The Horse Dancer (52 page)

Sarah tried to collect her thoughts, as Thom helped her tack up, and handed her two croissants, which he’d begged from the owner of the lairage. He opened out a small map on which he had marked her best route.

‘It’s sixty, seventy miles from here, headed south-west,’ he said, pointing her along a red road. ‘I’d drive you if I could, but I can’t lose another four hours. It’s beautiful riding weather, though, and these roads are pretty quiet. I can’t see that you’ll have too much trouble. Just take your time, yes?’

She was close, she realised, with a sudden thrill. She could see the name on the map. Compared to the size of France, they were a matter of centimetres away.

‘There’s another lairage just here.’ He had circled a village with a ballpoint. ‘Here’s the phone number, just in case. Now, I’ve rung ahead and they’ll be expecting you. You should be able to get a meal there tonight, but I’d try to grab something beforehand, just in case. And don’t forget they’re expecting a horse by the name of . . .’

‘Diablo Blue,’ she said.

‘Now, will you be okay?’ He was serious, his face shadowed with misgivings.

‘Fine,’ she said. She was pretty sure she would be. She’d made it across the sea, hadn’t she? She was travelling with the finest horse in France and Papa’s blessing.

‘Here’s my number. Will you do me a favour and ring me if you get into trouble? Hell, ring me when you get where you’re headed.’ He placed the folded map in her hand. ‘Just ring me. I’d be glad to know you’re okay.’

She nodded, shoving the piece of paper deep in her pocket.

‘And don’t talk to anyone. Especially not anyone like me. Just – just keep your head down and keep going till you get there.’

She nodded again, a small smile this time.

‘You have the euros we changed up?’ She reached into her rucksack, feeling for the envelope.

Thom sighed. ‘God help me. You’re the strangest hitchhiker I’ve ever met. But good luck to you and that big old horse of yours.’ He hesitated, as if still unsure that he was doing the right thing.

‘I’ll be fine, Thom,’ she insisted. She felt a pang to be leaving; she had felt safe with him. Nothing could happen to her or Boo in his care. She felt brief, unexpected envy of his step-daughter, whose troubles he had insisted on making his own, and added, after a moment, ‘Thanks, though.’

‘Bah,’ Thom said. He stepped forward, holding out his good hand. She took it, feeling a little self-conscious. They both grinned, as if the thought had occurred to them both.

‘It’s been a pleasure travelling with you, young Sarah.’ He waited for her to mount, then walked back towards his lorry. ‘And your old man sounds like a fine fellow,’ he yelled, turning back suddenly. ‘When he finds out you got there, I’ll bet you he’s as pleased as Punch.’

The fields in France were wider than those
en route
to Dover, flat, sprawling expanses with no boundaries in sight. The earth, however, looked as it had in England: a rich, claggy brown, not yet drilled but turned in rough clods that resembled choppy seas. Boo, refreshed, strode out happily on the grass verges, his ears pricked forward, clearly glad to be on solid ground. His breeding meant that his winter coat was barely thicker than his summer one. Thom must have brushed him down while she was sleeping because he was spotless. They moved through a country that was alien, yet not so: the land of Papa’s stories, a language she had heard from her youngest days. Seeing it on billboards, on road signs, she felt a little as if the country was speaking to her. As if it expected her to understand.

She passed through small villages, the streets quiet, civilised, the rows of small houses uniform, in grey stone, but for the odd carefully tended window-box or brightly painted shutters. A man walked past carrying two baguettes and a newspaper tucked under his arm. He nodded at her, as if a girl on a horse was nothing unusual. ‘
Bonjour
,’ he said.

‘
Bonjour
,’ she replied, feeling faint joy as she spoke. It was the first French word she had uttered since she had been there. She stopped at an animal trough in the square, from which Boo took great draughts of water, his ears sliding back and forth comically as he gulped. She dismounted and rested there for half an hour, splashing her face with the cold water, eating her croissants and allowing a mother to approach with two solemn-faced small children so that they could pet him. The woman remarked that Boo was handsome, and Sarah replied, in French, that the Selle Français breed was known for it. She had grown up listening to Papa speak it, but hearing it from her own voice made her feel awkward.

