Bonecrack - Страница 7

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'I can ride,' he said flatly.

'Racehorses?'

'I can ride.'

This was getting nowhere. I tried again. 'Have you ever ridden in any sort of race?'

'I have ridden in amateur races.'

'Where?'

'In Italy, and in Germany.'

'Have you won any?'

He gave me a black stare. 'I have won two.'

I supposed that that was something. At least it suggested that he could stay on. Winning itself, in his case, had no significance. His father was the sort to buy the favourite and nobble the opposition.

'But you want now to become a professional?'

'Yes.'

'Then I'll apply for a licence for you.'

'I can apply myself.'

I shook my head. 'You will have to have an apprentice licence, and I will have to apply for it for you.'

'I do not wish to be an apprentice.'

I said patiently, 'Unless you become an apprentice you will be unable to claim a weight allowance. In England in flat races the only people who can claim weight allowances are apprentices. Without a weight allowance the owners of the horses will all resist to the utmost any suggestion that you should ride. Without a weight allowance, in fact, you might as well give up the whole idea.'

'My father-' he began.

'Your father can threaten until he's blue in the face,' I interrupted. 'I cannot force the owners to employ you, I can only persuade. Without a weight allowance, they will never be persuaded.'

He thought it over, his expression showing nothing.

'My father,' he said, 'told me that anyone could apply for a licence and that there was no need to be apprenticed.'

Technically, that is true.'

'But practically, it is not.' It was a statement more than a question: he had clearly understood what I had said.

I began to speculate about the strength of his intentions. It certainly seemed possible that if he read the Deed of Apprenticeship and saw to what he would be binding himself, he might simply step back into his car and be driven away. I fished in one of Margaret's tidy desk drawers, and drew out a copy of the printed agreement.

'You will need to sign this,' I said casually, and handed it over.

He read it without a flicker of an eyelid, and considering what he was reading, that was remarkable.

The familiar words trotted through my mind '- the Apprentice will faithfully, diligently and honestly serve the Master and obey and perform all his lawful commands- and will not absent himself from the service of the Master, nor divulge any of the secrets of the Master's business- and shall deliver to the Master all such monies and other things that shall come into his hands for work done – and will in all matters and things whatsoever demean and behave himself as a good true and faithful Apprentice ought to do-'

He put the form down on the desk and looked across at me.

'I cannot sign that.'

'Your father will have to sign it as well,' I pointed out.

'He will not.'

'Then that's an end to it,' I said, relaxing back in my chair.

He looked down at the form. 'My father's lawyers will draw up a different agreement,' he said.

I shrugged. 'Without a recognisable apprenticeship deed you won't get an apprentice's licence. That form there is based on the articles of apprenticeship common to all trades since the Middle Ages. If you alter its intentions, it won't meet the licensing requirements.'

After a packed pause he said, 'That part about delivering all monies to the Master- does that mean I would have to give to you all the money I might earn in races?' He sounded incredulous, as well he might.

'It does say that,' I agreed, 'but it is normal nowadays for the Master to return half of race earnings to the apprentice. In addition, of course, to giving him a weekly allowance.'

'If I win the Derby on Archangel, you would take half. Half of the fee and half of the present?'

'That's right.'

'It's wicked!'

'You've got to win it before you start worrying,' I said flippantly, and watched the arrogance flare up like a bonfire.

'If the horse is good enough, I will.'

You kid yourself, mate, I thought; and didn't answer.

He stood up abruptly, picked up the form, and without another word walked out of the office, and out of the house, out of the yard, and into his car. The Mercedes purred away with him down the drive, and I stayed sitting back in Margaret's chair, hoping I had seen the last of him, wincing at the energy of my persisting headache, and wondering whether a treble brandy would restore me to instant health.

I tried it.

It didn't.

