Nerve

Eight

It was a false security. My charmed run of good luck had ended with a vengeance, and Dunstable proved to be only the fringe of the whirlpool. During the next two weeks I rode seventeen horses. Fifteen of them finished in the rear of the field, and in only two cases was this a fair result.

I couldn’t understand it. As far as I knew there was no difference in my riding, and it was unbelievable that my mounts should all lose their form simultaneously. I began to worry about it, and that didn’t help, as I could feel my confidence oozing away as each disturbing and embarrassing day passed.

There was one grey mare I particularly liked riding because of the speed of her reactions: she often seemed to know what I intended to do a split second before I gave her signals, rather as if she had sized up the situation as quickly as I had and was already taking independent action. She was sweet tempered and silken mouthed, and jumped magnificently. I liked her owner too, a short jolly farmer with a thick Norfolk accent, and while we watched her walk round the parade ring before her race he commiserated with me on my bad luck and said, ‘Never mind, lad. The mare will put you right. She’ll not fail you. You’ll do all right on her, never fear.’

I went out smiling to the race because I too believed I would do all right on her. But that week she might have been another horse. Same colour, same size, same pretty head. But no zip. It was like driving a car with four flat tyres.

The jolly farmer looked less jolly and more pensive when I brought her back.

‘She’s not been last ever before, lad,’ he said reproachfully.

We looked her over, but there was nothing wrong with her that we could see, and she wasn’t even blowing very hard.

‘I could get her heart tested I suppose,’ the farmer said doubtfully. ‘Are you sure you gave her her head, lad?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But she had no enthusiasm at all today.’

The farmer shook his head, doleful and puzzled.

One of the horses I rode belonged to a tall sharp-faced woman who knew a great deal about racing and had no sympathy with bunglers. She laid straight into me with her tongue after I had eased her ultra-expensive new gelding from last into second last place only feet from the winning post.

‘I suppose you realise,’ she said in a loud, hard voice, unashamedly listened to by a large group of racegoers, ‘That in the last five minutes you have succeeded both in halving the value of my horse and in making me look a fool for having paid a fortune for him.’

I apologised. I suggested possibly that her animal needed a little time.

‘Time?’ she repeated angrily. ‘For what? For you to wake up? You speak as if it were my judgment that is at fault, not yours. You lay far too far out of your ground. You should have taken closer order from the beginning...’ Her acid lecture went on and on and on, and I looked at the fine head of her glossy high-bred black gelding and admitted to myself that he was probably a great deal better than he had appeared.

One Wednesday was the big day for a ten-year-old schoolboy with sparkly brown eyes and a conspiratorial grin. His wealthy eccentric grandmother, having discovered that there was no minimum age laid down for racehorse owners, had given Hugo a colossal chestnut ’chaser twice his height, and was considerate enough to foot the training bills as well.

I had become firm friends with Hugo. Knowing that I saw his horse most mornings at James’s, he used to send me tiny parcels containing lumps of sugar filched from the dining table at his prep. school, which I conscientiously passed on to their intended destination: and I used to write back to Hugo, giving him quite detailed accounts of how his giant pet was progressing.

On that Wednesday Hugo had not only begged a day off from school to see his horse run, but had brought three friends with him. The four of them stood with me and James in the parade ring, Hugo’s mother being the rare sort who liked her son to enjoy his limelight alone. As I had walked down from the weighing-room she had smiled broadly to me from her station on the rails.

The four little boys were earnest and excited, and James and I had great fun with them before the race, treating them with seriousness and as man-to-man, which they obviously appreciated. This time, I promised myself, this time, for Hugo, I will win. I must.

But the big chestnut jumped very clumsily that day. On the far side of nearly every fence he ducked his head, and once, to prevent myself being hauled over in a somersault, I had to stretch forward down his neck with one hand only, leaving go of the reins entirely with the other. The free arm, swinging up sideways, helped to bring my weight far enough back to keep me in the saddle, but the gesture known as ‘calling a cab’ was not going to earn me any bonus points with James, who had denounced it often as the style of ‘bad, tired, scared or unfit amateurs.’

Hugo’s little face was pink when I dismounted, and the three friends glumly shuffled their feet behind him. With them as witnesses there would be no chance of Hugo smoothing over the disaster with the rest of his schoolmates.

‘I’m very sorry, Hugo,’ I said sincerely, apologising for everything — myself, the horse, the race, and the miserliness of fate.

