‘Before the gods that made the gods
Had seen their sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was cut out of the grass’
—G.K. Chesterton, ‘Ballad of the White Horse’
Spencer 1997
Spencer, getting dressed, could see the White Horse from his window. What a logo, he thought. Thousands of years old and good as new, unfurled like a banner up the face of the hill, proclaiming not just the Bronze Age fort but the brazen confidence of its occupants. You had to hand it to them.
This morning, Spencer’s last in England, was the finest since he’d arrived two weeks ago. Not that he was complaining, he’d had a fondness for the English weather ever since the war. Soft, capricious, teasing – female weather, as against the blustering machismo of the elements back home. The sunshine, even when it came along, had a tremulous quality. And as for the winters, only a nation accustomed to that special brand of grey, icy wetness could have invented the sturdy delights of bread and dripping, bread sauce, crumpets, and that treacle-coloured beer (now less common, he found) the temperature of body fluids in which the hops seemed still to be growing . . . God knows the Brits back then had had little enough to enjoy. It was no wonder he and his like had been greeted as saviours. You could forget the air war over Europe, it was get out the goodies when the Yanks came to call.
With a small grunt of effort he placed his right foot on the edge of a chair to tie his laces. Coming back as an old man on the eve of a new age, he appreciated for the first time just how bad things had been then. The small country hotel he was staying in wasn’t materially different in period and design from the Seven Stars in Church Norton, or the Scratching Cat, or the Pipe and Bowl, or any of a score of other pubs he could remember, but it had wised up and got itself three stars in the guide by creating a beefed-up version of a fantasy English inn, the sort which had probably never existed outside Americans’ imaginations. He changed feet laboriously, conceding that they’d done a good job. Now, the quaint freestanding tubs were spanking new, with Jacuzzi ducts, and the brass mixer faucet delivered water soundlessly at the right temperature and roughly the right pressure not only into the tub itself but from the shower. The double bedstead was oak repro, the mattress posture-sprung, the kingsize duvet a riot of tea roses. Breakfast was fine, dinner was better, but the great British afternoon tea (he sighed fondly as he buttoned his shirt) appeared to have gone by the board. There were phones with voice-mail in the rooms and you could receive faxes and e-mails at reception. Old world, hi-tec: a Britain at peace, and in clover.
He brushed his hair, bending his knees slightly to look in the mirror. Something had been lost, he reflected, but it was almost certainly he, and not the British people, who had lost it. You couldn’t go back, you couldn’t relive the past, nor retrieve the special cocktail of experiences which had made your pulse race at twenty-one . . . He picked up his room key.
Just the same, there was a teenage waitress down in the dining room he found himself watching. He did so now, after he’d given her his order and was eating the fruit compôte which salved his conscience about bangers and eggs to come. She wasn’t from the usual run of waitresses, a student probably. One of those aloof English girls, cool and clever and shy, her shiny mouse-brown hair pulled back into a pony tail, her long thin legs in unseasonal black tights. Not a beauty exactly, but oh, my!
Like Rosie, in fact.
And probably not much older than she had been – what, eighteen, nineteen? Hard to tell. Girls these days were more knowing, it seemed to him, but had an extended youth. They went on playing and choosing and scooting around for as long as they wanted, leaving home, going back, living with guys and living alone. There was no pattern.
He finished the fruit and glanced at his folded newspaper, his eye running up and down the same column of print until she came back. When she did return she hesitated, not wanting to disturb his reading by reaching across with the plate. He looked up and smiled, rescuing her.
‘Is that my breakfast?’
‘Yes.’
‘Come on then –’ he tapped his place mat ‘– I can hardly wait.’
Colouring up a little, she put the plate in front of him. She blushed easy, but her whole manner warned him, if he were thinking of such a thing, not to make anything of it. Which he would never have dreamed of doing.
‘Thank you. I’m going to miss this.’
‘Oh? You’re leaving?’
‘Later on today.’
