OUTSIDE the box the morning remained grey and raw, but inside the high cab it quickly became warm with the heat from the engine. On either side of the main road the country lay cold and deserted beneath the winter sky, but Ginny felt like singing as Branton dropped farther and farther behind them. They stopped for breakfast at a big, whitewashed pull-in that was one of the few places open at that hour on a Sunday morning. There were only two other customers—two lorry drivers on a week-end run—and before they left after the satisfying, if rather greasy meal, Tamara asked them what they thought of the weather.
“Snow coming up,” replied one of them. “It was on the forecast just before you came in, and you can smell it. Going far?”
“Sussex,” Tamara told him.
“Then you’ll see something of it,” the man told her.
The lorry driver and the weather forecast proved to be right, though not for a few hours. But they left Bedford with the first icy spatter of sleet dashing against the windscreen, and it was very soon snowing in earnest. The fields were hidden by the flying veils of white, and the tyre-tracks cut long black lines through the freshly fallen flakes. They did not stop for lunch, but when they came to a village where a small shop was open, Angela was dispatched to buy bread rolls, boxes of cheese sections, and apples. She was being very quiet, and except when she wanted something done, Tamara almost ignored her, directing all her casual remarks and questions at Ginny, who could not help feeling slightly uncomfortable. It was difficult to tell whether or not Angela really minded this freezing out, but Ginny knew that if it had been applied to her she would have felt angry enough to get out and walk. Again she hoped that she had not made a mistake in coming. But it had been far too good a chance to miss.
By half-past one they were entering London down the almost deserted A5. Ginny had only been to London once before, on a day excursion from Derby, and she had felt ill all day, with an aching head and legs and a sore throat, and she had been sick on the way home. Early the next morning she had been rushed into Branton hospital with polio. Today London seemed a very different city. She lay like a sleeping giant under her fresh mantle of snow, and the sooty back streets and broad main thoroughfares, the roof-tops, and the peeling window-ledges were touched with magic. Edgware Road was transformed into an avenue of spotless white and glistening silver under a grey-and-white canopy, and Marble Arch stood white and solitary in the centre of the white road, like an arch on a wedding cake. Tamara took the box across the broad expanse of road and into Park Lane, past Hyde Park, whose plane-trees and bandstands were blotted out by the falling snow, and whose few parked cars were white mounds beside the faint line of the curb.
“Do you like London, Ginny?” Tamara asked her, as they passed Albert Gate a few minutes later and turned down white, deserted Exhibition Road.
“I’ve only been here once before,” Ginny told her. “I don’t think I’d like to live here.”
“I was brought up here,” Tamara told her unexpectedly. “My father ran a riding school in the Paddington district. We used to hire a lot of horses to the films and specialized in supplying them with coaches and teams of horses. I still do quite a bit of that work now.”
“It must have been fun,” Ginny told her enviously, remembering her own childhood in Railway Rise and at Branton Primary School, and days spent playing in the alleyway and the sooty grass plot below the brewery.
“There wasn’t much fun about it,” said Tamara grimly. “We had anything above twenty horses in the place and every one had to earn its keep. They were always changing, and there were only the three of us—Dad, a man, and myself—to do the lot. And they had to be done properly: no skimping the grooming or missing exercise. Then Dad was often away on film work, sometimes me as well, or the man went instead, and I was left with the whole stable to do. And there isn’t much fun to filming once the novelty wears off—ten or more horses in half-canvas stables with rents in them, the nearest water half a mile away, and crazy stunt men galloping the legs off them all day.”
“But you’ve gone on with it,” Ginny pointed out. Tamara was laying it on a bit thick, she thought, she’d never have decided to go in for horses once she grew up if it was that bad.
“I never had the chance to do anything else,” Tamara told her. “I was born and raised in the stable, and it was all I knew when my father was killed. So here I am.”
“You mean you don’t like them really?” asked Ginny incredulously.
“Of course I like them.” Tamara was suddenly impatient. “They’re my life, the whole of it. I’m merely telling you that it isn’t all glamour and glory. I’ve still got plenty of my father’s methods in operation at Hampton, and working for me won’t be all honey, will it, Angela?”
Taken by surprise, Angela merely stared at her, and Ginny said quickly, “I didn’t expect it to be.”
Tamara did not reply, and there was silence in the cab except for the roar from the hot engine. Tamara glared angrily at the white road ahead and the large, soft flakes driving steadily at her to stop with a silent flop on the windscreen and be swept aside by the wipers, What was there about this skinny, partly crippled child that made her want to confide in her and warn her of what she was in for, and even make a friend of her? Whatever it was, it would not do. Her immediate liking for Ginny Harris should have warned her against bringing her home.
