The Old Contemptibles (4 page)

“Oh, that. By the time Vivian arrives, Jury, the woman, the tots and the drugger will all have broken it off.”

The boy in the tree had his high-powered Zeiss binoculars trained on a scene unfolding less than an eighth of a mile away from the Severn School grounds.

On another strap slung over his shoulder was a portable telephone.

The boy had climbed this tree on the school grounds many times, sailing above the high stone wall. He might have exulted in the feeling of elation that comes from such a perspective. He might have been moved to write a poem about what he saw.

He might have; but he wasn’t. The boy in the tree was interested only in the perspective the tree allowed him of the race-course out there and of the ’chasers pounding round it at this very moment. The second Rogue’s Gallery hit the finish line at three-to-five odds, he spoke into the telephone.

“Number ten, Dusty Answer, thirty-to-one.”

“Got it, lad,” said his elderly companion, sitting in a bunged-up Land Rover outside the gates of Severn School. He hit four digits on his car phone and repeated the name of the horse, the number of the race, and the modest bet of twenty nicker to the person at the other end.

The turf accountant sighed. “Have to time you, guv’nor, you know that.”

“Right,” said the man in the car, who then redialed to the boy in the tree. “He’s timing it. But I think we’re wearing him down.”

The boy in the tree was sure of it. Over the last two months, their bets on long shots ranged anywhere from two to two hundred quid. They never won. That was the point.

The boy thought,
felt
with the confidence, if not the prescience of teenage boys that today they’d hit it.

“Favorite, next race?” the boy asked the man in the car.

He sat behind the wheel with the racing form. The boy had one too, but he was too taken up with the binoculars to give it a thorough study.

“Splendid Spring, looks like. Odds three-to-four . . . um, um, um. Several long shots, which one do you like? Shall we take one that’ll make me look a little less like a total fool?”

“Yes. A little less.”

“Right. How about a ten-to-one named Cannibal Isle?”

The boy had raised the binoculars again, and was watching the horses get into post position. “Where do they get these names? Okay.”

“Will he ever fall for it, d’ya think, lad? We been at it now for weeks.”

“Greed. He thinks you’re a fool that doesn’t know horses; he’s sick of hearing from you—hold on.”

The boy wished only he could hear it as well as see it. He had to use his imagination to hear the drumming of the hooves, the whish over hedges, the pulsing of the crowd, the wails, the screams—the victory. There! Not Splendid Spring but the third favorite, Gal O’Mine, won. “Gal O’Mine,” he said into his hand-held phone.

Again, his companion in the car hit the same digits, got the accountant. “Cannibal Isle in the fifth. Fifty quid.”

“Jesus . . . isn’t that like a twenty-to-one? . . .” A huge sigh. No skin off the turf accountant’s nose. “I’ll have to time it again.”

“All right by me.” To the boy in the tree he said, “Skip the sixth. Give him time.”

“Uh-huh.”

They waited.

The bookmaker called, said to the man in the car, “No. Both races already started.” The phone slammed down.
Don’t waste my time.

The man in the car called the boy in the tree. “Surprise. We past-posted again. Listen: in the eighth there’s a horse I like. Really like. Give it a go? Nothing to lose.”

The boy thought about it. “Is it favored?”

“With me it is.” He checked the form. “Second favorite, no, third. Odds are good—three-to-one. It’s your horse, lad. Fortune’s Son.” He laughed.

“I like it.” The boy smiled through the tracery of narrow limbs already coming into leaf. March had been warm. He picked off a leaf, looked at it, shoved it in his pocket. “All right. Let’s do five hundred. No, a little more. Seven. To win. That’s real money.”

“If he takes it.”

“And if you’re right.” The boy laughed. He took out a cigarette, fired up a match, and sat there on the cool branch-bench, letting the next race go by. Then he snapped up his binoculars, watched the horses readying at the post for the eighth. He slewed the Zeiss along the line to number eight. She was on the outside. Still. Eighth horse in the eighth race. And he loved the silks, gold and blue. Fortune’s Son.

They broke away and for a minute and a quarter the boy held his breath as he watched them leap hedges and ditches as if he’d actually put seven hundred quid on the line.