‘And don’t you have nice breakfasts in America?’ A tiny glint of irony.
‘We have great breakfasts, but when it comes to sausages, you win.’
‘Really? I’ll take your word for it. I’m a vegetarian.’
‘You don’t know what you’re missing.’
‘Oh, I do, that’s just the point.’
Definitely not a full-time waitress. He watched as she walked away again. She had that gait characteristic of a certain kind of English girl, a long, loping stride which attempted to deny any hint of sexiness, but which was in consequence as sexy as hell.
As he left the dining room, she said: ‘Safe journey.’
In the hallway the receptionist hailed him. ‘Mr McColl, e-mail for you.’
‘Thanks.’
It was from Hannah.
Just to let you know I can hardly wait to see you day after tomorrow – has it really only been a week? I suddenly got this sick fancy you might not want to come home, all those old memories, all that quaint old charm . . . remember I’ve got quaint old charms too. Hurry back, honey, love you. XXX Your old lady.
‘Can I reply right away?’
‘Of course. Office is round the corner.’
His message was brief.
Relax, old lady. Get the pipe and slippers out, I’m on my way. XXX Spence.
Back in his room as he put the last couple of items in his bag and prepared to leave he secretly conceded that Hannah’s fancy had not been as sick as all that. There might have been no particular moment when he considered staying, but neither had he especially looked forward to returning as he should have done.
Downstairs, he settled up, ordered a cab for later, left his bags at reception and set out on foot for the White Horse.
For the last few days, the past had become his magnetic north.
It had been easy to fall asleep: it was hell waking up.
This disproved at a stroke Stella’s mother’s oft-repeated maxim that things would look better in the morning. As a child it had certainly been true. Stella had lost count of the number of agonising anxieties, fears and looming horrors which had resumed their correct proportions over porridge and brown sugar, against the burble of the news on her father’s wireless and the chugging of the early-morning water pipes. Night was black and eternal, a featureless abyss in which separate problems had merged to become the single great insuperable problem of Being Oneself (another of her mother’s maxims). But back then, good old day made light work of the dark stuff.
Not this time. Jesus wept . . . The back seat of the car, so cosy five hours ago, felt like some kind of mediaeval torture device, a way of chilling, twisting and compressing the human frame till it cried uncle.
She’d left the northern town at eleven last night, still on a roll from the show, her system fizzing with adrenalin. Even the heartache – who was she kidding? The heart-rip, heart-haemorrhage – which had been her constant companion for months was subsumed in the sheer simplicity of the decision: she was going home.
All she had to do was climb into her car, switch on the engine and point south. To get from A to B that was all it took.
They – the management, the producer, even Derek – thought she was off her trolley, that she wouldn’t come back. She saw it in their pale, startled faces as they wished her a safe journey. There was always this faint sense that they didn’t trust her – not that they thought she’d deliberately deceive them, but that she was a loose cannon, not quite in control. This in spite of twenty years in the business with never a cancelled performance (not counting the great schism) or, she flattered herself, a duff one. But of course they were right without knowing how right they were. Only Stella knew how many small victories went into the delivery of one great song. Her onstage persona was not an escape, but her means of survival.
Anyway, to hell with them. It had been Saturday night, she had thirty-six hours, she needed to be home. She’d driven on auto-pilot with first Missa Luba, then Billie Holiday, finally Brahms, to keep her company. She hadn’t had a drink since leaving the stage, her head was clear and the white line stayed single, but just the same she knew her reactions weren’t a hundred per cent. Once, on the M6 near Wolverhampton, she came that close to ploughing into a juggernaut as it moved into the middle lane in front of her. The driver had signalled with time to spare, she could comfortably have pulled out to accommodate him, but her brain had failed to register the winking light until she heard the hysterical whine of the lorry’s horn, and was flooded by the livid glare of its full-on lights in her rear windscreen.
