Chapter 4

‘HE BLUFFED ME out,’ the Colonel said.

‘That wasn’t difficult,’ Steve said glumly.

‘Don’t talk to the Colonel like that,’ Anna said, and the Colonel said, ‘He’s right. I was a flop.’

They were all sitting round the kitchen table at the farmhouse, trying to work out the next move. Anna, the Colonel’s wife and Callie’s mother, with her long pale hair pinned on top of her head. Callie in her school uniform, trying to do homework and be part of the talk at the same time. Steve disgusted, but eating slice after slice of home-made bread as Anna cut it. Dora with her untidy hair and brown blunt face, two puppies snoring in her lap. Little Slugger Jones, ex-jockey, ex-boxer, who worked with Steve and Dora in the stables.

‘He wants to keep his nose out of trouble,’ Slugger said. ‘That’s what he wants to do.’ He had been punched about so much in his boxing days that he could no longer talk directly to anybody, only to himself.

‘That’s no help to that poor mare,’ Dora said.

‘There she goes again.’ Slugger munched cake with his gums. He was losing his teeth and hair at an equal rate. ‘All excited over hearsay talk.’

‘Slugger might be right, you know,’ the Colonel said. ‘Sometimes he is. How do we know that groom was telling the truth?’

‘Of course he was. You heard him.’ Callie drew beautiful lines under her Earth Science heading, but could write nothing more.

‘Suppose he was trying to get back at them for sacking him?’

‘But suppose—’ Callie was having an idea – ‘suppose those boys came up on the bike yesterday because they thought the groom might be here?’

‘Good grief, she’s brilliant,’ Dora said.

Steve said, ‘She’s almost human.’

‘That boy Steve saw at the Pinecrest. Lewis. Louse. I’ve seen him too, but I can’t think where. He’s no good. Oh, Colonel.’ She still called him that, although he was her stepfather. ‘Please – you must go back!’

‘When the Cruelty to Animals man gets home—’

‘It can’t wait!’

‘That wretched mare—’

‘An infected sore on a thoroughbred—’

They rounded on him, Dora, Steve, Callie, even Anna who was quickly moved to pity.

‘I can’t go in. He’ll bar the way with those teeth.’

‘Pretend you want to hire a horse.’

‘I can’t. They know me.’

‘But they don’t know me.’ Dora stood up, spilling sleepy puppies. ‘I wasn’t here when the boys came. “Good morning, Mr Hammond, I want to hire a hack” (anyone got any money?) “Certainly, madam.” “Let me see all your horses, and I’ll choose.”’

‘They’ll rumble you,’ Steve said. ‘One look at your hands and they’ll know you work in a stable.’

‘No they won’t. I’ll go disguised as one of those silly women who say they can ride and then don’t even know how to hold the reins. Anna – lend me those pink flowered pants.’

‘Yes, and that nylon top with the frills.’

‘What on my feet?’

‘Those plastic sandals Corinne left.’

‘Long dangly earrings.’

‘Lots of make-up.’

‘Nail varnish.’

‘Scent. My “Passion Flowers”.’

‘Love beads.’

‘A hair ribbon.’

‘You’re putting me off me off my tea.’ Dora pushed away her plate. ‘But I’ll do it. For poor old Beauty Queen, I’ll do it.’

Steve drove her in the farm truck to a crossroads half a mile from the Pinecrest Hotel, and got her bicycle out of the back.

‘Be sure and wait for me,’ she told him. ‘I’m not going to ride this thing ten miles home and up that hill. Especially in this outfit.’

Dora never wore anything but jeans and sweaters and old shirts of Steve’s that had shrunk in the wash. She had one skirt for going home to her mother. She felt ridiculous in the flowered pants and the earrings, with the garish eye make-up and the pale shiny lipstick and silver nail varnish with which Anna and Callie had prepared her as carefully as if she were a film star going on the set. The ‘Passion Flowers’ scent made her slightly sick. Horses were her natural perfume.

She approached the Pinecrest stables doubtfully, but the man who came out greeted her without surprise.

‘Looking for someone, dear?’

‘I want to hire a horse to go for a horseback ride,’ said Dora in the kind of voice someone would have who would go riding dressed like this.

‘All right, dear,’ said the man, still unsurprised. First bad mark to him. If he ran a decent riding stable, he would have said, Go home and get a proper outfit.

‘My friend told me you had beautiful animals here.’ Girls who looked like this always had ‘my friend’ who told them this or that fantasy. The man was grinning as if he liked girls who looked like this, so Dora risked a seductive smile and a bit of a hip swing through the muddy yard. ‘Might I see them all?’

‘Come along in, my dear.’

Steve had said, ‘Yuch!’ when Dora got into the truck with him, but Mr Hammond (‘Call me Sidney’) seemed to find her divine.

