The horse fell at the peak of his forward-to-win acceleration and crashed down at thirty or more miles an hour. Winded, he lay across the jockey for inert moments, then rocked back and forwards vigorously in his struggle to rise again to his feet.
The fall and its aftermath looked truly terrible from where I watched on the stands. The roar of welcome for a favorite racing home to a popular win was hushed to a gasp, to cries, to an endless anxious murmur. The actual winner passed the post without his due cheers, and a thousand pairs of binoculars focused on the unmoving black and white chevrons flat on the green December grass.
The racetrack doctor, though instantly attending him from his following car, couldn’t prevent the fast-gathering group of paramedics and media people from realizing that Martin Stukely, though still semi-conscious, was dying before their eyes. They glimpsed the blood sliding frothily out of the jockey’s mouth, choking him as the sharp ends of broken ribs tore his lungs apart. They described it, cough by groan, in their news reports.
The doctor and paramedics loaded Martin just alive into the waiting ambulance and as they set off to the hospital they worked desperately with transfusions and oxygen, but quietly, before the journey ended, the jockey lost his race.
Priam, not normally a man of emotion, wept without shame as he later collected Martin’s belongings, including his car keys, from the changing room. Sniffing, blowing his nose, accompanied by Lloyd Baxter, who looked annoyed rather than grief-stricken, Priam Jones offered to return me to my place of business in Broadway, though not to my home in the hills, as he intended to go in the opposite direction from there, to see Bon-Bon, to give her comfort.
I asked if he would take me on with him to see Bon-Bon. He refused. Bon-Bon wanted Priam alone, he said. She had said so, devastated, on the telephone.
Lloyd Baxter, Priam added, would now also be off-loaded at Broadway. Priam had got him the last available room in the hotel there, the Wychwood Dragon. It was all arranged.
Lloyd Baxter glowered at the world, at his trainer, at me, at fate. He should, he thought, have won the Cup. He had been robbed. Though his horse was unharmed, his feelings for his dead jockey seemed to be resentment, not regret.
As Priam, shoulders drooping, and Baxter, frowning heavily, set off ahead of us towards the car park, Martin’s valet hurried after me, calling my name. I stopped, and turned towards him, and into my hands he thrust the lightweight racing saddle that, strapped firmly to Tallahassee’s back, had helped to deal out damage and death.
The stirrups, with the leathers, were folded over the saddle plate, and were kept in place by the long girth wound around and around. The sight of the girth-wrapped piece of professional equipment, like my newly dead mother’s Hasselblad camera, bleakly rammed into one’s consciousness the gritty message that their owners would never come back. It was Martin’s empty saddle that set me missing him painfully.
Eddie, the valet, was elderly, bald and, in Martin’s estimation, hardworking and unable to do wrong. He turned to go back to the changing room but then stopped, fumbled in the deep front pocket of the apron of his trade and, producing a brown paper-wrapped package, called after me to wait.
“Someone gave this to Martin to give to you,” he shouted, coming back and holding it out for me to take. “Martin asked me to give it back to him when he was leaving to go home, so he could pass it on to you... but of course...” He swallowed, his voice breaking. “He’s gone.”
I asked. “Who gave it to him?”
The valet didn’t know. He was sure, though, that Martin himself knew, because he had been joking about its being worth a million, and Eddie was clear that the ultimate destination of the parcel had been Gerard Logan, Martin’s friend.
I took the package and, thanking him, put it into my raincoat pocket, and we spent a mutual moment of sharp sadness for the gap we already felt in our lives. I supposed, as he turned to hurry back to his chores in the changing room, and I continued into the car park, that I might have gone to the races for the last time, that without Martin’s input the fun might have flown.
Priam’s tears welled up again at the significance of the empty saddle, and Lloyd Baxter shook his head with disapproval. Priam recovered enough, however, to start Martin’s car and drive it to Broadway, where, as he’d intended, he off-loaded both me and Lloyd Baxter outside the Wychwood Dragon and himself departed in speechless gloom towards Bon-Bon and her fatherless brood.
Lloyd Baxter paid me no attention but strode without pleasure into the hotel. During the journey from the racetrack he’d complained to Priam that his overnight bag was in Priam’s house. He’d gone by hired car from Staverton airfield, intending to spend the evening at Priam’s now canceled New Year’s Eve party, celebrating a win in the Gold Coffee Cup before flying away the following morning to his thousand-acre estate in Northum berland. Priam’s assertion that, after seeing Martin’s family, he would himself ferry the bag to the hotel, left Tallahassee’s owner unmollified. The whole afternoon had been a disaster, he grumbled, and in his voice one could hear undertones of an intention to change to a different trainer.
My own glass business lay a few yards away from the Wychwood Dragon on the opposite side of the road. If one looked across from outside the hotel, the gallery’s windows seemed to glitter with ultra-bright light, which they did from breakfast to midnight every day of the year.
I walked across the road wishing that time could be reversed to yesterday: wishing that bright-eyed Martin would march through my door suggesting improbable glass sculptures that in fact, when I made them, won both commissions and kudos. He had become fascinated by the actual composition of glass and never seemed to tire of watching whenever I mixed the basic ingredients myself, instead of always buying it the easy way — off the shelf.
The ready-made stuff, which came in two-hundred-kilo drums, looked like small opaque marbles, or large gray peas, half the size of the polished clear-glass toys. I used the simple option regularly, as it came pure and clean, and melted without flaws.
When he first watched me load the tank of the furnace with a week’s supply of the round gray pebbles, he repeated aloud the listed ingredients, “Eighty percent of the mix is white silica sand from the Dead Sea. Ten percent is soda ash. Then add small specific amounts of antimony, barium, calcium and arsenic per fifty pounds of weight. If you want to color the glass blue, use ground lapis lazuli or cobalt. If you want yellow, use cadmium, which changes with heat to orange and red and I don’t believe it.”
“That’s soda crystal glass.” I nodded, smiling. “I use it all the time as it’s safe in every way for eating or drinking from. Babies can lick it.”
He gazed at me in surprise. “Isn’t all glass safe to suck?”
“Well... no. You have to be exceedingly careful making things with lead. Lead crystal. Lovely stuff. But lead is mega mega poisonous. Lead silicate, that is, that’s used for glass. It’s a rusty red powder and in its raw state you have to keep it strictly separate from everything else and be terribly meticulous about locking it up.”
“What about cut lead crystal wineglasses?” he asked. “I mean, Bon-Bon’s mother gave us some.”
“Don’t worry,” I told him with humor. “If they haven’t made you ill yet, they probably won’t.”
“Thanks a bunch.”
I went in through my heavy gallery door of beveled glass panes already feeling an emptiness where Martin had been. And it wasn’t as if I had no other friends, I had a pack of beer and wine cronies for whom fizzy water and sauna sweats were on their anathema lists. Two of those, Hickory and Irish, worked for me as assistants and apprentices, though Hickory was approximately my own age and Irish a good deal older. The desire to work with glass quite often struck late in life, as with Irish, who was forty, but sometimes, as with me, the fascination arrived like talking, too early to remember.