Forfeit

3

We lived over a row of lock-up garages in a mews behind Grays Inn Road. A development company had recently knocked down the old buildings opposite, letting in temporary acres of evening sunshine, and was now at the girder stage of a block of flats. If these made our place too dark and shut in when they were done, I would have to find us somewhere else. Not a welcome prospect. We had moved twice before and it was always difficult.

Since race trains mostly ran from London, and to cut my travelling time down to a minimum, we lived ten minutes’ walk from the Blaze. It had proved much better, in London, to live in a backwater than in a main street: in the small mews community the neighbours all knew about Elizabeth and looked up to her window and waved when they passed, and a lot of them came upstairs for a chat and to bring our shopping.

The District Nurse came every morning to do Elizabeth’s vapour rubs to prevent bed sores, and I did them in the evenings. Mrs. Woodward, a semi-trained but unqualified nurse, came Mondays to Saturdays from nine-thirty to six, and was helpful about staying longer if necessary. One of our main troubles was that Elizabeth could not be left alone in the flat even for five minutes in case there was an electricity failure. If the main current stopped, we could switch her breathing pump over to a battery, and we could also operate it by hand: but someone had to be there to do it quickly. Mrs Woodward was kind, middle-aged, reliable, and quiet, and Elizabeth liked her. She was also very expensive, and since the Welfare State turns a fish-faced blind eye on incapacitated wives, I could claim not even so much as a tax allowance for Mrs Woodward’s essential services. We had to have her, and she kept us poor: and that was that.

In one of the garages below the flat stood the old Bedford van which was the only sort of transport of any use to us. I had had it adapted years ago with a stretcher type bed so that it would take Elizabeth, pump, batteries and all, and although it meant too much upheaval to go out in it every week, it did sometimes give her a change of scenery and some country air. We had tried two holidays by the sea in a caravan, but she had felt uncomfortable and insecure, and both times it had rained, so we didn’t bother any more. Day trips were enough, she said. And although she enjoyed them, they exhausted her.

Her respirator was the modern cuirass type: a Spirashell: not the old totally enclosing iron lung. The Spirashell itself slightly resembled the breastplate of a suit of armour. It fitted over the entire front of her chest, was edged with a thick roll of latex, and was fastened by straps round her body. Breathing was really a matter of suction. The pump, which was connected to the Spirashell by a thick flexible hose, alternately made a partial vacuum inside the shell, and then drove air back in again. The vacuum period pulled Elizabeth’s chest wall outwards, allowing air to flow downwards into her lungs. The air-in period collapsed her chest and pushed the used breaths out again.

Far more comfortable, and easier for everyone caring for her than a box respirator, the Spirashell had only one drawback. Try how we might, and however many scarves and cardigans we might stuff in round the edges, between the latex roll and her nightdress, it was eternally draughty. As long as the air in the flat was warm it no longer worried her. Summer was all right. But the cold air continually blowing on to her chest not surprisingly distressed her. Cold also reduced to nil the small movements she had retained in her left hand and wrist, and on which she depended for everything. Our heating bills were astronomical.

In the nine and a half years since I had extricated her from hospital we had acquired almost every gadget invented. Wires and pulleys trailed all round the flat. She could read books, draw the curtains, turn on and off the lights, the radio and television, use the telephone and type letters. An electric box of tricks called Possum did most of these tasks. Others worked on a system of levers set off by the feather-light pressure of her left forefinger. Our latest triumph was an electric pulley which raised and rotated her left elbow and forearm, enabling her to eat some things on her own, without always having to be fed. And with a clipped on electric toothbrush, she could now brush her own teeth.

I slept on a divan across the room from her with a bell beside my ear for when she needed me in the night. There were bells, too, in the kitchen and bathroom, and the tiny room I used for writing in, which with the large sitting-room made up the whole of the flat.

We had been married three years, and we were both twenty-four, when Elizabeth caught polio. We were living in Singapore, where I had a junior job in the Reuter’s office, and we flew home for what was intended to be a month’s leave.

