Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [70]
‘I should damn well think so.’
Fred Collyer immediately regretted his offer, which had been instinctive. He remembered that he had not intended to drink until after he had written. Still, perhaps one… And he did need a drink very badly. It seemed a century since his last, on Wednesday night.
They left together, walking out with the remains of the crowd. The racecourse looked battered and bedraggled at the end of the day: the scarlet petals of the tulips lay on the ground, leaving rows of naked pistils sticking forlornly up, and the bright rugs of grass were dusty grey and covered with litter. Fred Collyer thought only of the dough in his pocket and the story in his head, and both of them gave him a nice warm glow.
A drink to celebrate, he thought. Buy Clay a thank-you drink, and maybe perhaps just one more to celebrate. It wasn’t often, after all, that things fell his way so miraculously.
They stopped for the drink. The first double swept through Fred Collyer’s veins like fire through a parched forest. The second made him feel great.
‘Time to go,’ he said to Clay. ‘I’ve got my piece to write.’
‘Just one more,’ Clay said. ‘This one’s on me.’
‘Better not.’ He felt virtuous.
‘Oh, come on,’ Clay said, and ordered. With the faintest of misgivings Fred Collyer sank his third: but couldn’t he still out-write every racing man in the business? Of course he could.
They left after the third. Fred Collyer bought a litre of bourbon for later, when he had finished his story. Back in his own room he took just the merest swig from it before he sat down to write.
The words wouldn’t come. He deleted six attempts and poured some bourbon into a tooth glass.
Marius Tollman, Crinkle Cut, Piper Boles, Amberezzio… It wasn’t all that simple.
He took a drink. He didn’t seem to be able to help it.
The Sports Editor would give him a raise for a story like this, or at least there would be no more quibbling about expenses.
He took a drink.
Piper Boles had earned himself ten thousand bucks for crashing into Salad Bowl. Now how the hell did you write that without being sued for libel?
He took a drink.
The jockeys in the tenth race had conspired together to let the only straight one among them win. How in hell could you say that?
He took a drink.
The stewards and the press had had all their attention channelled towards the crash in the Derby and had virtually ignored the tenth race. The tenth race had been fixed. The stewards wouldn’t thank him for pointing it out.
He took another drink. And another. And more.
His deadline for telephoning his story to the office was ten o’clock the following morning. When that hour struck he was asleep and snoring, fully dressed, on his bed. The empty bourbon bottle lay on the floor beside him, and his winnings, which he had tried to count, lay scattered over his chest.
SPRING FEVER
Women’s Own magazine unexpectedly asked me for a suitable story. (Five thousand words, please.)
They would leave the actual content to me, they said, but they would prefer a story geared to their women readers.
Spring Fever, which I very much enjoyed writing, was the result.
Looking back, Mrs Angela Hart could identify the exact instant in which she fell irrationally in love with her jockey.
Angela Hart, plump, motherly, and fifty-two, watched the twenty-four-year-old man walk into the parade ring at Cheltenham races in her gleaming pink and white colours, and she thought: ‘How young he is, how fit, how lean… how brave.’
He crossed the bright turf to join her for the usual few minutes of chit-chat before taking her horse away to its two-mile scurry over hurdles, and she looked at the way the weather-tanned flesh lay taut over the cheekbones and agreed automatically that yes, the spring sunshine was lovely, and that yes, the drier going should suit her Billyboy better than the rain of the past few weeks.
It was a day like many another. Two racehorses having satisfactorily replaced the late and moderately lamented Edward Hart in Angela’s affections, she contentedly spent her time in going to jump