Five Horse Accumulator

Sadly, I have failed to find an editor who wants to work with me, so my recent stories have not had the benefit of a disinterested pre-reader. Any offers would be gratefully considered.

*

Ever since 1961, when off-course betting was legalised and the first betting shops opened, I have been a habitual, though modest punter. Winter and summer, rain and shine, whenever there has been horseracing, I have placed half a crown a day on a daily five-horse accumulator. The outlay of twelve and sixpence or fifteen shillings a week has been my reward for giving up smoking. In this way I can claim with a modicum of truth, that my bets cost the household nothing.

This has been going on for almost six years now, and I have become pretty good at it. Shared with three friends at work, I take Raceform and Timeform and Sporting Life, and study the characteristics of racecourses; the weather; whether or not jockeys are in form and horses are in health, and all the variables I can take into account. I keep a careful note of up-and-coming apprentices and try spot talents like Fred Winter and Lester Piggott as soon as they emerge.

My scheme depends on winning my five-horse accumulator two days in succession and using the whole of the first day's winning as the second day's stake. Of course it hasn't come off yet, but three or four times I have got four winners on the second day and three winners come along several times a year, so it is only a matter of time before the elusive second five comes along.

Never mind, I said to myself, I can wait. So I waited and this afternoon, at Towcester; the only racecourse apart from Leicester where I have ever watched an afternoon's racing, my day has come. Yesterday my accumulator yielded 128 pounds, eight and fourpence. Today at 12.30 I walked down to Joe Coral's betting shop and placed it all on today's selection, and by half past four I knew I had finally won. With all odds at starting prices I had netted 10,273 pounds, seven and twopence, plus my original half crown stake money. Janet and I can afford a divorce. Finally I can give the woman I love her freedom.

***

Janet and I met right at the beginning of our time as students at Sheffield University. I took organic chemistry, and Janet was one of the earliest students at Sheffield's unique School of Japanese studies. We both came from Leicester, and, for the first year or more we travelled home more weekends than not for some home cooking and time to relax in a place where you did not have to make any effort to fit in.

She lived in Great Wigston, and I lived in Fleckney, about five miles away, but we had never met until we got to Sheffield. My mum had given me her old Morris Minor when she upgraded to a Mini. The green car had been her pride and joy, and now it was mine. Not many students had their own cars and a car-owner could share the cost of each journey with two or three other people, just by placing a card in the students' Union notice board, asking people who are seeking lifts to and his home town area to put a note in his pigeonhole.

Janet became one of my regular passengers and we became friendly acquaintances, on nodding and greeting terms. She was a very pretty girl, with long black hair hanging straight down her back in a smooth, straight mass ending in a smooth curve below her shoulder blades. Her face was pale in contrast to the black of her hair, with arched eyebrows over brown eyes with a hint of green. She never seemed to wear makeup, and her full red lips never needed the aid of artifice. She was very slim, with long, elegant legs and a good figure, but what struck me immediately was that she was always beautifully, rather formally dressed in blouses and tailored slacks. This was in contrast to the duffle coats and levis of so many of the beatniks-manqué of the time.

As you can perhaps gather, I should have liked to get to know her better, but I was deflected by her shyness and her air of vulnerable remoteness. I am not a shy person. I like people and want to get to know them; I am gregarious and chatty with a fund of silly stories. But I could make no headway with Janet.

Then it all changed.

My dad is an electrical engineer, and as a child, he had taken me to work with him on building sites across the Midlands. I tried to help him, and after a while I guess I became more of a help than a hindrance and he let me carry out simple tasks under his guidance, and the simple tasks got more complex as time goes on. Physics was my best subject at school, although I preferred chemistry. In my senior years at Grammar school, the physics teacher gave up his precious free time to supervise me as I rewired and extended the stage lighting board, and handled the stage lighting and sound effects over four years of school plays.

A couple of days after I arrived to enrol at the University, I attended an event called the Freshers' bazaar, at which clubs, teams and societies solicited support from the new first year students. I offered myself to SUDS, the Sheffield University Dramatic Society as a stage electrician.