He answered with a stoicism which would have been a lesson to many of his seniors. ‘I expect it was an off day,’ he said kindly. ‘And anyway, someone always has to be last. That’s what Daddy said when I came bottom in History.’ He looked at the chestnut forgivingly, and said to me, ‘I expect he’s keen really, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Keen, very.’

‘Well,’ said Hugo, turning bravely to the friends. ‘That’s that, then. We might as well have tea.’

Failures like these were too numerous to escape anyone’s attention, but as the days passed I noticed a change in the way people spoke to me. One or two, and Corin in particular, showed something like contempt. Others looked uncomfortable, others sympathetic, others pitying. Heads turned towards me wherever I went, and I could almost feel the wave of gossip I left in my wake. I didn’t know exactly what they were saying, so I asked Tick-Tock.

‘Pay no attention,’ he said. ‘Ride a couple of winners and they’ll be throwing the laurel wreaths again, and back-pedalling on everything they’re saying now. It’s bad-patchville, chum, that’s all.’

And that was all I could get out of him.

One Thursday evening James telephoned to my digs and asked me to go up to his house. I walked up in the dark, rather miserably wondering whether he, like two other trainers that day, was going to find an excuse for putting someone else up on his horses. I couldn’t blame him. Owners could make it impossible for him to continue with a jockey so thoroughly in the doldrums.

James called me into his office, a square room joining his house to the stable yard. Its walls were covered with racing photographs, bookshelves, a long row of racing colours on clothes hangers, and filing cabinets. A huge roll-top desk stood in front of the window, which looked out on to the yard. There were three broken-springed armchairs with faded chintz covers, a decrepit Turkish carpet on the floor, and a red-hot coal fire in the grate. I had spent a good many hours there in the past three months, discussing past performances and future plans.

James waited for me and stood aside to let me go in first. He followed me in and shut the door, and faced me almost aggressively across the familiar room.

‘I hear,’ he said without preamble, ‘that you have lost your nerve.’

The room was very still. The fire crackled slightly. A horse in a near-by loose box banged the floor with his hoof. I stared at James, and he stared straight back, gravely.

I didn’t answer. The silence lengthened. It was not a surprise. I had guessed what was being said about me when Tick-Tock had refused to tell me what it was.

‘No one is to blame for losing his nerve,’ James said non-committally. ‘But a trainer cannot continue to employ someone to whom it has happened.’

I still said nothing.

He waited for a few seconds, and went on, ‘You have been showing the classic symptoms... trailing round nearly last, pulling up for no clear reason, never going fast enough to keep warm, and calling a cab. Keeping at the back out of trouble, that’s what you’ve been doing.’

I thought about it, rather numbly.

‘A few weeks ago,’ he said, ‘I promised you that if I heard any rumours about you I would make sure they were true before I believed them. Do you remember?’

I nodded.

‘I heard this rumour last Saturday,’ he said. ‘Several people sympathised with me because my jockey had lost his nerve. I didn’t believe it. I have watched you closely ever since.’

I waited dumbly for the axe. During the week I had been last five times out of seven.

He walked abruptly over to an armchair by the fire and sat down heavily.

Irritably he said, ‘Oh sit down, Rob. Don’t just stand there like a stricken ox, saying nothing.’

I sat down and looked at the fire.

‘I expected you to deny it,’ he said in a tired voice. ‘Is it true, then?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Is that all you’ve got to say? It isn’t enough. What has happened to you? You owe me an explanation.’

I owed him much more than an explanation.

‘I can’t explain,’ I said despairingly. ‘Every horse I’ve ridden in the last three weeks seems to have had its feet dipped in treacle. The difference is in the horses... I am the same.’ It sounded futile and incredible, even to me.

‘You have certainly lost your touch,’ he said slowly. ‘Perhaps Ballerton is right...’

‘Ballerton?’ I said sharply.

‘He’s always said you were not as good as you were made out to be, and that I’d pushed you on too fast... given you a top job when you weren’t ready for it. Today he has been going round smugly saying “I told you so”. He can’t leave the subject alone, he’s so pleased.’

‘I’m sorry, James,’ I said.

‘Are you ill, or something?’ he asked exasperatedly.

‘No,’ I said.

‘They say the fall you had three weeks ago was what frightened you — the day you got knocked out and your horse rolled on you. But you were all right going home, weren’t you? I remember you being a bit sore, but you didn’t seem in the least scared of falling again.’

