Gilgamesh

by Jo Bannister

  “Leave my effing horse alone,” she spat with real venom, snatching the reins from the man who held them. “I hope this happens to you one day. No, damn it, I hope you really are hurt. I hope your effing head falls off!” And with that she stumped away, trailing the horse through the interested crowd.

  “Good heavens above,” I said to the judge, “do they all take setbacks with such dignity?”

  He grinned. “More or less. Your blood’s up, you see, you couldn’t do it if it wasn’t. Shall I tell you something? If it does happen to me, next month at Wellesbourne say, I shall be twice as difficult and three times as rude, and every bit as ashamed of myself when I get home as she’s going to be.”

  Harry and I walked slowly back up the hill to our vantage. “And another thing you don’t realise,” he said, continuing the same sentence, “is that the riders are all quite, certifiably mad.”

  Then it was Sally’s turn. The horse before her had already been eliminated and turned for home, so we had a little wait before she appeared. But not as long as it might have been; the big horse was eating the course with great, raking strides and huge, disdainful leaps. They were all travelling fast; it was an important event and everyone who entered wanted a crack at it, but the differences between the horses we had already seen and this Gilgamesh of David’s were unmistakable, even to our ignorant eyes.

  He couldn’t have been travelling half as fast again, but he looked to be. It was as well the horse in front had pulled out, it would have been run down before the end of the course. Great muscles surging visibly under the dark shining of his coat thrust out his limbs like pistons, mechanical in their precision and tirelessness. The sheer length of his stride devoured the ground.

  It’s absurd to claim I could read his expression watching from our hill—particularly as horses have bony, rather fixed faces, with only their eyes, lips, and nostrils capable of mobility. But if it wasn’t an expression, it was something—in his carriage, his deportment, his massive and overbearing presence—which told me and everyone else who saw him that day what he was feeling as he bore down on the great log-jam in his path.

  It was contempt. Contempt for the fiddling little obstacles in his way. Contempt for the few scant miles he had to gallop. Contempt for the opposition, horses without his speed or strength or stamina or courage, which found themselves tested to their limits by this afternoon stroll of an event. And contempt for his rider, a blur of coloured silks perched over his shoulder, a thing of no strength without his strength, a mere passenger presuming to tell him how to gallop and how to jump—but not too often, since the price for such impertinence was to have the reins ripped out of her hands.

  I had thought when they first came into view that Sally must be beating a tattoo on his ribs to make such speed. Nothing could have been further from the truth. She was sitting there—or rather crouched in her stirrups—as still as she could manage, interfering as little as she could and still keeping the horse on the track. She tried to steady fractionally for the logs, but rage glinted in the horse’s eye and he snatched the rein he wanted from her and hurdled the two corners as if they’d been a couple of gorse bushes included for fun.

  He treated the other fences we could see with equal disdain, and vanished from sight behind us as quickly as he had appeared. I don’t think it was just us: I think the whole of the crowd gathered in that corner of the course breathed out as one and went on standing for a moment after he had passed as if aware that they had just seen something special.

  “Well,” said Harry after a moment, and we picked up his coat and dusted ourselves down, and clumped our way back towards the finish.

  We found Ellen standing alone by the weigh-in tent, looking dazed. She brightened visibly when I hailed her, and looked up and saw us coming. “You made it, then. Harry—you too? What, are Skipley criminals taking Saturdays off now?”

  “Time off for bad behaviour,” murmured Harry.

  Ellen grinned. “Thanks for bringing Karen. She really appreciated it; so do I.”

  I looked round. “She found you, then. Where is she?”

  “Taking Gilgamesh back to his stall. I was happy to let her. I can’t even lead that big bastard with any confidence.”

  “And Sally?”

  “Around.” She gestured vaguely. “Every time I see her she’s talking to someone else. Last time it was the British chef d’équipe. Did you see her ride?”

  “It looked a bit hairy.”

