Flying Finish

Chapter Four

‘Your kind ought not to be allowed,’ he said, with charming directness. He had to say it very loudly, also, on account of the noise of the aircraft.

I sat on a hay bale with my back against the rear wall of the cabin and looked at him as he stood ten feet in front of me with his legs apart for balance.

‘Your kind, of course,’ I shouted back, ‘are the salt of the earth.’

He took a step forward and the plane bumped hard in an air pocket. It lurched him completely off his balance and he fell rolling on to his side. With sizzling fury, though it wasn’t I who had pushed him, he raised himself up on one knee and thrust his face close to mine.

‘—you,’ he said.

At close quarters I could see how very young he was. His skin was still smooth like a child’s and he had long thick eyelashes round those vast pale blue-grey searchlight eyes. His hair, a fairish brown, curled softly close to his head and down the back of his neck, cut short and in the shape of a helmet. He had a soft, full lipped mouth and a strong straight nose. A curiously sexless face. Too unlined to be clearly male, too heavily boned to be female.

He wasn’t so much a man, not even so much a person, as a force. A wild, elemental, poltergeist force trapped barely controllably in a vigorous steel-spring body. You couldn’t look into Billy’s cold eyes from inches away and not know it. I felt a weird unexpected primitive tingle away down somewhere in my gut, and at the same time realised on a conscious level that friendliness and reason couldn’t help, there that would be no winning over, ever, of Billy.

He began mildly enough.

‘Your sort,’ he yelled. ‘You think you own the bloody earth. You soft lot of out-of-date nincompoops, you and your lah-di-dah bloody Eton.’

I didn’t answer. He put his sneering face even nearer.

‘Think yourself something special, don’t you? You and your sodding ancestors.’

‘They aren’t very usual,’ I yelled in his ear.

‘What aren’t?’

‘Sodding ancestors.’

He had no sense of humour. He looked blank.

‘You didn’t spring from an acorn,’ I said resignedly. ‘You’ve had as many ancestors as I have.’

He stood up and took a step back. ‘Bloody typical,’ he shouted, ‘making fun of people you look down on.’

I shook my head, got to my feet, and went along the plane to check the horses. I didn’t care for useless arguments at the best of times, let alone those which strained the larynx. All four hurdlers were standing quiet in the boxes, picking peacefully at the haynets, untroubled by the noise. I patted their heads, made sure everything was secure, hesitated about going forward to the galley and cockpit for more friendly company, and had the matter settled for me by Billy.

‘Hey,’ he shouted. ‘Look at this.’ He was pointing downwards with one arm and beckoning me with sweeps of the other. There was anxiety on his face.

I walked back between the last box and the side wall of the aircraft, into the open space at the back, and across to Billy. As soon as I got near enough to see what he was pointing at, the anxiety on his face changed to spite.

‘Look at this,’ he shouted again, and jabbed his clenched fist straight at my stomach.

The only flicker of talent I had shown in a thoroughly mediocre and undistinguished career at Eton had been for boxing. I hadn’t kept it up afterwards, but all the same the defence reflex was still there even after eight years. Billy’s unexpected blow landed on a twisting target and my head did not go forward to meet a punch on the jaw. Or more likely in this case, I thought fleetingly, a chop on the back of the neck. Instead, I gave him back as good as I got, a short hard jolt to the lower ribs. He was surprised, but it didn’t stop him. Just the reverse. He seemed pleased.

There are better places for fighting than the back of an aircraft. The floor of that one was banded by the rows of seat anchorages, so that it was only a matter of time before one of us caught his foot in them and overbalanced, and it happened to be me, dodging away from a hand stretched at my throat. I went down flat on my back, unable to stop myself.

Billy fell deliberately and heavily on top of me, grinning fiercely with his own private pleasure, stabbing his elbows sharply into my chest and pressing me down hard on to the rigid anchorages. It hurt, and he meant it to. I kicked and rolled over, trying to get him underneath for a taste of it, but he was off like a cat at the crucial point and already aiming his boot as I stood up. I took that on the thigh and lunged accurately in return at his head. He just shook it briefly and went on punching, hard, quick, and with no respect for convention; but the pleasure left his face when he continued to get everything back with interest.

