Nerve

Seventeen

We set off early and got down to the cottage before nine, because there was a good deal to be done before Kemp-Lore arrived.

I hid the car behind the bushes again, and we carried the rug and the other things indoors. Buttonhook was safe and sound in her room, and was delighted to see us, neighing purringly in her throat when we opened her door. While I tossed her straw and fetched her some more hay and water, Joanna said she would clean the windows at the front of the cottage, and presently I heard her humming softly as she wiped away the grime of years.

The putty round the new panes had hardened well, and after I had finished Buttonhook, and Joanna was stepping back admiring the sparkle of the glass, I fetched the paint and began the tedious job of covering the patchwork of old decayed black paint and pale new putty with a bright green skin. Joanna watched me for a while and then went indoors. She put down the rug in the little hall, and I heard her banging a nail into the wall to hang up the picture just inside the front door where no visitor could fail to see it. After that she worked on the inside of the windows while I painted their outsides. She cut the flowery material into lengths and pinned it so that it hung like curtains.

When we had both finished we stood at the gate in front of the cottage admiring our handiwork. With its fresh paint, pretty curtains, and the rug and picture showing through the half-open door, it looked well cared for and homely.

‘Has it got a name?’ Joanna asked.

‘I don’t think so. It’s always called “The Keeper’s Cottage,” as far as I know,’ I said.

‘We should name it Sundew,’ she said.

‘After the Grand National winner?’ I said, puzzled.

‘No,’ she said soberly, ‘the carnivorous plant.’

I put my arm round her waist. She didn’t stir.

‘You will be careful, won’t you?’ she said.

‘Yes, I will,’ I assured her. I looked at my watch. It was twenty minutes to eleven. ‘We’d better go indoors in case he comes early.’

We went in and shut the front door and sat on the remains of the hay bale in the front room, giving ourselves a clear view of the front gate.

A minute or two ticked by in silence. Joanna shivered.

‘Are you too cold?’ I said with concern. There had been another frost during the night and there was, of course, no heating in the cottage. ‘We should have brought a stove.’

‘It’s nerves as much as cold,’ she said, shivering again.

I put my arm round her shoulders. She leaned comfortably against me, and I kissed her cheek. Her black eyes looked gravely, warily into mine.

‘It isn’t incest,’ I said.

Her eyelids flickered in shock, but she didn’t move.

‘Our fathers may be brothers,’ I said, ‘but our mothers are not related to them or to each other.’

She said nothing. I had a sudden feeling that if I lost this time I had lost for ever, and a leaden chill of despair settled in my stomach.

‘No one forbids marriage between cousins,’ I said slowly. ‘The Law allows it and the Church allows it, and you can be sure they wouldn’t if there were anything immoral in it. And in a case like ours, the medical profession raises no objection either. If there were a good genetic reason why we shouldn’t marry, it would be different. But you know there isn’t.’ I paused, but she still looked at me gravely and said nothing. Without much hope I said, ‘I don’t really understand why you feel the way you do.’

‘It’s instinct,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand it myself. It’s just that I’ve always thought of it as wrong... and impossible.’

There was a little silence.

I said, ‘I think I’ll sleep in my digs down here in the village tonight, and ride out at exercise with the horses tomorrow morning. I’ve been neglecting my job this week...’

She sat up straight, pulling free of my arm.

‘No,’ she said abruptly. ‘Come back to the flat.’

‘I can’t. I can’t any more,’ I said.

She stood up and went over to the window and looked out. Minutes passed. Then she turned round and perched on the window-sill with her back to the light, and I couldn’t see her expression.

‘It’s an ultimatum, isn’t it?’ she said shakily. ‘Either I marry you or you clear out altogether? No more having it both ways like you’ve given me this past week...’

‘It isn’t a deliberate ultimatum,’ I protested. ‘But we can’t go on like this for ever. At least, I can’t. Not if you know beyond any doubt that you’ll never change your mind.’

‘Before last week-end there wasn’t any problem as far as I was concerned,’ she said. ‘You were just something I couldn’t have... like oysters, which give me indigestion... something nice, but out of bounds. And now’ — she tried to laugh — ‘now it’s as if I’ve developed a craving for oysters. And I’m in a thorough muddle.’

‘Come here,’ I said persuasively. She walked across and sat down again beside me on the hay bale. I took her hand.

‘If we weren’t cousins, would you marry me?’ I held my breath.

‘Yes,’ she said simply. No reservations, no hesitation any more.

