The Horses of Follyfoot Read online

  ‘Let me out,’ Ron begged.

  ‘I said I’d take you all the way into London. Don’t thank me. I like the company.’

  ‘I’ve got smallpox,’ Ron said, but a car was hooting at her and she didn’t hear. He prayed for a quick death, but a busy roundabout came instead. The old lady had to slow. He opened the door, jumped and ran.

  He was taken on into London in a van driven by an old mate of his. Ron didn’t have to put on an act for him, so he told him the story about the sick horse and his phone call and how it had started this whole hullabaloo.

  The mate didn’t read the newspapers, except for the sports pages, and he only listened to rock music on radio, so this was the first he’d heard of it.

  ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘You must think I was born yesterday, Ronald Stryker. What a pack of lies.’

  ‘Now it’s funny you should say that,’ Ron said, ‘because for the first time in me life, I’m telling you the clean, unvarnished truth.’

  When he got to the office of the newspaper he had picked to favour with his exclusive story, the doorman would not let him go up to the newsroom.

  ‘Bomb scares,’ he said. ‘Sorry. State your business and I’ll send up a message.’

  ‘I’m the one that broke the news about the epidemic of ephalitis – elephantisis – you know. Dr Dillon. I’ve come to have me picture taken.’

  The doorman spoke on the telephone.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said more firmly. ‘There’s no one up there able to see you.’

  ‘But they must!’ cried Ron. ‘They’re daft, they don’t know their business.’ There were people going in and out of the lifts all the time. This made him furious. ‘It’s hot news. Call back again.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t keep saying that.’

  Ron was so frustrated that he set fire to the wastepaper basket (give ’em some hot news). The doorman smothered the fire, sighed and called upstairs for someone to come and deal with Dr Dillon.

  A girl came down. They sent a mere girl, who looked as if it was her first day on the job.

  ‘What is it that you want?’

  ‘It’s about the great epidemic, innit?’

  ‘What great epidemic?’ the girl asked. ‘There never was one.’

  ‘There was too. You don’t know your job, mate. There’s the great horse epidemic. All the kids in Britain threatened. Never been a story like it.’

  ‘Never been a flop like it.’ The girl laughed. ‘Haven’t you heard the news?’

  ‘What news? I been on the road since morning.’

  ‘That horse died.’

  ‘There you are, what did I tell you?’

  ‘They cut it open. What do you think it died of?’

  ‘What I said – elphlacitis – elepan—’

  ‘It died of a brain tumour. There’s no epidemic.’

  ‘But I came all the way to London!’

  ‘Sorry about that.’ She got him firmly to the door and out into the street. All right, so it wasn’t her first day on the job.

  Ron felt very discouraged and quite worn out. He went to see an acquaintance of his who sold souvenirs in Oxford Street, borrowed some money and went back by train.

  His way home from the station to the cottage where he lived with his mother took him past Follyfoot. He looked across the field at the top of the hill, where lights and shadows moved across the grass in a pattern of moon and cloud. Someone was coming up the long slope. A poacher? If it was old Bob, he owed Ron five pounds.

  Ron climbed the gate and stood behind a tree. It was a very small poacher. It was Callie.

  ‘Ron!’ She gasped and jumped as he stepped out in front of her.

  ‘Been courting, dear?’

  He saw that her face was streaked with tears and dust, and that her breath was coming hard, in dry sobs.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Oh, Ron, it’s awful.’ She raised her face to his and tears began to run again down the tracks the others had made. ‘Oh, Ron—’

  ‘Oh, Ron, what?’

  ‘It’s—’ She took a deep breath and swallowed. ‘It’s one of the puppies. The one with the bent tail. He’s been missing since morning and I can’t find him anywhere.’

  ‘Them pups is old enough to take care of themselves.’ Ron put an arm round her. ‘Never you mind, love. You go on to bed, and we’ll have a good look in the morning.’

