the race. As they waited, she watched the jockeys taking their horses to look at the first fence.
Mrs Wilkinson couldn’t see over it, Sir Cuthbert, who resented missing lunch, was trying to eat it and spitting out bits of spruce. Other horses were having their manes raked or their ears pulled, anything to calm them.
For a second Tommy clung to Mrs Wilkinson.
‘Just come home safely, darling, and you too, Amber.’
‘I want to say thank you for all you’ve done for me, Tom,’ muttered Amber, about to cover her frantically chattering teeth with her gum shield. ‘If I don’t come back, I want you to have all my jewellery.’
Tommy thought her heart would burst.
138
As forty horses circled together, the sun came out to see them off. All the Irish jockeys were crossing themselves.
‘Our father,’ Awesome intoned.
‘Defend oh Lord, this thy child and her horse,’ murmured Amber. She thought about Rogue and then about Billy, then she thought of nothing but the race as they hustled in a cavalry charge over the Melling Road for three hundred yards to the first fence rising as huge as a green block of flats. A great cheer went up as Mrs Wilkinson stood back on her hocks and flew over.
‘That bar used to be a railway siding, where people watched the race from the train,’ said a BBC cameraman as they hurtled Dora along beside the track.
‘Wilkie’s jumping really well,’ crowed Dora. ‘Can we go a bit faster?’
‘We mustn’t go too fast or the horses start racing us, which infuriates the jockeys.’
As Rupert had told her to hunt round the first circuit, Amber was actually taking it very easily. Rupert had had a good effect on Wilkie, she was running much straighter. Furious, even further behind, was loathing having horses all round him, and exhausting himself battling against the brutal strength of Eddie, who’d been instructed to hold him up.
Shade’s pacemaker Voltaire Scott was as usual going much too fast. Out of the forty runners, six horses, trying to keep up, fell at the first fence, eight at the second, seven at the third. Soon loose horses were galloping all round Amber.
At each fence the leaders ripped away a forest of fir tree and put up a cloud of dust it was difficult to see through. Amber was trying to get a clear run, but every time she landed, she had to avoid fallen horses and jockeys on the ground.
Now it was Becher’s, vaster than Etta’s conifer hedge and with its seven-foot drop. As Rupert had instructed, she steered Wilkie towards the middle and even though she felt they were falling off the edge of the world, they landed safely.
When would Harvey-Holden start employing his team tactics? Gradually on her left she was aware of a dark shadow growing closer, Johnnie Brutus and Ilkley Hall edging up on the rails, then Bafford Playboy sliding up on her right, and she realized in terror they were trying to box her in and once again block Wilkie’s good eye.
Somehow they scrambled over Foinavon and were scorching towards the Canal Turn, where the course jinked ninety degrees and where, because of Animal Rights trouble in the past, no crowds were allowed.
Through a haze of fear, Amber tried to remember what Rupert had told her.
‘Go wide round the bend, take it at an angle, then swing left in the air, straighten out and go hell for leather for Valentine’s.’
Shoved out by Johnnie Brutus on the inner, unable to go wide because of Killer threatening her on her right, Mrs Wilkinson forgot Rupert’s lessons and jumped wildly to the left to reach the safety of the rails, cutting across Furious who was just behind her.
Losing concentration, distracted by the swearing and the shouts of the jockeys and by loose horses on all sides, Furious took off too early, hit the top of the fence and seeing a horse writhing just below him, lunged to the right. Next minute he had fallen heavily, taking Eddie with him.
Eddie sat with his head bowed, his right hand thrashing the cut-up ground with his whip, he’d done something awful to his left shoulder. He’d let Grandpa down, no three-thousandth win.
‘Fucking, fucking horse, fucking stupid animal,’ he screamed, until the rest of the field had moved on and the sun had gone in in embarrassment.
The crowd and Rafiq watching on the big screen had yelled in relief as, ever gallant, Furious scrambled to his feet and broke into a canter. The cameras moved on, but