‘I’ll show you all the horses.’ He jumped down.
‘We haven’t the time, and I don’t—’
But Jim was already halfway across the yard and waiting for her by the first loose box. He gave her the grand tour, with histories of each horse, which he had learned by listening to Dora and Steve and Callie when they showed visitors round:
‘This is the Weaver, who used to be with the Mounted Police until he got the habit of crib-biting. He led all the parades and once he knocked over a man who was going to shoot a politician in Trafalgar Square. This is poor old Flypaper who used to pull a junk cart. This is Hero, rescued from a fate worse than death in a circus …’
If Slugger was here alone when people came, they got a very skimpy tour, because he would say no more than, ‘This here is a old police horse, ruddy nuisance. That’s a donkey, been here as long as me – too long. Out in that field, there’s a lot of lazy eating machines …’
When Jim had dragged her, protesting, round the stables, he insisted on riding Barney in the rain, so that his mother could see how quiet he was now.
Sheltering under a tree with a newspaper over her hairdo, she couldn’t believe it. ‘Is he drugged again?’
‘No, he’s himself. I wish I still had him, instead of Maggie.’
‘No, you don’t, dear. Grey Lady is worth twenty of that common pony.’
‘She’s got less sense.’
‘She’ll be the best at the races. Even Sir Arthur’s boys with their fancy ponies looked a bit glum when they saw her.’
Dora was in with Amigo when Jim took his mother to see his favourite, bandaging the leg which she was treating with a new liniment.
‘What a hideous horse.’ Mrs Bunker recoiled as he stretched out his pink freckled nose. Since the accident with Barney, she approached a horse very cautiously, with her hands in her pockets, which meant sugar to Amigo.
‘Ssh. He’s got troubles enough without hearing that.’ Jim knew about Dora’s money problems. Everyone knew. Ron Stryker teased her about it all the time, counting up the days until he would, as he said, ‘foreclose the mortgage’.
Kneeling in the straw, tying the tape of the bandage, Dora had one of her wild, impossible ideas.
There seemed to be plenty of money for buying ponies, loose boxes, recently a trailer for Grey Lady, an Italian saddle, expensive breeches and boots for Jim. The Bunkers had taken up horsiness in quite a big way. Mrs Bunker wore a Pony Club badge on one lapel, and on the other a glittery horseshoe brooch. Could Dora ever find the nerve or the words to ask her for a loan of sixty pounds?
While she was searching for them among the jumble of ideas and impulses and half-formed sentences scrambled in her head, Jim told her, dreaming with his shoulder against Amigo’s wide chest, ‘If Maggie and I win the steeplechase, we’ll give you the prize money for Amigo.’
The prize money was a hundred pounds. Colossal largesse from colossally rich Mr Wheeler, who did not think in figures of less than two noughts.
Dora sat back on her heels. ‘You wouldn’t.’
‘Why not? We wouldn’t want the money, would we, Mum?’
‘For you to win that race will be reward enough for me.’
‘I don’t much want to ride in it, you know,’ Jim said.
‘Of course you do,’ his mother said firmly. ‘It’s the chance of a lifetime.’
For her to get into Society at Broadlands. As the parents of a competitor, she and her husband were sure of an invitation to the champagne supper. As mother of the winner, she would be the equal of anybody. If Jim and Grey Lady were first past the post, it would be the crowning triumph of her life.
Grey Lady had a chance. She was a marvellously built pony, very fast and a bold jumper, though she made mistakes sometimes with Jim because he was nervous.
Now that Amigo’s future hung on the race, Steve began to train the grey mare when Jim brought her over to Follyfoot. They had built some larger jumps and a longer course. It included jumping the stone wall onto the lawn, over the rose arbour which had fallen in the last storm, and out again by way of the trench they had dug from the drainspout so that rain and sinkwater would keep it wet and boggy. This was good practice for the notorious Broadlands Water jump, uneasily nicknamed Beecher’s Brook.
Steve was in his glory with such a good pony to ride. Jim let him do the training. He would rather ride Barney, or potter about on the donkey, or sit high on the ridge of Amigo’s back as he ambled about the field.
