Sheltering Rain, Page 26

Thom sat, very still. She could feel his eyes upon her, and felt suddenly disadvantaged, being so far beneath him. She rubbed at her glasses.

  "I'm fine, honest."

  "You can't hang around here. This rain's not going, it's settling in. You could be waiting all night."

  "Thom, please . . ."

  But he had leaned forward, and swinging his leg over the back of the saddle, dismounted. Holding the horse's reins in one hand, he walked over to her, his boots squelching in the wet earth, and pulled the brown hat from his head.

  "Here," he said. "Take this." He rubbed his hand through his short, dark hair. Where his hand was wet, the hair stood up in short, sleek spikes.

  "And this." He had removed his waterproof, and thrust it at her. She took it wordlessly, gazing at him in his thick jumper, already dusted with the first drops to force their way through the sparse canopy above. It was impossible to tell about his arm, she noted, unless you looked at that hand.

  "Go on, put it on," he said. "I'll walk you back."

  "But you'll get soaked."

  "But not for long. If you stay here in that thing," he pointed dismissively at her jacket, warm enough for the worst that London could throw at it, "you'll catch pneumonia. C'mon, it's sheltering rain."

  "I feel . . . I feel . . ." she hesitated.

  "Cold. Wet. Go on. The quicker you do, the quicker we can get back."

  She put the coat on. Cut to cover the saddle as well as its passenger, it reached down almost to her ankles and swished around her shins. He grinned as she placed the hat on her head.

  "Why don't you trot back," she said, pleadingly. "Then you won't get so wet. I'm fine with this lot on."

  "I'll walk you back," he said, firmly, and she decided not to argue any more.

  They followed the stream, their silence punctuated by the slop-clop of the horse's hooves, and the occasional metallic jangle of the bit against its teeth. Beyond the hedge, the mist had come down so that where one could usually make out Kilcarrion's distant chimneys, only a silent gray nothingness remained. Kate, despite herself, found she had begun to shiver.

  "Is there a reason why you're out on your own?" They were having to speak unnaturally loudly, shout almost, to be heard above the thrumming of the rain.

  "As opposed to being on a horse?"

  He laughed. "You know what I mean." Kate stared at her boots. Her footfall trudged sludgily, out of rhythm.

  "It's not very easy," she said eventually. "Coming back, I mean."

  "That's for sure."

  "So, why did you?" She stopped, and looked at him. "Why did you come back?"

  Thom, who had also been watching his feet, glanced up at her, and then looked away.

  "Ahh. Too long a story."

  "We've got at least half an hour. Unless a taxi comes past."

  "True. But you first."

  "Well, I came back because my father is dying. Or at least I think he's dying. But you probably know more about that than I do." She paused, and stared at him, but he shrugged slightly, as if in contradiction. His jumper, she noted guiltily, had started to hang lower from the extra weight of the water.

  "And I wanted to see Sabine. But something seems to have happened while she's been here, and she . . ." Kate lifted her head, trying to keep the choke from her voice. "She doesn't seem to want to come back."

  There. She had acknowledged it. She glanced at him, waiting for some response, some suggestion of judgment on his part, but he just kept walking, staring down at his feet.

  Kate sighed.

  "I can't say I blame her. There's been . . . well, there's been a lot of upheaval at home. I left my partner for someone else, and then he turned out . . . well, he turned out to be not what I'd expected. And so in the end I ended up on my own." She tripped slightly, and glanced up at him, trying to smile. "Probably no great surprise to you."

  But Thom kept walking. She paused again, fighting the swelling urge to cry.

  "Still, I thought she'd be pleased. I thought she'd want to come back, and just be the two of us. Because she's never really liked anyone I've been with. And I thought she'd hate it here, with all the rules and stupid deadlines for meals, and hunting, hunting, hunting. I always wanted her to grow up free of all that, you see. None of that rigidity. None of that formality. None of that constant sense of things being either right or wrong. I just wanted her to be happy, to be my friend. But . . ." Here she pulled up her spectacles and rubbed at her eyes, grateful that under the broad brim of the hat, it would probably just look like she was struggling with the rain. "She seems to have liked it. In fact, she seems to prefer it to living with me. So, the reason I'm out here in the rain is, frankly, that I feel a bit of a spare part. I don't know what to do with myself. And I don't think anyone here really knows what to do with me."

