In the lift, they could not look at each other. In the car, they couldn’t talk, not only because of the noise.
Charlie stood on the back seat with his nose to the window, snuffing the draught. Off the main road, taking the short cut through the far corner of the Housing Estates, there was a van blocking their road. Dad opened the window to yell at it to get out of the way.
‘Detour.’ A man came from behind the van. ’Shooting a film here.’
‘What film?’ Dad asked belligerently. He was ready to pick a fight with anybody. ’Dog biscuit commercial.’
At the far end of the street, there was a crowd of people, and some dogs on leads.
Dad growled a curse - would he ever smile again? - and crunched into reverse. As he turned to look behind him, Charlie favoured his nose with a wet mauve tongue.
Dad was already so angry that he hit him in the face. Charlie sneezed. Em burst into tears and climbed into the back seat.
‘Go on,’ Dad said miserably. ’You turn against me too, like all the rest.’ He tortured the gears, wrenched the wheel and skidded forward on the icy road. Charlie lost his balance and fell against his shoulder.
‘Get back.’ He shrugged him off. ’Useless, stupid dog.’
‘He’s a genius,’ Em mumbled into Charlie’s coat.
‘Then why doesn’t he write a book? You work your guts out, and who cares? Dog food commercial, he says. All people care about is some stupid dog.’
Em lifted her face out of Charlie’s long hair and said, ’Let me out at the corner. I want to see Alec Harvey.’
‘I’ll drop you there.’
‘I want to walk.’
He jammed on the brakes. The back doors didn’t open when you braked like that. Clutching the satchel, Em climbed over the seat to get out. Charlie leaped after her.
‘The rats desert the sinking ship,’ Dad said bitterly and drove off, polluting Newtown with his broken exhaust pipe.
Em ran back over the dirty town snow to where she had seen the film people. Which is the producer? As she ran, she rehearsed what she was going to say. Here is a play. You can buy it if you want. The man would look through the pages. Great stuff. Who wrote it? I did. You? No. As she ran, Em felt again the pain in the pit of her stomach when her father took the terrible blow in the Editor’s office. My father wrote it. Jerome Fielding.
She came to the back of a small crowd, and pushed her way through.
‘Which is the—’
‘Quiet. They’re going to shoot.’
‘All right, everybody. Quiet please.. This will be a take.’ A man in dark glasses and a long sheepskin coat with fur round the collar and bottom was shouting through a megaphone in the middle of the street.
’Everybody clear now. Georgie, here on the marker with that bloody great box. Everybody else into the houses, or over there out of view. We don’t want to see anyone but the dogs. OK, Jack, you’re behind the red door with that black and white monstrosity. Nancy, get that dog into the kennel. You know when to give him the signal. You - where’s the poodle’s trainer? - get him behind the gate and don’t let him jump till the brown dog is level. Take him up the street, Wally, behind the wall. We don’t see him till the whistle. Mrs What’s-it, you’re behind the camera. OK every body, you know what you do. Mrs What’s-it blows the whistle. Wally lets the brown dog go, and as he comes down the street you other handlers let your dogs go - through the door flap, over the gate, out of the kennel. Get ’em excited. I want to see them come round this corner yelping like a pack of wolves.’
‘While I stand there?’,said the man with the outsize box of dog biscuits nervously.
‘While you stand there, Georgie. That’s why you’ve got a padded suit. Chuck out the biscuits fast. Maybe they’ll go for them.’
Em stood at the front of the crowd with her hand on Charlie’s collar.
’Action!’
The whistle blew. The brown dog shot out from behind the wall. The poodle leaped the gate with all four feet together. Charlie tore loose from Em’s hand and ran out, shouting. There were seven or eight dogs tearing down the street with Charlie in the lead, scuttering the snow. Running with the horses had made him fast and fit.
Georgie with the padded suit and the dog biscuits stood in the middle of the road with a big actor’s grin on his rubbery comedian’s face. Charlie reached him first, and as the actor threw a biscuit, he went up on his hind legs with his paws wide apart, dancing and laughing in the snow, catching the biscuits - one, two, three - over his shoulder, high in the air, pouncing down to field a low one right from the jaws of the black and white mongrel.
