But somehow it didn’t seem right to see Hender embracing a boy. I was half-way to Make-up before I realized that his lover had not been a boy at all. It had been Angel.
“Angel,” I said, “when was the last time the Aga was lit?”
She thought about it. “Last winter. No, later than that because it was such a cold spring. May, I think.”
“Could we light it now?”
The cobalt eyes widened. “What on earth for?”
“I just thought… if it was lit, we might have more constant hot water – we could also cook.”
“Cook?” Angel’s eyebrows rose. “We?”
“Well,” I remembered the streptococci casserole. “I could. I’m not fantastic, but I could do better than the Hare and Hounds. If I have to face another slimy chip, I think I shall die.”
Angel looked at me. She looked at the Aga. Cookery was something she had never suggested. I had half expected it; the mixture of hope and speculation on her face, the hesitant way she would begin “I don’t suppose… if I found you a saucepan – in your spare time…?” It had never happened. But now I had suggested it, she warmed to the idea at once.
“There is some fuel in the outhouse…”
“So you wouldn’t mind if I went ahead?”
“It isn’t all that easy to light. You need kindling – paper and sticks for a start. You will have to nurse it. Someone will have to keep it fed.”
“I shall nurse it. I shall keep it fed. There are plenty of old Horse and Hounds lying about. I can collect sticks from the wood.”
“I wouldn’t go into the wood,” Angel said hastily. “It might not be safe. Undesirable types from the village tend to lurk. You know, poachers and people like that.”
I was not intimidated by the thought of a poacher or two, not after the undesirables one encountered in Soho, but I was touched by her unexpected regard for my personal safety. “All right,” I agreed, “I’ll collect sticks from the edge of the wood.”
“You will need something to cook with.”
“There are saucepans and things in the bottom of the dresser. I’ve looked.”
“Not saucepans. Food. Ingredients.”
“We could go to the supermarket in the village. We could call there during our ride.” Now into my second week at Moat Farm I was having a lunge lesson early in the morning, a school lesson at noon, and a hack in the afternoon. “I want to call at the Post Office anyway, to ask about my script.”
“I thought you had given up worrying about the script,” Angel said crossly. “There’s no point in badgering the Post Office. We keep telling you all sorts of things can go wrong with scripts. People have died waiting for scripts to arrive.”
“Well I’m not going to die waiting for mine to arrive,” I snapped. “If it isn’t here by the beginning of next week I’m going to ring my agent and find out what has happened.” As a matter of fact I had already tried to ring Ziggy several times, but the telephone at the Café Marengo seemed to be permanently engaged.
“There’s no point in ringing your agent,” Angel insisted, “he won’t be able to tell you anything. You heard what Anthony said…”
“I don’t care what Anthony said! Nor does he care if the script arrives or not! Anthony attaches no importance to what I do! He disapproves of me! He makes that very clear!”
I looked at Angel in aggravation. She sat on the kitchen table wearing the inevitable jeans and suede chaps, swinging her jodhpur-booted feet, with her extravagant hair caught up in two bunches above her ears like a King Charles spaniel. “It’s only because you want to be an actress,” she said. “You know how he hates actors and actresses.”
“Almost as much as he hates film producers and directors! He seems to hate everyone in the profession! Sometimes I wonder why he stays in the business!” But of course, I knew why he stayed. It was because of the horses. He was their protector. Their champion. He stayed to be the conscience of every actor who ever made use of a horse for the camera, of every stunt rider, every producer, every director. And he had a very long memory. Other people remembered Borodino, Glencoe, Belsen, Hiroshima. Anthony remembered Ben Hur.
“So you don’t fancy him?” Angel said.
I stared.
“Most women do, you know. They find him fascinating.”
“I’m not most women!” I did not want to discuss Anthony’s fascinating effect on the opposite sex. I opened one of the doors on the front of the Aga. Ash trickled on to the kitchen floor. “I’m an actress!” I slammed the door shut.