Elizabeth felt ill on the flight. The light hurt her eyes, and she had a headache like a rod up the back of her neck, and a stabbing pain in her chest. She walked off the aircraft at Heathrow and collapsed half way across the tarmac, and that was the last time she ever stood on her feet.

Our affection for each other had survived everything that followed. Poverty, temper, tears, desperate frustrations. We had emerged after several years into our comparative calms of a settled home, a good job, a reasonably well-ordered existence. We were firm close friends.

But not lovers.

We had tried, in the beginning. She could still feel of course, since polio attacks only the motor nerves, and leaves the sensory nerves intact. But she couldn’t breathe for more than three or four minutes if we took the Spirashell right off, and she couldn’t bear any weight or pressure on any part of her wasted body. When I said after two or three hopeless attempts that we would leave it for a while she had smiled at me with what I saw to be enormous relief, and we had rarely even mentioned the subject since. Her early upbringing seemed to have easily reconciled her to a sexless existence. Her three years of thawing into a satisfying marriage might never have happened.

On the day after my trip to Virginia Water I set off as soon as Mrs Woodward came and drove the van north-east out of London and into deepest Essex. My quarry this time was a farmer who had bred gold dust in his fields in the shape of Tiddely Pom, ante-post favourite for the Lamplighter Gold Cup.

Weeds luxuriantly edged the pot-holed road which led from a pair of rotting gateless gateposts into Victor Roncey’s farmyard. The house itself, an undistinguished arrangement of mud-coloured bricks, stood in a drift of sodden unswept leaves and stared blankly from symmetrical grubby windows. Colourless paint peeled quietly from the woodwork and no smoke rose from the chimneys.

I knocked on the back door, which stood half open, and called through a small lobby into the house, but there was no reply. A clock ticked with a loud cheap mechanism. A smell of wellington boots richly acquainted with cowpat vigorously assaulted the nose. Someone had dumped a parcel of meat on the edge of the kitchen table from which a thread of watery blood, having by-passed the newspaper wrapping, was making a small pink pool on the floor.

Turning away from the house I wandered across the untidy yard and peered into a couple of outbuildings. One contained a tractor covered with about six years’ mud. In another, a heap of dusty-looking coke rubbed shoulders with a jumbled stack of old broken crates and sawn up branches of trees. A larger shed housed dirt and cobwebs and nothing else.

While I hovered in the centre of the yard wondering how far it was polite to investigate, a large youth in a striped knitted cap with a scarlet pom-pom came round a corner at the far end. He also wore a vast sloppy pale blue sweater, and filthy jeans tucked into heavyweight gum boots. Fair haired, with a round weatherbeaten face, he looked cheerful and uncomplicated.

‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘You want something?’ His voice was light and pleasant, with a touch of local accent.

‘I’m looking for Mr Roncey.’

‘He’s round the roads with the horses. Better call back later.’

‘How long will he be?’

‘An hour, maybe,’ he shrugged.

‘I’ll wait, then, if you don’t mind,’ I said, gesturing towards my van.

‘Suit yourself.’

He took six steps towards the house and then stopped, turned round, and came back.

‘Hey, you wouldn’t be that chap who phoned?’

‘Which chap?’

‘James Tyrone?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well for crying out loud why didn’t you say so? I thought you were a traveller... come on into the house. Do you want some breakfast?’

‘Breakfast?’

He grinned. ‘Yeah. I know it’s nearly eleven. I get up before six. Feel peckish again by now.’

He led the way into the house through the back door, did nothing about the dripping meat, and added to the wellington smell by clumping across the floor to the furthest door, which he opened.

‘Ma?’ he shouted. ‘Ma.’

‘She’s around somewhere,’ he said, shrugging and coming back. ‘Never mind. Want some eggs?’

I said no, but when he reached out a half-acre frying pan and filled it with bacon I changed my mind.

‘Make the coffee,’ he said, pointing.

I found mugs, powdered coffee, sugar, milk, kettle and spoons all standing together on a bench alongside the sink.

‘My Ma,’ he explained grinning, ‘is a great one for the time and motion bit.’

He fried six eggs expertly and gave us three each, with a chunk of new white bread on the side.

