‘Are James’s plans fixed for the Midwinter Cup?’ he asked casually, his eyes on the horses. I smiled. But he had his job to do, I supposed, and there was no harm in telling him.
‘Template runs, all being well,’ I said.
‘And you ride him?’
‘Yes,’ I agreed.
‘How is Pip getting along?’ he asked, wheezing quietly.
‘They think his leg is mending well, but he is still in plaster,’ I said. ‘It comes off next week, I believe, and he might be ready for Cheltenham, but of course he won’t be fit for the Midwinter.’
The race in question was a richly endowed new event at Ascot, introduced to provide a high spot in mid-February, and nicely timed to give three full weeks for recovery and re-tuning before the Cheltenham Gold Cup. It lay almost a month ahead, on that day at Dunstable, and I was looking forward to it particularly as it seemed possible that it would be my last chance on Template. Pip would do his very best to be fit to ride him in the Gold Cup, and so would I have done in his place.
‘What chance do you give Template in the Midwinter?’ Maurice asked, watching the start through his race glasses.
‘Oh, I hope he’ll win,’ I said, grinning. ‘You can quote me.’
‘I probably will,’ he agreed, grinning back. We watched the race together, and such was the effect of his personality that I left Dunstable quite cheerfully, the dismal two days’ results temporarily forgotten.
Eight
It was a false security. My charmed run of good luck had ended with a vengeance, and Dunstable proved to be only the fringe of the whirlpool. During the next two weeks I rode seventeen horses. Fifteen of them finished in the rear of the field, and in only two cases was this a fair result.
I couldn’t understand it. As far as I knew there was no difference in my riding, and it was unbelievable that my mounts should all lose their form simultaneously. I began to worry about it, and that didn’t help, as I could feel my confidence oozing away as each disturbing and embarrassing day passed.
There was one grey mare I particularly liked riding because of the speed of her reactions: she often seemed to know what I intended to do a split second before I gave her signals, rather as if she had sized up the situation as quickly as I had and was already taking independent action. She was sweet tempered and silken mouthed, and jumped magnificently. I liked her owner too, a short jolly farmer with a thick Norfolk accent, and while we watched her walk round the parade ring before her race he commiserated with me on my bad luck and said, ‘Never mind, lad. The mare will put you right. She’ll not fail you. You’ll do all right on her, never fear.’
I went out smiling to the race because I too believed I would do all right on her. But that week she might have been another horse. Same colour, same size, same pretty head. But no zip. It was like driving a car with four flat tyres.
The jolly farmer looked less jolly and more pensive when I brought her back.
‘She’s not been last ever before, lad,’ he said reproachfully.
We looked her over, but there was nothing wrong with her that we could see, and she wasn’t even blowing very hard.
‘I could get her heart tested I suppose,’ the farmer said doubtfully. ‘Are you sure you gave her her head, lad?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But she had no enthusiasm at all today.’
The farmer shook his head, doleful and puzzled.
One of the horses I rode belonged to a tall sharp-faced woman who knew a great deal about racing and had no sympathy with bunglers. She laid straight into me with her tongue after I had eased her ultra-expensive new gelding from last into second last place only feet from the winning post.
‘I suppose you realise,’ she said in a loud, hard voice, unashamedly listened to by a large group of racegoers, ‘That in the last five minutes you have succeeded both in halving the value of my horse and in making me look a fool for having paid a fortune for him.’
I apologised. I suggested possibly that her animal needed a little time.
‘Time?’ she repeated angrily. ‘For what? For you to wake up? You speak as if it were my judgment that is at fault, not yours. You lay far too far out of your ground. You should have taken closer order from the beginning...’ Her acid lecture went on and on and on, and I looked at the fine head of her glossy high-bred black gelding and admitted to myself that he was probably a great deal better than he had appeared.
One Wednesday was the big day for a ten-year-old schoolboy with sparkly brown eyes and a conspiratorial grin. His wealthy eccentric grandmother, having discovered that there was no minimum age laid down for racehorse owners, had given Hugo a colossal chestnut ’chaser twice his height, and was considerate enough to foot the training bills as well.
I had become firm friends with Hugo. Knowing that I saw his horse most mornings at James’s, he used to send me tiny parcels containing lumps of sugar filched from the dining table at his prep. school, which I conscientiously passed on to their intended destination: and I used to write back to Hugo, giving him quite detailed accounts of how his giant pet was progressing.
On that Wednesday Hugo had not only begged a day off from school to see his horse run, but had brought three friends with him. The four of them stood with me and James in the parade ring, Hugo’s mother being the rare sort who liked her son to enjoy his limelight alone. As I had walked down from the weighing-room she had smiled broadly to me from her station on the rails.
The four little boys were earnest and excited, and James and I had great fun with them before the race, treating them with seriousness and as man-to-man, which they obviously appreciated. This time, I promised myself, this time, for Hugo, I will win. I must.
But the big chestnut jumped very clumsily that day. On the far side of nearly every fence he ducked his head, and once, to prevent myself being hauled over in a somersault, I had to stretch forward down his neck with one hand only, leaving go of the reins entirely with the other. The free arm, swinging up sideways, helped to bring my weight far enough back to keep me in the saddle, but the gesture known as ‘calling a cab’ was not going to earn me any bonus points with James, who had denounced it often as the style of ‘bad, tired, scared or unfit amateurs.’
Hugo’s little face was pink when I dismounted, and the three friends glumly shuffled their feet behind him. With them as witnesses there would be no chance of Hugo smoothing over the disaster with the rest of his schoolmates.
‘I’m very sorry, Hugo,’ I said sincerely, apologising for everything — myself, the horse, the race, and the miserliness of fate.
He answered with a stoicism which would have been a lesson to many of his seniors. ‘I expect it was an off day,’ he said kindly. ‘And anyway, someone always has to be last. That’s what Daddy said when I came bottom in History.’ He looked at the chestnut forgivingly, and said to me, ‘I expect he’s keen really, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Keen, very.’
‘Well,’ said Hugo, turning bravely to the friends. ‘That’s that, then. We might as well have tea.’
Failures like these were too numerous to escape anyone’s attention, but as the days passed I noticed a change in the way people spoke to me. One or two, and Corin in particular, showed something like contempt. Others looked uncomfortable, others sympathetic, others pitying. Heads turned towards me wherever I went, and I could almost feel the wave of gossip I left in my wake. I didn’t know exactly what they were saying, so I asked Tick-Tock.
‘Pay no attention,’ he said. ‘Ride a couple of winners and they’ll be throwing the laurel wreaths again, and back-pedalling on everything they’re saying now. It’s bad-patchville, chum, that’s all.’