The journey from London to Sussex proved the slowest and most uncomfortable part. It was snowing really hard by now, with a strong wind driving the flakes into a swirling blizzard, and Tamara had to stop every ten minutes to clear the windscreen from ice, climbing back each time into the cab smothered in snow, and bringing with her an icy gust of the winter that raged outside the warm compartment. It was dark soon after four, with a leaden sky above the thick blanket of white which hung between it and the earth. The headlamps turned the swirling flakes to gold and lit swift, magical pictures in the snow-hung trees and hedges beside the road. The box was sliding a little now as the snow flattened into half-formed ice beneath its heavy wheels, and Tamara muttered about the weather without seeming to notice its beauty.
“Is it far now?” Ginny asked her, speaking for the first time since Tamara’s remarks about the job.
“A couple of miles,” replied Tamara briefly.
Ginny was silent again, and a few minutes later Tamara said, “Here we are,” and the box was slowing and beginning to turn in through a wide gateway into a snowy drive. The headlamps picked out trees lining the way on either side, their trunks white over on the windward side, their branches heavy with snow, and away to the right Ginny caught a glimpse of lights. Then they were bearing to the left as the drive forked, and a few yards farther on they entered the stable yard. There were lights on in some of the buildings, shining golden through the snow, and showing trampled trails of footprints criss-crossing the white yard. The stables were built in two parallel rows, with a big, dark building like an aeroplane hangar across the far end.
Tamara brought the box to a standstill and switched off the engine. After the entire day spent in its roar Ginny’s ears sang in the sudden silence, and the movements of the two horses behind them sounded impossibly loud. Tamara opened the door, and dropped down into the snow. Ginny followed Angela out on the other side, her feet crunching on the crisp snow, the cold air burning her lungs after the hot stuffiness of the cab, and turning her breath to steam. Tamara was already letting down the ramp, and an elderly man with bent shoulders and slightly bowed legs encased in well-worn breeches emerged from the snow and the shadows to help her.
Gambler was brought out first and led away by the man, Angela crossing the yard towards the tack-room with her arms full of his belongings, and Ginny led Flash down the ramp.
“Over here,” called Tamara, and Ginny followed her through the snow to an empty box. “Bates,” she shouted, “bring some straw.”
Flash’s hooves sounded sharply on bare concrete, and a few minutes later the old man appeared suddenly out of the snow, carrying a bale of straw on his back. Tamara untwisted the wires which held it together and began to shake it down around the horse’s feet. Flash and Ginny both took deep, satisfied breaths of its fresh, clean cornfield smell, and exalted in the crisp crackle of it beneath their feet after Vic Tyler’s sparse, damp combine straw and bare, beaten-earth floors. Bates returned with a well-filled hay-net, and Tamara ran her hand down Flash’s thin neck and checked the tightness of his circingle.
“He can keep that rug on,” she told Ginny. “Stop him from freezing to death, anyway, and it’ll hide him a bit from my customers. He’s a complete disgrace at present.”
But Ginny saw from her expression that she was enjoying the sight of Flash’s dazed delight at so much luxury, and she knew that what the girl had said in the box was true, for she certainly loved horses, and it was easy to believe that she had little time for anything else.
With Flash settled, Ginny followed Tamara across the yard to the tack-room. This was square and whitewashed, its wooden walls lined with saddle-racks and brackets for bridles, most of them fully laden, and all with clean, supple tack. There was a big cupboard on the left of the door, a first-aid cabinet on the wall opposite, and a large, dark oak chest bound in shining leather beneath it. Above the saddles hung a few neatly framed photographs of horses, too high up for Ginny to be able to read the captions beneath them. In the centre of the room was a black, potbellied stove with a thick pipe reaching up through the roof above it, and from this radiated a glowing warmth. Angela, her face pale and set as it had been all day, was warming her hands over it, and as Tamara came in she looked straight at her.
“I shan’t be coming any more,” she said, and the coldness of her tone surprised Ginny, who had not thought her capable of it.
“What about the week’s notice you’re supposed to give?” demanded Tamara. “I may insist on your working that.”
