The Horses of Follyfoot Read online

  ‘I don’t think I want to go.’

  On her last evening she knew she didn’t want to go.

  The horses were all out in the fields. The little brown donkey with the white muzzle and endless white-tipped ears, christened Dottie, was out with Don in the summer twilight, grazing the thistles and coarse grass that the horses wouldn’t touch.

  ‘Too stupid to know good grass when they see it,’ Ron said. He resented the horses for the work they made, but he resented the donkeys even more.

  ‘Donkeys are good for a pasture, fool,’ Slugger said. ‘That’s why we have ’em.’

  ‘The Colonel’s soft in the head, that’s why we have ’em.’

  They were all leaning over the gate watching the horses move away towards their night-time grazing ground on the other side of the stream. Cobby, his chestnut coat bright in the afterglow of the sunset, swished his thick tail like a bell. Spot, the circus horse, his sagging back on which ladies had once danced showing his years. Dolly with her back feet twisting outwards, sign of an animal that has been over-driven. Magic the police horse who was so fat and well this summer that dapple marks showed on his quarters.

  Woman-o’-War, with that awful dropping action of her left hind leg, but filling out already, the desperate look gone from her eye. Her roan coat was less patchy, the rubbed marks grown in, the blue colour improving as she fattened up.

  Dora half-closed her eyes and imagined, grazing slowly forward with the herd, her horse, her bay horse, moving easily with the long thoroughbred walk that told what his gallop would be like.

  ‘I don’t want to go,’ she said.

  ‘This time tomorrow,’ Callie said, ‘you’ll be miles up in the air. Maybe the window will fly out, like they do sometimes, and you’ll drop down, spinning like a corkscrew, and land in Nova Scotia.’

  ‘I don’t want to go.’

  The Colonel took her to the airport in his rough little sports car. It was one of the few drives with him when she had not clutched the seat convulsively, and trodden on the floorboards in a desperate attempt to brake before he did. If she were killed on the road, at least she couldn’t be killed in the plane.

  She was very quiet.

  ‘Excited, eh?’ The Colonel turned to look at her once, saw her tight lips and turned back to the road and left her alone.

  Approaching the airport, they began to see a lot of planes overhead. Dora began to get that feeling, like trying to swallow a wet stone and having it lodge somewhere between your swallow and your stomach.

  ‘What happens,’ she asked the Colonel in a small voice, ‘if I’m sick on the plane?’

  ‘You do it in a brown paper bag.’

  ‘I haven’t got a brown paper bag.’

  ‘There’ll be one in the pocket of the seat in front of you,’ he said without looking at her. ‘Along with instructions about what to do when the plane crashes into the sea.’

  ‘I see,’ said Dora. Her hands had begun to sweat a little into the palms.

  She hardly spoke. The Colonel took care of the ticket and bags, while she stood beside him, feeling smaller than usual. When he put his hand on top of her head, she jumped. She felt extra sensitive, like a crab without its shell.

  Outside the gate where she had to leave him he started to bite his nails, because he wasn’t sure whether she would want him to kiss her goodbye. She flung her arms round his neck.

  ‘Are you sure you can manage without me?’ What if they didn’t notice she’d gone, and didn’t care whether she ever came back?

  ‘Of course we can’t.’

  ‘Thanks. That makes me feel much better.’

  Dora walked bravely through the gate with her head up like a French aristocrat going to the guillotine.

  Chapter 9

  ‘TRAVELLING ALONE?’ THE voice made her jump. A man had come to sit beside her on the plane. Tall. A briefcase. One of those faces that have been around. ‘Bob Nelson,’ he said.

  She nodded. Although the plane was on the ground, she was gripping the edge of the seat as if it was in the air.

  ‘Scared?’ he asked. ‘Don’t be. It’s boring, that’s all.’

  The takeoff was so exciting that beyond a fleeting certainty that they would hit some high-tension cables, Dora forgot to be afraid. She sat by the window, saw a reservoir, saw a riding school, saw the green cabbage fields of Middlesex rushing away from her, saw Windsor Castle tilting dangerously by the narrow glittering river, and then they were into a cloud, and up beyond, where it seemed no one had ever gone before. Tall stacks of piled-up brilliant white cloud, cotton-wool masses, the tops of clouds where before she had seen only the leaky bottom. The sky was a piercing blue and the unseen sun a dazzling presence.