Thankful at least that he had produced no flick knife or bicycle chain I battled on, knowing in a cold detached part of my brain that I would gain nothing even if I won. Billy’s resentment would be greater, not less, for being slogged by what he despised.

I did win in the end, if anyone did, but only because he had a belly full of beer and I hadn’t. We were both very near to a standstill. I hit him finally very hard just below the navel, my fist sinking in deep, and he fell against the aft box retching and clutching himself and sliding down on to his knees. I caught hold of one of his wrists and twisted his arm up across his back.

‘Now you listen, Billy,’ I said loudly in his ear, panting to get enough breath, ‘I don’t see any point in fighting you, but I will if you make me. You can forget I’m an earl’s son, Billy, and take me as I am, and this is what I am...’ I jerked his arm. ‘Hard, Billy, not soft. As tough as necessary. Remember it.’

He didn’t answer, perhaps because he was showing signs of being sick. I yanked him to his feet, pushed him across to the lavatory compartment in the tail, opened the door for him, and shoved him through. As the only lock was on the inside I couldn’t make sure he stayed there, but from the sounds which presently issued from the open door, he was in no state to leave.

My own body ached from head to foot from his punches and kicks and from brisk contact with many sharp and knobbed edges, not least those spaced regularly on the floor. I sat down weakly on a straw bale and rubbed at a few places which didn’t do much good, and was suddenly struck by something very odd indeed.

My face was completely unmarked.

I had bashed my head against one of the metal bars on the rear box and there was a tender swelling a little above my right ear. But Billy, I remembered distinctly, had not once even aimed at my face; not at any point higher than my throat.

For someone in the grip of obsessive fury, surely that was extraordinary, I thought. The usual impulse in such a case was to ‘smash his face in’. Billy had actually taken pains not to. I didn’t understand why. I thought about it all the way to Cambridge.

It was dark when we landed and the cabin lights were on. The cheerful customs man made his way through the plane, raised his eyebrows, and asked where my two mates were.

‘Billy is in there,’ I nodded towards the lavatory, ‘and John stayed in France. He said he was coming back tomorrow.’

‘O.K.’ He checked through the horses’ papers perfunctorily. ‘All clear,’ he said, and as an afterthought: ‘Buy anything?’

I shook my head, and he grinned, helped me open the double doors, and whistled away down the ramp as soon as it was in position.

Billy had locked himself into the lavatory and refused to come out, so I had to get one of the box drivers who had arrived to collect the cargo to help me unload the horses. Unloading was always quicker and easier than loading, but I had begun to stiffen up all over with bruises, and I was glad when it was done. The helpful box driver led out the last horse, an undistinguished brown mare, and before turning back to tidy up I watched them step and slither down the ramp. That mare, I thought idly, was very like the one we had taken across in the morning, though the rug she wore might be misleading. But it couldn’t of course be the same. No one would ship a horse out in the morning and back in the afternoon.

I turned away and began slowly to stack the box sides and the bars, wished painfully that Billy hadn’t been quite so rough, and forgot about it.

The following day I went down to the wharf building and hooked Simon out for a liquid lunch. We shambled down the road to the usual hideous pub and he buried his face in a pint like a camel at an oasis.

‘That’s better,’ he said, sighing, when a scant inch remained. ‘How did yesterday’s trip go?’

‘All right.’

His eyes considered me thoughtfully. ‘Did you have a fall on Saturday?’

‘No. A winner. Why?’

‘You’re moving a bit carefully, that’s all.’

I grinned suddenly. ‘You should see the other fellow.’

His face melted in comprehension and he laughed. ‘I imagine I have,’ he said. ‘Billy has a sunset of a black eye.’

‘You’ve seen him?’ I was surprised.

Simon nodded. ‘He was in the office this morning, talking to Yardman.’

‘Getting his version in first, I suppose.’

