by K. M. Peyton
Ruth, having gained new confidence with Fly-by-Night, now found that her season of content was doomed.
‘It can’t happen!’ she said desperately to Ron. ‘I can’t give him up now, when everything is beginning to come right!’ She did not dare let her parents see how much it mattered, because she knew that they had enough to bother about as it was. There was only Ron, the universal comforter, whose presence invariably cheered Ted, and whom everyone was pleased to see.
‘Well, it hasn’t happened yet,’ Ron said steadily. ‘And if you do move to somewhere without a field, perhaps Peter could help you out? Your parents did a lot for him, after all. Mr. McNair might keep Fly-by-Night for you.’
‘But without paying? I couldn’t afford to pay.’
‘What your mother did for Peter is worth years of a pony’s keep.’
‘But, if it’s a flat, that means a town, and we’ll be miles away from Hillingdon — how shall I be able to go over and ride him often enough?’ Even to Ron, Ruth could not explain that she would have to see Fly-by-Night often, almost every day, or life would have no point at all. In fact, she could not imagine herself without the pony. Life without Fly-by-Night was like a thick fog in her imagination. It was a nothing. Even sensible Ron would not understand how utterly committed she was.
His idea was a straw, and Ruth clutched at it. One night her parents drafted out an advertisement to put in the paper, to sell the house, and the next day Ruth waylaid Peter at school, after lunch, and told him what was happening.
‘I’m sure we could keep Fly-by-Night for you,’ Peter said gravely. ‘I know my father wouldn’t mind.’ He pondered, and looked at Ruth’s tight, miserable face. ‘It’ll be difficult for you, getting over to ride him.’
Ruth nodded. ‘About three hours’ bike-riding, to a couple of hours’ pony-riding.’ It was better than selling him, but the prospect was heart-chilling.
Peter grimaced. ‘Rather you than me.’ He paused, then said, ‘Look, why don’t you come over on Saturday and see my father about it? Come over on Fly, then you can try him round our course.’
Ruth’s heart leapt at the invitation. Simultaneously she thought of all the snags. ‘It’s a lot of road, to get to you. He’s not shod.’
‘Haven’t you had him shod yet? Why ever not?’
‘I can’t afford it,’ Ruth muttered.
‘Oh, but you must,’ Peter said. ‘Then you can come up whenever you like, and use our jumps. I bet you won’t move for ages yet, if your parents are only just writing out the advertisement.’
Ruth was silent.
Peter said, ‘If you ride him up on Saturday, you can leave him at our place, because the smith’s coming next Monday. Then he can be shod with ours, and you can take him back again afterwards. You won’t have to pay anything. How about that?’
Ruth was silent again. The prospect was so inviting that her puritan streak made her feel she must refuse. Then she thought of Ron’s sense, and grinned, and said, ‘Yes, that would be marvellous.’
The house advertisement was in the paper on the Friday and on Saturday morning, as Ruth left home on Fly-by-Night, a man and a woman had already arrived to view. Ruth rode away down the concrete road, trying to keep her mind on the marvellous day that lay before her, but her stupid wits kept wandering, and all she could think of were the grassy tracks down to the creek where the skylarks sang, and the red-gold stubble where Fly-by-Night had cantered through August and September. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ she told herself. ‘What’s the good of thinking of that?’
Now, early November, the fields were all ploughed again, and the elms baring, like ink drawings against the sky. The tarmac gleamed with rain. Fly-by-Night’s coat was thickening, the frosty roan working over the movement of his shoulders as his unshod hoofs padded along the verge. ‘When you come back,’ Ruth told him, ‘you will clatter. You’ll frighten the wits out of yourself.’
But today he was good, and they reached the McNair drive without incident. Ruth felt Fly stiffen with excitement as he smelt the other horses. Peter was in the yard waiting for her.
‘We’ll put him in a box for now, and you can come indoors and meet my big fat momma. Then this afternoon we can ride.’
‘What, you too?’
‘Why not?’
Ruth realized that the chocolate-eclair sessions must have had good effect after all. ‘Fly-by-Night’s never been in a loose-box before — at least, not that I know of,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose he’ll like it.’
‘Time he learnt,’ Peter said. ‘Do you want to look at the horses?’
