Claudine coolly removed the phone from Lizzy’s hands and took a look. Expecting her to say some sexy-sounding French words, I was a bit disappointed to see her brow knitting. ‘Oh,’ she said.
I took the phone back. ‘What does that mean?’
She shrugged. ‘I do not like him.’
‘Why?’ Lizzy asked. ‘Did you go blind?’
Claudine frowned. ‘I just do not like him. He looks … obvious.’
‘Guys, he’s not my boyfriend. He’s just my new boss. Who I’m NOT INTERESTED IN.’
Claudine studied my face for a few moments. ‘Okay. Okay.’
Claudine never approved of any of my crushes. It was like she actually wanted me to be single. It was like she wanted me to reach thirty-three in May and have had sex only one and a half times. ‘Even Kate likes him,’ I lied. She definitely would like him – she’d love him, but I wanted to call and tell her my news tomorrow.
Tim gave me a sideways hug, which Lizzy watched from across the table with interest. She was convinced we were secretly in love with each other.
‘To our brilliant Annie!’ Tim said, raising his glass. ‘Well done again, Pumpkin. I’m so proud of you.’ I sighed happily, comfortable in his lemony armpit, until Claudine interrupted to say she still thought Stephen looked cheesy and self-satisfied and that his approach to hiring people sounded completely subjective and in no way professional.
‘You should have married Tim,’ Lizzy slurred, when he and Claudine had stumbled off home. Being Lizzy, she was waiting for an Uber taxi, and being me I was waiting with her until it arrived because I was nervous about getting on the tube so late at night and was dithering over ordering a cab of my own.
‘Timmy,’ Lizzy continued. ‘You and him are like bloody brother and sister. I get quite jealous, you know.’
‘Oh, shush.’
‘I’m serious,’ she said, staring at me. Suddenly – and it didn’t happen often – I had Lizzy’s full attention. ‘Tim and you are the best people on earth and it’s crazy that you’re not together. I’m quite sure you love him.’ She actually seemed sad for us. ‘And he loves you. Kate said exactly the same thing when she was over for New Year’s Eve.’
‘I don’t love him,’ I repeated, for the millionth time. ‘And he doesn’t love me. I’d love to love Tim, Lizzy, but I don’t and thassat. Kate should know bet-better … God, I’m drunk. Where’s your cab?’
‘It’ll be here soon. Go home! I’ll be fine.’
‘No.’
‘Moron.’
‘Twatfink.’
‘Love you.’
‘Love you more.’
It’s a heatwave, everyone’s saying. Going to last two weeks! Right through to the end of summer! Maybe through autumn too!
For the girl, in this moment, there is no autumn, no September, no consciousness of anything that might be to come. There is just the shimmering heat, the smell of peaty green grass, the delicate splitting of daisy stems. She focuses all her attention on the pearly crescents of her fingernails, and the hairy little daisy stalks with their curious smell. She holds her breath every time she picks a new daisy and doesn’t let it go until she has threaded it through the slit of the last.
They are making a daisy chain, the tenth of the morning, but if her mother has tired of the game she doesn’t show it. She strokes her daughter’s hair, running her hand down the plait she attempted earlier that morning. It was the first time her child had asked for one and the request – so clear and formal – had made her laugh and kiss her all over.
‘Today I would like a plait,’ she had said, absolutely confident in her mother’s ability to do what the other mothers did. ‘I want you to start it on the top of my head so that I look like Carrie. She says it’s called a French plait.’
The plait had little blonde horns poking out of it and a kink like a broken mermaid’s tail, but she was delighted with it. She had stood smiling at herself in the mirror, holding the plait in both hands as if it might fall off.
‘What would you like to do with your birthday morning, sweetheart?’ her mother had said. She’d given her daughter the day off school. No child should have to spend their seventh birthday in a hot classroom with whistles and rules and shouty books. She’s still not convinced she won’t take both of her girls out of school and set up the home-education group she’s been talking about with two other mothers in the village. It just doesn’t sit right with her. They should be outdoors more at this age. Playing. They live in the middle of a National Park! Surely that’s the best classroom a child could ask for.