Dora too preferred to ride Barney. Although she wanted Grey Lady to win the money for Amigo, she still wanted Barney to be in the race, for his experience and her pride.
‘You still think I’m going to ride him?’ Callie asked, after the ponies had completed the course, with Dora a hundred yards behind by the time she lurched over the drainwater jump and into the last stretch over the hurdles to finish at the dead tree in the orchard.
‘I know he hasn’t a chance, but still.’
‘If he hasn’t a chance,’ Callie said, ‘I don’t mind so much.’
‘What do you mean?’ Dora slid off the sweating bay pony.
‘It was the idea of having to try and win I couldn’t face. You know I hate contests.’ Callie suffered tortures in exams or on School Sports Day, or at the kind of parties where they played competitive games. ‘But if it’s just for fun, then I wouldn’t mind so much.’
That evening, they sat at the kitchen table to make out the entry for the Moonlight Pony Steeplechase.
‘Give us a bit of paper,’ Ron said. ‘I’m entering me old pal Amigo.’
‘He’s not yours.’
‘He’s as good as mine.’ Ron never lost an opportunity to make a joke about the loan that was not really a joke.
‘If you’re riding that Flamingo,’ Slugger saw Dora’s face and tried to make it into a real joke, ‘I’m entering the mule.’
‘Too old,’ Callie said without looking up from what she was writing.
‘What do you mean, too old?’
‘He must be nearly twenty.’
‘Oh.’ Slugger sat back. ‘I thought you meant me.’
On a clean sheet of paper, Callie, whose handwriting was the best, copied out the entry:
‘Barnacle Bill. Bay gelding. 14.1 hh. 7 years (he was nine, but seven looked better). Rider: Cathleen Sheppard. 12 years. Colours: blue with gold cross.’ (Her father’s racing silks, much too big, but Dora would take in the seams).
Callie read it out.
‘Disqualified already.’ Ron was picking his teeth with a chicken bone. ‘Warned off the course.’
Callie and Dora stared at him.
‘Barnacle still belongs to the Bunkers. Ponies must be ridden by their owner. Chip told me when I was down at their place last week to see how she’s going with that roan.’
‘How is she going?’
‘Lovely.’ Ron made a circle of his thumb and forefinger, and kissed it into the vague direction of the Nicholsons’ stable. ‘Makes Grey Maggie whatsername look like a plough horse.’
‘We’ll see,’ Steve said.
‘But if I’m not going to win,’ Callie was working carefully on the flourishes of her signature under the entry form, ‘cheating won’t matter. It’s just for fun, isn’t it, Dora?’
‘Yes.’ But secretly, crazily, Dora had never stopped dreaming that the bay pony might win the race. ‘Just for fun.’
Chapter 17
BARNACLE BILL WAS too slow. Dora gave him plenty of oats and plenty of galloping, and also walked him endlessly uphill to develop his muscles, but he was not built for speed, and he did not have the speed.
Dora thought he was galloping faster, until she went with Steve and Ron to a meeting at the racecourse near Bernard Fox’s stables and saw the thoroughbreds run. That was really galloping.
It was a flat racing course, a mile oval of beautiful turf, with the double line of rails newly painted, and the red-brick stands and buildings bright with white paint and window boxes. There were flowers everywhere,
and neatly-trimmed evergreens. Even the bookies, on a lawn by the grandstand, looked more colourful than usual, with bright umbrellas up not for the rain, but the sun in a dazzling sky.
Ron Stryker went to every race meeting and came back a plutocrat or a pauper, usually a pauper. Steve and Dora did not go often, because they had no money to lose, and if you followed Ron’s tips, you lost, even when he mysteriously won. But on a fine day this course was attractive and the races were exciting, and it was easy to see all the way round without buying a grandstand ticket.
