Stars Don't Cry (The Silver Bridle Book 2) Page 7

  “Do horses fall more naturally one way than the other?”

  “Don’t you ever give up? All horses are one-sided, you will find that out for yourself eventually. Usually it stems from their breaking, people tend to lunge them more the way they go best. But if you think about it, they are usually handled from one side, led and mounted, girthed and bridled, and all the time the horse has its head bent towards the handler, stretching the muscles on the opposite side, using them, making them more elastic. One sidedness is a physical thing, muscular, nothing to do with disobedience.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you?” The voice was sceptical.

  “Yes, I do. You explained it perfectly. It’s only logical.”

  He fed the brown horse oats, walked it round again. “If you’ve grasped that fact, Grace Darling, you’ll have done more than the majority of riders. If you bother to notice, you’ll see them all the time, trying to cure one-sidedness by force, dragging the horse by the mouth, tightening the side-reins…”

  “No wonder your horses love you.” It was a spontaneous compliment, genuine.

  He looked round at me in surprise, arrested in the strapping of a foreleg. For a fleeting moment he was Valentino again, totally devastating, but just as swiftly the moment had passed. He resumed strapping the foreleg. He stood up and passed the rein over the brown mane streaked with white hairs. I watched as the brown horse sank to one knee, powerless to resist. He rolled on to his side in the sand. One felt it was against his will but there was nothing he could do about it.

  On the way back to the stables, the brown horse walked between us.

  “How will you get him to fall at the gallop with a rider in the saddle?” I asked.

  “He won’t fall at the gallop. I don’t allow it. Eventually I shall get him to fall from a canter and they will undercrank the camera to speed up the action. After a few more sessions he should begin to fall to the rein aid alone. Some horses never reach that point and if they don’t you know they will never make it. You can’t force it, they have to fall willingly. When he falls to the rein aid I’ll get on top, we’ll start falling from a walk, and work up to canter. It’s surprisingly easy from canter because it’s three-time, you’ve got a leading leg and you can put the horse in the right position.”

  “But in front of the camera, he’ll be falling on hard ground.”

  “No horse of mine falls on hard ground. I get the place prepared beforehand. I know where the camera is. I know exactly where he has to fall.”

  I looked at the brown horse with the white hairs in his mane and I wondered how many times he would fall for the camera. Hundreds? Thousands? Before one day, for one of a million reasons, he wouldn’t do it any more. “It all seems so… unnecessary.”

  “Unnecessary it may be, but as long as film people want horses to fall for entertainment, somebody has to make sure they can do it without hurting themselves.” We stopped outside a stable door. “Don’t tell me you’re getting soft, Grace Darling. Starting to consider the horses.”

  It was a barb, and typical of Anthony, but perhaps it was one I deserved. I was no longer the same person who had ridden The Raven at the film test. Already Moat Farm had changed all that. I stroked the brown horse’s face. “I’m getting to know them I suppose. And once you do… when you know what they’re like… it’s not very easy to explain, but there’s something about horses… the way they are, that catches your heart.”

  “In that case, perhaps I should introduce you to the mare who was once the best faller in the business.” He opened the half-door.

  I looked at the bay mare with the gentle eyes and the satin coat, and at the hugely swollen stomach which seemed too big for her slender black legs to carry. “But I know this mare, I feed her every morning. She’s in foal.”

  “It seemed a good idea. The lameness won’t go away, but it isn’t acute.”

  “So she was your famous faller. Will she foal whilst I’m here? Will I see the foal?”

  “You can attend the happy event if you want to. She’s due any time. That’s why she’s in the foaling box.”

  “I think I would rather not. I would probably faint.” I looked around the foaling box, expecting to see something, I was not sure what.

  “There’s nothing to see. It isn’t exactly a labour ward. It’s just bigger than the other boxes, there’s more room, and less risk of her getting cast.”

  “Cast?”

  “Wedged with her legs folded against the wall. Horses do get themselves in that position sometimes when they can’t roll over. Then they start to panic because they can’t move.”

  I went into the stable, up to the mare. She rubbed her face against my shirt. She was very beautiful. “When her foal is old enough to train, will it be a faller?”

  Anthony came into the box, the brown horse stood outside with the rein on the ground, as it was trained to do. “If it’s a colt, I will try it. If it’s a filly, I’m not so sure. I don’t know if it’s a good idea to use a mare as a faller, I don’t know that they’re tough enough.”

  I put my arms around the mare’s satin neck. “Then I hope she has a filly.”

  “You are getting soft!”

  “I know what you’re thinking. Who am I to criticize? I’m only an actress! Worse, I’m the stupid bitch who only cared about getting the part, who didn’t know the first thing about riding, who lamed The Raven for five weeks. I realize I shall never live that down!”

  Anthony did not deny it. He did not even look at me. He put his hands in the pockets of his breeches and he leaned against the wall of the foaling box. He stared through the open door. It seemed impossible to reach him, but it was the perfect opportunity to say what I had been thinking.

  “Hender Copper’s got a faller.”

  The texture of the silence suddenly changed. Now it was terrible. Ominous. But I had begun and there was nothing to it but to continue.

