Nerve

Twelve

Kneeling very soon became uncomfortable, so I shuffled across the floor until I came to a wall, and sat with the bottom of my spine propped against it and my knees bent up.

The plaster on my eyes was still stuck tight. I tried to scrape it off by rubbing it against the rope on my wrists, but made no headway. The hooks hindered me and bumped into my face, and in the end I gave it up and concentrated again on warming my hands, alternately cradling them between my thighs and thumping them against my knees to restore the circulation.

After a time I found I could move my fingers. I still couldn’t feel them at all, but movement was a tremendous step forward, and I remember smiling about it for at least ten minutes.

I put my hands up to my face and tried to scrape the plaster off with my thumbnail. My thumb slid across my cheek, checked on the edge of the plaster and, when I pushed from the elbow, bent uselessly and slithered away. I tried again. It had to be done, because until I could see where I was going I couldn’t leave the tack-room. It was colder outside, and my ankles were still hobbled, and wandering about blind in those conditions did not appeal to me a bit.

I bent my head down and put my right thumb in my mouth, to warm it. Every few minutes I tested the results on the edge of the plaster and at last got to the stage where the thumb would push without bending. I only needed to prise a corner up, but even that took a long time. Eventually, however, my nail had pushed a flap unstuck which was big enough for me to grip between my wrists, and with several false starts and a fair selection of oaths, I managed in the end to pull the obstinate thing off.

Dazzling moonlight poured through the open door and through a window beside it. I was sitting against the end wall with the door away on my left. Above my head and all round the room there were empty wooden supports for saddles and bridles, and bare shelves and a cupboard on the wall facing me. An efficient-looking stove occupied the corner on my right, with a few dead cinders still scattered on the ground beside it.

From the centre of the ceiling, pale in the moonlight, hung twenty inches of sturdy galvanised chain.

I looked down at my hands. The harness hook glinted with reflected light. No wonder it had been so difficult to break, I thought. The chain and the hook were almost new. Not the dark, old, rusty things I had been imagining all along. I swallowed, really shattered. It was just as well I hadn’t known.

My hands themselves, including the thumb I had tried to warm, were white. Almost as white as my shirt-sleeves. Almost as white as the nylon rope which wound round the hooks. Only my wrists were dark.

I stretched my feet out. More white nylon rope ran from one ankle to the other, about fifteen inches of it.

My fingers wouldn’t undo the knots. My pockets had been emptied; no knife, no matches. There was nothing in the tack-room to cut with. I stood up stiffly, leaning against the wall, and slowly, carefully, shuffled over to the door. My foot kicked against something, and I looked down. On the edge of a patch of moonlight lay the broken link. It was a grotesquely buckled piece of silvery metal. It had given me a lot of trouble.

I went on to the door and negotiated the step. The bucket stood there, dully grey. I looked round the moonlit L-shaped yard. Four boxes stretched away to my right, and at right-angles to them there were two more, on the short arm of the L. Over there too, was the tap; and beside the tap, on the ground, an object I was very glad to see. A boot-scraper made of a thin metal plate bedded in concrete.

With small careful steps I made my way to it across the hard-packed gravel, the cutting wind ripping the last remnants of warmth from my body.

Leaning against the wall, and with one foot on the ground, I stretched the rope tautly over the boot-scraper and began to rub it to and fro, using the other foot as a pendulum. The blade of the scraper was far from sharp and the rope was new, and it took a long time to fray it through, but it parted in the end. I knelt down and tried to do the same with the strands round my wrists, but the harness hook kept getting in the way again and I couldn’t get anything like the same purchase. I stood up wearily. It looked as though I’d have to lug that tiresome piece of ironmongery around with me a while longer.

Being able to move my legs, however, gave me a marvellous sense of freedom. Stiffly, shaking with cold, I walked out of the yard round to the house looming darkly behind it. There were no lights, and on looking closer I found the downstairs windows were all shuttered. It was as empty as the stable; an unwelcome but not unexpected discovery.

I walked a bit unsteadily on past the house and down the drive. It was a long drive with no lodge at the gate, only an estate agent’s board announcing that this desirable country gentleman’s residence was for sale, together with some excellent modern stabling, forty acres of arable land and an apple orchard.

A country lane ran past the end of the drive giving no indication as to which way lay civilisation. I tried to remember from which direction the Mini-Cooper had come, but I couldn’t. It seemed a very long time ago. I glanced automatically at my left wrist but there was only rope there, no watch. Since it had to be one thing or the other, I turned right. It was a deserted road with open fields on the far sides of its low hedges. No cars passed, and nowhere could I see a light. Cursing the wind and aching all over, I stumbled on, hanging on to the fact that if I went far enough I was bound to come to a house in the end.