They accepted my offer with alacrity, and I took over the job. Our first production was to be the winter pantomime Aladdin and the wonderful lamp, an uproarious comedy written and directed by the only authentic genius I have ever met. Even as a student, Mischa Abramovitch was clearly destined for the Hollywood career he embarked upon eight or ten years later.

As soon as rehearsals began and the cast started roughing out scenes and trying out dialogue and songs, we realised that we lacked a costume mistress. The acid-tongued harridan who took the job the previous year had left, unlamented, and nobody appeared to take her place. I volunteered, on behalf of the backstage crew, to put a card in the Students' Union and interview anyone who replied.

The first applicant was Janet and I needed look no further. Just as I had learned electrical work from my father, so Janet had learned dressmaking from her mother, who had been an apprentice at Hardy Amies before she left to raise a family.

Janet simply told me that she had made the slim, grey slacks and the beautifully tailored paisley pattern silk blouse she was wearing. I needed no further convincing, but she insisted upon giving me a demonstration. We went to her room in hall and I sat on the bed in my singlet whilst she got out her sewing machine, rapidly took my shirt to pieces, took a piece out of the tail, re-faced the collar and turned the cuffs; presenting me, half an hour later, with what was, essentially, a new shirt.

Within a week, Janet had drawn beautiful colour sketches of costumes for all the main pantomime characters, and started to source fabrics and trimmings. Whilst I worked on the lighting board and checked bulbs, fuses and filters, and Mickey the stage carpenter organised his crew to build flats, Janet organised her crew to make costumes. Backstage was organised chaos, but organised; and a lovely atmosphere in which to work.

The show was a triumph. Janet's costumes were sensational, and at the curtain-call, Mischa and the leading members of the cast insisted that she take a bow. She refused unless I came onstage and held her hand. So there she was, bowing to an audience still coming down from the spectacular closing number, hand in hand with a bewildered lighting engineer not half a dozen people in the auditorium, recognised. It was her night, and was proud of having made a small contribution to it.

Yes, by that time Janet and I were going out together. The backstage crew had become firm friends and, after an evening of work at the theatre, we would go out for a coffee together. Soon Janet and I were sitting together and I was walking her back to her Hall of Residence. By imperceptible stages we were walking hand in hand, then with my arm around her waist, then kissing goodnight, then stopping in the pools of darkness between the streetlights for kisses and cuddles.

I was far from being a virgin, and, thanks to my rather extroverted personality, I scored more than my share of one night stands both at Grammar School and in my first term at Sheffield. With Janet, though, I was dealing with a girl as naive as she was sweet, and I was taking no chances.

Three years later we were married. We continued as sweethearts through the three years of University, and Janet, true to the vow she made herself at her Confirmation, was a virgin on her wedding night. Since I am trying to be totally frank I have to admit that I continued to have short-time sexual partners, but I was very discreet and ruthless in protecting Janet's peace of mind. Now I was deeply committed to being the best, most faithful husband I could be.

I got the place i had set my heart on as a graduate trainee at Fisons, the pharmaceutical and agrochemicals business based in Ipswich, which had its research labs in Loughborough; twelve miles from Leicester. My ambition was to be a research biochemist, working on cutting edge pharmaceuticals.

Janet's future was far less certain. She went to a series of discussions with the Careers Advice people, but they were a bit one-track minded. She had a good degree in Japanese, and good German and French. She should "use her degree" in the sterile jargon of the time. This overlooked one salient fact.

Janet had to spend two terms in the University of Tokyo as a part of her degree. Initially charmed, she had come to loathe Japanese culture, which seemed to her to comprise bullying and harassing subordinates and cringing before superiors, a form of ruthless hierarchy that hens in a barnyard would consider overdone. Above all, although she was no sort of women's libber, she felt could not work in an environment which afforded women such abysmally low status.