Then the shock-sweat had broken out all over her. For half an hour after that she’d pushed a hundred, putting time and space between her and the incident, scared that the vengeful (and she was sure misogynistic) juggernaut might pursue her like the one in the Spielberg film.
At around two-thirty a.m. with only a few miles left, she was suddenly poleaxed by exhaustion. She was off the motorway and on the A-road, deserted in the small hours, when her head nodded and for a nanosecond she slept. The car swerved crazily, she was disorientated, it careered back and forth across the road three times before she regained control of it. Had there been anyone else coming, in either direction, she and they would have been killed. No great loss for herself, she was tempted to think, but that was wicked – what about the other people?
Shaken and shamed she’d turned into a lane which crept from the snug fold of the valley round the flank of a hill until suddenly the White Horse had appeared in front of her, huge and strange, a creature of earth and air, leaping towards the heavens like the magic rocking horse of children’s fiction. She’d stopped exactly where she was, knowing this place and confident she was alone on this narrow thread of road. It had once been a track up to the fort; people had trudged, and run, and ridden and toiled up this same road for two thousand years. All that lay between their way and hers was a thin skin of tarmac.
She’d switched off the lights and the engine, and got out of the car. She walked a little way up the grassy slope, trusting to instinct until her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Then she stood quite still, breathing in the secret deeps of the hillside, the wild, arrested flight of the White Horse, and the glitter of the endless stars.
For the first time in weeks – months – she felt the jagged corners of her spirit soften and extend like the fronds of a sea anemone in the incoming tide. Minute muscles in her neck and face yielded just a little, releasing some of the tears that she’d so far been unable to shed.
After a few minutes she returned to the car, shuffling and stumbling like a drink, scarcely able to walk for tiredness. She took her tissues out of the glove compartment and blew her nose, shattering the spell with a loud, prosaic honk. Then she climbed into the back seat, unlaced her boots and curled up, her arms wrapped around her face. She had nothing to cover herself with, because it was summer, and she had brought nothing with her. She was relaxed. She sank into sleep like a child.
But this morning her body at least was grown-up. A bloody Methuselah, thirty-nine years old, with aching joints, cold hands and feet, an empty stomach and eyes itchy with last night’s stage make-up. A mouth like a fell-runner’s crotch and breath – she tested it warily in her cupped palm – like a car crash. She unwrapped a wrinkled stick of chewing gum, put it in her mouth, and kneeled up to inspect herself in the driving mirror. Her reflection made her flinch. The only time she looked in a mirror was before and after a show when her face, uncompromisingly it, was just a commodity – a blank canvas on to which she painted Stella Carlyle, entertainer. Be yourself? And what, in God’s name, was that? Her raspberry-red hair stood up in wild stooks above her poor, pasty complexion, legacy of two decades of slap. Last night’s healing tears had left snail-tracks of dried mascara down her cheeks. She found a fresh tissue, spat on it and scrubbed at her face and eye sockets. Who the fuck that mattered, or cared, was going to see her anyway?
There was a half-full bottle of tepid Evian water rolling around on the floor by the front passenger seat, along with the usual drift of old newspapers, burger cartons, road maps and dead flowers. She got out, retrieved it, took the gum out of her mouth and gulped down the water as she took in her surroundings.
It was ten o’clock, and now that daylight had restored detail and scale to her surroundings the White Horse seemed farther away. Even at this time on a Sunday morning there was a walker up there, moving at a snail’s pace uphill, along the horse’s back. Looking away, about three miles down the valley to her right, she could see the line of trees of the Mayden watercourse and make out the conical church tower of Fort Mayden. Above and beyond it the hill with its cape of ancient woodland, that protected the old manor house. To her left, the west, the smooth moon-coloured contours of the downs rolled towards Salisbury, forty miles away.
