10 lb Penalty (22 page)

I was handed from department to department and shown around, and in an undemanding interview at the end was asked for my age and references. I went away in disappointment: they had been polite and kind but had asked none of the piercing questions I would have expected if they’d had a job to offer.

Back at Exeter, living in rooms halfway between the university and Stallworthy’s yard, I began dispiritedly to send job applications to a list of industries. Weatherbys had seemed my natural home: too bad they didn’t see me as their child.

They did, however, follow up on the references I’d given them: my tutor at the university and Stallworthy himself.

The gruff old trainer told me he’d said my character and behavior were satisfactory. Thanks a lot, I thought. Jim laughed. “He doesn’t want you to leave and take Sarah’s Future with you. It’s a wonder he didn’t call you a loudmouthed troublemaker!”

There was a letter from my tutor:

His testimonial in full read:

Shit, I thought. Oh, well.

Much to my astonishment, I also received a letter from Sir Vivian Durridge:

 

 

His enclosure read:

 

 

I sat down, the pages shaking in my hands. Vivian Durridge was about the last person I would ever have applied to for a thumbs-up.

I had vaguely been looking for a safe place to keep my birth certificate, so as not to lose it while I moved from lodgings to lodgings. I knew I wouldn’t lose the marriage photographs so I decided to put my birth certificate behind my father and Polly, and as I’d been doing that when Vivian Durridge’s remarkable letter arrived, I folded his pages into the frame, too.

Three days later the mail brought an envelope bearing the Weatherbys logo, a miniature representation of a stallion standing under an oak tree, from a painting by George Stubbs.

I was cravenly afraid of opening it. It would begin
We regret ...

Well, it had to be faced.

I opened the envelope, and the letter began
We are pleased ...

That evening my father telephoned. “Is it true you’ve got yourself a job at Weatherbys?”

“Yes. How do you know?”

“Why didn’t you ask for my help?”

“I didn’t think of it.”

“I despair of you, Ben.” He didn’t, though, sound particularly annoyed.

He had been talking to one of the Weatherby cousins at a dinner in the City, he said. The web of insider chat in the City far outdid the Internet.

I asked if I could move Sarah’s Future from Devon.

“Find a trainer.”

“Thanks.”

Spencer Stallworthy grumbled. Jim shrugged: life always moved on. I parted from them with gratitude and vanned my chestnut pal to a new home.

 

Weatherbys took me into their racing operations department, which handled entries, runners, weights, riders, the draw: all the details of every race run in Britain, amounting to about a thousand transactions most days and up to three thousand at busy times.

All this computer speed took place in airy light expanses of desks and floor space, and in the calm quietness so impressive on my first visit. I’d thought that at a couple of days over twenty-one I might be at a disadvantage from youth, but I found at once that the whole staff were young, and enjoyed what they were doing. Within a month I couldn’t imagine working anywhere else.

Every so often my own name cropped up, both whenever I was actually racing, but also in the next-door department of racing administration, which dealt with records of owners. It became a sort of running joke—“Hey, Juliard, if you race that nag again at Fontwell, he’ll suffer a 7-lb. penalty,” or “Hey, Juliard, you carried overweight at Ludlow. Cut down on the plum duff!”

Sarah’s Future, as far as I could tell, enjoyed the exchange of the soft air of Devon for the brisker winds of farther north. He still acknowledged my morning arrivals with much head nodding and blow breathing down his wide black nostrils, and he seemed to think it normal that I should embrace his neck and tell him he was a great fella, and mean it.

Those who say there can be a true fusing of animal/ human consciousness are probably deluding themselves, but after several intimate years of speed together, that chestnut and I were probably as near to brothers as interspecies relationships could get.

One Saturday, about a year after I’d started at Weatherbys, the horse and I lined up at Towcester for an uneventful three-mile ’chase, my father’s inconspicuous colors of gold and gray made even less discernible by a persistent drizzle.

No one on the stands seemed afterwards to be sharply clear what happened. From my point of view we were rising cleanly in a well-judged takeoff to a big black open ditch fence coming up the hill towards the straight. Another horse tripped and crashed into us, knocking Sarah’s Future completely off balance. He had jumped that fence expertly several times over the past years: neither he nor I was expecting disaster. His feet were knocked sideways. He landed in a heap, throwing me off forwards. I connected with the ground in one of those crunching collisions that tells you at once that you’ve broken a bone without being sure which bone. I heard it snap. I rolled, tucking my head in to save it from the hooves of the runners behind me. The remainder of the field of half-ton horses clattered over my head as I lay winded and anxious on the slippery grass with blades of it in my mouth and up my nose, and dislodging my goggles after an uncontrollable slide.

The clamor of the contest faded away towards the next fence. Two horses and two jockeys weren’t going to be worrying about that. The horse that had crashed into Sarah’s Future scrambled to its unsteady feet and trotted off as if dazed, and his unseated rider bent over me with “Are you all right, mate?” as his best effort at an apology.

I gripped his hand to haul myself to my feet and found that the bone I’d broken was somewhere in my left shoulder.

Sarah’s Future, also on his feet, was trying to walk but succeeding only in hobbling around in a circle. He couldn’t put any weight on one of his forelegs. A groundsman caught him by the bridle and held him.

In hopeless love for the horse I walked over to him and tried to will it not to be true, not to be possible that after so long this closest of companionships should have so suddenly come to the edge of a precipice.

I knew, as every rider of any experience knew, that there was nothing to be done. Sarah’s Future, like Sarah herself, was going to eternity in my hands.

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.

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 no chance.

Why run it, I thought? I happily took the ride and plugged away, and the horse finished third. Delighted, the farmer put me up again, and although I never actually won for him, I got handed around to his friends like a box of chocolates, and cantered down to a start somewhere most Saturdays.

It wasn’t the same without Sarah’s Future, but I wasn’t ready to try to replace him, even if I could have afforded it. One day, I thought. Perhaps. When I’d paid off the installments on a car.

I had rationalized my liking for speed. Taking intoxicating risks was normal in growing up. Warrior genes were inbred: it was necessary to fight the birch fences and the ski slopes, perhaps, in lieu of war.

Nearing Christmas, my father said we’d been invited to a reception at No. 10 Downing Street—himself, Polly and I—for the customary jolly given by the current prime minister to the members of his Cabinet and their families.

Polly wore a reasonable dress and my father hired a chauffeur, and the Juliards in good formation walked through the famous front door.

Staff greeted my father as one who belonged there. Polly had been through the portals before, but I couldn’t help but feel awed as I trod through the crimson-walled entrance hall over the black-and-white squared floor and through into the inner hall and up the historic staircase in a river of other guests. The brilliant yellow staircase wall, going up around a central well, was hung with portraits of all the past prime ministers; and I knew from the friendly way he looked at them that my father would try his best to join them one of these days.