‘I didn’t give that fall another thought,’ I said.

‘Then why, Rob, why?’

But I shook my head. I didn’t know why.

He stood up and opened a cupboard which contained bottles and glasses, poured out two whiskys, and handed one to me.

‘I can’t convince myself yet that you’ve lost your nerve,’ he said. ‘Remembering the way you rode Template on Boxing Day, only a month ago, it seems impossible. No one could change so fundamentally in so short a time. Before I took you on, wasn’t it your stock in trade to ride all the rough and dangerous horses that trainers didn’t want to risk their best jockeys on? That’s why I first engaged you, I remember it clearly. And all those years you spent in wherever it was as a stockman, and that spell in a rodeo... you aren’t the sort of man to lose his nerve suddenly and for nothing, and especially not when you’re in the middle of a most spectacularly successful season.’

I smiled for almost the first time that day, realising how deeply I wanted him not to lose faith in me.

I said, ‘I feel as if I’m fighting a fog. I tried everything I knew today to get those horses to go faster, but they were all half-dead. Or I was. I don’t know... it’s a pretty ghastly mess.’

‘I’m afraid it is,’ he said gloomily. ‘And I’m having owner trouble about it, as you can imagine. All the original doubters are doubting again. I can’t reassure them... it’s like a Stock Exchange crash; catching. And you’re the bad stock that’s being jettisoned.’

‘What rides can I still expect?’ I said.

He sighed. ‘I don’t exactly know. You can have all the Broome runners because he’s on a cruise in the Mediterranean and won’t hear the rumours for a while. And my two as well; they both run next week. For the rest, we’ll have to wait and see.’

I could hardly bring myself to say it, but I had to know.

‘How about Template?’ I asked.

He looked at me steadily. ‘I haven’t heard from George Tirrold,’ he said. ‘I think he will agree that he can’t chuck you out after you’ve won so many races for him. He is not easily stampeded, there’s that to hope for, and it was he who drew my attention to you in the first place. Unless something worse happens,’ he finished judiciously, ‘I think you can still count on riding Template in the Midwinter a week on Saturday. But if you bring him in last in that... it will be the end.’

I stood up and drained the whisky.

‘I’ll win that race,’ I said, ‘whatever the cost, I’ll win it.’

We went silently together to the races the following day, but when we arrived I discovered that two of my three prospective mounts were mine no longer. I had been, in the expressive phrase, jocked off. The owners, the trainer in question brusquely explained, thought they would have no chance of winning if they put me up as planned. Very sorry and all that, he said, but no dice.

I stood on the stands and watched both the horses run well: one of them won, and the other finished a close third. I ignored as best I could the speculative, sideways glances from all the other jockeys, trainers and pressmen standing near me. If they wanted to see how I was taking it, that was their affair; just as it was mine if I wanted to conceal from them the inescapable bitterness of these two results.

I went out to ride James’s runner in the fourth race absolutely determined to win. The horse was capable of it on his day, and I knew him to be a competent jumper and a willing battler in a close finish.

We came last.

All the way round I could barely keep him in touch with the rest of the field. In the end he cantered slowly past the winning post with his head down in tiredness, and mine down too, in defeat and humiliation. I felt ill.

It was an effort to go back and face the music. I felt more like driving the Mini-Cooper at top speed into a nice solid tree.

The freckle-faced lad who looked after the horse deliberately did not glance at me when he took hold of the reins in the paddock. He usually greeted me with a beaming smile. I slid off the horse. The owner and James stood there, their faces blank. No one said anything. There was nothing to say. Finally, without a word, the owner shrugged his shoulders and turned on his heel, and walked off.

I took my saddle off the horse and the lad led him away.

James said, ‘It can’t go on, Rob.’

I knew it.

He said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. I’ll have to get someone else to ride my horses tomorrow.’

I nodded.

He gave me a searching look in which puzzlement and doubt were tinged for the first time with pity. I found it unbearable.

‘I think I’ll go to Kensington tonight after the races,’ I said, trying to speak evenly. ‘Instead of coming back with you.’

‘Very well,’ he said, obviously relieved at not having to face an embarrassing return journey. ‘I really am sorry, Rob.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know.’

