The Horse Dancer, Page 37

  She had guessed John was the kind of man who liked to tell a story and was happy to listen: it stopped her thinking. And Mac wouldn't mind: he loved hearing about people's lives; it came from years of indulging his photographic subjects.

  'From there he ended up on horseback, mounted cavalry or some such, and in the 1950s he worked his way up until he was accepted by Le Cadre Noir, when they were building up again after the war.' He eyed the two people in front of him. 'That ain't no small achievement, you know. They're like, the top percentage of the whole country. It's an elite academy. Man, he loved that place. When he used to talk about it he'd stand a little straighter - you know what I'm saying?'

  'Then how the hell did he end up living at Sandown?'

  'Women.' John scowled at Natasha, as if she should somehow bear shared responsibility. 'He fell in love.'

  Le Cadre Noir had been on one of its first international tours in 1960 when Henri Lachapelle had noticed the small, dark-haired woman at the front of the audience. She was there for each of the three performances. The great joke was she didn't really like horses; she had come with a friend, but had been transfixed by the young man in the stiff black collar who had made riding a horse look magical.

  He had come out to see her after a performance one evening and, as he had described it to John years afterwards, it was as if everything in his life up to that point had been a rehearsal.

  'I don't think he'd had too much in the way of love, and it hit him real hard,' John said, lighting another cigarette. 'They had three more evenings together, and then they wrote and visited for the best part of six months, getting together when they could. Problem was,' he said, 'being apart from her made him cranky. You know what young lovers are like, and Henri was never one to do things by halves. He started off not paying attention, then his performances suffered. He began to question things they were telling him in the school. In the end they told him it was their way or the highway and, in a fit of temper, he went. Got to England, married his girl and . . .'

  'Lived happily ever after,' Natasha concluded, thinking back to that photograph. The woman who was well loved.

  John's glare was withering. 'Are you kidding me?' he said. 'Who the hell gets to live happily ever after?'

  Twenty-three

  'A disobedient horse is not only useless, but he often plays the part of a very traitor.'

  Xenophon, On Horsemanship

  Henri Lachapelle realised almost within the first year that he had made a terrible mistake. It wasn't Florence's fault: she loved him, kept herself pretty and tried to be a good wife. It wasn't her fault that her anxiety about his happiness made him feel little more than guilt or that this frequently manifested itself in a kind of irritation.

  He had asked Florence to marry him the evening of Le Carrousel, breathless, bloodied and still covered with sand. The audience in the seats around her had stood and cheered. They had walked the streets of Saumur for hours, negotiating the drunks and the motorbikes, planning their future, cementing their passion, giddy with dreams. The next morning he had not appeared for early training but had packed his few possessions in his kit-bag, and asked to see Le Grand Dieu. He had informed him that he wished to be released from his position.

  Le Grand Dieu had peered at Henri's black eye, his swollen cheek. He put his pen on his desk. There was a lengthy silence.

  'You know why we take the hind shoes off our horses, Lachapelle?' he asked.

  Henri blinked painfully. 'So they cannot hurt other horses?'

  'And so that when they are learning to find their feet, when they flail and thrash and kick out, as they inevitably will, they do not accidentally hurt themselves.' He placed his hands on the table. 'Henri, if you do this, you will hurt yourself more deeply than you can know.'

  'With respect, sir, I don't believe I can be happy here.'

  'Happiness? You think that me cutting you loose will give you happiness?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'There is no happiness in this world other than what is achieved by love of one's work. This is your world, Henri. A fool could see it. You cannot cut a man out of his world and expect him to be happy.'

  'With respect, sir, I have made up my mind. I would like to be released.'

  It had felt good to be so determined, to see his future so clearly. The only moment he had come close to changing his mind was when he walked down the covered yard to see Gerontius for the last time. The great horse whinnied as he approached, nudged his pockets, then rested his head on Henri's shoulder as Henri tickled his nose. Henri blinked back tears. He had never had to let go of anyone he loved before; until Florence he had never loved anyone. Just this magnificent, gentle horse.