  “You do know about Angel and Hender. You can’t go on ignoring it. Sooner or later you are going to have to do something about it!”

  “And sooner or later, you are going to have to keep your nose out of things that don’t concern you!”

  “Angel concerns me!” I cried. “Don’t ask me why because I won’t have an answer, but somehow she does concern me!”

  “And you think she doesn’t concern me?”

  I sighed. “I don’t think anything concerns you, apart from your horses.”

  “You are very good at dishing out unwanted advice,” Anthony said in a thin voice.

  “You do need a faller,” I said.

  Now he looked at me and the eyes were pure Valentino. “Grace Darling, have you always been so bloody infuriating?”

  I had to look away. “I suppose so. Just as you have always been so perfectly hateful.”

  He moved across the straw. I closed my eyes. I did not want him to come near me.

  “Do you really hate me?”

  What could I say that would not be a lie? “I’m trying,” I said.

  He lifted a hand to my face. I must have flinched because with the back of it he rubbed my cheek, as gently, as soothingly as if I was one of his horses.

  “Keep hating me, Grace Darling,” he said. “Somehow I think it would be better for everyone.”

  “He will never agree,” Angel said.

  “He might.”

  “You mean you might have actually mentioned it?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “And what was his reaction? What did he say?”

  I moved the potatoes, boiling furiously, to a cooler spot on the Aga hotplates. “Very little actually.”

  “I bet he did!” Angel paced the kitchen looking fraught.

  “But he didn’t dismiss the idea! He didn’t refuse! Listen Angel, he does know, so I wasn’t giving away any great secret. Anthony is no fool. And it makes perfect sense because you would all benefit. You would have Hender who would be a great help in th
e yard, nobody can deny he’s a great worker – you only have to look at the work he put in on the hansom cab to see that; Anthony would have a faller and some more driving horses, and Hender would benefit from Anthony’s skill and from not having to rent a yard; but the greatest advantage would be that you would all be working for the same team – where is the problem?”

  “Anthony is the problem,” Angel said darkly.

  We both fell silent, thinking about Anthony. I put a frying pan on the Aga and put into it a little oil and butter. I sprinkled the pork chops with pepper and lemon juice.

  “Anthony would be the greatest beneficiary,” I said.

  “But how do we get him to see that? What is the next step?”

  “We all sit down and discuss it. We shall invite Hender to supper.”

  “Invite Hender to supper!” Angel stopped pacing and looked aghast. “Anthony will eat him alive!”

  The oil and butter began to sizzle. I put the chops into the pan. “No he won’t. In any case there is more to Hender than you give him credit for. Do it, Angel. Go and see Hender and sell him the idea. Ask him for supper. It may not work, it could be a disaster, but at least you will know, Angel. It’s worth a try!”

  Angel flopped down into a chair. “Yes,” she conceded. “It is worth a try.”

  “I don’t suppose Anthony has any attachments himself?” I tried to keep my voice casual.

  “Attachments?”

  “I wondered where he goes to, at nights.” I kept my back to her. Turned the chops.

  “At nights?” Angel’s voice sounded furtive.

  “I’ve seen him go into the woods from my bedroom window… a few times – accidentally, of course.”

  “Of course.” Angel was playing for time. She must know where he went.

  “I just thought, if he did have someone, it would make it easier to understand your relationship with Hender.” It sounded rather unlikely, even to my own ears.

  “I don’t know where he goes. Perhaps to the Hare and Hounds for a few drinks.”

  “With his own bottle?”

  “Look, if you want to know anything about Anthony, you had better ask him yourself.” Angel now turned defensive. “Anyway, why do you want to know? I thought you weren’t interested.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Hrmmm.” The tone was disparaging. “Because of Richard?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ha!”

  I was not about to be drawn on the subject of Richard. I was waiting for him to ring. I needed his help. Both Anthony and Angel regarded my anxiety about the non-arrival of my script as premature, but it was week three at Moat Farm and by now I was really worried. I suspected that something had gone wrong. Earlier in the day I had tried to telephone Ziggy again, and this time, instead of getting the engaged tone, all I had heard was a continuous burring sound. On application to the Operator I had been told that the number had been withdrawn from service. When I had asked what that meant, I had been referred to Directory Enquiries. After a goodly interval, Directory Enquiries had informed me that the number I had been trying to dial had been changed and was now listed as ex-directory. I had explained that as the Café Marengo was a Soho café this was impossible. Directory Enquiries had snapped that it was not only possible but fact. Bewildered and apprehensive, I had replaced the telephone receiver.

  I did not know what was happening at the Café Marengo but I did not like the sound of it. Panic had begun to stir. I needed to find Ziggy, to talk to him urgently. Why had he not tried to contact me? Should I ring Richard and beg him to take me to London? I had decided to wait one more day and if he had not telephoned by then, I would take the initiative. I did not to do it. Richard already felt himself used and, however cleverly I phrased it, I would be compromised. There would be no pulling the wool over his eyes. But I had to get to London, and if I had to beg, then I would beg. I was resigned to that.

  “What’s this?”

  Anthony now appeared at the kitchen door. He looked astonished.