Between where she was now and the main road was a broad, shallow sweep of coarse hill grass, thinly fenced with posts and wire. There were three horses inside the fence, two big alert-looking chaps and a third lying on its side asleep. When she began to walk towards them the two lively ones began to trot and then canter about, arching their necks, kicking, strutting their stuff – horsing around, she supposed. Stella had a lifelong fear of horses, but this artless braggadocio was bewitching. At one point they seemed to charge the fence and be about to leap over it, and she took a couple of steps backwards in alarm, but at the last minute they turned and galloped westward along the inside of the fragile wire, tails streaming, necks snaked forward ears flat, in mock competition.
As they stormed away Stella’s eye was drawn back to the third horse which still lay motionless in the grass. Its head was towards her, and it had not moved by so much as a muscle. Knowing nothing about horses she was nonetheless struck by something fixed and unnatural in its position – something about the way the legs were held. She squinted shortsightedly – could the poor thing be dead?
She returned to the Ka and took her glasses off the dashboard. When she looked again, the two show-off horses had come to a halt and were cropping the grass, tails still switching skittishly, some hundreds of yards away at the north-western corner of the field in the lee of the smooth barrow known as Knights Hill. The third horse still lay in that odd, rigid attitude. Stella’s heart sank. She’d barely slept, she was knackered and famished, her eyes felt as though they’d been sandblasted and she was scared of horses. But her wretched conscience pricked her. To drive away now, in the cosy expectation of tender hugs and home comforts, not knowing whether the animal was dead or alive . . . was that the action of a decent human being?
Praying with an atheist’s bad grace that the fence was not electrified, she bent and very gingerly slipped between the top strands of wire. She took a few steps and paused. The two frisky horses had picked her up on their radar and raised their heads to look at her. One movement in my direction, she told herself, just one, and I’m out of here. But having made their long-distance assessment they began once more peaceably grazing.
Moving very slowly, not wanting to attract their attention again, she advanced. The notion entered her head, unbidden, that Vitelio would have been proud of her.
Last night Robert had embarked on a precipitate white-water ride of furious, focused energy for which he knew he’d pay heavily. He would show nothing to blur his brutal clarity of purpose. This was a small country, nothing was far away in terms of distance or time, and he had at his command a performance car the full rampaging glory of which he rarely indulged. For once he was going to put his foot to the floor and let her go. He hadn’t had a drink, and if he was caught for speeding it hardly mattered. For once, success would be surrender, and it would be cheap at any price.
The arterial roads out of London were virtually empty, dark and hollow as drains. On littered wastes of pavement occasional war parties of teenagers moved from club to club chi-iking, spilling off the pavement, grimacing, gesturing, seething with sex and substances. In the unsmart northern suburbs quiet ranks of semi-timbered respectable homes stood patiently, stoically awaiting the teenagers’ return. Further out in provincial laybys, lorries and their drivers slumbered, with coyly curtained cabs. Others thundered on, winking indicator lights confidingly to let him by – no competition at this hour, they were all knights of the road.
It took him only three hours to reach Manchester, twenty minutes to locate the hotel. The night porter was initially the very soul of discreet intransigence, but mellowed under the influence of a fifty-pound note.
The party in question had returned from the theatre, but he couldn’t recall Miss (no chance of a Ms here) Carlyle being with them. Then could you, Robert had asked with unusual politeness, possibly, as an enormous favour, call Mr Jackman’s room, say it’s Mr Vitelio, an old friend of Miss Carlyle’s?
The porter pointed out that it was one in the morning. Robert’s turn to be intransigent. This was absolutely crucial.
Jackman came on the line, sounding surprisingly alert considering the hour.
‘Mr Vitelio? Are you who I think you are?’
Robert thought, How the hell should I know?
‘Possibly.’
‘Stay there, I’ll come down.’
Robert replaced the receiver and addressed the porter. ‘He’s on his way.’
Unlike most performers seen offstage, Derek Jackman was bigger and taller than Robert had expected. He was tousled, but wore black trousers and a denim open-necked shirt. He held out a hand the size of a teatray.
‘How do you do. What can I do for you?’
‘I want to contact Stella.’