  The man next to her said, ‘It’s fun, isn’t it, seeing it for the first time?’

  When you could not see the ground, there was less fear of falling onto it. Dora sat back and thought she might be enjoying herself.

  After lunch she went to sleep. She woke in a panic, not knowing where she was. The plane was jolting, bumping against the clouds. It felt like that sickening moment in a car when you realise you have a flat tyre on a lonely road at night, with either no jack or no spare tyre.

  ‘White knuckles again.’ Mr Nelson saw her gripping the seat. ‘Nothing to be scared of.’

  But Dora was right and he was wrong. The captain’s voice came over the intercom. ‘I hate to tell you this, folks.’

  Dora gripped harder.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Mr Nelson said. ‘You don’t have to jump yet.’

  ‘We have developed some small oil-pipe trouble. Nothing to worry about. But in view of possible bad weather ahead, we are going to take the precaution of detouring to Keflavik, Iceland, where repairs will be carried out as soon as possible.’

  ‘I’ll be God damned,’ Bob Nelson said.

  ‘Do you think I’m a jinx?’

  ‘First time this ever happened to me.’

  ‘Last time I’m ever going to fly,’ Dora said.

  They dropped down through a brilliant sky and saw the coast of Iceland like a moon landscape; bare, stony, impregnable. They flew over some scattered houses and a tiny airstrip cut perilously close to a brown rocky range of hills.

  They would never make it.

  ‘You don’t have to shut your eyes.’ Mr Nelson took Dora’s hand.

  ‘When you go to your execution,’ she said, ‘they always blindfold you.’

  After the anticlimax of a smooth landing, they were taken in an ordinary bus to an ordinary hotel. They were given the same kind of dinner they might have had at a London airport. Pea soup, roast chicken and coloured ice cream. Squares of stale bread. America was too far away. Dora would never get there.

  In the morning when she looked out of her window, she knew she was in Iceland. On the stony land behind the hotel, a herd of thick-coated, shaggy ponies, with scrubby manes and long tangled tails was nosing among the rocks, pulling at the green-grey lichen. They all looked sturdy and strong, although there didn’t seem much for them to live on. At the back of the herd followed the great grandfather; grizzled nose, patchy mane, moth-eaten, most of his tail rubbed out at the top. He was skinny, with a combination of boniness and pot belly. A lively young pony came back to make runs and darts at him, jostling him, nipping him in the rear. The old pony stumbled and kicked out fretfully, and the young one charged him again from the other side.

  Poor old fellow. In her mind, Dora put a halter on him and took him back to Follyfoot. He could be Eric the Red, after the old Icelandic adventurer.

  When they took off again in the repaired plane, rising just in time over the mountains, Dora saw below them the herds of ponies dotted over the barren landscape. She leaned against the window and shut her eyes as the plane leaped upward with that powerful boost, like a good horse clearing a jump.

  ‘I saw this old pony,’ she told Bob Nelson, ‘out of the hotel window.’

  ‘You would.’ She had told him about Follyfoot.


  ‘He was old and scruffy, and the young ones were allowed to tease him because he would be dead soon. I wanted to build a crate and take him with us. He could be the first customer.’

  She told him about Blank’s dream of starting a Home of Rest for Horses in Elmwood, Massachusetts.

  ‘I live near there,’ he said. ‘Maybe I could help.’

  Chapter 10

  AS THE PLANE lost height and the ground became real, Dora looked down and began to ride the countryside. So many times in a train or a car, she had ridden an imaginary course alongside, taking hedges, enormous posts and rails, iron fences, clattering down roads, leaping wide streams to keep up with herself on wheels.

  Now she rode the landscape from the air, covering a hundred miles in a few minutes, galloping down a straight wide path through a forest, up a hill and down and up again through what must be a fire break, through the gardens of low houses, racing her bay thoroughbred down a grassy track between two ribbons of highway where tiny coloured cars sped nowhere in both directions.

  ***

  Fear returned when they landed at Boston. Dora could not remember what Blank looked like. Would he know her in the red and white suit her mother had bought her (uncreasable) to travel in?