  He closed his eyes, breathing in the familiar scent of the animal's warm skin, feeling the velvet softness of his nostrils, the immutable sense of grace that came from being in his presence. And then, gritting his teeth and hoisting his bag over his shoulder, Henri Lachapelle turned and walked towards the gates of L'Ecole du Cavalerie.

  The first months in England had been tolerable, their trials masked by the quiet satisfaction he felt as a newly married man. Florence glowed under his attention; a million times a day he saw in her little things that enabled him to justify his decision. Her family, while obviously a little wary of the young Frenchman who had whisked their daughter off her feet, were polite. Not as antagonistic as his own father would have been, no matter whom he had brought home. Cleverly, Florence had asked him to wear his uniform when he first met them; the war still fresh in their memories, her parents' generation found it hard to see anything but good in a man in uniform. 'You're not thinking of settling in France, though?' her father had confirmed, several times. 'Florence is a family girl. She wouldn't do well so far from home.'

  'My home is here,' Henri said, believing it. And Florence, seated beside him, had flushed with pleasure.

  He had taken lodgings and, a matter of weeks after he arrived in England, they had married in Marylebone Register Office, so swiftly that for several months afterwards the neighbours cast suspicious looks at Florence's waistline whenever they passed. He set out to find work, travelled across London and to the suburbs, trying for employment as a riding instructor, but riding for pleasure was still very much the preserve of the wealthy, and on the few occasions he was taken on trial, his poor grasp of the language, impenetrable accent and formal opinions on riding won him few admirers. In turn, he found the English attitude to horses incomprehensible, their ill-thought out approach to equestrianism, based on the hunting field, sloppy, inexact and, worse, unsympathetic. They seemed to care more about dominating the horse than working with it or encouraging it to show itself off to its full advantage.

  He found England a disappointment. The food was worse than he had received in the cavalry. The people seemed happy to eat everything from tins; there were few markets at which you could buy cheap, fresh food, the bread was spongy and tasteless, the meat ground to a brown gruel and re-formed into dishes with peculiar names: faggots, rissoles, shepherd's pie. On a few occasions he brought home fresh food and prepared it himself: tomato salad, fish enlivened with the few dried herbs he could find. But Florence's parents would widen their eyes over the dinner-table, as if he had done something subversive. 'Bit sharp for me,' her mother would remark, 'but thank you, Henry. Very kind of you to try.'

  'Not my cup of tea, I'm afraid,' her father would say, pushing his plate to the centre of the tablecloth.

  He felt stifled by the forbidding grey skyline, and would return to the narrow house in Clerkenwell to reveal that he had been 'let go' again, often without being paid what he was owed. It was impossible to argue in a language he did not yet understand. Family meals were tense. Florence's father, Martin, would ask over tea whether he had found another job yet, and when the answer was no, whether he might think about improving his English a little so that he could get a 'proper' one. One that apparently involved sitting behind a desk.

  Florence would clasp his hand under the ta
ble. 'Henri is so very talented, Dad,' she would say. 'I know someone will find a role for him soon.' He became grateful that the language barrier precluded all but the most cursory conversations.

  At night he dreamt of Gerontius. He rode out into the place du Chardonnet, seated in a slow, rocking canter, urging his brave old horse to switch his leading leg here, to flick his feet out in passage there. He danced, pirouetted, rose up on his back in a perfect levade, and saw the world laid out beneath him. And then, inevitably, he woke in the cramped bedroom of Florence's childhood, with its drab brown furniture, view of the high street, and his wife, her hair in rollers, snoring gently beside him.

  A year on, he could no longer disguise the magnitude of his error. The English were worse than Parisians, suspicious when he opened his mouth, the older men muttering disparaging comments about the war that they thought he could not understand. Those who surrounded him had no appetite for learning or for bettering themselves. They seemed to care only about earning money that they would drink on a Friday night with a kind of grim determination. Or they would stay locked in their houses, even when the weather was beautiful, curtains drawn, hypnotised by their new television sets.