We sat at the kitchen table, and I’d rarely tasted anything so good. He ate solidly and drank coffee, then pushed his plate away and lit a cigarette.

‘I’m Peter,’ he said. ‘It isn’t usually so quiet around here, but the kids are at school and Pat’s out with Pa.’

‘Pat?’

‘My brother. The jockey of the family. Point-to-points, mostly, though. I don’t suppose you would know of him?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘I read your column,’ he said. ‘Most weeks.’

‘That’s nice.’

He considered me, smoking, while I finished the eggs. ‘You don’t talk much, for a journalist.’

‘I listen,’ I said.

He grinned. ‘That’s a point.’

‘Tell me about Tiddely Pom, then.’

‘Hell, no. You’ll have to get Pa or Pat for that. They’re crazy on the horses. I just run the farm.’ He watched my face carefully, I guessed for surprise, since in spite of being almost my height he was still very young.

‘You’re sixteen?’ I suggested.

‘Yeah.’ He sniffed, disgusted. ‘Waste of effort, though, really.’

‘Why?’

‘Why? Because of the bloody motorway, that’s why. They’ve nearly finished that bloody three lane monster and it passes just over there, the other side of our ten-acre field.’ He gestured towards the window with his cigarette. ‘Pa’s going raving mad wondering if Tiddely Pom’ll have a nervous breakdown when those heavy lorries start thundering past. He’s been trying to sell this place for two years, but no one will have it, and you can’t blame them, can you?’ Gloom settled on him temporarily. ‘Then, see, you never know when they’ll pinch more of our land, they’ve had fifty acres already, and it doesn’t give you much heart to keep the place right, does it?’

‘I guess not,’ I said.

‘They’ve talked about knocking our house down,’ he went on. ‘Something about it being in the perfect position for a service station with restaurants and a vast car park and another slip road to Bishops Stortford. The only person who’s pleased about the road is my brother Tony, and he wants to be a rally driver. He’s eleven. He’s a nut.’

There was a scrunch and clatter of hooves outside, coming nearer. Peter and I got to our feet and went out into the yard, and watched three horses plod up the bumpy gravel drive and rein to a halt in front of us. The rider of the leading horse slid off, handed his reins to the second, and came towards us. A trim wiry man in his forties with thick brown hair and a mustard coloured moustache.

‘Mr Tyrone?’

I nodded. He gave me a brisk hard handshake in harmony with his manner and voice and then stood back to allow me a clear view of the horses.

‘That’s Tiddely Pom, that bay.’ He pointed to the third horse, ridden by a young man very like Peter, though perhaps a size smaller. ‘And Pat, my son.’

‘A fine looking horse,’ I said insincerely. Most owners expected praise: but Tiddely Pom showed as much high quality to the naked eye as an uncut diamond. A common head, slightly U-necked on a weak shoulder, and herring gutted into the bargain. He looked just as uncouth at home as he did on a racecourse.

‘Huh,’ snorted Roncey. ‘He’s not. He’s a doer, not a looker. Don’t try and butter me up, I don’t take to it.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said mildly. ‘Then he’s got a common head and neck, a poor shoulder and doesn’t fill the eye behind the saddle either.’

‘That’s better. So you do know what you’re talking about. Walk him round the yard, Pat.’

Pat obliged. Tiddely Pom stumbled around with the floppy gait that once in a while denotes a champion. This horse, bred from a thoroughbred hunter mare by a premium stallion, was a spectacular jumper endowed with a speed to be found nowhere in his pedigree. When an ace of this sort turned up unexpectedly it took the owner almost as long as the public to realise it. The whole racing industry was unconsciously geared against belief that twenty-two carat stars could come from tiny owner-trained stables. It had taken Tiddely Pom three seasons to become known, where from a big fashionable public stable he would have been newsworthy in his first race.

‘When I bred him I was hoping for a point-to-point horse for the boys,’ Roncey said. ‘So we ran him all one season in point-to-points and apart from one time Pat fell off he didn’t get beat. Then last year we thought we would have a go in hunter chases as well, and he went and won the Foxhunters’ at Cheltenham.’