Two of the dogs started to fight. One crawled under a car. Charlie bounced in front of Georgie with his plumed tail going like a flag, catching the biscuits all round him.
‘Cut! That’s it - OK everybody, grab your dogs, break it up!’ The man in the long Russian coat and dark glasses yelled over the pandemonium of barking dogs. Georgie threw the biscuit box at them and joined the director.
‘That shaggy dog stole the scene,’ he said.
‘Where did he come from?’
Em stepped forward to defend Charlie.
‘I let him go. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. It was great. He’s a natural.’
‘He was absolutely marvellous.’ The actor gave Em his rubbery grin.
‘I thought you were very good too,’ she said politely.
‘You’ve had your lot though, Georgie,’ the Director said. ’From now on, I’m going to use that dog alone. Just the biscuits flying at him from all sides, and we speed it up so he’s catching them flick, flick, flick.’ He wagged his head until the dark glasses fell into the snow. T want him at the studio tomorrow. We’ll build the new series round him. What’s his name, kid?’
‘Charlie.’
Charlie, who had eaten all the biscuit crumbs, and most of the box, looked up.
‘Catchem Charlie. I’ll make him famous.’
The director bent and kissed Em, which surprised her into the courage to say, T brought you a play.’ She swung the satchel round to open it. ’It’s very good.’
‘Don’t bother me now, honey. We’re going to try another take.’
‘Would you like a play to act in?’ Em asked Georgie.
’No.’ The director pulled him away. ’Come on. Another take. Can Charlie do it again?’
Twenty One
Charlie was famous. Catchem Charlie. Children recognized him in the street and shopkeepers were all of a sudden politer.
The day they showed the first commercial, everybody went to Mr Mismo’s house to watch it on the huge colour set which took up half the sitting-room.
‘Catchem Charlie! He never misses! And your dog will never miss health and fun with Chewitt biscuits!’
Grinning like an alligator, his matted winter coat bathed and brushed, Charlie caught the dog biscuits above, ahead, and all round him.
‘He did miss a few,’ said Em, who was Head Handler and always went to the studio with him, ’but they cut those bits out.’
At the end of the short commercial, Charlie gave several shouting barks at the camera (’He’ll always ask for more!’), and it moved right in on his eager jaws and bright toffee-ball eyes. They thought he would bark back at the screen, but he lay under the tea table and would not look, any more than he would ever look at himself in the mirror.
The advertising agency had paid him some money in advance, and the barn roof was mended within a week.
Carrie and Lester and Michael went to Brookside to tell the Agnews. They rode up the front drive, and Priscilla beat on her turret room window, and they could see her mouth shaping the cry, ’Oliver!’
Oliver was eating an ornamental blue spruce.
‘That’s poison.’ Mr Agnew came to the door in ski trousers and a thick white sweater, looking fit and tanned (he cheated with a sun lamp).
‘No, that’s yew,’ Carrie said.
’I’m harmless.’ He liked a good
simple joke, and Michael laughed kindly at the ancient pun.
‘Will she let Bristler ride again?’ he asked. ’She doesn’t want her to.’ ’What about you?’ Lester asked.
For all his hearty ways and booming laugh, Mr Agnew was quite easy to talk to, as grown ups go.
‘Well - I’d try anything, but Priskie has always been my wife’s department,’ he said, as if the family were a store.
In the room upstairs, they saw Mrs Agnew shaking her head vigorously. Priscilla’s face fell away from the window and they heard her babyish wail.
‘She never cries when she’s riding,’ Michael said.
Mr Agnew put his hands over his ears. ’I can’t stand that noise of hers. Sometimes I hear it in the night, but when I go in there, she’s not awake. She must cry in her sleep.’
‘So you hear it too?’ Lester whispered, and Peter moved restlessly as he felt his body tense. ’Hear what?’
They told him about the ghost of Diller’s baby, and. the tree that wailed when the axe struck it.
‘How perfectly marvellous.’ His eyes bulged. ’I’ve never had a haunting before. Why doesn’t my wife hear it?’