  Florence detected his unhappiness and tried to compensate, loving him more, praising him, assuring him that things would improve. He saw only the desperation in her eyes, felt her adoration morph into clinginess, and would announce that the following week he would leave to find work again, even when he knew there was no work to be had. Her attempts to disguise her disappointment merely fuelled his guilt and resentment.

  It was April - almost fifteen months after he had arrived - when he plucked up the courage to write to Varjus. He was not a great communicator, and kept the letter brief:

  My dear friend,

  Would they take me back? It is too hard to live only with gravity.

  He handed it over at the post office feeling terrible guilt but also hope. Florence would understand. She could not want a husband who earned nothing, who could not provide her with a home. She would adapt to France eventually. And if not - here he would feel shame lodging deep within him - would it be so bad if he never returned? Surely she could not be happy as things were. Surely she understood that no man could continue to be so distant from the thing he loved.

  He held the knowledge of that letter winging its way across the continent throughout another interminable supper. It was chicken. Mrs Jacobs had cooked it to a leathery texture and dressed it with some kind of cheese sauce. A small mound of unrecognisable vegetables sat beside it, diced into submission.

  Henri sat in silence, forking pieces diligently into his mouth as Mr Jacobs muttered darkly about 'that Russian bloke' going into space. He seemed to take Mr Gagarin's exploration as a personal affront. 'I don't see what they're doing, sending men up into the sky,' he observed, for the third time. 'It's against all the laws of nature.'

  Mr Jacobs was not a man, Henri had worked out very quickly, who liked change, and was pretty sure now that his daughter marrying a Frenchman fell into the 'unwelcome' category.

  'I think it's exciting,' Florence ventured.

  Henri was surprised: she rarely expressed an opinion that might contradict her father's view.

  'It's romantic,' she added, cutting a piece of chicken neatly. 'I like the thought that someone's up there, amid all the twinkly stars, looking back at us.' She smiled at him, a secret smile. Her mother, he realised, was smiling at both of them.

  'Florence has something to tell you, Henry,' she said, catching his confusion.

  Florence wiped her mouth and put her napkin on her lap. She blushed a little.

  'What?' he said.

  'I was going to keep it secret a bit longer, but I couldn't. I told Mother. We're going to have to set another place at our table.'

  'Why?' said Mr Jacobs, tearing his attention from his newspaper. 'Who's coming?'

  Florence and her mother burst out laughing. 'No one's coming, Father. I'm - I'm in the family way . . .' She took Henri's hand over the tablecloth. 'We're going to have a baby.'

  Well, they certainly did things differently in France, Mrs Jacobs remarked later to her husband, long after the younger couple had retreated to their room. For all the talk of Frenchmen being so sophisticated, she didn't think she'd ever seen a man so shocked in all her life.

  Henri was leaving the flat when he met the postman on the landing. Varjus, true to his nature, had written back within a week. He ripped open the envelope and read the hastily written words, his face impassive.

  Le Grand Dieu is a good man, an understanding man. I think if you approached him with humility, he might allow you this one mistake. Most of all, he knows you are a horseman! I look forward to your return, my friend.

  'Good news, mate?' The postman thrust a folded magazine into number forty-seven's letterbox.

  Henri screwed the note into a ball and thrust it deep into his pocket. 'I'm sorry. I don't speak English,' he said.

  'Two paths', the Grand Dieu had said. Why had he not warned him how quickly they would turn into one?

  He opened the front door to let himself into the narrow hallway. The smell of overcooked cabbage pervaded the air and he closed his eyes briefly in silent dread of whatever food was coming that evening. Then a sound made him stop. In the living room, on the other side of the anaglypta wallpaper, he could hear noisy sobs.

  The kitchen door opened and Florence appeared. She navigated herself along the passageway and reached up to kiss him.

  'What is this?' he said, hoping she would not detect the alcohol on his breath.

