by Tim Pears
‘I was just …’ he began.
The man cut him off. ‘I done told you to quit. So shut your mouth and go. And don’t try nothin or I’ll blow your bowels out.’
Leo nodded and turned and walked away.
4
Lottie Prideaux hitched Pegasus to the buggy and drove out of the estate. The horse was too large, barely fitting between the shafts. He trotted with his neck upright and his head high and his trot was more of a prance. This job was beneath him and he wished to make that clear.
At Wiveliscombe Station Lottie put the brake on the buggy and told the horse not to be foolish. She walked towards the station then stopped and looked back. The horse was not watching her but gazing in quite another direction, eyes fixed apparently on a distant horizon.
Lottie stood on the platform. Her guests had stayed the night in Exeter and were expected on this early train. Others on the platform waited to be taken to Barnstaple, or stations in between. Lottie spoke with a woman whose pig she had once treated for gastritis. She asked the porter to be ready to help with her guests’ luggage.
The train came in to the station. It had two carriages. The guard stepped down from the first and called to the porter. The people on the platform began to board the train. A woman emerged from the second carriage. She looked about her then turned and helped a man down the step and then to the platform. The guard passed luggage down and the porter stacked it on his trolley.
Lottie walked along the platform. The man stood, turning his head slightly from side to side. The woman held his right arm. In his left hand he held a cane. The woman said, ‘You must be Miss Prideaux.’
The man said, ‘Lottie,’ and pulled his right arm free and held it out in front of him. Lottie grasped his hand and shook it.
‘William,’ she said.
The man withdrew his hand and gestured to his right and said, ‘May I introduce my sister, Helena Carew. Helena, this is Lottie Prideaux.’
The women shook hands. Lottie turned and walked slowly along the platform, and the Carews walked with her. She enquired after their journey while the porter wheeled their luggage to the buggy and loaded it. Helena helped her brother up onto the seat. Lottie gave the porter a threepenny bit and he thanked her and pushed the empty trolley back into the station, then Lottie drove back to the estate.
The Carews stayed in Lottie’s cottage. They ate a cold lunch and in the afternoon Lottie left them while she answered an emergency call to Wood Farm. In the evening she served them cottage pie with peas and carrots, apologising for the quality of her cooking, followed by trifle made for her by one of the farmers’ wives.
‘Do you remember how you used to cut up those dead animals?’ William asked her. He tilted his head towards his sister. ‘While other girls her age filled their heads with length of skirt and style of hair, Lottie was finding out for herself how animals are put together.’ He turned back towards Lottie, as if to look at her though his eyes were sightless. Perhaps it was habit, from when he could see. But he never quite faced her directly. It was as if he was gazing past her, miscalculating a touch. Or perhaps he imagined there was someone else standing there, and it was this ghostly figure he addressed.
Helena said that Lottie was pretty enough to be able not to bother herself about styles. As William shifted his head a little, Lottie understood all at once that it was not his eyes but his ear he was directing. His head was tilted the better to hear what she or Helena said.
Helena told Lottie that she worked as a nurse in a children’s ward in the South London Hospital. The hospital was for females only, except for boys under the age of seven, and all the staff were women. Helena expected to become a Matron eventually. She said that she did not envy the younger women studying medicine and training to be doctors. They were forced to make brutal decisions and the women now qualifying had to ignore the prompting of their natural compassion and develop callous masculine traits.
‘Perhaps you have a more benign view of women than I do,’ Lottie said. ‘I fear we’re no different from men. Just as capable of cruelty.’
‘How can you say that, less than ten years after the worst bloodbath the world has known?’ Helena demanded. She made a vague gesture towards her brother. William listened closely to the conversation.
‘If women had power,’ Lottie said, ‘or wielded the weapons, would it all have been different?’
‘Of course,’ Helena said. She wore her hair cut short, almost shorn like a nun’s, as if like them to renounce any claim to femininity. She wore no lipstick. Her clothes were those of an older woman, or else a young woman of the previous epoch. Her eyebrows were paler than her light brown hair.