For today, though, it’s all about her seven-year-old girl with her fat plait and her white cotton dress. She’ll do anything her daughter wants. She loves her today with the same ferocity that she loved her when she came out seven years ago, a squashed, messy bundle, so perfect she could barely breathe as she held her in her arms.
‘I want to be outside all day,’ her daughter had announced. ‘Let’s start with some daisy chains and maybe then we can pick me some special birthday flowers. And apples, let’s look for apples.’
The woman had smiled. My little hippie, she thought proudly. ‘We’ll go up behind Woodford Farm,’ was what she said. ‘It’s still covered with daisies there.’
Chapter Three
Kate
On my first morning working at Mark Waverley’s yard I stumbled down the thirty-three steps to the kitchen feeling like I’d been hit round the head with a fence pole. It was six thirty a.m., still pitch black and bitingly cold, and it felt like only five minutes had elapsed since Becca had finished tutoring me late last night.
I was sick with nerves and sleeplessness. In spite of the deep exhaustion that had pinned me to my bed, I’d lain awake for hours, missing my family and wondering if there was any way I could reasonably contact them. My subsequent acceptance that I couldn’t had been terrible. There was a grief that went beyond tears, I often thought, and at that moment it had settled over me, like a pillow pressed to my face.
I needed toast. I could start a day without a shower, without a newspaper and certainly without human contact. I could not start the day without toast.
Joe, the groom, was sitting by a radiator eating a piece of cheese. In spite of the freezing cold he was wearing only a stripy T-shirt and jodhpurs, and in spite of the devastating hour, he was wearing a gigantic grin. He moved his hair out of those naughty eyes and winked at me.
‘Galway!’ He beamed, patting a chair near to him. ‘Come here to me and tell me stories of the Twelve Bens mountains. And feed me cheese.’
I dithered. Joe’s eyes had lit up as soon as I’d opened my mouth when I’d arrived in the kitchen last night. ‘Well, if it isn’t a flame-haired little lady of Eire for me to fall in love with!’ he’d shouted joyfully. ‘Happy St Patrick’s Day, my dear compadre!’
‘Happy St Patrick’s Day,’ I’d whispered uncomfortably.
‘That’s a strange accent you have there, my green-eyed princess. Mayo, perchance?’
‘Galway,’ I’d croaked.
‘The wild west.’ He grinned. ‘Wonderful!’ Joe was a little taller than me, as lithe and muscled as a whippet. Like everyone else there, he was quite young but his face had a sandblown quality, presumably from spending all his time on the exposed hills of Exmoor.
‘Tell me now, Galway.’ He’d poured me a glass of wine. ‘What brings you here?’
‘Left my job in Dublin for a career change,’ I’d trotted out. The wine was disgusting but as necessary as oxygen. ‘Couldn’t cope not being around horses. I’ve horses in my blood.’
Becca, arranging socks on the rack above the Aga, had smiled approvingly.
Joe had got me mildly drunk, told me I was gorgeous and asked me to marry him twice.
Now, at six thirty-five, he was taking calm mouthfuls of a big block of Cheddar and chatting away as if it were still last night. ‘I’ve a mate, Sean Burke, up in Kilgevrin. Do you know Kilgevrin?’
‘I don’t … I
moved to Dublin years ago.’
‘It’s a bit of a shitehole, Galway. Anyway, he …’
I zoned out, standing by the toaster while my bread had the moisture sucked out of it. Tiredness aside, I really wasn’t sure if I could do this. Any of it.
Tough, I said to myself. You have nowhere else to go, remember?
My toast popped and I searched for a plate. I had to make it work here, and that would be a lot easier to achieve if I stopped thinking about home. And all of the Bad Shit.
‘Galway?’
Joe was still eating straight from the cheese block. Little crumbs of it fell on to the large terracotta floor tiles. ‘Galway, are you fantasizing about us having sex, there?’
I shook my head, forcing a smile. Last night, with the wine and the warmth of a kitchen full of people, I’d found him funny. Now I was struggling. Come on, I chided gently. Crack a smile, Brady.
Joe wrapped up his cheese and put it in the vast American-style fridge. ‘Ah, Galway, you’re going to drive me wild,’ he said cheerfully, putting on a jumper. ‘You and all that gorgeous red hair. Well, I’m going to get Kangaroo tacked up. Best give me your number so I can call if I need anything.’ He pulled a hat on.
