‘Oh hell.’ The continuity girl was small and dark, with a lively manner and bright black eyes. She looked Italian, but her name was Joan Jones. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘So am I,’ said the Colonel. ‘I could have paid half my next winter’s hay bill.’
‘And we could have finished our outdoor shooting this week. We’ve been on location too long already. We’ve got to get the battle scenes done before the weather breaks.’
‘Marston Moor?’
‘Sixteen forty-four.’ Callie had hopped over to listen.
‘First defeat of the Royalists,’ Joan Jones said, to show she also knew a thing or two. ‘Michael Fox, who plays Prince Rupert of the Rhine, he’s in command of King Charles’s men, and when they’re routed by Cromwell and that lot, there’s no one to rescue this wounded Cavalier, so Rupert does this great bit on the horse to save him.’
‘And breaks his own neck,’ the Colonel said.
‘No.’ Callie had studied the Civil War for the scholarship exam. ‘Rupert lived for years after they cut off Charles the First’s head.’
‘You should have told the stunt man that,’ Joan Jones said. ‘The first time we tried it, he fell off and cracked two ribs and dropped the Cavalier into the water.’
‘You didn’t tell me you’d tried it,’ the Colonel said.
‘I wasn’t going to until you said you’d do it. We’ve got just the right place, over the other side of the valley, that marvellous stretch of bleak moorland, and the sudden sheer drop into the quarry. It looks twice as high and steep from where we’ve got the camera.’
Mac had been working with David in the field behind the stables. He came round the side of the barn, the horse walking relaxed and limber, the man moving easily to David’s long swinging stride.
As he came into the yard, one of the puppies ran at him from nowhere, yapping under his feet. David shied violently, and whipped round to bolt off with his head up.
Mac hardly moved in the saddle, just shifted his weight slightly back and somehow controlled the horse and turned him quietly round without appearing to do anything.
‘My God.’ The continuity girl was standing in the yard staring at him with her mouth open and her black eyes astonished. ‘Cosmo Spence.’
‘What? That’s one of my staff,’ the Colonel said. ‘Mac – bring the horse over here.’
‘He’s the living spit of Cosmo Spence. Same build. The eyes. The lazy, insolent way he sits a horse. Take off the hair and beard and I’d have sworn …’
‘I’ve doubled for him,’ Mac said, ‘in my movie days. I was supposed to look like him, but I think that’s an insult to me.’
‘He did all his own stunts,’ Joan Jones said.
‘Says who? He had a good publicity man.’ Mac grinned, his teeth very white through the grizzled beard. ‘I done a lot of riding for him, back in the States.’
‘Was it you,’ Callie said, ‘in Angel on Horseback, where the Centurion jumped right over that cart with the oxen and through the tent and out the other side?’
‘Yup.’
‘And in Calgary Stampede, where he was the only one could ride the black horse? And in Blue Ribbon, where he’s jumping against the clock and the flashbulb goes off and the horse crashes through the barrier?’ Callie had seen nearly all the Cosmo Spence films.
‘Uh-huh. I cracked my ankle doing that, and they had to lift me on and off.’
‘Listen,’ the continuity girl said excitedly, ‘you want to make some big money?’
Mac shook his head. He was not interested in money. He would not even let the Colonel pay him overtime when he worked in the evening, painting doors.
‘Pity.’ She turned away. ‘The Colonel could have used that money, even if you couldn’t.’
‘What would I have to do?’
‘One day’s work.’ She whipped round at once. ‘Ride for Michael Fox. Prince Rupert of the Rhine at the Battle of Marston Moor. Long curly hair and a suit of armour and those floppy boots. The Mad Cavalier, they called him.’
‘Michael Fox, that jerk.’ Sitting on David, Mac spat on the ground, a bad habit he had picked up in his Western days. ‘He couldn’t play a Cavalier, sane or crazy. Why give a part like that to a guy who can’t ride a bicycle, let alone a horse? Why didn’t you get Cosmo?’
‘Didn’t you hear? He had a breakdown. Very bad. His wife walked out on him, and he was drinking. He’s washed up, I’m afraid.’