“Why?” asked Angela. “You don’t want me any more; you’ve never done anything but despise me since I came. I ought never to have tried to work for you; I’ve met enough people who’ve found it impossible. You want us to have completely one-track minds and never dream of anything except horses. You refuse to realize that we’re as alive and a lot more sensitive than your beastly horses. We’re just a lot of machines to you, and as soon as we don’t work quite hard enough or well enough you throw us out. Ginny, I ought to have warned you before, I couldn’t decide what to do, but I’m warning you now. Go home, take your poor old horse with you and fatten him up at the Slaters’; get out while you can. Don’t stay here and let her break your heart.”
Ginny stared at Angela’s pale, passionate face in amazement, seeing the tears shining on her fair lashes, and realizing suddenly with what high hopes and ambitions the other girl must have come to work for Tamara Blake, only to have them crushed by her own inadequacy and Tamara’s harsh impatience. Then Tamara’s voice cut across the tense silence like an icy knife.
“Angela, I think it’s time you went home,” she said. “As the idea of working your week’s notice makes you hysterical I won’t insist on it.”
“How generous of you!” said Angela, and the burning bitterness in her voice made Ginny jump.
She picked up her belongings, and went out without another word.
For a long moment neither Tamara nor Ginny spoke. Then Tamara said in an unusually brittle voice, “So now we’ve both warned you, Ginny. Do you still want to work for me?” and for some reason Ginny felt suddenly sorry for her.
“It takes more than that to put me off,” she said cheerfully. “Do you feed them now? If so, can I help?”
Tamara looked at her for a moment, her odd eyes dark and thoughtful, and then she smiled. “By tomorrow night you’ll be begging for mercy, not asking to help,” she said. “Come on, it’s a good way to meet the horses.”
The feed-room behind the boxes was lit only by a low-powered bulb, and deep, soft shadows lay in the corners and behind the stacked bales of hay and straw, and the two big galvanized cornbins. It was full of the rich, sweet scents of summer, in startling contrast to the driving snow and bitter cold outside. Bates came silently to join them, smiling at Ginny with his thin, wide mouth and deep-set dark eyes. His small, dark face was covered in a thousand wrinkles, and his cheeks were dusted by a stubble of darker beard.
Tamara scooped oats and bran into the buckets, adding thick, dark molasses to some feeds, boiled barley to others, and a few carrots to them all. Bates and Ginny took the feeds round for her, Bates pointing out the appropriate horses to Ginny. There was Golden Prize, almost the twin to Gambler, a bit more lightly built, with one white leg, and Mosaic, the appaloosa, with his dark roan forehand and white, black-spotted hind quarters. Then she fed Cayenne, one of the liveries, a blazing bright chestnut with a wicked, white-rimmed eye, Gambler, and Flash, whose nose dived at once into his plentiful feed as though he expected her to snatch it away again. Even if things turned out badly for her at Hampton, Ginny knew that she would never regret coming for his sake.
The feeding finished, Tamara took her round the remaining boxes, forgetting or ignoring the fact that Ginny might be tired or hungry and eager to see where she was to live. Ginny herself did not even think of these things, so intense was her interest. Tamara introduced her to Variety, a round, hogged, fourteen-two skewbald, two more liveries, Icicle, a tall, thoroughbred fleabitten grey, and Gaylord, a rich red bay horse with plenty of breeding, and finally to the three horses who were her greatest pride, the ones who made her bleak, lonely life worth living: White Lion, the pure white Lipizzaner stallion, typical of his aristocratic breed, with his long-backed, light-quartered, heavy shouldered build, his great, arched, muscular neck under the flowing white mane, and his small, haughty, Roman-nosed head; and the two beautiful, excitable dark bay carriage horses, Count and Countess, both sixteen hands high, with black points, lovely heads, and the broad chests and powerful hind quarters of Cleveland bays coupled with the elegance and blood of thoroughbreds.
“They’re not easy to handle, but they’re brilliant in harness,” Tamara told her proudly. “And I get a lot of film work with them.”
“Do you drive them on the roads?” asked Ginny, surprised.
She had seen great slow-moving horses drawing the brewery wagons in Branton, though they had become increasingly few, but never had she dreamed that anyone still drove horses like Tamara’s pair in double harness except on the films.
“Of course I drive them. How do you think they’re exercised?” demanded Tamara. “They don’t behave very well under saddle, and I can’t lunge them for ever. Besides, I like driving, and they’re a wonderful advertisement for me.”
“Could I learn to drive?” asked Ginny breathlessly. This was yet another new joy to be experienced with horses.
“If you want to.” Tamara was amused by her eagerness. Just wait until she had had a few days of Hampton Stables; this tremendous keenness would soon wear off, Ginny’s employer told herself.