Ruth felt herself shiver with pure pleasure. A place like McNair’s, with Peter now her personal friend, was her idea of paradise. The boxes were all immaculate, full of clean straw and shining animals. Fly-by-Night, appeased with a large net of hay, stood looking about him with amazed, excited eyes — no less amazed and excited than Ruth’s. She followed Peter down the yard, looking in at each half-door, and Peter told her about each inmate. ‘Jason. He’s nice, but been spoilt.’ Jason was a fourteen-and-a-half-hand chestnut with a lovely head and a bold eye. ‘And this is Prairie Fire. He’s won two point-to-points. My eldest brother is riding him in a National Hunt race next week.’ Prairie Fire was dark bay, a raking, powerful gelding with scars on his legs. ‘You can’t stop him once he’s going. But can he go! This grey is Seashell. She’s as mild as milk, lady’s hunter. And this is Rustum. Half-Arab, nice, very green . . . ugh, Woodlark. You pretty little devil! This is beastly Woodlark.’
‘Why is she so beastly?’
‘You can have a ride on her, if you like. You’ll find out. She’s got a nasty female mind.’
‘Better than a nasty male mind.’
‘Oh, no, give me a gelding any day.’
Ruth followed Peter round to the house, in a warm, horsy dream. The house was warm, filled with delicious cooking smells. In the kitchen, Mr. McNair was sitting in front of a blazing fire, reading Horse and Hound and drinking coffee, and at the cooker stood the Neapolitan opera-singer. Ruth thought she was like a great sun. Well-being emanated from her like the warmth from the fire. She beamed at Ruth, and immediately produced steaming mugs of cocoa, and Ruth was fascinated by the vastness of her; yet she was so neat and quick and strong with it, and so happy. She sang while she cooked, and spoke in torrents of beautiful Italian, which nobody understood, but Mr. McNair and Peter nodded and smiled and said, ‘Si, si,’ and after a little while Ruth found herself doing the same. Ruth could see the change that had been wrought in Peter’s father, for he had an air of contentment about him like a domestic cat on the hearth-rug. Ruth would not have recognized the same man who had nagged Peter on the day of the Hunter Trials. After a delicious lunch, Ruth left the house almost regretfully to go riding with Peter. She had offered to wash up, but had been refused with a cascade of shocked surprise and an embrace.
‘Nice, isn’t she?’ Peter said, as they went back to the stables. ‘You can’t imagine the change she’s made in everything.’
Ruth looked at Peter, remembered the night he had arrived in her own home, pale and silent, and thought how strangely things worked out: now it was her turn to be hurt by what was happening, and Peter’s turn to be made happy. They seemed to have no control over anything at all.
Peter decided to ride his beastly Woodlark, because he said she needed it, so they saddled the two ponies and rode side by side across McNair’s fields to the woods beyond. There were no woods where Ruth lived, and as the ponies left the open fields and turned on to a peaty track that led away into an unfamiliar, cathedral-like gloom, Ruth was aware of a new dimension in her riding. Fly-by-Night’s hooves rustled in brittle leaves; trailers of wild clematis tangled in her hair. It was silent and secret. When a pair of wood-pigeons clattered suddenly, heavily, out of the branches above their heads, she was as startled as Fly-by-Night, and shied with him in spirit. Peter turned and laughed, and Ruth saw Woodlark break into a trot and start twisting through the trees, Peter bending lo
w to miss the branches, yet quite easy and still in the saddle. Fly-by-Night, anxious not to be left behind, followed eagerly, and Ruth felt herself whipped and whacked by the trees. She bent down like Peter, but bounced and slithered and bit her tongue. She had no control over Fly-by-Night at all.
‘A bit different from the sea-wall!’ Peter said, pulling up to wait.
Fly-by-Night barged into Woodlark’s quarters, but Peter turned the mare instantly, before she had time to think about kicking. ‘We’ve made a Hunter Trials sort of course through the rides here. All the jumps are very low. I bet Fly-by-Night will do it, if Woodlark gives him a lead. Do you want to try it?’
