Tom found the right issue and read the piece again, hoping it might shed some light on what to do with Pilgrim. It was kind of short on detail but it seemed all the guy had really done was take the mare back to basics as if he were starting her afresh, helping her find herself, making the right thing easy and wrong thing difficult. It was fine, but there was nothing new there for Tom. He was doing that already. As for the turning-into-pain thing, he still couldn't make a lot of sense of it. But what was he doing? Looking for a new trick? There were no tricks, he should know that by now. It was just you and the horse and understanding what was going on in both your heads. He pushed the magazine away, sat back and sighed.
Listening to Grace this evening and earlier to Logan, he'd searched every corner of what they said for something to latch on to, some key, some lever he could use. But there was none. And now at last he understood what he'd been seeing all this time in Pilgrim's eyes. It was a total breakdown. The animal's confidence, in himself and all around him, had been shattered. Those he had loved and trusted had betrayed him. Grace, Gulliver, everyone. They'd led him up that slope, pretended it was safe and then screamed at him and hurt him when it turned out not to be.
Maybe Pilgrim even blamed himself for what happened. For why should humans think they had a monopoly on guilt? So often Tom had seen horses protect their riders, children especially, from the dangers that inexperience led them into. Pilgrim had let Grace down. And when he'd tried to protect her from the truck, all he'd gotten in return was pain and punishment. Then all those strangers, who'd tricked him and caught him and hurt him and jabbed their needles in his neck and locked him up in the dark and the filth and the stench.
Later, as he lay sleepless with the light out and the house long fallen quiet, Tom felt something float heavily within him and settle on his heart. He now had the picture he'd wanted or as much of it as he was likely to get and it was a picture as dark and devoid of hope as he'd ever known.
There was no delusion, nothing foolish or fanciful about the way Pilgrim had assessed the horrors that had befallen him. It was simply logical and it was this that made helping him so hard. And Tom wanted so very much to help him. He wanted it for the horse itself and for the girl. But he knew too - and knew at the same time that it was wrong - that above all he wanted it for the woman he'd ridden with that morning and whose eyes and mouth he could see as clearly as if she were lying there beside him.
Chapter Twenty-one
The night Matthew Graves died, Annie and her brother were staying with friends in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica. It was the end of the Christmas holiday and her parents had gone back down to Kingston and left them up there for a few more days because they were having such fun. Annie and George, her brother, were sharing a double bed, tented by a vast mosquito net into which, in the middle of the night, their friends' mother came in her nightgown to wake them. She turned on the bedside light and sat on the end of the bed waiting for Annie and George to rub the sleep from their eyes. Dimly through the gauze of the mosquito net, Annie could see the woman's husband, hovering in his striped pajamas, his face in shadow.
Annie would always remember the strange smile on the woman's face. Later she understood it was a smile born of fear at what she had to say, but in that moment when sleep and consciousness elide her expression seemed humorous, so when the woman said she had bad news and that their father was dead, Annie thought it was a joke. Not a very funny one, but still a joke.
Many years later, when Annie thought she should do something about her insomnia (an urge that came upon her every four or five years and led only to large amounts of money being paid to hear things she already knew), she had been to see a hypnotherapist. The woman's technique was 'event oriented'. This apparently meant that she liked her clients to come up with some incident that marked the onset of whatever particular mess they were in. She would then pop you into a trance, take you back and resolve it.
After the first hundred-dollar session the poor woman was clearly disappointed that Annie couldn't come up with an appropriate incident, so for a week Annie had racked her brain to find one. She'd talked it over with Robert and it was he who came up with it: Annie being woken at the age of ten to be told her father was dead.
The therapist nearly fell off her chair with excitement. Annie felt pretty pleased too, like one of those girls she'd always hated at school who sat in the front row with their hands in the air. Don't go to sleep because someone you love might die. It didn't come much neater. The fact that for the next twenty years Annie had slept each night like a log didn't seem to bother the woman.
She asked Annie what she felt about her father and then what she felt about her mother and after Annie had told her, she asked how she felt about doing 'a little separation exercise'. Annie said that would be fine. The woman then tried to hypnotize her but was so excited she did it too fast and there wasn't a hope in hell it would work. Not to disappoint her, Annie did her best to fake a trance but had a lot of trouble keeping a straight face when the woman stood her parents on spinning silver discs and dispatched them one by one, waving serene farewells, into outer space.
But if her father's death, as Annie actually believed, had no connection with her inability to sleep, its effect on almost everything else in her life was immeasurable.
Within a month of his funeral, her mother had packed up the house in Kingston and disposed of things around which her children had felt their lives revolved. She sold the small boat in which their father had taught them to sail and had taken them to deserted islands to dive among the coral for lobsters and run naked on the palmed white sand. And their dog, a black Labrador cross called Bella, she gave to a neighbor they hardly knew. They saw the dog watching from the gate as the taxi took them to the airport.
They flew to England, a strange, wet, cold place where nobody smiled and their mother left them in Devon with her parents while she went up to London to sort out, she said, her husband's affairs. She lost no time in sorting one out for herself too, for within six months she was to marry again.
Annie's grandfather was a gentle, ineffectual soul who smoked a pipe, did crossword puzzles and whose main concern in life was avoiding the wrath or even mild displeasure of his wife. Annie's grandmother was a small, malicious woman with a tight white perm through which the pink of her scalp glowed like a warning. Her dislike of children was neither greater nor less than her dislike of almost everything else in life. But whereas most of these things were abstract or inanimate or simply unaware of her dislike, from these, her only grandchildren, she derived a much more gratifying return and set about making their stay, over the ensuing months, as miserable as possible.
She favored George, not because she disliked him less but in order to divide them and thus make Annie, in whose eye she was quick to spot defiance, all the more unhappy. She told Annie her life in 'The Colonies' had given her vulgar, slovenly ways which she set about curing by sending her to bed with no supper and smacking her legs, for the most trivial of crimes, with a long-handled wooden spoon. Their mother, who traveled down by train to see them each weekend, listened impartially to what her children told her. Inquests of stunning objectivity were held and Annie learned for the first time how facts could be so subtly rearranged to render different truths.