‘What happened?’ he asked interestedly.

‘Billy picked a fight.’ I shrugged. ‘He resents my existence. It’s ridiculous. No one can help what his father is. You can’t choose your birth.’

‘You feel strongly about it,’ Simon observed, ordering another pint. I shook my head to his invitation.

‘So would you, if you had to live with it. I mostly get treated as a villain or a nit or a desirable match, and not much else.’ I was exaggerating, but not unduly.

‘That last doesn’t sound too bad,’ he grinned.

‘You haven’t had half the debs’ mums in London trying to net you for their daughters,’ I said gloomily, ‘with your own mother egging them on.’

‘It sounds a wow.’ He had no sympathy for such a fate.

‘It isn’t me they want,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s only my name. Which is no fun at all. And on the other end from the wedding ring I get bashed around for exactly the same reason.’

‘Very few can feel as strongly as Billy.’

I looked at him. ‘There were the French in seventeen eighty-nine, remember? And the Russians in nineteen-seventeen. They all felt as strongly as Billy.’

‘The English like their aristocrats.’

‘Don’t you believe it. They don’t mind them from the social point of view because titles make the scandal sheets juicier. But they make damn sure they have no effective power. They say we are a joke, an anachronism, out of date, and weak and silly. They pretend we are these things so that we are kept harmless, so that no one will take us seriously. Think of the modern attitude to the House of Lords, for example. And you — you still think it funny that I want this sort of job, but you wouldn’t think so if my father was a... a farmer, or a pubkeeper, or a school-master. But I’m me, here and now, a man of now, not of some dim glorious past. I am not an anachronism. I’m Henry Grey, conceived and born like everyone else, into this present world. Well, I insist on living in it. I am not going to be shoved off into an unreal playboy existence where my only function is to sire the next in line, which is what my parents want.’

‘You could renounce your title, when you get it,’ Simon pointed out calmly. He spotted a pin on the bar counter and absentmindedly tucked it into his lapel. It was such a habit with him that he sported a whole row of them, like a dressmaker.

‘I could,’ I said, ‘but I won’t. The only good reason for doing that is to stay in the House of Commons, and I’ll never be a politician, I’m not the type. Renouncing for any other reason would be just a retreat. What I want is for people to acknowledge that an earl is as good as the next man, and give him an equal chance.’

‘But if you get on, they say it’s because of your title, not because you have talent.’

‘You are so right. But there’s a prince or two, a few dukes’ sons, and some others like me, all in the same boat just now, and I reckon that our generation, if we try hard enough, might in the end be treated on our own terms. Have some more beer.’

He laughed and agreed.

‘I’ve never heard you say so much,’ he said smiling.

‘It’s Billy’s fault. Forget it.’

‘I don’t think I will.’

‘You know something odd? I’m covered with bruises, and there isn’t a single one on my face.’

He considered, drinking.

‘He’d have got into trouble if he’d marked you for all to see.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘I gather you haven’t told Yardman?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

I shrugged. ‘I think he expected it, or something like it. He was ironic when he gave me the job. He must have known that sooner or later I would come up against Billy. And yesterday, he knew Billy would be after me. He warned me, in his way.’

‘What are you going to do about it?’

‘Nothing.’

‘But what if you find yourself on another trip with Billy? I mean, you’re bound to, sometime.’

‘Yes, I know. Well, it’s up to him entirely. I wouldn’t start anything. I didn’t yesterday. But I did tell him plainly that I’d fight back any time. And I am not, repeat not, leaving here because of him.’

‘And you look so quiet and mild.’ He smiled one-sidedly, looking down into his again empty glass. ‘I think,’ he said slowly, almost it seemed to me sadly, ‘that one or two people in Yardman Transport have miscalculated about you, Henry.’

But when I pressed him to explain, he wouldn’t.