In desperation the careers counsellors turned to her skill with textiles and her design sense. A personnel manager from Sandersons, the textiles and wall-coverings people came up, spent an afternoon with her, looking at the delicate water-colours in her portfolio and the exquisite garments she had made, and offered her a traineeship in their headquarters in Berners Street, Soho. So, while I was receiving training and evaluation in Ipswich, she was to receive it in London.

Could our brand new marriage stand a year or more of separation, broken only by weekends together? We decided that it could, and she decided to accept the offer. Then came the Deus ex machina.

Mischa Abramovitch, our Best Man when we married in July, had been snapped up by the Royal Shakespeare Company upon graduation, and steadily built up his reputation. He became Byam Shaw's protégé; had a success d'estime when he directed a modern dress Coriolanus with powerful totalitarian overtones. He put the men into Nazi SS uniforms and he made brilliant use of a soundtrack eerily reminiscent of Leni Reifenstahl's Triumph of the will. Soon afterwards he scored a major hit when he directed Peggy Ashcroft in sell-out back to back productions of Miss Julie and Hedda Gabler. His name was made.

Now he was ringing Janet with an offer. He had his first independent production - an Ice Spectacular, Cinderella on Ice, in Birmingham for the pantomime season. He had stipulated in his contract that he had total control of hirings outside of starring parts, and he must have her as Costume designer and Wardrobe Mistress. It was an offer she could not, and should not refuse.

*****

So we embarked on our married life with me in motion from Ipswich to Loughborough, Loughborough to Holmes Chapel or another of the outlying parts of the Fisons empire and Janet moving from job to job with Mischa. In many ways it was better than the life we had planned.

I enjoyed the reflected glamour of backstage parties, first nights and pre-performance hysteria. (Not Janet's I might add, she was as cool under fire as any old soldier). When she came back to Leicester for a month or so between productions, she was full of funny stories and theatrical gossip, and warmed by the acquisition of some good, loyal friends. At first she let the tantrums, the backbiting and the sickly envy go over her head, and it was only slowly that it got to her and made her uneasy.

I was busy building my own little empire. My job was to visit Health Centres, clinics and hospitals and brief doctors about our new products. The job might have been made for me. I have a very retentive memory and good enough scientific background to deal with almost all the questions thrown at me. When I wasn't sure, I gained brownie points by admitting my ignorance, coming back with a detailed answer as soon as possible, and never, never bullshitting. I made sure to read the contraindications and side effects of all our drugs in fine detail, and take pains to get the knowledge through to where it was needed. In this way I built a solid reputation.

About a year after we got married, we bought a nice pre-war semi-detached house in Birstall and set about nest-building. Janet threw herself into interior decoration and I was her willing apprentice. Three weeks later, when she had to go down to Brighton for six weeks to dress the Summer variety show at the theatre Royal, she was clearly having a problem dragging herself away.

She had always phoned me three or four times a week when she was away, but now it became every evening, and the bright theatrical chatter was subdued and perfunctory. She was more likely to be checking up on my work excavating the hole for the fishpond in the back garden, than talking about her costumes for the shipwrecked sailor sketch. Her work was becoming a burden for her. For some time, as a sideline she had been taking commissions to make evening frocks or dance dresses for people in the shows she dressed. It started as favours to a few close friends, but as she mentally withdrew from theatrical costume design, she took more and more such jobs; spending her free time at her cutting table and her sewing machines. I think I became aware before she did that it was only a matter of time before she left the itinerant life and came home.

The break came suddenly.

"Janet. I've got some really good news. Yesterday I got called into the head office, so I drove down to Ipswich this morning. They have offered men the job of regional sales Manager for the Midlands, Lancashire and Yorkshire. It's a big promotion and it pays a bit more than I'm getting now, with performance bonuses on top. But best of all, I could work from Loughborough and be at home at least three weeks in four, Darling it's a godsend. It means you can pick and choose your jobs and be at home as much as you like."

"Alan, that's brilliant. I couldn't be more pleased. If I can pick and choose, then this job's my last. I didn't know why, but I've been putting off signing the Drury Lane contract because I hated the thought of spending another Christmas in London. Would you mind if I turned it down? It's very good money, but I'm just about sick of show business."

