The Horses of Follyfoot Read online

  The thought came to her that he might be dead. She was so exhausted that she could think of that calmly. How would she break the news to his wife?

  Swimming half in a dream, scenes drifted in and out of her head. Going through the house to the terrace where Mrs Blank sat with a glass of iced tea and the evening paper and the radio news. ‘This afternoon, at Belair Beach …’ Trying to find Jody at her college. Getting Vince on the telephone. ‘He’s what? I can’t understand you.’ Vince made a big show of not being able to understand Dora’s accent. Would she have to stay for the funeral? All she wanted was to be on dry land at the top of her Follyfoot hill.

  She should never have come. Never. The words matched her desperate kicks. She had known she shouldn’t come. Hadn’t she said so? She had thought then that it was fear of flying, but she knew now that it was a premonition of her death by drowning.

  If I drown, she thought sadly, I won’t be able to show Robin to Steve.

  There was a splashing all around her. Arms and legs. A lot of power in the water. The Nelson boy got Blank away from her, turned him on his side with his head propped on his shoulder, and swam with a powerful stroke towards the shore. Dora, her aching arms relieved of the weight, managed to make it somehow to the sandbank. On the bank, the boy put Blank’s still body on his shoulders and carried him in. Dora followed and was almost knocked down by the labrador leaping and barking at the edge of the waves.

  They left Blank’s car in the car park, and Michael Nelson took him and Dora home. She sat in the back with Blank wrapped in beach towels and a sailing jacket. He dozed and woke and apologised and dozed again and woke again, to murmur, ‘Such a nuisance,’ and fell asleep again.

  Dora too kept falling into an exhausted doze, from which she was woken by Elizabeth saying things like, ‘It’s weird that he can’t swim,’ and, ‘Didn’t you know about the current on the ebb tide?’ and, ‘Good thing Michael and I were there.’

  Once she said to Dora, ‘It’s a blast the way you talk. Are you from Australia, or something?’

  ‘Shut up, kid,’ her brother said.

  Chapter 16

  BLANK WAS ALL right, but he had to stay in bed and rest for the last few days of Dora’s time in America. He wanted to get up and go to see Mr Nelson again about the sale of the farmland, but the doctor would not allow it.

  Michael came to ask how he was. He sat in the kitchen with Dora and had a Coke. When she told Michael that she was leaving in two days, he said, ‘What’s he going to do then with that good-looking bay horse when you’re not here to ride him?’

  ‘He’s giving it away.’

  ‘Crazy waste. Who to?’

  ‘Me, Robin’s coming to England as soon as they have space on the plane.’

  ‘Lucky,’ said Michael.

  ***

  The day before she was to leave Dora went up to tell Blank that the air-cargo people were on the telephone. An unexpected vacancy had come up, and Robin could fly in two days’ time.

  ‘Chuckie will take care of everything,’ Blank said. ‘She knows it all.’

  Dora got on the bicycle and rode down to the stables. Chuckie was out in the ring, lungeing a young horse.

  ‘Robin can fly the day after tomorrow,’ Dora said. ‘Could you get him to the airport?’

  ‘No sweat,’ said Chuckie.

  ‘All his papers are in order, aren’t they?’ Dora asked. ‘He’s had his encephalitis shots, of course.’

  ‘Dammit,’ said Chuckie. She was still lungeing the young horse. Dora rotated with her in the middle of the ring. ‘I was going to have the vet come next week to give the first shot to the ones who haven’t had it.’

  ‘Can’t he come today? It’s an emergency.’

  ‘The horse wouldn’t get the immunisation certificate. He has to have two shots at an interval of ten days.’

  ‘But, Mrs Fiske!’ Dora stood wringing her hands while the colt lolloped round them. ‘If he doesn’t get on that plane, it may be weeks before he can get another place. I want to get him on that plane so badly.’

  ‘You and me too, babe.’ Chuckie flicked the colt with the long whip. ‘I want to get him out of here. I’ve got a year-round boarder waiting for that stall. I can’t tie up space with a horse that isn’t going to stay. I’m not in this business for my health, you know. Hey, Dora, listen.’ She began to haul in the colt, hand over hand on the lunge rein. ‘I tell you what we’ll do …’

  Next day, Mrs Blankenheimer drove her to the airport. Robin was to follow the next day.