  She let out a long shuddering breath, glancing over at Thom. "Bit of a mess, really," she said, apologetically.

  Thom, one arm now thrown over the low-hung neck of his horse, didn't look at her. He appeared to be deep in thought, oblivious to the rivulets of water running from his hair down the lines of his jaw and dripping onto his collar.

  They walked on in silence until they reached a five-barred gate, which, solicitously, he opened, holding his horse back and away from her until she'd gone through.

  "Stupid, really," she said, feeling a desperate need to fill the silence. She didn't think the countryside could be this quiet. "There's me, thirty-five years old, and still not able to sort my life out. You'd think I would have worked it out by now. My brother has. Most of my friends have. Sometimes I think I'm the only person who has not been given the set of rules . . . you know, the ones that show you how to grow up."

  Her voice, she realized, had begun to rise. She had begun to babble.

  "Are you not going to say anything?" she said, once he'd shut the gate behind them.

  He looked at her. His eyes, outlined by black, wet lashes, were surprisingly blue. Or perhaps it was just that everything around them seemed so gray.

  "What do you want me to say?" he said. It sounded, peculiarly, like a genuine question.

  A quarter of a mile away, in a room only slightly less damp, Sabine and Joy were going through some of the album photographs. It had been at Joy's suggestion, which had surprised Sabine, but then lots of things about Joy's behavior surprised her these days: the fact that she had accepted Sabine's plans to go out with a boy without a murmur; the fact that she had suddenly started letting the dogs, to their apparent relish, sleep nights on her bed; the fact that she seemed to want to do almost anything rather than sit in the same room as her husband.

  Whom she adored.

  Sabine stared at the formal photograph of the couple on their sixth wedding anniversary. She was seated on a stool, dressed in a dark, button-down dress with a wide, striped collar and full skirt, and her smile suggested some repressed sense of mirth. He, again in whites, stood behind her, one hand on her shoulder, the other clasping hers with a kind of loose affection. He was looking down at the top of her head, and also appeared to be trying not to laugh.

  "He was the most awful photographer," said Joy, fondly, wiping nonexistent dust from the page. "He was a lovely Chinese fellow, but with the most terrible English expressions that the troops had evidently told him meant something quite different. He thought he was telling you to sit closer together, but he'd say some awful piece of slang, like . . ." Joy paused, and glanced at Sabine. "Anyway, your grandfather and I had terrible trouble keeping a straight face. If I remember rightly, we absolutely howled afterward."

  Sabine stared at the picture, reanimating it in her imagination into the two laughing lovers, conspiring in their mirth, erupting in some joint emotion as they emerged, blinking into the sunlight. It was as if they had some invisible shield around them, as if their happiness left no room for anyone else to get in. I want a man to look at me like that, Sabine thought. I want to feel that loved.

  "Did you and Grandfather never argue?"

  Joy
paused, folding the tissue paper back over the page.

  "Of course we did. Well, not argue as such, more disagreements."

  She looked up, and out of the window.

  "I think it was a bit easier for our generation, Sabine. We knew what our roles were. There wasn't all this fussing and fighting over who did what that you seem to get today."

  "Plus, you had servants. No moaning over who did the washing up."

  "No. That did help."

  "But he must have upset you sometimes. You must have hated each other's guts sometimes. No one's perfect."

  "I never hated his guts, as you so charmingly put it."

  "But you must have rowed. Everyone rows." Please don't let it just be my mother, she said, silently.

  Joy compressed her mouth, as if considering her words carefully. "There was a day, one day, in which your grandfather upset me very much."

  Sabine waited for an explanation of this dreadful deed, but none appeared to be forthcoming.

  Joy drew breath, and continued. "I was very, very unhappy afterward, and I thought: Why on earth should I stay? Why should I stick this out? It's too difficult. And then this ridiculous phrase came to me . . . from the coronation ceremony. You know we were rather obsessed by the coronation when we were your age. And as I understood it at the time, it was about the need to stick with something, in order to get your reward. It was about duty. And honor. And I thought of how excited everyone had been at this young woman giving up her life, and her life with her dashing new husband, in order to fulfill her duty--to rule over her "temporal kingdom," as they put it. And I realized it wasn't just about oneself, about one's own happiness. It was about not letting everyone else down, about keeping other people's dreams alive."