‘Then might it make sense to let us have the power, in the hope that you are right?’
Helena made a sound with her mouth as if spitting something out from between her lips. ‘You’re trying to trip me up with sophistry,’ she said.
William turned towards Lottie. His eyelids were closed, not upon curved eyeballs but sunken sockets, and Lottie suspected that the skin of one lid was not the original but had been taken from elsewhere on his body and grafted there. ‘My sister’, he said, ‘has a pessimistic view of the world. If not a tragic one. She prefers the fallen world as it is to an unknowable future.’
After supper Helena insisted that her brother go to bed. She helped Lottie with the washing-up, the two women working around each other in the cottage’s small kitchen. With a tea cloth Helena dried the utensils they had used. Lottie reached around her, putting cutlery or crockery away, on shelf or in cupboard. She asked how William was coping. Helena said the worst thing was having nothing to do. He lived in her flat, where he listened to music. The wireless was a further distraction. He could go for walks alone, in a gradually increasing radius, but she sensed that it gave him little pleasure to grope along the pavements of Clapham. And on the one or two occasions he’d broken free onto the Common he’d become disorientated and distressed, and was brought home cowering.
‘This is the first time he’s spent a single night away from my flat. To be honest with you, I don’t think it’s a good idea. But I foolishly read out your invitation for us to visit, and once William heard it he was set on accepting.’ Helena gave Lottie the wet tea towel. ‘I constantly worry about him while I’m at work,’ she said. ‘That he’ll be robbed, or beaten, or step into the road and be run down.’
‘How ironic, considering his adventures,’ Lottie said. ‘When he travelled all over the world.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Helena agreed. ‘Ironies abound. Do you know, William was the best shot in his regiment? He should have been a sniper, but such work was considered beneath officers.’
‘And now you support him,’ Lottie said.
‘Oh, he has his pension,’ Helena said. ‘I have to work.’
‘And your life?’ Lottie asked.
‘Apart from my job, William is my life,’ Helena said. The Carews’ mother had died and their sister taught in a school in Yorkshire. ‘Look at me,’ she said.
Lottie frowned. ‘What should I see?’
‘A plain Jane,’ Helena said. ‘Oh, no, don’t make a face. It’s true and I know it. Someone like you wouldn’t know what that’s like and why should you? Nature fashions us according to her whim. No doubt you have many suitors at your hunt balls and country parties.’ She waved her hand towards Lottie to indicate, or perhaps to dismiss, Lottie’s looks.
Lottie reckoned that if she wished to, Helena could make herself far more appealing. She chose to hide rather than accentuate her looks. Perhaps she had embraced her sisterly martyrdom as a calling, a vocation, twinned with her nursing.
‘I’m an old maid now. There are many of us in the hospital. It’s not so bad.’
Lottie said that surely Helena was still young.
‘Men have had their pick. For women like me, our would-be suitors lie in the fields of Flanders.’ She shook her head. ‘Listen to me. I can’t bear people who feel sorry for themselves.’
&n
bsp; On the morning following, they walked to the big house, all boarded up, and wandered through the garden. Lottie told William that he would hardly recognise it now. Alice sent the gardener Alf Satterley instructions throughout the winter. Plans, drawings, the names of fashionable plants. And when she brought the boys down for their holiday she oversaw new developments, standing over the gardener or his boy as they worked.
Lottie laughed. ‘I thought he must hate it and would leave as soon as he could find another job, every alteration a desecration of the garden he’d created with my mother. But then I realised that I was wrong. Old Mr Satterley began to enjoy it. A new collaboration. He’s getting younger by the month.’
From the other side of the kitchen garden wall an engine suddenly roared into life, sputtering, then backfiring, and Lottie saw William flinch, bending low and covering his head with the arm that was not holding the cane.
‘It’s a lawnmower,’ Lottie said.
