Riders (43 page)

“Oh, fuck off,” said Billy furiously. “Why d’you reduce everything to your own disgusting level?”

T
he moment Billy got back he rang the news desk at Janey’s paper, to be told that she was away. Her interview with Jack Nicholson had taken longer than expected—Billy wondered miserably what form it had taken—and she was expected back sometime that week.

Now it was the fifth day of the Horse of the Year show and there was no sign of her. He must have passed the competitors’ board fifty times a day in the hope of a message. Every time he saw a tawny mane of hair in the crowd his stomach disappeared. His fears that she’d been nice to him only because she wanted some good quotes were multiplied when he talked to Joanna Battie and Dudley Diplock.

“Did they know her?” he asked.

“ ’Course I do,” said Joanna. “She’s her paper’s star writer, hang gliding one week, going into battle in a tank the next, interviewing Prince Charles the next. Pretty high-powered stuff.”

“Very pretty,” said Billy.

“Very,” said Dudley with a wolfish laugh. “Puts herself about by all accounts. Fleet Street claims she got to the top on her back.”

“On her front,” said Joanna. “Janey’s much too liberated to accept the missionary position.”

Billy felt quite sick. “Are you sure?”

“Well, let’s say she’s a bloody good journalist and, like most of them, she’s not too particular how she gets her information. They pay her well. I reckon she’s on twenty thou a year, don’t you, Joanna?”

After a sleepless night, Billy talked to Rupert as they exercised the horses. Rupert was reassuringly outraged.

“For God’s sake! Remember the things they’ve said about you and me in the past, even implying we’re a couple of fags. You know it’s all fairy tales. They make it up to excite themselves. Christ, Revenge is sluggish. I’m going to have to nail up his box during the day to stop the public stuffing him with goodies.”

At that moment Humpty Hamilton came waddling past in a pale blue quilted waistcoat. “Hi, Sweet William,” he said, and waddled on, roaring with laughter.

Next to come by was Driffield. “Hello, great lover,” he sneered. “Seen the paper?”

Finally, as Billy was handing The Bull back to Tracey, Lavinia rode into the practice ring. “Hello, Sweet William,” she said, an acid note creeping into her voice. “You
have
made a conquest.”

Heart thumping, Billy ran to the newsstand.

“Hi, Sweet William,” said the man behind the counter, handing him a newspaper. “You’ve boosted my sales so much this morning you can have it for free.”

Billy retired behind a pillar. Janey’s piece was in the middle, opposite the leader page, with a huge heading “Sweet Sweet William” and a picture of Billy taken from an extremely flattering angle.

“When I went to see Billy Lloyd-Foxe,” Janey had written, “I took him a bunch of freesias. They should have been sweet Williams, since he is easily the nicest man I have ever met.” Then there was a lot of guff about his Jean-Paul Belmondo looks, and his clinching the team silver and winning the King’s Cup. Then it ended:

“We all know of his sympathy with animals, his brilliant horsemanship, and his ability to smile even in the bitterest defeat. Last year he admits he was heartbroken when his long-standing girlfriend, Lavinia Greenslade, married French hearthrob Guy de la Tour. Since then the only female in Billy’s life has been Mavis, his blond mongrel, who follows him everywhere, bestowing a slit-eyed expression of marked disapproval on any lady intruder.

“Billy lives with Helen and Rupert Campbell-Black, and his soothing, easygoing presence must be a great help in sustaining a somewhat volatile marriage. But Billy, with characteristic modesty, says he owes everything to Rupert (including money, he adds with a smile). He also has the highest praise for his chef d’equipe, martinet Malise Gordon, and of course The Bull—who eats the fruit out of the Pimm’s jug—with whom he jumped a final clear in the team event to clinch the silver for Britain. He may only have got a silver, but he’s got a heart of gold. I haven’t heard a bad word about him on the circuit. After seven hours in his company, all I can say is please give me back my heart, Billy. Our offices are open to accept parcels twenty-four hours a day.”