"Turn it down by all means. Now is the time to start your own dressmaker's business. We can turn the boxroom into a store-room and the back bedroom into a workroom and you can work from home. Put adverts in Players and Players, Spotlight and, Oh I don't know, or Vogue, and you'll be snowed under with work in six months."

That began the happiest years of our lives. Janet's reputation as a dress designer grew, thanks to the word-of-mouth between theatrical friends. Soon she was dealing with people who thought nothing of driving down from Edinburgh or up from Bristol for a fitting, spending the day (often the night too, and sharing the gossip. An excellent little bed-and-breakfast nearby always kept a room available for her visitors and did very well out of it. Janet could not bring herself to charge her friends a market price, but we were doing well enough for it not to matter.

Around this time I started to make my daily bets on the horses, really to give me a few lighthearted moments in what was so often a long, gruelling day. I could have made a regular trickle of money from betting as my workmates did, but I was going for the really rare event; the life-changing score that could buy us the house in the country with a paddock, a vegetable plot and an acre of orchard. Then, three years ago, came the disaster that has so undermined our lives. Driving home in the dark in torrential rain I got a flat tyre, and rather than wait for the AA, I decided to change the wheel myself. I misaligned the carjack, and whilst I was raising the rear end it slipped and came down on me. My legs escaped, fortunately as I though at the time, but I came out of it with a golf ball sized lump at the side of my groin, under the pubic hair. An inguinal hernia.

No great problem, you are thinking. Well, that's what I thought too. I saw my GP and arranged a hospital appointment. An operation was scheduled for a month later and I came out of the anaesthetic with a howling pain in my abdominal floor. It will go away, I thought, but when Janet came to collect me eight hours later it had not shifted a whit.

"A fairly uncommon side-effect of this operation," I was blandly assured. "It will go away after a week or two, Meanwhile here are some powerful codeine tablets. Take one every four hours, and gradually reduce the dose as the pain subsides."

Well, the pain never did subside. I have just learned to live with it. What I can't live with is what they blandly call the erectile dysfunction that came along for the ride. I was impotent; terrified to attempt sex, and I had a profound feeling that my life, our married life, was over.

Janet was brave and loving. She used every means of verbal and physical persuasion that she possessed to reassure me. But I could not accept oral or manual relief from her when I knew that I could not reciprocate in the way she needed. Janet has a simplistic view of love-making. Mutual oral sex is for foreplay, but the only way she can (or will) get an orgasm is when I come inside her. She has always sucked me to repletion a couple of times a month whilst she is menstruating, but otherwise cocksucking is for foreplay only.

I had never considered the matter, but I suppose I assumed that if a man is impotent, that is all there is to it. But now I know from long experience that the inability to get an erection is relative, and it does not preclude masturbating to orgasm. I understand that Janet would willingly give me oral or manual sex now that I cannot sustain an erection, but I could not go on taking from her and give nothing back. So I content myself with surreptitiously wanking into a handkerchief after her breathing tells me that she has gone to sleep.

*****

This spring I discovered quite by accident that Janet is having an affair with Richard, or former next-door neighbour. I felt at the same time sad for myself and both relieved and happy for her. I said nothing and she did the same. I was grateful for her silence, as I simply could not find the words to talk about it.

The previous autumn, feeling that she needed an intellectual challenge, Janet had started a London university MA distance learning course on Comparative Social Systems. In the breaks from dressmaking, out would come the course books and she would work on the current assignment. Sometimes she would come up with some gem of bureaucratic ineptitude and she would read it to me, infectious laughter bubbling up in her. Our eyes would meet, I would start to laugh, and for a moment we would forget our burdens.

As the course progressed she started to attend evening seminars in Leicester, and weekend events in London or Birmingham. Then she started to go to study group meetings at the leisure centre. It was when she was supposed to be at one of these meetings that I was sitting in my car at the traffic lights and saw her go to Richard's house on the Leicester road, reach through the letterbox, take out the key on its string and open the door. At that point I knew.