Helena took her brother by the shoulders and reassured him that it was only the mower and all was well. All was calm. William stood up once more and smiled, though he was trembling, and said what a chump he was. Helena caught Lottie’s eye and opened her own wide and raised her eyebrows as if to say, you see? You see?
They walked further. Lottie admitted she now managed the estate, the job William had held, briefly. They walked up the hill to Hangman’s Wood and looked out. Lottie named the farms they could see. Helena said that when William had described the estate she didn’t somehow imagine it to be as large as this.
In the evening, after their meal, William gave Lottie some new records and she played one on her gramophone. She confessed to never having heard of Jean Sibelius. The work was the Karelia Suite. William said that although Sibelius was inspired by his native Finland, and indeed the work had been adopted by the patriots of that country, it summoned for William this place, Lottie’s own West Country. They sat and listened, and the scratchy recording of the boundless music filled the room as if it came from far away, from Finland itself perhaps. Yet Lottie understood what William meant. It could have been inspired by this land.
Helena nodded off. When she jolted awake she apologised and said she was exhausted from the journey and no doubt the fresh air. William suggested she go to bed, he would be fine with Lottie here, and to her surprise Helena acceded and went upstairs to her room.
Lottie poured William a brandy and they drank. He suggested another piece of music but Lottie said no, she would like him to meet her horse properly. William smiled and said that he would be delighted.
The moon sat like a boat in the sky and stars blazed across the firmament as brightly as they did on only a few nights as clear as this in a year. It was fortunate timing. Then Lottie was reminded that for William the darkness was total, all year round, in or out of doors, wherever he might be. But the silver light was helpful to her, and it meant that Pegasus was not spooked when they reached the gate and she called him up out of the field. Lottie opened the gate and walked through, and when the horse came to her she fed him a carrot she’d brought with her and put the halter on him.
‘Come in,’ Lottie told William. He followed the bars of the gate and found the metal loop over the post and lifted it. He opened the gate a little and squeezed in and closed it behind him.
‘Over here,’ said Lottie, and he stepped towards her. She took his hand and placed it on her horse’s neck. ‘He’s called Pegasus,’ she said.
‘He’s tall,’ William said.
‘Almost seventeen hands. He’s strong, but gentle. And with a lovely soft mouth.’
William caressed the horse and put his head to the horse’s neck and smelled him. Pegasus turned his head and snuffled against the strange man’s skin.
‘What does he look like?’ William asked.
Lottie described her handsome grey gelding.
‘Do you know,’ William said, ‘I miss riding.’
Lottie said that she had a notion. She reopened the gate and led her horse to the stable yard. William followed the sound of their steps. In the yard Lottie tied the rope to a ring in the wall and fetched the bridle from the tack room, which jangled as she carried it. She removed the halter and replaced it with the bridle, throwing the reins over the gelding’s head, then reaching the bridle over his ears and under his jaw and feeding the bit into his mouth. Over the bridle she attached a head collar.
Lottie fetched the saddle, and swung it over Pegasus. She bent and reached down and pulled the girth strap under his belly and secured it. Then she stood and waited. William had come up and stood a few yards away.
‘He’s a terror for blowing himself up,’ Lottie said. ‘Then holding his breath. I have to wait for him every single time I saddle him. It does him no good but he never learns.’
William listened. Eventually Pegasus breathed out and Lottie cinched the girth strap another two notches tighter. The horse did not neigh or strut or make any noise that would give the impression he thought it strange to be harnessed in the dark. William remarked upon this. ‘As you told me, Lottie, he has equanimity. Or perhaps one should say equine-nimity.’
Lottie smiled. She invited William to step forward to the horse. ‘You’re on his left side.’ She took the reins in her left hand, and lifted William’s right hand and gave them to him. Then she stepped to her horse’s head, and held the head collar, and told William to mount whenever he was ready.
William reached his right hand up and felt for the cantle at the back of the saddle. He stood for a moment, not moving, and it occurred to Lottie what an overwhelming prospect this must be for him, how unfair a challenge she had presented him with.