I turned towards her and put my hands on the sides of her head and tilted her face up. There wasn’t any panic this time. I kissed her; gently, and with love.

Her lips trembled, but there was no rigidity in her body, no blind instinctive retreat as there had been a week ago. I thought, if seven days can work such a change, what could happen in seven weeks?

I hadn’t lost after all. The chill in my stomach melted away. I sat back on the hay bale, holding Joanna’s hand again and smiling at her.

‘It will be all right,’ I said. ‘Our being cousins won’t worry you in a little while.’

She looked at me wonderingly for a moment and then unexpectedly her lips twitched at the corners. ‘I believe you,’ she said, ‘because I’ve never known anyone more determined in all my life. You’ve always been like it. You don’t care what trouble you put yourself to to get what you want... like riding in the race last Saturday, and fixing up this fly-trap of a cottage, and living with me how you have this week... so my instinct against blood relatives marrying, wherever it is seated, will have to start getting used to the idea that it is wrong, I suppose, otherwise I’ll find myself being dragged by you along to Claudius Mellitt to be psychoanalysed or brain-washed, or something. I will try,’ she finished more seriously, ‘not to keep you waiting very long.’

‘In that case,’ I said, matching her lightheartedness, ‘I’ll go on sleeping on your sofa as often as possible, so as to be handy when the breakthrough occurs.’

She laughed without strain. ‘Starting tonight?’ she asked.

‘I guess so,’ I said smiling. ‘I never did like my digs much.’

‘Ouch,’ she said.

‘But I’ll have to come back here on Sunday evening in any case. As James has given me my job back, the least I can do is show some interest in his horses.’

We went on sitting on the hay bale, talking calmly as if nothing had happened; and nothing had, I thought, except a miracle that one could reliably build a future on, the miracle that Joanna’s hand now lay intimately curled in mine without her wanting to remove it.

The minutes ticked away towards eleven o’clock.

‘Suppose he doesn’t come?’ she said.

‘He will.’

‘I almost hope he doesn’t,’ she said. ‘Those letters would be enough by themselves.’

‘You won’t forget to post them when you get back, will you?’ I said.

‘Of course not,’ she said, ‘but I wish you’d let me stay.’

I shook my head. We sat on, watching the gate. The minute hand crept round to twelve on my watch, and passed it.

‘He’s late,’ she said.

Five past eleven. Ten past eleven.

‘He isn’t coming,’ Joanna murmured.

‘He’ll come,’ I said.

‘Perhaps he got suspicious and checked up and found there wasn’t any Mrs. Doris Jones living in the Keeper’s Cottage,’ she said.

‘There shouldn’t be any reason for him to be suspicious.’ I pointed out. ‘He clearly didn’t know at the end of that television interview with me last Saturday that I was on to him, and nothing I’ve done since should have got back to him, and James and Tick-Tock promised to say nothing to anyone about the doped sugar. As far as Kemp-Lore should know, he is unsuspected and undiscovered. If he feels as secure as I am sure he does, he’ll never pass up an opportunity to learn about something as damaging as pep pills... so he’ll come.’

A quarter past eleven.

He had to come. I found that all my muscles were tense, as if I were listening for him with my whole body, not only my ears. I flexed my toes inside my shoes and tried to relax. There were traffic jams, breakdowns, detours, any number of things to delay him. It was a long way, and he could easily have misjudged the time it would take.

Twenty past eleven.

Joanna sighed and stirred. Neither of us spoke for ten minutes. At eleven-thirty, she said again, ‘He isn’t coming.’

I didn’t answer.

At eleven-thirty-three, the sleek cream nose of an Aston Martin slid to a stop at the gate and Maurice Kemp-Lore stepped out. He stretched himself, stiff from driving, and glanced over the front of the cottage. He wore a beautifully cut hacking jacket and cavalry twill trousers, and there was poise and grace in his every movement.

‘Glory, he’s handsome,’ breathed Joanna in my ear. ‘What features! What colouring! Television doesn’t do him justice. It’s difficult to think of anyone who looks so young and noble doing any harm.’

‘He’s thirty-three,’ I said, ‘and Nero died at twenty-nine.’

‘You know the oddest things,’ she murmured.

Kemp-Lore unlatched the garden gate, walked up the short path and banged the knocker on the front door.

We stood up. Joanna picked a piece of hay off her skirt, swallowed, gave me a half-smile, and walked unhurriedly into the hall. I followed her and stood against the wall where I would be hidden when the front door opened.

Joanna licked her lips.

‘Go on,’ I whispered.