‘I remember that,’ I said.

‘Yes. So last year we tried him in open handicaps, smallish ones...’

‘And he won four out of six,’ I concluded for him.

‘It’s your job to know, I suppose. Pat,’ he shouted. ‘Put him back in his box.’ He turned to me again. ‘Like to see the others?’

I nodded, and we followed Pat and the other two horses across the yard and round the corner from which Peter had originally appeared.

Behind a ramshackle barn stood a neat row of six well-kept wooden horse boxes with shingle roofs and newly painted black doors. However run down the rest of the farm might be, the stable department was in tip top shape. No difficulty in seeing where the farmer’s heart lay: with his treasure.

‘Well now,’ Roncey said. ‘We’ve only the one other racehorse, really, and that’s Klondyke, that I was riding just now. He ran in hunter chases in the spring. Didn’t do much good, to be honest.’ He walked along to the second box from the far end, led the horse in and tied it up. When he took the saddle off I saw that Klondyke was a better shape than Tiddely Pom, which was saying little enough, but the health in his coat was conspicuous.

‘He looks well,’ I commented.

‘Eats his head off,’ said Roncey dispassionately, ‘and he can stand a lot of work, so we give it him.’

‘One-paced,’ observed Pat regretfully over my shoulder. ‘Can’t quicken. Pity. We won just the two point-to-points with him. No more.’

There was the faintest glimmer of satisfaction in the laconic voice, and I glanced at him sideways. He saw me looking and wiped the expression off his face but not before I had seen for certain that he had mixed feelings about the horses’ successes. While they progressed to National Hunt racing proper, he didn’t. Older amateur riders had been engaged, and then professionals. The father-son relationship had needles in it.

‘What do you have in the other boxes?’ I asked Roncey, as he shut Klondyke’s door.

‘My old grey hunter at the end, and two hunter mares here, both in foal. This one, Piglet, she’s the dam of Tiddely Pom of course; she’s in foal to the same sire again.’

Unlikely, I thought, that lightning would strike twice.

‘You’ll sell the foal,’ I suggested.

He sniffed. ‘She’s in the farm accounts.’

I grinned to myself. Farmers could train their horses and lose the cost in the general farm accounts, but if they sold one it then came under the heading of income and was taxed accordingly. If Roncey sold either Tiddely Pom or his full brother, nearly half would go to the Revenue.

‘Turn the mares out, Joe,’ he said to his third rider, a patient looking old man with skin like bark, and we watched while he set them loose in the nearest field. Peter was standing beside the gate with Pat: bigger, more assured, with far fewer knots in his personality.

‘Fine sons,’ I said to Roncey.

His mouth tightened. He had no pride in them. He made no reply at all to my fishing compliment, but instead said, ‘We’ll go into the house and you can ask me anything you want to know. For a magazine, you said?’

I nodded.

‘Pat,’ he shouted. ‘You give these three horses a good strapping and feed them and let Joe get on with the hedging. Peter, you’ve got work to do. Go and do it.’

Both his boys gave him the blank acquiescing look which covers seething rebellion. There was a perceptible pause before they moved off with their calm accepting faces. Lids on a lot of steam. Maybe one day Roncey would be scalded.

He led the way briskly back across the yard and into the kitchen. The meat still lay there dripping. Roncey by-passed it and gestured me to follow him through the far door into a small dark hall.

‘Madge?’ he shouted. ‘Madge?’

Father had as little success as son. He shrugged in the same way and led me into a living room as well worn and untidy as the rest of the place. Drifts of clutter, letters, newspapers, clothing, toys and indiscriminate bits of junk lay on every flat surface, including the chairs and the floor. There was a vase of dead and desiccated chrysanthemums on a window sill, and some brazen cobwebs networked the ceiling. Cold ash from the day before filled the grate. A toss-up I thought, whether one called the room lived-in or squalid.

‘Sit down if you can find somewhere,’ Roncey said. ‘Madge lets the boys run wild in the house. Not firm enough. I won’t have it outside, of course.’