Then she saw him lean forward and to the side until his face was up against the horse’s neck. William was smelling the animal. He leaned back, and took his right hand off the saddle and felt for the stirrup, and when he had found it he lifted his left foot and inserted it. Then he put his right hand back on the saddle. Her horse was so tall. And William had not mounted a horse in ten years.
Only now did Lottie remember the mounting block, on the far side of the yard. How stupid she was. She was about to suggest they go over there, when William flexed his muscles and pushed off with his right leg from the ground and pulled with his left leg in the stirrup and rose up and swung his right leg over the saddle. Pegasus’s back dipped to take the rider’s weight. William sat in the saddle and gave a gasp of satisfaction or relief.
‘All right?’ Lottie asked.
William smiled. ‘A piece of cake,’ he said.
Lottie fetched a longer rope and a whip from the bothy and came back and clipped the rope to the horse. She held the rope in her right hand close to Pegasus and carried the rest of it coiled in her left. She led the horse away from the yard on the path down through the spinney towards the paddock. Wood pigeons cooed in their sleep on the branches. Two or three flew up. William held the reins loosely in his hands. Lottie walked into the middle of the paddock feeding out the long lunge, then she made a clicking sound with her teeth and told her horse to walk on and circled him anti-clockwise around her. She reckoned there was enough light for Pegasus to see the whip as she pointed it for him to follow. William held the loose reins and the horse walked around, his hooves sending up granules of silver sparkling from the sandy ground.
‘Are you all right?’ Lottie called. ‘We can keep him as slow as you like. He won’t mind.’
William did not reply but kept riding. Lottie could not quite tell how much he had to concentrate to keep his seat. He sat awkwardly, too tense. It must be so hard to balance without sight. Wasn’t balance connected to the ears? Would being deaf be worse? She did not think so. She brought the horse to a gradual halt herself, using the rope and clicking her teeth and telling Pegasus to slow. Then she turned him and resumed circling clockwise.
After Lottie had changed direction two or three more times, she could see William’s posture relaxing. He squeezed the horse with his legs. Either Pegasus did not wish to respond to an unfa
miliar rider or the horse was too big and strong for subtle persuasion so William kicked him with his heels and this time Pegasus broke into a trot.
Horse and rider circled the woman in the middle of the paddock. Then Lottie slowed Pegasus and walked towards him casually, looping the rope in a coil hanging from her left wrist. When she reached them she saw how heavily William was breathing. She asked him if he was all right. When he smiled she could see his teeth white in the moonlight.
‘As good as I’ve felt in a long time,’ he said. ‘A long, long time.’
‘Have you had enough?’ she asked.
‘Not nearly,’ he said.
They resumed. William kicked the horse to a trot and after one circumference kicked him again and the horse eased into a gentle canter. Though the speed was greater, it was easier to ride a canter than a trot and William looked so comfortable that Lottie was tempted to let him ride off the rope. It was a fanciful notion. She did not see how it could work. A horse required instruction. It demanded it. And if a rider could not see where he was going how could he give direction to the horse?
They rode counter-clockwise then stopped and turned. Lottie approached the horse, coiling the rope loosely, and unclipped it from the ring on the chinstrap of the head collar. Perhaps Pegasus would not need direction. ‘He’s yours,’ she said. ‘He can see where the fence is and he won’t want to bash into it. Just give him a loose rein and go at the speed you wish.’
William nodded, said ‘Hup’ to the horse and kicked him. Pegasus took off. He carried his mount at a canter in similar circuits to those he had performed constrained by the rope. Somewhat eccentric, perhaps. Lottie turned where she stood, watching them canter around her. Was it possible that the horse knew his rider was blind? When they came close by she saw William grinning.
Then she heard a yell behind her.
Lottie turned. At first she could see nothing. Then a figure emerged from the trees in the spinney and Helena came marching towards them. ‘Stop!’ she yelled. ‘What are you doing? Stop at once!’