“Have you been on a horse before?” asked the instructor. He was a petite man, with an elfin face and large, toughened lands.
Did you not hear him say ‘absolute beginner’?
“No, I haven’t…”
“Okay, no need to be afraid.” He smiled, and I tried to feel a little more encouraged. Rather than allowing me to mount straight away, he first explained the equipment—the halter and the bridle, the reins and the stirrups. By the time I stepped on the mounting block, Nicholas and Myra were nowhere to be seen. He led me circuitously around the arena, at a slow, steady pace, all the while calling out instructions. Keep your elbows tucked in… sit square in the middle of the saddle… keep your hands level when holding the reins… push your heels down and point your toes up to the sky…
After an hour, he allowed me, for a short instance, to move on my own. It was frightening, and thrilling. I liked that it depended on small gestures, moving gently on the saddle in sync with the horse’s rhythm. It was easier than swimming; somehow, less alien, less unfamiliar.
“Good… good,” said the instructor as I passed him. I could see Nicholas approaching, with Myra a short distance behind, their horses cantering swiftly. Nicholas slowed down, and dismounted by the arena; he leaned on the railing, watching, smiling. “Well done,” he called. “You’re a natural.”
I swelled with joy and pride.
Slow down by briefly squeezing your thighs against the horse…
The instructor helped me dismount. I slipped off my helmet, turning around to Nicholas. I looked past him at Myra; I should thank her for inviting me, but I stopped short—she was frowning at the sight of us, her face twisted into something raw and enraged.
Perhaps, that’s why I was there. Because she hoped I’d make a fool of myself.
Yet, in an instant, it was gone. I could have imagined it. She waved, laughing. Like a cloud moving across the sun, or a bird’s shadow rippling on water.
That first morning at Wintervale, I breakfasted in the loft.
Myra had said I was welcome to join them, but they ate early, at half past seven.
Maybe I’d prefer to lie in?
Wastrel, I was certain Philip would say.
Which is why I had every intention of waking up on time and proving him wrong.
But it was almost dawn before I finally fell asleep. I’d watched the sky lighten, gradually like a slow miracle. When I opened my eyes, the clock showed past nine.
If there’d been a chance to impress Philip with my rigorous self-discipline, it was irrefutably lost.
I took my toast and tea outside, to the wooden stairs. It was a cold but patchily sunny winter day. Beyond the stone wall around the edges of the garden, the Hawthorne hedges along the road, farmland dipped and swelled, marked by the straight tallness of poplars, the rounded sprawl of oak. Wintervale had no immediate neighbors, surrounded instead by windswept fields. What struck me was not the unfamiliar quiet, the unfamiliar sounds—the persistent mooing of cows in the distance, the whir of machinery—but the smell of the countryside. How the air was laden with richness. Each shift of wind carried earth and grass, or the deep, piquant odor of dung and wet leaves.
It was, strangely enough, un-repulsive.
At that time, the house lay stonily quiet, and I thought I was the only one out, but in the yard, Elliot was riding a bicycle. In regular untiring circles. I hadn’t yet had a chance to observe him well until now.
I watched the boy, his curly dark hair, the shape of his nose, the slant of cheek.
In daylight, all could be revealed.
Soon, Myra emerged from the back of the house and strolled over to him, her boots crunching heavily on the gravel. In the pale sunlight, her ochre-blue jumper, asymmetrical and oversized, looked like a piece torn out of the sky. She stroked Elliot’s head, and glanced up towards the loft.
“Good morning,” she called.
“Sorry I wasn’t up for breakfast…”
“That’s alright; Dad thinks you’re a wastrel.”
I said I wasn’t surprised.
“I’m joking… did you sleep alright?”
“I think the bats kept me up all night.”
“Oh, I was going to warn you about that… I’m afraid we can’t touch them… we’re part of some bats conservation trust. Volunteers drop by to check on them… we’d have you to blame if anything happened.”
“I’ll make sure I sing them a lullaby tonight.”
She laughed, squinting up at me. The sun was in her eyes. “Would you like to go for a walk? You can see the horses after…”
I sipped my tea. “Alright.”
Swiftly, I washed up and changed, and twenty minutes later, walked past Elliot’s abandoned cycle. Outside the kitchen door, I found Myra surveying a pile of muddy, military green wellington boots.
“I wasn’t sure of your size.”
None fit perfectly, so I wore double socks and pulled on ones a size too large. She’d changed into a black pair.
“Is Elliot coming along?”
She shook her head. “Mrs Hammond will keep an eye on him.”
I hesitated. “And your father?”
“Out with the horses.”
I silently hoped we wouldn’t run into him on our trail.
We set out and walked along the main road for a short while before turning off into a dirt track flanked by thick blackthorn hedge, too late now for their sloe berries that would have ripened in October. Fields unfurled behind us, pockmarked by frost, the soil hard and bitter-brown, scattered with sycamore trees molded into strange shapes by the wind. They were barren now, and their branches looked like a vast network of veins against the sky. The short tough grass crunched beneath our boots.
“How old is Elliot?”
“Ten… almost eleven…”
“He’s Nicholas’, isn’t he?”