Billy read it incredulously over and over and over again. It was a love letter. He rushed to the telephone. There was still no answer at Janey’s flat. The Features desk said she’d got back last night and was racing to finish the Nicholson piece and had probably switched off her telephone. Billy couldn’t bear it. He had to see her. He told Rupert he was going into London for a couple of hours.

“Well, don’t be too long,” said Rupert, grinning. “You’re obviously better in the sack than I thought. And what’s this about my ‘somewhat volatile marriage’? What does ‘volatile’ mean—that I’m always out on the tiles?”

Billy took a taxi to Janey’s flat. It was a long time before she answered. Compared with her glamorously tawny appearance before, she looked pale and black under the eyes and rather unadorned like a sitting room the day after the Christmas cards are taken down.

“Billy,” she said, “how lovely to see you.” She didn’t sound as though it was at all.

“I’m sorry to barge in, but I’ve missed you like hell.”

She backed away nervously. “Darling, I’m terribly sorry, I can’t stop. The office want Jack Nicholson by tomorrow lunchtime, so I’ll have to work all night.”

“Surely you can stop for five minutes.”

“I can’t, honestly. I’ve got complete brain freeze, I’ve just got to crack it.”

“The piece you wrote about me, it was so kind, and ludicrously flattering.”

She smiled, looking suddenly more like the Janey who’d come down to Penscombe. “Did they run it today? They must have held it back for the Horse of the Year. I filed the copy weeks ago.”

And perhaps she feels quite differently about me now, thought Billy. He was dying to ask about Jack Nicholson. Instead he said, “It’s the last night tomorrow. Will you have dinner with me afterwards?”

“I don’t know. I’m supposed to be dining with some MP as a preliminary interview. What time d’you finish?”

“About eleven, but I’m off to Washington, New York, and Toronto on Monday, and I must see you.”

“You must go now, but I really will try and make it tomorrow.”

“I’ll leave a ticket at the gate. Janey, I love…”

But she’d shut the door on him. Billy was filled with black despair. She hadn’t seemed pleased to see him, dismayed in fact, and rather guilty and not looking him in the eye. If she’d filed that copy weeks ago, she was bound to have met someone else in America.

Back in her flat, Janey Henderson felt equally suicidal. Her vanity wouldn’t allow her to explain to Billy that she’d already been home for forty-eight hours on a crash diet, in order to look ravishing for him on Saturday night. He’d caught her at the worst possible moment—she’d been writing and hadn’t got dressed or had a bath or used deodorant for two days. Her body had that rank smell of fear and sweat that always drenched her when she was wrestling with a piece. She was convinced her breath smelt from her all-meat diet. She hadn’t shaved her legs since she’d last seen him, her hair was filthy, she was sure she had dandruff and she couldn’t meet his eyes because he’d caught her with unplucked eyebrows and no makeup. Also her ginger cat, Harold Evans, had been sick in the bathroom that morning and she hadn’t had time to clean it up. The flat looked a tip because her cleaner had walked out while she was away and the neighbor who’d come to feed Harold Evans had failed to change his litter box—hardly a lovers’ bower.

Janey knew she ought to go back and wrestle with Jack Nicholson. Instead she reread the proof of the piece on Billy. She had actually lied to him and had only telephoned the corrections through the previous night. It really was rather good, and he looked even more gorgeous just now in a battered Barbour. He must have masses of girls after him. She mustn’t seem too keen. She’d lusted and lost too often over the last ten years. She was, in fact, twenty-nine. That was another lie she’d told Billy. Would he ever trust her when he found out?

Janey Henderson came from a respectable upper-middle-class family. Her father had been in advertising, her kind easygoing mother had stayed at home, brought up the children and encouraged them to have careers, but never taught them how to do anything around the house. Janey, the baby of the family, had been the most successful. She possessed a strong sex drive which led her into trouble, but was bourgeois enough to be paranoid about being talked about. Used to adoration at home, she expected it from her lovers and in order to keep them happy she would tell lies and, when they rumbled her and grew angry, she tended to move on to another one, who could be fooled for a few weeks that she was absolutely perfect. Her father doted on her and, if she had any troubles with landladies or bills or angry bosses, she’d run to him. In the old days he had always bailed her out, but since his advertising agency had folded in the economic collapse of 1973, he suddenly found himself very short of money.

