by Tim Pears
On the fourth day Lottie lay on the boards above as Leo had once done, looking down upon Lottie and her tortured blue roan. Leo repeated the procedure with the mare then once more took steps in the dimness towards her. Again she lurched and lunged, and strained against the rope in her efforts to attack him, making noises he had never heard before from a horse. Screams and shrieks that faded into tremulous whispers then suddenly resumed as high-pitched wails of terror and aggression combined, before falling again, low and broken. Then the screams swelled once more.
Leo stood and spoke to the horse. The words were drowned out by her cries. Once, in the contortions of her violent struggle, the mare got her leg over the rope. Leo made a move to free her, but Lottie yelled down, ‘No,’ and he held back. Eventually, when she reared again, the horse freed the limb herself. The smell of her hot sweating body began to smoulder through the stables, overwhelming that of the sweet dry grass. The old chaff dust rose under her hooves in the loose box. Gradually her shrieks began to subside. Either she was tiring or she was losing heart in her wild exertions, for some of the violence ebbed out of them.
Lottie lay on the wooden boards, peering over the edge, her eyes adjusting to the gloom. How insane this was. How foolish she had been. To buy a horse she didn’t need with a vice she couldn’t cure. Even if the mare was put right, would she ever be able to use her for the plan she had in mind? And now Leo Sercombe, returned after all these years, was spending his time trying to cure her. Lottie gazed down into the ill-lit box, at the brooding horse, the still man. A tense and compelling spectacle. It occurred to Lottie that she’d never seen such patience. In partnership with such a man, perhaps they might achieve what she was dreaming of.
Leo soothed the horse, and waited. After a long while she finally stood motionless. Only a spasmodic tremor rippled beneath her dusty, sweaty skin. Leo took a step closer. The mare made no move. Scrutinising every twitch of her, the man eased closer, holding his right arm high on her neck as a protection should she swing her head at him. He reached out a hand and touched her withers, and felt her tremble. He smoothed her body and rubbed his hands along her neck and back. Still she did not move. He could feel the muscles beneath her skin soften, as she held herself less rigidly, and after some minutes she turned towards him. But she did not bite him.
Leo continued to talk to the mare and to handle her, and he only left her when she bent her head to resume her meal with the man standing there beside her. He looked up, and said into the space above, ‘I don’t believe her’s cured yet, quite, but her’s on the way now, for sure.’
There was no answer. Lottie must have grown bored and left. Leo could not blame her but he was amazed by the disappointment that bloomed like some malignant yeast in his gut. He walked to the door and opened it and stepped outside, eyes downcast from the glare of the sun. He turned and closed and bolted the lower door, and opened wide the upper door, clipping the hook to the wall. The bay mare munched her hay in the light-filled stable.
Leo watched the horse. He did not notice Lottie appear, but there she was, standing beside him.
‘I thought you’d gone off,’ he said.
‘I just climbed down,’ Lottie told him. ‘I saw it all.’
Leo turned to find her looking at him.
‘It is incredible,’ she said. ‘Your forbearance. After what she did to you.’
Leo did not shift his eyes from hers. Thus they stood. All his life when he’d felt another’s gaze see too deep into him, it was unsettling, he had to look away. Yet he did not need or wish to avert his eyes from Lottie’s. Did he want her to see into him? It was not explicable. ‘Just took a bit a time,’ he said.
Lottie shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. You really are a horseman, Leo Sercombe.’
They stood looking at each other. Then Lottie reached forward her right hand to Leo’s left arm and leaned into him. With his right hand he pulled her towards him, and they kissed.
In Lottie’s cottage they ate sausages, mashed potato and carrots. She apologised for the plainness of the fare. Leo said that he was used to finer food in her presence, recalling the trays brought to the stables as she tended her blue roan when it lay dying.
So, Lottie said, Leo Sercombe had become an epicurean now, had he? A gourmet? He smiled. ‘No man’, he said, ‘who’s done a whole stint in the Royal Navy can call himself a judge of fine food.’
They ate, and made love again. Lottie said, ‘I knew it was you. Your eyes are still the colour of blackberries.’
‘And you’, Leo said, ‘still have some freckles there, across the bridge a your nose.’ He kissed them.