She put her hand on the latch, and opened the door.

‘Mrs. Jones?’ the honey voice said. ‘I’m so sorry I’m a little late.’

‘Won’t you come in, Mr. Kemp-Lore,’ said Joanna in her cockney suburban accent. ‘It’s ever so nice to see you.’

‘Thank you,’ he said stepping over the threshold. Joanna took two paces backwards and Kemp-Lore followed her into the hall.

Slamming the front door with my foot, I seized Kemp-Lore from behind by both elbows, pulling them backwards and forcing him forwards at the same time. Joanna opened the door of Buttonhook’s room and I brought my foot up into the small of Kemp-Lore’s back and gave him an almighty push. He staggered forwards through the door and I had a glimpse of him sprawling face downwards in the straw before I had the door shut again and the padlock firmly clicking into place.

‘That was easy enough,’ I said with satisfaction. ‘Thanks to your help.’

Kemp-Lore began kicking the door.

‘Let me out,’ he shouted. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

‘He didn’t see you,’ said Joanna softly.

‘No,’ I agreed, ‘I think we’ll leave him in ignorance while I take you into Newbury to catch the train.’

‘Is it safe?’ she said, looking worried.

‘I won’t be away long,’ I promised. ‘Come on.’

Before driving her down to Newbury I moved Kemp-Lore’s car along and off the lane until it was hidden in the bushes. The last thing I wanted was some stray inquisitive local inhabitant going along to the cottage to investigate. Then I took Joanna to the station and drove straight back again, a matter of twenty minutes each way, and parked in the bushes as usual.

Walking quietly I went along the side of the cottage and round to the back.

Kemp-Lore’s hands stuck out through the glassless window frames, gripping the water pipe bars and shaking them vigorously. They had not budged in their cement.

He stopped abruptly when he saw me and I watched the anger in his face change to blank surprise.

‘Who did you expect?’ I said.

‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ he said. ‘Some damn fool of a woman locked me in here nearly an hour ago and went away and left me. You can let me out. Quickly.’ His breath wheezed sharply in his throat. ‘There’s a horse in here,’ he said looking over his shoulder, ‘and they give me asthma.’

‘Yes,’ I said steadily, without moving. ‘Yes. I know.’

It hit him then. His eyes widened.

‘It was you... who pushed me...’

‘Yes,’ I said.

He stood staring at me through the criss-cross of window frames and bars.

‘You did it on purpose? You put me in here with a horse on purpose?’ His voice rose.

‘Yes,’ I agreed.

‘Why?’ he cried. He must have known the answer already, but when I didn’t reply he said again, almost in a whisper, ‘Why?’

‘I’ll give you half an hour to think about it,’ I said, turning to walk away.

‘No,’ he exclaimed. ‘My asthma’s bad. Let me out at once.’ I turned back and stood close to the window. His breath whistled fiercely, but he had not even loosened his collar and tie. He was in no danger.

‘Don’t you have some pills?’ I said.

‘Of course. I’ve taken them. But they won’t work with a horse so close. Let me out.’

‘Stand by the window,’ I said, ‘and breathe the fresh air.’

‘It’s cold,’ he objected. ‘This place is like an ice house.’

I smiled. ‘Maybe it is,’ I said. ‘But then you are fortunate... you can move about to keep warm, and you have your jacket on... and I have not poured three bucketfuls of cold water over your head.’

He gasped sharply, and it was then, I think, that he began to realise that he was not going to escape lightly or easily from his prison.

Certainly, when I returned to him after sitting on the hay bale for half an hour listening to him alternately kicking the door and yelling for help out of the window, he was no longer assuming that I had lured him all the way from London and gone to the trouble of converting a cottage room into a loose box merely to set him free again at his first squawk.

When I walked round to the window I found him fending off Buttonhook, who was putting her muzzle affectionately over his shoulder. I laughed callously, and he nearly choked with rage.

‘Get her away from me,’ he screamed. ‘She won’t leave me alone. I can’t breathe.’

He clung on to a bar with one hand, and chopped at Buttonhook with the other.

‘If you don’t make so much noise she’ll go back to her hay.’

He glared at me through the bars, his face distorted with rage and hate and fright. His asthma was much worse. He had unbuttoned the neck of his shirt and pulled down his tie and I could see his throat heaving.

I put the box of sugar cubes I was carrying on the inner window-sill, withdrawing my hand quickly as he made a grab at it.

‘Put some sugar on her hay,’ I said. ‘Go on.’ I added, as he hesitated, ‘this lot isn’t doped.’

