Joanna switched off. She said, ‘Are you absolutely determined to go?’
‘Absolutely,’ I said.
‘Well... I’d better tell you... I watched that programme last night on television. Turf Talk.’
‘Did you now!’ I said, surprised.
‘I sometimes do, since you were on it. If I’m in. Anyway I watched last night.’
‘And?’ I prompted.
‘He,’ she said, neither of us needing help to know who she meant, ‘he talked about the Midwinter Cup nearly all the time; potted biographies of the horses and trainers, and so on. I was waiting to hear him mention you, but he didn’t. He just went on and on about how superb Template is; not a word about you. But what I thought you’d like to know is that he said that as it was such an important race he personally would be commentating the finish today, and that he personally would also interview the winning jockey afterwards. If only you can win, he’ll have to describe you doing it, which would be a bitter enough pill, and then congratulate you publicly in full view of several million people.’
I gazed at her, awestruck.
‘That’s a great thought,’ I said.
‘Like he interviewed you after that race on Boxing Day,’ she added.
‘That was the race that sealed my fate with him, I imagine.’ I said. ‘And you seem to have done some fairly extensive viewing, if I may say so.’
She looked taken aback. ‘Well... didn’t I see you sitting unobtrusively at the back of a concert I gave in Birmingham one night last summer?’
‘I thought those lights were supposed to dazzle you,’ I said.
‘You’d be surprised,’ she said.
I pushed back the bedclothes. The black trews looked even more incongruous in the daylight.
‘I’d better get going,’ I said. ‘What do you have in the way of disinfectant and bandages, and a razor?’
‘Only a few minute bits of Elastoplast,’ she said apologetically, ‘and the razor I de-fuzz my legs with. There’s a chemist two roads away though, who will be open by now. I’ll make a list.’ She wrote it on an old envelope.
‘And A.P.C. tablets,’ I said. ‘They are better than just aspirins.’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘I won’t be long.’
When she had gone I got out of bed and went into the bathroom. It’s easy enough to say, but it wasn’t all that easy to do, since I felt as if some over-zealous laundress had fed me several times through a mangle. It was exasperating, I thought bitterly, how much havoc Kemp-Lore had worked on my body by such simple means. I turned on the taps, took off the trews and socks, and stepped into the bath. The blue cardigan had stuck to my back and the shirt bandages to my wrists, so I lay down in the hot water without tugging at them and waited for them to soak off.
Gradually the heat did its customary work of unlocking the worst of the cramps, until I could rotate my shoulders and turn my head from side to side without feeling that I was tearing something adrift. Every few minutes I added more hot water, so that by the time Joanna came back I was up to my throat in it and steaming nicely, warm to the backbone and beyond.
She had dried my trousers and pants overnight, and she pressed them for me while I eased myself out of the blue cardigan and reluctantly got out of the bath. I put on the trousers and watched her setting out her purchases on the kitchen table, a dark lock of hair falling forward into her eyes and a look of concentration firming her mouth. Quite a girl.
I sat down at the table and she bathed the grazes with disinfectant, dried them, and covered them with large pieces of lint spread with zinc-and-castor-oil ointment which she stuck on with adhesive tape. She was neat and quick, and her touch was light.
‘Most of the dirt came out in the bath luckily,’ she observed, busy with the scissors. ‘You’ve got quite an impressive set of muscles, haven’t you? You must be strong... I didn’t realise.’
‘At the moment I’ve got an impressive set of jellies,’ I sighed. ‘Very wobbly, very weak.’ And aching steadily, though there wasn’t any point in saying so.
She went into the other room, rummaged in a drawer, and came back with another cardigan. Pale green, this time; the colour suited my state of health rather well, I thought.
‘I’ll buy you some new ones,’ I said, stretching it across my chest to do up the fancy buttons.
‘Don’t bother,’ she said, ‘I loathe both of them.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, and she laughed.
I put the anorak on again on top of the jersey and pushed the knitted cuffs up my forearms. Joanna slowly unwound the blood-stained bandages on my wrists. They still stuck a bit in spite of the soaking, and what lay underneath was a pretty disturbing sight, even to me, now that we could see it in daylight.
‘I can’t deal with this,’ she said positively. ‘You must go to a doctor.’
‘This evening,’ I said. ‘Put some more bandages on, for now.’
‘It’s too deep,’ she said. ‘It’s too easy to get it infected. You can’t ride like this, Rob, really you can’t.’
‘I can,’ I said. ‘I’ll dunk them in a bowl of Dettol for a while, and then you wrap them up again. Nice and flat, so they won’t show.’
‘Don’t they hurt?’ she said.
I didn’t answer.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Silly question.’ She sighed, and fetched a bowl full of warm water, pouring in Dettol so that it turned a milky white, and I soaked my wrists in it for ten minutes.
‘That’s fixed the infection,’ I said. ‘Now... nice and flat.’
She did as I asked, fastening the ends of the bandages down with little gold safety pins. When she had finished the white cuffs looked tidy and narrow, and I knew they would be unnoticeable under racing colours.
‘Perfect,’ I said appreciatively, pulling down the anorak sleeves to cover them. ‘Thank you, Florence.’
‘And Nightingale to you, too,’ she said, making a face at me. ‘When are you going to the police?’
‘I’m not. I told you,’ I said. ‘I’m not going at all. I meant what I said last night.’
‘But why not; why not?’ She didn’t understand. ‘You could get him prosecuted for assault or for causing grievous bodily harm, or whatever the technical term is.’
I said, ‘I’d rather fight my own battles... and anyway, I can’t face the thought of telling the police what happened last night, or being examined by their doctors, and photographed; or standing up in court, if it came to that, and answering questions about it in public, and having the whole rotten lot printed in gory detail in the papers. I just can’t face it, that’s all.’
‘Oh,’ she said slowly. ‘I suppose it would be a bit of an ordeal, if you look at it like that. Perhaps you feel humiliated... is that it?’
‘You may be rather bruisingly right,’ I admitted grudgingly, thinking about it. ‘And I’ll keep my humiliation to myself, if you don’t mind.’
She laughed. ‘You don’t need to feel any,’ she said. ‘Men are funny creatures.’
The pity about hot baths is that although they loosen one up beautifully for the time being, the effect does not last; one has to consolidate the position by exercise. And exercise, my battered muscles protested, was just what they would least enjoy; all the same I did a few rather half-hearted bend-stretch arm movements while Joanna scrambled us some eggs, and after we had eaten and I had shaved I went back to it with more resolution, knowing that if I didn’t get on to Template’s back in a reasonably supple condition he had no chance of winning. It wouldn’t help anyone if I fell off at the first fence.