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  She looked up at Steve, her hair, disordered from bed standing wildly up as if the electricity had gone right through it.

  ‘Yes,’ she croaked. ‘One does what one can. But there are some people—’ she glowered up at Nancy, still rocking and holding herself as if she might fall apart – ‘some people who don’t know the meaning of the word gratitude.’

  *

  After this, Steve did take Nancy to the farm at the weekend to show her the horses.

  The Colonel was delighted with her. He conducted her round himself, hands behind his back, cap over his eyes, very military. Callie was pleased with her because she asked the right questions and said, ‘How lucky for Miss to have Callie to look after her,’ when they visited Miss America, queening it in the orchard so that the other horses would not disturb the healing wound.

  Dora was rather gruff. She took a long look at Nancy’s legs, then went off to greet a family of visitors and became very busy giving them a conducted tour of all the horses.

  The family, who had only come to see the donkey which had once belonged to their Uncle Fred, kept saying, ‘Well, better be getting along,’ but Dora dragged them on from horse to horse, so as not to have to talk to Nancy.

  Soon after this, Steve got a letter from Mrs Jordan. Their telephone bad been cut off because they couldn’t pay the bill.

  The plump woman and the plumber had put the pink house up for sale and gone away. Two days after – ‘If she’d only waited two days, she could have had her revenge in chinchillas’ – Mr Jordan was asked by a friend in Australia to go out and join him on the ranch where he was breeding horses.

  ‘So we’re all going, Steve. A new life. Free passage out if we stay two years, and they can have this poor house and make it into a pub or a Bingo hall or whatever they want. No regrets. Except about David. We sail next week. Please find him a good home and use the sale money for the farm. The best home only. I trust you.’

  David could stay out at night, so the Colonel let Steve bring him to the farm.

  ‘What’s that?’ Dora made a face at the grey as he backed neatly out of the horse box and stood with his fine head up and his mane and tail blowing like an Arab, staring at some of the old horses, who were drawn up in the field, all pointing the same way like sheep, observing him.

  ‘It’s the horse we found on the other side of the wood. You know.’

  ‘Nancy’s horse.’

  ‘Yes,’ Steve said. ‘They’re—’

  ‘It’s too long in the back,’ Dora said, ‘and I don’t like the look of that near hock.’

  ‘They’re going to Australia. With Nancy.’

  ‘But other than that, it’s the best-looking horse we’ve ever had here.’ Dora grinned. ‘Can we ride him?’

  ‘Till we can find the right home.’

  ‘Let’s not start looking yet.’

  ‘We’ve got to work with him a bit,’ they told the Colonel. ‘He hasn’t worked for so long, we’ll have to school him before we can show him to anyone.’

  And every day when the Colonel, during his morning rounds, asked, ‘You got a prospect for that grey?’, they said, ‘He’s still a bit tricky. We want him perfect.’

  David already was perfect. They had never had such a marvellous horse to ride. They were not going to let him go in a hurry. ‘Got to work with him a bit longer.’

  Chapter 10

  CALLIE HAD DREADED going back to school, but when the summer term started, Lewis seemed to have been converted by the glories of Easter, because he left Callie alone and did not bully her.

  She watched him from a distance. He was strangely quiet. He did not make a dead set for the new, younger ones, as he usually did, twisting their arms to see if they would cry, knocking into them in the cafeteria to make them drop their food.

  ‘School isn’t so bad,’ Callie told Anna. ‘Perhaps I will stay.’

  ‘Take the scholarship exam anyway.’ Anna was used to Callie’s frequent changes of mind. Tomorrow school might be no good again.

  But tomorrow, Callie actually had a conversation with Lewis the Louse.

  They were in the library, where you were not supposed to talk, but they were behind a stack of shelves and Mrs Dooley was busy at the far desk.

  Lewis had taken down a book and opened it, but he did not seem able to read. Callie was searching for something in an index. She was aware that Lewis was watching her, so she looked up and smiled nervously.