  When Mrs Blank came out to tell Dora it was time to leave Dora was sitting with Blank on the terrace in the late-afternoon sun. He was wrapped in a blanket, humped and sad.

  ‘I will miss you, Door.’

  ‘I can never thank you enough.’

  They made rather stilted conversation, like people at railway stations, not knowing how to fill in the long goodbyes.

  ‘You’ll let me know, won’t you, when you hear about the farmland?’ Dora said for the tenth time.

  ‘Yes,’ said Blank for the tenth time. ‘I’ll let you know.’

  Mrs Blank came out with the local paper. She put it on the table. Dora saw the headline of a front-page story.

  NELSON FARMLAND SOLD TO DEVELOPER, CONSTRUCTION TO START SHORTLY.

  Dora picked up the paper and held it behind her back.

  When she said goodbye to Blank, she said, ‘And, look, if you don’t get that land in the end, don’t worry. You’ll find somewhere else just as good.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I wonder if there’ll ever be a Follyfoot over here.’

  ‘Of course there will.’

  ‘I’d never do it without you.’

  ‘I’ll come back some time,’ Dora said.

  ‘Bye, Door.’

  ‘Bye, Blank.’

  She dropped the newspaper on an indoor table as they went through the house to get the car. Cowardly? Yes. But his goodbye face was bad enough without having to see it slapped by the newspaper headline.

  Chapter 17

  STEVE BROUGHT THE horse box to the airport, and he and Dora spent the night with a friend of his from the reform school, who was now married and living in a caravan on the edge of a muddy field.

  They stayed up half the night talking. Dora was too tired and too excited to sleep. She told everything about America, as she would have to tell it again, to the Colonel and Anna and Callie and Slugger and Ron and Toby, giving different versions according to who the audience was.

  In the morning Steve couldn’t start the horse box. He had left the lights on all night and the battery had run down. By the time they got to the airport, Robin had landed and been taken to the RSPCA hostel among all the dogs, monkeys, tropical fish and pitiful plumed birds jammed side-by-side in travelling cages.

  A girl in a blue overall with long yellow hair took them to the stable. She was about Dora’s age. Lucky girl working with such a variety of animals. As they went through a room, Dora stopped to look into a deep box full of feathers.

  ‘Don’t,’ the girl said. ‘It’s horrible. I was so glad when you came because I was just going to have to unpack that box.’

  ‘What’s in it?’

  The girl made a face. ‘Hundreds of dead turkey chicks.’

  Not so lucky.

  Robin was in one of the big boxes at the rear of the hostel, wearing a smart blue and white summer sheet, legs wrapped in cotton wool and a new set of blue bandages, his gentle eyes intelligently curious.

  Dora held out her hand to him low. He dropped his nose into it, and she moved her fingers on the silky paler hair just above his nostril, his favourite place to be caressed.

  Then he smelled her hair to reassure himself, and went all over Steve.

  ‘A horse that likes the smell of people,’ the blonde girl said, ‘is always an easy one to handle. I wish King Kong could stay here.’

  ‘I thought his name was Ro—’ Steve began.

  Dora cut in smooth
ly, ‘That’s his pet name. Isn’t he great, Steve? I can’t wait for you to ride him.’

  Robin went into the horse box as if he had been going in and out of it all his life. All the way home, Dora had a prickly feeling in her back, knowing that he was behind her. As they came up the last bit of winding hill before the farm, she greeted each familiar tree, each bush and heap of stones, the place where Ron had skidded, showing off, and fallen off his motorbike, the hedge where Callie found the dead owl, as if she had been away for twenty years.

  Callie was sitting on the wall at the side of the gate. She jumped down at once and climbed on the mudguard to look at Robin through the slats at the top of the horse box. Ron just happened to be out polishing the metal on his bike. The Colonel just happened to be crossing the yard. Slugger just happened to be painting the gate post. As the van drove through the gateway, Dora held out her hand to him.

