The ground was littered with torn-up paper by the truckful. The brilliant colours of the bookmakers’ tickets overshadowed the buff cards from the Tote, and made the search a haystack; and there was the detritus too not only of the Grand National’s ‘also-rans’ but also those of the earlier races. Somewhere there was his torn ticket from Spotted Tulip, for instance. Tearing up losing tickets and entrusting them to the wind was a gambler’s defiance of fate.
Austin Glenn searched and cursed until his back ached from beading down. He was not alone in having disregarded the punters’ rule of not throwing tickets away until after the all-clear from the weigh-in, but to see others searching as hard as he was gave him no pleasure. What if someone else picked up his pieces of ticket and claimed his winnings? The idea enraged him; and what was more, he couldn’t stay on the course indefinitely because he had to catch his return train. He couldn’t afford to be late; he had to work that night.
Crispin’s men shifted from foot to foot as time went by and they were left there growing more and more conspicuous while the crowd thinned and trooped out through the gates. When the Tote closed for the day, the Chief Superintendent called them off in frustrated rage and conceded that they would have to wait for another opportunity after all, and never would such a good one come that way again.
In the weighing-room, Jerry Springwood bore the congratulations as best he could and announced to surprised television millions that he would be hanging up his boots immediately, after this peak to his career.
He didn’t realise he had ridden the bravest race of his life. When the plaudits were over he locked himself in the washroom and wept for his lost courage.
Austin Dartmouth Glenn travelled home empty-handed and in a vile mood, not knowing that his lost ticket had saved him from arrest. He cursed his wife and kicked the cat, and after a hasty supper, he put on his neat navy-blue uniform. Then he went scowling to work his usual night shift in the nearby high-security jail.
Haig’s Death
What if? is the beginning of fiction. What if Haig died when he shouldn’t?
There could be a hundred intertwined ripples but, anyway, here there are three.
Unaware that it was for the last time, Christopher Haig steered his buzzing electric razor over the contours of his chin and watched its progress impersonally in the bathroom mirror.
Christopher Haig’s beard grew strong and black; unfairly virile, he considered, when his crown was mercilessly thinning. Sighing, he straightened the transition line between beard and hair beside each ear, and blew the shaved-off ends of whiskers carefully into a plastic bag always ready for the purpose.
As middle-age and a gentle paunch had crept up and overtaken him, Christopher Haig had begun at forty-two to wish that he had dared more, had crazily set off to fly round the world in a hot air balloon or spent a summer photographing penguins in Antarctica or had canoed up the Orinoco river to the Angel Falls. Instead, he had worked reliably day by day as an animal-feed consultant and, as the pinnacle of his suppressed urge to adventure, acted as the judge at race meetings.
He looked forward, on that particular Friday morning, to the bustle of the first half of the two-day Winchester Spring Meeting. He savoured his drive to Winchester racecourse from his home (an empty-feeling home now that his wife had run off with a raggle-taggle TV repair man), taking pleasure in the sunshine sparkling on the fresh green buds of regenerate trees. Happy enough without his wife (relieved, if the truth were told), he wondered how one actually set about dog-sledding in Alaska or driving across the vast red-dust wastes of Australia: could one’s every-day travel agent arrange it?
Meticulous by nature, he packed imaginary suitcases for his fantasy journeys, wondering if snow-shoes would glide over both powdery surfaces, and choosing audio books for the long nights. Dreams and daydreams plugged the empty spaces of a worthy working life.
He was one of the fifteen judges regularly called to decide the winner and placed horses of the races. As there were fifteen judges but not fifteen race meetings every day (there were seldom more than four except on public holidays), acting as judge was to Chris Haig a sporadic and unpredictable pleasure more than an occupation. He never knew long in advance to which meeting he might be sent: none of the judges officiated always on the same course.
Christopher Haig regretted the passing of the old days when the word of the judge was law: if the judge said ‘So and so’ had won the race, then he darned well had won it, even if halt the racegoers put ‘What d’ya macall’ in front. Nowadays the photo-finish camera gave unarguable short-head verdicts, which the judge did little more than announce. Fairer, Chris Haig acknowledged, but not much fun.
The photo-finish camera at Winchester races had been on the blink last time out, though the trouble (more pompously classified as a malfunction) had happened to another judge, not Christopher Haig. It had now not only reportedly been fixed but exhaustively tested. A pity, Haig reprehensibly thought.
Chris Haig parked his car (for the last time) in the ‘Officials only’ car park and made his way jauntily towards the weighing-room (the centre of officialdom), scattering ‘good mornings’ to gatemen and arriving jockeys as he passed.
The judge was feeling particularly well that day. He recognised in himself the awakening of nature’s year and, as often before, but more strongly this time, decided that as he could realistically look forward to thirty more years of life, he should change direction pretty soon. The urge was clear: the destination, still a mist. He would have been astounded to learn that it was already too late.
Christopher Haig was greeted as always with a smile by the stewards, the clerk of the course, the starter, the clerk of the scales and all the passing crowd of race organisers in the weighing-room. The judge was popular, not only because he did his job without mistakes, but for his effortless generosity, his good nature, and his calmness in a crisis. Those that thought him dull had no insight into the furnace of his private landscape. What if, he thought, I joined an oil-fire fighting unit?
Before each race the judge sat at a table near the scales and learned the colours worn by each jockey as he or she weighed out. He learned also the name of each horse and made sure the jockeys carried on their number cloths the corresponding numbers on the racecard. Chris Haig, after years of practice, was good and quick.
The first three races gave him no problems. There were no finishes close enough to need to be settled by photo, and he’d been able to pronounce the winners and placed horses firmly and with confidence. He was enjoying himself.
The fourth race, the Cloister Handicap Hurdle, was the big event of the day. Chris Haig carefully made sure he could identify each of the eleven runners at a glance: it was always a shocking disgrace for a judge to hesitate.
Number 1, he noted: Lilyglit, top weight.
Number 2, Fable.
Number 3, Storm Cone.
He continued down the list. The runners’ names were all familiar to him from other days, but the first three on the card for the Cloister Handicap were woven into his short future in ways he couldn’t have imagined.
Number 1. Lilyglit
At about the time earlier on that Friday morning when Christopher Haig shaved with the help of a bathroom mirror and dreamed his dreams, Wendy Billington Innes sat on her low comfortable dressing stool and stared at her reflection in her dressing-table’s triple-section looking-glass. She saw not the pale clear skin, the straight mid-brown hair nor the darkening shadows below her grey-blue eyes; she saw only worry and a disaster she didn’t understand and couldn’t deal with. An hour ago, she thought, life had seemed simple and secure.