Riders (9 page)

He nodded. “When I was six I was in the hospital for eighteen months, learning to walk again. It left me with a wasted leg.”

“And a raging desire to prove yourself, presumably,” said Granny Maxwell dryly. “And your father was a gypsy?”

Juke nodded.

“My mother’s family tried to resettle him, but he missed the wandering life and the horses. He was a genius with horses. So he pushed off soon after I came out of the hospital.”

“And your mother committed suicide. You blamed yourself for that, I suppose?”

“I think she was let down by some chap who she took up with after my father left, but I didn’t know that at the time.”

“What happened after she died?”

“The school where I went free as a day boy made me board. I hated it, so I ran away and joined a group of gypsies. They taught me all I know, to poach and to look after horses and train dogs. There was an old grandmother there; she taught me about all the medicines she’d learnt from her great-grandmother.”

He took Granny Maxwell’s arm and guided her down some stone steps to a pond filled with irises and marsh marigolds. She caught her breath at the pain.

“An infusion of the leaves of Traveler’s Joy works wonders for rheumatism,” he said. “I’ll make you some up to try, or if you prefer, you can carry the skin of a dead frog against your skin.”

Granny Maxwell watched the dogs lapping out of the pond. The mongrel got into the water, drinking, paddling, and making a lot of splashing.

“I always feel very badly about the gypsies,” she sighed. “It’s one of the great unnecessary tragedies of progress. They should never have been forced into compounds to settle and sell scrap metal. But it’s always the same story today of harassment from the police and from farmers. Before the war they always used to park in our fields for the seasonal piecework. My father often kept them employed from March until Christmas.

“I miss the sight of their fires at twilight, with that marvelous smell of rabbit stew, and the gaudy washing on the line, and the shaggy horses and silent, lean dogs. They knew a thing or two, those dogs.”

Jake didn’t say anything, but felt an emotion, almost love, stronger than he had ever felt for another human being.

“How long were you with the gypsies?”

“Three years. Then I was picked up by the police and put in an orphanage.”

“Can’t have been much fun.”

“It was better than prep school. The kids were less vicious. They even accused me of having a posh accent.”

They walked back across the burnt lawn.

“We need rain badly. And what about this horse Tory appears to have bought?”

When he spoke about Africa, his face took on a tinge of color.

“She’s just the best horse I’ve ever ridden; she’s got so much potential and such a lovely nature.”

“Are you sure you don’t love her more than Tory?”

Jake thought for a minute, frowning, then he said: “I’m not sure, but if I take care of Tory as well as I look after Africa she won’t do too badly. Anyway, she couldn’t be worse off than she is at the moment with that bitch of a mother. She’ll have a nervous breakdown if she has to go to many more of those smart parties. It’s like putting a carthorse in a hack class, then beating it if it doesn’t win.”

“And I gather Molly has a new boyfriend, some colonel?”

“He’s a jerk; they don’t want Tory.”

“Why are they so reluctant to let her go, then?”

“Molly likes something to sharpen her claws on. Tory’s her cat-scratching board.”

She bent down to pull a bit of groundsel, then asked Jake to uproot a thread of bindweed that was toppling a lupin.

“It’s hell getting old. I can only prune sitting down now. And what’s in it for you?” she asked.

“I couldn’t marry her if she weren’t rich. I’ve got to get started somehow. And I think Tory and I could make each other happy. Neither of us has ever really had a home before.”

That was the nearest he was going to get to placating her.

“Aren’t you banking too much on that horse being a winner? She might break a leg tomorrow.”

“I’ll get more horses. This is only the beginning. To make it work as a show jumper, you’ve got to have at least half a dozen top horses and novices coming on all the time. The gypsies taught me how to recognize a good horse, and I can ride them, and I’ve got patience.”

“Let’s go and watch the three-thirty,” said Granny Maxwell.

Mal le Maison was second, Whirlwind Courtship nowhere. That’s torn it, thought Jake. At that moment, Tory came in with a tray.

“Are you ready for tea yet, Granny?”

“Put the tray down on this table in front of me, thank you, and sit down. I have something to say to you both.”

For a minute she looked at them both with speculative eyes.

“I’m not going to give you any money. Young people should get along by themselves. Tory has a considerable income and you’ll soon save enough to buy and sell a few horses.”

Jake’s face was expressionless. That was that. His hopes crashed.