The snow had almost ceased by now, and with the clearing of the sky it was growing much colder. Even Tamara felt it, and shivered briefly under her heavy coat and old green sweater.
“Come on,” she told Ginny. “You’d better see where you’re going to live. Bates will finish up this evening.”
Ginny collected her belongings from the tack-room and they started down the silent, snow-covered drive away from the stables. By now there were no more than a few small particles of ice drifting out of the darkness, and the snow crunched crisply beneath their feet, while their breath hung around them in clouds on the frozen air. Tamara had no torch, but the snow lit the way for them with its own pale glow, and soon Tamara branched off to the left up the drive that Ginny had noticed on the way in. The lights of the house were directly ahead now, and Ginny asked Tamara if it belonged to her.
“No, I rent part of it,” replied Tamara. “I’m afraid you won’t find it very luxurious.”
“You should see my room at home,” Ginny told her, remembering the overcrowded room that she shared with the untidy Doreen, the peeling wall-paper, and the big damp patch above the window.
“Then perhaps you won’t mind this one,” said Tamara, glancing sideways at Ginny’s face, transparent with its white skin and sharp bones in the cold snow light, and realizing again that Ginny was different from the usual type of girl who drifted through Hampton Stables.
They were almost there by now; Ginny saw the lights showing warmly round the edges of partly drawn curtains in many of the rooms, and Tamara said, “It’s divided into three flats and an annexe. I’m in the annexe. It used to be the ballroom and dressing rooms.”
The drive curved round towards the main door of the house, but Tamara kept straight on along a narrow path through some shrubbery which dropped icy lumps of snow on to Ginny’s shoulders and down her neck, and they came out into a tiny yard, with a dustbin in one corner and a dark-painted door facing them.
“This is it,” said Tamara, producing a key.
The door opened into a small, tile-floored lobby, off which led three more doors. Tamara pushed open the one on the left, and Ginny followed her inside as she switched on the light.
“This is your room,” Tamara told her. “The bed needs making up. Angela and most of the other girls I’ve had have lived out.”
Ginny found herself in a very small room, longer than it was wide, with a worn stone floor on which lay a thin rag rug. The walls were painted dark green, and the woodwork cream. It was furnished with a high, narrow bed on which lay a mattress covered with a white counterpane, a tall chest of drawers, and a wash-basin with running water beneath the frosted glass window which overlooked the dustbin. One corner had been curtained off to form a wardrobe, and there was a small mirror on the wall beside the wash-basin. It was cold and bare and lit only by the single, unshaded bulb, but it was to be Ginny’s alone. No Doreen to disturb its cold peace, no roar of noise from below or towering brewery outside. And its bareness could soon be improved by ornaments, photographs, and books, its cold by an oil-stove or an electric fire, and the light by a more powerful bulb and a shade. Ginny was quite satisfied with it, and Tamara smiled to herself again. Ginny certainly was different.
“I’ll leave you to wash, then come and eat,” she told Ginny. “It’s through the door to your left out of here. Kitchen and bathroom are opposite.”
She left Ginny alone in the cold, silent room which had filled its few other occupants with immediate misery and home-sickness. But Ginny washed her face and hands in icy water without a qualm, and looked round with intense pleasure as she dried them.
No more trouble with Doreen over upset nail varnish and laddered stockings, no more quarrels about her wanting the light on to read when Doreen wanted to sleep. She could really start to live her own life at last.
Tamara’s main room was very different. Once the ballroom, it had been converted into two rooms by a partition wall, which did not quite reach to the high, vaulted roof with its whitewash and its dark timbers. The walls were covered in peeling brown Victorian wall-paper, and there was an electric wall-fire in the old fireplace. A big window looked out over the snow-covered shrubbery; it was uncurtained, and the glass looked icy against the white-shrouded night. There was a sagging armchair beside the electric fire, and an equally sagging settee facing it. A gate-legged table, a heavy, dark oak sideboard, and some battered upright chairs completed the main furnishings.
The atmosphere was overwhelmingly horsey. The walls and every available space were covered in photographs, paintings, and sketches of horses. There were old circus and theatre posters advertising horse acts, horse brasses, odd pieces of tack, old horse-shoes, and ash-trays and ornaments shaped like horses. An overcrowded bookcase held dozens of books on riding, stable management, and veterinary procedure, bound copies of horse magazines and periodicals, and there was a striped horse-blanket thrown over the broken springs and torn upholstery of the old settee. Sagging riding-boots and dented bowler hats, wellington boots, and crash caps were thrown in an untidy heap behind it, and there was an all-pervading smell of stale horse and cats, two of which were in the room: a large grey one asleep on the settee, and a black one perched on the sideboard. A door in the partition wall presumably led into Tamara’s bedroom. Ginny was still gazing around her when Tamara herself entered the room carrying a table-cloth and a saucepan of spaghetti in tomato sauce.