  To her amazement, he smiled back, his lower lip hanging on his face like a hammock, his teeth as pointed as his father’s, but with gaps from fighting.

  ‘What you do in the holidays then?’ he asked.

  Callie was so surprised and flummoxed that she could not think of anything.

  ‘Oh – nothing much. I rode. I worked most of the time in the stables. I helped Steve build a gate.’

  ‘Who’s Steve?’

  ‘The boy who works at the farm.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ Lewis nodded, remembering.

  ‘He did a marvellous thing.’ Callie babbled on, making the most of the chance to get on the right side of the Louse. ‘He foiled a woman.’

  ‘Foiled?’ Lewis’s mouth hung. His vocabulary was not very large.

  Callie told him about the woman letting out David and then ringing the police. He listened, his slow dull eyes following the movement of her face, breathing through his mouth like a patient under anaesthetic.

  ‘Who’s talking there?’ Mrs Dooley came round the end of the bookshelves. Lewis had disappeared. There was only Callie there to take a discipline mark.

  Two nights later, the door of the Mongolian horse’s loose box was open, and Trotsky wandered across a field of young wheat, eating it as he went and occasionally lying down for a crushing roll.

  ‘Good thing he didn’t have shoes on,’ the Colonel said nervously to the farmer.

  ‘Good thing I wasn’t out there with a gun,’ the farmer said grimly.

  Trotsky was wily enough to undo a latch if the bolts were not fastened.

  ‘But I know I bolted Trot’s door,’ Dora said. ‘And the bottom bolt too, because he bit me while I was bending down.’

  ‘Someone opened it then,’ Steve said. ‘Like the Jordans’ neighbour.’

  Callie kept her mouth shut, which was how she should have kept it behind the library shelves. Was it possible that she had put this idea for new trouble into the Louse’s thick head?

  He left her alone. She told her mother that she was definitely not going to take the exam. But when Lewis saw she was off her guard, he invited her one day to go with him and buy a chocolate cornet before it was time for her bus.

  She went. They never got to the ice-cream van. As soon as they were round the corner from the school, Lewis pulled her into the overgrown garden of an empty house and knocked her backwards into the bushes. She picked herself up and was going to run away, but he grabbed her.

  ‘That’s just the beginning.’ He stared at her with his horrid revolting slab of face.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Stopping us getting a licence.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Your stepfather. The Sergeant, the Bosun, whatever his daft name is. He done it.’

  ‘It was nothing to do with the Colonel. He only sent the County Council a report on your stable.’

  ‘He wouldn’t know one end of a stable from the other.’ Lewis was gripping her arm so hard that she would scream if it went on. ‘Much less a horse.’

  ‘Let me go!’

  ‘He’s got it in for us. Trying to keep an honest man from earning a crust of bread, my dad says. We’ve lost a lot of bookings, you know.’ His gorilla brow came down threateningly. ‘People come to us for the riding.’

  ‘Why don’t you clean the place up and apply for another licence?’ Callie bit her lip. Her arm was going numb. She would not scream.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with our place,’ Lewis growled. ‘It’s your stepfather, that’s who there’s something wr
ong with. We’d ought to put him out of business too. Perhaps we will. Yeah.’ He dropped her arm, frowning under the weight of what passed for thoughts. ‘Perhaps we will. My dad says it’s a crime to keep them poor old horses alive against their will.’

  ‘It’s not against their will!’ Callie could have run now, but she stayed to argue, rubbing her arm. ‘They’re all fit enough to enjoy life. The Colonel says it’s wrong to take life from an animal while he can still use it.’

  ‘A crime against Nature.’ The Louse was obviously echoing his father. ‘Shouldn’t be allowed.’

  ‘We save horses! We saved your horse because you were all too cruel and stupid—’

  Lewis pulled back his arm and took an open-handed swipe at her, and she ran, ducking through the bushes until she was out on the road where there were people.

  When she got home, she kept her sleeve down over her bruised arm and explained her scratches by telling her mother that she had got off the bus half-way up the hill for exercise, and taken a short cut through the brambles.