“I’ve no intention of breaking the trust,” Granny Maxwell went on, picking up the blond peke and rolling it onto its back, “until I see if you’re capable of making Tory happy. In three years’ time, she’ll get the money anyway. However…”

Jake stiffened, fighting back hope, as with maddening deliberation Granny Maxwell poured tea into three cups, and went into a long “would anyone like milk, sugar, or lemon” routine, and then handed out plates, and asked whether anyone would like a sandwich.

“However,” she repeated, “Mr. Binlock is retiring to a cottage in the middle of June, which means the Mill House at Withrington—that’s about twenty miles north of here—will be empty. You can have that.”

Tory turned pale. “But Granny, it’s got stables and fields,” she stammered.

“Exactly, but it’s tumbledown and very damp. I hope you haven’t got a weak chest,” she added to Jake, “but it’s yours if you want it.”

“Oh, Granny, darling,” said Tory, crossing the room and flinging her arms round her grandmother.

“Don’t smother me, child, and there’s no need to cry. And as you don’t appear to have any transport, I’ll buy you a decent horse box for a wedding present.”

Jake shook his head. “I can’t believe it,” he said.

“There’s one condition,” Granny Maxwell went on with a cackle of laughter. “That the first time you appear at Wembley, you buy me a seat in the front row. I’m a bored old woman. In time, if you do well, I might buy a couple of horses and let you ride them for me.”

“If you really are going to buy us a horse box,” said Jake, “I’d better learn to drive properly and take a test.”

S
ix long months after she arrived in London in 1972, Helen Macaulay met Rupert Campbell-Black. Born in Florida, the eldest daughter of a successful dentist, Helen was considered the brilliant child of the family. Her mother, a passionate Anglophile and the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, was constantly reminding people of her English ancestry. In fact, a distant connection had come over, if not on the
Mayflower,
perhaps by the next boat. Mrs. Macaulay glossed over this fact and from an early age encouraged the young Helen to read English novels and poetry and admire all things English. Later, Helen majored in English Literature at the University of Tampa, where she was confidently expected to get a brilliant degree.

Deeply romantic on the one hand, Helen was also repressed by the rigid respectability of her family. The only proof that her parents had ever copulated at all were the four Macaulay daughters. Helen had never heard her mother and father row, or seen either of them naked. Her mother, who always insisted on women doctors, never mentioned sex, except to imply that it was degrading and wicked. Neither of her parents ever told her she was beautiful. Work to keep sin at bay, feel guilty if you slack, was the Macaulay motto.

Until she was nineteen, Helen never gave her parents a moment’s trouble. She worked at school, helped her mother in the house, never had acne or gained weight, and never answered back. At Tampa, at the beginning of the seventies, however, she came under the influence of the women’s movement—anathema to her mother, who believed a woman’s place was in the home. Her mother did, however, support the feminists’ view that a woman should never allow herself to be treated as a sex object, nor be admired for her body rather than her mind.

To her parents’ horror, Helen started getting caught up in student protest movements, demonstrating against the Vietnam war and joining civil rights marches. Even worse, she came home on vacation and said disparaging things about Richard Nixon. But far worse was to come. During her third year, Helen flunked out with a nervous breakdown, pregnant by her English professor, Harold Mountjoy.

Heavily married, but accustomed to the easy conquest of female students, Harold Mountjoy was quite unprepared for the torrent of emotion he unleashed in Helen Macaulay. It was Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester, Charlotte Brontë and her professor all over again. Except that Helen was a beauty. Only a tremendous earnestness and dedication to study had kept her on the straight and narrow so long at Tampa. On campus she was known as the fair Miss Frigidaire. Harold Mountjoy set about defrosting her. Seeing her huge hazel eyes fixed on him, like amber traffic lights, during lectures he should have read caution. Instead, one day after class, he kept her back to answer a complicated question on Browning’s “Paracelsus.”

Discussing ambition in life, Harold had lightly quoted: “ ‘I am he that aspired to
know,
and thou?’ ” To which Helen had instantly, almost despairingly, quoted back: “ ‘I would
love
infinitely, and be loved!’ ”

Harold Mountjoy realized he was on to a good thing and asked her for a drink. Secret meetings followed; self-conscious letters weighed down by literary allusions were exchanged, and finally Helen’s virginity was lost in a motel twenty-five miles from the campus, followed by fearful guilt, followed by more motels and more guilt. Under Harold’s radical guidance, Helen embraced radical causes and on vacation shocked her parents even more.