“Good ! You can make some toast,” she told Ginny. “Switch on the electric fire. I’ll fetch the bread and a fork.”
Ginny did as she was told, and Tamara set the saucepan down by the fire to keep warm. Ten minutes later, red in the face from heat after kneeling in front of the fire making toast, Ginny was sitting down to her first meal at Hampton. They both ate hungrily, without talking, Ginny’s eyes still taking in the details of the room and the nearest photographs, one of which was of a showy grey horse, poised on his hind legs, ridden side-saddle by a dark-haired girl in a flowing habit. Tamara followed her gaze, and smiled her grim smile, a touch of bitterness in her shattered face.
“Yes, that’s me,” she said. “I was seventeen then.”
“It’s a lovely horse,” Ginny told her, avoiding mention of Tamara’s looks, for she had been unusually pretty then.
“Snow Ranger? Yes, he was one of Dad’s best,” agreed Tamara. “For the films, that is. He had a mouth like iron.”
She abandoned her meal for a moment and crossed the room to fetch another photograph, which she handed to Ginny.
“That was one of our more spectacular stunts,” she told her, returning to her chair while Ginny stared at it. It was a picture of the same grey horse, travelling at full speed, dragging someone behind him, with their foot apparently caught in the stirrup.
Ginny gasped.
“Who was doing it?” she asked.
“I was.” Tamara smiled at her expression. “It isn’t so difficult if you know what you’re doing and you can trust the horse not to lose its head and start kicking. Gambler’s good at that sort of thing.”
No wonder Tamara had wrecked her looks as she had, thought Ginny, as she returned to her meal. If that was how she earned her living it seemed surprising that she was still alive. But she had told Mr. and Mrs. Harris that she specialized in dressage. Ginny could not see where the dressage came in. She decided to probe a little. “I thought you did dressage mostly, and took riders and liveries?” she asked Tamara.
“I like dressage more than anything else,” replied Tamara. “I’d concentrate on that entirely if I could. But I have to earn my bread and butter somehow, and there’s no money in dressage. I don’t get a lot of riders, and there are only the three liveries. Film work pays well; that’s the attraction of it. So does variety, though it’s a dreary business. If I could manage without I wouldn’t touch them, they can be murder.”
Remembering the photographs and the dreariness of Branton Empire, Ginny could well believe it.
After supper Tamara produced sheets and blankets and helped Ginny to make up her bed, and then she announced that she was going down to the stables to have a last look round.
“I’ll come with you,” Ginny told her eagerly.
“It’s time you did your unpacking,” replied Tamara discouragingly. “I shan’t be long.”
“I can do it later,” insisted Ginny, missing the hint. “I’d like to come.”
“I told you to do your unpacking,” snapped Tamara. “What’s the matter? Are you scared to stop here alone?”
She was glaring at Ginny, her odd eyes furious, and Ginny’s green eyes blazed back at her.
“You needn’t worry,” she retorted. “I’ll stay and keep the burglars out for you.”
For a moment she thought that Tamara was going to lose her temper. Then the other girl’s fury faded, and she smiled.
“You do that,” she said, and picked up her coat.
The front door slammed sharply behind her, and silence descended over the room. Ginny bent absent-mindedly to pick up the grey cat, and wondered why it was that Tamara so definitely did not want her company.
In the stable yard everything was quiet. Bates had retired to his caravan in the field behind the indoor school, and a peaceful sound of munching came from some of the boxes. Tamara glanced in at White Lion, Flash, and the pair, and then stood for a few minutes in the centre of the frozen yard, almost unaware of the biting cold, her horses around her in their dark boxes, and the high, clear, star-scattered sky above her, savouring the joy of independence and ownership. This was her yard and these were her horses; no one could tell her what she must do; she relied on no one for anything—not help, or friendship, or love. Her father was no longer there to bully her, and as she made no friends there was no one who could hurt her. And, Tamara vowed, remembering the treacherous liking she felt for Ginny, there never would be. For she would not let Ginny become anything more to her than had any of the other girls she had employed, despised, and driven away.