His head jerked up. I looked bitterly into his staring eyes.

‘Twenty-eight horses,’ I said, ‘starting with Shantytown. Twenty-eight sleepy horses who all ate some sugar from your hand before they raced.’

Savagely he picked up the box of sugar, tore it open, and sprinkled the cubes on the pile of hay at the other end of the room. Buttonhook, following him, put her head down and began to crunch. He came back to the window, wheezing laboriously.

‘You won’t get away with this,’ he said. ‘You’ll go to jail for this. I’ll see you’re pilloried for this.’

‘Save your breath,’ I said brusquely. ‘I’ve a good deal to say to you. After that, if you want to complain to the police about the way I’ve treated you, you’re welcome.’

‘You’ll be in jail so quick you won’t know what hit you,’ he said, the breath hissing through his teeth. ‘Now, hurry up and say whatever it is you want to say.’

‘Hurry?’ I said slowly. ‘Well now, it’s going to take some time.’

‘You’ll have to let me out by two-thirty at the latest,’ he said unguardedly. ‘I’ve got rehearsals today at five.’

I smiled at him. I could feel it wasn’t a pleasant smile.

I said, ‘It isn’t an accident that you are here on Friday.’

His jaw literally dropped. ‘The programme...’ he said.

‘Will have to go on without you,’ I agreed.

‘But you can’t,’ he shouted, gasping for enough breath, ‘you can’t do that.’

‘Why not?’ I said mildly.

‘It’s... it’s television,’ he shouted, as if I didn’t know. ‘Millions of people are expecting to see the programme.’

‘Then millions of people are going to be disappointed,’ I said.

He stopped shouting and took three gulping, wheezing breaths.

‘I know,’ he said, with a visible effort at moderation and at getting back to normal, ‘that you don’t really mean to keep me here so long that I can’t get to the studio in time for the programme. All right then,’ he paused for a couple of wheezes, ‘if you let me go in good time for the rehearsals, I won’t report you to the police as I threatened. I’ll overlook all this.’

‘I think you had better keep quiet and listen,’ I said. ‘I suppose you find it hard to realise that I don’t give a damn for your influence or the pinnacle the British public have seen fit to put you on, or your dazzling, synthetic personality. They are a fraud. Underneath there is only a sick mess of envy and frustration and spite. But I wouldn’t have found you out if you hadn’t doped twenty-eight horses I rode and told everyone I had lost my nerve. And you can spend this afternoon reflecting that you wouldn’t be missing your programme tonight if you hadn’t tried to stop me riding Template.’

He stood stock still, his face pallid and suddenly sweating.

‘You mean it,’ he whispered.

‘Indeed I do,’ I said.

‘No,’ he said. A muscle in his cheek started twitching. ‘No. You can’t. You did ride Template... you must let me do the programme.’

‘You won’t be doing any more programmes,’ I said. ‘Not tonight or any night. I didn’t bring you here just for a personal revenge, though I don’t deny I felt like killing you last Friday night. I brought you here on behalf of Art Mathews and Peter Cloony and Grant Oldfield. I brought you because of Danny Higgs, and Ingersoll, and every other jockey you have hit where it hurts. In various ways you saw to it that they lost their jobs; so now you are going to lose yours.’

For the first time, he was speechless. His lips moved but no sound came out except the high, asthmatic whine of his breathing. His eyes seemed to fall back in their sockets and his lower jaw hung slack, making hollows of his cheeks. He looked like a death’s-head caricature of the handsome charmer he had been.

I took the long envelope addressed to him out of my pocket and held it to him through the bars. He took it mechanically, with black fingers.

‘Open it,’ I said.

He pulled out the sheets of paper and read them. He read them through twice, though his face showed from the first that he understood the extent of the disaster. The haggard hollows deepened.

‘As you will see,’ I said, ‘those are photostat copies. More like them are in the post to the Senior Steward and to your boss at Universal Telecast, and to several other people as well. They will get them tomorrow morning. And they will no longer wonder why you failed to turn up for your programme tonight.’

He still seemed unable to speak, and his hands shook convulsively. I passed to him through the bars the rolled up portrait Joanna had drawn of him. He opened it, and it was clearly another blow.

‘I brought it to show you,’ I said, ‘so that you would realise beyond any doubt that I know exactly what you have been doing. All along you have found that having an instantly recognisable face was a big handicap when it came to doing things you couldn’t explain away, like ramming an old Jaguar across Peter Cloony’s lane.’