Finally, towards the end of the summer term, Helen fainted in class. Her roommate, who, despite Helen’s attempts at secrecy, had regularly been reading her diary, went to the head of the faculty. He, in turn, was highly delighted, because for years he had been looking for an excuse to dump Harold Mountjoy, whom he regarded as not only immoral but, far worse, intellectually suspect. Helen’s parents were summoned. Appalled, they removed her from college. Her father, being a dentist, had the medical contacts to organize a discreet abortion. Helen and Harold were forbidden to see one another again. Harold, clinging to his job, terrified his wife would find out, complied with the request. This was the last straw for Helen. Losing her virginity had meant total commitment. She had expected Harold to tell her to keep the baby and to divorce his wife.

Desperately worried about her, her parents, who were kindly if rigid people, packed her off to England in the hope that this other great imagined love of her life would distract her. She was to stay for at least a year. Helen rang Harold Mountjoy in despair. He urged her to go. They would both write. In time they would meet again. There was a possibility he’d get over to England in August. At last Helen agreed.

The head of the faculty wrote to his London publishers, giving Helen an excellent reference and praising her diligence, and they agreed to give her a job, reading manuscripts, writing blurbs, and copyediting. He also fixed her up with digs with a female author in Hampstead.

So Helen pieced her broken heart together and came to England in October, unable to suppress a feeling of excitement that she would soon be able to visit St. Paul’s, where John Donne had preached, and Wimpole Street, where Robert Browning had courted Elizabeth Barrett. She might even get up to the Lakes to see Wordsworth’s cottage, or Haworth, home of the Brontës.

Sadly, England proved a disappointment. Accustomed to year-round Florida sunshine, Helen arrived at the beginning of the worst winter for years. She couldn’t believe how cold it was.

By day she froze in her publishing house, by night she froze at her digs, which were awful. The female author was an ancient lesbian who watched her every move. Upstairs was a lecherous lodger who made eyes at her at mealtimes and kept coming into her room on trumped-up excuses. The place was filthy and reeked of a tomcat, which her landlady refused to castrate. The landlady also used the same dishcloth to wash up the cat’s plates and the humans’ plates. The food was awful; they seemed to eat carbohydrates with carbohydrates in England. She found herself eating cookies and candy to keep out the cold, put on ten pounds, and panicked.

At the weekends she froze on sightseeing tours, shivering at Stratford, at the Tower, and on the train down to Hampton Court, and in numerous art galleries.

The English men were a bitter disappointment, too. None of them looked like Darcy, or Rochester, or Heathcliff, or Burgo Fitzgerald, or Sebastian Flyte. None of them washed their hair often enough; she never dared look in their ears in the subway. They also seemed de-sexed by the cold weather. They never gazed or whistled at her in the street. Anyway, Helen was not the sort of girl who would have picked up men. As the days passed, she grew more and more lonely.

Harold Mountjoy was another disappointment. After one letter: “Darling girl, forgive a scribbled note, but you are too precious to have brief letters. It would take a month to tell you all I feel about you, and I don’t have the time,” he didn’t write at Christmas or remember her birthday or even Valentine’s Day.

Finally, at the beginning of March, Helen decided she could bear her digs no longer. On the same day that her landlady used a cat-food-encrusted spoon to stir the beef stew with, and the tomcat invaded her room for the hundredth time and sprayed on her typewriter cover, she moved into Regina House, an all-female hostel in Hammersmith, which catered exclusively for visiting academics, and was at least clean and warm.

Nor was her job in publishing very exciting. The initial bliss of being paid to read all day soon palled because of the almost universal awfulness of the manuscripts submitted. To begin with, Helen wrote the authors polite letters of rejection, whereupon they all wrote back, sending her other unpublished works and pestering her to publish them; so finally she resorted, like everyone else, to rejection slips.

Her two bosses took very extended lunch hours and spent long weekends at their houses in the country. One of the director’s sons, having ignored her in the office, asked her out to dinner one evening and lunged so ferociously in the car going home that Helen was forced to slap his face. From then on he went back to ignoring her.

The only other unmarried man in the office was a science graduate in his late twenties named Nigel, a vegetarian with brushed-forward fawn hair, a straggly beard, a thin neck like a goose, and spectacles. For six months, Helen and he had been stepping round each other, she out of loneliness, and he out of desire. They had long political arguments and grumbled about their capitalist bosses. Nigel introduced her to Orwell and bombarded her with leftist literature.

