by Jo Bannister
I climbed to my feet. It was a slow, laborious climb, longer than I remembered it, and in the course of the final ascent I leaned my hand on the horse’s kneecap with a familiarity that would have seemed incredible only a minute earlier, before we heard the siren. When I got there, I was closer, a little, to Sally’s level. It seemed worth trying the woman-to-woman approach.
“Listen,” I said. “I owe you nothing, not even good advice. But if it was me sitting there on top of an eventer, with a police car coming up the hill behind me and a get-away plane ready to fly me the hell out of here, I wouldn’t be sitting there long. I’d be riding away at top speed, happy in the knowledge that where I led, no police vehicle in the world could follow, excepting only a helicopter and you have to book those three days in advance.”
I could see her thinking about it. She glanced back at Foxford and then distantly at the wood as if her rendezvous with the expected plane was behind The Brink somewhere. On land at or convenient to Standings probably. There were any number of long, flat fields in the area where a light aircraft could land, and while several of them were currently knee-deep in growing barley, there was, in this horse-mad county, no shortage of pasture as well. “Where’s he taking you?”
“Ireland,” she said. Then a look of mingled slyness and outrage crossed her face, as if she’d caught me in some cunning subterfuge. Then she shrugged. “Well, they could guess that much—Harry’s people.” The way she said his name, all her problems were his fault. Even with his blood on her hands, she still hated him for it. “Then South America. I’m not telling you where. The place is full of stud-farms; a good English rider can always get work. I’ll be all right.” It wasn’t me she was trying to reassure so much as herself.
What was keeping her? If she was waiting for me to wish her luck, she’d miss the plane.
“I don’t want to go,” she said, and smiled sadly. She sounded rather like a little girl leaving for her first Brownie camp and rather like a bride with the wedding car waiting at the door—not so much afraid of the future as clinging to the past. “I love this place.”
If I’d had it in me to feel sorry for her, that would have been the time. I hadn’t, but the time for hatred was gone too. “You could stay and sort it out.”
“I’d go to prison!”
“Yes. But the time would get over, and then you could come back. From Bolivia or wherever, you’ll never be free to come back.”
She looked at me intently for a moment and then, straightening, turned and looked down The Brink onto Skipley, sprawling and grey and infinitely little in its dirty valley, compared with the rolling green and gold all round. She shook her head. “I couldn’t bear to be confined. After this—this freedom, this power?
“You don’t understand, do you? People who don’t ride never do. You think it’s something like keeping a cocker spaniel. Men think girls do it for the want of something between their legs. But it isn’t sublimated mothering and it isn’t sublimated sex: it’s power, pure and simple. The Huns knew it. The Chinese, who lost one army and risked another to get horses, knew it. The Plains Indians knew it. David knows it—ask him. The strength and speed and endurance of the horse is something a man on foot can never match; but an unridden horse hasn’t the courage to use its power. The combination of man and horse is greater than the sum of the parts.
“Well, I don’t want to go back to being a mere human again. I won’t be tied to the ground, like you. You might as well cut a runner’s feet off, or a painter’s hands. It’s the same thing: deprive me of a horse and you cripple me. I won’t live like that. I can fly! I will not be put in a cage!”
That was the root of all her problems, that feeling of being more than human, not bound by human rules and regulations, and she needed weaning off it as much as an alcoholic ever needed drying out. But I had no interest in her needs, not even enough to try to persuade her. She had hurt me too much. I wanted to get back to my husband and keep him safe and comfortable until the ambulance arrived.
I said, “Do what you like. I’m going back now.” I turned away from her and began to trudge back across the field. I knew she could ride me down if she wanted. I didn’t think she would. I was almost too tired to care. When I was half-way there the field gate swung open and a uniformed policeman shot through like a jack-in-the-box. He took two running strides towards me, hesitated on the third, then broke to a walk and stopped. I looked round, but Sally and the big bay horse were gone.
I got back to the yard just in time to see the ambulance disappearing down the drive. The policeman had radioed for it as soon as they’d found Harry, and it only had a mile to come.
“Damn,” I said, angrily blinking back the tears I thought I’d seen the last of. “I wanted to go with him.”
The policeman blinked too. He’d been looking at my thigh. I think it was the blood that fascinated him, though it could have been the sight of his superior’s wife in a state of informality verging on undress. “Tell you what,” he said. “Your house is just down the road, isn’t it? If we drop you there, can you drive yourself down to the hospital? We’ll have to take off after your friend on the horse, though God only knows where we’ll find her.”
I borrowed his map and indicated the line which Sally’s gaze had sketched when she spoke of her escape. “Try along there. She’s expecting a light plane to pick her up, so you’re looking for a fairly big, flat field with nothing growing in it.”
“Bless you, love,” said his mate, his eyes warming, and we all piled into the squad car and zoomed backwards up the yard and then forward down the drive after the ambulance.
Fate spat in my eye again. At the end of the drive, when the driver throttled back to join the road, I heard the fractional waspish murmur above the car engine that said time was of the essence.
I glanced from one policeman to the other, but neither of them had heard it yet. In just a minute they could drop me at my door and go on from there. They wouldn’t know when I’d first heard it. Harry needed me with him.