Her silence was affirmative.
We walked without speaking; somewhere I could hear the sound of running water. Soon the blackthorn that flanked us dipped and disappeared; the path swerved to the right alongside a swift, clear stream.
“Nem,” she began, “I called you here—”
“You said we needed help? What did you mean?”
To my surprise, she laughed.
We were approaching a cluster of weeping willows, their branches so low and heavy they formed a long canopy, a bare, brown cage. She twisted through, and I followed.
“Don’t you see?” Her eyes were the color of morning frost.
“I’m not sure what you mean…”
She tugged on a branch, it dipped easily.
“When I met you at the concert… and you told me you were there because of Nicholas… you had that look on your face… such hope. That he’d be there. You hoped he’d be there, didn’t you?”
I didn’t reply.
“How many years has it been?”
“Since?”
“Since you lived with him in Delhi… for… oh, I don’t know… six months…”
“Eleven,” I corrected.
Myra fished out a cigarette and lighter from her pocket. I’d never seen her smoke before.
In the wind, the branches curled around us, drawing closer.
“I was exactly like you… Nicholas was… was like breath. I met him in London, at a concert. He told me he watched only my fingers while I played… and my mouth.” She exhaled a thin stream of smoke. “I was twenty-one and thought I’d met a god. Someone so impeccably perfect… I found it hard to believe he was real. We didn’t seem to do what other people… other couples did… with him I felt I was watching the world from afar… that it was all out there, everything I ever wanted, and I could reach out and touch it. It was that simple. And so it continued… until one day, he told me he was leaving for India, that he was going away on fieldwork…”
She lifted her head, gazing at something ahead that I couldn’t spy.
“Have you ever counted time? I mean, really, counted the minutes, the days,
like your mind is some kind of giant hourglass. I wrote him letters everyday—some I just tore up and threw away, scared they might overwhelm him… some I posted…”
“You wrote him letters?”
“Endlessly…”
I want you in me.
Always,
M.
Even though it was midday, the sky had grown overcast, the sun swiftly hidden behind low, quilted clouds. The day glowed with a hidden light, lit from within.
“At some point,” she continued, “I planned this elaborate surprise to travel to India to see him… I was full of him, and only him, and being apart felt like a million needles tearing at me…”
I thought of that afternoon on the lawn, when Myra walked out in her grey dress, still sleepy. “And then you landed up…”
She nodded. “That December… yes, he was so angry. I’d never seen him… anyone… so … angry.” Her voice was soft, almost as though she was speaking to herself. I could only imagine his fury; he’d never directed his wrath at me, but I’d had hints of it, an abrupt stormy sullenness, a swift impatience.
She tugged at a branch again, and let it swing back. “I’d built up this vision of happiness… and he was enraged by my appearance. I couldn’t understand it. But there was nothing to be done… I was there, and I couldn’t leave… at least he didn’t make me leave. I remember that morning, he went away… I don’t know where… for a while, and when he returned, he was calmer, saying we could work something out. That I must say I was his cousin or step-sister… that people in India were conservative, and they would talk, and it wouldn’t be acceptable for us to be in the same house if we weren’t related somehow.”
“And you believed him?”
“I would’ve believed anything to calm him down… and put him in a better mood.”
She stubbed the cigarette, and walked through the canopy, finding her way out.
Our boots squelched through endless mud, the smell of dung rising thickly ripe and sweet. The hills in the distance seemed painted, hazy behind a light, gauzy mist.
“At first I didn’t know what to make of you. When I asked Nicholas… he told me you were delicate… disturbed, in fact… that he’d saved you after you tried to harm yourself…” Myra stopped, and turned to me. “Is that true?”
“It wasn’t quite like that…”
She didn’t move.
“No. I didn’t.”
She continued walking. “He said you’d developed a deep and intense gratitude, this psychological dependence on him… and he was afraid to upset the balance and tip you over again… so I was to treat you well…” She smiled. “He called you his pet.”
My blank slate.
“I felt sorry for you, of course… but sometimes, I was jealous, I hated your proximity to him… something just didn’t seem to fit… but I couldn’t place it.” The wind blew her hair across her face. “Now, I know. It’s true, isn’t it… you and him?”
“And Elliot?” I asked softly.
She leaned over the gate, the bar pressing into her stomach. As though she was reaching out for something she couldn’t grasp.
“When Nicholas returned from India, we were together for a while in London. I was finishing music school, and things were fine for a few months, or so I thought. And then, suddenly, like it so often happens… they weren’t. He’d be annoyed at me… for—I don’t know—forgetting to wash my teacup. Silly things that turned into everything. We’d argue, he’d leave… I’d leave… it was terrifying just for how long we could go on… this endless, relentless battle. Like Elliot and his little toy soldiers and forts… destroying and rebuilding. Then, one day he left. He disappeared and didn’t return.”
I said it had been that way too, in Delhi. When I returned, one July morning, and Nicholas was gone.
“At least you didn’t find out two weeks later you were pregnant.” She laughed, thin and hollow; it reminded me of Eva.