  “Hairy?” She shuddered. “She frightened the life out of me. To be fair though, she did a good job. I didn’t think she’d be able to stay off his mouth that much, leave that much to him. It takes some nerve to sit on top of some lunatic horse galloping into a fixed fence and not try to pull him back.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought nerve was one of Sally’s problems,” said Harry, and Ellen shook her head in awe and admiration.

  “You can say that again.”

  I said, “How are they placed, then? They’ll not be beaten on speed, surely.”

  “Not unless someone’s found a way of fitting a turbo-charger. Theirs is the fastest time of the day so far—by twenty-four seconds! And that in spite of a run-out three from home. It wasn’t Sally’s fault; he was still travelling so fast she couldn’t turn him into the last element and he just skimmed past it. That was their only mistake on the course. She retook it and was still way inside the time, but the twenty penalties will keep her out of the ribbons.”

  She looked at me quite sharply then, as if she’d read my thoughts. “But no, not off the team, if anybody has a notion to put her there. It was an excellent performance for a combination that’s, only been together a fortnight. It must have sharpened the selectors’interest in her. Nobody’s seen her ride a top-class horse before; Pasha in his day was good, but he wasn’t in the same league. If she can do this with Gilgamesh after a fortnight, they’ll want to know what she can do with him in two or three months.”

  There was a kind of edge on her voice that I don’t think she was aware of, that she would have blunted if she had been. It was quite a day for Foxford, for Gilgamesh and the team producing him. Even I felt some of the glow entering my soul. But it was impossible for Ellen to divorce her pleasure at the way the horse had run from the awareness that it should have been David on him, not a girl who’d had the chance of him and had to give him up because she wasn’t good enough and who could never have got him here but for David’s hard work and now David’s tragedy. It was hard for her, in the circumstances, not to resent Sally’s success.

  I saw her shake herself almost physically. “I’m going to go and find a phone, and call the hospital. David will want to know how they got on.”

  “Give him our love,” I said.

  Soon after that we had to leave. It was a long way back to the Midlands, and even though Colonel Fane’s lad had seen to their lunch, the remaining inmates of the stables—David’s three and Pasha—were complaining of starvation and neglect by the time we returned to Foxford. I was going to stay and help, but Karen insisted she could whip through four meals and four beds in the time it would take us to drive the last half-mile home.

  Until Ellen and Sally returned after the final show-jumping phase the next day, Karen would be sleeping in the house alone. Before we said good night, Harry scribbled our home phone number on the back of a card and gave it to her.

  “With both Sally and Gilgamesh away, I can’t see much prospect of you being bothered,” he said. “But be careful, lock up properly, and if you’re anxious for any reason, however silly, call us and we’ll be up the hill before you’ve put the phone down.”

  “I’ll be fine,” she promised. She was about twenty years old and she was humouring the wrinklies. Then she grinned. “And if I’m not, I’ll be down that field and hurdling the hedge into your back garden before you’ve time to pick the phone up!”

  So we left her to her feed scoop and her shavings fork and went home. I was pleased to find that I remembered it quite c
learly. There was a dodgy moment as we went past Miss Withinshaw’s just as she was taking Podgy for his constitutional, but after that I had no doubt which was our gate and remembered our front door quite distinctly.

  We had cocoa, a wrinkly drink if ever there was one, and then I went to bed, leaving Harry poring over his large-scale map of Skipley and environs. When I asked what he was doing, he grunted.

  “And a good night to you too, dear,” I said, and went up.

  Chapter Five

  The next day was Sunday, and we went for a walk. It was Harry’s idea. He said he’d walk up to Foxford with me, and when I’d finished helping Karen, we’d go for a walk in Foxford Wood. We had lived within sound of its rooks for over a year and never yet taken the trouble to walk there, but it was a nice idea and a nice day and I agreed readily enough. Besides, it was about as romantic as Harry ever gets and I didn’t want to discourage him.

  Listening to the gossip in the coffee shops—well, all right, transport cafes—of Skipley, you’d think you couldn’t venture into Foxford Wood without tripping over writhing bodies pale in the dappled light. You’d think that parking would be such a problem in the narrow track leading there that a small multi-storey car-park would be the only solution. You’d think half the population of the West Midlands had been conceived there.