  She paused, gazing out of the window, into the distance, held briefly captive by her own memories.

  "So I stuck with it. And all those people who would have been disappointed if I hadn't . . . well, I think they were happier as a result."

  But what about you? Sabine wanted to say. But her grandmother suddenly became rather brusque. "Good gracious, look at that rain," she said. "I had no idea. Come on, we've got to get those horses out of the bottom field. You can help me before you go out."

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Thomas Keneally had left Ireland aged nineteen, without money or job prospects, bound for Lambourn, in England, where, he was assured by his fellow jockeys, a man with his light hands and, more important, bollocks of steel, would find work as a jump jockey. He left behind him a good job, at least two offers of work from reputable Irish trainers, and his distraught parents, who while acknowledging that teenage sons grew up and moved away, had always assumed it would be his elder brother, Kieron, who went first. Thom's father had hoped it would be; Kieron had crashed his car twice now, and never, unlike Thom, gave his mother a portion of his wages toward housekeeping. Both parents declined to ask their younger son why he was leaving, but had been discreetly informed by his aunt, Ellen, who worked at the big house, that it "might have something to do with the daughter." For this reason, Thom's mother, until she died almost nine years later, bore a weighty, if silent, grudge against Kate Ballantyne, despite the fact that Thom had never so much as mentioned her, she had met her all of twice, and Kate herself had left Ballymalnaugh under a cloud some months before Thom's departure. There was the baby, of course, but Thom, unusually, had nearly bitten her head off when she had asked whether it was anything to do with him. He wasn't the kind of lad you pushed for answers, even then.

  He had, as predicted, found work fairly easily, in the forty-strong yard of a well-known woman trainer, who managed to combine a twinkling ability to flirt with even her animals, with the stamina (and build) of a cart horse, and a temper that could sear third-degree burns on raw skin. She liked Thom; he was straightforward, good with the horses, and, most of all, was not afraid of her. There was some resentful gossip among the existing lads that she liked him for better reasons than that, but Thom was so fiercely ambitious, and so hardworking, that it was hard for anyone who spent any time with either rider or trainer to take them seriously.

  He was not, as the racing crowd put it, one of the boys. He neither disappeared with his colleagues to the local pub on a Friday night to dissolve his meager wages in beer nor brought local girls back for raucous after-hours drinks to the side-by-side cramped and badly heated mobile homes that passed for their accommodations, nor sat with mugs of artificially sweetened black coffee after morning stables, complaining about the poor pay and backbreaking hours that are the trainee jockey's lot. He worked, studied form books, rode out at every opportunity, and sent what little money he had left over back to his parents. It was, even he had to admit afterward, pretty nauseating behavior.

  Which was why, when, four years later, a bad-tempered four-year-old by the name of Never on Sunday panicked in the stalls, and went over, crushing his arm so badly that it was left hanging by two tendons and a shattered bone, the only person who really grieved for him was the lady trainer (she was also grieving for herself; she hadn't had anyone work as hard as he had the whole time she'd been in business) and the bookies, who had long noted Thom's uncanny yet gratifyingly predictable ability to bring a horse home in second place. The other lads, while sympathetic (it could have been one of them, after all) harbored a silent sense of schadenfreude, and told one another reassuringly in hushed tones that being "teacher's pet" evidently got you nowhere.

  Thom, meanwhile, spent a large part of the following year in hospital, first fighting off an infection that had resulted from the amputation, and, later, having his first false limb fitted. He did not, it is fair to say, adjust well to his new handicap at first, despite the efforts of the lady trainer, who, showing an unlikely loss of her customary hardheadedness (one that led even Thom to question whether he had been wrong in his assessment of her feelings toward him), told him he could have a job for life working in her yard.

  That offer became slightly less fervent after Thom started drinking. It was withdrawn completely after, following twelve pints of Australian lager and a brief, messy interlude with a barmaid who claimed she could tell certain things about him from his shoe size, that he drove the lady trainer's Range Rover into a ditch in the early hours of the morning, writing it off in the process. He then walked home, ignoring the wound to his head, and the fact that the vehicle's alarm was heralding a new dawn for half of Berkshire, and was still asleep on his blood-sodden sheets when the lady trainer broke into his mobile home and asked him (except she didn't exactly ask) to pack his bags.