‘You are Cosmo Spence, aren’t you?’ Steve and Dora and Callie had forced their way into Mac’s room with a bowl of Anna’s chicken soup – rice and celery and onions and big chunks of chicken. You could almost eat it with a fork. They came in quickly before he could stop them, and stood with their backs to the door so that he could not open it and throw them out.
‘What do you think?’
‘I knew all along,’ Callie tried, then shook her head. ‘No, I didn’t. But when we saw that film, it bothered me all the time. He looked familiar, Cosmo did. I mean, more than just from other films.’
‘If I was Cosmo Spence,’ Dora said, ‘I’d want everyone to know it.’
‘That’s just it.’ He – Mac – Cosmo – sat on the edge of his bed and ate the soup out of the bowl, with the spoon handle sticking up into the side of his beard. ‘Too many people did know. And they get sick of you.’
‘“All these new kids coming up.” My agent used to call me every day, long distance, collect, Hollywood to New York – wherever I was. “You got to get a new image. You’ve got to get another big part or you’ll be finished.”’
He put the bowl down on the floor, wiped his mouth on a dirty towel and threw it into a corner. ‘Television. That stupid Western series with the fat guy and the little black kid, and I’d done three movies in a row that were all stinkers. I was so goddam tired. My wife stayed in New York. She never came on location with me. I rang her every day. I was lonely. I had all those phoney friends, but no one really but Elsa, after our – well, we had a little girl, but she died.’
No one said anything. He had never talked before. Now it seemed as if he could not stop.
‘It wasn’t the babysitter’s fault.’ He ran his strong hands through his beard and his thick hair, and dropped them, slapping the edge of the bed. ‘We went to a party. She suffocated in her crib. I never went to any more parties after that. I’d never liked them anyway. Horses were the only thing. I had ten one time when I lived in Wyoming. That was – oh, I don’t know – one time when Elsa left me. She always came back after a bit, and we’d start over.
‘Then I came over here to talk about a part my agent wanted me to do – lousy part, jolly coaching days, in capes and beaver hats, I’d have looked like hell – and Elsa wrote she’d gone to Mexico for a divorce. I cracked up. All shot to pieces. Nervous breakdown, you know?’
He looked up at them. Standing by the door, they nodded, although they did not know what it must be like to have the very fibres of your being snap, so that you could not cope with yourself, or anyone else.
‘Every time I had to talk to anyone, I cried. Hotel clerk, taxi driver – God damnedst thing you ever saw. They were going to put me in a clinic. I ducked off, got on a train to somewhere, got me a room – I didn’t even know what town I was in – hid from everybody and let my hair and beard grow, and didn’t surface until I was flat broke.’
‘Was that when you came here?’ Dora asked.
‘Yeah. I’d gone to the Employment Office to get work as a builder’s labourer, or something, but someone said “Horses”, so I scooted straight up here. Glad I did.’ He grinned at them.
‘Has it – I mean – has it helped?’
‘You bet. I think I’m beginning to be real again. I think I’m beginning to be real for the first time in years.’
‘Mr Spence, would you mind,’ Callie asked politely, ‘if we went on calling you Mac?’
He laughed. ‘Finest thing I ever heard.’
Chapter 20
WHEN MAC SAW the gravel qua
rry that the film director wanted him to ride down, carrying a limp man, and when saw the common grey horse he was to ride, he said, ‘Nothing doing. Not on that clumsy screw.’
‘The stunt man took him down O.K.’
‘And fell off into the stream, man. They told me.’
‘It’s the best horse we’ve got. It’s trained.’
‘I got one back home is better trained. I got one will go anywhere with me, and stay up on four feet.’
‘Bring it over tomorrow, and we’ll retake the close-ups with Michael.’
The Colonel said No. ‘Not David. It sounds too tricky. Never mind about the money. It’s not worth the risk.’
‘There’s no risk. I’ve had him down banks steeper than that. He’s as sure-footed as a cat. And the stream – I wouldn’t have gone near it on that plug they produced, but David isn’t scared of water. He’ll jump big, and he’ll jump clean.’