With no more export trips to be flown until Thursday, I went the next day, Wednesday, to the races. Someone offered me a spare ride in the novice chase and for some reason it fretted me more than ever to have to refuse. ‘I can’t,’ I said, explaining thoroughly so that he wouldn’t think I was being rude. ‘I’m only allowed to ride in fifty open races a season, and I’m already over the forty mark, and I’ve got mounts booked for Cheltenham and the Whitbread and so on. And if I ride too much now I’ll be out of those, but thank you very much for asking me.’

He nodded understandingly and hurried off to find someone else, and in irritation two hours later I watched his horse canter home to a ten lengths win. It was some consolation, however, when immediately afterwards I was buttonholed by a large shrewd-faced man I knew very slightly, the father of another well occupied amateur jockey. Between them, father and son owned and trained half a dozen good hunter ’chasers which they ran only in amateur events with notoriously satisfactory results. But on this particular afternoon Mr Thackery, a large-scale farmer from Shropshire, showed signs both of worry and indecision.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’ll not beat about the bush, I’m a blunt man, so I’m told. Now, what do you say to riding all my horses until the end of the season?’

I was astonished. ‘But surely Julian... I mean, he hasn’t had a bad fall or anything, has he?’

He shook his head. The worry stayed in place. ‘Not a fall. He’s got jaundice. Got it pretty badly, poor chap. He won’t be fit again for weeks. But we’ve a grand lot of horses this year and he won’t hear of them not running just because he can’t ride them. He told me to ask you, it’s his idea.’

‘It’s very good of him,’ I said sincerely. ‘And thank you, I’d like to ride for you very much, whenever I can.’

‘Good, then.’ He hesitated, and added, ‘Er... Julian told me to tell you, to ask you, if ten per cent of the prize money would be in order?’

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘That will be fine.’

He smiled suddenly, his heavy face lightening into wrinkles which made him look ten years younger. ‘I wasn’t sure about asking you, I’ll tell you that, only Julian insisted on it. There’s no nonsense about Henry, he said, and I can see he’s right. He said Henry don’t drink much, don’t talk much, gets on with the job and expects to be paid for it. A pro at heart, he says you are. Do you want expenses?’

I shook my head. ‘Ten per cent for winning. Nothing else.’

‘Fair enough.’ He thrust out his hand and I shook it.

‘I’m sorry about Julian’s jaundice,’ I said.

Mr Thackery’s lips twitched. ‘He said if you said that, that he hoped for the sake of our horses you were being hypocritical.’

‘Oh, subtle stuff.’ I pondered. ‘Tell him to get up too soon and have a relapse.’

The next afternoon I went on a flight to New York.

With Billy.

The ice between us was as cold as the rarefied air outside the pressurized stratocruiser which took us. Yardman, I reflected, wasn’t showing much sense in pushing us off together so soon, and on a two-day journey at that.

The wide cold stare was somewhat marred by the blackish streaks and yellow smudges left by my fist, and Billy was distinctly warier than he had been on the French journeys. There were no elementary taunts this time; but at the end of everything he said to me he tacked on the words ‘Lord Grey,’ and made them sound like an insult.

He tried nothing so crude as punching to make my trip memorable; instead he smashed down one of the metal bars as I was fixing a guy chain during the loading. I looked up angrily, squeezing four squashed right fingers in my left hand, and met his watchful waiting eyes. He was looking down at me with interest, with faintly sneering calculation, to see what I would do.

If anyone else had dropped the bar, I would have known it was accidental. With Billy, apart from the force with which it had landed, I knew it wasn’t. But the day had barely begun, and the cargo was much too valuable to jeopardise for personal reasons, which I dare say he was counting on. When he saw that I was not going to retaliate, or at least not instantly, he nodded in satisfaction, picked up the bar with a small cold private smile, and calmly began putting it into place.

The loading was finished and the plane took off. There were thick dark red marks across my fingers an inch below the nails, and they throbbed all the way to America.

With us on that trip, looking after a full load of twelve horses, we took two other grooms, an elderly deaf one supplied by Yardman, and another man travelling privately with one particular horse. Owners occasionally sent their own grooms instead of entrusting their valued or difficult animals entirely to Yardman’s, and far from resenting it I had learned from Timmie and Conker to be glad of the extra help.

