10 lb Penalty - Dick Francis [71]
I wept. I couldn’t help it. It looked like the rain. The horse had broken his near foreleg. His jockey, his left collarbone.
The horse died.
The jockey lived.
Ten
My father had discontinued the insurance of Sarah’s Future when I went to work for Weatherbys; partly, he’d said, because the horse was getting old and lessening in value and partly, punctiliously, so that if the horse were killed, Weatherbys would not have to pay up.
He would hear no apologies when I telephoned him. He briefly said, “Bad luck.”
When I went back to work two days after Towcester the man who had originally interviewed me drew up a chair at my desk and said, “We used to insure that horse of yours, of course.”
I explained why my father had let the insurance lapse.
“I didn’t come to talk to you about your loss,” the Weatherbys man said, “though you do have all my sympathy. And is your arm all right? I came to ask you whether you would be interested in transferring yourself from here into our insurance services department, to work there from now on.”
The insurance department, mainly one long room walled by books, more books and files and more files, was inhabited also by two men in their twenties. One was leaving the firm. Would I like his place?
Yes, I would.
Promotion struck the Juliards twice in one week. Another internal upheaval shuffled the cards in the government, and when the hurt feelings settled, my father had moved sideways and upwards to the Cabinet as minister for agriculture, fisheries and food.
I congratulated him.
“I would have preferred secretary of state for defense.”
“Better luck next time,” I said flippantly.
My father’s resigned sigh came down the wire. “I suppose you’ve never heard of Hudson Hurst?”
“No.”
“If you think I’m going up fast, he’s going up faster. He beat me to Defense. He’s currently the can-do-no-wrong flavor of the year with the prime minister.”
“How’s Polly?” I asked.
“You’re incorrigible.”
“I’m sure the jellied eels and the brontosaurus burgers will be safe in your hands.”
There were for once no agricultural crises looming, and both he and I spent the autumn of that year rooting ourselves comfortably in new realms.
Not a great deal to my surprise I took to insurance with energy: it not only satisfied my inclination to numbers and probabilities, but I got sent out fairly often on verification trips, to see, for instance, if the polo ponies I was asked to set a premium for actually existed.
As Evan, my co-worker and boss in the insurance department, preferred office work and computers, I did more and more of the legwork, and it seemed to be a useful arrangement all around, as I knew what good stables looked like and fast developed a nose and an instinct for the preparatory arrangements for a ripoff. Preventing insurance fraud at the planning stage became a game like chess: you could see the moves ahead and could put the knights where they would zigzag sideways for the chop.
A great advantage, it transpired, was my youth. I might not look seventeen anymore, but often at twenty-two I wasn’t taken seriously enough. A mistake.
In the normal everyday honestly intentioned work of the department, Evan (twenty-nine) and I handled bona fide policies on every sort of horse and need, from the chance of infertility in a stallion to barrenness in a mare.
We also arranged cover for stable yards, all buildings, personal accident, public liability, fire, theft and measles. Anything for everyone. As agents, we kept underwriters busy.
I did abominably miss my days’ early mornings on Sarah’s Future, but as dawn grew later and colder towards winter, I would have found, as I had the previous year, that only weekends gave me much scope.
As for riding in races, I was lucky in that: the Northamptonshire trainer who’d taken the chestnut phoned me one day to say an owner of his, a farmer, wanted a free jockey—in other words, an amateur—for a runner he thought had