I took my saddle back to the weighing-room, acutely aware of the glances which followed me. The conversation in the changing-room died into an embarrassed silence when I walked in. I went over to my peg and put the saddle on the bench, and began to take off my colours. I looked at the circle of faces turned towards me, reading on some curiosity, on some hostility, on some sympathy, and on one or two, pleasure. No contempt: they would leave that to people who didn’t ride, to the people who didn’t know at first hand how formidable a big fence can look to a jockey on a bad horse. In the changing-room there was too much consciousness in their minds of ‘there but for the grace of God go I,’ for them to feel contempt.

They began to talk again, but not much to me. I guessed they didn’t know what to say. Nor did I.

I felt neither more nor less courageous than I had done all my life. It was surely impossible, I thought confusedly, to be subconsciously afraid, to keep out of trouble and yet think one was as willing as ever to accept risks. Three weeks earlier, I would have laughed at the idea. But the shattering fact remained that none of the twenty-eight horses I had ridden since I had been knocked out in that fall had made any show at all. They were trained by several different trainers and owned by different owners: all they had had in common was me. There were too many of them for it to be a coincidence, especially as those I had been removed from had done well.

Round and round in a jumble went the profitless thoughts, the hopeless statistics, the feeling that the sky had fallen. I put on my street clothes and brushed my hair, and was surprised to see in the mirror that I looked the same as usual.

I went outside on to the steps outside the weighing-room and heard the normal chatter which my presence had muffled in the changing-room break out cheerfully again as soon as I was gone. No one outside either seemed very anxious to talk to me: no one, that is, except a weedy little ferret of a man, who worked, I knew, for one of the minor sporting papers.

He was standing with John Ballerton, but when he caught sight of me he came directly over.

‘Oh, Finn,’ he said, taking a notebook and pencil out of his pocket and looking at me with a sly, malicious smile. ‘May I have a list of the horses you are riding tomorrow? And next week?’

I looked across at Ballerton. There was a smirk of triumph on his heavy face. I took a great grip on my rising temper and spoke mildly to the Pressman.

‘Ask Mr. Axminster,’ I said. He looked disappointed, but he didn’t know how close he had come to feeling my fist in his face. I had just enough sense to know that letting fly at him would be the worst thing I could do.

I strode away from him, seething with rage; but the day had not done with me, even yet. Corin, crossing my path purposefully, stopped me and said, ‘I suppose you’ve seen this?’ He held out a copy of the paper for which the ferrety little man wrote.

‘No,’ I said. ‘And I don’t want to.’

Corin smiled thinly, enjoying himself. ‘I think you ought to sue them. Every one thinks so. You’ll have to sue them when you’ve read it. You can’t ignore it, or everyone will think...’

‘Every one can think what they damn well please,’ I said roughly, trying to walk on.

‘Read it,’ insisted Corin, thrusting the paper in front of my eyes. ‘Everyone else has.’

It needed only half a glance to see the headline. There was no missing it. In bold type it said, ‘Nerve Lost.’

Against my will I began to read.

‘Nerve, depending on how it takes you, is either fear overcome by an effort of will, or a total lack of imagination. If you ride steeplechasing it doesn’t matter which sort you have, as long as you have one of them.

‘Does anyone understand why one man is brave and another is not? Or why a person can be brave at one time and cowardly at another?

‘Maybe it is all a matter of hormones! Maybe a bang on the head can destroy the chemical make-up which produces courage. Who knows? Who knows?

‘The crumbling of a jumping jockey’s nerve is a pathetic sight, as every recent racegoer will realise. But while one may extend sympathy to a man for a state which he cannot help, one must at the same time ask whether he is doing the right thing if he continues to seek and accept rides in races.

‘The public deserves a fair run for its money. If a jockey can’t give it to them because he is afraid of hurting himself, he is taking fees under false pretences.

‘But it is only a matter of time, of course, before owners and trainers withdraw their custom from such a man and, by forcing him into retirement, protect the betting public from wasting any more of its money.

‘And a good thing too!’

I gave the paper back to Corin and tried to loosen the clamped tension of my jaw muscles.

‘I can’t sue them,’ I said. ‘They don’t mention my name.’

He didn’t look surprised, and I realised sharply that he had known it all along. He had wanted only the pleasure of watching me read, and there was still about his eyes a remnant of a very nasty smile.

‘What did I ever do to you, Corin,’ I asked, ‘to make you feel the way you do?’

He looked taken aback, and said weakly, ‘Er... nothing...’

