Airs Above the Ground (17 page)

‘They are starting. Are you going in to see the show again?’

I shook my head. ‘I was wondering . . . I suppose this old chap won’t have had any exercise at all since
the fire? Has he even been out to grass? I thought not. You know, a bit of gentle walking would do him a world of good, and a bit of grazing would do even more. I wondered if there was anywhere I could take him? Do you think the verge of the road? Would it be allowed?’

‘Of course,’ said the dwarf, ‘you must do as you wish, you know what is best. But do not take him to the road, there is too much dust. Go the other way.’ The little arm gestured towards the far door of the stable. ‘Behind this field there is a wood, but it is not a big wood just a – what do you say? – a belt of trees, perhaps twenty metres wide. There is a gate, and a path up through the trees, and above them is a little alp; it is common land, and there is good grass there. Nobody will stop you.’

‘Can I leave him grazing there till the pull-down?’

‘Of course. You will not want to hobble him, no? Then if you wait one moment, I will get you the tether and a peg.’

It was easy enough to find the place. At the far side of the field the ground lifted sharply away from the flat land where the tents stood, and the late sun gilded the young fir cones with amber and threw into deep shadow the path that wound upwards through the trees. The wood of the gate was damp, and it creaked a little as I opened it and led the old horse through. We went slowly. He put his off fore to the ground perhaps a little tenderly, but he was by no means lame; at most his gait was stiff, and as we made our way gently up the mossy track between the pines he seemed to go better
with every step. He lifted his head, and his ears pricked with the first sign of interest he had shown. Even I, with my poor human senses, could smell the rich scents of that summer’s evening.

Above the belt of pines lay the alp the dwarf had told me of, a long terrace of flat green, dotted here and there with bushes, and walled on every side by the dark firs. Someone had scythed down the long meadow grass, and the hay lay drying here and there in little piles; where it had been shorn the new grass was fresh and tender green, and full of flowers. The air smelt of honey.

The horse shouldered his way past me into the sunlight, dropped his head and began to graze. I left him to it, and carrying the slack of the tether took the peg into the middle of the meadow and drove it in, then moved a little way off and sat down.

The ground was warm with the day’s sun. Faintly from below the belt of pines came the circus music, muted and made more musical by the distance. I sat listening, enjoying the last of the sunshine, while I contentedly watched the now greedy grazing of the old stallion. The grass was thick with familiar meadow flowers – harebells, thyme, eyebright, and, where the scythe had not yet passed, the foaming white and yellow of parley and buttercups. What was not so familiar was the fluttering, rustling life of the meadow: the whole surface of the field seemed moving with butterflies – meadow browns, blues, sulphurs, fritillaries, and a few of my own Vanessas, the red admirals and tortoiseshells. Their colours flickered among the flowers, each vanishing momentarily as it clung and
folded, then opening to its own bright colour as it fluttered on. Even the green roots of the grass were alive, as countless grasshoppers hopped and fiddled there. The air droned with bees, all zooming past me, I noticed, on the same purposeful track, as if on some apian
Autobahn
of their own. They were all making for a little hut, the size of a small summer-house, chalet-style and beautifully built of pine, and as full of tiny windows as a dovecot. It was, in fact, a bee-house, a sort of collective hive for several swarms, each one with its own tiny bee-door, behind which it made its honey in candle-shaped combs. Amused and interested, I watched the laden bees aiming like bullets, each for its own door, remembering how, even a few years ago, in my own childhood, the English meadows, too, had been alive with wings, and how quiet now was the poisioned countryside.

From beyond the pines, sounding surprisingly remote, the cracked bell of the little church chimed six. There had been an interval of silence from the circus. I supposed it was the clowns’ act, or the performing dogs: now, faintly and sweetly, but quite distinctly in the still clear air, the music started again. I heard the fanfare and recognised it; it was the entrance of Annalisa and her white stallion. The trumpets cut through the air, silver, clear and commanding. Old Piebald stopped grazing and lifted his head with his ears cocked, as one imagines a war-horse might at the smell of battle and the trumpets. Then the music changed, sweet, lilting and golden, as the orchestra stole into the waltz from
Der Rosenkavalier
.