  ‘So she’s done it again,’ he said, in his Slugger way of talking at people rather than to them. ‘All the way to the United States, she’s been, three thousand miles she’s been, to bring us back another old crock.’

  ‘Wait till you see him, Slug.’ Dora let go of his hand, and they drove into the yard.

  ***

  Robin seemed to be all right, apart from a slight cold and loss of appetite. Dora was suffering from jet lag too. After a few days, she rode him out to get him loosened up and used to the new landscape.

  He peered a lot at stones and white fences and bits of paper.

  ‘I hope he’s not going to be a shyer,’ Steve said.

  ‘He’s curious.’ Dora would have nothing wrong with Robin. ‘That’s a sign of intelligence.’

  They went through the wood, and decided to take the short cut home down the road, so as not to overdo Robin.

  As they turned out of the narrow lane with the high hedge, towards the road that ran along the top of the hills, Robin’s head shot up, and a fraction of a second later Miss America flung up her handsome narrow head too. A second after that, Dora and Steve heard hoofs on the road.

  They pulled in to the side. Down the hard highway, mane and stirrups flying, foam-flecked and wild-eyed, a black horse galloped frantically without a rider.

  ‘Which way?’ said Dora. ‘Go to catch it, or go to see who fell off?’

  ‘You go one way, I’ll go the other.’

  Steve went after the horse. Dora went on down the road. A few hundred metres farther on, she found Amanda Crowley, her doughy face distorted with tears, a painful graze reddening the side of her chin.

  Dora told her to stand on a gate, and somehow got Amanda behind her. Robin had probably never had such a doughy girl behind the saddle, but he didn’t buck or fuss. Although he was lively and responsive, he was the most unsurprised horse Dora had ever known.

  Amanda had stopped bellowing and slobbering, but when Dora put her down off the horse at the back of her house, she began to weep and carry on again as she ran through the kitchen door.

  Mrs Crowley came out in an apron with flour on her forearms.

  ‘Can’t understand it … gentle as a lamb, they said … She loves that horse like a brother…’

  The Crowleys did not seem to have progressed much since Dopey became Woman-o’-War.

  Steve trotted down the road, leading the black horse back to the Crowleys’ house. Dragging it, rather. It was hanging back, with its ears laid flat.

  ‘How did you know it was theirs?’ Dora went to meet him.

  ‘It’s got bits of pink ribbon tied into its mane,’ he said grimly. ‘Should be red. It’s a tricky sort.’

  ‘My poor baby. Poor brave little girl. Here’s Rebel come back, see, safe and sound, say thank you to Steven and Doris.’

  Amanda had come out again, and was snuggling and sniffling under her mother’s arm.

  ‘I didn’t know you had a new horse,’ Steve said. ‘Where did you get him?’

  ‘From some people Mr Crowley knows, at work. Their children have ridden him. We bought him in good faith, a real bargain, and the girls have taken so much trouble over him. Can’t understand …’ The mother wiped the girl’s face on her apron, rubbing the graze, and Amanda yelled and scowled and pulled away, aiming a kick at the back of her mother’s solid legs.

  Then she came over to the black horse and aimed a kick at him.

  ‘Here,’ said Steve. ‘None of that. Was it his fault you fell off?’

  ‘Of course it was, the pig. He pretended to be so qui-so-qui-so quiet.’ She started blubbering again at the memory of it. ‘We were trotting along and I was singing to him, like I do, and then suddenly – he suddenly – Ow-wow-wow, it was awful, Mum!’ She ran back to the apron and the floury arm.

  ‘What then, my precious? What did that naughty horse do? And they said he was so gentle!’

  ‘Did he shy?’ Dora asked. The black horse was quiet enough now, standing with its knees slightly bent, and its large common head drooping, eyes half-shut. The Crowleys certainly didn’t pick horses on looks.

  ‘Sort of, except that there was nothing to shy at.’ Amanda looked out from her mother’s armpit, pouting her lower lip to catch tears. ‘He dropped his head suddenly and then he threw it up and hit me in the nose and sort of stood on his back legs and spun round. I didn’t fall off,’ she said defiantly. ‘I got off. Bet you would have too.’