‘Then I’m sorry for you,’ I said stonily. ‘I’m sorry for your spiteful, mean, cowardly little soul...’

‘Cowardly!’ he exclaimed, stung and flushing. ‘Who are you to call anyone else cowardly? That’s a laugh, that really is. Just wait till they hear this. Just wait till I tell...’

But I didn’t wait. I had had far, far more than enough. I went back to Kensington in as deep and terrible a mood of despair as I ever hope to have to live through.

There was no one in the flat, and for once it was spotlessly tidy. The family, I concluded, were away. The kitchen confirmed it. There was no food or milk in the refrigerator, no bread in the bin, no fruit in the basket.

Back in the silent sitting-room I took a nearly full whisky bottle out of the cupboard and lay down full length on the sofa. I uncorked the bottle and took two large gulps. The neat spirit bit into my gums and scorched down to my empty stomach. I put the cork in the bottle and the bottle on the floor beside me. What is the point of getting drunk, I thought: I’d only feel worse in the morning. I could stay drunk for several days perhaps, but it wouldn’t do any good in the end. Nothing would do any good. Everything was finished. Everything was busted and gone.

I spent a long time looking at my hands. Hands. The touch they had for horses had earned me my living all my adult life. They looked the same as always. They were the same, I thought desperately. Nerves and muscles, strength and sensitivity, nothing was changed. But the memory of the last twenty-eight horses I had ridden denied it: heavy, cumbersome and unresponsive.

I knew no other skill but riding, nor had ever wanted any. I felt more than whole on horseback: I felt extended. Four extra limbs and a second brain. More speed, more strength, more courage... I winced at the word... and quicker reactions. A saddle was to me as the sea to a fish, natural and easy. Home. And a racing saddle? I drew in a breath, shivering. For a racing saddle, I thought bleakly, I am not sufficient.

It wasn’t enough after all to want to race as well as anybody, one had to have the talent and the staying power as well; and I was face to face with the conviction that I was not good enough, that I was never going to be good enough, to take firm hold of the position which had been so nearly in my grasp. I had thought myself capable of seizing the incredible opportunity I had been given. The mess I had made of it, the weak degrading retreat from the brink of success, was tearing to shreds all I had known or believed about myself.

I picked up the whisky bottle and held it on my chest. It was all the company I had, and it offered sleep, at least. But I suppose old habits cling hard: I held the bottle to my chest like a life-jacket to a drowning man and knew I wouldn’t pull the cork out again. Not for a while. Not that night, anyway.

And what of the future? I could return during the next week and race on one or two of James’s horses, if he would still let me, and perhaps even on Template in the Midwinter. But I no longer either expected or hoped to do well, and I could feel myself shrink at the prospect of going back to a racecourse to face all those stares and insults again. Better to start a new life at once, perhaps. But a new life doing what?

It couldn’t be the old life. Being a stockman might have suited me at twenty, but it was not what I would want at thirty, nor at forty, nor fifty. And whatever I did, wherever I went now, I would drag around with me the knowledge that I had totally failed at what I had tried hardest to do.

After a long time I stood up and put the bottle back in the cupboard.

It was then a good twenty-six hours since I had eaten, and despite everything my stomach was beginning its squeezing routine. On a second inspection the kitchen revealed only some assorted tins of escargots, cheese straws and marrons glacés; so I went out and along the streets until I came to a decent-looking pub where I was sure I was not known by sight. I didn’t want to have to talk.

I ordered ham sandwiches and a glass of beer, but when it came the thick new white bread stuck tastelessly in my mouth and my throat kept closing convulsively against all attempts to swallow. This can’t go on, I thought. I’ve got to eat. If I can’t get drunk and I can’t have Joanna and I can’t... I can’t be a jockey any more... at least I can eat now as much as I like, without worrying about gaining a pound or two... but after ten minutes trying I had swallowed only two mouthfuls, and I couldn’t manage another bite.

The fact that it was Friday had meant nothing to me all evening, and the approach of 9 o’clock went unnoticed. But just when I pushed away the sandwiches and was eyeing the beer with the beginnings of nausea, someone turned up the volume of the television set which stood at one end of the bar, and the opening bars of the ‘Galloping Major’ suddenly blared out across the tinkling glasses and the buzzing voices. A large bunch of devotees who had settled themselves with full pint pots in front of the set made shooshing noises to those nearest to them, and by the time Maurice Kemp-Lore’s tidy features materialised there was a more or less attentive audience to receive him. My little glass-topped table was as far as it could be from the door, so that it was more because leaving meant weaving my way through the sprawling silent crowd, than from a positive desire to watch, that I stayed where I was.