The stables were what you would expect of a second-rate riding school just managing to sneak in under the law. Outside, a scrubby paddock with a trodden ring and a few flimsy jumps made of oil drums and old doors. Inside, jerry-built loose boxes with no windows, and narrow standing stalls, with a clay floor stamped into holes and hillocks. Woodwork chewed from boredom – or hunger. Scanty, dirty bedding. Flies. Thin horses with dusty coats, many of them with telltale patches of white where the hair had grown in over an old sore. As far as Dora could see, most of them needed shoeing.

‘What a pretty horse. Oh, I like that spotted one. Why is he waving his head like that? What’s he trying to say? Ah, the wee pony. Got the moth a bit, hasn’t he?’

As Sidney Hammond showed her round the stable, she made stupid remarks to disguise what she thought. Some of the horses were fat enough, the chunky, cobby kind who wouldn’t lose weight if you fed them diet pills; but many of them were ribby and hippy, gone over at the knee, and you could tell by their eyes that they had lost hope. Dora wanted to untie all their broken and knotted rope halters, let them all out, and herd them slowly back to the farm, wobbling behind them on her bicycle. But, as the Colonel said, ‘Face it, everyone isn’t like us. If we took away every horse that wasn’t kept by our standards, we’d have half the horses in the county up here.’

And she was here to look at Beauty Queen. That was her job.

And Sidney Hammond, although ignorant and probably miserly, was quite nice to his horses. He slapped them on their bony rumps and thin ewe necks, and told tall tales about their breeding and performance.

‘This little grey. Irish bred. What a goer across country! Now here’s a bay mare. Perfect lady’s hack. Suit you all the way, she would. Todd!’ He shouted towards the tack room, where a transistor radio was blasting.

A tall weedy boy with a feeble growth of beard appeared in the doorway. ‘What do you want?’ he shouted back. He inspected Dora from head to foot and back up again, and favoured her with a breathy wolf whistle.

‘Get the tack for Penny.’

‘Oh, just a moment, there’s one horse I didn’t give a sugar lump to.’ In a dark corner box, Dora had spotted an unmistakable thoroughbred head beyond the cobwebby bars. She ran down the littered aisle, stumbling in the loose sandals. Before Sidney could reach her, she slid back the bolt and went into the box, where a thin chestnut mare rested a back leg in the dirty straw, wearing a torn rug.

‘Why is she wearing pyjamas?’ Dora looked innocently up at Sidney. Anna had put so much black stuff on her lashes that she could hardly see.

‘Keep her warm, love.’

‘But she’s sweating. Let me—’

‘Best not touch her,’ Sidney said quickly. ‘She’s nervous.’

‘Oh, I’m not afraid of her.’ She reached up and quickly but carefully folded the rug back on to the neck of the mare, who jumped away in pain.

No wonder. The saddle sore on her high withers was two or three inches wide, oozing and raw.

‘Oh God!’ Dora said in her normal voice, but Sidney Hammond was too busy explaining to notice.

‘Looks worse than it is. All my groom’s fault. I sacked him for letting it get so bad. It’s clearing up with this new ointment.’

‘Have you had the vet?’

‘Of course, love.’ When he was telling a full scale lie, his mouth went on smiling, but his eyes did not.

‘He can’t be much good. I know someone who could help.’

‘I’m not a rich man, you know. I can’t afford these huge fees.’

‘No, I mean at Follyfoot Farm. The place where they have the old horses.’

‘But Beauty Queen isn’t old.’ If Mr Hammond guessed at a connection between Dora and the Colonel, his soft-soaping smile didn’t show it.

‘They might take her though. I know a boy—’ Dora. lowered the heavy lashes coyly – ‘a boy who works there. Shall I ask?’

Mr Hammond sighed, and surrendered. ‘If it’s best for Beauty. I’m up to my neck here, short-handed, all these animals and a hotel full of guests …’

He started to cover the mare’s back, but Dora said, ‘Let’s take off the rug and put ointment on, and a clean rag or something.’

‘You’re a great girl.’ Sidney squeezed her hand. ‘A real little Samaritan.’

When they left the box, Penny, the bay mare was drooping between pillar reins, with a long-cheeked curb bridle and an ugly old saddle that made Beauty’s back understandable. ‘You pay in advance,’ said smiling Sidney.

‘How much?’

‘Twenty-five pounds to you, my dear.’

‘Oh, I’m afraid that’s too much.’

Some other people had come to ride, three women in tight jodhpurs who looked as if they were housewives hoping to lose weight, and other horses were being saddled.

Sidney lowered his voice. ‘Twenty pounds then, but keep it dark.’

‘Oh no,’ said Dora, glad to find a way out of riding poor Penny, although she would only have taken her round the nearest corner and let her graze for an hour. ‘That wouldn’t be fair on you. I’ll come back when I’m not so broke. I’ll ring up the farm about Beauty. Don’t worry.’

She ducked under Penny’s pillar rein and got herself out to the yard, where one of the housewives already had her stout thighs across a hairy cob with its eyes half shut. Dora paused briefly to let out a couple of links in its curb chain, and ran slop, slop in the plastic sandals – to her bicycle.

‘Don’t forget to come back, my dear!’ Sidney Hammond was in the stable doorway, smiling and waving.