His head jerked back, as if it still surprised him that I knew so much.

I said calmly, ‘A ticket collector at Cheltenham said you were pretty.’

I smiled faintly. He looked very far from pretty at that moment.

‘As for that Jaguar,’ I said, ‘I haven’t had time yet to find out where it came from, but it can be done. It’s only a question of asking. Advertising its number in the trade papers... tracing its former owner... that sort of thing. Tedious, I dare say, but definitely possible, and if necessary I will do it. No one would forget having you for a customer.

‘You must have bought it in the week after the tank carrier blocked Cloony’s lane, because that is what gave you the idea. Do you think you can explain away the time sequence of acquiring the Jaguar and abandoning it exactly where and when and how you did? And disappearing from the scene immediately afterwards?’

His mouth hung open and the muscle twitched in his cheek.

‘Most of your vicious rumours,’ I said, changing tack, ‘were spread for you by Corin Kellar and John Ballerton, who you found would foolishly repeat every thought that you put into their heads. I hope you know Corin well enough to realise that he never stands by his friends. When the contents of the letter he will receive in the morning sink into that rat-brain of his, and he finds that other people have had letters like it, there won’t be anyone spewing out more damaging truth about you than him. He will start telling everyone, for instance, that it was you who set him at loggerheads with Art Mathews. There won’t be any stopping him.’

‘You see,’ I finished after a pause, ‘I think it is only justice that as far as possible you should suffer exactly what you inflicted on other people.’

He spoke at last. The words came out in a wheezing croak, and he was past caring what admissions he made. ‘How did you find it out?’ he said disbelievingly. ‘You didn’t know last Friday, you couldn’t see...’

‘I did know last Friday,’ I said, ‘I knew just how far you had gone to smash Peter Cloony, and I knew you hated me enough to give yourself asthma doping my mounts. I knew the dope business had gone sour on you when it came to Turniptop at Stratford. And you may care to learn that it was no accident that James Axminster jogged your arm and stepped on the sugar lumps; I asked him to, and told him what you were doing. I knew all about your curdled, obsessive jealousy of jockeys. I didn’t need to see you last Friday to know you... there wasn’t anyone else with any reason to want me out of action.’

‘You can’t have known all that,’ he said obstinately, clinging to it as if it mattered. ‘You didn’t know the next day when I interviewed you after the race...’ His voice trailed off in a wheeze and he stared at me hopelessly through the bars.

‘You aren’t the only one who can smile and hate at the same time,’ I said neutrally. ‘I learned it from you.’

He made a sound like a high-pitched moan, and turned his back towards me with his arms bent upwards and folded over his head in an attitude of the utmost misery and despair. It may be regrettable, but I felt no pity for him at all.

I walked away from his window, round the cottage and in at the front door, and sat down again on the hay in the front room. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter to two. The afternoon stretched lengthily ahead.

Kemp-Lore had another spell of screaming for help through the window, but no one came; then he tried the door again, but there was no handle on his side of it for him to pull, and it was too solidly constructed for him to kick his way through. Buttonhook grew restive again from the noise and started pawing the ground, and Kemp-Lore shouted to me furiously to let him out, let him out, let him out.

Joanna’s great fear had been that his asthma would make him seriously ill, and she had repeatedly warned me to be careful; but I judged that while he had enough breath for so much yelling he was in no real danger, and I sat and listened to him without relenting. The slow hours passed, punctuated only by the bursts of fury from the back room, while I stretched myself comfortably across the hay and day-dreamed about marriage to my cousin.

At about five o’clock he was quiet for a long time. I got up and walked round the outside of the cottage and looked in through the window. He was lying face down in the straw near the door, not moving at all.

I watched him for a few minutes and called his name, but as he still did not stir I began to be alarmed, and decided I would have to make sure he was all right. I returned to the hall, and having shut the front door firmly behind me, I unlocked the padlock on the back room. The door swung inwards, and Buttonhook, lifting her head, greeted me with a soft whinny.

Kemp-Lore was alive, that at least was plain. The sound of his high, squeezed breath rose unmistakably from his still form. I bent down beside him to see into just how bad a spasm he had been driven, but I never did get around to turning him over or feeling his pulse. As soon as I was down on one knee beside him he heaved himself up and into me, knocking me sprawling off balance, and sprang like lightning for the door.