Fortune’s Son came in first. “Call,” the boy yelled into his phone.

His friend in the car hit the digits.

The boy in the tree waited, binoculars still on the jockey’s silks, the smashing bay horse looking as if he knew he’d won. He bet they did, the horses. He bet they knew.

The phone crackled. He held it to his ear.

A chuckle. “Laddie, the damned fool fell for it. Couldn’t resist that seven hundred. That’s twenty-one-hundred quid!” He let out a gleeful yell.

“Go collect. And meet me here tomorrow. Say, during games. Three o’clock. And don’t scarper.” The boy laughed.

“Not a chance, lad, not a chance.”

 • • • 

He shoved the phone in the belt at his back where his school jacket would cover it with hardly a bulge. The binoculars he didn’t have to worry about. He was also studying bird migration.

He came down the tree most of the way before he dropped with a thud. Looking up as he brushed off his trousers, he saw his science master.

“Sir,” he said calmly and confidently.

“Hullo!”

The boy held up the new green leaf. “If you look close, you’ll see the striations are different.”

The master squinted. “I don’t, really. But apparently you do. Interesting theory.”

“Thank you, sir. I’m finished now. I need to write up my findings.”

“I’ll be interested to read them.”

“Sir.” He watched the science master walk off, hands clasped behind his back, musing. Nice man. Bit dim, but nice.

He looked at the leaf, tossed it aside.

One leaf looked just like any other to him.

The boy sat at a round table in one of the rear rooms at the Rose and Crown. There were six of them playing straight poker. Ned Rice was one.

The other four were taking it as a lark that this lad apparently thought himself a first-rate player. He wasn’t bad; he wasn’t good. During the eight months he’d been playing regularly (except for school holidays) he’d won maybe a dozen pots, all small.

He was brash; he liked to brag about the visits he’d made to the States, always to Las Vegas (which he called “Vegas”), where he had a rich uncle who was a “high roller” in some club there called the Mirage.

And he played with U.S. dollars, never sterling.

Now, that had made them really wonder.

Allan Blythe, a National Health doctor who took private patients on the side and shoved the money in a drawer, had asked him why the bloody hell he didn’t take the currency to the bank and exchange it for pounds sterling.

“Because the local banks here don’t do currency. I’m supposed to go up to London just to exchange money? Don’t make me laugh. I’m giving you a better rate of exchange than a bank, anyway.”

The first time he’d come round with his dollars and Ned Rice, the other four had nearly laughed themselves sick. Frankie Fletcher knew a small-time counterfeiter and wouldn’t let the kid play until
he’d checked out a sampling of the bills. Frankie took the bills in his own winnings once or twice every month to his mate. They always checked out; they were real.

By now, the others were used to him. They got a kick out of having a public school boy at the table who’d come into town with the others once a week to go to the cinema. Only, this kid never saw the film. Since he wasn’t a serious contender, since he didn’t cheat (they’d watched him very closely) they began to treat him as a kind of mascot, this swaggering kid with his rich uncle in Vegas and his flashy Americanisms.

One thing they noticed: he always folded if the pot was small, saying he didn’t play for “chicken feed.” Frankie Fletcher snorted at that one. “More like you didn’t learn nothin’ from that uncle.”

“He could wipe the floor with you,” said the boy, heatedly.

“Now, now, no offense, kid.” Frankie leaned over as the boy made change, stuck in a twenty-dollar bill, drew out two five-pound notes and some American dollars. Then he raised Frankie a fiver.

Allan Blythe (the biggest tightwad at the table) kept track of the dollar-to-pound ratio, making sure the boy was giving them his promised better-than-bank rate. Allan Blythe even checked the currency fluctuations to make sure they were getting their five percent higher.

Frankie won that hand with only a pair of tens. “What the hell’re you bettin’ on, kid?” he laughed.

For another hour they played—no high rollers here, Ned Rice laughed—and he made change again, at the same time calling. He put in a twenty, drew out some sterling and some American.

He lost again.

At ten o’clock the film was always over. The boy stood up, shoved his money in his pocket, either a meager win or a meager loss, and left, after smiling at Ned Rice.

