10 lb Penalty

Nine

So my father went to Westminster and I to Exeter, and the intense month we had spent in getting to know each other receded from a vivid present experience into a calmer, picture-filled memory.

I might not see him for weeks at a time but we talked now often on the telephone. Parliament was still in its summer recess. He would go back as a new boy, as I would, when my first term began.

Meantime I rode Sarah’s Future every morning under Stallworthy’s critical eye and can’t have done as badly as for Vivian Durridge because when I asked if he would enter the chestnut in a race for me — any race would do — he chose a novice ’chase at Wincanton on an inconspicuous Thursday and told me he hoped I’d be worth it as it was costing my father extras in the way of horse transport and shoeing with racing plates, not to mention the entry fee.

Laden thus half with glee and half with guilt, I went with Jim in his car to Wincanton, where Jim declared and saddled the horse and then watched him win with as much disbelief as I felt when I sailed past the post first.

“He flew!” I said, thrilled and astonished, as I unbuckled the saddle in the winner’s enclosure. “He was brilliant.”

“So I saw.”

Jim’s lack of much enthusiasm, I discovered, was rooted in his not having had the faith for a bet. Neither was Stallworthy overjoyed. All he said the next morning was, “You wasted the horse’s best win. You haven’t any sense. If I’d thought for a moment you would go to the front when the favorite fell, I’d have told you to keep the chestnut on a tight rein so we could have put the stable money on him next time out. What your father will say, I can’t imagine.”

What my father said was, “Very well done.”

“But nobody backed it...”

“Don’t you listen to Stallworthy. You listen to me. That horse is for you to do your best on. To win whenever you can. And don’t think I didn’t back it. I have an arrangement with a bookmaker that wherever — whenever — you ride in a race, I am betting on you at starting price. I won on you at twenties yesterday... I’m even learning racing jargon! Always try to win. Understand?”

I said “Yes” weakly.

“And I don’t care if you lose because some other horse is faster. Just keep to the rules and don’t break your neck.”

“OK.”

“Is there anything else you want?”

“Er...”

“You’ll get nowhere if you’re afraid to tell me.”

“I’m not exactly afraid,” I said.

“Well, then?”

“Well... will you telephone Stallworthy? Will you ask him to run your horse in the novice ’chase at Newton Abbot a week tomorrow? He’s entered him but now he won’t want to run him. He’ll say it’s too soon. He’ll say the horse will have to carry a 5-lb. penalty because I won on him yesterday.”

“And will he?”

“Yes, but there aren’t many more races — suitable races, that is — that I can ride him in before term starts. Stallworthy wants to win but I just want to race.”

“Yes, I know.” He paused. “I’ll fix it for Newton Abbot. Anything else?”

“Only... thanks.”

His laugh came down the wire. “Give my regards to Sarah’s Future.”

Feeling a bit foolish, I passed on the message to the chestnut, though in fact I had fallen into a habit of talking to him, sometimes aloud if we were alone, and sometimes in my mind. Although I had ridden a good many horses, he was the first I had known consistently from day to day. He fitted my body size and my level of skill. He undoubtedly recognized me and seemed almost to breathe a sigh of relief when I appeared every morning for exercise. We had won the race at Wincanton because we knew and trusted each other, and when I’d asked him for maximum speed at the end he’d understood from past experience what was needed, and had seemed positively to exult in having at last finished first.

Jim forgave the success and grew interested. Jim was by nature in tune with horses and, as I gradually realized, did most of the actual training. Stallworthy, although he watched the gallops most mornings, won his races with pen and entry forms, totting up times and weights and statistical probabilities.

Up the center of the long exercise field there were two rows of schooling fences, one of three flights of hurdles, and one of birch fences. Jim patiently spent some mornings teaching both me and the chestnut to go up over the birch with increasing precision, measuring our stride for takeoff from farther and farther back before the actual jump.

The riding I’d learned to that date had been from watching other people. Jim taught me, as it were, from inside, so that in that first month with Sarah’s Future I began to develop from an uncoordinated windmill with a head full of unrealistic dreams into a reasonably competent amateur rider.