  ‘All right,’ she whispered. She was as white as a little ghost. Ron would have liked to tell her about his horrible day, but he hadn’t the heart. He’d tell his mother and his mother would say, ‘Trouble? You don’t know the meaning of the word if you’ve not lived with this pain I suffer in my back, night and day…’

  He walked with Callie to the gate that led to the stables, boosted her over it and watched her run like a thin, scared animal across the yard and into the house.

  Chapter 27

  CALLIE DOZED AND woke and dropped into a nightmare of charging horses from which she woke with a cry and an arm flung over her face, in fear of being trampled. She had hoped to sleep most of the next day, because she did not want to face the next day, but the mercy of sleep was denied her. She lay scared and trembling, chewing on the sheet, her eyes staring into the gradually spreading light.

  When she could stand it no longer, she gave a deep sigh, stepped into last night’s clothes that were in a heap by the bed and started downstairs. Someone was frying already.

  In the kitchen, Dora was scooping out of a pan three fried eggs with burned bottoms and broken yolks.

  ‘Want me to do you some, Cal?’

  Dora looked unnervingly bright and healthy compared to the way Callie felt after her night of tears and nightmares. Callie shook her head. She poured herself a mug of tea from the enormous potful that Dora had made, and sat down at the table, cradling the steaming mug moodily in her hands.

  ‘Pig, aren’t I?’ Dora had started on the eggs and a hunk of bread and butter. ‘I always say it should be horses first, then people, but this morning I felt like feeding myself first before our four-legged friends out there.’

  She didn’t know yet.

  ‘I was starving.’ Dora sopped bread in the greasy eggs. ‘Must be the relief.’

  In Callie’s miserable, sleep-starved brain, a thought began to register. It finally became clear.

  ‘Relief?’ She looked up.

  ‘That’s right.’ Dora put down her knife and fork. ‘Good Lord, nobody’s told you yet. You went to bed so early yesterday, you were asleep when the fantastic news came through.’

  ‘What news?’ No news could be fantastic at this point.

  ‘About Rebel. He died, you know. Not that that’s fantastic, but, well – the poor thing was dying anyway. The thing is, what he died of. The tests on the mice still weren’t confirmed, but as soon as he died they did a post mortem, and what do you think they found?’

  ‘Massive brain damage due to the virus,’ Callie growled. She knew what encephalitis could do.

  ‘A tumour. A brain tumour. Not that big, but in a vulnerable spot. It would account for the erratic way he behaved, if a branch knocked him, or some fool like me hit him behind the ear. So Robin’s in the clear. The scare’s off.’

  Callie stood up and turned away from her grin. She went to stand by the window. She was going to have to speak without looking at Dora.

  ‘We should have woken you, I suppose,’ Dora went on. ‘But you looked so peaceful.’ Callie’s faking face, that must have been, with her arms crossed over her chest like a dead maiden, lacking only a lily between her hands.

  ‘I feel so good, I’ve half a mind to fry myself another egg. Are you sure you—’

  ‘Dora,’ Callie said in a hollow voice. ‘Last night, in the middle of the night, I got up.’

  ‘Why?’ Dora was at the stove. She cracked one of the big brown eggs that Henrietta laid in Wonderboy’s hay rack (he preferred his hay off the floor, anyway) and dropped it into the pan.

  ‘
You told me that the Follyfoot horses might have to be destroyed.’

  ‘That’s what they thought then. It was unbearable. I never want to have to go through another day like that again.’

  ‘This one isn’t going to be too good,’ Callie said in a small voice. ‘I thought – you see, I thought they were going to shoot all our horses, so I took them down to the end of the long field and let them out on to the moor.’

  ‘You what?’ Dora was concentrating on getting the egg out of the pan, only half hearing.

  ‘I did. I let them all out onto the moor. They followed the donkey.’

  ‘Including Robin?’ Dora turned round with the plate in one hand and the spatula in the other.

  Callie nodded.

  ‘Stupid idiot!’ Callie had never seen Dora so angry. Dumb with misery, she stood and let the words of Dora’s rage hit her like arrows.

  ‘Stupid, hysterical kids—’

  A cat jumped up on the table and started on the egg as Dora grabbed her jacket from the hook behind the door and slammed out.