There was no sign of him in the morning, and on all counts the day was better. The kicked two-year-old's knee had gone up like a football but he was walking pretty sound on it, and the cut on Lucky Lindsay was as superficial as Etty had hoped. The elderly cyclist, the evening before, had accepted my apologies and ten pounds for his bruises and had left me with the impression that we could knock him down again, any time, for a similar supplement to his income. Archangel worked a half speed six furlongs on the Sidehill gallop, and in me a night's sleep had ironed out some creases.

But Alessandro Rivera did come back.

He rolled up in the drive in the chauffeur-driven Mercedes just as Etty and I finished the last three boxes at evening stables, timing it so accurately that I wondered if he had been waiting and watching from out on Bury Road.

I jerked my head towards the office, and he followed me in. I switched on the heater, and sat down, as before; and so did he.

He produced from an inner pocket the apprenticeship form and passed it towards me across the desk. I took it and unfolded it, and turned it over.

There were no alterations. It was the deed in the exact form he had taken it. There were, however, four additions.

The signatures of Alessandro Rivera and Enso Rivera, with an appropriate witness in each case, sat squarely in the spaces designed for them.

I looked at the bold heavy strokes of both the Riveras' signatures and the nervous elaborations of the witnesses. They had signed the agreement without filling in any of the blanks: without even discussing the time the apprenticeship was to run for, or the weekly allowance to be paid.

He was watching me. I met his cold black eyes.

'You and your father signed it like this,' I said slowly, 'because you have not the slightest intention of being bound by it.'

His face didn't change. 'Think what you like,' he said.

And so I would. And what I thought was that the son was not as criminal as his father. The son had taken the legal obligations of the apprenticeship form seriously. But his father had not.

CHAPTER FOUR

The small private room in the North London hospital where my father had been taken after the crash seemed to be almost entirely filled with the frames and ropes and pulleys and weights which festooned his high bed. Apart from all that there was only a high-silled window with limp floral curtains and a view of half the back of another building and a chunk of sky, a chest-high wash basin with lever type taps designed to be turned on by elbows, a bedside locker upon which reposed his lower teeth in a glass of water, and an armchair of sorts, visitors for the use of.

There were no flowers glowing against the margarine coloured walls, and no well-wishing cards brightening the top of the locker. He did not care for flowers, and would have dispatched any that came straight along to other wards, and I doubted that anyone at all would have made the error of sending him a glossy or amusing get-well, which he would have considered most frightfully vulgar.

The room itself was meagre compared with what he would have chosen and could afford, but to me during the first critical days the hospital itself had seemed effortlessly efficient. It did after all, as one doctor had casually explained to me, have to deal constantly with wrecked bodies prised out of crashes on the A. 1. They were used to it. Geared for it. They had a higher proportion of accident cases than of the normally sick.

He had said he thought I was wrong to insist on private treatment for my father and that he would find time hanging less heavy in a public ward where there was a lot going on, but I had assured him that he did not know my father. He had shrugged and acquiesced, but said that the private rooms weren't much. And they weren't. They were for getting out of quickly, if one could.

When I visited him that evening, he was asleep. The ravages of the pain he had endured during the past week had deepened and darkened the lines round his eyes and tinged all his skin with grey, and he looked defenceless in a way he never did when awake. The dogmatic set of his mouth was relaxed, and with his eyes shut he no longer seemed to be disapproving of nineteen twentieths of what occurred. A lock of grey-white hair curved softly down over his forehead, giving him a friendly gentle look which was hopelessly misleading.

He had not been a kind father. I had spent most of my childhood fearing him and most of my teens loathing him, and only in the past very few years had I come to understand him. The severity with which he had used me had not after all been rejection and dislike, but lack of imagination and an inability to love. He had not believed in beating, but he had lavishly handed out other punishments of deprivation and solitude, without realising that what would have been trifling to him was torment to me. Being locked in one's bedroom for three or four days at a time might not have come under the heading of active cruelty, but it had dumped me into agonies of humiliation and shame: and it had not been possible, although I had tried until I was the most repressed child in Newmarket, to avoid committing anything my father could interpret as a fault.