And that was all I could get out of him.
One Thursday evening James telephoned to my digs and asked me to go up to his house. I walked up in the dark, rather miserably wondering whether he, like two other trainers that day, was going to find an excuse for putting someone else up on his horses. I couldn’t blame him. Owners could make it impossible for him to continue with a jockey so thoroughly in the doldrums.
James called me into his office, a square room joining his house to the stable yard. Its walls were covered with racing photographs, bookshelves, a long row of racing colours on clothes hangers, and filing cabinets. A huge roll-top desk stood in front of the window, which looked out on to the yard. There were three broken-springed armchairs with faded chintz covers, a decrepit Turkish carpet on the floor, and a red-hot coal fire in the grate. I had spent a good many hours there in the past three months, discussing past performances and future plans.
James waited for me and stood aside to let me go in first. He followed me in and shut the door, and faced me almost aggressively across the familiar room.
‘I hear,’ he said without preamble, ‘that you have lost your nerve.’
The room was very still. The fire crackled slightly. A horse in a near-by loose box banged the floor with his hoof. I stared at James, and he stared straight back, gravely.
I didn’t answer. The silence lengthened. It was not a surprise. I had guessed what was being said about me when Tick-Tock had refused to tell me what it was.
‘No one is to blame for losing his nerve,’ James said non-committally. ‘But a trainer cannot continue to employ someone to whom it has happened.’
I still said nothing.
He waited for a few seconds, and went on, ‘You have been showing the classic symptoms... trailing round nearly last, pulling up for no clear reason, never going fast enough to keep warm, and calling a cab. Keeping at the back out of trouble, that’s what you’ve been doing.’
I thought about it, rather numbly.
‘A few weeks ago,’ he said, ‘I promised you that if I heard any rumours about you I would make sure they were true before I believed them. Do you remember?’
I nodded.
‘I heard this rumour last Saturday,’ he said. ‘Several people sympathised with me because my jockey had lost his nerve. I didn’t believe it. I have watched you closely ever since.’
I waited dumbly for the axe. During the week I had been last five times out of seven.
He walked abruptly over to an armchair by the fire and sat down heavily.
Irritably he said, ‘Oh sit down, Rob. Don’t just stand there like a stricken ox, saying nothing.’
I sat down and looked at the fire.
‘I expected you to deny it,’ he said in a tired voice. ‘Is it true, then?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Is that all you’ve got to say? It isn’t enough. What has happened to you? You owe me an explanation.’
I owed him much more than an explanation.
‘I can’t explain,’ I said despairingly. ‘Every horse I’ve ridden in the last three weeks seems to have had its feet dipped in treacle. The difference is in the horses... I am the same.’ It sounded futile and incredible, even to me.
‘You have certainly lost your touch,’ he said slowly. ‘Perhaps Ballerton is right...’
‘Ballerton?’ I said sharply.
‘He’s always said you were not as good as you were made out to be, and that I’d pushed you on too fast... given you a top job when you weren’t ready for it. Today he has been going round smugly saying “I told you so”. He can’t leave the subject alone, he’s so pleased.’
‘I’m sorry, James,’ I said.
‘Are you ill, or something?’ he asked exasperatedly.
‘No,’ I said.
‘They say the fall you had three weeks ago was what frightened you — the day you got knocked out and your horse rolled on you. But you were all right going home, weren’t you? I remember you being a bit sore, but you didn’t seem in the least scared of falling again.’
‘I didn’t give that fall another thought,’ I said.
‘Then why, Rob, why?’
But I shook my head. I didn’t know why.
He stood up and opened a cupboard which contained bottles and glasses, poured out two whiskys, and handed one to me.
‘I can’t convince myself yet that you’ve lost your nerve,’ he said. ‘Remembering the way you rode Template on Boxing Day, only a month ago, it seems impossible. No one could change so fundamentally in so short a time. Before I took you on, wasn’t it your stock in trade to ride all the rough and dangerous horses that trainers didn’t want to risk their best jockeys on? That’s why I first engaged you, I remember it clearly. And all those years you spent in wherever it was as a stockman, and that spell in a rodeo... you aren’t the sort of man to lose his nerve suddenly and for nothing, and especially not when you’re in the middle of a most spectacularly successful season.’
I smiled for almost the first time that day, realising how deeply I wanted him not to lose faith in me.
I said, ‘I feel as if I’m fighting a fog. I tried everything I knew today to get those horses to go faster, but they were all half-dead. Or I was. I don’t know... it’s a pretty ghastly mess.’
‘I’m afraid it is,’ he said gloomily. ‘And I’m having owner trouble about it, as you can imagine. All the original doubters are doubting again. I can’t reassure them... it’s like a Stock Exchange crash; catching. And you’re the bad stock that’s being jettisoned.’
‘What rides can I still expect?’ I said.
He sighed. ‘I don’t exactly know. You can have all the Broome runners because he’s on a cruise in the Mediterranean and won’t hear the rumours for a while. And my two as well; they both run next week. For the rest, we’ll have to wait and see.’
I could hardly bring myself to say it, but I had to know.
‘How about Template?’ I asked.
He looked at me steadily. ‘I haven’t heard from George Tirrold,’ he said. ‘I think he will agree that he can’t chuck you out after you’ve won so many races for him. He is not easily stampeded, there’s that to hope for, and it was he who drew my attention to you in the first place. Unless something worse happens,’ he finished judiciously, ‘I think you can still count on riding Template in the Midwinter a week on Saturday. But if you bring him in last in that... it will be the end.’
I stood up and drained the whisky.
‘I’ll win that race,’ I said, ‘whatever the cost, I’ll win it.’
We went silently together to the races the following day, but when we arrived I discovered that two of my three prospective mounts were mine no longer. I had been, in the expressive phrase, jocked off. The owners, the trainer in question brusquely explained, thought they would have no chance of winning if they put me up as planned. Very sorry and all that, he said, but no dice.
I stood on the stands and watched both the horses run welclass="underline" one of them won, and the other finished a close third. I ignored as best I could the speculative, sideways glances from all the other jockeys, trainers and pressmen standing near me. If they wanted to see how I was taking it, that was their affair; just as it was mine if I wanted to conceal from them the inescapable bitterness of these two results.
I went out to ride James’s runner in the fourth race absolutely determined to win. The horse was capable of it on his day, and I knew him to be a competent jumper and a willing battler in a close finish.
We came last.
All the way round I could barely keep him in touch with the rest of the field. In the end he cantered slowly past the winning post with his head down in tiredness, and mine down too, in defeat and humiliation. I felt ill.
It was an effort to go back and face the music. I felt more like driving the Mini-Cooper at top speed into a nice solid tree.