Ruth, getting her breath back, nodded. She was frightened, and longing to do it at the same time. She felt as if the trees were pressing down on her. It was like being indoors. There was a cracking of dry twigs and Woodlark was away, cantering over the thick, soft humus. Ruth felt Fly-by-Night go, without her telling him, and she sat there, head down, her throat dry with fright, but all her instincts up over the jumps ahead of herself. This, she recognized, was the very stuff of her dreams: Peter giving Fly-by-Night a lead and herself learning what it would be like at Brierley.
The jumps came at her at all angles; she just got a warning in time by the flick of Woodlark’s black tail ahead of her. Fly-by-Night crashed through regardless, carrying away loads of brush on his thrashing hoofs. Ruth had a vision of Woodlark disappearing suddenly, as if over a precipice, then herself teetering on the edge of a peaty bank, looking down on Peter. She saw Woodlark stretched out, bounding away from her, then she was flying through the air as Fly-by-Night plunged in pursuit. Amazingly, at the bottom, she landed back in the saddle, although she was convinced that she had come down the bank quite independently of her pony. There was a jolt; she clutched a handful of mane, and stayed with him as he went over a log and away down a stinging ride, hoof-fuls of peat from Woodlark’s hooves flinging up in his face. For a moment she had time to enjoy it, the muffled ground running beneath, the smell of wet bark and pungent leaf, and the sourness of fungus and decay; then Peter had turned right-handed ahead of her and they were flying a bank into a thicket. There was running water below, and the clutching of brambles. Ruth shut her eyes. Fly-by-Night stopped suddenly.
‘Still there?’ she heard Peter say, and they were out on the edge of the open fields again, pulling up on familiar slippery grass. Woodlark’s nostrils were red as she curvetted to a standstill, all feminine elegance, Peter’s hands taking her up, strong but not rough. Fly-by-Night stopped in three bounds, tearing up streamers of turf. Ruth landed up his neck.
‘Oh, heavens!’ Ruth muttered. How did Peter have time to think? she wondered. How would she ever do it, alone?
‘Lots of that is what you want,’ Peter said. ‘It’s very good for getting them handy. If you came up every week-end, he’d soon be going round without any trouble.’
‘Oh, if I could —!’
‘But why not?’
Wracked with fears, longings, and doubts, Ruth left Fly-by-Night in the McNair paddocks and cycled home on Peter’s bike. She had half-expected to see the removal van outside and all their possessions on the pavement, but when she asked her mother, ‘Did they buy it?’ Mrs. Hollis looked at her in amazement, and laughed. ‘Gracious me, you’re in a hurry! We’ve had three lots of people to see, but nobody’s falling over themselves to give us a cheque. These things take time, as a rule.’ Ruth, without Fly-by-Night in the garden, felt bereaved. ‘This is what it will be like if we move,’ she thought. What good would a pony be to her half across the county, a Saturday pony? A pony was for talking to when you went out of the back door, and for looking at out of your bedroom window, and riding even if you only had half an hour before tea. What good would Fly-by-Night be, left in a paddock, even a McNair paddock, if nobody bothered with him except at week-ends? Now, just when her dreams of Peter helping her were coming true, satisfaction was bludgeoned by all the other circumstances. Ruth wept. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ her mother asked.
‘It’s her age,’ Ted said, which was a family joke to explain the unpredictable.
Fly-by-Night was shod and Ruth rode him home. In his field that night he whinnied for his lost companions, and roamed up and down the hedges. ‘He’d have friends if he lived at McNair’s,’ Ruth thought. ‘But he wouldn’t have me.’ She didn’t think he would mind terribly, not having her, but she minded. She wept again. Her mother gave her two aspirins and a hot lemon.
Peter was right about the house not being sold very quickly. Ruth, Ted and Elizabeth got used to putting everything away and keeping the place excruciatingly tidy for the couples who would call inconveniently in the evenings and poke round their bedrooms and in the airing-cupboard and the bathroom. Mr. and Mrs. Hollis went to look at flats, and came home with long faces, saying nothing. Because she was going to leave it, Ruth loved the grassy tracks down to the creek more and more. The stubble was ploughed, snow fell on the saltings and piled up in big drifts against the sea-wall. The winter was as bad as the summer had been good, and there were only a few Saturdays when Ruth was able to ride over to Hillingdon. Even then the wood was bogged down and the ground too wet for jumping. She would hack through the fields with Peter and they would come back into the house for platefuls of steaming risotto round the fire, then Ruth would hurry home along the darkening roads, wincing at the sluicings from passing cars. But Fly-by-Night had enough to eat, because Mr. McNair came down in the estate car and left sacks of pony-nuts and some bales of good hay.
