Then he heard the horses drifting slowly up from behind, the string of them unlimbering in the slow canter before the start. One of the jockeys was singing and Banks could not bear to raise his eyes, could not bear to see Rock Castle in that winding and nervous line, afraid to know that the horse had come this far. He kept his eyes down, began again his pushing and shoving, and there were only shoes to see: the open toes, pieces of nicked leather, buckles. Heel the color of a biscuit, slipper covered with diamond dust and glue, some child’s boot tied with string. Shoes in motion or fixed at isolated angles amidst tickets, sweet wrappers, straws, and with the bit of stocking or colored sock or bare ankle protruding — shoes which end to end would have made a terrible marching column round the track the horses were soon to charge upon. He could not bear the faces, refused to look at them. On his own face the fresh plaster held the split comers of his mouth together and he was clean — it had not been easy to visit the Baths again but he had forced himself — and his narrow cheeks were shaved and his tie was straight. The only dirt was sleeplessness and he could not rid himself of that.
“Now, Sally, you’ll see a little more from here,” somebody said.
He kept pushing, trying to get beyond the crowd, trying for the north comer, where it was thinner at least. He saw the man with the gray tea-party topper and new supply of yellow, brown, green tickets stuck in the band, and he lowered his eyes again, thought of the night before and drinking-glasses with lipstick on the rims. He thought he should like to try it, try some of that, with Margaret. Once he stopped and lifted his head, but she was not in sight.
Then he was walking easily and into the glare of the hot sun, past the ranked petrol-smelling rows of empty cars, and there were little shattering bursts of light off the wipers and chrome and door handles, and only a few other people strolling here, laughing or pausing in the weeds by the rail. He leaned against a Daimler and tried to breathe. He noticed the pock-faced girl and it was clear she had found her quid: a big man with a sandy bush of mustache and gold links in his cuffs was holding her round the buttocks with one great hand. Another man and woman had their elbows side by side on the rail.
“Look,” said the woman, and he heard no inflection, no rise or fall in her voice, “they’re off.”
Far away, back under clock and pennants, a terrible cheering went up. But it was the woman’s clear statement that made him sick. He pulled his hand away from the radiator cap, set his foot down from the bumper, and tried to get close to her before the thirteen horses of the field should pass.
“Charlie, you’re going to owe me a tonic,” the woman said.
He heard the sound of hoofs and managed to stumble into the shadow of the pair by the rail. He nodded to the woman and she smiled, spoke again to her husband—“You might as well tear up your ticket!”—and he felt the coming breeze, watched a long hair on his sleeve. The mustached man had his back to the race. The girl was trying to see over his shoulder but he prevented her. And then the hair was saved between his fingers and he looked up, began to choke.
The blinders, the tongue tied down, the silver neck sawing in stride; the riders coming knee to knee with tangle of sticks and the noise; dust, the dangerous dust, rising high as a tall tree, and pebbles flying out like shots. He put an arm across his face, whispered Margaret, Margaret, and in the vacuum, the sudden silence, heard no hoofs, no roar, but only the thwacking of the crops and the clear voice of Jimmy Needles: “Make way for the Prince of Denmark … out of my path, St James. …” He knew he must put a stop to it.
“You can’t do that! Grab him, for God’s sake, Charlie!”
But he was over the rail then and into the dust at last. It was a long way to go — directly across the track in the open sun — and he stumbled, tried to hold the hat. He heard his heart — far away a child seemed to be beating it down the center of a street in the End — heard the sound of air being sucked beneath the spot where the constable had landed two heavy blows, and his feet were falling upon the same loose earth so recently struck by iron.
He hadn’t the strength to climb the second fence, instead went between the bars, going down, seeing his own dead shoe for a moment, feeling his hand slipping off the whitewash. Then he was on the green, splashed through an artificial pond, ran headlong into roses and hedges that came up to his shins. It was a park, a lovely picture of a park with a mad crowd down one edge and thirteen horses whirling round. His shoe came down on the blade of a shears some gardener had overlooked. He nearly fell. He would have to be fast, very fast, to stop them now.
He heard his shoes snapping off the thorns and trampling the grass, and yet he seemed only to be drifting, floating across the green. But it was a good run, an uphill run. The wind was catching his saliva when suddenly he veered round the man rising up between the rose bushes with a pistol. He saw the gun-hand, the silencer on the barrel like a medicine bottle, the quickness of Sparrow’s waist-high aim, and then felt both shots approaching, overtaking him, going wild. And he reached the third and final fence, crawled through.
The green, the suspended time was gone. The child pounded on his heart with anonymous rhythm and he found that after all he had been fast enough. There were several seconds in which to take the center of the track, to position himself according to the white rails on his right and left, to find the approaching ball of dust ahead and start slowly ahead to encounter it. Someone fired at him from behind a tree and he began to trot, shoes landing softly, irregularly on the dirt. The tower above the stands was a little Swiss hut in the sky; a fence post was painted black; he heard a siren and saw a dove bursting with air on a bough. I could lean against the post, he thought, I might just take a breath. But the horses came round the turn then and once more his stumbling trot was giving way to a run. And he had the view that a photographer might have except that there was no camera, no truck’s tailgate to stand upon. Only the virgin man-made stretch of track and at one end the horses bunching in fateful heat and at the other end himself — small, yet beyond elimination, whose single presence purported a toppling of the day, a violation of that scene at Aldington, wreckage to horses and little crouching men.
The crowd began to scream.
He was running in final stride, the greatest spread of legs, redness coming across the eyes, the pace so fast that it ceases to be motion, but at its peak becomes the long downhill deathless gliding of a dream until the arms are out, the head thrown back, and the runner is falling as he was falling and waving his arm at Rock Castle’s on-rushing silver shape, at Rock Castle who was about to run him down and fall.
“… the blighter! Look at the little blighter go!” Quietly, holding the girl’s arm in the midst of the crowd: “Let me have the binoculars, Sybilline.” Larry removed his green glasses, blinked once, and, still holding her arm so that the brass knuckles were brilliant and sunken into her flesh, looked through binoculars until the cloud went up.
“He’s crossed us,” whispered Sybilline, “he’s crossed us, hasn’t he?”
Out beyond the oval and past the broken threads of the rail the cloud stopped short and rose, spending itself dark as an explosion’s smoke. Then Larry was done and Sybilline took a look for herself: dust abruptly curling, settling down, horses lying flat with reins in the air, small riders limping among the animals or in circles or off toward the fence. And the silver horse was on its side with Banks and Jimmy Needles underneath. And three dirty-white Humber ambulances were racing up the track.
“Take me out to him … take me out to him, please.”