Dora stood by the rail of the paddock all the time the horses were being led round before the race. She could never get enough of watching that marvellous swinging thoroughbred walk, the arch of the fine-skinned neck as the horse caught impatiently at the snaffle, the muscles moving under the shining skin, the whole bloom of a perfectly fit horse from the tip of the slender curved ears to the brushed tail swinging like a bell. Dora envied the stable lads and girls who led the horses, but they looked quite unexcited. So did the owners and trainers as they chatted in a sophisticated way in the centre of the paddock. Only the jockeys, when they came out, gave a hint in the eyes and mouth of being tense and excited, although some of them who had been riding for years joked casually, as if riding a race at thirty miles an hour were no more than going to the cinema.
When the horses went out to canter down to the start, Dora pushed through the crowd to get a place on the slope of grass at the side of the stands. From here you could see the whole race streaming round the course like a train; turning the bend, and head on into the straight, pounding, thudding, the leading jockey glancing back, each horse’s head going like a piston, its hoofs reaching for the turf and flinging it behind, a galloping marvel.
They were made for speed, and made for a course like this where they could gallop flat out. The pony course at Follyfoot was full of odd quirks and corners, rough ruts and soft patches, muddy wallows through gateways, short stretches of grass where you could let your pony go if you were sure of stopping him in time for the bend round the tree and the tricky hop onto the bank, with a drop into the lane. If Barney could only gallop here, he might learn to stretch and reach and gallop out, as the thoroughbreds did.
Dora was standing among the cheering and clapping people round the unsaddling enclosure, watching the pretty woman owner in a white dress and sandals who was holding her horse’s bridle, when the idea came to her.
‘Good race, Jessica!’ someone called, and the owner waved to them in the crowd. She patted her horse’s dark soaked neck and smiled for a man with a camera, wrinkling her eyes against the sun.
When the Pony Steeplechase was run and won, it would be moonlight, not sunlight, in which the winner would stand, with the cheers of praise all round.
Mr Wheeler always picked a date when the moon would be full. If it was cloudy, the race was put off to a clear night. The course was lit by the moon, with floodlights in the trees at the start and finish, and the headlamps of cars positioned to light jumps without dazzling.
This was the great risk and venture of the race, which some people (not invited to the supper) said would need to have a huge prize to get anyone to enter. No one, they grumbled, but an old fool like Mr Wheeler, who had been a daredevil rider in his day and was said to have broken every bone in his body, would dream up a night-time race. Although horses, like many animals, can see better than people in the dark, ponies who galloped and jumped well out hunting or in training would be much more uncertain and nervous under the moon.
But if Barney could gallop here on the racecourse, if he could learn to gallop by moonlight, flat out with confidence on the smooth turf …
Chapter 18
DORA DID NOT tell anyone her plan. She could not even tell Callie, because if she knew how serious Dora was about training Barney, she might refuse to ride in the race.
‘Just for fun,’ she had insisted. But there was nothing funny about sneaking Barney out of the small field at night, and riding him down the moonlit lanes into the valley and up the other side to the racecourse.
This was serious. Dora had turned him out tonight, so that Steve would not hear him come out of his box and across the cobbles. She had taken his saddle and bridle from the tack room where Steve slept above, and hidden it in the woodshed. She had gone upstairs with Slugger and Callie, and then dropped silently from her window into the tomato bed, using a branch of lilac to swing herself down.
Barney was easy to catch these days, as long as you pretended you did not want him. If you stood still in the field, not looking at him, he would come up and drop his mealy nose into your hand and practically beg you to take hold of the halter.
The moon was three-quarters full, bright and pearly. A fairly strong breeze blew small clouds across it, but they were gone quickly. Barney trotted quite happily in the half dark, his big ears alert to the unfamiliar black and white landscape, but without shying or stumbling. Dora would be able to let him gallop flat out. Neither of them would be afraid.
The main entrance to the racecourse would be shut and locked, but Dora knew that she could go round to the far side, where there was a gate used by the man who grazed a couple of horses on the grass in the middle of the course. They lifted their heads as Barney came in, and one of them called, but as he trotted down the side of the course to the stands, they dropped their heads again, well used to seeing horses gallop here.