“It is an obstacle, one has to admit.”
“And I do not fancy Anthony!”
“No, of course not. I can’t think why I mentioned it.” Angel countered my glare with a totally guileless look. She jumped down from the table. “We could ride to the village now, if you like, or would you prefer to light the Aga first?”
“I can light the Aga later,” I said grumpily. “It will take all night to warm up so I won’t be able to cook until tomorrow, but we can do the shopping, and we can call at the Hare and Hounds to cancel the meals after this evening.”
“So we don’t need to go to the Post office?”
“We do need to go to the Post Office!”
“There’s no need to be so prickly,” she said in a reproving tone. “I’m only trying to save you another disappointment.”
Her confident pessimism was infuriating. I said irritably, “You seem so certain my script isn’t going to arrive that I’m beginning to wonder if you know something about ATC that I don’t.”
“Know something about ATC?” Angel paused in the kitchen doorway, the cobalt eyes wide and innocent. “Oh no, Grace. I can assure you I know nothing whatsoever about ATC. Nothing at all.”
I almost believed her.
There was no script waiting for me at the Post Office. I had not really expected that there would be.
In the supermarket I shopped for chops and salad, cheese and fruit – easy things. Bread, milk, eggs and dairy produce were delivered daily to Moat Farm. I staggered to the checkout further encumbered by a five-pound pack of new potatoes and a litre of white wine.
Angel waited outside with the horses. We had brought the lunge pony as a pack animal. His panniers were historic accoutrements dating from the era of Roundheads and Cavaliers. They were not at all commodious. The leather was cracked and the stitching weak. The potatoes and wine were heavy items and I was not confident that the panniers would hold out.
“We shall have to take the short way back through the woods,” Angel decided. She was riding a tall, speckled grey horse with a Roman nose and a high head carriage. I was riding the roan with the long, white stockings who had been loose because he liked to be loose on the day I arrived. Angel leaned down and put some weight on the offside stirrup whilst I mounted. I had not yet mastered the art of swinging lightly and easily into the saddle. My muscles were still protesting too much for me to try.
It was the first time I had been taken into the woods, and yet the horses were clearly accustomed to the path which was well-worn by countless hooves. It was the obvious route to and from the village, avoiding the narrow, twisting lane with its black hedges and steeply rising banks where there was precious little room to escape the unexpectedly rocketing car, or road-hogging tractor belching blue smoke.
Angel led the way, leading the pack pony. The wood was thick, dark and silent. Our horses’ hooves made little sound other than where the mud of the winter had baked to a dry crust. Twigs snapped, old leaves rustled, leather creaked, as we followed the path that Anthony had taken on the first night when I had watched from my window; and yes, I had seen him again and again, crossing the wilderness in the dusk with a bottle under his arm. I had never managed to stay awake long enough to hear him return.
We rode past a cottage, tumbledown, almost a ruin, with slipping thatch and cracked walls green with lichen and covered with ivy and deadly nightshade, looking like a stage set for a sinister scene in a pantomime. Only one w
indow retained any glass. I fancied something moved behind it, then realized it must have been my own reflection.
“What a sad little place! Who does it belong to?”
Angel applied her heels to the speckled grey, as if to hasten past as quickly as possible. I remembered her warning about the wood not being safe and wondered if the cottage was a rendezvous for the undesirables she had mentioned.
“It belongs to us. But it’s quite derelict. Absolutely uninhabitable. Don’t ever come here. It’s dangerous.”
“As if I would!” This time there was no suggestion that “…we might do it up… get a new roof… treat the beams…”
Angel looked round. “Shall we trot on? Do you feel confident?” Without waiting for a reply she sent the speckled grey into trot.
As the roan horse trotted steadily behind, I kept a wary eye on the panniers. I could rise easily to the trot by now and no longer had to strain to keep in time with the gait. Nor did I need to use the reins as a lifeline now that the lunge lessons were beginning to have their effect, deepening and strengthening my seat, improving my balance. Already I was beginning to look and feel like a rider.