  So it was something of a disappointment to find Harry and I had the place to ourselves that sunny Sunday morning. Another couple might have taken advantage of such an opportunity; but Harry’s a policeman.

  The wood was a lot bigger than I’d thought. We saw the face of it, where it frowned down on grey Skipley, and it ran along the northern edge of The Brink and up to the ridge that was the crown of that geological feature. What we couldn’t see from our cottage, from Foxford, or from down in the valley was how it flowed smoothly over the top of The Brink and for some considerable distance down the gentler slope on the southern side. I wouldn’t know an acre from a hole in the wall, let alone these newfangled hectares, but I doubt there was much change from a mile in either direction. It was a big wood, and under its canopy it was a pretty dark wood too. Any number of babes could have been lost there, any number of sharp-eyed, patter-footed, whistling Wild Wooders could have lurked among the boles and thick roots.

  In a timid, Moly sort of voice I said, “Oh Ratty, I’m so glad you’re here.” But, of course, Harry had been boning up on the Police Manual while the rest of us were reading The Wind in the Willows and thought I was being silly and really rather offensive.

  Tracks and paths of all proportions, from one-way hedgehog runs to rides that would have taken a robust small car, crossed and recrossed the wood. The trees themselves were spaced somewhat randomly, but at natural rather than monoculture-forestry intervals. Trees that had been allowed to grow old gracefully and die on their feet now lay rotting gently across the paths, and new paths had been worn round them. Clearly they would remain there until there was nothing more than enriched humus to feed the new generations of oak, ash, and beech. They were in no one’s way, unless maybe the owner of the small car with the remarkable springs. Certainly they had not impeded the motor-cyclists who had left their tyre tracks here, baked into the dried earth round the fallen trunks and right over the top of one.

  Harry studied that particular spoor, the tread deep and clearly etched in the mud either side of the tree and just a narrow track skinned of moss and crumbling bark over the top, for some time without speaking.

  There were other tracks too, similarly preserved by the winter’s mud drying into the long spring: a horse, a small pony, several different boots and shoes, several different dogs, a probable fox, and something heavy and clawed that I decided on no evidence at all was a badger. None of them appeared to be recent. We weren’t leaving any trail that we could see, and it was unlikely that anything else in this wood in the last few weeks had either.

  Harry nodded at the hoofprints. “David?”

  “I doubt it. Karen says he never rides here. If he does anything like Sally’s speed, I’m not surprised. You could run into a tree very handily.”

  “Well, someone’s had a horse in here.”

  “Maybe someone who rides slower than your average eventer.”

  “Like Dick Turpin, you mean?”

  “Or Paul Revere.”

  Harry’s brow creased thoughtfully. “Was that him in the Derby?” I told you, a sense of humour. A strange sense of humour, but a sense of humour just the same.

  We walked on, bearing approximately north. Harry chose the route, walking two paces ahead of me like the Queen and making increasingly rare essays at conversation. I couldn’t see what was guiding him, what dictated one path rather than another as pretty and clearer. But plainly he had something in mind, so I tagged along, largely uncomplaining, although I made an exception when I found myself trailing two steps behind him through a bramble bush.

  But then the dappled shade under the trees began to brighten, and we saw daylight ahead where the wood gave way at last to open fields. We walked towards the light until barbed wire stopped us, some three generations of it tangling rustily along the edge of the wood to waist height. Brambles had grown up through it; stakes supported it at irregular intervals and angles. It was more than unpassable; it was unapproachable.

  We tracked left and walked until we came to a gate, but it wasn’t much better: angle-iron rusted along the top to lethal points and projections, secured by a chain whose padlock might have opened once but hardly within living memory.

  We stood at the impassable gate, looking down the green hill onto Skipley. Away to the right was a thick fuchsia hedge that looked vaguely familiar and a ridge-pole and a chimney-pot.

  “I can see our roof!”

  “Good heavens,” said Harry indulgently, “even from down there?”