The horse involved on this occasion had come from Norway, stayed in England overnight, and was bound for a racing stable in Virginia. The new owner had asked for the Norwegian groom to go all the way, at his expense, so that the horse should have continuous care on the journey. It didn’t look worth it, I reflected, looking over at it idly while I checked the horses in the next box. A weak-necked listless chestnut, it had a straggle of hair round the fetlocks which suggested there had been a cart horse not far enough back in its ancestry, and the acute-angled hocks didn’t have the best conformation for speed. Norway was hardly famed for the quality of its racing any more, even though it was possibly the Vikings who had invented the whole sport. They placed heaps of valued objects (the prizes) at varying distances from the starting point: then all the competitors lined up, and with wild whoops the race began. The prizes nearest the start were the smallest, the furthest away the richest, so each rider had to decide what suited his mount best, a quick sprint or a shot at stamina. Choosing wrong meant getting no prize at all. Twelve hundred years ago fast sturdy racing horses had been literally worth a fortune in Norway, but the smooth skinned long legged descendants of those tough shaggy ponies didn’t count for much in the modern thoroughbred industry. It was sentiment, I supposed, which caused an American to pay for such an inferior looking animal to travel so far from home.

I asked the middle-aged Norwegian groom if he had everything he wanted, and he said, in halting, heavily accented English, that he was content. I left him sitting on his hay bale staring mindlessly into space, and went on with my rounds. The horses were all travelling quietly, munching peacefully at their haynets, oblivious to rocketing round the world at six hundred miles an hour. There is no sensation of speed if you can’t see an environment rushing past.

We arrived without incident at Kennedy airport, where a gum-chewing customs man came on board with three helpers. He spoke slowly, every second word an ‘uh’, but he was sharply thorough with the horses. All their papers were in order however, and we began the unloading without more ado. There was the extra job of leading all the horses through a tray of disinfectant before they could set foot on American soil, and while I was seeing to it I heard the customs man asking the Norwegian groom about a work permit, and the halting reply that he was staying for a fortnight only, for a holiday, the kindness of the man who owned the horse.

It was the first time I too had been to the States, and I envied him his fortnight. Owing to the five hours time difference, it was only six in the evening, local time, when we landed at Kennedy, and we were due to leave again at six next morning; which gave me about nine free hours in which to see New York. Although to my body mechanism it was already bedtime, I didn’t waste any of them in sleeping.

The only snag to this was having to start another full day’s work with eyes requiring matchsticks. Billy yawned over making the boxes as much as I did and only the third member of the team, the deaf elderly Alf, had had any rest. Since even if one shouted he could hear very little, the three of us worked in complete silence like robots, isolated in our own thoughts, with gaps as unbridgeable between us as between like poles of magnets. Unlike poles attract, like poles repel. Billy and I were a couple of cold Norths.

There was a full load going back again, as was usual on Yardman trips from one continent to another. He hated wasting space, and was accustomed to telephone around the studs when a long flight was on the books, to find out if they had anything to send or collect. The customers all liked it, for on full long distance loads Yardman made a reduction in the fares. Timmie and Conker had less cheerful views of this practice, and I now saw why. One’s body didn’t approve of tricks with the clock. But at the point of no return way out over the Atlantic I shed my drowsiness in one leaping heartbeat, and with horror had my first introduction to a horse going berserk in mid-air.

Old Alf shook my shoulder, and the fright in his face brought me instantly to my feet. I went where he pointed, up towards the nose of the aircraft.

In the second to front box a solidly muscled three-year-old colt had pulled his head collar to pieces and was standing free and untied in the small wooden square. He had his head down, his forelegs straddled, and he was kicking out with his hind feet in a fixed, fearful rhythm. White foamy sweat stood out all over him, and he was squealing. The companion beside him was trying in a terrified way to escape, his eyes rolling and his body pushing hard against the wooden side of the box.