  “What is what?” Thinking about my script and Richard and the mystery of the Café Marengo had made me feel stressed. There was also the problem of Angel and Hender. Then there was Anthony, who sometimes looked like Valentino, who was capable of playing cat and mouse and who could have me thrown off the set and out of the television serial if I so much as put a toe out of line. On top of all this, I was sore and exhausted from the increased riding lessons and worried that I would not be good enough to please Tom Silver. It was a bad moment.

  “You’re cooking!”

  “You knew I was going to cook,” I said crossly. “I told you last night. Why else would I have lit the Aga?”

  Anthony looked at me. His eyes widened.

  “You’ve washed the floor!”

  “It was disgustingly filthy.”

  “There are plates on the dresser!”

  There were. All my frustrations had been vented in an orgy of washing, cleaning, scrubbing and tidying. The bricks on the floor were no longer a uniform mud-colour, but revealed in shades ranging from cream to rose. Spiders’ webs and the dusty husks of their victims had been banished from the beams overhead. The converted oil lamp gleamed. The Aga threw out a companionable warmth. Old, unmatched plates pleased the eye on the dresser, and the table was laid for supper with salad and cheese and French bread. The kitchen was a different place.

  “What have you done with all my letters, my bills?”

  “They are in the office.”

  “You haven’t started to clear out the office!”

  “No.”

  “Thank God for that!”

  I had hardly expected him to be grateful. He now picked up the bottle of wine. “Anjou Blanc. Three pounds ninety-nine pence. I bet it’s absolutely terrible.”

  “It isn’t. I’ve tasted it.”

  “Have you?”

  “I used half a glass for the gravy.”

  “Is there no end to your talents, Grace Darling?”

  I snatched the potatoes off the hotplate and took them to the stone sink to drain. I was in no mood for badinage. There were to be no cat and mouse games between Anthony and myself. Patrick Spencer had warned me about that.

  “As long as I am here, I shall do the cooking,” I told him. “My stomach won’t take any more meals on wheels, and if you don’t like the idea, I suggest you take yourself off to eat at the Hare and Hounds!”

  It was spoken in temper and a chancy thing to say to someone like Anthony, but he took it in surprisingly good part. He unscrewed the cap of the wine bottle, poured out three glasses, and handed one to me.

  “I’ve only been inside the Hare and Hounds once,” he said, “and that was once too often. I certainly shan’t go tonight and miss this.”

  So much for Angel’s explanation for his nocturnal wanderings. I turned to give her a meaningful look, but she had suddenly become inexplicably interested in the contents of the salad bowl.

  “No, no, you must remember to sit – how can you possibly use your seat to drive him forward if you keep rising to the trot? Try again. Take him across the diagonal, towards the corner, now sit down hard! Left rein, right leg behind the girth; sit and push – Oh, well done! I think you’ve mastered it! By the way,” Angel said, “I won’t be able to give you your lunge lesson tomorrow morning, I’m seeing Hender. I’m going to try and sell him our idea.”

  Tearing my eyes from between the roan horse’s ears, where I was supposedly training myself to look, I looked at Angel instead. Despite the blistering rays of a sun blazing fiercely out of a cloudless sky; heat that made the roan horse apathetic and caused the shirt to stick to my back, she still wore jeans and chaps. Her jodhpur boots were filmed with dust. But as a concession to the weather, the extravagant hair was twisted up and skewered on the top of her head with the pencil that should have been beside the tack room telephone.

  “And ask him for supper?”

  “Tomorrow night, I thought.”

  “Good.” Sensing my
inattention the roan dropped back into trot and from trot to walk. Although it was against the rules to allow the horse to make decisions on his own account, I let it happen, acknowledging by non-intervention that it was too hot for transitions.

  Tomorrow looked as though it was going to be make or break day. Tomorrow we would know the outcome of the meeting between Hender and Anthony. Tomorrow I had made up my mind to ring Richard if he had not rung me before then. I was desperate to talk to Ziggy, to find out if my part in the television serial was still safe. If something had gone wrong the consequences would be too terrible to contemplate. My career would be over before it had begun. I pushed it out of my mind. It was important to concentrate on my riding. There was not a lot of time left.

  The roan horse with the white stockings stopped by the gate, hoping the lesson was over, longing if not for the cool of a stable, for the blessing of a shady tree. I closed my legs on his sides. Reluctantly, he walked on.

  “Angel, how am I doing? There is such a lot to learn. I’m terrified I’m not going to be good enough.”

  “You don’t have to be all that good, not to start with, not to play a disabled person,” she said. ‘After all, she is in a wheelchair.’

  “In a wheelchair?” I stopped the roan horse. I stared at her. “I’m playing a disabled person in a wheelchair?”

  Angel now looked horrified. “Grace, you did know! They have told you she’s disabled?”

  “But I had no idea! Nobody has told me anything! If she’s in a wheelchair and disabled, how can she possibly ride?”

  Angel looked at me in confusion. “Look, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything. Maybe she isn’t so disabled, but from what I’d heard it was part of the story – you know, not being able to join in, do anything, until the horse came along.”