‘How many do you have?’

‘Boys? Five.’

‘And a daughter?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said abruptly. ‘Five boys.’

The thought didn’t please him. ‘Which magazine?’

‘Tally.’ I said. ‘They want background stories to the Lamplighter, and I thought I would give the big stables a miss and shine a bit of the spotlight on someone else for a change.’

‘Yes, well,’ he said defensively, ‘I’ve been written up before, you know.’

‘Of course,’ I said soothingly.

‘About the Lamplighter, too. I’ll show you.’ He jumped up and went over to a knee-hole desk, pulled out one of the side drawers bodily, and brought it across to where I sat at one end of the sofa. He put the drawer in the centre, swept a crumpled jersey, two beaten up dinky cars and a gutted brown paper parcel on to the floor, and seated himself in the space.

The drawer contained a heap of clippings and photographs all thrust in together. No careful sticking into expensive leather folders, like the Huntersons.

My mind leapt to Gail. I saw Roncey talking to me but I was thinking about her body. Her roundnesses. Her fragrant pigmented skin. Roncey was waiting for an answer and I hadn’t heard what he’d asked.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘I asked if you know Bert Checkov.’ He was holding a lengthy clipping with a picture alongside and a bold headline, ‘Back Tiddely Pom NOW.’

‘Yes... and no,’ I said uncertainly.

‘How do you mean?’ he said brusquely. ‘I should have thought you would have known him, being in the same business.’

‘I did know him. But he died. Last Friday.’

I took the clipping and read it while Roncey went through the motions of being shocked, with the indifference uppermost in his voice spoiling the effect.

Bert Checkov had gone to town with Tiddely Pom’s chances in the Lamplighter. The way he saw it, the handicapper had been suffering from semi-blindness and mental blocks to put Tiddely Pom into the weights at ten stone seven, and all punters who didn’t jump on the band-wagon instantly needed to be wet nursed. He thought the ante-post market would open with generous odds, but urged everyone to hurry up with their shirts, before the bookmakers woke up to the bonanza. Bert’s pungent phraseology had given Roncey’s horse more boost than a four stage rocket.

‘I didn’t know he’d written this,’ I admitted. ‘I missed it.’

‘He rang me up only last Thursday and this was in the paper on Friday. That must have been the day you said he died. In point of fact I didn’t expect it would appear. When he telephoned he was, to my mind, quite drunk.’

‘It’s possible,’ I conceded.

‘I wasn’t best pleased about it either.’

‘The article?’

‘I hadn’t got my own money on, do you see? And there he went, spoiling the price. When I rang up my bookmaker on Friday he wouldn’t give me more than a hundred to eight, and today they’ve even made him favourite at eight to one, and there’s still nearly three weeks to the race. Fair enough he’s a good horse, but he’s not Arkle. In point of fact I don’t understand it.’

‘You don’t understand why Checkov tipped him?’

He hesitated. ‘Not to that extent, then, let’s say.’

‘But you do hope to win?’

‘Hope,’ he said. ‘Naturally, I hope to win. But it’s the biggest race we’ve ever tried... I don’t expect to win, do you see?’

‘You’ve as good a chance as any,’ I said. ‘Checkov had his column to fill. The public won’t read half-hearted stuff, you have to go all out for the positive statement.’

He gave me a small tight smile laced with a sneer for the soft option. A man with no patience or sympathy for anyone else’s problems, not even his sons’.

The sitting-room door opened and a large woman in a sunflower dress came in. She had thick fair down on her legs but no stockings, and a pair of puffed ankles bulged over the edges of some battered blue bedroom slippers. Nevertheless she was very light on her feet and she moved slowly, so that her progress seemed to be a weightless drift: no mean feat considering she must have topped twelve stone.

A mass of fine light brown hair hung in an amorphous cloud round her head, from which a pair of dreamy eyes surveyed the world as though half asleep. Her face was soft and rounded, not young, but still in a way immature. Her fantasy life, I guessed uncharitably, was more real to her than the present. She had been far away in the past hour, much further than upstairs.

‘I didn’t know you were in,’ she said to Roncey.