What I came to first was not a house but something much better. A telephone box. It stood alone, brightly lit inside, square and beckoning, on the corner where the lane turned into a more main road, and it solved the embarrassing problem of presenting myself at some stranger’s door looking like a scarecrow and having to explain how I had got into such a state.

There were a lot of people I could have called. Police, Ambulance or the Fire Brigade for a start; but by the time I had forced my still nearly useless hands to pull the door open far enough for me to get my foot in, I had had time to think. Once I called in authority in any form there would be unending questions to answer and statements to make, and like as not I’d end up for the night in the local cottage hospital. I hated being in hospitals.

Also, although I felt so bone cold, it was not, I thought, actually freezing. The puddles at the side of the road had no ice on them. They would be racing at Ascot the next day. Template would turn up for the Midwinter, and James didn’t know his jockey was wandering around unfit to ride.

Unfit... Between seeing the telephone box and clumsily picking up the receiver I came to the conclusion that the only satisfactory way to cheat Kemp-Lore of his victory was to go and ride the race, and win it if I could, and pretend that tonight’s misfortunes had not happened. He had had things his own way for far too long. He was not, he was positively not, I vowed, going to get the better of me any more.

I dialled 0 with an effort, gave the operator my credit card number, and asked to be connected to the one person in the world who would give me the help I needed, and keep quiet about it afterwards, and not try to argue me out of what I intended to do.

Her voice sounded sleepy. She said, ‘Hello?’

‘Joanna... are you busy?’ I asked.

‘Busy? At this hour?’ she said. ‘Is that you, Rob?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Well, go back to bed and ring me in the morning,’ she said. ‘I was asleep. Don’t you know what time it is?’ I heard her yawn.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Well, it’s... er... twenty to one. Good night.’

‘Joanna, don’t go,’ I said urgently. ‘I need your help. I really do. Please don’t ring off.’

‘What’s the matter?’ She yawned again.

‘I... I... Joanna, come and help me. Please.’

There was a little silence and she said in a more awake voice, ‘You’ve never said ‘please’ like that to me before. Not for anything.’

‘Will you come?’

‘Where to?’

‘I don’t really know,’ I said despairingly. ‘I’m in a telephone box on a country road miles from anywhere. The telephone exchange is Hampden Row.’ I spelled it out for her. ‘I don’t think it’s very far from London, and somewhere on the West, probably.’

‘You can’t come back on your own?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve no money and my clothes are wet.’

‘Oh.’ A pause. ‘All right, then. I’ll find out where you are and come in a taxi. Anything else?’

‘Bring a sweater,’ I said. ‘I’m cold. And some dry socks, if you have any. And some gloves. Don’t forget the gloves. And a pair of scissors.’

‘Sweater, socks, gloves, scissors. O.K. You’ll have to wait while I get dressed again, but I’ll come as soon as I can. Stay by the telephone box.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I’ll hurry, don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Good-bye.’

‘Good-bye...’ I fumbled the receiver back on to its rest. However quick she was, she wouldn’t arrive for an hour. Well, what was one more hour after so many? I had had no idea it was so late: the evening had certainly seemed to me to be going on for an eternity, but I had lost all sense of actual time. And Kemp-Lore hadn’t come back. His show had been over for hours, and he hadn’t come back. The bloody, murdering bastard, I thought.

I sat down on the floor of the box and leaned gingerly against the wall beside the telephone, with my head resting on the coin box. Exercise and the bitter wind outside, inactivity and shelter inside; one looked as cold a prospect as the other. But I was too tired to walk any more if I didn’t have to, so the choice was easy.

I put my hands up to my face and one by one bit my fingers. They were icy cold and yellowish white, and none of them had any feeling. They would curl and uncurl, but slowly and weakly, and that was all. I got to work on them seriously then, rubbing them up and down against my legs, bumping them on my knees, forcing them open and shut, but it seemed to make little difference. I persevered from fear that they should get worse if I didn’t, and paid for it in various creaks from my sore and sorely misused shoulders.

There was a good deal to think about to take my mind off my woes. That sticking-plaster for instance. Why had he used it? The strip over my mouth, I had assumed, had been to stop me shouting for help; but when I got it off at last and shouted, there was no one to hear. No one could have heard however loud I yelled, because the stable was so far from the lane.