  ‘Bet I would.’

  Sitting on her beautiful well-behaved Robin, Dora could not help feeling sorry for the Crowleys, silly though they were, and for the bad luck they had with horses. And for the bad luck of any horse who found its way to their draughty, narrow stable in the bare paddock fenced with barbed wire.

  Riding home with Steve, she was silent for a while. As they turned onto the cart track that led between the fields to the back of the farm buildings, Steve said, ‘Don’t bother telling me. I know what you’re thinking.’

  Dora sighed. ‘Yes, I am. Well, why couldn’t we, Steve?’ She turned to him, standing sideways in her saddle. ‘We’ve had some pretty good success with difficult horses. I know I’m not the world’s greatest, but I did learn a bit about schooling from Chuckie Fiske. Rebel’s not such a bad horse in spite of that coffin head. But if he doesn’t get straightened out, he’ll either kill one of those girls, or they’ll get rid of him and he’ll be half killed by someone else who’s not so soppy.’

  ‘Now look, Dora,’ Steve said. ‘That’s not what Follyfoot is for. We’re here to look after the horses who need us. Not to take in a rogue horse who isn’t worth a day’s keep.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as a rogue horse,’ Dora said. ‘No horse is bad by nature. People make them that way, and people can cure them.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Steve opened the gate and let it swing back instead of holding it for Dora. ‘Horses are like people. There’s some will always be no good.’

  Catching the gate, Dora was going to argue that too, but Steve, whose irritation with the Crowleys seemed to have seeped over onto her, turned round on Miss America’s bare back and said, ‘You’ve got one horse here already that shouldn’t be. Don’t land us with another.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Steve kicked Miss America and trotted into the yard without answering.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Dora took off Robin’s tack, and went into the loosebox where Steve was already rubbing down Miss A with an old towel, copying the Colonel’s hissing whistle.

  ‘Are you talking about Rob?’

  ‘About the expense of him.’ Steve kept his head down against the mare’s side.

  ‘Blank’s paying for his keep. He’ll send more next winter. He said so.’

  ‘He also said when he was here that he’d send the Colonel a donation for the old horses. So he’s sending Robin’s keep instead.’

  ‘Oh—’ Dora was horrified. She hadn’t seen it that way. ‘Has the Colonel said this to you?’

  Steve kept his head down, and went on hissing and rubbing.

  Chapter 18

  IGNORING ROBI
N’S IMPATIENT hoof against his door demanding to be let out to roll, Dora ran down the cinder path to the house, pushed past Ron enquiring, ‘Where’s the fire?’ and Anna enquiring, ‘Why haven’t you put your sheets in the laundry?’ and banged into the Colonel’s study.

  He was sitting on the rug with Dottie, the donkey foal curled up against her mother’s rounded side.

  Refusing to be sidetracked by this touching scene, Dora stopped with her legs apart and her arms folded and said brusquely, ‘Have you and Steve been talking about me?’

  ‘Dora, what on earth?’ The Colonel looked up. The skin at the corner of his scarred eye twitched, and the other eyebrow went up. ‘What are you so angry about?’

  ‘I’m not angry. I’m upset.’ That was a mild word for it. She was hurt, humiliated, shattered. She had thought everybody shared her joy in the gift of Robin. Now here they’d all been gossiping behind her back that she was taking Follyfoot money.

  ‘Keep the money,’ she told the Colonel. ‘Use it to pay bills, and I’ll find some way of paying for Robin. I’ll get baby-sitting jobs.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like babies.’

  ‘I’ll read to blind people.’

  ‘There aren’t any round here, except old Mr Corrigan and he can read Braille now that—’

  ‘I’ll sell something. I’ll sell my clothes.’

  ‘What clothes?’

  Dora’s suitcase with her dresses and long skirt and red swimsuit had been lost by the airline, and Dora had not bothered to claim for it.

  ‘I’ll work for you for nothing.’

  ‘You are, practically, the little I pay you. Dora, what on earth are we talking about?’ He stroked Dottie’s endless brown ears. The Colonel was the only person she would allow to touch her ears.

  ‘You told Steve it wasn’t fair of me to have Robin here.’