There was some enchantment in hearing it at that distance on that lovely evening in the Alpine meadow. I settled my back comfortably against one of the little soft haycocks, and prepared to enjoy the concert; but then something about the old horse caught my attention, and I sat up to watch.

He had not lowered his head again to graze, but was standing with neck arched and ears pricked, in a sort of mimicry of the white stallion’s proud posture. Then, like the white stallion’s, his head moved, not in an ordinary equine toss, but with a graceful, almost ceremonial movement of conscious beauty. A forefoot lifted, pointed, pawed twice at the soft ground; then slowly, all by himself, bowing his head to his shadow on the turf, he began to dance. He was old and stiff, and he was going short on the off fore, but he moved to the music like a professional.

I sat among the lengthening shadows of the lonely meadow, watching him, somehow infinitely touched. In this way, I supposed, all old circus horses felt when they heard the music of their youth: the bowing, ceremonious dance of the liberty horse was something which, once learned, could never be forgotten.

And then I realised that this was not the movement of a liberty horse. It was not dancing as the palominos had ‘danced’; this was a version, stiff but true, of the severely disciplined figures of the high school: first the Spanish Walk, shouldering-in in a smooth skimming diagonal; then the difficult
pirouette
, bringing him round sharply to present him sideways to his audience; then as I watched he broke into a form of the
piaffe
. It
was a travesty, a sick old horse’s travesty, of the standing trot which the Lipizzaner had performed with such precision and fire, but you could see it was a memory in him, still burning and alive, of the real thing perfectly executed. In the distance the music changed: the Lipizzaner down in the ring would be rising into the
levade
, the first of the ‘airs above the ground’. And in the high Alpine meadow, with only me for audience, old Piebald settled his hind hooves, arched his crest and tail, and, lame forefoot clear of the ground, lifted into and held the same royal and beautiful
levade
.

And this, it seemed, had been enough. He came down to all four feet, shook his head, dropped his muzzle to the grass, and all at once was just an old tired piebald horse pegged out to graze in a green meadow.

This is the attitude in which artists depict the horses on which gods and heroes ride.

Xenophon:
The Art of Horsemanship

‘Tim,’ I said, ‘you’re not proposing to sit through the whole of the second house too, are you?’

‘No, I wasn’t, though I’d have liked to see Annalisa ride again. Why, did you want me?’

‘Yes, and I want you to skip Annalisa too, if you will. I’ve got something to show you, and it’s something you won’t want to miss. No’ – in response to a quick, inquiring look from him – ‘nothing to do with that. Something purely personal. Will you come with me?’

‘Well, of course. Where?’

‘Away up the hill behind the field. I’m not going to tell you anything about it, I want you to see for yourself.’

It was dark now, but the moon was coming up clear of the mountains and the trees. The air was very still, and the bats were out. The horse had moved on a little, grazing quietly.

‘Oh, you’ve got old Piebald here,’ said Timothy.
‘Goodness, he looks a different creature. He’s eating like a horse, as they say.’

‘Exactly like a horse. But –
How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form, in moving, how express and admirable! . . . the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!
’

‘What on earth’s that?’

‘
Hamlet
, with a dash of Noël Coward. Look, come over here, the grass is damp now, but there’s a log; we can sit on that.’

‘What were you going to show me?’

‘You’ll have to wait for it. It’s something that happened, and I hope it’ll happen again. Here, sit down. Listen how clearly you can hear the music.’

‘Mm. That’s the liberty act, isn’t it? There, that’s the end. Now it’ll be the clowns. What is it, Vanessa? You sounded sort of excited.’

‘I am a bit. Wait and see. It may not happen, I – I simply don’t know, and I may have been wrong. I can’t help feeling now that it was all my imagination, but if it wasn’t, perhaps you’ll see it, too.’

It was a beautiful night, the air clear and still. The butterflies had all gone, and the bees were quiet in their bee-house. In the silence I thought I could hear the cry of bats high up above the trees. The swish of the horse’s hoofs through the grass, and the tearing sound of his cropping, were very loud in the still air. The moon rose clear of a low cloud that hugged the hill.