‘Good evening,’ Maurice said, the spellbinding smile in place. ‘This evening we are going to talk about handicapping, and I have here to meet you two well-informed men who look at weights and measures from opposing angles. The first is Mr. Charles Jenkinson, who has been an official handicapper for several years.’ Mr. Jenkinson’s selfconscious face appeared briefly on the screen. ‘And the other is the well-known trainer, Corin Kellar.’

Corin’s thin face glowed with satisfaction. We’ll never hear the last of this, I thought; and then with a stab remembered that I wouldn’t be there to hear any of it anyway.

‘Mr. Jenkinson,’ said Maurice, ‘will explain how he builds a handicap. And Mr. Kellar will tell you how he tries to avoid having his horses defeated by their weights. The battle between handicappers and trainers is none the less fierce for being conducted in gentlemanly and largely uncomplaining reticence, and perhaps tonight you will capture a whiff of that unrelenting struggle.’ He smiled engagingly. ‘A handicapper’s pinnacle of success is for every single runner in a race to pass the winning post in a straight line abreast — a multiple dead-heat — since it is his aim to give each horse an exactly equal chance. It never actually happens, but handicappers dream about it in their softer moments.” He grinned sideways in a friendly fashion towards his guests, and when Mr. Jenkinson appeared on the screen one could almost see the self-confidence begin to flow in him as he started to talk about his job.

I listened with only half my mind, the rest being submerged in persistent misery, and Corin had been speaking for some moments before I paid much attention to him. He was being of necessity less than frank, since the bald truth would have lost him his licence very smartly. In practice he felt no qualms at all when giving his jockey orders to start at the back and stay there, but in theory, I was sardonically amused to see, he was righteously on the side of the angels.

‘Horses from my stable are always doing their best to win,’ he said, lying without a tremor.

‘But surely you don’t insist on them being ridden hard at the end when they’ve no chance at all?’ said Maurice, reasonably.

‘As hard as necessary, yes,’ Corin asserted. ‘I hate to see jockeys easing up too soon, even if they are beaten. I dismissed a jockey a short while ago for not riding hard enough at the end. He could have come third if he had ridden the horse out...’ his voice droned on, pious and petulant, and I thought of Tick-Tock, thrown to the stewards for obeying his orders too conscientiously and now having trouble getting other trainers to trust him. I thought of Art, nagged and contradicted and driven to death; and the active dislike I already felt for Corin Kellar sharpened in that dim pub corner into hatred.

Maurice dragged him back to handicapping and finally wrung from him a grudging admission that from the point of view of the weight he would be allotted in future, it was better for a horse to win by one length than by ten. Maurice would have done better, I thought, to have chosen almost anyone else to show how to dodge the handicapper: or perhaps he did not know Corin well enough to expect him hypocritically to deny in public what he had said in private. Every jockey who had ridden the Kellar horses had learned it the hard way.

‘One is always in the hands of one’s jockey,’ Corin was saying.

‘Go on,’ said Maurice encouragingly, leaning forward. A light somewhere in the studio lent his eyes a momentary shimmer as he moved. Corin said, ‘You can slave away for weeks preparing a horse for a race and then a jockey can undo it all with one stupid mistake.’

‘It does the handicap good though,’ Maurice interrupted, laughing. The pub audience laughed too.

‘Well...’ agreed Corin, nonplussed.

‘If you look at it that way,’ Maurice continued, ‘there is always some compensation for a jockey not getting the most out of a horse. Whatever the reason, trivial, like a mistake, or more serious, like a failure of resolution at a crucial point...’

‘No guts, you mean?’ said Corin flatly. ‘I’d say that that would be as obvious to a handicapper as to everyone else, and that he’d take it into account. There’s a case in point now...’ he hesitated, but Maurice did not try to stop him, so he went on more boldly, ‘a case now where everything a certain jockey rides goes round at the back of the field. He is afraid of falling, you see. Well, you can’t tell me any handicapper thinks those particular horses are not as good as they were. Of course they are. It’s just the rider who’s going downhill.’