Harry would never forgive me if I let our needs interfere with his job. I sighed wearily and announced, “I can hear the plane.” So we turned up the lane towards Standings.
It took eight minutes. Long before we raced round the curve of the drive in front of Standings, spitting gravel at the Colonel’s windows, the little four-seater had dropped down over the meadows towards Clayton, circled three or four times in preparation for a landing, and vanished below the close and wooded horizon.
“Let me out here.” I didn’t want to be there when they caught her—if they caught her, if it took longer to turn the plane and take off again than it would take them to reach it. I could call a taxi from the house; whatever role Colonel Fane had played, I didn’t think he’d begrudge me that. The car paused just long enough for me to dive out and then hurtled on its way.
I went to the front door and rang the bell, but there was no reply. The Fanes’housekeeper had left a week after Bramham; now it was clear why. After Sally came back, they couldn’t risk having staff in the house. So I went to the back and knocked, and when there was still no response, I tried the door and, finding it unlocked, walked in. I didn’t much like making free with the Colonel’s house like this; but my need was pressing, and anyway, the situation seemed to have passed beyond the point of normal courtesy.
The telephone was in the hall, outside the sitting-room door. The door was open, and as I passed, I saw the shape within of Colonel Fane sitting in his preferred chair in front of the TV. He gave no indication of being aware of my presence, but I didn’t feel I could help myself to his telephone without at least announcing myself first.
I put one foot over the threshold and my head through the door. “I’m just going to use your telephone, Colonel, if that’s all right.”
He looked round then—slowly, as if all his body had gone stiff. The steel-blue eyes were expressionless, deep wells in which nothing moved. In the weeks since I had seen him, he had lost weight and put on
years. His face was drawn and harrowed into a relief map of suffering. There was, too, a vacancy about him as if he’d been left behind by events. He looked an old, old man waiting in his favourite chair for death or Meals on Wheels, whichever should come first.
His voice, when he spoke, was faint, as if it was already travelling across a greater distance than that between him and me. “Of course, Mrs. Marsh. Are you all right?”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“I am glad,” he said. “I tried to stop her, but …” He let the sentence peter out.
“She shot Harry.”
“Oh no.” I don’t think I imagined the distress in his voice.
“I think he’ll be all right. An ambulance took him to the hospital. I’d like to call a taxi and follow.”
“Of course. No, take my car, it’ll be quicker.” He stood up and patted vaguely at his pockets. Then he shuffled over to the bureau and started opening drawers and feeling in pigeon-holes. I had never seen anyone outside a stroke ward move so slowly. I was beginning to think it would be quicker to call the taxi when he found them. “There. It’s in the coach-house, round the corner in the straw yard. Take it. I shan’t need it.”
He held out his hand with the keys in the palm. I took the step or two into the room which were necessary to reach for them. As I took them, his hand closed on mine, firmly enough to startle yet somehow not to alarm me. It was a gesture almost of supplication.
“I really am most dreadfully sorry about what’s happened,” he said. “I hope you’ll believe that I never knew anything of what she intended until after the harm was done. I could have given her up then, I suppose; but she is my daughter … But if I had, your husband wouldn’t have been hurt. That at least is my fault. And the aircraft.”
“The aircraft?”
“I heard it just now. I arranged that—arranged with a friend of mine for his son to pick her up and fly her to Ireland. He doesn’t know the police are after her. He thinks they’re going for a weekend’s racing at Fairyhouse and then flying back. None of this is his fault.”
Gently I extricated my hand. If I couldn’t bring myself to free him from blame, neither did I feel any need to add to his burden. “I have to go. They’ll be looking for me at the hospital.”
“Of course. I’m sorry. I am sorry, about everything. I hope your husband will be all right.”
I has a strong sense that he was saying goodbye. I hovered in the doorway, anxious to go and yet unwilling to leave him. I’d have felt less bound if he’d asked me to stay, felt less sympathy if he’d sought it. I knew that what he’d done and hadn’t done had contributed to the train of events which left Harry lying in the dirt with a hole in his chest, but whatever the dictates of the law, it wasn’t reasonable to expect him to have behaved in any other way. He had helped his daughter hide from her pursuers and had arranged to get her out of the country when the chance arose. He wasn’t responsible for the hole in Harry’s shirt.
I said, “Listen, this will all get sorted out. Whether the police pick up Sally or not. There’ll be a lot of questions and a lot of fuss for a short time, and then gradually everything will start getting back to normal. I know how difficult it must be for you, but it won’t go on being—forever, or even for very long. Stick with it; it’ll get better.”
He smiled then that sad, gentle smile that Sally had surprised me with. She was very like him. Sally’s tragedy was that she had had no great cause in which to sink her energies and risk herself. Faced with an epic wrong, she would have triumphed spectacularly or, at worst, failed with honour. At Scutari she’d have been another Florence Nightingale; in the First World War, another Edith Cavell; in a storm-tossed rowing boat, another Grace Darling; at Mount Tabor, another Deborah. Sally’s tragedy was that the only cause that came her way was her own success, the only great wrongs in her life the ones she wrought herself. If only she could have used the strength of purpose, the analytical mind, the skills and strategy she had learnt from her father in some way he could have been proud of. War would certainly have made her a heroine; without one, she’d had to devise her own.