One Wednesday evening a middle-aged couple who had looked at the house earlier called back and left Mr. Hollis a deposit on it. ‘They don’t want to move in any great hurry,’ Ruth heard him say, ‘but I suppose we’d better decide what we’re going to do.’
‘The flat over the butcher’s shop, next door to Woolworth’s was the best of the last batch,’ Mrs. Hollis replied.
Ruth felt sick. Her parents asked her if she would like to go and see it with them, but she shook her head, white and silent. Ted went, and came back and said, ‘It’s all right. There’s a good yard round the back for a motor bike. Near Ron, too.’
It was snowing softly. In the field Fly-by-Night’s back was melting the snow as it fell, but his roan made it look as if it was lying on him. He whinnied impatiently for his nuts, shaking drops of moisture off his muzzle hairs. Ruth stroked his hard neck. Under its roughness, his coat was shining with Mr. McNair’s good feeding, and he was fit, and his hoofs shapely from the blacksmith. Ruth went up the garden and cried again, over the washing-up, and her mother said sharply, ‘Ruth, for heaven’s sake! At least you can keep him — what more do you want?’ But the flat next to Woolworth’s was fifteen miles from Hillingdon.
Three days later, when the thaw set in, Ron called. As he unwound all his layers and wrappings in the kitchen, his nose shining red in his good-natured, unhandsome face, Ruth put the kettle on to make him a cup of tea.
‘There was an ambulance going down the lane at the bottom. Asked me for Mr. Lacey’s. So I went along to show ’em the way. He’s got his daughter over there from London, but she said the cold was too much for him. He’s got pneumonia. He looked bad. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the finish of him.’
‘Oh, poor Mr. Lacey!’ Ruth said. ‘I didn’t know.’ And even as she spoke the words, an unworthy thought came into her head. She looked at Ron and saw that the unworthy thought was in his head, too. Flushing slightly, she turned away to fetch the tea-caddy. They neither of them said anything more about Mr. Lacey.
It snowed again the next week, and Ruth, unable to resist the temptation, went down the lane and walked up Mr. Lacey’s garden path. The pear trees, loaded with snow, seemed to lean against the dilapidated lean-to kitchen. Big puddles lay on the stone flags inside. Ruth could not see her mother there, somehow. With set face she peered in through the living-room windows. The ceilings were cracked and flakes of plaster lay on the carpet like indoor snow. She could see the narro
w staircase curling up, and the brick floor. At the back there was a conservatory with a vine in it. Ruth turned her head away and walked on down the garden. The old fruit trees made arched roofs of snow over her head; every move on her part brought a rushing avalanche. Beyond the trees were the old sheds, a line of them, with sagging roofs, cluttered about with old water-butts and rolls of wire-netting and rotted rabbit hutches. Beyond again, a gate, and two acres of virgin snow, quilted with birds’ feet, stretching towards the marshes. Ruth stood in the snow and squeezed her face up with longing. ‘Oh, God, please! Please could it happen? He needn’t die; he could just go and live with his daughter.’
But when she got home her mother said Mr. Lacey had died that afternoon.
CHAPTER XII
A DAY OF DECISIONS
‘OH, THE MESSINESS of it!’ Ruth said to Ron. ‘The not knowing. The misery of it!’
She sat at the kitchen table, with the Hunter Trials entry form in front of her. There was a month to go, and a smell of spring in the air outside.
‘Woe, woe, woe!’ Ted wailed. ‘Oh, misery me!’ He reached over for a box of crisps that stood on the table and ducked his hand in.
‘Hasn’t she made her mind up yet?’ Ron said.
‘Oh, reely, I don’t know what to do for the best, Mr. ‘Ollis,’ said Ted in a mimicking voice. ‘George says sell the place and Edie says keep it, it’ll be worth a lot of money for building one of these days. And our Ada says we could use it for a summer cottage. And Joe says keep it in the family; our Tom has hankerings after being a farmer, and he’s only a year more to do at school and we could set him up in tomatoes, like, if we had a bit of ground. And our Ethel says —’