‘There’s some people hear ghosts,’ Lester said in Miss Etty’s tones, ’and some that don’t.’
‘And I do? I say, how splendid. I’m psychic. She’s not.’
‘Make her let Bristler ride,’ Michael urged quickly.
‘Make her?’ Discovering that he could hear ghosts had set him up no end. ’If I say she can, she can.’
He ran off lightly on the balls of his feet to tell Priscilla. The wailing stopped. Her face came again to the window, waving and smiling. They waved back. As they turned to go, they could hear the man’s and woman’s voices raised behind her in argument.
Soon after Priscilla began to ride again in the big barn, she was joined by Mr Mismo’s nephew Rickie. He was partly paralysed from polio. He had hobbled on crutches for so long that he could hardly remember when he had played and run with other children.
When Mr Mismo came to ask Alec if he would teach Rickie to ride, he offered his cob, Princess Margaret Rose. ’Quiet as a peastick. You could fire a gun under her nose. I have too.’
‘She’s too broad.’ Alec Harvey knew the mare well. She sometimes went lame, though Mr Mismo said she was ’sound as a dragonfly’. ’And she’s a heavy goer.’
‘Oh fish, she goes across country like a cloud. Dressage too, in her day.’
When Mr Mismo talked about the fat oatmeal cob, it always sounded as if he were talking about another horse.
Lester offered Peter, but Alec thought he would be too quick and nervous.
‘John could do it,’ Garrie said. John could do anything.
‘Too hot. You been corning him up.’ Mr Mismo was not going to let John have it over Princess Margaret Rose.
‘I’ve been giving him Mounted Police training. He’ll stand anywhere. If Constable Dunstable ever gets himself moved out of the village, we’ll need John for riot control when the Revolution starts.’
‘What Revolution?’ Mr Mismo tipped back his tweed hat which was shaped like a mould for blancmange, and scratched under his grey forelock.
‘Against Mrs Agnew making the Women’s Institute do Keep-fit classes in mauve tights,’ Lester said. His mother gave talks at the WI on how to stop your daughter doing something that would get her into Mount Pleasant. At the last meeting, Mrs Agnew had told her that if she lost two stone, public speaking would not make her breathless. She had never been back.
John seemed to know what was wanted of him. With Carrie to lead him and Mother walking beside Rickie, he stood still for the exercises, walked on, trotted slow and smooth, carrying the boy as if he were a fragile egg. With two riders, they could have games and competitions.
‘It’s got to be fun,’ Alec said. ’That’s what the horses can give them.’
Priscilla and Rickie were having more fun than either of them had known for years.
Before every lesson, they brushed John and Oliver, Rickie propped on his crutches, Priscilla leaning against a wall, but standing more strongly all the time.
Michael gave quizzes on points of the horse.
‘What’s this lump here at the bottom of his neck?’
Priscilla hung her head. Her memory was terrible, because she had not used it for so long. Rickie gave his slow, gentle smile and shook his head.
‘I told you,’ Michael said sternly. ’The weathers. What’s that there at the top of his bee-hind?’
‘Croup!’ Priscilla turned round in the saddle and put her hand on top of Oliver’s round quarters. When she started exercising on the pony, she could not turn at all.
‘All right, now this sort of ankle there is called the fetlock. Rickie, what’s the point of the shoulder?’
‘To hold his neck on?’ Rickie laughed when everyone laughed.
‘Show me.’
Rickie leaned to touch the pony’s shoulder with his thin, twisted hand. Alec had got the saddler to sew bars across the reins so he could hold them with his two good fingers, and John could neck-rein like a cowpony. They had slow bending races round poles cemented into flower pots.
On the Star one night, John told a group of horses about his new job.
‘I won a bending race today.’
‘Pooh, that’s nothing.’ The flighty bay mare who had crushed Priscilla’s back tossed her head as if she could feel the rosette under her ear. ’I won at millions of gymkhanas. Full gallop.’
‘I won in a walk,’ John said.
‘So did I.’ Creeping Sally bumped him with her blind old head. ’A hundred years ago, I won a trotting match in a fog that stopped all the others, even Phenomena. My rider and I had no use of our eyes anyway.’