Grumbling at great length about owners who knew nothing at all about racing and should leave all decisions to their trainer, Stallworthy complainingly sent the chestnut to carry his 5-lb. penalty at Newton Abbot.

I’d never before ridden on the course and at first sight of it felt foolish not to have listened to Stallworthy’s judgment. The steeplechase track was an almost one-and-a-half-mile flat circuit with sharpish turns, and the short grass gave little purchase on rock-hard ground, baked by the sun of August.

Stallworthy, with several other runners from his yard, had brought his critical eye to the course. Jim, saddling Sarah’s Future, told me the chestnut knew the course better than I did (I’d walked around it a couple of hours earlier to see the jumps, and the approaches to them, at close quarters) and to remember what I’d learned from him at home, and not to expect too much because of the weight disadvantage and because the other jockeys were all professionals, and that this was not an amateur race.

As usual, it was the speed that seduced me and fulfilled, and the fact that we finished third was enough to make my day worthwhile, though Stallworthy, who had incidentally also trained the winner, announced to me several times, “I told you so. I told your father it was too much to expect. Perhaps you’ll listen to me next time.”

“Never mind,” Jim consoled. “If you’d won today you’d have to have carried a 10-lb. penalty at Exeter races next Saturday, always supposing you can persuade the old man to let him run there, after this. He’ll say it’s too soon, which it probably is.”

The old man (Stallworthy) conducted a running battle over the telephone with my father.

My father won.

So, blisteringly, by six lengths, did Sarah’s Future, because the much longer galloping track, up on Halden Moor above Exeter, suited him better. He carried a 5-lb. penalty, not 10, and made light of it. The starting price, my father assured me later, would pay the training fees until Christmas.

Two days after that, in cooler blood, I went to learn mathematics.

My father learned back-bench tactics, but that wasn’t what the party had sent him to Hoopwestern for. He tried to explain it to me that the path upward led through the whip’s office, which sounded nastily about flagellation to me, though he laughed.

“The whip’s office is what gives you the thumbs-up for advancement towards the ministerial level.”

“And their thumbs are up for you?”

“Well... so far... yes.”

“Minister of what?” I asked, disbelievingly. “Surely you’re too young?”

“The really forward boys are on their way by twenty-two. At thirty-eight, I’m old.”

“I don’t like politics.”

“I can’t ride races,” he said.

To have the whip withdrawn, he explained, meant the virtual end to a political career. If getting elected was the first giant step, then winning the whip’s approval was the second. When the newly elected member for Hoopwestern was shortly appointed as undersecretary of state in the Department of Trade and Industry, it was apparently a signal to the whole fabric of government that a bright, fast-moving comet had risen over the horizon.

I went to listen to his maiden speech, sitting inconspicuously in the gallery. He spoke about lightbulbs and had the whole House laughing, and Hoopwestern’s share of the illumination market soared.

I met him for dinner after his speech, when he was again in the high exaltation of post-performance spirits.

“I suppose you haven’t been back to Hoopwestern?” he said.

“Well, no.”

“I have, of course. Leonard Kitchens is in trouble.”

“Who?”

“Leonard...”

“Oh, yes. Yes, the unbalanced mustache. What sort of trouble?”

“The police now have a rifle which may be the one fired at us that evening.”

“By the police,” I asked as he paused, “do you mean Joe the policeman whose mother drives a school bus?”

“Joe whose mother drives a school bus is actually Detective Sergeant Joe Duke, and yes, he’s now received from The Sleeping Dragon a very badly rusted .22 rifle. It seems that after the trees shed their leaves the guttering ’round the roof of the hotel got choked with them, as happens most years, and rainwater overflowed instead of draining down the pipes as it should, so they sent a man up a ladder to clear out the leaves, and they found it wasn’t just leaves clogging the guttering, it was the .22 rifle.”

“But what’s that got to do with Leonard Kitchens?”

My father ate peppered steak, rare, with spinach.

“Leonard Kitchens is the nurseryman who festoons The Sleeping Dragon with all those baskets of geraniums.”