The strip over my eyes should have been to prevent my seeing where I was going, but why did it matter if I saw an empty yard and a deserted tack-room? What would have happened differently, I wondered, if I had been able to see and talk.

To see... I would have seen Kemp-Lore’s expression while he went about putting me out of action. I would have seen Kemp-Lore... that was it! It was himself he had not wanted me to see, not the place.

If that were so it was conceivable that he had prevented me from talking simply so that he should not be trapped into answering. He had spoken only once, and that in a low, unrecognisable tone. I became convinced that he had not wanted me to hear and recognise his voice.

In that case he must have believed I did not know who had abducted me, that I didn’t know who he was. He must still believe it. Which meant that he thought James had knocked Turniptop’s doped sugar out of his hand by accident, that he hadn’t heard about Tick-Tock and me going round all the stables, and that he didn’t know that I had been asking about the Jaguar. It gave me, I thought, a fractional advantage for the future. If he had left any tracks anywhere, he would not see any vital, immediate need to obliterate them. If he didn’t know he was due for destruction himself, he would not be excessively on his guard.

Looking at my bloodless hands and knowing that on top of everything else I still had to face the pain of their return to life, I was aware that all the civilised brakes were off in my conscience. Helping to build up what he had broken was not enough. He himself had hammered into me the inner implacability I had lacked to avenge myself and all the others thoroughly, and do it physically and finally and without compunction.

She came, in the end.

I heard a car draw up and a door slam, and her quick tread on the road. The door of the telephone box opened, letting in an icy blast, and there she was, dressed in trousers and woolly boots and a warm blue padded jacket, with the light falling on her dark hair and making hollows of her eyes.

I was infinitely glad to see her. I looked up at her and did my best at a big smile of welcome, but it didn’t come off very well. I was shivering too much.

She knelt down and took a closer look at me. Her face went stiff with shock.

‘Your hands,’ she said.

‘Yes. Did you bring the scissors?’

Without a word she opened her handbag, took out a sensible-sized pair, and cut me free. She did it gently. She took the harness hook from between my knees and laid it on the floor, and carefully peeled from my wrists the cut pieces of rope. They were all more brown than white, stained with blood, and where they had been there were big corrugated raw patches, dark and deep. She stared at them.

‘More bits of rope down there,’ I said, nodding towards my feet.

She cut the pieces round my ankles, and I saw her rubbing my trouser leg between her fingers. The air had been too cold to dry them and my body had not generated enough heat, so they were still very damp.

‘Been swimming?’ she said flippantly. Her voice cracked.

There was a step on the road outside and a man’s shape loomed up behind Joanna.

‘Are you all right, miss?’ he said in a reliable sounding Cockney voice.

‘Yes, thank you,’ she said. ‘Do you think you could help me get my cousin into the taxi?’

He stepped into the doorway and looked down at me, his eyes on my wrists and my hands.

‘Christ,’ he said.

‘Very aptly put,’ I said.

He looked at my face. He was a big sturdy man of about fifty, weather-beaten like a sailor, with eyes that looked as if they had seen everything and found most of it disappointing.

‘You’ve been done proper, haven’t you?’ he said.

‘Proper,’ I agreed.

He smiled faintly. ‘Come on then. No sense in hanging about here.’

I stood up clumsily and lurched against Joanna, and put my arms round her neck to save myself from falling; and as I was there it seemed a shame to miss the opportunity, so I kissed her. On the eyebrow, as it happened.

‘Did you say “cousin”?’ said the taxi driver.

‘Cousin,’ said Joanna firmly. Much too firmly.

The driver held the door open. ‘We’d better take him to a doctor,’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No doctor.’

Joanna said, ‘You need one.’

‘No.’

‘That’s frostbite,’ said the driver pointing to my hands.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It isn’t freezing. No ice on the puddles. Just cold. Not frostbite.’ My teeth were chattering and I could only speak in short sentences.

‘What happened to your back?’ asked the driver, looking at the tattered bits of shirt sticking to me.

‘I... fell over,’ I said. ‘On some gravel.’

He looked sceptical.

‘It’s a terrible mess, and there’s a lot of dirt in it,’ said Joanna, peering round me and sounding worried.

‘You wash it,’ I said. ‘At home.’

‘You need a doctor,’ said the driver again.

I shook my head. ‘I need Dettol, aspirins and sleep.’

‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ said Joanna. ‘What else?’

‘Sweater,’ I said.

