Wild Horses - By Dick Francis Page 0,29

other guests weren’t avid readers of Drumbeat’s ‘Hot from the Stars’, and with relief I saw that the two papers most in evidence were the Racing Gazette and the Daily Cable, both of them lying open at the obituary page for Valentine.

Nash and I shook a fair number of hands and were seated in prestigious places, and while Nash asked a dumbstruck waitress for fizzy mineral water, nearly causing her to faint from her proximity to the sexiest eyes in screendom, I read both farewells to Valentine, and found they’d done the old man proud. Cremation, the Gazette also noted, was set for eleven am, Monday, and a memorial service would be arranged later. If I were truly out of work, I thought gloomily, I could go to both.

By the coffee stage, the Drumbeat’s pages were fluttering across the table and inevitably someone commiserated with Nash over the mess his director was making of his film. My own identity, remarked on round the table behind sheltering hands, produced universally disapproving stares.

Nash said with authority, his expert voice production easily capable of silencing other conversations, ‘Never believe what you read in the papers. We’re making an excellent film in Newmarket. We’re being bad-mouthed by a spiteful little man. I did not say what I am reported to have said, and I have complete confidence in Thomas here. I shall complain to the paper and demand they print a retraction.’

‘Sue them,’ someone said.

‘Perhaps I will.’

‘And as for you, Thomas,’ said one of the stewards whom I knew personally, ‘you must definitely sue.’

I said, ‘I’m not sure that I can.’

‘Of course you can!’ He stabbed at the pages with a forefinger. ‘This is defamatory in the extreme.’

I said, ‘It’s difficult to sue anyone for asking questions.’

‘What?’

‘Those defamations are written carefully in the form of questions. The question marks tend to take the certainty out of the slurs.’

‘I don’t believe it!’

A head further along the large table was gravely nodding. ‘A scurrilous suggestion, if it is expressed as a question, may or may not be considered libel. There are grey areas.’

My steward friend said blankly, ‘That’s not justice!’

‘It’s the law.’

‘You knew that?’ Nash said to me.

‘Mm.’

‘Did Howard know it?’

‘Whoever wrote that piece certainly did.’

Nash said, ‘Shit!’ and not a single face objected.

‘What Nash really needs,’ I said, ‘is a reliable tip for the Lincoln.’

They laughed and with relief turned to the serious business of the day. I half-heard the knowledgeable form-talk and thought that five hours could be a long torture. Barely forty minutes of it had so far passed. My pulse still raced from anxiety. My whole professional life probably hung on whether the moguls who would be bidden to the breakfast table were putting in a good night’s sleep. Saturday morning. Golf day. I would be doubly unpopular.

I went down with Nash and a couple of the stewards’ other lunch guests to see the horses walking round the parade ring before the first race. Nash looked at the horses: the racecrowd progressively looked at Nash. He seemed to take the staring for granted, just as he would have done back home in Hollywood, and he signed a few autographs for wide-eyed teenagers with pleasant politeness.

‘How do I put a bet on?’ he asked me, signing away.

‘I’ll do it for you if you like. Which horse, how much?’

‘Hell knows.’ He raised his eyes briefly and pointed to a horse being at that point mounted by a jockey in scarlet and yellow stripes. ‘That one. Twenty.’

‘Will you be all right if I leave you?’

‘I’m a grown boy, you know.’

Grinning, I turned away, walked to the Tote, and bet twenty pounds to win on the horse called Wasp. Nash, waiting for me to retrieve him, returned with me to the stewards’ room, from where we watched Wasp finish an unobtrusive fifth.

‘I owe you,’ Nash said. ‘Pick me one yourself for the next race.’

The races as always were being shown on closed-circuit television on sets throughout the bars and the grandstands. A set in the stewards’ room was busy with a replay of the just-finished race, Wasp still finishing fifth, the jockey busy to the end.

I stared breathlessly at the screen.

‘Thomas? Thomas,’ Nash said forcefully in my ear, ‘come back from wherever you’ve gone.’

‘Television,’ I said.

Nash said ironically, ‘It’s been around a while, you know.’

‘Yes, but…’ I picked up a copy of the Racing Gazette that was lying on the table and turned from Valentine’s obituary to the pages laying out the Doncaster programme. Television coverage