Janey Henderson was attracted to power. As a journalist, she had racketed around and met endless stars. She had mixed with the rich and famous and longed to live like they did. She was a good, if sloppy, writer, an inspired listener who was able to sift out the minutia that mattered. A teenager in the swinging sixties, she had enjoyed the fruits of the permissive society and benefited in her career from the rise of the women’s movement. She had also seen her girlfriends trying to do their own thing, raising their consciousness and their husbands’ blood pressure, finally walking out on these husbands and then being absolutely miserable as single parents. At twenty-nine, Janey realized there was nothing one needed more than a good man. She wanted to settle down and have children. She had seen Rupert’s beautiful house and assumed that servants and land and unlimited Pimm’s were all the normal perks of a show-jumper’s life. Janey also longed to be a more serious writer. If she married Billy, she could be more selective, producing one piece a month instead of two or three a week, and could even write books.

Janey Henderson pondered on these things. The sight of the blank page in the Olivetti and the mess in the flat brought her back to earth. There was no MP to be interviewed tomorrow night. If she had to hand in copy at lunchtime, she reckoned it would take her till late evening to clean the flat and make herself look ravishing.

Harold Evans was weaving furrily round her ankles, demanding lunch.

“I must take you away from all this squalor, Harold,” said Janey, picking him up. “How would you like to live in Gloucestershire?”

Back at Wembley, Billy was inconsolable, despite the fact that Rupert had good news of a possible sponsor. “He approached me to test the water. I said you’d need at least £50,000 a year to stay on the road.”

“What a lot of money—what does he make?”

“Cat food.”

“The Bull won’t have to eat it, will he?”

“No, but he might have to change his name to Moggie Meal Charlie, or something.”

“Christ, what’s this sponsor like?”

“Oh, frightful. Thatched hair, jangling initial bracelets, frilled duck egg blue evening shirts, firm handshakes, fake American accent, and calls you by your Christian name every second sentence.”

“What’s his name?”

“Kevin Coley. Rather suitable under the circs. Puts a lot of himself into his products.”

Billy grinned. “What’s in it for him?”

“Social mountaineering. He’s made his pile and now he wants upmarket fun and some smart friends. He thinks you have tremendous charisma.”

“Glad someone does,” said Billy gloomily. “He won’t much longer if The Bull goes on knocking down fences.”

“I think you should talk to him,” said Rupert. “Fifty grand a year’s not to be sniffed at. Your mother’s not likely to croak for at least twenty years. And I thought you wanted to marry that girl?”

“After today, I don’t think she’ll have me.”

Billy was sure that Janey wouldn’t turn up the following night. Even his horoscope was ambiguous: it warned Pisces subjects to watch out for fireworks, and make travel plans in the evening.

It had been the Germans’ Wembley. Hot-foot from the Olympics and their double gold, they had jackbooted their way through the week, winning every big class except the
Sunday Times
Cup, which had gone to Rupert. On the last night the crowd was really hungry for a British victory. The big class was the Victor Ludorum, a two-round competition in which riders with double clears jumped off against the clock for £6,000. Rupert jumped clear in the first round and so did Billy, although he was very lucky. The Bull rapped every fence and had the upright swinging back and forth like a metronome on lente, but he didn’t bring it down and the crowd went wild.

They had given him and The Bull a colossal welcome whenever he’d come into the ring that week. But each time Dudley Diplock had announced them as “that great Olympic combination—Billy Lloyd-Foxe riding The Bull” the little horse had raised two hoofs at the commentary box and knocked up a cricket score. He was tired after a long season. Tonight, however, he felt more bouncy. “You’ve got to win,” Billy urged him, “to impress Janey, if she comes.”

Now Billy sat in the riders’ stand, biting his nails, watching Rupert jump his second round. Revenge was also a bit tired. He flattened twice and had eight faults at the combination and a brick out of the wall. As he came out of the ring, Rupert patted Revenge consolingly, determined to refute any charges of cruelty, knowing the television cameras were still on him.