  She told the Colonel that the Pinecrest Hotel had been refused a licence to run a riding stable.

  ‘Thank God,’ the Colonel said. ‘There is some sense to the Town Hall after all.’

  ‘I’ll bet they wish they could put you out of business too.’ Callie watched his face to see how he would take that.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so.’ In spite of all the cruelty and ignorance he had seen in his work for horses, the Colonel still believed the best of people, right up to the time when he discovered the worst.

  ‘And I’ve decided,’ Callie told Anna and the Colonel – the pain of her arm kept reminding her – ‘that I do want to go away to that school.’

  ‘Your name’s still on the exam list,’ Anna said. ‘I didn’t keep asking Miss Crombie to take it off every time you changed your mind.’

  ‘Suppose I don’t get the scholarship?’

  ‘Miss Crombie thinks you have a very good chance.’

  Chapter 11

  ONE OF THE disastrous things that people did was to give their small children day-old chicks for Easter. Dear little fluffy yellow Easter chicks. You could buy them in cut-price stores.

  Some of them fell out of the paper bags and were stepped on or run over in the crowded street. Some of them were crushed to death by hot little hands soon after they got home. Some died of cold. Some died of the wrong food. Some died of not bothering to live.

  The few who survived were either given away when they grew into chickens, or kept in a cellar or a cupboard, or even the bath, until the people got sick of it and gave them away or killed them, or the chickens got sick of it and died. It was a total disaster for all concerned.

  This Easter, a town family had staged an even bigger disaster.

  Their little daughter was ‘mad about’ horses, and so when she woke up on Easter morning, the car was standing in the road and there was a horse in the garage.

  It was not much of a horse. The family had bought it quite cheaply at a sale. It had a big coffin head, lumps on its legs, a scrubby mane and tail and large flat feet that had not seen a blacksmith for a long time.

  ‘My horsie!’ They had bought an old bridle with the horse, and they put it on back to front with the brow band where the throat latch should be and the reins crossed under its neck, and the little girl climbed on, rode away down the middle of the road and fell off before she got to the corner.

  She hit her head and was in bed for two weeks, and the horse went back into the garage in disgrace.

  Now and then when someone remembered, they fed it a soup can of oats, which it could not chew properly, because it had a long loose tooth hanging at the side of its mouth. It had no hay, because they thought that hay was only for the winter, and no bedding, because they did not know about bedding. There was a small patch of grass behind the garage, and the horse ate that bare, and then licked the ground.

  When the little girl was better, she got on the horse again with her friend and the two of them rode round and round on a patch of waste land, clutching the mane and each other and shrieking with joy. Finally, the horse stumbled and fell down, and the children tumbled off, which seemed the easiest way to get down, and a great joke too.

  The floor of the garage was concrete and the walls were concrete blocks, sweating a chill damp. When the horse lay down, which it did more often as it grew weaker, it rubbed sores on its elbows and hocks.

  If it was lying down when she came home from school, the little girl would get it up by holding the soup cup of oats a little way off. When it stood up, she would take the oats away and put on the bridle.

  ‘Work before food, Rusty dear,’ she would tell it, and she and her friend would take Rusty to play circus on the piece of waste ground.

  She was devoted to the horse. She sang to it. She made daisy chains to hang on its ear. She brushed it with her old hairbrush, but she could not get it very clean, because she did not like the smell of manure, and so she did not clean out the garage, although she told her father she did.

  Her father hardly ever went to look at the horse, but he was very proud about it, and told everyone at work how his little girl thought the world of Rusty and it would do your heart good.

  The mother did not look at the horse very much, because she was afraid of horses, and said she was allergic to them, which she thought was quite a grand thing to be, and she also did not like the smell that was accumulating in the garage.

  But her little girl was happy, and she thought it was a lovely thing for a kiddie to have a faithful pet.

  The faithful horse was willing enough to keep going somehow, although he was very thin and lumps of his hair fell out, and he was becoming dehydrated from only having small amounts of water, which the little girl brought him in a seaside toy bucket.

