10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [38]
I nodded as if she were conceding nothing, and with minute body signs steered her to where the horses plodded around the ring, the sun shining on their coats, the smell and sound of them piercing my senses, the last four days setting up in me such an acute sense of loss that I wished myself anywhere on earth but on a racecourse.
“What’s the matter?” Orinda said.
“Nothing.”
“That’s not true.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
She had given me a perfect opening for what I wanted to say to her, but I miserably shrank from it. I hadn’t expected to feel so grindingly forlorn: an exile looking through a glass barrier at a life denied him.
I found a place .for us to stand against the rails of the parade ring, and I gave her my race card, as she had left her own upstairs. She needed spectacles from her handbag to see small print with, and help in identifying the runners from their number cloths.
“What do all these figures mean?” she asked, scratchily pointing to the card. “It’s double Dutch to me.”
“They tell you the horse’s age and how much weight he’s carrying in the race. Those very small figures tell you his results in the last races he’s run in.” I pointed. “F means fell, and P means he pulled up and didn’t finish.”
“Oh.” She studied the card and read aloud the conditions of entry to the first race, a two-and-a-half-mile hurdle race for novices.
“A race for four-year-olds and upwards, which at the start of the season have not won a hurdle race ... but if they have won a hurdle race since the start of the season, they are to carry a 7-lb. penalty.” She looked up, disliking me. “What’s a 7-lb. penalty?”
“Extra weight. Most often flat thin sheets of lead carried in pockets in the weight cloth which lies over the horse’s back under the number cloth and saddle.” I explained that a jockey had to carry the weight allotted to his horse. “You get weighed before and after a race ...”
“Yes, yes, I’m not totally ignorant.”
“Sorry.”
She studied the race card. “There’s only one horse in this race carrying a 7-lb. penalty,” she announced. “Will he win?”
“He might if he’s very good.”
She turned the pages of the card, looking forward. “In almost every race a horse carries a penalty if it’s won recently.”
“Mm.”
“What’s the heaviest penalty you can get?”
I said, “I don’t think there’s any set limit, but in practice a 10-lb. penalty is the most a horse will be faced with. If he had to carry more than ten pounds extra in a handicap he almost certainly wouldn’t win, so the trainer wouldn’t run him.”
“But you could win with a 10-lb. penalty?”
“Yes, just about.”
“A lot to ask?”
“It depends how strong the horse is.”
She put her glasses away and wanted me to go with her to the Tote, where she backed the horse that had won on the first day of the season and earned himself an extra seven pounds of lead. “He must be the best,” she said.
Almost as tall as I was, Orinda walked always a pace ahead of me as if it were natural to her to have her escort in attendance to her rear. She was used to being looked at, and I did see that her clothes drew admiration, even if more geared to Ascot than a country meeting in the boondocks of rural far-from-all-crowds Dorset.
We stood on the steps of the grandstand to watch the race. Orinda’s choice finished fourth.
“Now what?” she said.
“Same thing all over again.”
“Don’t you get bored with it?”
“No.”
She tore her Tote ticket across and let the pieces flutter to the ground like a seasoned loser.
“I don’t see much fun in this.” She looked around at a host of people studying race cards. “What do you do if it rains?”
The simple answer was “get wet,” but it would hardly have pleased her.
“People come to see the horses as much as to gamble,” I said. “I mean, horses are marvelous.”
She gave me a pitying stare and said that after the following race she would return to the stewards’ room to thank the duke for his hospitality, and then she would leave. She couldn’t see the fascination that jump racing held for everyone.
I said, “I can’t see what fascination politics has for my father,