‘Ah,’ the woman said, ‘
comme le Cadre Noir
.’ To hear the name mentioned with familiarity was like a spur. She had spoken of it as others might mention the local sports centre, or Sarah’s estate at home.

She remounted and they continued towards a signpost that pointed her to Tours. She left the other side of the village, past a windmill and over a bridge, and within minutes, was in open countryside again. She passed under motorways, through a vast field of whirring turbines, hearing the
thump, thump, thump
of their vast, elegant rotation like a heartbeat within her. Sarah, her spirits lightening with each mile, began to sing, a children’s song she remembered Papa singing to her as a child. She pushed her scarf down from her face, feeling a growing excitement: ‘
Ah ah, Monsieur Chocolat! Oh, oh, Monsieur Cacao . . .
’ Her voice rang out over the empty, frost-tipped fields. Boo champed at the bit and tossed his head, asking to go faster, and, impatient to arrive, conscious that she was only a matter of hours from her destination, she squeezed him on, the cold air tightening her skin, her body feeding off his energy. Her senses felt sharper, as if she was absorbing this new landscape through every cell. It was just her and her horse, unobserved, free; she felt this freedom like any other horse-borne traveller over a thousand years.

I’m in France, Papa, she told him silently, and it’s beautiful. She pictured the old man in the bed, dreaming of the very roads she was travelling now, thinking with satisfaction of what she was about to do. And perhaps hearing his voice, his instruction, she straightened a little, corrected the precise angle of her lower legs, shortened her reins and began to canter, Boo’s feet placing themselves rhythmically, elegantly along the grass verge in a manner that, had he seen them, might indeed have made the old man dip his head approvingly.

Even as a child she had hated lengthy car journeys. She never remembered the cheerful campsites, the caravans by the sea, the fairgrounds and ice-creams or overjoyed relatives that her siblings later recounted. When asked to recall her childhood journeys Natasha remembered only the endless motorways, the miles between exits punctuated by cries of ‘Are we nearly there?’, her parents bickering in the front seats, the surreptitious kicks and pinches from her sisters, squashed each side of her in the back. She remembered the faint smell of vomit when someone, inevitably, became car sick.

She was almost thirty years older now, but the dread had never been supplanted by the supposed joy of the open road, the excitement of getting to a new destination. While Mac, during the holidays of their marriage, had loved road trips, stopping where the whim took them, driving all night if he had thought it would be fun, she had wished secretly for an itinerary. The uncertainty of not having a meal and a pre-booked bed to count on disconcerted her; and her suburban outlook, as Mac seemed to see it, made her feel both inadequate and guilty for spoiling his fun. In the last couple of years they had settled – to the satisfaction of neither – on package holidays. She would sit by the pool, reading, trying to disguise the work papers she had smuggled with her, while he paced around the hotel complex, like someone trying to remember where he had left something, and ended up drinking with his new friends at the bar.

Natasha’s credit card had been used, the previous evening, at a French motorway service station. The difficulty, the credit-card operator had advised, was that the transaction had come up simply as ‘La Bonne Route, Paris’, a description that encompassed seven such places across northern France.

‘Well, I think we should head for the horse place,’ Mac had said on the ferry the previous night. They had managed to get the car on to a late-evening crossing. She sat in near-silence, staring out of the glazed window at the dark, churning waters below, and tried to reconcile what she had heard from the credit-card company with what she had believed possible. How could Sarah have crossed the Channel with a horse? How had she managed to get to France? None of it made any sense.

‘What if it’s not her?’ she said.

Mac handed her a bottle of water. He rested his feet on the seat beside her and she moved an inch away from them.

‘What do you mean?’ He took off the top and drank. ‘God, I’m thirsty.’ He hadn’t shaved, and his chin bore a layer of stubble.

‘What if she sold the card, or it was stolen from her? What if we’re following the wrong person?’

‘It’s possible, but it’d be a hell of a coincidence for someone else to want to get to France. And, besides, we don’t have any other leads, do we?’