“You didn’t tell him, did you?”
The silence was broken by the distant rumble of a vehicle. The roar of its engine echoed in the quiet country air.
“In my eighth month… in sheer desperation… I crawled back here…” she gestured grandly around her, “where I’ve been trying to get away from my whole life.”
“And your father…?”
She lit another cigarette. Then, absentmindedly, or perhaps she changed her mind, she flicked it away. “My father took me in… disgusted as he was by his daughter. I had no money, no savings, no job… I was a musician, for Christ’s sake. All the while I thought I’d get rid of it, and I put it off… again and again, until it was too late… but he took care of everything, my father… Elliot had a nanny, he’s being given music lessons… he’s going to boarding school soon… no expense spared, really…”
“It’s good of him, to look after you like that.”
“Me? He’s not doing it for me. It’s for Elliot… my father has an immaculate sense of fair play… it’s not my son’s fault and therefore, he won’t be made to suffer.”
“And you?”
Her eyes were a long-lost evening blue. “I offer him… my obedience.”
“Myra…”
“Yes?”
“Don’t you think you ought to…”
“Tell Nicholas?”
She climbed over the gate, and started making her way across the field. Here, the scent lingered of freshly turned earth, something light, and mildly flowery. The mist was thickening, rising over the ground like smoke; the light that had throbbed through the day earlier was beginning to drain away.
I caught up with her.
“He abandoned me…”
He abandoned everybody.
“I have no wish to see him again.” From the look on her face I could see it was true. “And so it should be with you.”
We crossed the field, and walked down the narrow country trail that joined the main road. The air echoed with the clopping of hooves. It was Philip on a mare with a glistening chestnut coat, her mane, tail and lower legs edged in lighter hazel, and a streak of white running down her nose.
He stopped beside us. “I’m heading back… she’s tired this morning.” He patted the horse’s neck.
“We’re going home too,” said Myra. “We walked by Coram’s Way. I was showing Nem around—”
A small, speeding car suddenly rounded the corner and zipped past. The mare shifted nervously, flicking her ears—I reached out and touched the side of her head and stroked her. She nuzzled my hand.
Philip edged her away from us. “I’m taking her home… before we meet more idiots on the road.”
When he was out of earshot, I said I wasn’t certain he meant only the driver.
Myra laughed. “He likes you, Nem… although the horses are the only creatures he truly loves. We used to have three, but when Charlie was put down, Dad vowed these would be the last ones he’d keep.”
“We went riding in Delhi… when you were there.”
“Did we?”
It was hard to imagine how something so embossed in my mind, could be equally absent from hers.
“Yes… you and Nicholas would go swimming…”
“I remember that… to a pool at this big white hotel.”
“Then you met someone who was a member at a riding club… I don’t know why you invited me along. You probably wanted me to fall off and break my neck. Or worse, make a fool of myself.”
“Probably… I wanted to show off.”
We were at the dip of the Hollow, and above us, oak trees domed across shutting out the leaf-tangled sky. For a while, we were in shadow, and then we emerged, at the crest of the slope, into sunlight.
Later that afternoon I headed to the stables.
It stood on the other side of a field at the back of the house, hidden from view by tall, rambling hedgerow that hemmed its borders. In the spring, Myra told me, the field was flecked gold with buttercups, and along the shady edges, replete with bluebells. Now, bereft of flowers, it roll
ed out in shades of dull brown and listless yellow. I even came upon a dead sparrow, a small, upturned tragedy, its eyes ever watchful as I passed.
The stables were a surprisingly modern structure of light wooden planks and a neat tin roof. Inside, clean and warm, cheerful with the sunny smell of straw and sawdust. Someone from the village came in to help everyday.
“But I like doing this myself,” said Philip. He was brushing Lady down with a soft brush. “I can lament the fate of the world, and she just listens. Myra would come in here quite often… not so much anymore.”
I was in the neighboring cubicle, stroking General. He was a larger, more muscled animal, with a deep charcoal coat, white stocking marks and a star on his forehead.
“They’re both beautiful…” I said.
“General’s a good-looking fellow. We could take them out tomorrow, if you like… how long are you here?”
Two days more. Leaving Sunday, on the afternoon train.
“What did you say you did in London?”
I told him.
“A what—?”
I tried to explain what it entailed, a fellowship from the Royal Literary Fund, but I couldn’t help feel he wasn’t all that captivated.
“And back in India?”
“I write on art.”
He brushed down Lady’s forelegs, his arms stretching, straining. I could see why he still looked the way he did, physically spry and spirited.
“Wonderful,” he said, straightening up. Either as a response to the admission of my profession, or the competent execution of his task.
On my part, it was affirmation.
Of the worlds we choose to inhabit. And the ones we exclude. In school, I enjoyed Venn diagrams not for their mathematical functions—of which I have a hazy recollection—but their aesthetic intricacies. The infinite possibilities of patterns, intersections, unions, complements, symmetries and overlaps. You could say Philip and I inhabited circles that didn’t, would never, touch.
For him, I might have been of less interest than the horses.
If prophecies carve a design for the future, premonitions weave patterns into our past.
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