I said softly: ‘Listen, those are the trumpets. Don’t say a word, now. Keep still.’

At first I thought it wasn’t going to happen. The
trumpets shivered the air, distant, silver, brave: the old horse grazed. An owl flew low across the field, silent, ghostly white in the moonlight. The horse lifted his head to watch it. The trumpets called on unheeded.

The waltz from
Der Rosenkavalier
wound its way up through the pines. Beside me on the log Timothy sat obediently still.

The waltz beat on softly; five bars, six bars – and then it happened. The old head lifted, the neck arched, the forefoot went out in that arrogant beautiful movement, and the piebald glided once more into his own private and ceremonious dance. This way and that he went, his hoofs striking the turf softly. The moonlight flooded the meadow, blanching all colours to its own ghostly silver. The pines were very black. As the stallion rose in the last magnificent rear of the
levade
, the moonlight poured over him bleaching his hide so that for perhaps five or six long seconds he reared against the black background, a white horse dappled with shadows, no longer an old broken-down gypsy’s piebald, but a
haute école
stallion, of the oldest line in Europe.

Timothy neither moved nor made a sound until it was over; then we turned and looked at one another.

‘Am I right?’ I asked.

He merely nodded, saying nothing. I had a suspicion that he was as moved as I had been by the sight, and was – boy-like – concerned not to show it. When he spoke, it was in a normal, even casual voice, but I knew I had been right. ‘The poor old chap,’ he said.

‘He’s been good, in his day,’ I said.

‘I’ll say.’ His voice sharpened, as he began to think. ‘But, here, I don’t understand! If the horse was trained, why should they talk of getting rid of him?’

‘He’s old. I had a good look at him: he’s over twenty.’

‘But nobody’s given his age as a reason for putting him down, it’s always been that “he’s no use, he can do nothing, the circus can’t afford to keep a horse who does nothing”. You remember Annalisa said they’d tried him in the liberty routine and he was no use.’

‘If he was a highly trained dressage performer when they got him, he’d take badly to a new routine.’

‘Yes, but if he’s “highly trained”, you’d think they could use him somehow. Or at any rate sell him. He’d fetch good money, even at twenty.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘they don’t know he’s a trained performer.’

He turned to stare at me. In the strong moonlight it was possible to see one another quite clearly.

‘
Don’t know?
’

I said: ‘Well, they can’t know, can they? You’ve just quoted the things they’ve said . . . and tonight, again, I got the impression they thought he was hardly worth my trouble,’ I told him what the dwarf had said.

He sat for a while, frowning down at the grass. ‘Well, where does this get us? We’ll tell them, of course. They’ll hardly—’

‘I’m not sure that we should.’

His head jerked up at that. ‘What d’you mean?’

‘I’ve been thinking,’ I said. ‘This was Franz Wagner’s horse. You remember what Annalisa told us, that he joined the circus ten years ago when it was somewhere
in the north, and he happened to be working there with a dealer in a horse fair, and he brought this horse with him from the other circus, the Czech one. Now, you can’t tell me that if he’d owned a horse trained like this one, and with this sort of talent, he’d have said nothing about it, if there hadn’t been something wrong. Why, if he brings a performing stallion with him (and goes on riding him in private, apparently), does he say nothing, not even cash in on what could be a big asset? Well, it’s certainly quite irrelevant to what Lewis wants to know, but Franz Wagner is part of Lewis’s puzzle picture after all. “Anything that’s out of pattern”, he said, and from all points of view we could bear to know a bit more about old Franzl. If it comes to that, Tim, he changed his name, remember?’

‘So he did. And refused to work an act . . . appear in public.’

I said slowly: ‘What if the horse was really valuable, and he’d actually
stolen
it from the circus he was in before? I’ve a feeling that old Mr Wagner – Annalisa’s grandfather – must have known about it, making him change his name and all that, but I’m pretty sure the others weren’t told . . . Not that it matters now, it all happened a long time ago, and the man’s dead; but if he stole one thing, he may have stolen others, and considering he’s somewhere in Lewis’s “mystery”, it might be worth following it up. If he’d done anything bad enough to lie low for, all these years, you might think that Paul Denver’s connection with him was—’