 • • • 

This particular night was the night after the big win on Fortune’s Son. It was fine with him that he was walking out of the side door of the Rose and Crown tonight with forty quid more than he’d walked in with, even though he hadn’t won a pot. To that uncle in Vegas, sixty, sixty-five dollars would have been no more than cigar money. But he didn’t have an uncle in Vegas. The boy grinned. Forty quid was nothing to sneeze at.

He turned up his blazer collar and went whistling down the alley between the pub and the cinema. Very convenient that was.

With his hands shoved in his pockets, he was practicing his soccer, kicking a heavy wad of paper along the cobbles and onto the pavement by the cinema.

He kicked it onto someone’s shoe.

The boy looked up into the thick, trifocaled glasses of his maths master staring down at him with eyes hard as rocks and arms folded. “So.”

“Oh bloody hell,” the boy muttered.

When Jury walked into his office and said good morning, Wiggins was concentrating on the row of medications lined up on his dispensary/desk. He responded with a bemused nod, his mind busy either trying to decide on what to take, or what ailment he was taking it for.

To Jury he said, “You seem almost
hearty,
sir. You’ve been that way for two weeks.” His tone was accusing. “Heartiness” was not on the superintendent’s rota. Then he made a display of looking at his watch. “It’s only half-seven. You’re not a morning person, sir.”

“I’m not?” Jury started in immediately tidying up his desk, testimony to the refurbishing of his temperament. “Am I usually in a bad mood, Wiggins?”

Wiggins thought this over. “Not ‘bad’ exactly. Melancholy, sometimes.” The sergeant pulled out his bottom drawer, the one that housed his collection of old herbal remedies for everything from bursitis to boils to broken hearts. “What I think is, you’ve not been getting enough sleep.”

“That,” said Jury, with a deadpan look at his sergeant, “is the most accurate diagnosis you’ve ever made.”

 • • • 

He had gotten, indeed, practically none for some days, at the same time he felt as rested as Rip Van Winkle.

When he went to Lewisham, which he had done every night for nearly two weeks, and Jane opened the door, they would embrace so quickly he’d kick the door shut with his foot. It made them laugh, realizing they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. They were like survivors of a shipwreck who, once saved, could look back over the cold sea of their lives and wonder how they had managed to make shore.

And when he wasn’t with her, he still felt a contentment that made him invulnerable. It was as if she’d dressed him in invisible armor.

He knew from past experience he should not plunge headlong into a love affair. He should stand back, take the longer view, judge whether the land was truly safe, meet her, at least for a while, on other terms. But he could think of no other terms; he couldn’t imagine their carefully stepping round one another, assessing the risks.

On his second visit to the Lewisham house, most of this had been going through his mind. They separated only when she said that their dinner was burning. It was, but they were so reluctant to let go, the chicken turned black, the salad limp, the white wine warm.

When they finally broke the embrace, it wasn’t to sit down to dinner, anyway.

 • • • 

“Do you know,” Jury had said, lying in bed, “I’ve been coming here every night for nearly two weeks and I couldn’t tell you what your living room looks like. I have vague notions about the kitchen, since we’ve eaten there, or at least I
think
we must have eaten something in the last two weeks, but if you put a gun to my head, I couldn’t give a clear description of anything but the bedroom. What a rotten detective I make.”

She laughed and reached across his chest for three little vials of medicine. There was a carafe of water on the end table on her side. “You know the only way to cure this myopic vision is take the time for a house tour.”

“What a waste of time. What are those pills for?”

She held them up each in turn and said, “This one is for dropsy; this one is for the vapors; this one for bubonic plague.”

Jury made a grab for her hand.

 • • • 

Two nights ago he’d said, “Let’s be practical: I could move in. Or you could move to Islington.”

“Somehow, I
don’t
think Miss Centerfold would appreciate that.”

It irritated him, these slighting references to Carole-anne. “Her name’s Carole-anne, not ‘Miss Centerfold’!”

“Sorry.” She’d turned away.

Jury turned her back. “It’s just that she’s a good friend and has had a fairly rotten life.” Jury didn’t actually know this to be true; he had to infer which of Carole-anne’s stories were contrivances, which not. “And if it hadn’t been for her, we’d never have met.”