‘Shall we sit down?’ Jackman led the way to an enclave of sofas in the corner of the lobby. ‘Do you want anything, the porter’ll get it?’ ‘No, thanks.’ Robert perched on the edge of the sofa. ‘I want to contact Stella.’
‘She’s gone home.’
‘What?’ He was rocked back. ‘London?’
Jackman shook his head. ‘Don’t think so. Down south to see her mother, her sister . . . Barmy thing to do after the week we’ve had, but she wasn’t about to listen to us – off she went about – what? – a couple of hours ago.’
‘Jesus!’ Robert pressed his hands over his eyes, trying to hold himself together.
‘Sure you wouldn’t like a drink?’
He shook his head. Lowered his hands and placed them, fingers spread, on his knees.
‘What a stupid bugger I was not to ring first.’
‘It wouldn’t have done any good, she made up her mind on the spur of the moment and that was that. Typical Stella.’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell you what though.’ Jackman looked into his face, man to man. ‘You will be a stupid bugger if you let her get away this time.’
In any other circumstances Robert would have resented this presumption of understanding, but now he was too unmanned by tiredness to object.
‘I know that.’
‘Her sister lives in a barn conversion at a house called Bells near a village called Fort Mayden, not too far from Oxford. There’s a White Horse there, if that means anything to you. That’s as much as I know.’
‘Thanks.’
‘So what are you waiting for?’ They rose, shook hands. ‘Good luck.’
He hit the road again at once, not lingering for so much as a sandwich or a cigarette. He wanted swiftly and seamlessly to rewind the long tape of motorway, to kid his system into believing that the previous three hundred miles had been not a fruitless diversion but a means to an end.
At the first all-night services he came to he stopped for petrol. He also bought two large bars of plain chocolate, one of which he opened and broke into chunks. He spread these out on their foil wrapper on the passenger seat – a drip-feed of artificial energy.
By the time he was passing through the western outskirts of London the everyday world was beginning to wake up. He resented the lightening sky, the first trickle of domestic cars dithering along at a conscientious seventy. It was business as usual with the lorries too – any small-hours camaraderie was a thing of the past, it was every man for himself and the devil take the middle lane. Once he’d passed the city he was going against the prevailing tide of traffic heading for work, so there was at least a grim schadenfreude to be enjoyed in watching the poor devils crawl into town.
He remembered Stella mentioning the White Horse, and he knew which one it was. He’d have to get there and then ask. Beyond Oxford, there were roadworks – winding columns of cones, narrow lanes, innumerable contraflows and a bloody diversion. All this, with the chocolate and the sleepless night, initiated a pounding headache over his right eye. Once the open road spun out again in front of him and he was closing on his objective he experienced a rush, though whether for fight or flight he couldn’t say. His sole aim had been to get to where she was, and now that he was within a few miles of the place he realised that he had no idea what he intended to do. He had not mentally rehearsed a single word or gesture, was rashly trusting to instinct to see him through.
For barely a second he considered stopping and getting his head together, before telling himself that since the whole enterprise was impulsive, to lay the dead hand of planning on it at this stage might be to render it dead in the water. He was astonished to realise that he was actually afraid – afraid of reflection and hesitation, afraid of weakening – painfully afraid of failure.
There was no problem finding the house, the first farmworker he asked knew exactly where it was. He arrived there at half-past nine, and approached the converted stable block.A heavily pregnant woman in baggy joggers and a sweatshirt bearing the legend ‘Ski Colorado’ opened the door.
‘Good morning!’
‘You don’t know me—’
‘Thank God for that, I thought I might be having a senior moment.’
He detected a familiar note in this remark – he had come to the right place.
‘I’m sorry to turn up on your doorstep like this. I’m actually trying to get in touch with Stella Carlyle and someone indicated that she might be here.’
‘They did?’ A small girl appeared and the woman pressed the child’s head absentmindedly against her thigh.‘Well, I’m her devoted sister – Georgina Travis, by the way – so there is always that likelihood, but it’s the first I’ve heard of it.’
