So Brat took Timber to the other side of the valley, and cantered him gently on the centuries-old turf of Clare Park, keeping well away from the trees. Then he walked him round the various clumps, gauging the height of the lowest limbs from the ground. The manoeuvre was received by Timber with a puzzled but passionate interest. One could almost see him trying to work it out. What was this for? What did the man come and look at large trees for? With a horse's abnormal memory, he was well aware that large trees were associated with private delights of his own, but, being a horse, he was also incapable of drawing any reasonable deduction from his rider's interest in the same kind of trees.
He walked up to each clump with a mannerly grace, until they approached the large oak which had been for five hundred years the pride of Clare Park. As they came within its flung shadow Timber propped himself suddenly on his forelegs and snorted with fright Brat was puzzled. What did he remember about the oak that would cause a reaction as strong as that? He looked at the ears that were sticking up as stiff as horns. Perhaps it wasn't a memory. Perhaps there was something in the grass.
"Do you always sneak up on girls under trees?" said a voice from the shadows, and from the grass there emerged the seal-like form of Miss Parslow. She propped herself on an elbow and surveyed the pair. Brat was a little surprised that she was alone. "Don't you ever ride anything but that black brute?"
Brat said that he did, quite often.
"I suppose it would be too much to expect that you were looking for me when you came over to the park to ride?"
Brat said that he was looking for a place to teach Timber manners.
"What's the matter with his manners?"
"He has a habit of diving suddenly under a tree so that he scrapes his rider off."
Miss Parslow propped herself a little farther up and looked with new interest at the horse. "You don't say! I never thought the brutes had that much sense. How are you going to stop him?"
"I'm going to make riding under trees a painful experience for him."
"You mean you'll beat him when he tries to do it?"
"Oh, no. That wouldn't do much good."
"After he has actually done it, then?"
"No. He mightn't associate the beating with a tree at all." He rubbed his whip up Timber's dark crest, and Timber bowed. "You'd be surprised at the odd things they associate."
"Nothing would surprise me to any extent about horses. How are you going to do it then?"
"Let him go full bat near a nice tempting tree, and when he swerves under it give him a cut on the belly that he'll remember all his life."
"Oh, no, that's too bad. The poor brute."
"It will be just too bad if I don't time my slip sideways on the saddle properly," Brat said dryly.
"And will that cure him?"
"I hope so. Next time he sees a likely tree he'll remember that it hurt like the blazes last time he tried it."
"But he'll hate you."
Brat smiled. "I'd be very surprised if he associated me with the business at all. I'd be surprised if he even associated it with the whip. Horses don't think like humans."
"What will he think hurt him, then?"
"The tree, more than likely."
"I always thought they were awfully silly animals."
It occurred to Brat that she had not made one of those riding parties on which he had accompanied Eleanor. Nor had he seen her about the stables lately. He asked how her riding was getting on.
"I've given it up."
"Altogether?"
"Uh-huh."
"But you were getting on well, weren't you? Eleanor said you had learned to bump."
"It was a very slithery bump, and it hurt me far more than it hurt the horse." She pulled a long grass and began to chew it, eyeing him with a sly amusement. "I don't have to hang around the stables any more. If I want to see Simon I know where to find him nowadays."
"Where?" said Brat before he could stop himself.
"The upstairs bar at the Angel."
"In Westover? But are you allowed to go to Westover when you like?"
"I'm attending a Westover dentist." She giggled. "Or rather, I was. The school made the first appointment for me, of course, but after that I just told them when I had to go next. I've reckoned that I have about thirty teeth, which should last me till the end of term quite nicely." She opened her red mouth wide and laughed. They were excellent teeth. "That's what I'm doing at the moment. Putting off time till the Westover bus is due. I could have gone with the earlier one but there is a very good-looking conductor on this one. He's got the length of asking me to the pictures one night next week. If Simon was going on the way he has been all those months, not knowing I'm alive, I'd maybe have done something about the conductor boy-he has lashes about an inch long-but now that Simon has stopped looking down his nose I think I'll give the conductor boy a miss." She chewed the stalk provocatively. "Got quite matey, Simon has."
"Oh."
"Have you been seducing the Gates girl from him, like I suggested?"
"I have not."
"That's funny. He's distinctly off her. And he's not awfully enamoured of you, if it comes to that. So I thought you'd been cutting him out with that Peggy woman. But I suppose it's just that you cut him out of Latchetts."
"You're going to miss your bus, aren't you?"
"You can be just as squashing as Simon, in your own way."
"I was only pointing out that the bus is almost at the smithy. It will be at the Park gates in — "
"What!" she shrieked, exploding to her feet in one enormous convulsion, so that Timber whirled in alarm from the wild eruption. "Oh, great heavens! Oh, for the love of…! Oh! Oh!"
She fled down the park to the avenue gates, screaming her distress as she went. Brat watched the green bus skim along the road past the white gates of Latchetts and slow down as it came to the gates of Clare Park. She was going to catch it after all, and her day would not be wasted. She would find Simon. At the Angel. In the upstairs bar.
That Simon should spend his time in Westover in the Angel bar was distressing but not, in the circumstances, surprising. What was surprising was the emergence of a Simon who was «matey» with Sheila Parslow. In Simon's eyes the Parslow girl had always been something beneath contempt; a lower form of life. He dismissed her with a gibe when her name was mentioned and in her presence was, as she had said herself, unaware that she was alive. What had happened to Simon that he was not only resigned to her companionship, but was «matey»? The girl was not lying about it. If her glowing self-satisfaction was not sufficient evidence, there was the obvious fact that Simon could avoid her by changing his drinking place. There was no lack of pubs in Westover; most of them more exclusively masculine haunts than the very social and female-ridden Angel.
Brat tried to imagine Simon with Sheila Parslow and failed.
What had come over Simon-the fastidious, critical Simon-that he found it possible to endure her? To spend hours in her company?
Was it a sort of «laming» his family for the disappointment he had been caused? A sort of you-don't-like-me-therefore-I'll-take-up-with-Sheila-Parslow? A sorry-when-I'm-dead reaction? There was a very childish side to Simon.
There was also, Brat thought from all he had heard, a very practical side and Sheila Parslow had money, and Simon needed it. But somehow Brat could not believe that Simon, even in his most deplorable moments, would ever consider pawning his life to a nymphomaniacal moron.
As he walked Timber home he considered yet once more the general oddity of Simon, but as usual came to no conclusion.
He handed Timber over to Arthur to be rubbed down, and went down with Eleanor to inspect Regina's new foal.
"She's an old marvel, isn't she," Eleanor said, watching the new arrival stagger about on its out-of-proportion legs. "It's another good one. Not much wonder that she looks complacent. People have been coming to admire her foals for practically a lifetime, the old duchess. I think foals to her are just a means of achieving this annual homage. She doesn't care a rap about the foal."