Colonel Fane said, “I appreciate your kindness. I’m sorry I haven’t done more to earn it. I really think you should go now, and see how Mr. Marsh is.”
So I did, even though it was already in the back of my mind that I would never see him again. In that, however, I was wrong.
The straw yard to one side of the brick house marked the ancient demarcation line between estate and farm, between owners and workers, landscape and land. It was where the ricks had once stood, in the days before combine harvesters and Dutch barns and now the pieces of farm machinery stood there, waiting for their turn to come round with the seasons. Between the ploughs and harrows and reapers and rakes, a fairway had been left to the coach-house where the cars were kept. I walked towards the door up this avenue of machinery like a farmer’s bride, lacking only the arch of crossed pitchforks and a muck-spreader for the drive to the reception.
And then it was as if a careless step had taken me across the invisible, fluctuating boundary of a time-warp and I was flipped back down the progression of my own hours, because long before I reached the door, hemmed in as I was by walls of agricultural equipment whose purposes I could mostly only guess, I heard again the hollow, rhythmical step which had filled me with such irrational terror—well, at that stage it was irrational—in the stable yard at Foxford.
There were of course differences. This time I knew she was there and she didn’t know I was. The horse’s stride was freer now she wasn’t holding him back to stretch the moments and savour the mounting tension. And we weren’t the only people on the place: Sally was calling to her father as she rode up the yard.
“Daddy? I didn’t go. When it came to it, I couldn’t. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in Brazil! I wouldn’t have made it, anyway: there’s a police car down on the forty-acre; I expect when they realise I’m not going to show, they’ll come up here. Daddy, I want—”
A full half-minute must have passed from when I first heard her to when she turned the corner of the straw yard and saw me. I could have used that time, to run silently on moccasined feet and let myself into the coach-house out of sight or just to get in among the bulky big machines and duck down. Either would have served, but I managed neither. I froze—like a climber on a rockface or a linesman up a pole or a rabbit fixed in the murderous unwinking stare of a stoat. Fear rooted me to the spot, the impossible fear of something I had already faced and survived, which even malicious fate couldn’t ask me to face again. Mixed with the fear were incredulity and outrage, but they didn’t help my feet unstick from the concrete until it was already too late.
I’m not sure Sally wasn’t more shocked than I was. The last thing she had expected to find here was me. She had left me behind, not only physically but in her mind and memory, when she went to meet her plane. Somewhere along the way she had changed her mind about accepting exile; I’m still not sure what she intended doing instead, but she had ridden back home, knowing the police were no distance behind her, to tell her father of her decision. And there, in her own back yard, ready to intrude even on that brief, emotional, infinitely private moment, she found me.
Through no choice of mine, I had come to wear the face of Nemesis for Sally Fane. It must have seemed to her that whenever her options narrowed, when opportunity slammed a door on her and luck ripped the rug from under her feet, I was there. I hadn’t engineered her downfall, though I had made my contribution to the process. But I think that by being there at every turn, watching her dream turning to ashes and occasionally giving the ashes a little stir, I had become associated in her mind with the terrible price she was going to have to pay for losing her gamble on Gilgamesh. That was what the ambush at Foxford had been about. Before she left, she wanted to erase me—negate me, demolish me, rub me out.
And now, this late in the game, here I was again, witnessing her ultimate defeat. It was the last straw and I saw it br
eak her reason. I saw rage burst like a storm in her eyes, filling them with darkness. I saw her face twist up with fury as if at an injustice, and the darkness of blood suffuse it. I saw her mouth gape with anger and heard a sound like mayhem ripping out.
And then she turned the horse by the rope along his neck and drove her heels into his muscled flanks, and he exploded into action, a roll of thunder and vengeance hurtling down on me head-on, so that almost all I was aware of was the wideness of his eyes, the flare of his nostrils, and the piston-pounding of his knees as they shot half-way up his chest with every stride.
Everything after that happened so incredibly quickly that you couldn’t split the separate events away from the fast, hard core of time driving through them. But for me on the inside it was somehow different: there was time to take account of the moment’s component parts, almost as if the horse galloped in slow motion. I could watch his knees raking up and his neck thrusting out with the effort of acceleration. I could see the madness in the face of the rider crouched over his shoulder. I could feel the slow percussion in my ankles as I ran backwards, each awkward step taking long moments and leaving me out of contact with the earth for far too long. And I felt the shock, short of pain but high on comprehension, as my career backwards came to an abrupt end on the sprung tines of a hay-rake.
I don’t know if Sally knew it was there at the end of the avenue and was deliberately driving me onto it, if she knew it was there and didn’t care, or whether in her rage she hadn’t even seen it. But as soon as I felt its sharp prod through my shirt, I knew what it was and what it meant, and the consequences for all three of us if she didn’t rein the horse back right now. If she hit me travelling at that speed, the tines would transfix me. Then the horse would run them deep into his chest. And if that happened Sally would fly forward onto the rows of spines like a battery of Catherine wheels.