“You must be joking,” said Fen. “I’ve been as cheerful as a corpse the last few months.”
“And I need you to look after Jake; keep him calm. D’you think he’s missing Tory?” Malise raised an eyebrow. Fen had the feeling he was fishing.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m sure he is.”
The same afternoon Rupert went racing with Ludwig and Guy. Jake broke his vow and, submitting to Helen’s pleading, drove her into the mountains. Looking for wildflowers, he was reminded of the picnic he had had with Tory and the children the day before the World Championship. Then he had found the lucky clump of tansy. Now Helen’s gold tansy in the breast pocket of his shirt was warding off evil.
Helen found Jake boringly worried about Fen.
“She’s very young. She’ll have other opportunities.”
“You don’t think that when you’re young,” said Jake, “and she’s had such a sod of a two years. Losing Billy, then being sent to Coventry, then losing Dino, and his not turning up at the Games, and now this. She’s very brave; makes very little fuss.”
I need you far more than she does, Helen wanted to shout. She was fed up with the entire Lovell family. She was jealous of Fen, and she was fed up with Suzy going on about how attractive Jake was, and assuming that he must be madly in love with Tory not to submit to Suzy’s charms.
Not having been alone with Jake for days, she wanted to pour out her troubles. Now she was faced with his total detachment. He seemed to have cocooned himself against the outside world. He wasn’t interested in the news, or plays or the concerts she had been to at the Hollywood Bowl, or even how appallingly Rupert was behaving. She failed to appreciate that the sensitivity with which he had listened to her and taken her to bed during the summer had a flip side of terrible nerves and vulnerability to outside pressures before a big class.
Finally, when tired of walking, they collapsed onto the grass, he lay with his head on her belly, not speaking, just gazing up at the snowy peaks against the stormy dark sky, luxuriating in the cool air until he fell asleep. Unable to bear wasting precious time when they could be making love, Helen woke him up.
“Jake, d’you really love me?”
“Of course I do.”
“You’re not showing it much at the moment.”
Jake sat up on his elbow, his eyes deeply shadowed in his tanned face.
“Can’t you understand that the emotional cauldron of the Olympics either makes or breaks you? I can’t afford distractions.” He took her hand and placed it on his breast pocket so she could feel the gold tansy. “But I keep you next to my heart the whole time.”
“I hoped I’d inspire you,” she wailed.
“You do,” said Jake, then, remembering Dublin, “but you also distract me. I don’t want to spend tomorrow, when I should be concentrating on winning, worrying that I’m going to slip up or betray myself in front of Rupert.”
“Don’t you even want me there?”
“Of course I do. Just don’t expect me to wave and smile during the day. People say I’m rude and ill-tempered. I just want to go inside myself before a class. If I have to worry whether you’re happy, it’ll be one more pressure.”
Seeing her uncomprehending face, he said, “There’s so much at stake — our whole future.”
“I get so lonely at big classes,” said Helen petulantly. “I’m almost glad Mother’s coming tomorrow.”
She pulled Jake towards her. “Please kiss me. I want you so badly.” But kissing was all he would do, which left her feeling profoundly uneasy. When Rupert had been mad about her in the early days, he’d always made love to her before and after and, frequently in the caravan, in the middle of classes.
On his way back from the races that evening, Rupert dropped into the Olympic village to collect his post and found a letter postmarked Perthshire. Ever-cautious Amanda had not used headed writing paper, but she apologized for being “utterly bloody” about the looking glass and admitted that she was missing him very much, that they’d all be staying up to watch him tomorrow, and to wish him good luck. She’d be back in London in September.
Equally cautious, Rupert tore her letter up and was about to throw it in the litter bin when he pieced it together again to see if it were really true. He felt absurdly pleased, and wondered why the hell he’d been playing around with Miss Romania. He had better go back to Arcadia and get some sleep. They were walking the course at seven-thirty.
Malise Gordon was not a religious man, but he prayed before the individual that night. He must try and be a good loser and not make any of the three riders feel too awful if they made a cock-up, and try and keep them calm without transmitting any of his fears and worries. Ivor had a good horse and didn’t usually suffer from nerves, but he lacked fire in his belly. Jake was desperately short of sleep and likely to crack. Rupert was far too confident and Rocky much too fresh. On the right day they were invincible, but Malise felt apprehensive. He felt ridiculously touched that Fen had sent him a good-luck card with a black cat on it. “To the best chef d’equipe in the world,” she had written inside. “We’ll live to fight another day, love, Fen.”
58
Jake slept fitfully, wracked by half-dreams. It was the opening ceremony and the singer turned into Helen, sobbing into a microphone that Jake didn’t love her. Then he was in the ring with girths breaking and bridles coming off. Finally he dreamed that Hardy had a heart attack in the ring. Lying there in the blazing sun gathering flies, he suddenly turned into Sailor. Jake woke up screaming, crying his eyes out. The next minute one of the weight lifters was sitting on his bed, patting his shoulder with a huge hand, the other was lighting him a cigarette. Having notched up a silver and a bronze the day before, they could afford to be magnanimous. As it was half-past three, they said, there was no point in Jake going back to sleep for an hour, so they might as well have a cup of tea and all chat to take his mind off things. Jake would rather have been left alone, but he was touched by their concern.
The weight lifters were dozing off as, with a feeling of unreality, Jake put on the new socks, the white breeches, the shirt, and tied his tie with trembling fingers. He was all in white like a bride, until he pulled on the gleaming brown-topped boots, and shrugged his way into the new red coat, with the black velvet collar and the Union Jack on the pocket. The day had actually come, as it came to boys going back to prep school, or to men in the condemned cell.
“Good luck,” mumbled the weight lifters sleepily. “We’ll watch you on the box. Sock it to ’em.”
“Good luck,” said the wrestlers, when Jake collected Ivor. “For Christ’s sake, look after him.”
“Good luck,” said the dour security guard at the end of the passage, smiling for the first time since they arrived. “Have a good day.”
It was a good thing they started early for as the sun rose, pale saffron gilding the Santa Monica mountains, cars were already jamming the freeways, and a continuous stream of enthusiasts from every nation — but mostly America — clutching a selection of hats, thermos flasks, coolers, beer cans, sandwiches, transistors, and even portable televisions to sustain them during the long day, poured into the showground. Ticket scalpers were everywhere, and to get to the stables, the team had to fight their way through autograph hunters and people peddling Coca-Cola, chewing gum, hamburgers, hot dogs, and souvenirs.
“If someone else offers me a poster of Dino I shall scream,” said Fen.
By seven o’clock the stands were packed under a hazy, dove-gray sky, which indicated colossal heat to come. Many of the crowd didn’t know one end of a horse from another, but, bitten by Olympic fever, they wanted to see America notch up yet another gold.
At seven-thirty, the riders and their chefs d’equipes walked the course, surging out over the rich brown tan. No one else, not even the press, was allowed into the arena. Royalty, however, brooked no such restrictions.
“Morning, Dudley,” Prince Philip called to Dudley Diplock, who was hovering at the entrance. “Walked the course yet?”
“No, sir.”
“Well come on, come on,” said the Prince, striding straight through the cordon of security guards, Dudley
