Chapter 15

STEVE CAME BACK from the hospital with his leg still cocooned in the long heavy plaster, scrawled over with messages from the nurses.

‘Behave yourself – Cathy.’

‘Good luck from Rosalita.’

‘Mary Ellen – don’t come back.’

‘Love always Susie’ and a heart with an arrow.

He could move about slowly with crutches. He spent one day sitting in the garden with his radio and various dogs and cats who were glad to find someone sitting still, and Anna bringing him things to eat and drink.

‘This is the life,’ he told her, but the next day he was out at the stables, trying to do his work again.

‘Here, let me.’ Dora ran up when she saw him at the outside tap.

‘Go away. I am going to be the only man on crutches ever to carry a full bucket of water.’

He settled the crutches under his arms, bent down with difficulty, tried to pick up the bucket and grab the bar of the crutch with the same hand, and lurched forward in a flood of spilled water as Dora caught him just in time.

‘Careful.’ She propped him up against Ginger’s stable. Her face was grave with anxiety, so she quickly smiled. ‘That’s expensive plaster, you know.’

Gradually Steve found out what he could do. He could carry a feed bucket, hung round his neck on a piece of bailing wire. Then he had to get into a loose box, move the horse out of his way with his shoulder or his voice, prop a crutch against the wall by the manger, unhook the bucket from his neck without the horse getting its nose in and strangling him, and tip the feed into the manger before the greedy horse knocked the bottom of the bucket and scattered the whole lot into its bedding.

He could sweep a bit, and do some grooming, leaning against a quiet horse. He cleaned all the tack, which there hardly ever was time for, and blacked the harness that Cobby wore to pull the blue cart out to the fields. But there was not much more he could do except sit on the old mounting block made out of a milestone (CLXVI miles to Tyburn) and play the guitar to Dora and Callie.

The Shetlands and the donkey had gone back to the children’s camp for the summer, and one of the very old horses had died, but five skeletons had come in from the stable of a man who had skipped the country to avoid arrest, and abandoned them. Dora and the Colonel and Slugger had more than they could do.

Steve’s plaster would not come off for at least a month, the doctor had said after the last X-ray. So the Colonel rang the Employment Office and asked for a temporary stable hand.

‘I mean a real one. I’d rather have nobody than a damfool girl who gets her big toenail trodden on or a long-haired layabout who shouts at the horses and goes to sleep in the hay with a lighted cigarette.’

After a few days, Mac turned up. He came in a fairly decent car, but terrible old clothes, a burly man with shaggy hair and a grizzle of growing beard, some age past forty.

‘I’m looking for work.’ He came rather shyly into the yard. ‘They told me to come here.’

‘Know anything about horses?’

‘Not much.’

‘Like ’em?’

‘I guess so.’ He was American.

‘Worked with them before?’

A pause. ‘Uh-huh. But I can learn.’

‘References?’

The man smiled and shrugged his shoulders. Under the hair, he had a weathered face, craggy, with the kind of thoughtful, clear-sighted eyes made for scanning far horizons, or searching a face. The Colonel liked the look of him and took him on.

In his dirty old trousers and his yellow-grey sweater that had once been white, pulled out of shape, with loops of thick wool hanging, Mac went straight to work helping with the evening feeds.

There was a storm coming up. You could see it far down the valley, rolling blackly towards the hills, so all the horses were brought in.

Mac pitched hay and carried water buckets, doing what he was told, not asking any questions, not answering any about himself, quiet with the horses, though he seemed to know nothing about them. When Dora said, ‘Two on that side need water – the grey and the roan. Know what a roan is?’ he thought for a moment, then smiled. ‘Sorry.’

When he smiled, his broad tanned cheekbones lifted and his eyes narrowed to a grey glint.

‘It’s a sort of reddish speckled—’ Dora looked at him sharply. ‘I’ve seen you somewhere before.’

Mac shook his head. He had hay seeds in his hair and beard. ‘Only in your dreams.’

‘What do you think of him?’ Dora asked Slugger Jones, as he was leaving for his cottage across the road.

‘What do I think? she asks. I seen ’em come, I seen ’em go. Mostly I seen ’em go.’

‘I hope Mac stays.’

‘Call me Mac, he says, coming out of nowhere. I seen ’em come, I seen ’em go,’ Slugger grumbled to no one in particular, clicked his knotted fingers for his terrier and ambled through the archway.