‘Carrying a man across the saddle?’
‘It’s a little guy. I’ve seen him. And the armour is made aloominum. Light as a feather.’
‘I don’t know.’ The Colonel chewed at the skin round his nails. ‘It’s too far to ride over there anyway, and Steve can’t drive.’
‘Mac can drive the horse box,’ Steve said. ‘I want to take the Cobbler.’
‘What for?’
‘They need some more Cavaliers in retreat. Duke of Newcastle’s Yorkshire White-Coats.’
‘With a broken leg in plaster.’
‘I’ll have armour and a big boot over it. They used to ride with their legs stuck out anyway. I get fifty pounds. I’ll put it in the collection box.’
‘Don’t bribe me.’
But the Colonel eventually agreed to let Mac take David, if they wrapped his legs. They took the ankle boots that old Flame used to wear because she knocked her fetlocks with the opposite hoof, and the wardrobe people painted them grey to look like bits of armour.
David also wore an armoured breastplate, jointed armour over his mane, like the back of a shrimp, and another piece over his forehead. The bridle and reins were of wide coloured leather, studded with bright metal. When he stood on the high ground at the top of the quarry, with his head up and his long tail blowing, he did look like a seventeenth-century battle charger. Mac, in armour and boots, with a glossy wig, his moustache curled and his beard greased into a point, looked like a Cavalier.
‘But he still looks like Cosmo Spence.’ Joan Jones was in the group by the cameras.
‘In his better days,’ someone said. ‘Poor old Cosmo. He’s had it completely, I hear.’
‘I heard he was dead,’ the cameraman said.
The wounded Cavalier, a resigned young man with a chestnut wig and a Vandyke beard, lay on the lip of the quarry, his helmet gone, his face carefully bloodied with panchromatic make-up. The cameras were placed so that as Mac galloped across them, it would not show that he was not Michael Fox, who had already climbed awkwardly on David for a close-up of the start of the heroic ride. Mac was on the horse now, nudging him with his legs and holding him in lightly, to keep him on his toes.
‘Action!’
Standing on the roof of the horse box in the road, Callie and Dora and Toby watched Mac wheel David, as Michael Fox had done, make him come up a bit in front, then trample, then off at a hand gallop that would look faster when they ran the film.
Behind him rode a group of Cromwell’s Ironsides. The wounded boy lay like a dead doll on the edge of the quarry. The steep drop below him was the only way of escape.
Mac brought David to a stop with all four feet together at what would look like the very edge of the quarry. He vaulted off, heaved the young man on to the front of the saddle, jumped on behind him, and glancing back at his grim pursuers, he pushed David over the edge and slid him down sitting back on his quarters.
They jumped down the last part where the slope levelled out. The stream at the bottom had firm banks, and with his arm round the boy, Mac gave David three strides and he was over, just as he had said, big and clean, and galloping off over the moor to where a scattered band of White-Coats waited at the foot of the low hills.
On the crest of the hill, in silhouette, a boy on a chestnut pony waved a plumed hat to cheer him on, his leg in the plaster cast stuck out on the side away from the camera.
Long afterwards, when the film was finally released, Dora and Callie saw it every day for a week.
David was superb, although you couldn’t see much of Mac, because when Michael Fox found out it was Cosmo Spence, he made them cut out the bits of film that showed his face.
But on the skyline, Cobbler’s Dream was unmistakable, with his head up to the wind and his long mane streaming from his crested neck. On his back, the young Cavalier stood slightly askew in one stirrup, and waved his plumed hat against the sky to cheer on Prince Rupert of the Rhine.
Chapter 21
IT WAS SOMETHING to tell at school.
‘Our horses are in a film,’ Callie said, to anyone who would listen. She did not usually have much to say at school. It was safer to keep quiet, so that nobody could find out what your real self was like, and attack it.
‘Our horses are in a film,’ she told Rosa Duff, who sat next to her.
‘Go on,’ Rosa said.