“But...” I objected.

“Apparently in a broom cupboard on that bedroom level he keeps a sort of cart with things for looking after the baskets. Shears, a long-spouted watering can, fertilizer. They think he could have hidden the gun in the cart. If you stand on a chair by the window you can reach up far enough outside to put a rifle up in the gutter. And someone did put a gun up there.”

I frowned over my food.

“You know what people are like,” my father said. “Someone says, ‘I suppose Leonard Kitchens could have put the rifle in the gutter, he’s always in and out of the hotel,’ and the next person drops the ‘I suppose’ and repeats the rest as a fact.”

“What does Leonard Kitchens himself say?”

“Of course, he says it wasn’t his gun and he didn’t put it in the gutter, and he says no one can prove he did.”

“That’s what guilty people always say,” I observed.

“Yes, but it’s true, no one can prove he ever had the gun. No one has come forward to connect him to rifles in any way.”

“What does Mrs. Kitchens say?”

“Leonard’s wife is doing him no good at all. She goes around saying her husband was so besotted with Orinda Nagle that he would do anything, including shooting me in the back, to get me out of Orinda’s way. Joe Duke asked her if she had ever seen a rifle in her husband’s possession, and instead of saying no, as any sensible woman would, she said he had a garden shed full of junk, and it was possible he had anything lying around in there.”

“Did Joe by any chance search the shed? I mean, did he have a look around to see if Leonard had any bullets?”

“Joe couldn’t get a warrant to search, as there were no real grounds for suspicion. Also, as I suppose you know, it’s quite easy to buy high-velocity bullets, and even easier to throw them away. There’s no chance of telling that it was indeed that rifle that was used because, even if you could remove all the rust, there is no bullet to match it to, as the one from the whatnot finally got lost altogether in the fire. No one ever found any cartridge cases in the hotel, either.”

My father continued with his steak. Putting down his knife and fork, he said, “I took the Range Rover to Basil Rudd’s garage and had him dismantle the engine for a thorough check of the oil system. There was nothing in the sump except oil. It was actually extremely unprofessional for that mechanic — Terry, I think he is — to push the substitute plug up into the sump, but Basil Rudd won’t hear a word against him, and I suppose there was no harm done.”

“There might have been,” I said. I thought for a moment and asked, “I suppose Leonard Kitchens isn’t accused of being in possession of candles?”

“You may laugh,” my father said, “but in the shop at his garden center, where they sell plastic gnomes and things, they do have table centerpieces with candles and ribboned bows and stuff.”

“You can buy candles anywhere,” I said. “And what about the fire? Was that Leonard Kitchens, too?”

“He was there,” my father reminded me, and I remembered Mrs. Kitchens saying her Leonard liked a good fire.

“Did the firemen ever find out how that fire started?”

My father shook his head. “They didn’t at the time. Some of them are now saying unofficially that it could have been started with candles. Leonard Kitchens fiercely denies he had anything to do with it.”

“What do you think yourself?”

My father drank some wine. He was trying to indoctrinate me into liking burgundy, but to his disgust, I still liked Diet Coke better.

He said, “I think Leonard Kitchens is fanatical enough to do almost anything. It’s easy enough to think of him as a bit of a silly ass, with that out-of-proportion mustache, but it’s people with obsessions who do the real harm in the world, and if he still has a grudge against me, I want him where I can see him.”

I did my best with the wine, but I didn’t really like it.

“There’s no point in his arranging accidents for you anymore, now that you’re elected.”

My father sighed. “With people like Kitchens you can’t be sure that good sense will be in control.”

I stayed with him that night in his Canary Wharf apartment by the Thames. His big windows looked down the wide river, where once a flourish of cranes had been busy with shipping, though he himself couldn’t remember “the Docks” except as a long-ago political lever. His old office (he ran his investment-consultant business from home) gave him a two-mile walk along the Embankment to his new office in Whitehall, a leg-stretching that was clearly keeping him muscularly fit. He blazed with vigor and excitement. Even though he was my father, I felt both energized and overwhelmed by his vitality.