I leaned forward and rubbed the roan’s neck with my knuckles and he flipped an ear backwards by way of acknowledgment. Our partnership was unequal as yet, but we were partners all the same. I knew I had Angel to thank for this. For all her oddly uncomfortable ways, she had proved an able instructress and whatever I had achieved in such a short time was really her success, not mine. As the path widened and the trees became less dense, it was possible to ride three abreast.
“Whatever happens to me as an actress,” I said, “I shall always be grateful to you for teaching me to ride and love horses.”
Across the pack pony with his creaking, historic panniers, Angel looked at me in a censorious manner. “I can only teach you how to ride,” she said. “If you are learning to love horses then that must be regarded as a bonus. You can’t teach a person to love. Nobody can. It just happens. It comes from inside.”
This was true. And yet I thought it difficult for a person to ride and know horses without also learning to love them. And it seemed to me it was a very special sort of love, very pure, very unselfish, because a horse could not really love you back, in your heart you knew that. Horses were not blindly faithful, affectionate animals like dogs; yet they were strong and beautiful, fast and courageous, and willing – even eager – to co-operate, having no expectations other than fair treatment. “I have never understood before why people loved horses,” I said, “but I understand it now.”
We rode through the thinning trees, towards the wilderness, on a path made flat and dusty by steel-shod hooves and the soles of long, brown boots treading it in the moonlight. Going where? To see whom?
“Sometimes I think it’s a pity that loving horses isn’t quite enough.”
“Isn’t enough?” It seemed a surprising comment from someone whose whole world revolved around them.
“Loving people is far more complicated,” Angel said.
“I know what you mean.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. It can’t be easy, juggling Anthony and Hender Copper.”
Instantly, I wished I had not said it. Angel’s face froze. “I don’t believe I know what you mean,” she said.
There was no retracting it now. “You do. You may as well admit it. I saw you together when we were filming.”
“You saw me with Hender Copper? No, you were mistaken.” Angel stared stiffly ahead.
“There was no mistake. You know perfectly well you were with him in the back of the horse box. I saw you.”
“You mean you were watching! You were spying on us!” Having decided there was no further point in denial, Angel now reined in the speckled grey, aghast, enraged.
“I didn’t watch, and I certainly didn’t spy. I just happened to come back to the box unexpectedly. I couldn’t believe it at first, but then I realized why Anthony is so antagonistic towards Hender. It must be very difficult.”
“Difficult!” Flushed with anger, Angel pounced on the word like an angry terrier.
“Well of course it must be difficult.” Over the lunge-lesson pony standing patiently on the path, I looked at her in exasperation. “If you wanted to make the relationship with Hender permanent, Anthony would be left to run this place on his own. Then Hender would have the benefit of your experience and expertise, and you would be rivals for the same business – brother and sister!”
“And I suppose you think I haven’t considered that!”
“I know you must have considered it.”
We looked at each other in silence for a while. The pack pony closed his eyes. The speckled grey sighed and rested a hind leg. The roan with the white stockings stood like a rock and stared into the distance.
“Every girl who has ever worked in the yard has been a threat to me,” Angel said. “Every time I wondered what would happen if Anthony fell in love. I didn’t know how I would cope with that. I was frightened of being displaced, of being left out. Anthony may not be very sociable, he may be obsessed about his horses, he may be difficult, but he was all I had and I dreaded having to share him with somebody else. And now?” She looked at me and to my dismay the beautiful cobalt eyes overflowed with despair. “Now I don’t know what to do.”
Luckily, one of the panniers chose this moment to split, spraying the path with new potatoes, startling the horses. It was a welcome diversion. Because I could not afford to involve myself in an emotional issue between Angel and Anthony, I knew that. It was potentially dangerous. Anthony was dangerous. And I had my career to think of.
Yet as I chased after potatoes in the wilderness, I had the sneakiest feeling that I was already involved right up to my neck.
“Isn’t that rather cruel?”