His face must have been an open book, for on hers he saw first sympathy, then dawning realisation.
‘You’re not by any chance Robert Vitelio?’
‘I’m afraid so.’ He had no idea what effect this information would have. How did he stand with Stella’s family? Was he the one that got away? Or a bounder, a bastard, an untouchable?
‘Put it there—’ she held out her hand ‘—you are the only man ever to have got under my sister’s skin.’
‘It’s mutual.’
‘Look, what am I doing keeping you hanging about on the doorstep? Come in.’ She stood aside, but he didn’t move. ‘My husband’s gone to collect the children from school for the day. This is Zoe.’
‘Hallo.’
‘When we get the baby,’ Zoe informed him, ‘I’m getting a pony.’
‘Not from the same place, I trust.’
The child stared suspiciously at him, but Georgina laughed and said again: ‘Come on in, do.’
He shook his head. ‘I won’t, thanks.’
‘Whatever. Who told you she’d be here?’
‘Derek Jackman.’
‘Well, he’s a fairly reliable source. But aren’t they in Manchester? I remember her saying what a pig it was that they had to go straight from the Parade up north without a break.’
‘They are up there, but Jackman told me she’d driven down here last night.’
‘So we’re no farther forward.’ Georgina folded her arms, frowning. ‘Have you tried her London number?’
He shook his head. ‘Jackman seemed sure she was coming here.’
‘Okay . . . So what would you like to do?’
‘He mentioned your parents – might she have gone to them?’
‘I doubt it, not first anyway. Dad’s not well, they’re not up to receiving company before ten at the earliest. Do you want me to ring and ask?’
‘No, no, don’t disturb them. Perhaps if I—’ he wracked his brains while she stood there smiling encouragingly ‘—if I go and stretch my legs, it’s a fine morning – and then I could call back a bit later.’
‘Sure, if that’s what you’d like. You know where we are.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Pleasure. If she turns up I’ll tell her you were here, and that you’ll come back.’
‘Thanks.’
He turned, and as he began walking away, she called after him: ‘Stella will be so pleased!’
He started the car and gunned the engine noisily out of the drive, fighting down his feelings: corralling them for when they would be needed. Nonetheless his eyes smarted and the outline of the White Horse shimmered on the other side of the valley.
That’s what he’d do, he’d go for a walk. Fresh air and exercise were restoratives he frequently commended to his post-operative patients but rarely employed himself. Get some space around him, and into his head. He took the road back down into the valley and turned westward, away from the village. After about half a mile he came to a green footpath sign pointing south, towards the hill fort. He parked and got out of the car. The path could be seen wriggling through the first field, beyond the gate, but there was no sign of a stile, or of the right of way having been maintained beyond that.
Still, if he was allowed to do it . . .
He was a city animal, used to the heady anonymity of busy streets. Setting off along the bumpy track he felt watched, conspicuous in his black shoes and fashionably baggy suit. As a concession to the countryside he removed his tie and stuffed it in his pocket.
In spite of himself he had to concede it was a glorious morning, with that shiny, new-minted quality to the sunshine which you only got in England where such days were rare. The field he crossed was empty, but there were signs (he circumnavigated them fastidiously) that it had been used for cattle. The low, tangled hedge to his right was laced with dog roses, and heraldic-looking thistles sprouted between the cowpats.
At the far side of the field the path petered out uncertainly – bolder ramblers than he had obviously passed this way and thought better of it – but he was determined not to be deflected. A walk needed an objective, and he wanted to climb the hill to a point which commanded a view. Allied to this was the barely acknowledged idea that to overlook his surroundings might be to gain a calmer perspective on his problems. In the corner of the field he discovered a place where the hedge had been breached, and he went through, the blackthorn spikes catching at his sleeves, and began trudging up the slope.
