Grant stood at my feet, looking down as if surprised to have caused so much mess. I could have laughed if I had not been so busy swallowing what seemed like cupfuls of my own blood.
Young Mike thrust a saddle under my shoulders and pushed my head backwards over it. A second later he was piling a cold, wet towel across the bridge of my nose; and gradually the breath-clogging bleeding lessened and stopped.
‘You’d better stay there for a bit,’ said Mike. ‘I’ll go and get one of the first-aid men to see to you.’
‘Don’t bother,’ I said. ‘Please don’t bother, it’s all right now.’
He came back irresolutely from the door and stood by my head. He looked upside down to me, as my eyes were level with his ankles.
‘What the hell did you do that for?’ he said to Grant.
I wanted to hear his answer too, but Grant did not reply. He scowled down at me, then turned on his heel and pushed his way out of the changing-room against the incoming tide of the jockeys returning from the last race. The list of Axminster horses fluttered to the floor in his wake. Mike picked it up and put it into my outstretched hand.
Tick-Tock dumped his saddle on the bench, tipped back his helmet, and put his hands on his hips.
‘What have we here? A blood bath?’ he said.
‘Nose bleed,’ I said.
‘You don’t say.’
The others began crowding round and I decided I’d been lying down long enough. I lifted the towel off my face and stood up gingerly. All was well. The fountains had dried up.
‘Grant socked him one,’ said one of the jockeys who had been there all the time.
‘Why?’
‘Ask me another,’ I said. ‘Or ask Grant.’
‘You ought to report it to the Stewards.’
‘It’s not worth it,’ I said.
I cleaned myself up and changed, and walked down to the station with Tick-Tock.
‘You must know why he hit you,’ he said. ‘Or was it merely target practice?’
I handed him Axminster’s list. He read it and gave it back.
‘Yes, I see. Hatred, envy and jealousy. You’re stepping into the shoes he couldn’t fill himself. He had his chance there, and he muffed it.’
‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘Why did Axminster drop him?’
‘I don’t honestly know,’ Tick-Tock said, ‘you’d better ask Grant and find out what mistakes not to make.’ He grinned. ‘Your nose looks like a vulgar sea-side postcard.’
‘It’s good enough for the goggle box,’ I said. I told him about Maurice Kemp-Lore’s invitation.
‘My dear sir,’ he said, sweeping off his Tyrolean hat, and making me a mocking bow. ‘I am impressed.’
‘You’re a fool,’ I said, grinning.
‘Thank God.’
We went our ways, Tick-Tock to his digs in Berkshire and I to Kensington. The flat was empty, the usual state of affairs on Saturday evenings, a busy night for concerts. I took half the ice cubes from the refrigerator, wrapped them in a plastic bag and a tea towel and lay down on the bed with the ice bag balanced on my forehead. My nose felt like a jelly. Grant’s fist had had the power of severe mental disturbance behind it.
I shut my eyes and thought about them, Grant and Art; two disintegrated people. One had been driven to violence against himself, and the other had turned violent against the world. Poor things, I thought rather too complacently, they were not stable enough to deal with whatever had undermined them: and I remembered that easy pity, later on.
On the following Wednesday Peter Cloony came to the races bubbling over with happiness. The baby was a boy, his wife was fine, everything was rosy. He slapped us all on the back and told us we didn’t know what we were missing. The horse he rode that afternoon started favourite and ran badly, but it didn’t damp his spirits.
The next day he was due to ride in the first race, and he was late. We knew before he arrived that he had missed his chance, because five minutes before the deadline for declaring jockeys his trainer had sent an official into the changing-room to find out if he was there, and he wasn’t.
I was standing outside the weighing-room when Peter finally came, forty minutes before the first race. He was running over the grass, anxiety clear on his face even from a distance. His trainer detached himself from the group of people he had been talking to and intercepted him. Fragments of angry remarks floated across to me.
‘Is this your idea of an hour before the first?... I’ve had to get another jockey... very stupid of you... second time in a week... irresponsible... not the way to go on if you want to keep your job with me...’ He stalked away.
Peter brushed past me, white, trembling and looking sick, and when I went back into the changing-room a short time later he was sitting on a bench with his head in his hands.
‘What happened this time?’ I asked. ‘Is your wife all right? And the baby?’ I thought he must have been so busy attending to them that he had forgotten to watch the clock.
‘They’re fine,’ he said miserably. ‘My mother-in-law is staying with us to look after them. I wasn’t late setting out... only five minutes or so... but...’ he stood up and gazed at me with his large, moist-looking eyes, ‘... you’ll never believe it but there was something else stuck across the lane, and I had to go miles round again, even further than last time...’ His voice trailed off as I looked at him in disbelief.
‘Not another tank carrier?’ I asked incredulously.
‘No, a car. An old car, one of those heavy old Jaguars. It had its nose in the hedge and one front wheel in the ditch, and it was jammed tight, right across the lane.’
‘You couldn’t have helped its driver push it straight again?’ I asked.
‘There wasn’t any driver. No one at all. And the car doors were locked, and the hand-brake was full on, and he’d left the thing in gear. The stinking bastard.’ Peter seldom used such strong language. ‘Another man had driven up the hill behind me and we both tried to shift the Jag., but it was absolutely hopeless. We had to reverse again for miles, and he had to go first, and he wouldn’t hurry a yard... he had a new car and he was afraid of scratching it.’
‘It’s very bad luck,’ I said inadequately.
‘Bad luck!’ he repeated explosively, apparently near to tears. ‘It’s more than bad luck it’s... it’s awful. I can’t afford... I need the money...’ He stopped talking and swallowed several times, and sniffed. ‘We’ve got a big mortgage to pay off,’ he said, ‘and I didn’t know babies could cost so much. And my wife had to stop working, which we hadn’t reckoned on... we didn’t mean to have a baby so soon.’
I remembered vividly the new little bungalow with its cheap, blue linoleum, its home-made terra-cotta rugs, its bare, bare furnishings. And he had a car to run and now a child to keep. I saw that the loss of a ten guinea riding fee was a calamity.
He had not been booked for any other ride that afternoon, and he spent the whole day mooching about the weighing-room so as to be under the eye of any trainers looking hurriedly for a jockey. He wore a desperate, hunted look all the time, and I knew that that alone would have discouraged me, had I been a trainer. He left, unemployed and disconsolate, just before the fifth race, having done himself no good at all in the eyes of every trainer at the meeting.
I watched him trailing off to the car park as I walked down from the weighing-room to the parade ring for my own one-and-only ride of the day, and I felt a surge of irritation against him. Why couldn’t he pretend a little, make light of his misfortune, shrug if off? And why above all didn’t he leave himself a margin for error on his journeys, when unprompt arrivals cost him so much? A punctured tyre, a windscreen shattered by a flying stone, anything might make him late. It didn’t have to be as unforeseeable as a tank carrier or a locked Jaguar wedged immovably across his path. And what a dismal coincidence, I reflected, that it should have happened twice in a week.