‘My number?’
‘It’s a big farm,’ he explained, digging his phone out. ‘We call each other all day.’ He stood in front of me, his phone in his hand.
Grudgingly, I pulled mine out and searched for my number.
‘Never understand people who don’t know their own number.’ Joe chuckled, punching it in.
‘From a man who eats Cheddar for breakfast and makes marriage proposals at first sight,’ I tried lightly. I even forced a shadow of a smile.
‘Grand!’ Joe tucked his phone away. ‘Now I can send you dirty messages … Ah, Christ, Galway, don’t blench like that! I’m jokin’ with you!’
He pulled his gloves on, watching me. Just for a moment, the naughty twinkling stopped and a shadow of compassion passed across his face. ‘You’ll be fine, Galway,’ he said kindly. ‘We don’t bite. Unless you ask us to.’
He left, and I started mechanically to eat toast, leaning against the rail of the Aga. You’ll learn, I reassured myself. You’ll learn to relax. These are decent people, Kate Brady, you can be happy here.
The grooms’ house was a beautiful old threshing barn with a large, Mexican-tiled kitchen that had once been a grain store. The ground floor was made up of several different reception rooms, ‘So it doesn’t feel like a hall of residence,’ Sandra had explained during my interview. There was a grown-up sitting room, a pool room, a TV room and even a reading room, but it seemed that most of the grooms at Mark Waverley’s yard spent their time in the kitchen or in the laundry room where they washed and dried all the horse stuff.
Everyone other than me had lovely big rooms with views across the rolling moorland that led eventually to the Bristol Channel, although my own view of the horse yard wasn’t too shabby. It was a rather lovely scene: an old stone stable block centred around a big square courtyard with a still-functional iron water pump in the centre: unusual and lucky to have so many proper old stables, Sandra had told me; none of those American-style barns with all that ugly metal. The doors and woodwork were painted a deep marine blue, which stood proudly against the yellowed stones of the stable walls. Behind the main courtyard, an ancient oak overhung a further oblong of stone stabling.
Last night I’d also met Tiggy, the Head Girl, who’d been friendly enough. In a very confident, this-is-my-empire-and-if-you-cross-me-I’ll-have-you-run-over sort of a way. Like all posh women who worked with horses she had blonde hair in a messy bun and one of those attractive, capable faces that had been genetically supplied with ruddy skin and good teeth.
Tiggy. For God’s sake. You couldn’t make it up.
Almost all of the jobs Becca had explained to me last night involved the removal of horse poo from one place to another. ‘Horses are veggies,’ Becca had reassured me, ‘so it don’t smell too bad, pet. Although their wee’s pretty bad, with all that ammonia, and they do like to take a good fart on you when you brush out their tails.’
Her final piece of advice had been about Joe. ‘Don’t go there,’ she’d advised. ‘He’s had a go on everyone. He’s gorgeous, if you’re into that sort of thing, but it’s not worth the pubic lice, my pet. Okay?’
‘I may not know a horse’s arse from its elbow,’ I’d said, ‘but I do know that I’m not looking for romance.’
‘Hock.’ Becca had smiled. ‘Horses don’t have elbows. They have knees and hocks.’
I finished my toast and pondered my next move. Neither Becca nor Tiggy had come downstairs yet and, other than stand and eat toast that I was too anxious even to taste, I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do.
I wandered across the warm kitchen floor – it was heated, I realized gratefully – and stared at a black-and-white photo of Mark Waverley on a beautiful horse. He was wearing a top hat, a tail coat and white gloves, and he was making the horse do a very boxy, poncy sort of a move. This, I remembered from the Olympics, was that mad dressage thing, where riders made horses do ballet in a long rectangular arena.
‘He got twenty-six on that test,’ Becca said, sliding into the kitchen. ‘Fuckin’ sensational. Don’t think anyone’s ridden a test like that in years.’
I smiled politely. ‘Oh, right.’
Becca sighed. ‘You don’t know what I mean, do you?’
‘Nope.’
‘Mark’s an eventer, right? That means someone who competes in horse trials. Dressage, cross-country and show-jumping all in one competition. Like a triathlon, I suppose,’ she said, pulling a large box of Shreddies out of a cupboard. ‘In the dressage phase you build up penalties for imperfections. Meaning that Mark got only twenty-six penalties. Nobody gets dressage scores like that.’