  Callie followed.

  ‘What do you want?’ Dora flung angrily over her shoulder as she ran.

  ‘Can’t I help you look for them?’

  ‘I suppose so. I’ve no idea where to start. Have to follow the hoof tracks. Is there anything left we can ride?’

  ‘All gone except Dottie and Polly.’

  ‘Oh God.’ The vision of them setting off to the rescue on the little brown donkey and her foal might have made her laugh, but it didn’t. She strode ahead. Callie trotted after. There was nothing else to do.

  They ran down the slope, crossed the stream at the bottom and began to push through the bushes that thickened the end of the field. As they came out to where they could see the gate, Dora stopped and let out a yell of laughter. Callie stopped and stared. Then all the anguish and the fear and the guilt from Dora’s anger suddenly exploded into the relief of a wild, high-pitched crowing laughter. For a moment, they could only stand there, clutching each other, cackling with joy.

  Outside the gate, lined up like people at a cafeteria, were all the old horses, Cobbler’s Dream in the lead, the others behind him in order of rank, Robin modestly near the end as a newcomer, waiting patiently for someone to come and let them in for breakfast.

  Walking back up the field with the horses, Callie said, ‘What about Steve? He’ll hear the horses coming in.’

  ‘I could say that I went out late last night and turned them out after we knew there was no danger.’

  In the kitchen, an hour ago, it had seemed as if Callie and Dora could never be friends again. But really nothing had changed. Dora was still the kind of friend who could understand when you wanted something hushed up.

  ‘But he’d have heard them going out, if so,’ Callie said. ‘That’s why I led them out quietly, one by one.’

  ‘All right. I led them out quietly one by one.’

  When Dora went into the kitchen after finishing the morning’s work with Callie and Steve her egg plate was still on the table, polished so clean by tough cat tongues that it appeared never to have been used.

  ‘’Lo, Dora.’ The Colonel, who should have been looking joyful, was looking gloomy. He had his old clacketty typewriter on the table, and was banging on it with one finger of each hand, his unlit pipe in the corner of his mouth, his giant-size coffee cup that Anna had brought back from Italy beside him, just such a cosy domestic scene as Dora had imagined when she was homesick in Mrs Blank’s spic-and-span kitchen.

  ‘I’m writing to Blankenheimer,’ he said. ‘I’ve held off until I saw what was what, but now I have to write and tell him what I think of him.’

  ‘But why?’ Dora sat down and spread her hands beseechingly on the table. ‘Why? Now that it doesn’t matter any more?’

  ‘Not matter?’ The Colonel looked at her over the half glasses he wore for reading. ‘But it’s a question of principle, don’t you see? There’s a law been broken. There’s a fishy deal been done. It’s the act, not the consequences that matters. Don’t you see?’ he asked again.

  Dora sighed and did not answer. Most of the time at Follyfoot it seemed as if age did not matter, as if everyone – Slugger, Anna and the Colonel, Steve and Dora, Callie – were the same generation, with a common purpose and a common pleasure centred on horses. But when something like this came up – forget it. If she said what she thought, the Colonel would say she was immoral.

  ‘False papers,’ the Colonel said, shaking his head glumly. ‘I don’t know what the immigration authorities will make of this, but it could land our friend Blankenheimer in very serious trouble.’

  He had his hands raised to strike the keys again, like an arthritic pianist, but Dora got up and shouted. There was no other way to do it. It was the thought of darling Blank, innocent and kind, the most generous gift of his life shattered, just as if Robin were a precious porcelain horse shattered by careless packers. It was the vision of Blank getting out of his comfortable car at the post office, finding the letter in his mail box – ‘Hey, great! A letter from the Colonel. Look, Mary, a letter from my old British buddy – and then his face, under whatever funny cap he was wearing now, stricken with the realisation of what Chuckie and Dora had done to him. That was why she had to shout.

