Neither Axminster nor Lord Tirrold had given me any orders in the paddock on how to shape the race. They had been too concerned about Pip, whom they had just briefly visited. The sight of his shattered leg had left them upset and preoccupied.
Axminster said only, ‘Do the best you can, Rob,’ and Lord Tirrold, unusually tactless for so diplomatic a man, said gloomily, ‘I put a hundred on Template this morning. Oh, well, it’s too late to cancel it, I suppose.’ Then seeing my rueful amusement added, ‘I beg your pardon, Rob. I’m sure you’ll do splendidly.’ But he did not sound convinced.
As the pattern of the race shifted and changed, I concentrated solely on keeping Template lying in about fourth position in the field of twelve runners. To be farther back meant leaving him a lot to do at the end, and to be farther forward meant that one could not see how well or how badly everyone else was going. Template jumped himself into third place at the second last fence, and was still not under pressure. Coming towards the last I brought him to the outside, to give him a clear view, and urged him on. His stride immediately quickened. He took off so far in front of the fence that for a heart-breaking second I was sure he would land squarely on top of it, but I had under-estimated his power. He landed yards out on the far side, collecting himself without faltering and surged ahead towards the winning post.
One of the two horses close in front had been passed in mid-air over the fence. There remained only a chestnut to be beaten. Only. Only the favourite, the choice of the critics, the public and the press. No disgrace, I fleetingly thought, to be beaten only by him.
I dug my knees into Template’s sides and gave him two taps with the whip down his shoulder. He needed only this signal, I found, to put every ounce into getting to the front. He stretched his neck out and flattened his stride, and I knelt on his withers and squeezed him and moved with his rhythm, and kept my whip still for fear of disturbing him. He put his head in front of the chestnut’s five strides from the winning post, and kept it there.
I was almost too exhausted to unbuckle the saddle. There was a cheer as we went into the unsaddling enclosure, and a lot of smiling faces, and some complimentary things were said, but I felt too weak and breathless to enjoy them. No race had ever before taken so much out of me. Nor given me so much, either.
Surprisingly Lord Tirrold and Axminster were almost subdued.
‘That was all right, then,’ said Axminster, the lower teeth glimmering in a smile.
‘He’s a wonderful horse,’ I said fervently.
‘Yes,’ said Lord Tirrold, ‘he is.’ He patted the dark sweating neck.
Axminster said, ‘Don’t hang about then, Rob. Go and weigh in. You haven’t any time to waste. You’re riding in the next race. And the one after.’
I stared at him.
‘Well, what did you expect?’ he said. ‘Pip’s obviously going to be unfit for months. I took you on to ride second to him, and you will stand in for him until he comes back.’
Tick-Tock said, ‘Some people would climb out of a septic tank smelling of lavender.’
He was waiting for me to change at the end of the afternoon.
‘Six weeks ago you were scrounging rides. Then you get yourself on television as a failure and make it obvious you aren’t one. Sunday newspapers write columns about you and your version of the creed gets a splash in The Times as well. Now you do the understudy-into-star routine, and all that jazz. And properly, too. Three winners in one afternoon. What a nerve.’
I grinned at him. ‘What goes up must come down. You can pick up the pieces later on.’
I tied my tie and brushed my hair, and looked in the mirror at the fatuous smile I could not remove from my face. Days like this don’t happen very often, I thought.
‘Let’s go and see Pip,’ I said abruptly, turning round.
‘Okay,’ he agreed.
We asked the first-aid men where Pip had been taken, and as they were leaving in any case they gave us a lift to the hospital in the ambulance. It was not until they told us that we realised how seriously the leg was broken.
We saw Pip only for a few moments. He lay in a cubicle in the casualty department, a cradle over his leg and blankets up to his chin. A brisk nurse told us he was going to the operating theatre within minutes and not to disturb the patient, as he had been given his pre-med. ‘But you can say hello,’ she said, ‘as you’ve come.’
Hello was just about all we did say. Pip looked terribly pale and his eyes were fuzzy, but he said weakly, ‘Who won the big race?’
‘Template,’ I said, almost apologetically.
‘You?’
I nodded. He smiled faintly. ‘You’ll ride the lot now, then.’
‘I’ll keep them warm for you,’ I said. ‘You won’t be long.’
‘Three bloody months.’ He shut his eyes. ‘Three bloody months.’
The nurse came back with a stretcher trolley and two khaki-overalled porters, and asked us to leave. We waited outside in the hall, and saw them trundle Pip off towards the open lift.
‘He’ll be four months at least with a leg like that,’ said Tick-Tock. ‘He might just be ready for Cheltenham in March. Just in time to take back all the horses and do you out of a chance in the Champion Hurdle and the Gold Cup.’
‘It can’t be helped,’ I said. ‘It’s only fair. And anything can happen before then.’
I think Axminster had trouble persuading some of his owners that I was capable of taking Pip’s place, because I didn’t ride all of the stable’s horses, not at first. But gradually as the weeks went by and I seemed to make no unforgivable bloomers, fewer and fewer other jockeys were engaged. I became used to seeing my name continually in the number boards, to riding three or four races a day, to going back to my digs contentedly tired in body and mind and waking the next morning with energy and eagerness. In some ways, I even became used to winning. It was no longer a rarity for me to be led into the first’s enclosure, or to talk to delighted owners, or to see my picture in the sporting papers.
I began earning a good deal of money, but I spent very little of it. There was always the knowledge, hovering in the background, that my prosperity was temporary. Pip’s leg was mending. Tick-Tock and I decided, however, to share the cost of buying a car. It was a second-hand cream coloured Mini-Cooper which did forty miles to the gallon on a long run and could shift along at a steady seventy on the flat, and a friend of Tick-Tock’s who kept a garage had recommended it to him as a bargain.
‘All we want now are some leopard-skin seat covers and a couple of blondes in the back,’ said Tick-Tock, as we dusted the small vehicle parked outside my digs, ‘and we’ll look like one of those gracious living advertisements in the Tatler.’ He lifted up the bonnet and took at least his tenth look at the engine. ‘A beautiful job of design,’ he said fondly.
Gracious living, good design or not, the little car smoothed our paths considerably, and within a fortnight I could not imagine how we had ever managed without it. Tick-Tock kept it where he lived, seven miles away, near the stable he rode for, and came to collect me whenever Axminster himself was not taking me to meetings in his own car. Race trains came and went without any further support from either of us as we whizzed homewards through the black December afternoons in our cosy box on wheels.
While the Gods heaped good fortune on my head, others fared badly.
Grant had offered neither explanation nor apology for hitting me on the nose. He had not, in fact, spoken one word to me since that day, but as at the same time he had also stopped borrowing my kit, I was not sure that I minded. He withdrew more and more into himself. The inner volcano of violence showed itself only in the stiffness of his body and the tightness of his lips, which seemed always to be compressed in fury. He loathed to be touched, even accidentally, and would swing round threateningly if anyone bumped into him in the changing-room. With my peg at most meetings still next to his I had knocked into him several times, for however hard I tried it was impossible in those cramped quarters not to, and the glare he gave me each time was frankly murderous.