In a way, I deeply loved him.

In a way I felt wholly incapable of ever equaling his mental force or his determination. It took me years to realize that I didn’t have to.

On the morning after his maiden speech I caught the early train from Paddington to Exeter, clicketing along the rails from reflected fame to anonymity.

In Exeter, one of eight thousand residential students, I coasted through university life without attracting much attention, and absorbed reams of calculus, linear algebra, actuarial science and distribution theory towards a bachelor of science degree in mathematics with accounting: and as a short language course came with the package I also learned French, increasing my vocabulary from piste and écurie (“track” and “stable”) to law and order.

As often as possible I cycled to Stallworthy’s stable to ride Sarah’s Future, and on several Saturdays set off from starting gates. After the first flourish as a novice, finding winning races for a steady but unspectacular jumper proved difficult, but also-ran was fine by me: fourth, fifth, sixth, one easy fall and no tailed-offs.

On one very cold December Saturday towards the end of my first term I was standing on the stands at Taunton watching one of Stallworthy’s string scud first towards the last flight of hurdles when it crashed and fell in a cascading cartwheel of legs, and snapped its neck.

They put screens round the disaster and winched the body away, and within ten minutes I came across Stallworthy trying to comfort the female owner. Crying ladies were not Stallworthy’s specialty. He first asked me to find Jim and then canceled that instruction and simply passed the weeping woman into my arms, and told me to take her for a drink.

Many trainers went white and shook with emotion when their horses died. Stallworthy shrugged and drew a line across a page.

Mrs. Courtney Young, the bereaved owner, wiped away her tears and tried to apologize while a large bracer of gin took its effect.

“It’s all right,” I assured her. “If my horse died, I’d be devastated.”

“But you’re so young. You’d get over it.”

“I’m sure you will, too, in time.”

“You don’t understand.” Fresh tears rolled. “I let the horse’s insurance lapse because I couldn’t afford the premium, and I owe Mr. Stallworthy a lot of training fees, and I was sure my horse would win today so I could pay off my debts, and I backed it with a bookie I have an account with, and I haven’t any money to pay him. I was going to have to sell my horse anyway if he didn’t win, but now I can’t do even that...”

Poor Mrs. Courtney Young.

“She’s mad,” Jim told me later, saddling Sarah’s Future. “She bets too much.”

“What will she do?”

“Do?” he exclaimed. “She’ll sell a few more heirlooms. She’ll buy another horse. One day she’ll lose the lot.”

I grieved very briefly for Courtney Young, but that evening I telephoned my father and suggested he insure Sarah’s Future.

“How did you get on today?” he asked. “I heard the results and you weren’t in the first three.”

“Fourth. What about insurance?”

“Who arranges horse insurance?”

“Weatherbys.”

“Do you want to?”

“For your sake,” I said.

“Then send me the paperwork.”

Weatherbys, the firm that arranged insurance for horses, were the administrators for the whole of racing. It was Weatherbys who kept the records, who registered horses’ names and ownership details, including colors; Weatherbys to whom trainers sent entries for races; Weatherbys who confirmed a horse was running and sent details of racing programs to the press; Weatherbys who printed race cards in color by night and dispatched them to racecourses by morning.

Weatherbys published the fixture list, kept the Thoroughbred Stud Book and acted as a bank for the transfer of fees to jockeys, prize money to owners, anything to anyone. Weatherbys ran a safe computer database.

There wasn’t much in racing, in fact, that Weatherbys didn’t do.

It was because of mad, tearful, silly Mrs. Courtney Young that I began to think that one distant day I might apply to Weatherbys for a job.

In the spring of my third year of study my father came to Exeter to see me (he had been a couple of times before) and to my surprise brought with him Dearest Polly.

I had spent a week of each Christmas holiday skiing (practicing my French!) and I’d been riding and racing in every spare minute, but I also played fair and passed all my exams and assessments with reasonable grades if not with distinction, so when I saw him arrive a quick canter around the guilt reflexes raised no wincing specters, and I shook his hand (we had at least advanced that far) with uncomplicated pleasure.