  One day when she and her friend were riding him proudly down the road to the pillar box, slapping his ribs to keep him moving, he stopped and lay down in the road with his nose resting on the kerb. All the shrieks and wails and kisses and smacks of the children and the shouts of some masons who were building a wall and the advice of housewives who came out of their houses and flapped their aprons could not get him up.

  It happened that the Colonel and Anna were taking a detour across the end of this road to avoid rush hour traffic. They saw the excitement, and turned the car up the street to see what it was.

  The Colonel walked through the small crowd and stood for a moment with his hands in his pockets, watching the little girls swarming round the horse like distressed bees, patting it and kissing it and begging it, Rusty dear, to get up. The Colonel looked at the horse and the horse looked at the Colonel, and a message passed between them like old friends.

  When the Colonel had got authority to take the horse, he telephoned for Steve to come with the horse box.

  ‘But I don’t understand.’ The mother had taken the little girl home and the father was back from work and standing nonplussed in the road, where street lamps were coming on and the masons had knocked off for the day and the housewives and the other children had gone indoors. ‘She loved that horse like her own brother. Thought the world of him, it would do your heart good.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ The Colonel was sitting on the kerb in his best suit with the horse’s head in his lap. ‘But a small child can’t be left alone to take care of a horse.’

  ‘But we didn’t know!’

  ‘Famous last words,’ the Colonel muttered. ‘People who don’t know anything about horses should stick to goldfish.’

  ‘That’s a good idea.’ The man began to cheer up. He was glad he was going to be able to garage his car again, anyway. ‘I’ll get her a bowl of nice fish tomorrow. Take her mind off it. They soon forget, the kiddies.’

  He went back to tell his wife and daughter the new idea. The Colonel took off the jacket of his best suit and laid it over the rump of the horse, who lay like a heap of roadmenders’ sand in the shadows between the street lamps.

  At
the Farm, the Colonel pulled out Rusty’s loose tooth by rubbing the opposite gum to make that side more sensitive, and then quickly tapping out the tooth with a small hammer.

  ‘Bran mashes now?’ Steve let go the bluish tongue, which he had been holding out to the side to keep the horse’s mouth open.

  ‘Give him anything he’ll eat, if he’ll eat.’ The Colonel got up from the straw where Rusty was lying. ‘He hasn’t got much longer.’

  ‘Will he die?’ From the doorway, Callie saw the horse through a glittery haze of tears.

  The Colonel nodded. That was the message that had passed between him and the horse in the road.

  I am dying.

  You shall die in peace.

  Chapter 12

  LEWIS WENT BACK to bullying the younger ones, and Callie kept clear of him. If she could keep out of his way until the end of term, she would be safe and free.

  The week before she was to take the scholarship exam, she went early to school for some extra study with Miss Crombie. ‘Not that I want to lose you next year, Callie, but I shall be thrilled if you do well.’ Miss Crombie flushed and scratched her head with the pencil she wore through her hair like Madam Butterfly. She had a pretty boring life and not much to be thrilled about.

  When Callie was in the cloakroom, she heard shouting in the yard outside, and running feet. The bigger boys never came so early, but there was a pack of them, galloping across the empty yard like hounds after a fox. She could not see what they were chasing, but whatever it was had dashed into the bicycle shed and bolted the door.

  Whooping and shrieking, the boys attacked the shed with feet and stones and bits of wood. One of them broke a window. It was Lewis, of course, climbing on the bicycle rack and putting in the boot with a crash of glass.

  Callie watched, paralysed. She had heard about a girl in New York being stabbed in the street while people hurried past or watched from their windows, and would not do anything to help. Now here she was, just as cowardly herself. Don’t get mixed up. Keep clear.

  Lewis was too big to climb through the window. He and the others went round to attack the shed from the back. As Callie heard the glass of the back window break, the door of the shed burst open and a little spindly boy, legs going like the spokes of a wheel, ran for his life across the yard. The boys were already round the shed and gaining on him as he wrenched open a door and got inside the school.