  Coming out of the customs hall, she searched the crowd. If he wasn’t there, would they deport her as an undesirable alien? She saw him and waved, but he turned away because it wasn’t him.

  ‘See your friend?’ Bob Nelson was behind her.

  ‘No.’

  But a voice was calling, ‘Door’, and there he was, smaller than she remembered, struggling towards her through the embracing, laughing, crying, exclaiming crowd – ‘Hey, Mom, how are ya?’, ‘Hi, Annie. How’s my girl?’, ‘Oh, honey, I thought I’d never—’

  ‘Hi, Door.’

  ‘Hi, Blank.’

  They stood and looked at each other, jostled by elbows and luggage. She had come all this way, and now there was nothing to say.

  She turned to introduce Mr Nelson. ‘He said he might help us with—’ But before he could shake hands, Bob Nelson was pounced on by a woman and a young man, both handsome, tanned, assured, who bore him away, laughing and chattering.

  ‘The Nelsons,’ Blank said. ‘They live near us.’

  ‘You know them?’

  ‘Everybody knows of them. But they wouldn’t know me.’

  ‘Oh, Blank.’ Dora could talk now. ‘You haven’t changed a bit.’

  He smiled, seeing beyond the red and white uncreasable suit and the new haircut. ‘Nor have you, Door.’

  ‘No Handle.’

  Blank was proud to show Dora America. They went through an endless tunnel under the harbour, and on to a highway where four lanes of cars raced furiously. The traffic was overwhelming, but Dora was not doing the white-knuckle clutch. Blank’s car was so large and upholstered that it insulated you, like a tank. And she was too tired to be frightened.

  ‘What do you think of it, huh?’ Blank kept asking, but she was too tired to take much in.

  At last they turned off onto a side road and drove through a lovely country of farms and fields and white wooden houses. There were quite a lot of horses. Blank showed her where the Nelsons lived, a rambling old house with a complex of stable buildings, white-railed paddocks and a riding ring.

  ‘Wow.’ Dora yawned. ‘And we held hands over Iceland.’

  The Blankenheimers’ house was smaller, neater, the garden disciplined, chairs set formally on a stone terrace. Three cars in the shiny black drive. Were they arriving in the middle of a party? Blank stopped in front of the garage, which was a miniature replica of the house, with false upper windows and chimneys.

  ‘Where are the horses?’ Dora asked.

  ‘My racehorses, they’re at a stud in Connecticut. I’ve only Robin around here now. I keep him at Chuckie Fiske’s stable, down the road. Tremendous woman, Chuckie is. Knows it all.’

  Dora had had experience with tremendous women who knew it all, and could make you feel you knew nothing, even if you knew more than they did. She was beginning to feel hopelessly tired.

  Blank took her through the garage towards a door which led into the kitchen.

  ‘Come along in,’ he said. ‘You’re very welcome to my home.’

  Dora tried to smile, but her face stretched into a tremendous yawn, like the jaw-breaking yawns of Stroller in the mornings, dribbling saliva from the vast ridged cavern of his hungry mouth. As Blank looked at her, she turned her head away to hide the yawn and yawned straight into the face of a woman coming to meet her through the kitchen.

  ‘Hello there,’ said Mrs Blankenheimer.

  ‘Sorry,’ Dora said, ‘I’m terribly tired.’

  ‘Of course you are. I know what it’s like. Every time I fly the Atlantic, I just about die.’

  ‘You only flew it once,’ her husband pointed out mildly.

  ‘And I just about died.’

  She was short, like he was, a little anxious, with some bright make-up that was supposed to help her look younger, but didn’t.

  ‘I’ll fix you something to eat,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not really hungry.’ Dora felt rather faint.

  ‘Of course you are. I’ll fix you a stack of pancakes and some bacon.

  ‘No, really, I—’ But Mrs Blank had headed for the stove. Dora saw that this was her style of welcome, and she had better go along with it.

  She sat in a kind of booth in the kitchen, which was hung with copper pans and jelly moulds and trailing plants and ornamental notices which said things like, BE REASONABLE. DO IT MY WAY, and, ABANDON HUNGER, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.

  Mr Blank sat beside her with a cup of coffee.

  ‘Can we go and see Robin after the pancakes?’ Dora asked.

  ‘Sure.’

