The Lime Twig

8

In the paddock and only minutes before the running of the Golden Bowl on a fast track and brilliant afternoon — high above them now the sun was burst all out of shape — Michael Banks and Needles listened to the dying of the call to saddle. A plaster held Banks’ lips together at a comer of the mouth and impaired his speech; the jockey was sallow but Banks wore a large rose with leaves in his lapel; Lovely the stableboy kept whispering: “What a gorgeous crowd! Coo, what a gorgeous crowd!” They had tied down Rock Castle’s tongue and now the horse’s mouth was filled with a green scum. Round the paddock the crowd was twenty deep and silent, save for a rat-faced man at the spectator’s rail who several times cocked his eyebrows, pointed at the silver horse, and said: “Rock Castle? Go on, I wouldn’t take your money. Poor old nag.”

Farther down, a mare set up a drumming with her hind hoofs, then was calmed. Men attending in the paddock spoke soothing words; a black horse was being led in tight circles, again the chestnut mare was dancing.

Banks took the camel’s hair coat off the jockey’s back, bared the resplendent little figure to sun and crowd. “Well, Needles,” carefully hanging the coat on his arm, “Cowles always said he’d run like fire. Well, up you go, Needles.”

Before he could take the jockey’s leg in his hands, he heard the sounds of light and girlish hurrying, saw her stoop beneath the rail, saw the hair and the swinging coat similar to Needles’.

“Oh, good,” cried Annie, “you’ve not started off! I thought I’d bring you luck.”

“You can’t come in the paddock,” glancing about for the detectives, “you haven’t any business here!”

“Oh, but I have, I have.”

And Annie reached toward the jockey then, and even while Banks gripped the blown-out silken sleeve, she caught hold of Jimmy Needles’ face in both her hands, leaned down and kissed the tiny wrinkles of his lips. Drawing away, golden hair uncombed and a printed card dangling from her buttonhole, breeze carrying off her laugh: “Oh, haven’t I always wanted to? Haven’t I just wanted to?”

Somebody whistled in the crowd.

“Tell you what,” straightening the green glasses, cutting his profile across the sun, “I’ll make it up to you. I’ll make it up for the twenty years. A bit of marriage, eh? And then a ship, trees with limes on the branches, niggers to pull us round the streets, the Americas — a proper cruise, plenty of time at the bar, no gunplay or nags. Perhaps a child or two, who knows?”

Arm in arm, Larry and Little Dora, one tall and tough, the other squat and tough, strode along until they approached one hired car in a line of cars and, opening the rear doors, stooping, lifted Margaret from under a shabby quilt and off the floor, and, each gripping an arm and wrapping round her body the coat that belonged to Dora, started back still talking — now across Margaret’s hanging head — about the streets and niggers and limes of the Americas.

“Coo, what a gorgeous crowd!”

But even the crowd was fixed. There were no more islands of space between the stands and the white threads of the rails upon which the slovenly men were chalking, erasing, again chalking up their slates. Yet Thick had made a way for himself and could see all he needed to of the first turn; through long dark binoculars Sybilline watched the final turn; and in the center of the oval’s roses, crouched down between two bushes, armed and grinning, Sparrow waited for signs of trouble, ready to shoot or turn as best he could to any threatened portion of the course. Sparrow always liked a race.

Banks saw nothing of the crowd but kept his eyes on Sybilline. Not once did she glance his way — though he was watched. He was being watched all right. Among the men on the rail he noticed the three who had accosted him, and wondered whether they would fling their bombs into a crowd just to bring one man down.

Then he heard the horses drifting slowly up from behind, the string of them unlimbering in the slow canter before the start. One of the jockeys was singing and Banks could not bear to raise his eyes, could not bear to see Rock Castle in that winding and nervous line, afraid to know that the horse had come this far. He kept his eyes down, began again his pushing and shoving, and there were only shoes to see: the open toes, pieces of nicked leather, buckles. Heel the color of a biscuit, slipper covered with diamond dust and glue, some child’s boot tied with string. Shoes in motion or fixed at isolated angles amidst tickets, sweet wrappers, straws, and with the bit of stocking or colored sock or bare ankle protruding — shoes which end to end would have made a terrible marching column round the track the horses were soon to charge upon. He could not bear the faces, refused to look at them. On his own face the fresh plaster held the split comers of his mouth together and he was clean — it had not been easy to visit the Baths again but he had forced himself — and his narrow cheeks were shaved and his tie was straight. The only dirt was sleeplessness and he could not rid himself of that.

“Now, Sally, you’ll see a little more from here,” somebody said.

He kept pushing, trying to get beyond the crowd, trying for the north comer, where it was thinner at least. He saw the man with the gray tea-party topper and new supply of yellow, brown, green tickets stuck in the band, and he lowered his eyes again, thought of the night before and drinking-glasses with lipstick on the rims. He thought he should like to try it, try some of that, with Margaret. Once he stopped and lifted his head, but she was not in sight.

Then he was walking easily and into the glare of the hot sun, past the ranked petrol-smelling rows of empty cars, and there were little shattering bursts of light off the wipers and chrome and door handles, and only a few other people strolling here, laughing or pausing in the weeds by the rail. He leaned against a Daimler and tried to breathe. He noticed the pock-faced girl and it was clear she had found her quid: a big man with a sandy bush of mustache and gold links in his cuffs was holding her round the buttocks with one great hand. Another man and woman had their elbows side by side on the rail.

