Twice Shy

In view of what has happened, I'm asking you to release me from the transfer that we had agreed. I haven't the heart, old friend, to build any more kingdoms. With Angelo jailed for life, there's no point in me buying all your betting shops. You knew, of course, that they were for him – for him to manage, anyway.

I know you had some other offers, so I hope you won't be coming after me for compensation.

Your old friend, Harry

Excerpt from a private letter from the Governor of Albany Prison, Parkhurst, Isle of Wight to his friend the Governor of Wakefield Prison, Yorkshire.

Well, Frank, we're letting Angelo Gilbert out on parole this week, and I wish between you and me that I felt better about it. I'd like to have advised against it, but he's served fourteen years and there's been a lot of pressure from the Reformers group on the Home Sec. to release him. It's not that Gilbert's actively violent or even hostile, but he's been trying hard to get this parole so for the last two years there's been no breath of trouble.

But as you know with some of them they're never stable however meek they look, and I've a feeling Gilbert's like that. You remember, when you had him about five years ago, you felt just the same. It isn't on the cards, I suppose, to keep him locked up for life, but I just hope to God he doesn't go straight out and shoot the first person who crosses him.

See you soon Frank, Donald

Part Two – WILLIAM

CHAPTER 12

I put my hand on Cassie's breast, and she said 'No, William. No.'

'Why not?' I said.

'Because it's never good for me, twice, so soon. You know that.'

'Come on,' I said.

'No.'

'You're lazy,' I said.

'And you're greedy.' She picked my hand off and gave it back to me.

I replaced it. 'At least, let me hold you,' I said.

'No.' She threw my hand off again. 'With you, one thing leads to another. I'm going to get some orange juice and run the bath, and if you're not careful, you'll be late.'

I rolled onto my back and watched her walk about the bedroom, a tall thin girl with too few curves and very long feet. Seen like that in all her angular nakedness, she still had the self-possessed quality which had first attracted me: a natural apartness, a lack of cling. Her self-doubts, if any, were well hidden, even from me. She went downstairs and came back carrying two glasses of orange.

'William,' she said, 'stop staring.'

'I like to.'

She walked to the bathroom to turn on the taps and came back brushing her teeth.

'It's seven o'clock,' she said.

'So I've noticed.'

'You'll lose that cushy job of yours if you're not out on the gallops in ten minutes.'

'Twenty will do.'

I rose up, however, and pinched the bath first, drinking the orange juice as I went. Count your blessings, I said to myself, soaping. Count Cassandra Morris, a better girl than I'd ever had before; seven months bedded, growing more essential every day. Count the sort of job that no one could expect to be given at twenty-nine. Count enough money, for once, to buy a car that wasn't everyone's cast-off held together by rust and luck.

The old ache to be a jockey was pretty well dead, but I supposed there would always be regret. It wasn't as if I'd never ridden in races; I had, from sixteen to twenty, first as an amateur, then a professional, during which time I'd won eighty-four steeplechases, twenty-three hurdle races, and wretchedly cursed my unstoppably lengthening body. At six foot one I'd broken my leg in a racing fall, been imprisoned in traction for three months, and grown two more inches in bed.

It had been practically the end. There had been very tall jump jockeys in the past, but I'd progressively found that even if I starved to the point of weakness I couldn't keep my weight reliably below eleven stone. Trainers began saying I was too tall, too heavy, sorry lad, and employing someone else. So at twenty I'd got myself a job as an assistant trainer, and at twenty-three I'd worked for a bloodstock agent, and at twenty-six on a stud farm, which kept me off the racecourse too much. At twenty-seven I'd been employed in a sort of hospital for sick racehorses which went out of business because too many owners preferred to shoot their liabilities, and after that there had been a spell of selling horse cubes, and then a few months in the office of a bloodstock auctioneer, which had paid well but bored me to death; and each time between jobs I'd spent the proceeds of the last one in wandering round the world, drifting homewards when the cash ran out and casting around for a new berth.

It had been at one of the points of no prospects that Jonathan had sent the cable.

'Catch the next flight. Good job in English racing possible if you interview here immediately. Jonathan.'