you did.’
Sally went very still. ‘That’s a lot to put on a person.’ She tipped the meat into the pan and the snap and hiss of frying filled the kitchen. ‘I wish I could say I watched over you, but that’s the way it is. Not all women manage what is expected of them, and I don’t see why I should be guilty, Fanny. You had Alfredo, who loved you.’
‘Sure,’ I said.
‘Pass me the casserole on the table.’
I got up and took it over to her. The phone rang and Sally answered it. I spooned cubes of meat and the carrots into the casserole, added some stock, and put it into the oven.
The next day I was awake early and stretched out in the old cotton-spool bed in the spare room under a patchwork quilt, watching sunlight slide like melted butter over the wall. Outside, a bird sounded in the larches, and a breeze rollicked through the branches. This was a wilder, wider place than home, with a bigger horizon. Sally had left my father for Art, a simple love triangle, but I reckoned, warm and sleepy in bed, that it had been as much to do with the wind in the larches and a horizon that marched out of sight as anything else.
‘Come and see the horses,’ Sally said, after we had had breakfast, and led the way up to the paddocks behind the house. There were seven of her shaggy-maned, large-eyed darlings milling around and, at the sound of her voice, they came over to us and jostled for attention. Rapt and confident, Sally talked to each one. ‘Here, Vince. Here, Melly…’
Not sure about them, Chloe squirmed in my arms, and I longed to be as assured in my handling of her as Sally was with her horses.
Sally took Chloe. ‘Go on. Make friends.’
I touched the hot, fragrant hides and soft muzzles. Chloe blinked and Sally guided her small hand towards a steamy flank. ‘Nice horse, Chloe,’ she said. ‘When you’re old enough, you must come and visit and I’ll teach you to ride.’
A sour taste flooded into my mouth. With a shock, I realized I was jealous of my own daughter. I busied myself with Melly’s mane and struggled to bring myself to order.
The moment passed.
Melly’s neck was corrugated with muscle. I ran my hand over it, enjoying the feel of her damp coat. ‘I wonder how Will is?’
‘What sort of man is he?’ Sally batted Melly’s nose gently out of Chloe’s orbit. ‘Would he like it here?’
‘I think so. But he hasn’t time to come.’
Sally gave me back Chloe and swung herself over the fence. Her horses swirled around her and she attached a leading-rein to Melly’s head-collar, grasped a handful of the golden mane and swung herself up. In daylight she seemed older, but the thighs under her denims were toned and strong. ‘Art gives himself plenty of time. That’s the difference.’ She turned Melly, then trotted her to the end of the paddock and back again. ‘Just testing. We’ve had trouble with her hock. But she’s fine.’
In the distance, Art’s station-wagon was nosing down the track towards us. It slowed and he wound down the window. The sound of country-and-western shattered the peace. ‘Thought I’d make a detour,’ he said, ‘to say hi to you ladies.’
He drove on. ‘Now, that’s what I call passing the test,’ said Sally fondly. ‘Most days he does that.’ She slid down from Melly’s back and leant against the picket fence. Once more, her horses closed in on her.
I felt the download of sadness, anger even, that my father had not passed Sally’s test. ‘You must get tired looking after the horses.’
Sally squinted into the sun, which emphasized the fanlight of lines around her eyes. ‘You get tired of everything. The question is, what do you tire of least? My horses are easy and uncomplicated. They want feeding, grooming, and exercising, and they might, in return, love a person a little. But not too much. It’s not their nature. I know that. And because I know that, it’s fine.’
She climbed back over the fence. ‘Do you want to know why your father and I didn’t make it? He wanted to go too far, too fast.
‘He didn’t become that rich. The business is hardly a gold mine.’
‘I made a mistake,’ said Sally. ‘I didn’t realize how a person could change as they grew older.’
On our last day Art minded Chloe, and Sally took me out on Melly. She rode upfront on the big, prancing Quincy and urged him along a track fringed by trees, which were turning every shade of yellow and ochre. The earth was moist underfoot and insects rose in clouds. In the distance the ridge of hills rose ragged and unpeaceful-looking in contrast to the warm landscape around the town. Sally pointed towards them. ‘There’s the ruins of a couple of mining buildings up there, if you look. Poor devils. They never found anything.’
Quincy’s tail twitched and I tagged behind, fussing with Melly’s reins and the angle of my foot. Every movement reminded me that I was not with Chloe. I knew she was perfectly all right, that she was safe, yet with every rustle in the undergrowth or shiver of the branches, I found myself listening for my child’s breathing. With every thud of the horses’ hoofs, I strained to hear her cry of distress, hunger or pleasure.
It was like that now, and there was nothing to be done about it.
After supper, I helped Sally to make gingerbread for the Rotary Club picnic. ‘We take the station-wagons and head up into the mountains, sing a little, eat a lot. It’s neat.’ Chloe was asleep in the little boxroom and Art was watching television in the next room, surrounded by papers and beer cans.
Sally dug a spoon into the molasses. ‘Since you’ve been here, my paperwork has gone to pot. Never mind – I’ve enjoyed it, Fanny. This has been good.’
The molasses had to be coaxed into the bowl.
‘Friends?’
‘Yup.’ She flushed a harsh red. ‘I wish… But that’s my business.’ She dropped the spoon and folded her hands across her stomach.
‘I thought you had no regrets.’
‘I don’t and I do. That’s natural.’ She poured the gingerbread mix into the tin. ‘But I have to say it’s mighty big of you to… Oh, what the heck, Fanny? What I did was for the best.’
‘Hey,’ I slipped my arm round her shoulders, ‘I didn’t mean…’
She looked up at me. ‘I chose me because I figured I only had one life and I’d better live it.’ She lowered her voice. ‘In a manner of speaking, Art was incidental.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘Coincidental, more like, because he happened along at the right time. But that’s our secret.’
I leant past her and ran my finger around the bowl. ‘He’s nice, Sally.’
‘He’s a man,’ she said briskly. ‘Is any of us nice? But we come in all shapes and his suited mine.’
I licked my finger. ‘You got away.’
Sally offered me the bowl for a second helping. ‘Like I say, I’m better with horses. And that’s what I’ve stuck to. You need things, you know, to take your mind off the mess and muddle of eating and sleeping and being polite in the home. Men don’t expect to think about it all the time. Why should I?’
Just as I was climbing into the spool bed for the last time Will rang. I wrapped a rug round my shoulders and went down to the kitchen to take the call.
‘Can’t wait to see you, Fanny,’ he said.
We hadn’t spoken for three days and I felt it acutely. ‘Tell me what’s been happening.’
He had several pieces of gossip. ‘Listen to this. The PM liked the speech I wrote for him and used a couple of the phrases. “Tough care”, you know, that sort of thing. Not very revolutionary but it seemed to do the trick.’
I told him about riding through the larch woods and the ruins of the mining buildings. ‘They sat up there during the winter, freezing and dying.’
‘They wanted a better life.’ He sounded like the Will I had first known.
‘If you come out here we can ride up into the mountains.’
‘Yup,’ he said. ‘I’d like that.’
Arriving home in the airport in London, I spotted Will before he saw Chloe and me. He was deep in conversation with a girl with a blonde ponytail and tight leather trousers.
He was smiling and talking, and gesticulating, in the way that he had when he wooed a listener around to his way of thinking. This was Will at his most persuasive and the girl was listening intently.