I caught his shoe as it zipped across three inches from my face and yanked him back. He fell heavily on top of me and we rolled towards Buttonhook, with me trying to pin him down on the floor and he fighting like a tiger to get free. The mare was frightened. She cowered back against the wall to get out of our way, but it was a small room and our struggles took us among Buttonhook’s feet and under her belly. She stepped gingerly over us and made cautiously for the open door.

Kemp-Lore’s left hand was clamped round my right wrist, a circumstance which hindered me considerably. If he’d been clairvoyant he couldn’t have struck on anything better calculated to cause me inconvenience. I hit him in the face and neck with my left hand, but I was too close to get any weight behind it and was also fairly occupied dodging the blows he aimed at me in return.

After he had lost the advantage of surprise, he seemed to decide he could only get free of me by lacing his fingers in my hair and banging my head against the wall, for this he tried repeatedly to do. He was staggeringly strong, more than I would have believed possible in view of his asthma, and the fury and desperation which fired him blazed in his blue eyes like a furnace.

If my hair hadn’t been so short he would probably have succeeded in knocking me out, but his fingers kept slipping when I twisted my head violently in his grasp, and the third time my ear grazed the plaster I managed at last to wrench my right hand free as well.

After that, hauling off a fraction, I landed a socking right jab in his short ribs, and the air whistled out of his lungs screeching like an express train. He went a sick grey-green colour and fell slackly off me, gasping and retching and clawing his throat for air.

I got to my feet and hauled him up, and staggered with him over to the window, holding him where the fresh cold air blew into his face. After three or four minutes his colour improved and the terrifying heaving lessened, and some strength flowed back into his sagging legs.

I clamped his fingers round the window frames and let go of him. He swayed a bit, but his hands held, and after a moment I walked dizzily out of the room and padlocked the door shut behind me.

Buttonhook had found her way into the front room and was placidly eating the hay. I leaned weakly against the wall and watched her for a while, cursing myself for the foolish way I had nearly got myself locked into my own prison. I was badly shaken, not only by the fight itself but by the strength with which Kemp-Lore had fought and by the shocking effect my last blow had had on him. I ought to have had more sense, I knew, than to hit an asthmatic with that particular punch.

There was no sound from the back room. I straightened up and walked round to the window. He was standing there, holding on to the frames where I had put him, and there were tears running down his cheeks.

He was breathing safely enough, the asthma reduced to a more manageable wheeze, and I imagined it would not get any worse from then on, as Buttonhook was no longer in the room with him.

‘Damn you,’ he said. Another tear spilt over. ‘Damn you. Damn you.’

There wasn’t anything to say.

I went back to Buttonhook, and put on her halter. I had meant to deal with her later, after I had let Kemp-Lore go, but in the changed circumstances I decided to do it straight away, while it was still light. Leading her out of the front door and through the gate, I jumped on to her back and rode her away up past the two cars hidden in the bushes and along the ridge of the hill.

A mile further on I struck the lane which led up to the Downs, and turning down that came soon to a gate into a field owned by a farmer I had often ridden for. Slipping off Buttonhook I opened the gate, led her through and turned her loose.

She was so amiable that I was sorry to part with her, but I couldn’t keep her in the cottage, I couldn’t stable an elderly hunter in James’s yard and expect his lads to look after her, I couldn’t find a snap buyer for her at six o’clock in the evening; and I frankly didn’t know what else to do with her. I fondled her muzzle and patted her neck and fed her a handful of sugar. Then I slapped her on the rump and watched my eighty-five quid kick up her heels and canter down the field like a two-year-old. The farmer would no doubt be surprised to find an unclaimed brown mare on his land, but it would not be the first time a horse had been abandoned in that way, and I hadn’t any doubt that he would give her a good home.

I turned away and walked back along the hill to the cottage. It was beginning to get dark, and the little building lay like a shadow in the hollow as I went down to it through the trees and bushes. All was very quiet, and I walked softly through the garden to the back window.

He was still standing there. When he saw me he said quite quietly ‘Let me out.’

I shook my head.

‘Well at least go and telephone the company, and tell them I’m ill. You can’t let them all wait and wait for me to come, right up to the last minute.’

I didn’t answer.

‘Go and telephone,’ he said again.

I shook my head.

He seemed to crumple inside. He stretched his hands through the bars and rested his head against the window frames.

‘Let me out.’

I said nothing.

‘For pity’s sake,’ he said, ‘let me out.’

For pity’s sake.

I said, ‘How long did you intend to leave me in that tack-room?’

His head snapped up as if I’d hit him. He drew his hands back and gripped the bars.