‘It’s in the taxi,’ she said. ‘And some other clothes. You can change as we go along. The sooner you get into a hot bath the better.’

‘I’d be careful about that, miss,’ said the driver. ‘Don’t go warming those hands up too fast or the fingers will drop off.’ A comforting chap. Inaccurate too, I trusted. Joanna looked more worried than ever.

We walked from the telephone box to the taxi. It was an ordinary black London taxi. I wondered what charm Joanna had used to get it so far out into the country in the middle of the night; and also, more practically, whether the meter was still ticking away. It was.

‘Get in, out of the wind,’ she said, opening the taxi door.

I did as I was told. She had brought a suitcase, from which she now produced a thin, pale blue cardigan of her own, and a padded man-sized olive-coloured anorak which zipped up the front. She looked at me judiciously, and out came the scissors. Some quick snips and the ruins of my shirt lay on the seat beside me. She cut two long strips of it and wound them carefully round my wrists. The taxi driver watched.

‘This is a police job,’ he suggested.

I shook my head. ‘Private fight,’ I said.

He held up the harness hook, which he had brought across from the telephone box.

‘What sort of thing is this?’ he asked.

‘Throw it in the ditch,’ I said, averting my eyes.

‘You’ll be needing it for the police,’ he insisted.

‘I told you,’ I said wearily, ‘no police.’

His disillusioned face showed that he knew all about people who got themselves beaten up but wouldn’t report it. He shrugged and went off into the darkness, and came back without the hook.

‘It’s in the ditch just behind the telephone box, if you change your mind,’ he said.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

Joanna finished the bandages and helped my arms into both the garments she had brought, and fastened the fronts. The next thing the suitcase produced was a pair of fur lined mittens which went on without too much trouble, and after that a thermos flask full of hot soup, and some cups.

I looked into Joanna’s black eyes as she held the cup to my mouth. I loved her. Who wouldn’t love a girl who thought of hot soup at a time like that?

The driver accepted some soup too, and stamped his feet on the ground and remarked that it was getting chilly. Joanna gave him a pained look, and I laughed.

He glanced at me appraisingly and said, ‘Maybe you can do without a doctor, at that.’ He thanked Joanna for the soup, gave her back the cup, settled himself in the driving seat and, switching off the light inside the taxi, started to drive us back to London.

‘Who did it?’ said Joanna.

‘Tell you later.’

‘All right.’ She didn’t press. She bent down to the case and brought out some fleecy slippers, thick socks and a pair of her own stretchy trews. ‘Take your trousers off.’

I said ironically ‘I can’t undo the zip.’

‘I forgot...’

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I’ll settle for the socks; can’t manage the trousers.’ Even I could hear the exhaustion in my voice, and Joanna without arguing got down on her knees in the swaying cab and changed my wet socks and shoes for dry ones.

‘Your feet are freezing,’ she said.

‘I can’t feel them,’ I said. The moon shone clearly through the window and I looked at the slippers. They were too large for me, much too large for Joanna.

‘Have I stepped into Brian’s shoes?’ I asked.

After a pause she said neutrally, ‘They are Brian’s, yes.

‘And the jacket?’

‘I bought it for him for Christmas.’

So that was that. It wasn’t the best moment to find out.

‘I didn’t give it to him,’ she said after a moment, as if she had made up her mind about something.

‘Why not?’

‘It didn’t seem to suit a respectable life in the outer suburbs. I gave him a gold tie-pin instead.’

‘Very suitable,’ I said dryly.

‘A farewell present,’ she said quietly.

I said sincerely, ‘I’m sorry.’ I knew it hadn’t been easy for her.

She drew in a breath sharply. ‘Are you made of iron, Rob?’

‘Iron filings,’ I said.

The taxi sped on.

‘We had a job finding you,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry we were so long. It was such a big area, you see.’

‘You came, though.’

‘Yes.’

I found sitting in the swaying taxi very uncomfortable. My arms and shoulders ached unceasingly and if I leaned back too heavily the raw bits didn’t like it. After a while I gave it up, and finished the journey sitting on the floor with my head and my hands in Joanna’s lap.

I was of course quite used to being knocked about. I followed, after all, an occupation in which physical damage was a fairly frequent though unimportant factor; and, especially during my first season, when I was a less efficient jockey and most of the horses I rode were the worst to be had, there was rarely a time when some area of my body was not black and blue. I had broken several of the smaller bones, been kicked in tender places, and dislocated one or two joints. On my general sense of well-being, and on my optimism that I wouldn’t crash un-mendably, none of these things had made the slightest dent. It seemed that in common with most other jockeys I had been born with the sort of resilient constitution which could take a bang and be ready for business, if not the following day, at least a good deal quicker than the medical profession considered normal.

