‘The day after tomorrow never comes,’ I said, but they didn’t think it funny.
I used the yard as a staging post and seldom kept horses there more than a night or two. They were a tie, because I looked after them myself, and I did that because until recently I had not been earning enough to think of employing anyone else.
In my first year in the business I had negotiated fifty sales, and in my second ninety three, and during the past three months I had been almost constantly busy. Given a bit of luck, I thought, like, say, buying a Derby winner for five thousand as a yearling... just some such impossible bit of luck... I might yet achieve tax problems.
I left the office and went to the sitting-room. My brother Crispin was still where I’d left him, face down, snoring, spark out. I fetched a rug and draped it over him, knowing he wouldn’t wake for hours, and that when he did he would be in his usual violent hangover temper, spewing out his bitter resentments like untreated effluent.
We had been orphaned when I was sixteen and he seventeen, first by a riding accident which killed our mother, and then three months later by a blood clot in Father. Abruptly, almost from one week to the next, our lives changed to the roots. We had been brought up in comfort in a house in the country, with horses to ride and a cook and gardener and stablemen to do the work. We went to expensive boarding schools and thought it natural, and holidayed on grouse moors in Scotland.
The glitter had by no means been founded on gold. Solicitors gravely told us that our parent had mortgaged all he possessed, had borrowed on his life assurance, had sold the family treasures and was only a Degas sketch away from bankruptcy. He had, it appeared, been living on the brink of disaster for several years, always finding a last minute goody to send to Sotheby’s. When his debts had been paid and house, horses, cook, gardener, stablemen and all had vanished into limbo, Crispin and I, without close relatives, were left with no home to go to and precisely one hundred and forty-three pounds each.
The school had been understanding but not to the point of keeping us without fees. We had finished the Easter term, but that was that.
It had affected Crispin more than me. He had been aiming for university and the law and could not bring himself to settle for the generously offered Articles in the grave solicitor’s office. My more practical nature saved me from such torments. I faced prosaically the fact that from now on I would need to work to eat, totted up my assets which proved to be a thin body, good health and a certain facility on horseback, and got myself a job as a stable lad.
Crispin had been furious with me but I’d been happy. I was not academic. Stable life, after the confines of school, had been a marvellous freedom. I never regretted what I’d lost.
I left him snoring and went upstairs to bed, thinking about our different fates. Crispin had tried stockbroking and insurance and felt he had not been appreciated, and I, in becoming a jockey, had found total fulfilment. I always reckoned I’d had by far the best of it and didn’t begrudge anything I could do to compensate.
My bedroom like the office looked out to the yard, and except when it was freezing I slept with the window open. At twelve thirty I woke from the depths with the sudden instant awareness of the subconscious hitting the alarm switch.
I lay tinglingly awake, listening at full stretch, not knowing what I’d heard but sure that it was wrong.
Then unmistakably it came again. The scrape of a hoof on a hard surface. The clop of horse shoes where they had no business to be at that time of night.
I flung back the duvet and jumped to the window.
No movement down there in the moonlit yard. Just a yawning black oblong which should have been filled by a firmly closed stable door.
I cursed with a sinking heart. The most valuable of my lodgers, all seventy thousand pounds worth, was out loose on the dangerous roads of Surrey.
3
He wasn’t comprehensively insured, because his new owner had jibbed at the high premium. He wasn’t finally paid for, because of a complicated currency transfer. I had had to guarantee the money to the vendor when I didn’t actually have it, and if I didn’t get that two-year-old back fast and unscratched the financial hot waters would close over my head. The foreign buyer was a ruthless man who would stop his cheque if the horse were damaged and my own insurers wouldn’t pay up for anything less than death, and reluctantly at that.
Sweater, jeans, boots went on at high speed and I ran downstairs fumbling to do up the buckles of the strap which anchored my shoulder. In the sitting-room Crispin still snored. I shook him, calling his name. No response. The stupor persisted.
I stopped in the office to telephone the local police.
‘If anyone reports a horse in their back garden, it’s mine.’
‘Very good,’ said a voice. ‘Saves time to know.’
Out in the yard there was no sound. The two-year-old had been already on the road when I woke, because it was metal on tarmac I’d heard, not the soft familiar scrunch on weedy gravel.
No sound on the road. It lay empty in the moonlight for as far as I could see.
He could be peacefully grazing the verge a few yards beyond my sight.
He could be halfway to the express line of the electric railway or on the dual carriageway to Brighton or on the main runway at the airport.
He could be crashing down rabbit holes in the local scrubby woodland.
I sweated in the cold night air. Seventy thousand bloody pounds I didn’t have and couldn’t raise.
Looking for a loose horse at night by car had high built-in failure factors. One couldn’t hear his movements and with his dark coat one could hit him as soon as see him. One could startle him into panic, into crashing through a fence, tearing himself on barbed wire, skidding to his knees, damaging beyond repair the slender bones and tendons of his legs.
I hurried back through the yard, picked up a bridle and a halter from the tackroom, and ran on out to the nearest paddock. There somewhere in the dim dappled light was the pensioned-off steeplechaser I used as a hack. Dozing on his feet and dreaming of long past Gold Cups.
Climbing the rails I whistled to him in a trill through my teeth, the sound he responded to when he felt like it.
‘Come on, boy,’ I called. ‘Come here you bugger, for God’s sweet sake.’ Come. Just come. But the field looked empty.
I whistled again, despairing.
He ambled over with all the urgency of a museum. Sniffed at my fingers. Resignedly allowed me to put on his bridle. Even stood moderately still when I led him to the gate and used it as usual as a mounting block. Jogging on his bare back, I trotted him through the yard, and at the gate let him choose his own direction.
Left lay the main roads and right the woods. He chose the right, but as I urged him on I wondered if he had gone that way because I subconsciously wanted it. Horses, highly telepathic, needed little steering.
If the two-year-old were in the woods he wasn’t under the wheels of a twenty ton lorry. If he were in the woods he could be calmly eating leaves from the branches and not sticking his feet down rabbit holes...
After half a mile, where the narrow road began to wind upward and the tangle of beech and bramble and evergreen grew thicker, I reined in my ‘chaser, stood him still, and listened.
Nothing. Only the faint sound of moving air, hardly as much as a rustle. My mount waited, uninterested and unexcited. He would have known if the two-year-old had been near. He was telling me indirectly that he wasn’t.
I went back, trotting him fast on the softer verge. Past the stable gate, where he wanted to turn in. Down the road to the village and across the moonlit green.