He breathed heavily, keeping his eyes on his feet. He wasn’t fit, and what with no sleep either, the ascent took it out of him. For the umpteenth time he told himself it was time to get his act together. Practise what he preached: give up the weed and the whisky. Sex could stay. If he was spared – Christ!
Starting to sweat, he took off his jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves. His sinewy arms looked alarmingly white – townie’s arms – but his blunt, short-nailed hands were more like those of a navvy than an eye doctor. Working hands, there wasn’t that much difference in it. He might not win any prizes for temperance and clean living but he could, he reminded himself, restore sighted life to other people for them to fuck up as they wished.
As usual this thought invigorated him as he plodded on. His job was always the weight he placed on the other side of the scales, balancing all the shit and shambles. Good work was what he believed he did, in both senses, well done and worthwhile; and handsomely paid which didn’t hurt. The thought of losing it was intolerable to him. He permitted himself a look up the hill and was pleased to find he’d made reasonable progress, and that there was only one more field, with a strange tumulus to the right, before he’d be on the open slope of the White Horse.
He stopped. For a split second his whole system seemed to cut out in a micro-death, like a silent sneeze. In the watercolour wash of these surroundings the pink car was as conspicuous as an alien spacecraft. Hot pink, the in-your-face colour of Brighton rock and candy floss and tarty lipstick.
The second after, his system went from pause to fast forward. His heart pattered dangerously and his lungs heaved, gulping in air. A few metres in front of him was a wire fence. He lurched towards it and grabbed one of the posts, leaning both hands on the top of it to steady himself.
It had to be her. But where? At his approach a couple of horses which had been grazing near the barrow began trotting about with heads lifted and tails like flags, prompted by some atavistic herding and defending impulse.
He scanned to the left.
There she was.
He was so attuned to her, he knew her so well. Even from several hundred yards away he could tell the expression on her face by the angle of her head. She was worried, and cross about being worried. Her arms were folded over her thin diaphragm, hands tucked into her armpits. As he watched she pulled off her glasses and with the inside of the same wrist rubbed her face and the top of her head, making her hair stick up even more. From this distance and in these surroundings she looked like a rather radical scarecrow. The beloved scarecrow of his most secret heart.
There was a large object lying at her feet. He thought perhaps she had been carrying something up the hill and been forced to put it down, which would account for the air of dejected frustration – she hated to be beaten.
But now she sank to her knees, as though praying, and as she did so he recognised with astonishment what it was in the grass.
Spencer had reached the top of the White Horse. He wasn’t in such bad shape for his age after all – not too puffed and the hip was holding up well.
By the horse’s poll he sat down and rested his arms on his knees. Lord, but it was pretty. God’s little acre. Or rather man’s – all history, artefact and modification, not much left of what the Bronze Age warriors, let alone the Almighty, would have looked out on from this point. He could see some landmarks he recognised – the village of Fort Mayden, the big house on the opposite hill – but the horizon in any direction seemed no more than a few miles away. From the mountain road behind his house in Moose Draw, Wyoming, he could see, on a clear day, for fifty, sixty miles. Still, this place had a magic of its own, and he was susceptible to it. He shortened his focus and looked down at the white stuff near his feet. He’d read about it. It wasn’t, as was commonly supposed, a design created by simply removing the turf but a deep pit filled with chalk rubble. Those Ancient Brits hadn’t been scared of hard work – this place, Stonehenge, weird circles, more darn great forts and castles than you could shake a stick at . . . And I’ll be . . . There was a cigarette end lying right there on the surface of the chalk. Incensed, he stretched out one leg and scraped it towards him with the toe of his shoe. Then he scrabbled a small hole with the fingers of one hand and buried it, patting the ground tidy and flat on top like a grave.