  ‘It wasn’t him!’ she shouted, ‘It was Chuckie Fiske and me. We were the only ones who knew. Yes, of course I knew.’ She wouldn’t let him speak, because if she stopped, she might not get started again. ‘I didn’t tell you because I was afraid you’d be angry. Well, you are angry and I am afraid. But Blank knew nothing, and I’m not going to let you accuse him, do you hear?’

  ‘What’s all the shouting?’ Anna came in and Dora went out, on fire. She could almost see her nostrils steaming.

  She had done what she had to do. She had stopped the Colonel writing to Blank, but now all his anger would be directed at her. She didn’t know that she could bear the weight of it.

  She tried to keep out of his way. When she did not come in for supper on the second day, Steve went to look for her. He found her in Robin’s stable, her arm round his neck and her face in his fine black mane. Robin was paying more attention to his food than to her, in the comforting way horses have of showing you that the world hasn’t come to an end.

  ‘Aren’t you coming in for supper?’ Steve put his hand on her arm, lightly, because Dora didn’t always want to be touched when she was upset.

  ‘I can’t eat.’

  ‘Well, that’s a lie,’ Steve said candidly, ‘since I saw you sitting on the wall this morning with a chunk of bread and butter in each fist.’

  ‘I can’t be in a room with the Colonel, if he still hates me.’

  ‘Who says he hates you? Don’t you know the difference between hate and anger? He’ll get over it.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘All right, love.’ Steve went to the door. ‘Don’t believe me. Just wait and see.’

  Chapter 28

  THE CHALKY HILLS rolled away on either side of Follyfoot Farm, following the lines of some ancient upheaval in the foundations of Britain. There were villages in the folds between the hills, some grazing farms and a few isolated houses in bare and windy spots, rugged, thick-walled, headed into the view.

  About ten miles from Follyfoot, there was a small cottage, once painted white, now rusty where the paint had flaked and the old bricks showed through. What had once been a good vegetable garden was now sadly neglected. Only a few cabbages and lettuces gone to seed grew among the weeds and broken pea sticks.

  But behind the house in the sheltering beechwood, the source of a stream bubbled up through tender, bright-green water plants. In front stretched the breathtaking view of gently diminishing hills, fields of all colour, farms, churches, curving roads, the willowed line of the river far away.

  Mabel had fallen in love with the place as soon as she saw it. Her children hated it. That confirmed Mabel’s opinion.

  Mabel’s husband had died a long time ago when her
children were small. When her father died, her old mother moved in with her. She became more and more difficult as she grew older. The children objected to taking care of her when Mabel was out. She fell in the fire and wandered off down the road at night.

  The day she almost got run over by the late bus, everybody told Mabel that her mother must go into a nursing home. The old lady was last seen being wheeled away down a corridor, calling back feebly, ‘Don’t leave me, Mabel!’

  Mabel’s children got married and had children of their own, and grew more opinionated and efficient and busy. Sometimes they seemed like strangers who could never have been the dreamy children she had hugged. Mabel herself gradually became an old lady. She began to forget things, to stumble and lose her glasses, and repeat herself, and set fire to pans of bacon fat on the stove.

  She realised that her children, particularly the girls, had begun to look at each other and mutter, and she thought that they were plotting to do the same thing to her as she had done to her mother.

  But she could never go to a home, because she had dogs and cats, not to mention her old horse, who had been with her longer than anyone could remember. She had a bit of money saved, and she knew what she would do.

  She sat her children down and said to them, ‘I’m getting near the end of my life.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense, Mother,’ Rachel said automatically. ‘You’ve got years yet.’

  ‘I’m going to do what I’ve always wanted.’ Mabel ignored her. ‘I’m going to take my animals and find a small cottage miles away from anywhere, and you don’t have to keep coming to see me, because I don’t want you to.’

  ‘But we must. We’d feel—’

  ‘Don’t come for your sakes,’ Mabel said. ‘If you come at all, come for mine. If I want you, I’ll send for you.’

  ‘Will you ring us up every day? Once a week?’

  ‘No. Because I shan’t have a telephone.’

  ‘Then how can you send for us? Letters take ages. If you were ill—’