“I don’t know if you realize,” my father said, “that we are fast approaching a general election.”

My immediate reaction was Oh, God. No. I managed not to say it aloud, but it must have been plain on my face.

Dearest Polly laughed and my father said, “This time I’m not asking you to canvass door to door.”

“But you need a bodyguard...”

“I’ve engaged a professional.”

I felt instantly jealous: ridiculous. It took me a good ten seconds to say sincerely, “I hope he’ll mind your back.”

“He’s a she. All sorts of belts in martial arts.”

“Oh.” I glanced at Polly, who looked merely benign.

“Polly and I,” my father said, “propose to marry. We came to hear if you had any objections.”

“Polly!”

“Dear Benedict. Your father is so abrupt. I would have asked you more gently.”

“I’ve no objections,” I said. “Very much the opposite.”

I kissed her cheek.

“Goodness!” she exclaimed. “You’ve grown.”

“Have you?” my father inquired with interest. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“I’ve stopped at last,” I sighed. “I’m over an inch taller and fifteen pounds heavier than I was at Hoopwestern.” Too big, I might have added, for much scope as a professional jockey, but an excellent size for an amateur.

Polly herself hadn’t changed, except that I saw with interest that the hard crimson lipstick had been jettisoned for an equally inappropriate scarlet. Her clothes still looked unfashionable even by charity shop standards, and no one had taken recent scissors to her hair. With her long face and thin, stringy body, she looked a total physical mismatch for my increasingly powerful father, but positive goodness shone out of her as always, and her sincerity, it seemed to me, was now tinged with amusement. There had never been anything gauche or self-conscious in her manner, but only the strength to be her own intelligent, uncompromising self.

More than a marriage of true minds, I thought. A marriage of true morality.

I said sincerely to my father, “Congratulations,” and he looked pleased.

“What are you doing next Saturday?” he asked.

“Racing at Chepstow.”

He was shaking his head. “I want you to stand beside me.”

“Do you mean...” I hesitated, “that you are marrying... next Saturday?”

“That’s right,” he agreed. “Now that we’ve decided, and since you seem quite pleased, there’s no point in delaying. I’m going to live with Polly in her house in the woods, and I’ll also find a larger apartment in London.”

Polly, I learned by installments through that afternoon, had inherited the house in the woods from her parents, along with a fortune that set her financially free to work unpaid wherever she saw the need.

She was two years older than my father. She had never been married: a mischievous glint in her eye both forbade and answered the more intimate question.

She didn’t intend, she said, to make a wasteland of Orinda Nagle’s life. Orinda and Mervyn Teck had been running the constituency day to day and making a success of it. Polly didn’t hunger to open fetes or flirt with cameras. She would organize, as always, from behind the scenes. And she would be listened to, I thought, where influence mattered.

Six days later she and my father married in the ultimate of quiet weddings. I stood by my father and Polly was supported by the duke who’d lured Orinda to the races, and all of us signed the certificates.

The bride wore brown with a gold-and-amber necklet given by my father, and looked distinguished. A photographer, at my request, recorded the event. A discreet paragraph appeared in The Times. The Hoopwestern Gazette caught up with the story later. Mr. and Mrs. George Juliard, after a week in Paris, returned to Hoopwestern to keep the lightbulb workers faithful.

I still disliked politics and I was extremely grateful that the approach of my final exams made it impossible for me to repeat my by-election stint.

There were many politically active students at Exeter, but I kept my head down with them, too, and led a double life only on Stallworthy’s gallops and various racetracks. I won no races that spring, but the sensation of speed was all that mattered: and, in an oddity of brain activity, the oftener I raced, the more clearly I understood second-order differential equations.

The general election swelled and broke under me like a Pacific surf, and my father, along with his party, were returned to power. A small majority, but enough.

No one shot at him, no one plugged his sump drain with wax, no one set fire to Polly’s house, and no one let the martial arts expert earn her fee.

Suspicion of shooting and arson still lay heavily on Leonard Kitchens, but no one could accuse him of anything this time as his formidable and unforgiving wife insisted on his taking her on a double Mediterranean cruise. They were in Athens on polling day.