  He worked at a number of yards after that, less reputable yards that cared less about his increasing reputation for drinking and womanizing, and thought they could capitalize on his earlier shrinking reputation for hard work and effectiveness with horses. He usually managed to disappoint them within six months; he was always good with horses, but difficult with the other lads, mercurial in temper, and, worst of all, frequently rude to owners. The last lad to crack a joke about his false arm found himself hanging upside down from a bridle-cleaning hook with a hoof pick parked somewhere that swiftly became the stuff of local legend.

  This downward spiral culminated in his last posting, working for a trainer also from Ireland, whose methods and company had raised eyebrows in the kind of horse racing circles that Thom had once been used to. Now, handicapped more by his reputation than by his arm, and determined to ignore his parents' requests to come home, he found himself accepting J. C. Kermode's offer of a position with what passed these days for alacrity.

  J. C. was a short, wiry former jockey with a brain as sharp as the metal teeth of a curry comb, and a patter as smooth as hoof oil. It did not take long for Thom to realize that these two gifts, essential in any trainer, could be less admirable when joined by an ability to bend the truth like Uri Geller with an old spoon.

  J. C.'s greatest gift was not training horses (in fact, his record was dismal), but the ability to persuade gullible new owners not only to park their hors
es with him, but also to buy more, and then to ignore the ever-mounting yard bills that he managed to ratchet up as part of their "special training routine." The climactic example of these were Dean and Dolores, a socially climbing couple of divorcees from Solihull, who J. C. sat next to on a plane from Dublin, and by the time the plane had landed, had persuaded that not only would they have "the best laugh" accompanying him racing at Uttoxeter, but that also, if they liked it, he had just the filly for them. Dean, the oversized and unlovely managing director of a kitchen utensil company, had rarely had anyone work so hard to convince him of his wonderful company. His new wife, Dolores, was still in shock from her divorce-related expulsion from Solihull's social creme de la creme, as she put it, and was deeply taken with J. C.'s flirtatious manner and vocal admiration of Dean's business acumen. Before the air hostesses had asked them to fasten their seat belts for landing, the pair had already pictured themselves in the winners' enclosure at Ascot (in Dolores's case, having smiled a glamorous smile to the television cameras, and hence to all those Solihull bitches who stuck by her ex-husband), and J. C. was on his way to the sale of a particularly problematic three-year-old called Charlie's Darling, with a ewe neck and a vicious and unpredictable buck.

  If Dean and Dolores were J. C.'s "cash cow," as he frequently described them to Thom, they were also to be his downfall. Although initially seduced by the racing scene, and by the idea of themselves as owners (a view aided by Charlie's Darling's completely unforeseen win in the three-thirty seller at Doncaster and J. C.'s tendency to bring Thom along; Dolores liked Thom), Dean and Dolores were left with something more than indigestion after their "fun days out" at the track when gradually the huge bills accumulated from their string of four horses. He was sure, he confided to a disbelieving Dolores, that J. C. was "up to something." Dolores, whose racing day wardrobe now accurately reflected in exact hues her "jockeys' colors," told him he was being ridiculous. But when Thom bored of flirting with her (it made him feel like an idiot, he mulishly told an exasperated J. C.), she, too, began to question the beneficence of their great new friend J. C.

  Then J. C.'s old friend from Ireland, Kenny Hanlon, appeared. He had gotten to hear about his old mate's financial good luck with these gullible British owners, and decided he'd quite like a slice of that particular pie. Best known for his rather controversial fruit-machine rental firm (it was said that on nearly all his machines one of his plums was missing), he began turning up at race meetings; with a jovial greeting to J. C., he would slide into the seat so recently vacated by Thom and shower compliments on the increasingly insecure Dolores, ignoring J. C.'s silent fury on the other side of the table (for a man with two cauliflower ears, it was said, he had an astonishingly winning way with the fair sex). It was only a matter of weeks before he was dropping Iagolike hints into her own, multiply pierced ear: Was she entirely sure that J. C. wasn't adding a little something to the bill? He was renowned for it, she should know. Was she sure he was getting her the best horses, and not just the old nags? They hadn't had many winners lately, after all. Might she be interested in moving the horses somewhere else? He knew just the place--and he could guarantee that Dean's feed and vets' bills would drop by at least a third. And did she know quite how delicious she looked in that shade of mauve?