  'I've told them that after the baby is born we're going to France,' she said. Her voice was calm, her hands neatly folded in front of her. At the word 'France' another round of noisy sobs ensued.

  Henri looked at his wife, confused.

  She took his hands. 'I've been thinking about it for ages. You've given me everything - everything,' she glanced down at her belly, 'but I know you're not happy here, Henri. And it's too hard on you to expect you to be, with people having such closed minds, and the horse thing being so different over here and all. So, I've told Mother and Father that once we've recovered from the birth, you'll provide for me there. As you can probably tell, Mother hasn't taken it too well.'

  She searched his face. 'Will Le Cadre Noir take you back, darling? I'm sure once I've got the hang of it I could keep a little house for you nearby. I'll learn French. Bring up the baby there. What do you think?'

  Perhaps disconcerted by his lack of a response, she began to play with her cuff. 'I wanted to say we'd go now. But I wasn't sure about going through the birth not knowing how to speak to the doctors . . . and Mother would be beside herself if she wasn't with me. But I've told them we'll go after the baby comes. I hope I did the right thing . . . Henri?'

  This brave, beautiful Englishwoman. Henri was moved beyond words. He didn't deserve her. She had no idea how close he had come . . . He stepped forwards and buried his face in her hair. 'Thank you,' he whispered. 'You don't know what this means. I will make sure we have a better future . . . for us and our baby.'

  'I know you will,' she said softly. 'I want you to fly again, Henri.'

  He heard the baby crying even before he reached the little house, a thin wail echoing over the quiet street. Even before he opened the door to their room he knew what he would find.

  She was bent over the crib, uttering soothing noises, her hand fluttering vainly over the child. At Henri's approach, she turned. She was pale and her eyes spoke of long anxious hours.

  'How long has she been crying?'

  'Not long. Really.' She straightened up, stepping aside. 'Just since Mother went out.'

  'Then why . . . ?'

  'You know I'm afraid to carry her when you're not here. My hands aren't working again. I dropped a cup this afternoon and--'

  He gritted his teeth. 'Cherie, there is nothing wrong with your hands. The doctor said so. You just need confidence.'

  He plucked Simone from her
cot, deftly holding the tiny child close to his chest, and she quieted immediately. Her little mouth opened and closed near his shirt, seeking milk. Florence sat on the chair in the corner, holding out her arms to receive her, closing them around her daughter only when she was sure she had been safely delivered into her embrace.

  While she fed the baby, Henri removed his boots, placing them neatly by the door. He took off his jacket and put the kettle on the stove. He had finally found a job on the railways. It was not so bad. Nothing was so bad, now that he knew it would be temporary. Neither of them spoke, the silence of the room broken only by the baby's greedy sucking and an occasional car passing outside.

  'Have you been out today?'

  'I meant to . . . but I told you, I was afraid to carry her.'

  'Your parents bought us a pram. You could have put her in it.'

  'I'm sorry.'

  'Don't say sorry.'

  'But I am . . . Henri . . .'

  You don't have to be. If you would just be less complicated about everything. If you would be less anxious about the child, drop these ridiculous complaints about hands that supposedly won't work any more, the imagined dizziness.

  'Nerves', the doctor had called it when, a matter of weeks after Simone was born, Florence had begun to complain that her body wasn't working as it should. Sometimes it was like this with new mothers, he had confided to Henri and her mother, as they stood in the narrow corridor after he had examined her. They saw terrors, dangers that weren't there. They might even hallucinate.

  'At least she's bonded with the child,' he observed. 'She and Baby should stay with Granny for a while. Just until she has become a little more . . . comfortable with motherhood.' What could Henri have said? He had nodded his acquiescence, marvelling that they could not see how every atom of him was straining towards the Channel.

  Florence was crying again. He watched her try to wipe the tell-tale teardrops off Simone's cotton gown, her head bowed, and felt a suffocating weight drape itself over him. How much longer? he wanted to yell at her. He thought of Gerontius, perhaps even now waiting for him, his head bowed over the stable door.