  But she did not really care about that. She suddenly felt terribly homesick. As she sat at the polished table in this clean kitchen with neat Mrs Blankenheimer making a stack of pancakes, she thought of the big round table in the messy, aromatic kitchen at Follyfoot. Anna lifting the kettle off the old stove. Callie doing homework with a fistful of bread and butter. The Colonel with one of the puppies on his lap and another asleep on his foot. Steve with his dirty boots on the bar of the table and his dark hair flopped forward over the book on genetics that he was studying for his future horse-breeding career. Even the noise of Ron’s motorbike starting up – the whole familiar picture swam in her head like a dream. As Mrs Blankenheimer put the plate of pancakes on the table and set the maple syrup beside it, Dora fell forward fast asleep with her hair in the butter.

  Chapter 11

  SHE SLEPT RIGHT through that night and halfway through the next day. Mrs Blankenheimer drove her to Blank’s office so that he could take her to see Robin.

  In his office, surrounded by drawing boards and bits of pipe and nails and plywood and calendars from plumbers and upholsterers, Blank seemed more at his ease. He wore stained overalls with his name ‘Earl’ embroidered on the pocket, and he was called Earl by his workmen.

  He took off his overalls and put on a hat – he never went anywhere without a hat – and drove Dora to Chuckie Fiske’s stable. Although it was late afternoon, it was still very hot. Dora had never been so hot in her life.

  The road took them between wide fields with stone walls and white fences. They stopped at an enormous barn of indoor loose boxes, with several brightly painted horse trailers in the yard. The horses were all inside. In this heat, they were kept in during the fly-pestering days. Each stall had a thick bed of clean wood shavings, an automatic watering trough, name on door, halter hanging outside.

  At Follyfoot the horses’ names were on the doors, but some of them were mis-spelled, because Callie had helped to paint them two years ago when she couldn’t spell. ‘Lancalott’ and ‘Jake and Jymmi’ were on the door of the box the donkey shared with the two shetlands.

  Dora started writing a letter in her mind to Steve:

  When I get back, let’s smarten up the stable a
bit, do some painting, get the Colonel to put in automatic watering.

  Poor man, he could hardly afford new buckets.

  They went into the tack room, where the saddles were on racks with linen covers, and the bridles had not only the bits but the leather polished. Chuckie Fiske was reading a magazine, wearing cotton trousers and a sleeveless shirt that showed her brawny brown arms.

  ‘Hi,’ she said without putting down the magazine.

  ‘This is Dora,’ said Blank. ‘The girl I told you about, from England.’

  ‘The one who gave you the idea about the old horses?’ Chuckie lowered the magazine to inspect.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dora eagerly. ‘We—’

  ‘Economically unsound,’ added the woman who knew it all, ‘with the price of feed and hay hitting the roof.’

  Blank cleared his throat and changed the subject. ‘May we go see Robin?’

  ‘Help yourself. He’s rarin’ to go. He’s short of work.’

  ‘Can I ride him?’ Dora asked. Mrs Blank had told her to come in jeans.

  ‘Depends if you can ride or not.’

  Chuckie reminded Dora of herself when she was bluntly rude to people without meaning it.

  As they walked down the aisle between the looseboxes, a girl with cropped red hair pressed a switch, and a cloud of insecticide came down over the backs of the horses.

  ‘Are the flies very bad here?’ Dora asked her.

  ‘Mosquitoes too. They’re a real pest. They carry the virus of encephalitis, you know?’

  ‘I don’t think we have that in England.’

  ‘Lucky you. We’re scared of another epidemic this year.’

  ‘Here he is,’ said Blank, as a bay head with a white star came over a door that said, King Kong. ‘Why is Robin in the wrong box?’

  ‘That’s not your horse.’ The red-haired girl tried to catch Dora’s eye with a ‘some people’ look, but Dora wasn’t having any of it.

  Robin was in the next box. ‘They are alike,’ she said, although they weren’t, except for being bay with a white star.

  King Kong was just a horse – Robin was a dream. He was part thoroughbred, part quarter horse. He had the fineness and quality of a thoroughbred, and the short back, square chest and strong quarters of the western cattle horse. He was, like Dora’s dream horse, a bright bay with a crescent-shaped star and two white feet.