  I glared at him, mostly from habit. “This is the field below Foxford, where David has his cross-country jumps. Where Sally was shot at.”

  “Where you found Sally, yes,” he agreed. “Come on, this is supposed to be a walk.” He led the way back into the wood, putting the field and Skipley beyond it at our backs.

  At least now he stuck pretty much to the tracks, and the better ones at that, so that although the depth of the wood from front to back was further than we had walked from the lane to the rusty gate, the going was easier and the way more pleasant. But I had long since given up on the fiction of a Sunday morning stroll. It wasn’t part of Harry’s style. Too much of his working life had been spent on his feet for him to consider it a recreation now. His preferred exercise for Sunday mornings involved a quite different part of his anatomy.

  And if it wasn’t a recreational and romantic stroll with his wife in sylvan surroundings on a sunny Sunday morning at the end of May, then he was working. I sighed resignedly and tramped on in his wake. I should have known better. Perhaps I did.

  In due course the woods ahead of us lightened again, and glints of a jewel-like green startled eyes grown accustomed to the dim. As we came to the southern edge of the wood, bit by bit the Shires spread their panorama before us. The slope ran away from us in a long and gentle curve, rolling like the surface of a quiet green sea towards a horizon gone to mauve with the distance. We could see hills that must have been twenty miles away: Edge Hill, the Cots-wolds, even the faint blue bulk of the Malvern Hills like a backdrop painted on the sky.

  Closer than that the folds of the earth were full of secret places. Little spinneys clustered in some, old houses in others. The tithe bam at Clayton, reroofed in living memory but essentially dating back to when medieval taxes were paid in kind, was a dominant feature of the view to the west, its great size in no way diminished by the manor, farm, and trees that grew up round it later or indeed by the four miles between Clayton and Foxford Wood.

  More to the south and closer was the warm brickwork of Standings, rising out of a little copse of landscape planting, its outline as militarily precise and upright as the Colonel himself, a retired brigadier of a house wi
th pink, scrubbed cheeks, whistling “Land of Hope and Glory” with the wind through its crenellations.

  A little eastward lay the mill house which Jan Parker and her brother had converted, fronted with white board of doubtful authenticity but great charm and topped with a cricketing weather-vane. The Maudsleys’house was down there too, a little further east and a little further away. I couldn’t see the house, but the tip of the flagpole at the end of the long lawn stood proud of the surrounding trees. I had it on good authority that Mr. Maudsley ran the Union Jack up that pole twice a year, on the Queen’s Birthday and St. George’s Day.

  It was impossible to look out over this garden of middle England and not be amazed that the mile that would take you from this edge of the wood down past the sunny pink timelessness of Standings and on the way to Clayton’s ancient barn would take you from the other edge of the wood down past the hospital, over the ring road, and into Skipley, where the rain either threatened or fell almost constantly, where the grey streets were host to nameless crimes and unmentionable vices, where the very name The Black Country seemed to have been coined.

  It was a landscape of extraordinary contrasts, of great beauty and great squalor, some of England’s most soul-destroying towns, set in some of its most exquisite country and surrounded by some of its most delightful villages. But who sings abroad the fame of the Slaughters, Upper and Lower, of Evesham and Bourton and Broadway and Warwick? Transplant any one of them to the south coast or the Thames valley and the tourists would cram in until the little places would start to suffocate in the crush and people queueing for the public conveniences would only live long enough to reach their goal by barbecueing a passing poodle in the car-park. But whoever takes holidays in the Black Country?

  So who’s complaining? If word got out about the beauty of the rolling shires behind The Brink, the first thing that would happen would be that the roads authority would straighten out all the lanes—Miss Withinshaw’s Podgy becoming an early casualty of the increased traffic and speed—and then they’d carve through the farmland with a branch motorway from the sinuous slumbering giant all but hidden in the distance and its own fumes away to the east. Fame has its price, for beautiful places as well as people. I just wish that friends wouldn’t pat my hand consolingly when I tell them I’ve moved to the Midlands.