back in my old place, doing again what I’d ached for in two and a half years. I grinned with irrepressible joy and got Revelation to lengthen his stride for the water jump.
He took it with feet to spare. Perfect. There were no irate shouts from the stands on my right, and we swept away on round the top bend of the course, fast and free. Another fence at the end of the bend — Revelation floated it-and five more stretching away down the far side. It was at the third of these, the open ditch, that the man had been standing and waving the flags.
It’s an undoubted fact that emotions pass from rider to horse, and Revelation was behaving with the same reckless exhilaration which gripped me: so after two spectacular leaps over the next two fences we both sped onwards with arms open to fate. There ahead was the guard rail, the four foot wide open ditch and the four foot six fence rising on the far side of it. Revelation, knowing all about it, automatically put himself right to jump.
It came, the blinding flash in the eyes, as we soared into the air. White, dazzling, brain shattering light, splintering the day into a million fragments and blotting out the world in a blaze as searing as the sun.
I felt Revelation falling beneath me and rolled instinctively, my eyes open and quite unable to see. Then there was the rough crash on the turf and the return of vision from light to blackness and up through grey to normal sight.
I was on my feet before Revelation, and I still had hold of the reins. He struggled up, bewildered and staggering, but apparently unhurt. I pulled him forward into an unwilling trot to make sure of his legs, and was relieved to find them whole and sound. It only remained to remount as quickly as possible, and this was infuriatingly difficult. With two hands I could have jumped up easily: as it was I scrambled untidily back into the saddle at the third attempt, having lost the reins altogether and bashed my stomach on the pommel of the saddle into the bargain. Revelation behaved very well, all things considered. He trotted only fifty yards or so in the wrong direction before I collected myself and the reins into a working position and turned him round. This time we by-passed the fence and all subsequent ones: I cantered him first down the side of the track, slowed to a trot to cross the road, and steered then not on round the bottom semi-circle but off to the right, heading for where the boundary fence met the main London road.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Chico running in my direction across the rough grass. I waved him towards me with a sweep of the arm and reined in and waited for him where our paths converged.
‘I thought you said you could bloody well ride,’ he said, scarcely out of breath from the run.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I thought so once.’
He looked at me sharply. ‘You fell off. I was watching. You fell off like a baby.’
‘If you were watching… the horse fell, if you don’t mind. There’s a distinction. Very important to jockeys.’
‘Nuts,’ he said. ‘You fell off.’
‘Come on,’ I said, walking Revelation towards the boundary fence. ‘There’s something to find.’ I told Chico what. ‘In one of those bungalows, I should think. At a window or on the roof, or in a garden.’
‘Sods,’ said Chico forcefully. ‘The dirty sods.’
I agreed with him.
It wasn’t very difficult, because it had to be within a stretch of only a hundred yards or so. We went methodically along the boundary fence towards the London road, stopping to look carefully into every separate little garden, and at every separate little house. A fair number of inquisitive faces looked back.
Chico saw it first, propped into a high leafless branch of a tree growing well back in the second to last garden. Traffic whizzed along the London road only ten yards ahead, and Revelation showed signs of wanting to retreat.
‘Look,’ said Chico, pointing upwards.
I looked, fighting a mild battle against the horse. It was five feet high, three feet wide, and polished to a spotless brilliance. A mirror.
‘Sods,’ said Chico again.
I nodded, dismounted, led Revelation back to where the traffic no longer fretted him, and tied the reins to the fence. Then Chico and I walked along to the London road and round into the road of bungalows. Napoleon Close, it said. Napoleon wasn’t
We rang the door of the second bungalow. A man and a woman both came to the door to open it, elderly, gentle, inoffensive and enquiring.
I came straight to the point, courteously. ‘Do you know you have a mirror in your tree?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ said the woman, smiling as at an idiot. She had flat wavy grey hair and was wearing a sloppy black cardigan over a brown wool dress. No colour sense, I thought.
‘You’d better take a look,’ I suggested.
‘It’s not a mirror, you know,’ said the husband, puzzled. ‘It’s a placard. One of those advertisement things.’
‘That’s right,’ said his wife contrapuntally. ‘A placard.’
‘We agreed to lend our tree…’
‘For a small sum, really… only our pension…’
‘A man put up the framework…’
‘He said he would be back soon with the poster…’
‘A religious one, I believe. A good cause…’
‘We wouldn’t have done it otherwise…’
Chico interrupted. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it was a good place for a poster. Your tree stands further back than the others. It isn’t conspicuous.’
‘I did think…’ began the man doubtfully, shuffling in his checked woolly bedroom slippers.
‘But if he was willing to pay rent for your particular tree, you didn’t want to put him off,’ I finished. ‘An extra quid or two isn’t something you want to pass on next door.’
They wouldn’t have put it so bluntly, but they didn’t demur.
‘Come and look,’ I said.
They followed me round along the narrow path beside their bungalow wall and into their own back garden. The tree stood half way to the racecourse boundary fence, the sun slanting down through the leafless branches. We could see the wooden back of the mirror, and the ropes which fastened it to the tree trunk. The man and his wife walked round to the front, and their puzzlement increased.
‘He said it was for a poster,’ repeated the man.
‘Well,’ I said as matter of factly as I could, ‘I expect it is for a poster, as he said. But at the moment, you see, it is a mirror. And it’s pointing straight out over the racecourse; and you know how mirrors reflect the sunlight? We just thought it might not be too safe, you know, if anyone got dazzled, so we wondered if you would mind us moving it?’
‘Why, goodness,’ agreed the woman, looking with more awareness at our riding clothes, ‘no one could see the racing with light shining in their eyes.’
‘Quite. So would you mind if we turned the mirror round a bit?’
‘I can’t see that it would hurt, Dad,’ she said doubtfully.
He made a nondescript assenting movement with his hand, and Chico asked how the mirror had been put up in the tree in the first place. The man had brought a ladder with him, they said, and no, they hadn’t one themselves. Chico shrugged, placed me beside the tree, put one foot on my thigh, one on my shoulder, and was up in the bare branches like a squirrel. The elderly couple’s mouths sagged open.
‘How long ago?’ I asked. ‘When did the man put up the mirror?’
‘This morning,’ said the woman, getting over the shock. ‘He came back just now, too, with another rope or something. That’s when he said he’d be back with the poster.’
So the mirror had been hauled up into the tree while Chico and I had been obliviously sitting in the bushes, and adjusted later when the sun was at the right angle in the sky. At two o’clock. The time, the next day, of the third race, the handicap steeplechase. Some handicap, I thought, a smash of light in the eyes.
White flag: a little bit to the left. Orange flag: a little bit to the right. No flag: dead on target.
Come back tomorrow afternoon and clap a religious poster over the glass as soon as the damage was done, so that even the quickest search wouldn’t reveal a mirror. Just another jinx on Seabury racecourse. Dead horses, crushed and trampled jockeys. A jinx. Send my horses somewhere else, Mr Witney, something always goes wrong