There was a little pink car parked beside the road about half a mile below where he was sitting, he’d noticed it earlier as he began his climb. Someone – he thought a young man – had got out of it, to take a leak probably. Now he could see whoever it was down in the field beyond the road where the horses were. The figure had gone over to the one that was on the ground asleep and was studying it. Then looked up, casting around. Actually he could see now it was a skinny woman – something in the angle of the head – which would explain the pink car. Her attitude was one of anxiety, concern. She probably knew nothing about horses, he could remember as a kid thinking they looked dead when they lay like that. She could see him up here, could even holler if she wanted help, so he didn’t wave. On the other hand it was time he began the descent. He rose laboriously – knees, feet, backside, eeeasy does it – and that wiped the silly grin off his face. It wasn’t the walking, it was the seizing up got you every time.
The head was already emerging – slick with fluid, webbed with membranes, steaming from the hot secrecy of the womb. Stella watched with a kind of awe this process which all her life she had striven to avoid both as participant and helper. Here was the real meaning of travail. The mare’s body surging and convulsing, subject to this ferocious physical imperative, her head stretched in a concentrated agony, eyes staring but unseeing, focused on the birth.
Should she do something to help? Leave well alone? Stay, go, tell someone else? If so, who? Her fear and ignorance were humiliatingly complete.
At that moment the foal’s head moved a little farther out, and twisted slightly. The movement made Stella think of its flailing legs, still inside the mare. She winced. Was all this normal? Some dim memory of a film seen in childhood suggested that a foal came out feet first, what in humans would be called a breech birth . . . or had the film got it wrong? The mare snorted violently, struggling for breath. Instinct overrode revulsion and with a groan of anxiety Stella knelt down, pushed up her sleeves, and prepared to engage with matters of life and death.
Robert had to pause again. He was too short of breath to call and she seemed too preoccupied to have noticed anyone else. Besides which he reminded himself that he was the last person she would be expecting to see, so she would be unlikely to identify him. In the middle distance another lone walker was making his way down the slope with short, careful steps, following the back of the White Horse. An elderly chap, Robert surmised, chary of his joints. But at least the old bugger had got up there without having a seizure.
Spencer shielded his eyes and took another long look at the woman in the field. She was on her knees by the horse. Something was wrong. He went so far as to cup his hands round his mouth to holler, but thought better of it. There was a guy a bit closer to her than he was who she could ask for help if help were needed. Spencer was old, with quite a way still to walk and a plane to catch. If he reached the road and an offer of help seemed appropriate, he’d make it. Otherwise – when in Rome – he’d mind his own business.
Stella knew that she had to overcome her squeamishness and apply brute strength. The other option was to run back – uphill, she reminded herself – to the car, and put the mobile phone to use. But the signal had been weak when she’d tried to ring George en route, and even if she were able to locate a vet through directory enquiries, what was rural protocol vis à vis unilaterally summoning help for someone else’s horse? She entertained visions of a man in a cap and gaiters carrying a gun and asking what in blue blazes gave her the right to interfere?
She was giddy and nauseous with apprehension as she took hold of the foal’s head. But it felt surprisingly solid, a proper horse in miniature and not the slimy unformed thing she’d feared. Also to her surprise it didn’t fight her touch, though with her peripheral vision she saw the mare’s head lift in consternation before sinking back submissively.
Instinctively Stella knew that her own strength must be used with that of the mare – it was like singing, taking a deep breath and letting your voice ride out on it. What she must not do was to work against nature, she must go with the flow. When the mare next went into a contraction Stella heaved at the foal’s head, trying to ease it a little farther out, feeling the angle at which the rest of the body lay. On the first occasion nothing happened. On the second there was a slither, a rush of fluid and the folded knees appeared, followed by one leg. Stella experienced a release of pressure in her own body.
I’ve done it, she thought. Together, we’re doing it.
‘Well done.’
That voice – so familiar, so longed for, so often imagined that she thought she must have imagined it now. ‘Not bad for an amateur.’
‘Bastard.’ Beloved.
‘Here we go. All hands to the pump.’
She hadn’t so much as glanced at his face, she hadn’t needed to. His hands came down to join hers and, hand over hand, shoulder to shoulder, they worked together.