They spoke more then and in the days to come. Of what they had done, of what had happened to them. In time they reached things that were hard to describe. Leo wanted to tell Lottie how his blood had been frozen, and now she was sending fire through the veins and arteries of his existence.
Was that it?
Or that he had once been thrown into the future. Catapulted. But he did not wish to live there. He wanted to live in the present.
No, that was not it.
He had been away, he had been wandering, now he was home. But to his surprise home was not a field in the West Country. It was not even the estate. It was her.
‘I remember the first time I saw you,’ Lottie said. ‘We must have been no more than five or six. Do you know what you were doing?’
Leo shook his head.
‘You were climbing up the tail of a carthorse.’
Lottie said that when she looked into the eyes of a horse, she acknowledged that it does not see as much as humans do, nor understand much of what it sees. ‘But I have the feeling that I glimpse what is behind the horse,’ she said. ‘What made her.’
‘God?’
‘I don’t know. Is there a need to name it?’
Leo shook his head in agreement. ‘I remember in Sunday School, Reverend Doddridge, he once said to us, “The eye that sees God is the same eye by which God sees me.”’
Lottie nodded. ‘Perhaps that is what I mean.’
Leo softened the bay mare. At his last Sunday lunch with the Luscombes he told them that he could not buy the field. He was leaving. Ethel said she might take over his cabin and his plot, it was time she had some distance from her sisters. Agnes said she was the eldest, if she fancied the cabin it was her right. Leo understood that the two girls were already consigning him to the past even as he sat beside them. Then Wally Luscombe spoke.
‘I’ll decide it,’ he said. ‘The cabin is Myrtle’s. You two’s needed here.’
Lottie began to let it be known that troubled people could visit her and her horses. She met doctors. Some were curious. Intrigued. She visited hospitals in Taunton and Exeter. Their first patients began to come to the estate.
If there was gossip, a local scandal, Lottie and Leo ignored it.
One evening in the early summer of 1929 they sat outside Lottie’s cottage. Leo rolled a cigarette. They drank red French wine. Lottie watched the evening sky. Leo rested a hand on her belly.
‘It may just be late,’ she said.
‘It may,’ Leo agreed. ‘I hope not.’
Lottie stroked the scar on his hand. She asked him how he’d got it. ‘I was bitten by a conger eel,’ he said, and told her of diving among the German wrecks.
Leo smoked, then said, ‘Three times I might a died. Drowned each time. You may just recall the first a them.’ He paused. Lottie waited. ‘Perhaps one a them times I did,’ he resumed. ‘And this is some kind a dream, of what might have been.’
Lottie put her hand over his. ‘Then I must be dead too,’ she said, ‘for I find myself in the same dream.’
Leo frowned. ‘Was there a time you could have died?’ he asked.
‘I considered it,’ Lottie said. She told him of her time as a vet’s assistant and, as she had never told anyone else, of what Patrick Jago did to her.
After she had finished, Leo squeezed Lottie’s hand. ‘I am glad you did not
go through with it.’ He smiled. ‘And what I said just now? ’Twas bull. Drivel. This is no dream. It is life, my love, our life, and now we shall live it.’
EPILOGUE
The old man took up his stick and went out of the back door of the house. He turned and put his mug of tea on the windowsill (whose slope brought the hot tea up to the lip of the mug on its lower side) and closed the door. He took the mug and walked around the side of the house and opened the door of his shed, placed the mug on the bench and switched on the electric light. Without this the shed was dim for, though one side had a long window, spiders’ webs hung there all engorged with sawdust. Leo studied blocks of wood up on the high shelf while sipping his tea. Some he took down and examined. Each had a date inscribed. He chose a piece not much larger than six inches square.
The old man put the block of wood in the vice, and sawed a section off the side. He loosened the vice, shifted the wood and took off another slice. When he was content with the overall shape he eyeballed the block of ash and, using a bradawl, made a hole in the centre of what he had decreed should be its hollowed top. He placed a screw chuck on the lathe. He then drilled the hole in the middle of the ash deeper, using a bit the same size as the shank on the screw chuck, and screwed the wood onto the lathe.