Natasha pointed at the map on the table between them. ‘Look at the distances here, Mac. John said a horse could travel thirty or forty miles a day at a push. It would have been tough enough for her to make it to Dover in that time. How could she have got across the Channel with a horse and then have ridden halfway down France? And, look, Saumur’s more than three hundred miles from Calais. She hasn’t a hope of getting that far.’

‘So what are you saying?’

She leant back in her seat. ‘We should turn round.’ Her voice was uncertain. ‘Or maybe call the police.’

Mac shook his head. ‘Look, we’re committed to a course of action now. I think we should head for Saumur.’

‘But what if we’re wrong?’

‘And what if we’re not? It makes sense that she’d go there. Her grandfather thinks that’s where she’s going. Your credit-card says so too.’

Natasha glanced out of the window. ‘I think . . . I think we’ve got this wrong. We should have called the police yesterday morning. You’re right – I didn’t want to get them involved because I didn’t want all of this out in the open. I admit it. But it’s gone beyond that now, Mac. We’re supposedly responsible for a fourteen-year-old girl who’s lost, possibly in a strange country. I say when we get off the ferry we call the police. It’s the responsible thing to do.’

‘No,’ he said, adamant. ‘The moment we call the police, she loses the horse. She loses everything. No. She’s only lost in that we don’t know where she is.
She
may know exactly where she’s going. I’m prepared to trust her to be okay.’

‘That’s not your decision to make.’

‘I know. But I’ll take responsibility if it goes wrong.’

‘I’m her foster-carer too.’

When Mac’s gaze was so direct, it still left her a little flustered. ‘You know what? If you’d really wanted to call the police, you would have done it yesterday. You know very well, Tash, that neither of us wants the police involved, even if our reasons are very different.’

He had never been so decisive about anything when they were married.

‘Anyway, we’re here now. We’ve got an idea where she’s headed. I say we drive to the horse place and wait for her there.’

Hurt made Natasha’s voice harder than she had intended. ‘And if you’re wrong, if she’s not safe, if she turns out not to be where we think, you’ll be happy to live with that, will you?’

Since then they had barely spoken. Mac drove the car off the ferry at Calais, and on through the night. He didn’t take the
autoroute
, but the smaller roads, roads on which a horse might travel, peering into the dark as he drove.

She dozed, and woke to the sound of his voice. He was speaking into his phone, low and insistent. ‘It’s not that,’ he said, and, some time later, ‘No, no, sweetheart. I don’t think that’s a good idea. I know. I know.’ Natasha, uncomfortably awake, kept her face turned away, her eyes shut, her breathing determinedly regular, until he rang off. She left it another ten minutes before she yawned ostentatiously. At that point he suggested they pull into a rest stop and grab forty winks. It was after one in the morning, and there was little chance of them finding a hotel. ‘We won’t sleep long,’ he said. ‘A couple of hours at most. Then we’ll drive on.’

After the silent tension of the past hour, Natasha was glad to accept. They pulled off the empty road into the car park of a service station, which was partially lit by a solitary sodium light. There were no other cars, and on the other side of a low, straggly hedge, the flat fields of the Somme were mournful in the dark, imbued with the weight of their history. The engine ticked its way to silence.

They sat awkwardly beside each other, a surreal parody, she thought, of some date, the prelude to a first kiss.

Mac, perhaps sensing this too, was distant and polite. He offered her the back seat and, with an equally polite thank-you, she had climbed into it, rolled her coat into a pillow and laid her head on it, conscious that in the morning her suit would be even more crumpled than it already was.

‘You want to borrow my jacket? I’m not cold.’

‘No, thank you.’

He fell asleep, as he had when they were married, like someone stepping off the edge of a cliff. With his seat tilted back, she could see his profile in the half-light, relaxed, his arm tilted across his forehead, and could hear the faint, regular sound of his breathing.

Natasha did not sleep. She lay in a strange car in a foreign country, her mind racing like the speeding traffic in the distance, thinking about her lost career, a man in London who didn’t love her any more, a girl who was out there at that moment, somewhere under the same sky, a web of unhappiness and loneliness, with herself at the centre. She grew chilled, and, regretting Mac’s jacket, remembered a boy she had once represented who had slept, for months, in a car park. She had won him the case, had been utterly determined to do so, but she couldn’t recall having wondered what it must have been like for him.