Chapter 22

IN THE SUMMER holidays, Callie worked harder than she ever did at school, but it did not seem like work. It seemed like the real purpose of living.

With the horses mostly in the fields, there was not so much stable work to do, but summer was a time for repairs and painting and mending fences and trimming hedges and restoring the land. With the money Mac gave him from the film, the Colonel was able to buy a small tractor to plough up part of the pasture, and harrow and re-seed.

In the long evenings, Steve and Dora and Callie rode on the fine springy turf along the top of the hills, or went down to the river, bare-back, and barefoot in shorts. They rode the horses into the water, then tied them up to graze in the lush meadow, while they had supper on the midge-misted bank.

One evening, the Colonel came into the kitchen, where Dora was starting to make sandwiches.

‘If you’re going riding,’ he said, ‘don’t take David. A chap is coming over to try him.’

‘Are you really going to sell him?’

‘Dora, I must. I can’t have a fit young horse taking up room here. We’ll be crowded for the winter as it is, with more coming in.’ He went on through into the office.

Dora put down the knife in disgust, threw the bread back into the bin and gave the end of the ham to the dog that was sitting behind her, as a dog or cat always did when anyone worked at the counter.

She and Steve and Callie stayed at home to view this interloper, whom they were prepared to hate.

He was a quiet young man in well-cut breeches and decent boots, with a country face and not much to say. He stood at the door of the loose box and looked at David for a long time without making any comment.

The Colonel did the same. They both chewed a piece of hay. Then the young man went up to David and patted him casually on the neck and murmured to him. He ran his hand down his legs, and picked up a foot, then came back to stand by the Colonel, and they both looked at the horse again.

Horse-trading is a strange, slow, closed-mouthed business. As an old sportsman once wrote:

The way of a man with a maid be strange,

But nothing compared

To the way of a man with a horse

When buying or selling the same.

‘Throw a saddle on him?’ the young man said at last.

‘If you like,’ the Colonel said, as if the young man had not come especially to ride David. ‘Steve?’

Steve took his time. He went slowly on his crutches, although he was by now quite nippy on them, and carried the saddle back on his head. He brought the worst saddle, and had to be sent back for another. He took a long time tacking up, moving the buckles of the cheekstraps up and down and ending in the same hole, since it was David’s bridle and already fitted him. The young man watched. Another unwritten law of horse trading is that you don’t help to get the horse ready, even when the groom has a broken leg.

‘Go easy with him,’ Steve said, as he held the grey horse for him to mount. ‘He’s very jumpy.’

‘Shies a bit, does he?’ The young man sat sideways, adjusting a stirrup leather.

‘No,’ said the Colonel, and Steve said, ‘Yes, he shies a lot. He’s a very nervous horse.’

He showed him where he could try David, and disappeared. He could not bear to watch.

The young man rode quietly for a while in the schooling ring, hopped over a few jumps, then trotted down the lane alongside the hedge to the big field where he could gallop.

When he was nearly at the gate, Steve suddenly started up the tractor with an explosive roar behind the hedge. David shied violently – any horse would – shot off with his head up, jumped the high gate with feet to spare and galloped off before the young man could collect him.

‘That’s the end of him,’ Steve said to Dora behind the hedge.

They worked with the tractor for a while, and when they came back to the house, the Colonel said, ‘Chap’s coming back for David tomorrow. He’s very pleased. He thinks he can make him into an Event horse, when he’s worked up his dressage and his jumping.’

They stared. ‘Can he handle him?’

The Colonel smiled. ‘He should. He was runner-up in the Pony Club Combined Training Finals two years ago. Bad luck, Steve.’

Bad luck because the horse was sold, or because the trick didn’t work, or both? With the Colonel, you were never quite sure how much he knew.

*

At the beginning of August, two girls in a red Mini were driving by and saw the sign on the gate and came in to visit the horses. They were secretaries from London, and they were on their holiday.

‘At least, we were,’ they told Anna, who greeted them, as everyone else was in the hay field. ‘But it’s all been ruined this year.’

In answer to an advertisement in a magazine, they had booked rooms at the Pinecrest Hotel.

‘Ride every day,’ they had been promised. ‘Fine mounts. Beautiful countryside.’

‘When we got there,’ the fair plump one was round all over, with round eyes and round pink cheeks like polished apples, ‘the stable was almost empty. Just two skinny old horses, but Jane and I wouldn’t ride those poor things.’

‘The people were quite nice, but we wouldn’t stay. It was the horses we’d come for. They wouldn’t give us our money back.’ Jane was the dark one with glasses. ‘We tried to protest, though Lily and I are no good at doing that, but they showed us a piece in small print at the bottom of their letter.’

She fished in her shoulder bag and showed Anna the letter, which warned in a fine print whisper, ‘Deposit not refundable under any circumstances.’

‘Anyway,’ Lily said. ‘It’s too late to get in anywhere else where there’s horses. On the way home, we saw your sign and thought we’d just come in. It’s the nearest we’ll ever get to a horse this summer.’

When Anna had showed them the horses in the orchard and the top field, Lily and Jane helped her to carry cold tea and buns down to the far hay field. Cobbler’s Dream was in the shade of a hedge with the cart, and they fell on him with affectionate cries and gentle caresses. They were frustrated horse lovers, who had always lived in the city and could only pat police horses and watch the Lifeguards. While the workers drank tea and rested, they seized hay forks and began to turn the windrows, with more energy than skill.

Anna talked to the Colonel, and then she said to Lily and Jane, ‘Why don’t you spend your two weeks here? You can have a room with Mrs Jones across the road. Steve won’t have his plaster off for another week or two, so you can help us in return for a free holiday. If you’d like to.’

‘If we’d like to!’ They dropped their forks, prongs up, the way amateurs did, and rushed at her.