He set the lathe turning and swung the rest across and used a spear-point chisel to take off the corner. The wood came off in ribbons towards him and in moments amassed like a head of hair or a wig of light brown shavings. He took the chisel off the wood and tossed the trimmings off to the side then resumed, flattening the base with the same chisel.
His tools were hand-forged carbon steel and he had recently ground them. He removed the block from the lathe and replaced the chuck with jaws, into which he placed the base of the wood and clamped the jaws tight.
Now he would hollow out the bowl. He used a half-inch bowl gouge, lining up the bevel of the gouge towards the centre. The lathe turning the wood created the power. All he had to do was to place his hand on the rest and ease the blade of the tool into the wood. He had done this many hundreds of times in his retirement yet still the pliancy of wood engrossed him. The power of the turning lathe. The subtlety of his handiwork. The sharp sweet scent of sawdust.
Oak was good, if somewhat hard to handle. Cherry was stable. Plum could have odd, appealing green and maroon patches. Laburnum held black wood and white wood in the same tree. Acacia was yellow, and possessed elegant rings. This piece of ash was nicely variegated in both the rings and the colour.
The old man turned the wooden bowl. He’d been born in the previous century. He would not make it to the next. His life had been eventful. His children and his grandchildren had heard one or two of his stories but there were more. They had their own lives to discover. He had seen and done many things, especially in his early years. All would pass with him.
The base had not been carved true. When the bowl spun, it did so in an eccentric manner. He switched the bowl around again and measured and marked the base with callipers. He used a spindle gouge to rough out the base then the half-inch bowl gouge to shape the profile of the bowl, working up away from the base to the rim. What really determined how pleasing to the eye the bowl ended up, was the curve of the wood. Soon he was happy with the smoothness of the surface but he wished to improve it, so he used a one-inch sheer scraper. Then he rolled a spindle gouge over the outer lip of the base to give it a slightly rounded rim. The bottom of the bowl would be rarely seen, but it brought satisfaction to him to render it attractive.
His name was Leo Jonas Sercombe, son of Albert and Ruth, brother of Fred, Sid and Kizzie. He was the son of a horseman, and a horseman himself. He had lived as the slave of a tribe of gypsies, worked on a cruel farm, resided with an old tramp in a Cornish wood. He had served on a battleship in the Great War, and as a sailor and a diver in the Royal Navy for twelve years. Then a further year he had spent as a diver, resurrecting German ships from the deep of Scapa Flow. It was not understood back then that years of diving could affect a man’s heart. He was lucky to have got out when he did.
He had known a few horsemen. The best of them was the master’s groom when he was a boy, Herb Shattock.
Leo folded over a sheet of one hundred-and-eighty-grit sandpaper and smoothed the bowl further, then did so again with a two-hundred-and-forty-grit paper, finely abrading the wood still more.
The old man had loved but one woman, a meagre portion perhaps but enough for him. She once was beautiful and still was, though he allowed that others might not see it as he did, for when he beheld her he saw Lottie now and as she had always been, since they were children. His father had worked horses into the ground, as had others for hundreds, thousands, of years. Leo had assumed he would do the same. Man’s technological ingenuity brought an end to such work, but Lottie saw how man and horse might work together in an entirely new way.
Only now, envisioning Lottie in the sawdusty shed, did he remember that she was two years gone under the ground. She had gone before him. He missed her so much. Death was final yet there was more to it than that, a mystery no man could fathom. And it would be his turn soon enough.
The wooden bowl turned on the lathe, under the light of the bare electric bulb. Outside, the afternoon dimmed into evening. Leo held a lump of beeswax against the bowl. He rubbed it into the wood with a rag. The surplus he wiped off with a clean cloth. This bowl was for their granddaughter, soon to be thirteen years old. She could keep her hairbands, rings, other trinkets in it. The old man could not recall in truth whether or not he had given her one much the same the year before. He suspected that his family had all been inundated with his wooden bowls. Well, he would turn them while he could. He would turn them on the turning lathe. Time proceeds along its ever-onward spiral. We join it for a moment.