Poor Isobel Bethune had been right: Paul Bethune’s party dumped him as a candidate in favor of a worthy woman magistrate. Though it was no longer hotly scandalous news, Paul Bethune’s roving eye had settled again outside his home, and Isobel, at last fed up with it, had shed her marriage and her sullen sons and gone to live with her sister in Wales.

Polly kept me informed, her humor dry. My father couldn’t have married anyone better.

I told him to beware of bikini-clad bimbos falling artistically into his lap with Usher Rudd in attendance for accusations of sleaze. Hadn’t I heard, he asked, that Usher Rudd had been sacked by the Gazette for manufacturing sleaze where it didn’t exist? Usher Rudd, my father cheerfully said, was now telephoto-lens-stalking a promiscuous front-bencher of the opposition.

When the party in power reassembled after the whole country had voted, there was a major reshuffle of jobs. To no one’s surprise at Westminster, my father’s career skipped upward like helium and he became a minister of state in the Ministry of Transport, one step down from a seat in the Cabinet.

I had the best photograph of his wedding to Polly framed, and stood it beside the one of him and my mother. I took the pacts we’d signed out of my mother’s frame and read them thoughtfully, and put them back. They seemed to belong to a different life. I had indeed grown up at Exeter, and I’d had “the first” that I would never forget: but the basic promises of those pacts had so far been kept, and although now it might seem a melodramatic statement, I knew that if it ever became necessary, I would indeed defend my father against any form of attack.

I took my final exams and, sensing that I’d probably done enough to gain a bachelor of science degree of a reasonable standard, I wrote to Weatherbys and asked for a job.

They replied, what job?

Any, I wrote. I could add, subtract and work computers, and I had ridden in races.

Ah, that Juliard. Come for an interview, they said.

Weatherbys, a family business started in 1770 and currently servicing racing in increasingly inventive and efficient ways, stood quietly in red brick surrounded by fields, trees and peaceful countryside near the small ancient town of Wellingborough, sixty miles northwest of London in the county of Northamptonshire.

Inside, the atmosphere of the furiously busy secretariat was notably calm and quiet also. Knowing the vast scope and daily pressure of the work being done there, I suppose I’d expected something like the clattering frenzy of an old-fashioned newspaper office, but what I walked into was near to silence, with rows of heads bent over computer monitors and people walking among them with thoughtfulness, not scurrying, carrying papers and boxes of disks.

I was handed from department to department and shown around, and in an undemanding interview at the end was asked for my age and references. I went away in disappointment: they had been polite and kind but had asked none of the piercing questions I would have expected if they’d had a job to offer.

Back at Exeter, living in rooms halfway between the university and Stallworthy’s yard, I began dispiritedly to send job applications to a list of industries. Weatherbys had seemed my natural home: too bad they didn’t see me as their child.

They did, however, follow up on the references I’d given them: my tutor at the university and Stallworthy himself.

The gruff old trainer told me he’d said my character and behavior were satisfactory. Thanks a lot, I thought. Jim laughed. “He doesn’t want you to leave and take Sarah’s Future with you. It’s a wonder he didn’t call you a loudmouthed troublemaker!”

There was a letter from my tutor:

His testimonial in full read:

Shit, I thought. Oh, well.

Much to my astonishment, I also received a letter from Sir Vivian Durridge:

His enclosure read:

I sat down, the pages shaking in my hands. Vivian Durridge was about the last person I would ever have applied to for a thumbs-up.

I had vaguely been looking for a safe place to keep my birth certificate, so as not to lose it while I moved from lodgings to lodgings. I knew I wouldn’t lose the marriage photographs so I decided to put my birth certificate behind my father and Polly, and as I’d been doing that when Vivian Durridge’s remarkable letter arrived, I folded his pages into the frame, too.

Three days later the mail brought an envelope bearing the Weatherbys logo, a miniature representation of a stallion standing under an oak tree, from a painting by George Stubbs.

I was cravenly afraid of opening it. It would begin We regret...