He stood up several seconds after me. ‘Madge, this is James Tyrone. I told you he was coming.’

‘Did you?’ She transferred her vague gaze to me. ‘Carry on, then.’

‘Where have you been?’ Roncey said. ‘Didn’t you hear me calling?’

‘Calling?’ She shook her head. ‘I was making the beds, of course.’ She stood in the centre of the room, looking doubtfully around at the mess. ‘Why didn’t you light the fire?’

I glanced involuntarily at the heap of ashes in the grate, but she saw them as no obstacle at all. From a scratched oak box beside the hearth she produced three firelighters and a handful of sticks. These went on top of the ashes, which got only a desultory poke. She struck a match, lit the firelighters, and made a wigwam of coal. The new fire flared up good temperedly on the body of the old while Madge took the hearth brush and swept a few cinders out of sight behind a pile of logs.

Fascinated, I watched her continue with her housework. She drifted across to the dead flowers, opened the window, and threw them out. She emptied the water from the vase after them, then put it back on the window sill and shut the window.

From behind the sofa where Roncey and I sat she pulled a large brown cardboard box. On the outside was stencilled Kellogg’s Cornflakes, 12 x Family Size and on the inside it was half filled with the same sort of jumble which was lying around the room. She wafted methodically around in a large circle taking everything up and throwing it just as it came into the box, a process which took approximately three minutes. She then pushed the box out of sight again behind the sofa and plumped up the seat cushions of two armchairs on her way back to the door. The room, tidy and with the brightly blazing fire, looked staggeringly different. The cobwebs were still there but one felt it might be their turn tomorrow. Peter was right. Ma had got the time and motion kick completely buttoned up; and what did it matter if the motive was laziness.

Roncey insisted that I should stay to lunch and filled in the time beforehand with a brisk but endless account of all the horses he had ever owned. Over lunch, cold beef and pickles and cheese and biscuits served at two-thirty on the kitchen table, it was still he who did all the talking. The boys ate steadily in silence and Madge contemplated the middle distance with eyes which saw only the scenes going on in her head.

When I left shortly afterwards Pat asked for a lift into Bishop’s Stortford and braved his father’s frown to climb into the front seat of the van. Roncey shook hands firmly as before and said he hoped to receive a free copy of Tally. ‘Of course,’ I said. But Tally were notoriously mean: I would have to send it myself.

He waved me out of the yard and told Pat brusquely to come straight back on the four o’clock bus, and we were barely out through the sagging gateposts before Pat unburdened himself of a chunk of bottled resentment.

‘He treats us like children... Ma’s no help, she never listens...’

‘You could leave here,’ I pointed out. ‘You’re what — nineteen?’

‘Next month. But I can’t leave and he knows it. Not if I want to race. I can’t turn professional yet, I’m not well enough known and no one would put me up on their horses. I’ve got to start as an amateur and make a name for myself, Pa says so. Well I couldn’t be an amateur if I left home and got an ordinary job somewhere, I couldn’t afford all the expenses and I wouldn’t have any time.’

‘A job in a stable...’ I suggested.

‘Do me a favour. The rules say you can’t earn a salary in any capacity in a racing stable and ride as an amateur, not even if you’re a secretary or an assistant or anything. It’s bloody unfair. And don’t say I could get a job as a lad and do my two and have a professional licence, of course I could. And how many lads ever get far as jockeys, doing that? None. Absolutely none. You know that.’

I nodded.

‘I do a lad’s work now, right enough. Six horses, we’ve got, and I do the bloody lot. Old Joe’s the only labour we’ve got on the whole farm, except us, believe it or not. Pa’s always got a dozen jobs lined up for him. And I wouldn’t mind the work, and getting practically no pay, I really wouldn’t, if Pa would let me ride in anything except point-to-points, but he won’t, he says I haven’t enough experience, and if you ask me he’s making bloody sure I never get enough experience... I’m absolutely fed up, I’ll tell you straight.’

He brooded over his situation all the way into Bishops Stortford. A genuine grievance, I thought. Victor Roncey was not a father to help his sons get on.