We are like horses, turning in the dust of a river bed on a clear morning, turning in the sand as the mist rolls over the water, hooves prancing, bodies steaming in the morning light, their muscled flanks rippling, revelling in their freedom.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to my editor, Alexandra Pringle, and to Allegra Le Fanu, Marigold Atkey, Philippa Cotton, Amber Mears-Brown, Angelique Tran Van Sang, Lynn Curtis and all at Bloomsbury, and to Anton Mueller, Lauren Hill and Grace McNamee at Bloomsbury USA.
And thanks to my agent, Victoria Hobbs, and to Jennifer Custer, at A.M. Heath.
Special thanks to: Simon Jackson, Acting Deputy Chief Operating Officer, the Royal Veterinary College; Tom Mercer, wood turner; David Charles-Edwards, ornithologist; Richard Stanley, for the James Baldwin quote; Rick Stroud for such helpful notes and horse knowledge; Doug and Tinker Stoddart for suggesting a list of Principal Characters; Hania Porucznik for her sharp red pen.
Paul Evans’s nature notes in the Guardian have been a regular nudge to scrutinise the natural world through which one moves. The books of Fred Archer likewise, a continual inspiration.
Helpful equine books include:
Elementary Lectures on Veterinary Science by Henry Thompson
Memoirs of a Veterinary Surgeon by Reginald Hancock
Healers on Horseback by R.H. Smythe
Fifty Years a Veterinary Surgeon by Sir Frederick Hobday
Handling Horses by Colonel P. D. Stewart
Equitation by Henry Wynmalen
Bracken Horse by Gareth Dale provided the story of the bay mare frightened of the dark.
Leo’s encounter with a grey seal quotes from Ted Hughes’s encounter with a roedeer as described in a footnote in Moortown Diary, while two horses in a field are borrowed from Melissa Harrison’s At Hawthorn Time.
The starting point of the Battle of Jutland chapter was my grandfather’s experience. Steuart Arnold Pears was a young gunnery lieutenant on the light cruiser HMS Falmouth, which was caught up at the centre of the maelstrom. His naval record includes: Showed great aptitude in Gunnery controlled fire in Jutland Battle with coolness and in other ways, showed marked zeal & ability, good manner with men.
&n
bsp; HMS Queen Mary set off from the Firth of Forth with a crew of 1,286. 1,266 were lost. Of the twenty survivors, eighteen were hauled out of the North Sea by British destroyers, two by German boats.
The passage on the Battle is threaded through with excerpts from Jutland 1916, Death in the Grey Wastes by Nigel Steel and Peter Hart, a masterly telling of the monumental naval battle through memoirs, letters and recollections of those who were there.
Further detail was given by Alexander Fullerton’s fine novel The Blooding of the Guns.
Able Seamen by Brian Lavery illuminated life on the lower deck of the Navy.
The True Glory by Max Arthur and Gone a Long Journey by Leonard Charles Williams were also helpful.
There are many books on Scapa Flow, on the scuttle and subsequent salvage of the German Imperial Fleet. Especially helpful were:
Scapa Flow by Malcolm Brown and Patricia Meehan, another brilliant history book composed largely of the memories of those who were there
The Grand Scuttle by Dan van der Vat
The Wrecks of Scapa Flow by David M. Ferguson
Jutland to Junkyard by S. C. George
Cox’s Navy by Tony Booth was particularly rich and extensive.
Salvage of the scuttled ships continued long after the events described in this novel. In the 1930s Metal Industries, a company which had taken over from Ernest Cox, sold much scrap metal from salvaged ships to Krupp of Essen, in Germany. Krupp had constructed most of the ships, and their armour and guns, in the first place. They now bought back this same metal, and began to use it in their building of Hitler’s navy.
Later, in 1945, at the moment of the explosion of the world’s first atomic bomb, at Hiroshima, the earth’s atmosphere was polluted by nuclear radiation. In the process of steel manufacture, enormous quantities of air are sucked in. All steel forged since 1945 therefore contains traces of radiation. Untainted steel is essential for extremely delicate scientific instruments, such as those used in nuclear medicine. The still unsalvaged scuttled ships of Scapa Flow remain the greatest resource of such high-grade, untainted steel to this day. Some of the Scapa Flow steel was used in the Voyager II spacecraft. Salvage continues …