. She put down the magazine and gave me a straight stare.
‘Kelly... Kelly Hughes?’
I didn’t answer.
‘Hey, you’re not a bit like I thought.’ She put her blonde head on one side, assessing me. ‘None of those sports writers ever said anything about you being smashing looking and dead sexy.’
I laughed. I had a crooked nose and a scar down one cheek from where a horse’s hoof had cut my face open, and among jockeys I was an also-ran as a bird-attracter.
‘It’s your eyes,’ she said. ‘Dark and sort of smiley and sad and a bit withdrawn. Give me the happy shivers, your eyes do.’
‘You read all that in a magazine,’ I said.
‘I never!’ But she laughed.
‘Who asked for the film that’s missing from the box?’ I said. ‘And what exactly did they ask for?’
She sighed exaggeratedly and edged herself off the desk into a pair of bright pink sandals.
‘Which film is that?’ She looked at the box and its reference number, and did a Marilyn Monroe sway over to a filing cabinet against the wall. ‘Here we are. One official letter from the Stewards’ secretary saying please send film of last race at Reading...’
I took the letter from her and read it myself. The words were quite clear: ‘the last race at Reading.’ Not the sixth race. The last race. And there had been seven races. It hadn’t been Carol or the Cannot Lie Co. who had made the mistake.
‘So you sent it?’
‘Of course. Off to the authorities, as per instructions.’ She put the letter back in the files. ‘Did you in, did it?’
‘Not that film, no.’
‘Alfie and the old man say you must have made a packet out of the Lemonfizz, to lose your licence over it.’
‘Do you think so too?’
‘Stands to reason. Everyone thinks so.’
‘Man in the street?’
‘Him too.’
‘Not a cent.’
‘You’re a nit, then,’ she said frankly. ‘Whatever did you do it for?’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Oh yeah?’ She gave me a knowing wink. ‘I suppose you have to say that, don’t you?’
‘Well,’ I said, handing her the Reading box to put back in the storeroom, ‘Thanks anyway.’ I gave her half a smile and went away across the expanse of mottled linoleum to the door out.
I drove home slowly, trying to think. Not a very profitable exercise. Brains seemed to have deteriorated into a mushy blankness.
There were several letters for me in the mailbox on my front door, including one from my parents. I unfolded it walking up the stairs, feeling as usual a million miles away from them on every level.
My mother had written the first half in her round regular handwriting on one side of a large piece of lined paper. As usual there wasn’t a full stop to be seen. She punctuated entirely with commas.
Dear Kelly,
Thanks for your note, we got it yesterday, we don’t like reading about you in the papers, I know you said you hadn’t done it son but no smoke without fire is what Mrs Jones the post office says, and it is not nice for us what people are saying about you round here, all airs and graces they say you are and pride goes before a fall and all that, well the pullets have started laying at last, we are painting your old room for Auntie Myfanwy who is coming to live here her arthritis is too bad for those stairs she has, well Kelly, I wish I could say we want you to come home but your Da is that angry and now Auntie Myfanwy needs the room anyway, well son, we never wanted you to go for a jockey, there was that nice job at the Townhall in Tenby you could have had, I don’t like to say it but you have disgraced us son, there’s horrid it is going into the village now, everyone whispering, your loving Mother.
I took a deep breath and turned the page over to receive the blast from my father. His writing was much like my mother’s as they had learned from the same teacher, but he had pressed so hard with his ballpoint that he had almost dug through the paper.
‘Kelly,
You’re a damned disgrace boy. It’s soft saying you didn’t do it. They wouldn’t of warned you off if you didn’t do it. Not lords and such. They know what’s right. You’re lucky you’re not here I would give you a proper belting. After all that scrimping your Ma did to let you go off to the University. And people said you would get too ladidah to speak to us, they were right. Still, this is worse, being a cheat. Don’t you come back here, your Ma’s that upset, what with that cat Mrs Jones saying things. It would be best to say don’t send us any more money into the bank. I asked the manager but he said only you can cancel a banker’s order so you’d better do it. Your Ma says it’s as bad as you being in prison, the disgrace and all.’
He hadn’t signed it. He wouldn’t know how to, we had so little affection for each other. He had despised me from childhood for liking school, and had mocked me unmercifully all the way to college. He showed his jolly side only to my two older brothers, who had had what he considered a healthy contempt for education: one of them had gone into the Merchant Navy and the other lived next door and worked alongside my father for the farmer who owned the cottages.
When in the end I had turned my back on all the years of learning and taken to racing my family had again all disapproved of me, though I guessed they would have been pleased enough if I’d chosen it all along. I’d wasted the country’s money, my father said; I wouldn’t have been given all those grants if they’d known that as soon as I was out I’d go racing. That was probably true. It was also true that since I’d been racing I’d paid enough in taxes to send several other farm boys through college on grants.
I put my parents’ letter under Rosalind’s photograph. Even she had been unable to reach their approval, because they thought I should have married a nice girl from my own sort of background, not the student daughter of a colonel.
They had rigid minds. It was doubtful now if they would ever be pleased with me, whatever I did. And if I got my licence back, as like as not they would think I had somehow cheated again.
You couldn’t take aspirins for that sort of pain. It stayed there, sticking in knives. Trying to escape it I went into the kitchen, to see if there was anything to eat. A tin of sardines, one egg, the dried up remains of some port salut.
Wrinkling my nose at that lot I transferred to the sitting-room and looked at the television programmes.
Nothing I wanted to see.
I slouched in the green velvet armchair and watched the evening slowly fade the colours into subtle greys. A certain amount of pace edged its way past the dragging gloom of the last four days. I wondered almost academically whether I would get my licence back before or after I stopped wincing at the way people looked at me, or spoke to me, or wrote about me. Probably the easiest course would be to stay out of sight, hiding myself away.