Dora went through a gap in the rail, dismounted, and took Barney into the paddock. Walking casually with a blade of grass in her mouth like one of the stable girls, she led him round, and imagined that thoroughbreds walked in front and behind her, and that the knowledgeable crowd were standing round with astute comments, and people like Ron were giving people like Steve unreliable tips about what and what not to back.
Her other self was there too, at the rail, watching herself with envy.
She was also there in the middle of the paddock as an owner, chatting easily with the woman in the white dress, and with her trainer, who bore a resemblance to Bernard Fox, except that he was polite to Dora, and with her jockey, who nodded briefly as she wished him ‘good luck.’
Then she was the jockey, coming out a bit bow-legged. She mounted, touched her cap to her invisible self as owner, nodded at a last minute instruction from Bernard Fox, rode out and cantered down to the start.
Barney trampled as she collected him, and closed her legs against his sides.
They’re off! He bounded ahead, and settled down to drum the turf in a steady gallop that seemed, that was, faster than he had gone before.
He galloped so fast that the wind roared in Dora’s ears as if she were flying in an open plane. He galloped halfway round the course before he slowed to a canter, and finished with his head down, blowing, the streaks of foam on his dark wet neck white in the moonlight.
The crowd went delirious. They cheered and shouted in the stands. They threw caps in the air, and crowded round Dora as she came off the course, reaching out to touch Barney.
Well done! Good race! The winner, the winner!
Dora got off Barney, and invisible hands slapped her on the back. She led him into the small unsaddling enclosure with the little room where the jockeys weighed in after a race.
She stood there with Barney, his neck steaming under her hand, his nose squared, in and out, to get his breath back, and peopled the rail with admiring faces, and imagined the applause and the excited voices and the click of cameras.
‘Oh, my God. Oh, good God, I can’t believe it. I absolutely and finally will not believe it.’
The vision fled. The cheers of the crowd faded. Dora and Barney stood alone in the empty unsaddling enclosure. Behind them at the gate were three men. One was Bernard Fox.
‘Get that animal out of there.’
Dora led Barney out, feeling more foolish than ever in her life, which had already included many foolish moments.
‘I dread the answer,’ Bernard Fox said, ‘but I’ll have to ask you to explain.’<
br />
‘I didn’t think anyone would be here.’
‘We happened to have a late committee meeting, and that’s a better explanation than yours. A thief climbs a drainpipe and gets in through a bedroom window. He’s at the jewellery box when the woman pops up in bed. “A burglar!”’
Bernie was showing off for the other men.
‘The thief shoots her dead and takes the diamonds. When they catch him, he explains, “I didn’t think anyone would be there.”’
The other men, one tall, one small, laughed. Dora did not crack a smile. Barney put his head down and cropped the short clovery turf.
‘You’ll have to think up a better excuse than that, Dorothy.’
‘You know the girl?’ The tall man looked at Dora down his long nose.
‘She works for the Colonel at Follyfoot Farm. Mad as hatters, the whole lot of them. And the Colonel’s the maddest to leave them on their own. I’ll have to write to him again,’ he told Dora, ‘so let’s hear your reason for trespassing.’
Dora shook her head, ‘There isn’t any.’
She could not say, ‘I’m training the pony for the race.’ They would say, ‘What race?’ and laugh when they heard. She thought of the marvellous big horses streaming round at thirty miles an hour. They would laugh at poor little Barney with his burst of speed that ended in a canter.
‘I can’t make sense of it,’ the small man said.
‘These young people,’ the tall man said, ‘they just want to barge into other people’s property as an act of rebellion.’ He put on the voice with which grown-ups who can’t remember what it was like to be young tell each other what the young are like.
‘A revolutionary, eh?’ The small man was quite twinkly and nice.
‘Nothing so dashing.’ Bernard Fox would not let it improve to a joke. ‘She’s a trespasser, and should be prosecuted. I shall write to the Colonel and warn him, in case the committee decide to tell the police.’
‘Please don’t.’
He did not answer, so Dora got on Barney and walked away. Before she turned out of sight behind a clipped hedge, Bernard Fox delivered his parting shot.
Dora at Follyfoot Page 8