‘It’s called The Mad Cavalier. You’ll have to see it.’
‘Is it a horror film?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’
Toby, who had been born chattering, and had never learned to keep his mouth shut, even when he was teased, boasted to the younger ones.
‘My horse was in a film.’
‘Your horse. You ain’t got a horse.’
‘I have then. I ride it.’
‘It ain’t yours.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because I know it ain’t.’
‘Well, that’s all you know then, because it is.’
The arguments scuffled back and forth, as they did every day among the small boys. Toby’s story of the film was submerged in a turmoil of arms and legs.
‘Break it up, break it up.’ Two or three big boys lounged across the playground, pushing through the smaller ones. If you did not nip out of the way, you got shoved aside or knocked down.
‘Toby’s a film star!’ One of the small boys jumped up and down like a frog, pointing at Toby, trying to get on the right side of Lewis Hammond by jeering.
‘I ain’t said—’
‘Better not say nothing.’ Lewis pushed his face close up and wiped his horrible nose back and forth across Toby’s button nose so hard it made his eyes water.
The Louse swaggered on.
The frog boy was still jumping up and down inanely, jabbing a finger at Toby.
‘Toby is a li-ar,’ he sang. ‘Where is Toby’s fa-ther?’
Toby’s father was in prison, but he did not think they knew that.
‘Shut up!’ he screamed, his eyes still watering, from rage as well as pain. ‘You think you’re so big, but we got a famous film star at our place, so stuff that.’
He was at the Farm so much that it was ‘our place’, just as the horses were ‘our horses’.
‘Go on.’ The boy stood still.
‘Who is it then?’ The others, who had been running after the Louse and Co., throwing gravel as near as they dared, turned and came back.
‘Cosmo Spence.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘Been dead for years.’
‘I’m sorry, I forgot.’ Toby told Mac about letting the secret out at school.
‘I told you not to tell anyone.’
‘Oh, it’s all right,’ Toby said cheerfully. ‘Most of them had never heard of you and the others thought you were dead.’
Instead of cheering him, this upset Mac more than the letting out of his secret.
‘You see,’ he said. ‘I am finished. They don’t know me any more, the kids.’
‘I thought you didn’t want to be known.’
>
‘Only if I choose. Not if they choose.’
He was gloomy for the rest of the afternoon, muttering about being all washed up, and giving the best years of his life, and nobody caring.
But towards evening, there was a tremendous noise in the road outside. Three cars pulled up together, and a crowd of screaming women rushed into the yard. ‘Where is he? Where is he?’
The schoolchildren had told their mothers, and they had all come looking for Cosmo Spence, idol of their youth.
‘Cosmo!’ They rushed at him like a pack of yapping beagles.
Dora looked at Mac, and saw that he was terrified. He was pale and shaking, unable to move. She pushed him into a stable and bolted the door.
His fans were streaming through the archway. Dora had been washing down the yard. The hose was still running. She grabbed it, twisted the nozzle to a full jet and turned it on the women.
Their giggling shrilled to screams. They ran, skittering over the cobbles, while Dora stood in front of the stable door where Mac crouched, holding the hose like a fireman, flushing out one woman who had ducked behind a wheelbarrow, and chasing her out after the others, through the arch and into the cars.
‘Thanks, pal.’ Mac stood up and peered cautiously over the door.
‘You still want to be known?’
‘No, sir. It brought it all back. The shakes. Geez, I’d be a nervous wreck if I ever had to go to a première again. They tear your guts out. It’s terrifying. They eat you alive.’
‘Like vampires,’ Dora said.
‘Yeah. They suck your blood.’
Next morning, they found him in his room, packing the few clothes and possessions that he owned.
‘I hate to let you down,’ he told the Colonel, ‘but after yesterday, I can’t stay here.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Back to the States, I guess.’
‘To Hollywood?’
‘No, sir. Being here at the Farm has taught me a hell of a lot. It’s shown me the way I want to live. I’m going to get me a ranch somewhere and start a place like this for old horses in the States. Get a couple of good kids to work with me—’
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