Practice had given me a certain routine for dealing with discomfort, which was mainly to ignore it and concentrate on something else: but this system was not operating very well that evening. It didn’t work, for instance, when I sat for a while in a light armchair in Joanna’s warm room with my elbows on my knees, watching my fingers gradually change colour from yellowy white to smudgy charcoal, to patchy purple, and finally to red.

It began as a tingle, faint and welcome, soon after we had got back and Joanna had turned both her powerful heaters on. She had insisted at once on removing my clammy trousers and also my pants, and on my donning her black trews, which were warm but not long enough by several inches. It was odd, in a way, letting her undress me, which she did matter-of-factly and without remark; but in another way it seemed completely natural, a throwback to our childhood, when we had been bathed together on our visits to each other’s houses.

She dug out some rather powdery-looking aspirins in a bottle. There were only three of them left, which I swallowed. Then she made some black coffee and held it for me to drink. It was stiff with brandy.

‘Warming,’ she said laconically. ‘Anyway, you’ve stopped shivering at last.’

It was then that my fingers tingled and I told her.

‘Will it be bad?’ she said prosaically, putting down the empty coffee mug.

‘Possibly.’

‘You won’t want me to sit and watch you then,’ she said.

I shook my head. She took the empty mug into the kitchen and was several minutes coming back with a full one for herself.

The tingle increased first to a burning sensation and then to a feeling of being squeezed in a vice, tighter and tighter, getting more and more agonising until it felt that at any minute my fingers would disintegrate under the pressure. But there they were, harmlessly hanging in the warm air, with nothing to show for it except that they were turning slowly puce.

Joanna came back from the kitchen and wiped the sweat off my forehead.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

She nodded, and gave me a faint edition of the intimate smile that had had my heart doing flip-flaps from boyhood, and drank her coffee.

When the pulse got going, it felt as though my hands had been taken out of the vice, laid on a bench, and were being rhythmically hammered. It was terrible. And it went on too long. My head drooped.

When I looked up she was standing in front of me, watching me with an expression which I couldn’t read. There were tears in her eyes.

‘Is it over?’ she said, blinking to disguise them.

‘More or less.’

We both looked at my hands, which were now a fierce red all over.

‘And your feet?’ she asked.

‘They’re fine,’ I said. Their awakening had been nothing.

‘I’d better wash those grazes on your back,’ she said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘In the morning.’

‘There’s a lot of dirt in them,’ she protested.

‘It’s been there so long already that a few more hours won’t hurt,’ I said. ‘I’ve had four anti-tetanus injections in the last two years, and there’s always penicillin... and I’m too tired.’

She didn’t argue. She unzipped and helped me take off the anorak, and made me get into her bed, still incongruously dressed in her black trews and blue cardigan and looking like a second-rate ballet dancer with a hangover. The sheets were rumpled from her lying in them before I had woken her up, and there was still a dent in her pillow where her head had been. I put mine there too, with an odd feeling of delight. She saw me grin, and correctly read my mind.

‘It’s the first time you’ve got into my bed,’ she said. ‘And it’ll be the last.’

‘Have a heart, Joanna,’ I said.

She perched herself on the edge of the mattress and looked down at me.

‘It’s no good for cousins,’ she said.

‘And if we weren’t cousins?’

‘I don’t know...’ she sighed. ‘But we are.’

She bent down to kiss me good night on the forehead.

I couldn’t help it; I put my arms up round her shoulders and pulled her down on to my chest and kissed her properly, mouth to mouth. It was the first time I had ever done it, and into it went all the pent-up and suppressed desire I had ever felt for her. It was too hungry, too passionate, much too desperate. I knew it, but I couldn’t stop it. For a moment she seemed to relax and melt and kiss me back, but it was so brief and passing that I thought I had imagined it, and afterwards her body grew rigid.

I let her go. She stood up abruptly and stared at me, her face scrubbed of any emotion. No anger, no disgust; and no love. She turned away without speaking and went across the room to the sofa, where she twisted a blanket around herself and lay down. She stretched out her hand to the table light and switched it off.

Her voice reached me across the dark room, calm, self-controlled. ‘Good night, Rob.’

‘Good night, Joanna,’ I said politely.

There was dead silence.

I rolled over on to my stomach and put my face in her pillow.