‘I went back to untie you,’ he said, speaking quickly, wanting to convince me. ‘I went back straight after the programme was over, but you’d gone. Someone found you and set you free pretty soon, I suppose, since you were able to ride the next day.’

‘And you went back to find the tack-room empty?’ I said. ‘So you knew I had come to no harm?’

‘Yes,’ he said eagerly. ‘Yes, that’s what happened. I wouldn’t have left you there very long, because of the rope stopping your circulation.’

‘You did think there was some danger of that, then?’ I said innocently.

‘Yes, of course there was, and that’s why I wouldn’t have left you there too long. If someone hadn’t freed you first, I’d have let you go in good time. I only wanted to hurt you enough to stop you riding.’ His voice was disgustingly persuasive, as if what he was saying were not abnormal.

‘You’re a liar,’ I said calmly. ‘You didn’t go back to untie me after your show. You would have found me still there if you had. In fact it took me until midnight to get free, because no one came. Then I found a telephone and rang up for a car to fetch me, but by the time it reached me, which was roughly two o’clock, you had still not returned. When I got to Ascot the following day, everyone was surprised to see me. There was a rumour, they said, that I wouldn’t turn up. You even mentioned on television that my name in the number frames was a mistake. Well... no one but you had any reason to believe that I wouldn’t arrive at the races: so when I heard that rumour I knew that you had not gone back to untie me, even in the morning. You thought I was still swinging from that hook, in God knows what state... and as I understand it, you intended to leave me there indefinitely, until someone found me by accident... or until I was dead.’

‘No,’ he said faintly.

I looked at him without speaking for a moment, and then turned to walk away.

‘All right,’ he screamed suddenly, banging on the bars with his fists. ‘All right. I didn’t care whether you lived or died. Do you like that? Is that what you want to hear? I didn’t care if you died. I thought of you hanging there with your arms swelling and going black... with the agony going on and on... and I didn’t care. I didn’t care enough to stay awake. I went to bed. I went to sleep. I didn’t care. I didn’t care... and I hope you like it.’

His voice cracked, and he sank down inside the room so that all I could see in the gathering dusk was the top of his fair head and the hands gripping the bars with the knuckles showing white through the skin.

‘I hope you like it,’ he said brokenly.

I didn’t like it. Not one little bit. It made me feel distinctly sick.

I went slowly round into the front room and sat down again on the hay. I looked at my watch. It was a quarter-past six. Still three hours to wait: three hours in which the awful truth would slowly dawn on Kemp-Lore’s colleagues in the television studio, three hours of anxious speculation and stop-gap planning, culminating in the digging out of a bit of old film to fill in the empty fifteen minutes and the smooth announcement, ‘We regret that owing to the... er... illness of Maurice Kemp-Lore there will be no Turf Talk tonight.’

Or ever again, mates, I thought, if you did but know it.

As it grew dark the air got colder. It had been frosty all day, but with the disappearance of the sun the evening developed a sub-zero bite, and the walls of the unlived-in cottage seemed to soak it up. Kemp-Lore began kicking the door again.

‘I’m cold,’ he shouted. ‘It’s too cold.’

‘Too bad,’ I said, under my breath.

‘Let me out,’ he yelled.

I sat on the hay without moving. The wrist which he had latched on to while we fought was uncomfortably sore, and blood had seeped through the bandage again. What the Scots doctor would have to say when he saw it I hated to think. The three warts would no doubt quiver with disapproval. I smiled at the picture.

Kemp-Lore kicked the door for a long time, trying to break through it, but he didn’t succeed. At the same time he wasted a good deal of breath yelling that he was cold and hungry and that I was to let him out. I made no reply to him at all, and after about an hour of it the kicking and shouting stopped, and I heard him slither down the door as if exhausted and begin sobbing with frustration.

I stayed where I was and listened while he went on and on moaning and weeping in desolation. I listened to him without emotion; for I had cried too, in the tack-room.

The hands crawled round the face of my watch.

At a quarter to nine, when nothing could any longer save his programme, and even a message explaining his absence could scarcely be telephoned through in time, Kemp-Lore’s decreasing sobs faded away altogether, and the cottage was quiet.

I got stiffly to my feet and went out into the front garden, breathing deeply in the clear air with an easing sense of release. The difficult day was over, and the stars were bright in the frosty sky. It was a lovely night.

I walked along to the bushes and started Kemp-Lore’s car, turning it and driving it back to the gate. Then for the last time I walked round the cottage to talk to him through the window, and he was standing there already, his face a pale blur behind the window frames.