Well, it had to be faced.

I opened the envelope, and the letter began We are pleased...

Pleased.

That evening my father telephoned. “Is it true you’ve got yourself a job at Weatherbys?”

“Yes. How do you know?”

“Why didn’t you ask for my help?”

“I didn’t think of it.”

“I despair of you, Ben.” He didn’t, though, sound particularly annoyed.

He had been talking to one of the Weatherby cousins at a dinner in the City, he said. The web of insider chat in the City far outdid the Internet.

I asked if I could move Sarah’s Future from Devon.

“Find a trainer.”

“Thanks.”

Spencer Stallworthy grumbled. Jim shrugged: life always moved on. I parted from them with gratitude and vanned my chestnut pal to a new home.

Weatherbys took me into their racing operations department, which handled entries, runners, weights, riders, the draw: all the details of every race run in Britain, amounting to about a thousand transactions most days and up to three thousand at busy times.

All this computer speed took place in airy light expanses of desks and floor space, and in the calm quietness so impressive on my first visit. I’d thought that at a couple of days over twenty-one I might be at a disadvantage from youth, but I found at once that the whole staff were young, and enjoyed what they were doing. Within a month I couldn’t imagine working anywhere else.

Every so often my own name cropped up, both whenever I was actually racing, but also in the next-door department of racing administration, which dealt with records of owners. It became a sort of running joke — “Hey, Juliard, if you race that nag again at Fontwell, he’ll suffer a 7-lb. penalty,” or “Hey, Juliard, you carried overweight at Ludlow. Cut down on the plum duff!”

Sarah’s Future, as far as I could tell, enjoyed the exchange of the soft air of Devon for the brisker winds of farther north. He still acknowledged my morning arrivals with much head nodding and blow breathing down his wide black nostrils, and he seemed to think it normal that I should embrace his neck and tell him he was a great fella, and mean it.

Those who say there can be a true fusing of animal/ human consciousness are probably deluding themselves, but after several intimate years of speed together, that chestnut and I were probably as near to brothers as interspecies relationships could get.

One Saturday, about a year after I’d started at Weatherbys, the horse and I lined up at Towcester for an uneventful three-mile ’chase, my father’s inconspicuous colors of gold and gray made even less discernible by a persistent drizzle.

No one on the stands seemed afterwards to be sharply clear what happened. From my point of view we were rising cleanly in a well-judged takeoff to a big black open ditch fence coming up the hill towards the straight. Another horse tripped and crashed into us, knocking Sarah’s Future completely off balance. He had jumped that fence expertly several times over the past years: neither he nor I was expecting disaster. His feet were knocked sideways. He landed in a heap, throwing me off forwards. I connected with the ground in one of those crunching collisions that tells you at once that you’ve broken a bone without being sure which bone. I heard it snap. I rolled, tucking my head in to save it from the hooves of the runners behind me. The remainder of the field of half-ton horses clattered over my head as I lay winded and anxious on the slippery grass with blades of it in my mouth and up my nose, and dislodging my goggles after an uncontrollable slide.

The clamor of the contest faded away towards the next fence. Two horses and two jockeys weren’t going to be worrying about that. The horse that had crashed into Sarah’s Future scrambled to its unsteady feet and trotted off as if dazed, and his unseated rider bent over me with “Are you all right, mate?” as his best effort at an apology.

I gripped his hand to haul myself to my feet and found that the bone I’d broken was somewhere in my left shoulder.

Sarah’s Future, also on his feet, was trying to walk but succeeding only in hobbling around in a circle. He couldn’t put any weight on one of his forelegs. A groundsman caught him by the bridle and held him.

In hopeless love for the horse I walked over to him and tried to will it not to be true, not to be possible that after so long this closest of companionships should have so suddenly come to the edge of a precipice.

I knew, as every rider of any experience knew, that there was nothing to be done. Sarah’s Future, like Sarah herself, was going to eternity in my hands.

I wept. I couldn’t help it. It looked like the rain. The horse had broken his near foreleg. His jockey, his left collarbone.

The horse died.

The jockey lived.