‘Go away!’ I said, genuinely impressed. ‘So he really is good, then?’
‘The best,’ she said proudly. ‘He may be an arsehole but he rides a beautiful dressage test. Especially on Stumpy.’
‘Dressage, show-jumping, cross-country,’ I repeated to myself, aware of the need to learn fast. ‘Dressage, show-jumping, cross-country. That’s a lot for one horse to do in a day.’
Becca smiled. ‘At Mark’s level, these things take place over three to five days,’ she explained. ‘Otherwise, aye, the horse’d die. So would Mark. So would we.’
I shook my head ruefully. ‘I’m useless,’ I said. ‘They’ll rumble me in seconds.’
‘Nonsense, pet. And if you don’t mind me saying, you’re not going to get very far with an attitude like that.’
‘Hmph.’
‘We’ll just stick to the story that you’ve had a few years off horses, so you’re a bit rusty. They really don’t care, sweetheart. They’ve got enough to worry about.’
Tiggy marched briskly into the kitchen, reeking of efficiency and good breeding. ‘Come on, then, folks,’ she commanded. ‘Let’s get this show on the road.’
But before anyone had time to get a show on the road, the door opened and suddenly the atmosphere darkened. ‘Morning,’ a male voice said crisply.
‘Morning!’ we all tinkled.
Mark Waverley. Younger than he looked in a riding hat. More handsome, too, with his dark hair and warm-toned skin, a strong, slightly Roman nose and guarded eyes. Something about him threw me straight off balance. Not in a good way.
‘Who are you?’ he asked. His eyes were appraising me as they might a new horse, although he didn’t necessarily seem happy with what he saw. Maybe I had bad hocks.
‘Kate,’ I said, giving him a firm, confident handshake. ‘Kate Brady, your new trainee yard assistant. Great to meet you. I’m a real fan of your work.’
I’m a real fan of your work?
‘You’re Irish,’ he said tonelessly.
‘I am. I’ve heard we make the finest yard assistants on earth.’
Mark just stared at me.
‘I’m armed and ready for acti
on!’ I added, although my voice was trailing off.
‘I forgot you were starting today.’ He glanced around the room where everyone had suddenly stopped eating and talking. Instead they were zipping up coats and rolling colourful horse bandages. ‘My mother hired you without passing on your CV or telling me anything about you,’ Mark continued, in that cold, slightly detached tone. ‘Can you come to the main house at lunch with your CV? You can tell us a little more about yourself. One p.m. sharp,’ he added, and turned away.
Becca gave me a reassuring smile.
‘The indoor school hasn’t been raked,’ Mark told Tiggy. ‘I told you last night I’d be in there doing flatwork at seven fifteen.’
‘We’ll get straight on to it!’ Tiggy said, as Mark left, without recourse to such pleasantries as ‘thank you’ or ‘see you later’.
‘You’d better take care of that,’ Tiggy said to Becca. ‘Teach Kate how to operate the Tank. Chop chop, team …’
Becca muttered about Joe being a lazy fucker, riding his own horse in there last night and not bothering to rake it afterwards. ‘Come on, pet.’ She sighed.
And then we were out in the freezing air, dark as night except for the old black pendant lamps, haloed by drizzle, that studded the outer walls of the stable block. Gravel crunched, ice-like, under my stupid wellies and a deadly wind made my eyes water.
This is it, I thought flatly. The first day of the rest of my life.
`I need to buy some proper clothes.’ I shivered as we crunched round to the stable-block entrance. ‘Today.’
A strange miasma of smells reached out as we opened the gate into the yard. Some I recognized – horse poo, straw – but many others wove together into an unfamiliar sensory blanket.
‘Clothes-buying?’ Becca snorted. ‘You’ve got a better chance of going on a weekend mini-break to New York than you have of nipping off to Minehead, pet. Lunch is a twenty-minute soup break and you’re spending yours with Mark. I’m going to tell you what to say this morning, and you’re going to listen hard while shovelling a lot of shit and filling a lot of buckets with freezing water, okay?’
The Day We Disappeared Page 5