‘My rider has no use of his legs,’ John said. ’He uses mine.’
He and Carrie walked back down through the skies, dropping gently towards sleep. The poem in Carrie’s head was the rhythm of his ambling walk:
What if we still ride on, we two.
With life for ever old yet new...
... And heaven just prove that I and she
Ride, ride together, for ever ride?
When Carrie died, she would ride John for ever on the limitless turf of the Star.
Twenty Two
Charlie got another payment for the Chewitt Dog Biscuit commercials, and they bought two lorry loads of sand and wood shavings for the floor of the barn.
The doctor wanted a spastic child to join the riding class, so a girl from the Pony Club brought her roan New Forest in a trailer twice a week. Helpers volunteered. The group was going to be part of the Riding for the Disabled Association.
‘It’s mad,’ Mrs Agnew still declared, but it was working.
Once, Priscilla walked three steps before she clutched at Oliver’s neck.
Her father, coming to fetch her, did not believe it.
‘Do it again, Bristler,’ Michael ordered. She did it.
‘It’s fantastic,’ Mr Agnew told Alec, ’what you’re doing.’
‘It’s not us,’ Alec said. ’It’s the pony.’
Mrs Agnew had kept away, but after Priscilla walked three steps, she finally agreed to come and watch her ride. It was a freak warm day, so they went out to the flat corner at the bottom of the meadow.
Mrs Agnew was very nervous. ’Look out!’ she called when Oliver stumbled. Priscilla turned to look at her and lost the rhythm.
‘Look at me, Pris,’ Alec called. ’Rickie, get that heel down. Susan, come on, you can rise to the trot. Legs, Pris, legs! Push him on. A lazy rider means a lazy horse.’
‘She’s not lazy,’ Mrs Agnew told him when he came over to the fence where she was sitting. ’She can’t use her legs.’
‘It’s what they can do that counts,’ Alec said. ’Not what they can’t. Look at ’em.’
Under a pale winter sun, two girls and a boy trotted round on the grass. Two wheelchairs stood by the gate and a pair of crutches leaned against the fence.<
br />
Lined up for exercises, they had to lean back on the quarters. If Michael lay on Oliver’s back, he bucked. With Priscilla, he had learned to stand still, though he put back his ears and tossed his head.
‘Watch that pony!’ Mrs Agnew called to Michael.
He looked round at her as she jumped down from the fence right behind Oliver. Oliver started, and trod on Michael’s toe. He yelled. Oliver jumped sideways. Liza grabbed at Priscilla, and managed to knock her foot out of the stirrup as she fell, toppling over the pony’s quarters with a thump on to the frosted ground that was as loud as Mrs Agnew’s cry.
She lay for a moment half stunned, then as her mother ran up and knelt beside her, she began to wail. Mrs Agnew picked her up and walked towards the gate. Priscilla wailed louder.
‘I want Oliver!’
‘She’s all right.’ Alec had checked her. ’Put her back on. It’s the only thing after a fall.’
‘You must be mad, Mr Harvey. I knew something like this would happen. You stupid child.’ She rounded on Michael. ’That pony’s mean, I knew it.’
Michael led Oliver away from her and tied him to the fence. Carrie would give him hell if she saw that he had tied him by the reins, but he didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything except that he had ruined the riding for Priscilla.
Her mother had put her in her wheelchair and was standing in a group, arguing with the other grown ups. Priscilla sat hunched miserably, like a trapped sparrow.
Michael pulled his hood low over his frowning eyes and. limped up the hill, kicking tufts of grass. He had to get away where no one could see him. He sat down under the lone elm in the middle of the slope. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow ... he would go on feeling as bad as this for the rest of his life. If he knew how to kill himself, he would.
As he sat under the tree with his nose running in the cold and his hands turning blue and purple, he saw Priscilla drag herself up out of the chair. She lost her balance and toppled against it. It fell sideways as she staggered forward and grabbed the fence. Then she began to pull herself along the fence, half dragging her feet, half hobbling. Carrie with John, the Pony Club girl with the roan pony, the arguing grown ups, all had their backs to her.
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