“Look,” said the woman, and he heard no inflection, no rise or fall in her voice, “they’re off.”

Far away, back under clock and pennants, a terrible cheering went up. But it was the woman’s clear statement that made him sick. He pulled his hand away from the radiator cap, set his foot down from the bumper, and tried to get close to her before the thirteen horses of the field should pass.

“Charlie, you’re going to owe me a tonic,” the woman said.

He heard the sound of hoofs and managed to stumble into the shadow of the pair by the rail. He nodded to the woman and she smiled, spoke again to her husband—“You might as well tear up your ticket!”—and he felt the coming breeze, watched a long hair on his sleeve. The mustached man had his back to the race. The girl was trying to see over his shoulder but he prevented her. And then the hair was saved between his fingers and he looked up, began to choke.

The blinders, the tongue tied down, the silver neck sawing in stride; the riders coming knee to knee with tangle of sticks and the noise; dust, the dangerous dust, rising high as a tall tree, and pebbles flying out like shots. He put an arm across his face, whispered Margaret, Margaret, and in the vacuum, the sudden silence, heard no hoofs, no roar, but only the thwacking of the crops and the clear voice of Jimmy Needles: “Make way for the Prince of Denmark … out of my path, St James. …” He knew he must put a stop to it.

“You can’t do that! Grab him, for God’s sake, Charlie!”

But he was over the rail then and into the dust at last. It was a long way to go — directly across the track in the open sun — and he stumbled, tried to hold the hat. He heard his heart — far away a child seemed to be beating it down the center of a street in the End — heard the sound of air being sucked beneath the spot where the constable had landed two heavy blows, and his feet were falling upon the same loose earth so recently struck by iron.

He hadn’t the strength to climb the second fence, instead went between the bars, going down, seeing his own dead shoe for a moment, feeling his hand slipping off the whitewash. Then he was on the green, splashed through an artificial pond, ran headlong into roses and hedges that came up to his shins. It was a park, a lovely picture of a park with a mad crowd down one edge and thirteen horses whirling round. His shoe came down on the blade of a shears some gardener had overlooked. He nearly fell. He would have to be fast, very fast, to stop them now.

He heard his shoes snapping off the thorns and trampling the grass, and yet he seemed only to be drifting, floating across the green. But it was a good run, an uphill run. The wind was catching his saliva when suddenly he veered round the man rising up between the rose bushes with a pistol. He saw the gun-hand, the silencer on the barrel like a medicine bottle, the quickness of Sparrow’s waist-high aim, and then felt both shots approaching, overtaking him, going wild. And he reached the third and final fence, crawled through.

The green, the suspended time was gone. The child pounded on his heart with anonymous rhythm and he found that after all he had been fast enough. There were several seconds in which to take the center of the track, to position himself according to the white rails on his right and left, to find the approaching ball of dust ahead and start slowly ahead to encounter it. Someone fired at him from behind a tree and he began to trot, shoes landing softly, irregularly on the dirt. The tower above the stands was a little Swiss hut in the sky; a fence post was painted black; he heard a siren and saw a dove bursting with air on a bough. I could lean against the post, he thought, I might just take a breath. But the horses came round the turn then and once more his stumbling trot was giving way to a run. And he had the view that a photographer might have except that there was no camera, no truck’s tailgate to stand upon. Only the virgin man-made stretch of track and at one end the horses bunching in fateful heat and at the other end himself — small, yet beyond elimination, whose single presence purported a toppling of the day, a violation of that scene at Aldington, wreckage to horses and little crouching men.

The crowd began to scream.

He was running in final stride, the greatest spread of legs, redness coming across the eyes, the pace so fast that it ceases to be motion, but at its peak becomes the long downhill deathless gliding of a dream until the arms are out, the head thrown back, and the runner is falling as he was falling and waving his arm at Rock Castle’s on-rushing silver shape, at Rock Castle who was about to run him down and fall.

“… the blighter! Look at the little blighter go!” Quietly, holding the girl’s arm in the midst of the crowd: “Let me have the binoculars, Sybilline.” Larry removed his green glasses, blinked once, and, still holding her arm so that the brass knuckles were brilliant and sunken into her flesh, looked through binoculars until the cloud went up.

“He’s crossed us,” whispered Sybilline, “he’s crossed us, hasn’t he?”

Out beyond the oval and past the broken threads of the rail the cloud stopped short and rose, spending itself dark as an explosion’s smoke. Then Larry was done and Sybilline took a look for herself: dust abruptly curling, settling down, horses lying flat with reins in the air, small riders limping among the animals or in circles or off toward the fence. And the silver horse was on its side with Banks and Jimmy Needles underneath. And three dirty-white Humber ambulances were racing up the track.

“Take me out to him … take me out to him, please.”

But in the confusion — they passed the lined white faces of the man with tickets, the woman’s husband Charlie, the older woman with chocolates smeared on her hands again — Larry and Syb and Little Dora hustled her behind the stands and out to the enormous car waiting in the line of cars, bundled her under the rags and quilting on the car floor. Thick was already sweating behind the wheel.