Outside everything’s sparkling with sunshine and the frost has nearly all gone, so the only crusty bits of lawn are those still in the shadows of the hedges. We sit in Gill’s room, face to face, cross legged on the dark rose pink carpet, and try to predict how her year will go. We started off near the window, but we’ve moved four times to keep in the squares of sunlight.
Gill is as upbeat and sparkly as the day outside. I’m listening, going along with it, adding questions here and there, but I want to tell her to stop it. Stop being cheery and happy and excited. You can’t make me be the same, contribute to the jokes, be normal. Not today.
I can’t keep my eyes from the suitcase and duffle bag parked in the corner by the door. She’s going. Life at Makuti Park without her is unimaginable. I sure as hell don’t wish to listen to what she’s going to get up to in England. I am trying, honest, but I’m not succeeding. No way.
So when she says, “Wow, I can’t believe this time tomorrow I’ll be in Surrey. D’you know, it might even be warmer there than it is here right now? The days will be long and we’ll be able to ride out until, like, I don’t know, ten o’clock? I’m kind of looking forward to that. It will be so different, don’t you think?” I give up the pretence and blurt out what I’m really thinking.
“You will actually come home next year won’t you?”
She blinks at me, then takes me by the shoulders and studies my face with those doll-blue eyes.
“Oh Tessa, don’t cry please. Of course I’ll come back. This is my home and I don’t want to leave it. I’m excited about Star Point’s future anyway. I want to ride him again for sure. I need to get this qualification though. You do understand that, don’t you?”
I nod, turn away. I’m not crying, but I will if I keep looking at her.
She slips her arms around behind me, squeezes, and rocks me gently in them. “You – we need to think about your riding career too. You should consider putting Induna into the Novice class at the horse trials in Umwindsidale in, when is it – October?”
“What? Without you?” I wriggle out of her grip, shaking my head. No. Absolutely not. What on earth’s made her think I’d enter horse trials for the first time while she’s not here?
“I need your advice and support at my first go, Gill!”
She thinks that’s funny.
“Have you forgotten that my parents exist? That it was them who encouraged me the first time I entered any sort of competition? Who’ve helped me all these years? Come on Tess. Mum and Dad will pull you through it. Induna will do a good dressage test and you know all about the show jumping now. Get Mum to talk you through the cross country phase. She can take you over to Turnpike to practice cross country jumps. Remember how you and Indie did so well the last time we went there? Mum’s brilliant with that sort of thing and she’ll love it and she’ll use you as a kind of substitute daughter while I’m gone. You’re family now anyway. I do feel like I have a sister and a brother.”
Her whole face is glowing at me. “And you and Nathan are neither!”
That’s done it. It hits me like a tidal wave and almost knocks me out of breath and I give this odd little howl that I certainly didn’t intend to come out. Gill is leaving, which is bad enough, but what really clouts me is the realisation that I love her family quite as much as my own – and am loved back. Here I am, seeking more advice and help from the Owens than from my own parents. I want their advice and their help. What sort of disloyal daughter does this make me?
“Whatever’s the matter?”
Gill gasps, frowns, smiles and frowns again, but I can’t tell her. I just sob.
“I will come back, honest, my love. Come on.”
She rolls up onto her feet and pulls several tissues from the frilly white box on her bedside table. She wipes my face with one of them and pushes the others into my hand.
“Blow your nose. There, that’s better. Now let’s go out to the yard. We’ll tack up Induna and start teaching you some cross country tactics. Tammy’s coming at half-ten and she might be bringing her little sister over. You can always talk to her about competition too you know. She’s especially good with dressage stuff. Have you met Sherrie, her sister? Pretty little thing.”
I allow myself to be led outside.
Nathan’s riding Bravo in the ménage. He’s a glossy liver chestnut with faint dapple markings, an ochre mane and tail and no white marks – a drop-dead gorgeous sort of horse. An aloof sort of horse. I tried to make friends with him over the stable door last week but although he didn’t act like he was going to bite me, he put his ears back and dodged my caresses and my attempts to blow into his nose, then moved to the back of his box and stood there watching me. At least when he did that he pricked his ears forward again. He even keeps a little apart from his companions in the paddock as if he scorns any existing hierarchy and has no desire to be part of it. It’s fascinating, because other new horses have invariably just fitted in with what Cactus Dan wants. Dan’s been boss for ages and he has issues with Bravo, who’s not behaving like he’s supposed to. He wastes a whole lot of energy displaying his displeasure, but Bravo watches him with that kind of Do-I-Look-Like-I-Care air about him, and the way the rest of the herd ignores Bravo and Bravo ignores them actually has a kind of harmony about it. It’s noticeable now that when Dan tries any of his habitual bullying tactics, the victim hurries over to graze somewhere near Bravo and Dan backs off.
I have this ridiculous notion that if Nathan was to be reincarnated as a horse, he would be Bravo.
Gill rides him well, of course, but he’s seventeen hands and with her slight figure she looks a little lost on his back. When Nathan sits on him, however, horse and rider do really become one single animal and Bravo assumes an almost supernatural aura. I’m being whimsical, I know. Bravo has a light, rhythmical cadence to all his paces, as if his limbs were made of elastic rather than of bones, ligaments and tendons, and he has big strides that eat up the ground, and yet he never appears to be moving fast. He has that magical, indefinable quality all my books call ‘presence’. There isn’t any other way to say it.
They execute a half-pass in trot across the school. The ache of wanting to ride that horse is real and physical, but I’m being over-ambitious here. His type of movement is way beyond any of my experience. I wouldn’t dare ask, but if I did I know exactly what Gill would say: “He’s too much horse for you Tessa. Maybe one day.”
One day… One day.
Nathan is still the same dead-pan, distant ghost flitting into view and then dissolving in a blink, but he must be nearly as tall as Charles now and his sinewy arms and legs have grown hard-edged muscles. His voice reminds me of Charles too, in a way. If Charles were to stand up in front of an audience and read the telephone directory, people would stay just to keep listening.
I keep out of Nathan’s way even more than I did before, except when I’m watching him ride, which is when he sticks around the longest. It’s like the difference in our ages, not something I’ve ever thought much about, has, instead of always being constant, suddenly got a whole lot bigger. With Gill in the mix, I’m comfortable, but once she’s left the buffer will be gone and it will be just me and him in any of our rare encounters.
I want to like him, but you don’t get to like someone really, truly, unless you can get into the sort of twisting, turning conversations that help you find out what makes that person tick, like I do with Gill and Jess. He’s too complicated with all those issues and I could quite easily say the wrong thing to him, even though I don’t know what the wrong thing is.
Now this is a hard one to figure out: Gill sees him as a brother and now me as a sister and I want Gill to be my sister, but then what will Nathan be to me?