‘My car,’ he said hysterically. ‘I heard the engine. You’re going to drive away in my car and leave me.’

I laughed. ‘No. You are going to drive it away yourself. As fast and as far as you like. If I were you, I’d drive to the nearest airport and fly off. No one is going to like you very much when they’ve read those letters in the morning, and it will be only a day or two before the newspapers get on to it. As far as racing goes, you will certainly be warned off. Your face is too well-known in Britain for you to hide or change your name or get another job. And as you’ve got all night and probably most of tomorrow before the storm breaks and people start eying you with sneers and contempt, you can pack up and skip the country quite easily, without any fuss.’

‘You mean... I can go? Just go?’ He sounded astounded.

‘Just go,’ I said, nodding. ‘If you go quickly enough, you’ll avoid the enquiry the Stewards are bound to hold, and you’ll avoid any charge they might think of slapping on you. You can get away to some helpful distant country where they don’t know you, and you can start again from scratch.’

‘I suppose I haven’t much choice,’ he muttered. His asthma was almost unnoticeable.

‘And find a country where they don’t have steeplechasing,’ I finished.

He moaned sharply, and crashed his fists down on the window frame.

I went round into the cottage and in the light of Joanna’s big torch unlocked the padlock and pushed open the door. He turned from the window and walked unsteadily towards me across the straw, shielding his ravaged face from the light. He went through the door, passed me without a glance, and stumbled down the path to his car; and I walked down the path behind him, shining the torch ahead. I propped the torch on top of the gate-post so as to leave my hands free in case I needed to use them, but there didn’t seemed to be much fight left in him.

He paused when he was sitting in his car, and with the door still wide open looked out at me.

‘You don’t understand,’ he said, his voice shaking.

‘When I was a boy I wanted to be a jockey. I wanted to ride in the Grand National, like my father. And then there was this thing about falling off... I’d see the ground rushing past under my horse and there would be this terrible sort of pain in my guts, and I sweated until I could pull up and get off. And then I’d be sick.’

He made a moaning noise and clutched his stomach at the memory. His face twisted. Then he said suddenly, fiercely, ‘It made me feel good to see jockeys looking worried. I broke them up all right. It made me feel warm inside. Big.’

He looked up at me with renewed rage, and his voice thickened venomously.

‘I hated you more than all the others. You rode too well for a new jockey and you were getting on too quickly. Everyone was saying “Give Finn the bad horses to ride, he doesn’t know what fear is.” It made me furious when I heard that. So I had you on my programme, remember? I meant to make you look a fool. It worked with Mathews, why not with you? But Axminster took you up and then Pankhurst broke his leg... I wanted to smash you so much that it gave me headaches. You walked about with that easy confidence of yours, as if you took your strength for granted, and too many people were getting to say you’d be champion one day...

‘I waited for you to have a fall that looked fairly bad, and then I used the sugar. It worked. You know it worked. I felt ten feet tall, looking at your white face and listening to everyone sniggering about you. I watched you find out how it felt. I wanted to see you writhe when everyone you cared for said... like my father said to all his friends... that it was a pity about you... a pity you were a snivelling little coward, a pity you had no nerve... no nerve...’

His voice died away, and his hollowed eyes were wide, unfocused, as if he were staring back into an unbearable past.

I stood looking down at the wreck of what could have been a great man. All that vitality, I thought; all that splendid talent wasted for the sake of hurting people who had not hurt him.

Such individuals could be understood, Claudius Mellit had said. Understood, and treated, and forgiven.

I could understand him in a way, I supposed, because I was myself the changeling in a family. But my father had rejected me kindly, and I felt no need to watch musicians suffer.

Treated... The treatment I had given him that day might not have cured the patient, but he would no longer spread his disease, and that was all I cared about.

Without another word I shut the car door on him and gestured to him to drive away. He gave me one more incredulous glance as if he still found it impossible that I should let him go, and began to fumble with the light switches, the ignition, and the gears.

I hoped he was going to drive carefully. I wanted him to live. I wanted him to live for years, thinking about what he had thrown away. Anything else would be too easy, I thought.

The car began to roll, and I caught a last glimpse of the famous profile, the eclipsed, exiled profile, as he slid away into the dark. The brake lights flashed red as he paused at the end of the lane, then he turned out into the road, and was gone. The sound of his engine died away.

I took the torch from the gate-post and walked up the path to the quiet cottage, to sweep it clean.

Forgiveness, I thought. That was something else again.

It would take a long time to forgive.