On my way back from the postbox at the end of the drive where once again I had failed to find not only my script, but any post at all, Angel having beaten me to it as usual, I stopped at the giant sandpit in which Anthony was training a brown horse with unexpected splashes of white on its rump.
One of the horse’s front legs had been strapped up and as it balanced on three legs, Anthony slowly pulled the opposite rein over the saddle, bending its head backwards until it was forced to slide down on to its strapped knee. Further pressure on the rein caused the horse to collapse on to its side.
“Well, isn’t it?”
Anthony, deftly unstrapping the leg and releasing the rein so the horse could scramble to its feet and be rewarded with oats, gave me an irritated look.
“I thought you were having a lesson,” he said shortly.
“I’ve had it.”
I was now having one lunge lesson and two school lessons a day. It was exhausting and made me sore, but as Angel pointed out, four weeks was not long enough to become proficient in comfort, and so it had to be endured.
“Well,” I said again, “is it cruel?”
Anthony walked the brown horse round the sandpit a few times then knelt to restrap the leg. He wore khaki breeches with long brown boots and a black shirt with the sleeves rolled above his elbows. He had not bothered to shave and as he leaned over the straps his dark hair fell into his eyes. He pushed it back with an impatient gesture. Without make-up he looked more like an itinerant horse-coper than Rudolph Valentino which was something of a relief.
“Everything is cruel to start with,” he said in a testy voice. “Putting a collar and lead on a puppy is cruel to begin with; sending a child to school on the first day is cruel if you care to think of it like that. In any case,” he gave me a narrow look, “since when have you been interested in the welfare of my horses?”
I was not prepared to rise to this. I had made up my mind not to be in any way provocative or contentious, but on the other hand, nor was I prepared to be intimidated.
“What are you doing exactly?”
He straightened. “I’m teaching him to fall, if you must know. I’m without a faller at the pre
sent and I have to start again from scratch.”
“What happened to the last one?”
He passed the rein over the saddle. “The last what?”
“The last faller. Did you sell it?”
“You don’t sell a faller!” From the brown horse’s shoulder he looked at me in exasperation. “For your information, Grace Darling, fallers are like gold dust. It takes a very special sort of horse to become a faller, and they don’t come along all that often. It’s a tough job and hard on the limbs. A good faller will fall for you hundreds, perhaps thousands of times, but then one day, for one of a million reasons, he won’t fall when you ask him, and that will be the end of it.”
“Which one of the million reasons did your faller stop for?”
He slackened the rein, resigned now to having to answer my question. The brown horse waited, expectant and slightly anxious, nosing the strapped foreleg, looking perplexed. “Shoulder lameness. There was nothing discernible at first, nothing to see, nothing to explain it. She seemed perfectly sound, absolutely level. But gradually the weakness began to show itself and it never left her. She never worked again.”
“She? Is it unusual for a mare to make a faller?”
“Yes, but she was the best faller in the business in her time.”
“And will he be a good faller?” I looked at the brown horse. The brown horse looked at Anthony, waiting for something to happen.
“He might, if you buzz off and let me get on with it. At least he’s shaping up better than the others I’ve tried.”
I was not going to be dismissed just like that. I sat down on one of the sleepers which prevented the sand from spreading over the paddock. “I think I would rather like to stay and watch. Observation is part of my educational programme, or so I was told.”
“My God, you’re persistent.” He turned his back.
This time the horse knew what was going to happen and resisted, attempting to drag his head away from the rein, opening his mouth in an effort to drop the bit, leaning on Anthony, and finally trying to rise up on to his hind legs, but Anthony was strong and the rein relentless. Eventually he slid down on to his knee and rolled over on to the sand. He was not released immediately, but made to lie there, praised with soothing words as he lay. After the unbuckling came the oats and another walk round the sandpit. This time the other foreleg was strapped and this time the brown horse went down as sweetly as a lamb.
Stars Don't Cry (The Silver Bridle Book 2) Page 6