I could feel the blood rush to my head and begin to pulse there. I leaned my elbows on the table and bit my knuckle. Hard.

The voices went on inexorably.

Maurice said, ‘What are your views on that, Mr. Jenkinson?’

And the handicapper, looking embarrassed, murmured that ‘Of course... er... in certain circumstances, one would... er... overlook the occasional result.’

‘Occasional!’ said Corin. ‘I wouldn’t call nearly thirty races in a row occasional. Are you going to overlook them all?’

‘I can’t answer that,’ protested Jenkinson.

‘What do you usually do in these cases?’ Maurice asked.

‘I... that is... they aren’t usually as blatant as this. I may have to consult... er, others, before coming to a decision. But it really isn’t a thing I can discuss here.’

‘Where better?’ said Maurice persuasively. ‘We all know that this poor chap took a toss three weeks ago and has ridden... er... ineffectively... ever since. Surely you’d have to take that into account when you are handicapping those horses?’

While the camera focused on Jenkinson hesitating over his answer Corin’s voice said, ‘I’ll be interested to know what you decide. One of those horses was mine, you know. It was a shocking exhibition. Finn won’t be riding for me again, or for anyone else either, I shouldn’t wonder.’

Jenkinson said uneasily, ‘I don’t think we should mention names,’ and Maurice cut in quickly, saying, ‘No, no. I agree. Better not.’ But the damage was done.

‘Well, thank you both very much for giving us your time this evening. I am sorry to say we have come nearly to the end once again...’ He slid expertly into his minute of chit-chat and his closing sentences, but I was no longer listening. Between them he and Corin had hammered in the nails on the ruins of my brief career, and watching them at it on the glaring little screen had given me a blinding headache.

I stood up stiffly as the chatter broke out again in the crowded pub and threaded my way a little unsteadily to the door. The bunch of racing enthusiasts were downing their pints and I caught a scrap of their conversation as I squeezed round them.

‘Laid it on a bit thick, I thought,’ one of them said.

‘Not thick enough,’ contradicted another. ‘I lost a quid on Finn on Tuesday. He deserves all he gets, if you ask me, the windy b—.’

I stumbled out into the street, breathing in great gulps of cold air and making a conscious effort to stand up straight. It was no use sitting down and weeping in the gutter, which would have been easy enough to do. I walked slowly back to the dark, empty flat, and without switching on any lights lay down fully dressed on my bed.

The glow from the street below dimly lit the small room, the window frame throwing an angular distorted shadow on the ceiling. My head throbbed. I remembered lying there like that before, the day Grant’s fist pulped my nose. I remembered pitying him, and pitying Art. It had been so easy. I groaned aloud, and the sound shocked me.

It was a long way down from my window to the street. Five storeys. A long, quick way down. I thought about it.

There was a chiming clock in the flat below ours, counting away the quarter-hours, and in the quiet house I could hear it clearly. It struck ten, eleven, twelve, one, two.

The window threw its shadow steadily on the ceiling. I stared up at it. Five storeys down. But however bad things were I couldn’t take that way, either. It wasn’t for me. I shut my eyes and lay still, and finally after the long despairing hours drifted into an exhausted, uneasy, dream-filled sleep.

I woke less than two hours later, and heard the clock strike four. My headache had gone, and my mind felt as clear and sharp as the starry sky outside: washed and shining. It was like coming out of a thick fog into sunshine. Like coolness after fever. Like being re-born.

Somewhere between sleeping and waking I found I had regained myself, come back to the life-saving certainty that I was the person I thought I was, and not the cracked-up mess that everyone else believed.

And that being so, I thought in puzzlement, there must be some other explanation of my troubles. All... all I had to do was find it. Looking back unsympathetically on the appalling desolation in which I had so recently allowed myself to flounder, I began at last, at long last, to use my brain.

Half an hour later it was clear that my stomach was awake too, and it was so insistent to be filled that I couldn’t concentrate. I got up and fetched the tins of cheese straws and marrons glacés from the kitchen, but not the snails. How hungry would one have to be, I wondered idly, to face those molluscs cold and butterless at five o’clock in the morning?

I opened the tins and lay down again, and crunched up all the cheese straws while I thought, and peeled and chewed half of the syrupy weight-producing chestnuts. My stomach quietened like a dragon fed its daily maiden, and outside the stars faded into the wan London dawn.

In the morning I took the advice I had given to Grant, and went to see a psychiatrist.