He was also heavily involved with the anti-fox hunting movement and seemed to spend an exciting resistance life on weekends rescuing foxes and hares from ravening packs of hounds, harassing hunt balls with tear gas, and descending by helicopter into the middle of coursing meetings. He was constantly on the telephone to various cronies named Paul and Dave, arranging dead-of-night rendezvous to unblock earths. Often he came in on Monday with a black eye or bandaged wrist, after scuffles with hunt supporters.

One Friday, towards the end of March, he asked Helen out to lunch. He was wearing a yellow corduroy coat, a black shirt, had clean hair, and looked less unattractive than usual. Inevitably, the conversation got around to blood sports.

“They think we’re all lefties or students on the dole living in towns,” he said, whipping off his spectacles. “But we come from all walks of life. You see, the fox,” he went on in his flat Northern accent, “beautiful, dirty, hard-pressed with so many people after him, hounds, foot-followers, riders, horses, terriers, he needs us on his side to tip the balance a little.”

Helen’s huge eyes filled with tears. For a moment, in his blaze of conviction, Nigel reminded her of Harold Mountjoy. He speared a piece of stuffed eggplant with his fork. “Why don’t you come out with us tomorrow? We’re driving down to Gloucestershire to rot up the Chalford and Bisley. It’s the last meet of the season. Dave’s got hold of a lot of fireworks; it should be a good day.”

Helen, unable to face another weekend on her own, trailing round galleries or visiting the house of some long-dead writer, said she’d love to.

“And afterwards, we might have dinner in Oxford,” said Nigel. “They’ve opened a good vegetarian restaurant in the High.”

And now she was rattling down the M4 to Gloucestershire and wondering why the hell she’d agreed to come. The dilapidated car was driven by a bearded young zoology graduate named Paul, who had cotton wool in his ears and was already losing his hair. Beside him sat Nigel. Both men were wearing gum boots and khaki combat kit, and khaki, she decided, simply wasn’t Nigel’s color.

Even worse, she had to sit in the back with Paul’s girlfriend, Maureen, who was large, dismissive, and aggressively unglamorous, with dirty dark brown hair, black fingernails, and no makeup on her shiny white face. Between her heavy lace-up boots and the bottom of the khaki trousers were two inches of hairy, unshaven leg. She was also wearing a voluminous white sheepskin coat which stank as it dried off. It was rather like sharing the back with a large unfriendly dog. Even worse, she insisted on referring to Helen as Ellen.

Taking one look at Helen’s rust corduroy trousers tucked into brown shiny boots, dark green cashmere turtleneck jersey, and brown herringbone jacket, she said, “I don’t expect you’ve ever demonstrated against anything in your life, Ellen.”

Helen replied, somewhat frostily, that she’d been on several anti-Vietnam war marches, which launched Maureen, Nigel, and Paul into an unprovoked attack on America and Nixon and Watergate, and how corrupt the Americans were, which irritated Helen to death. It was all right for her to go on about corruption in America, but not at all okay for the Brits to take it for granted.

Sulkily, she buried herself in a piece in the paper speculating as to whether Princess Anne was going to marry Captain Mark Phillips. She’d been following conflicting reports of the romance with shamefaced interest. Mark Phillips was so good-looking, with his neat smooth head, and gleaming dark hair, so much more attractive than Nigel and Paul’s straggly locks. In America, hair like theirs had long gone out of fashion, other than for aging hippies.

They were off the motorway now, driving past hedgerows starry with primroses. Buds were beginning to soften and blur the trees against a clear blue sky. Flocks of pigeons rose like smoke from the newly plowed fields. Helen felt tears stinging her eyes once more.

“Spring returns, but not my friend,” she murmured, thinking sadly of Harold Mountjoy.

“I suppose foxes do have to be kept down somehow,” she said out loud, feeling she ought to contribute something to the discussion. “They do kill chickens.”

“Rubbish,” snapped Maureen. “These days, chickens are safely trapped in battery houses.”

“And Ellen,” said Paul earnestly, “only five percent of foxes ever touch chicken.”

Helen had a sudden vision of the five percent sitting down to coq au vin with knives and forks.

Now Maureen, Paul, and Nigel were slagging someone they referred to as R.C.B.

“Who’s R.C.B.?” asked Helen, and was told it was Rupert Campbell-Black, the one the Antis hated most.

“Male chauvinist pig of the worst kind,” said Maureen.

“Upper-class shit who makes Hitler look like Nestlé’s milk,” said Paul.

“Always rides his horses straight at us,” said Nigel. “Broke Paul’s wrist with his whip last autumn.”

“Remember that hunt ball when he smashed a champagne bottle on the table and threatened you with it, Nige?” said Maureen.