The next day, I went to see Dad. There wasn’t any real need to ring, he was always there, doing what he always did, and was always pleased to see me, but I gave him a call anyway before I pitched up. He was there. And he was pleased too.
I found him lunging a yearling in the field behind his cottage: a nervous young filly trotting round him in circles on the end of a long piece of rope. My father’s face was a picture of rapt concentration, the only time it looked like that, aside from when he was pricking out seedlings in what passed for his greenhouse. Yes, young things: fillies, seedlings, children. I’d been lucky. And only my gran had known that when Mum died. Most people had looked at one another in horror: Peter Mortimer, with a child of eleven! A little girl! But Gran had known about his nurturing heart and had no truck with people who’d told her she should step in and take over. She lived reasonably close by and had popped in regularly – Mum’s mum, this is – and if she’d ever been appalled at the chaos, the confusion, the endless saddles and bridles slung over chairs, the hastily opened tins of beans for tea, she never said. Might have quietly cleaned up, but, looking out of the window as she washed up, would have seen me perched in front of Dad in the saddle of some huge hunter, or with him in the barn filling hay nets or water buckets, which could easily descend into a water fight in the yard, both of us running in drenched. I was always pretty grubby and oddly dressed, but I was always with him: beside him in the rattling old horse lorry off to the sales – never a seat belt and probably never a tax disc either. Dad wasn’t dishonest, but if he was up against it money-wise, which he always was, he sailed fairly close to the wind. And Gran would have left us to it. Stayed for tea – more beans – and gone away knowing I’d probably be awake until Dad went to bed. Knowing too that I didn’t always make it to school if we’d been up all night with a mare foaling, that I drove around the farm alone in a horse box with hardly any brakes, but also that I appeared to be thriving. That I was getting a different sort of nourishment.
Calling it a farm was pitching it high, I thought with a small smile as I stood at the edge of the flat, windy field, watching the filly, who, nostrils flaring, all her instincts telling her this was not right and she shouldn’t be on the end of this rope, was nonetheless falling for the patience and kindness of the man on the other end. The field was one of six, all patchy and overgrazed, which together totalled thirty acres. A smallholding, really, with a cottage, a few tumbledown outhouses and a barn, which Dad had personally divided into stalls. All the stalls were crib-bitten and crisis-managed, held together with bits of plywood and binder twine, but they were scrupulously clean and the occupants looked happy enough. Glossy, healthy and relaxed, rather as, years ago, the young occupant of the cottage had been: thriving on benign neglect.
‘What d’you think?’ Dad called softly. He’d slackened the rope and was walking towards her, stealthily winding the rope in loops around his elbow as he went until he was beside her.
‘Lovely,’ I said quietly, walking across. I reached out a cautious hand, making sure she’d seen it first, to stroke a silky chestnut neck. ‘Is that the first time you’ve lunged her?’
‘Second. Might put a blanket on her tomorrow.’
I smiled. Received horsey wisdom suggested one might not do this until the age of three, but Dad had his own method of breaking horses, which involved treating them like adults from an early age. He’d adopted the same policy with me. He’d never turned a hair at teenage indulgences, never joined the clucking mothers who endlessly dissected their children’s love – or rather sex – lives; indeed he had no problem with my sexuality at all. What he did mind very much, though, was whose car I got into.
‘How long have you been driving?’ he’d quiz some surprised seventeen-year-old boy, probably Ben, as he came to pick me up.
‘Um, about three weeks, Mr Mortimer.’
‘Shift across and let Poppy drive, would you?’
‘OK,’ the boy would say, stunned. And he’d shift, because of course I’d been driving untaxed cars since I was twelve.
There again, as many of the mothers muttered, it was all very well. He was lucky with me. I hadn’t rebelled. I hadn’t had sex at thirteen, didn’t get pissed on a regular basis and I hated smoking. Now if Peter Mortimer had had our Chloe, for instance, they’d say, rolling their eyes … and Dad would smile, incline his head and agree. Privately, though, he’d wonder whether, if our Chloe had been around enough whisky and overflowing ashtrays in her formative years, had sipped Famous Grouse straight from the bottle and been sick, taken a puff of Capstan Full Strength and been sick again, and not had the rules and regulations about such things almost planted in her shoulder bag, she would have been in so much of a hurry. Would it have been such a thrill?
Jennie’s mother, Barbara, hadn’t been like that: quietly tutting and waiting in the wings for Peter and Poppy to come a cropper. Barbara, like Gran, had been discreetly helpful, taking me and Jennie to Boots and letting us fill a basket each: a bit of make-up, shampoo. ‘You’ll want some conditioner now, Poppy.’ Quietly popping in some STs – ‘For your drawer, by your
