Peter’s wife opened the white front door and came down the path to meet us. She was, I saw, very soon to have a child. She herself looked hardly old enough to have left school. She spoke shyly.
‘Do come in,’ she said, shaking my hand. ‘Peter telephoned to say you were coming, and everything is ready.’
I followed her into the bungalow. It was extremely neat and clean and smelled of furniture polish. All the floors were covered with mottled soft blue linoleum with a few terra-cotta rugs scattered about. Peter’s wife, she told me during the evening, had made the rugs herself.
In the sitting-room there was only a sofa, a television set, and a dining-table with four chairs. The bareness of the room was to some extent disguised by one wall being almost completely covered in photographs. They had been framed by Peter himself and were edged in passe-partout in several different bright colours, so that the effect was gay and cheerful. Peter showed them to me while his wife cooked the dinner.
They were clearly devoted to each other. It showed in every glance, every word, every touch. They seemed very well matched; good-natured, quickly moved to sympathy, sensitive, and with not a vestige of a sense of humour between them.
‘How long have you two been married?’ I asked, biting into a wedge of cheese.
Peter said, ‘Nine months,’ and his wife blushed beguilingly.
We cleared away the dishes and washed them, and spent the evening watching television and talking about racing. When we went to bed they apologised for the state of my bedroom.
‘We haven’t furnished it properly yet,’ said Peter’s wife, looking at me with anxious eyes.
‘I’ll be very comfortable indeed,’ I said. ‘You are so kind to have had me at all.’ She smiled happily.
The bedroom contained a bed and a chair only. There was the blue linoleum on the floor, with a terra-cotta rug. A small mirror on the wall, some thin rust-coloured curtains at the window, and a hook and two hangers on the back of the door to serve as a wardrobe. I slept well.
In the morning, after breakfast, Peter did a lot of house-hold jobs while his wife showed me round the small garden. She seemed to know every flower and growing vegetable individually. The plants were cherished as thoroughly as the house.
‘Peter does most of my housework just now,’ she said, looking fondly back to the house. ‘The baby is due in six days. He says I mustn’t strain myself.’
‘He is a most considerate husband,’ I said.
‘The best in the world,’ she said fervently.
It was because Peter insisted at the last minute on driving down to the village shop to fetch a loaf of bread to save his wife the walk that we started out for Cheltenham later than we had intended.
We wound up the twisty hill too fast for prudence, but nothing luckily was on its way down. At least, it seemed to be lucky until we had streaked across the farm land and were slowing down to approach the turn into the main road. That was when we first saw the tank carrier. It was slewed across the road diagonally, completely blocking the way.
Peter’s urgent tooting on the horn produced one soldier, who ambled over to the car and spoke soothingly.
‘I’m very sorry, sir, but we were looking for the road to Timberley’.
‘You turned too soon. It’s the next road on the right,’ said Peter impatiently.
‘Yes, I know,’ said the soldier. ‘We realised we had turned too soon, and my mate tried to back out again, but he made a right mess of it, and we’ve hit the hedge on the other side. As a matter of fact,’ he said casually, ‘we’re ruddy well stuck. My mate’s just hitched a lorry to go and ring up our H.Q. about it.’
We both got out of the car to have a look, but it was true. The great unwieldy articulated tank carrier was solidly jammed across the mouth of the narrow lane, and the driver had gone.
Pale and grim, Peter climbed back into his seat with me beside him. He had to reverse for a quarter of a mile before we came to a gateway he could turn the car in: then we back-tracked down the long bend-ridden hill, raced through the village and out on to the road on the far side. It led south, away from Cheltenham, and we had to make a long detour to get back to the right direction. Altogether the tank carrier put at least twelve miles on to our journey.
Several times Peter said, ‘I’ll be late,’ in a despairing tone of voice. He was, I knew, due to ride in the first race, and the trainer for whom he rode liked him to report to him in the weighing-room an hour earlier. Trainers had to state the name of the jockey who would be riding their horse at least three-quarters of an hour before the event: if they took a chance and declared a jockey who had not arrived, and then he did not arrive at all, however good the reason, the trainer was in trouble with the stewards. Peter rode for a man who never took this risk. If his jockey was not there an hour before the race, he found a substitute; and since Peter was his jockey, the rule was a good one, because he was by nature a last-minute rusher who left no time margin for things to go wrong.
We reached the racecourse just forty-three minutes before the first race. Peter sprinted from the car-park, but he had some way to go and we both knew that he wouldn’t do it. As I followed him more slowly and walked across the big expanse of tarmac towards the weighing room I heard the click of the loud speakers being turned on, and the announcer began to recite the runners and riders of the first race. P. Cloony was not among them.
I found him in the changing-room, sitting on the bench with his head in his hands.
‘He didn’t wait,’ he said miserably. ‘He didn’t wait. I knew he wouldn’t. I knew it. He’s put Ingersoll up instead.’
I looked across the room to where Tick-Tock was pulling his boots up over his nylon stockings. He already wore the scarlet jersey which should have been Peter’s. He caught my eye and grimaced and shook his head in sympathy: but it was not his fault he had been given the ride, and he had no need to be too apologetic.
The worst of it was that Tick-Tock won. I was standing beside Peter on the jockeys’ stand when the scarlet colours skated by the winning post, and he made a choking sound as if he were about to burst into tears. He managed not to, but there was a certain dampness about his eyes and his face had changed to a bloodless, greyish white.
‘Never mind,’ I said awkwardly, embarrassed for him. ‘It’s not the end of the world.’
It had been unfortunate that we had arrived so late, but the trainer he rode for was a reasonable man, if impatient, and there was no question of his not engaging him in future. Peter did in fact ride for him again that same afternoon, but the horse ran less well than was expected, and pulled up lame. My last glimpse of him showed a face still dragged down in lines of disappointment and he was boring everyone in the weighing-room by harping on the tank carrier over and over again.
For myself, things went slightly better. The novice chaser fell at the water jump, but went down slowly and I suffered nothing but grass stains on my breeches.
The young hurdler I was to ride for James Axminster in the last race on the card had as vile a reputation as his stable-mate the previous day and I had made completing the race my sole target. But for some reason the wayward animal and I got on very well together from the start, and to my surprise, an emotion shared by every single person present, we came over the last hurdle in second place and passed the leading horse on the uphill stretch to the winning post. The odds-on favourite finished fourth. It was my second win of the season, and my first ever at Cheltenham: and it was greeted with dead silence.
I found myself trying to explain it away to James Axminster in the winner’s unsaddling enclosure.