The colt’s hooves thudded against the back wall of the box like battering rams. The wooden panels shook and rattled and began to splinter. The metal bars banding the sides together strained at the corner lynch pins, and it only needed one to break for the whole thing to start disintegrating.

I found the co-pilot at my elbow, yelling urgently.

‘Captain says how do you expect him to fly the aircraft with all this thumping going on. He says to keep that horse still, it’s affecting the balance.’

‘How?’ I asked.

‘That’s your affair,’ he pointed out. ‘And for God’s sake do something about it quickly.’

The back wall of the colt’s box cracked from top to bottom. The pieces were still held in place by the guy chains, but at the present rate they wouldn’t hold more than another minute, and then we should have on our minds a maddened animal loose in a pressurised aircraft with certain death to us all if he got a hoof through a window.

‘Have you got a humane killer on board?’ I said.

‘No. This is usually a passenger craft. Why don’t you bring your own?’

There were no rules to say one had to take a humane killer in animal transport. There should be. But it was too late to regret it.

‘We’ve got drugs in the first aid kit,’ the co-pilot suggested.

I shook my head. ‘They’re unpredictable. Just as likely to make him worse.’ It might even have been a tranquilliser which started him off, I thought fleetingly. They often backfired with horses. And it would be quite impossible in any case to inject even a safe drug through a fine needle designed for humans into a horse as wild as this.

‘Get a carving knife or something from the galley,’ I said. ‘Anything long and sharp. And quick.’

He turned away, stumbling in his haste. The colt’s hind feet smashed one broken half of the back wall clean out. He turned round balefully, thrust his head between the top and centre banding bars, and tried to scramble through. The panic in his eyes was pitiful.

From inside his jerkin Billy calmly produced a large pistol and pointed it towards the colt’s threshing head.

‘Don’t be a bloody fool,’ I shouted. ‘We’re thirty thousand feet up.’

The co-pilot came back with a white handled saw-edged bread knife, saw the gun, and nearly fainted.

‘D... don’t,’ he stuttered. ‘D... d... don’t.’

Billy’s eyes were very wide. He was looking fixedly at the heaving colt and hardly seemed to hear. All his mind seemed to be concentrated on aiming the gun that could kill us all.

The colt smashed the first of the lynch pins and lunged forwards, bursting out of the remains of the box like flood water from a dam. I snatched the knife from the co-pilot and as the horse surged towards me stuck the blade into the only place available, the angle where the head joined the neck.

I hit by some miracle the carotid artery. But I couldn’t get out of his way afterwards. The colt came down solidly on top of me, pouring blood, flailing his legs and rolling desperately in his attempts to stand up again.

His mane fell in my mouth and across my eyes, and his heaving weight crushed the breath in and out of my lungs like some nightmare form of artificial respiration. He couldn’t right himself over my body, and as his struggles weakened he eventually got himself firmly wedged between the remains of his own box and the one directly aft of it. The co-pilot bent down and put his hands under my arm-pits and in jerks dragged me out from underneath.

The blood went on pouring out, hot sticky gallons of it, spreading down the gangways in scarlet streams. Alf cut open one of the hay bales and began covering it up, and it soaked the hay into a sodden crimson brown mess. I don’t know how many pints of blood there should be in a horse: the colt bled to death and his heart pumped out nearly every drop.

My clothes were soaked in it, and the sweet smell made me feel sick. I stumbled down the plane into the lavatory compartment and stripped to the skin, and washed myself with hands I found to be helplessly trembling. The door opened without ceremony, and the co-pilot thrust a pair of trousers and a sweater into my arms. His overnight civvies.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Compliments of the house.’

I nodded my thanks, put them on, and went back up the plane, soothing the restive frightened cargo on the way.

The co-pilot was arguing with Billy about whether Billy would really have pulled the trigger and Billy was saying a bullet from a revolver wouldn’t make a hole in a metal aircraft. The co-pilot cursed, said you couldn’t risk it, and mentioned ricochets and glass windows. But what I wanted to know, though I didn’t ask, was what was Billy doing carrying a loaded pistol round with him in an underarm holster as casually as a wallet.