When the work was done, Dora took Mac round to all the loose boxes and told him the names and stories of the horses.

‘Cobbler’s Dream.’ Everyone started with Cobbler’s Dream in the corner box. He was so striking, with his bright white blaze, his head always over the door, watching, demanding attention, chewing his hay now, and dribbling it into the yard. Mac picked up the bunch of hay and gave it back to him. Cobby turned his head to observe him with his good eye.

‘He was hit in the head,’ Dora said. ‘Spoiled, stinking brat with a whip. He used to be a champion show jumper. Still could be, even though he can’t see much. But we don’t go to shows.’

‘Why not?’

‘We’re not good enough. We couldn’t afford the clothes anyway. And – oh, I don’t know. A horse doesn’t mind showing off, but having to perform perfectly, dead to order, our idea not his …’

‘Maybe he likes it.’

‘How do we know?’ Dora looked up at him. ‘We say a horse loves to jump because he gets all excited, but perhaps he’s only nervous. Look at this one – Wonderboy. He belonged to Callie’s father, who died. He loved to race, they said, but how do we know?’

Mac went ‘Hm’ into his beard. Dora wondered if she was being a bore.

‘I’d love to know what Spot thought about the circus.’ She showed Mac the broad-backed appaloosa. ‘Three fat ladies in silver wigs and spangled tights danced on him at once, the Colonel says, though I don’t know how he knows, because he won’t go to the circus. Anna, his wife, took Callie once and they saw Hero.’ She took him across the yard to the brown, ewe-necked horse that Callie had saved. ‘His rider was forcing him to lie down, and pulling his head so far round that he couldn’t, and then beating him when he didn’t. So Callie stole him.’

‘How did she get away with that?’

Mac seemed interested. Perhaps he – perhaps he was a thief too? He would tell nothing about himself. On the run? Incognito? The beard looked fairly new and the car was too good for the clothes. If he had stolen that, he’d better get it away from the road.

She showed him the four newcomers – the fifth had had to be destroyed yesterday – the pitiful thin horses which had been abandoned, tied by the head and helplessly starving.

‘The owner was some sort of underworld gambling type, who had bought this big house and the horses to make himself look respectable in the neighbourhood. He left in a hurry, he—’

She stopped dead, staring at Mac. What if he—? The thought was into her head and out again in a fraction of a second. She laughed.

‘What’s so funny?’ Mac was frowning at the black horse with the wound on its bony head, shoulders hunched in the awful sweater.

‘Fantastic things one thinks.’

‘Such as?’

Dora always said what she was thinking. ‘I thought for a second, what if you were that man?’

‘What would you do?’

‘Kill you, I suppose. The halter on this horse was so tight that it was embedded in the flesh. The vet had to cut it out under anaesthetic. Even if it heals, he’ll have a dent in his head for ever, like a fossil. All the horses had halter sores. They had nothing to eat. They had chewed all the wood within reach. The one we put down yesterday had started to bite at her own chest.’

‘It’s unbelievable,’ Mac said.

‘It’s true.’

Dora showed him Fanny, with an empty socket where a drunken farmer had knocked out her eye, and Ranger and Prince, whose mouths had been cut to bits by the gangs of ‘Night Riders’, with wire for a bridle. She showed him Pussycat, who had broken down on her way from Scotland to London with a petition for the Queen, the brewery horse and the old police horse and ugly Ginger, who used to have a milk round before the dairy went motorized.

‘They were going to put him down, but all the ladies in one street clubbed together and bought him. They call him Peregrine. They think he’s beautiful. Do you?’

‘I wouldn’t know one horse from another,’ Mac said.

Heavy drops began to fall out of the sky like lead pellets. The sky blacked over at great speed, like the end of the world. Dora shook back her short hair and stuck out her underlip to catch the rain. Mac pulled up the collar of his bulky sweater and lowered his beard into it.

Anna ran out, with a coat over her head. ‘Come on in!’ she called. ‘Come in and have some supper,’ she told Mac.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I’ll get something. I have to go find a room.’

‘You can stay here.’

‘Thanks.’ He backed away. ‘I’ll be O.K.’

The rain suddenly came down like a waterfall. He ran, splashing to his car.

Anna ran with Dora back to the house.

‘What’s he afraid of?’

‘I don’t know,’ Dora said. ‘I don’t think we’ll see him again.’