Crossfire (6 page)

“And how do you know they ordered a dope test?” she demanded.

“It says so in today’s
Racing Post.
”

“I told you not to read that paper,” she said crossly.

“I don’t always do what I’m told,” I said.

“No,” my mother said. “That’s the problem. You never did.”

She turned abruptly and strode away, leaving Ian and me standing alone.

“So what do
you
think?” I asked him.

“Don’t involve me,” he said. “I’m in enough trouble already.”

He turned to walk away.

“But wouldn’t you have had a vet in last night?” I said to his retreating back.

“I told you,” he said over his shoulder without stopping, “don’t involve me. I need this job.”

I called after him, “You do realize there won’t be a job if someone has been nobbling the horses. There won’t be any jobs here. The yard will be closed down.”

He stopped and came back.

“Don’t you think I know that?” he said through clenched teeth.

“Well, what are you going to do about it?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Nothing?”

“That’s right. Nothing. If I say anything I’ll lose my job, and then I’ll have no job and no reference. What chance would I have then?”

“Better than having a reputation as a doper,” I said.

He stood silently, looking up at me.

“So far the tests have all been negative. Let’s hope they stay that way.”

“But you think otherwise, don’t you?” I said.

“Something strange is going on. That’s all I know. Now let me get on with my job, while I still have it.”

He strode away purposefully, leaving me alone outside Pharmacist’s stall. I opened the top half of the door and took another look at the horse. As yesterday on the television, he looked all right to me.

But, then, I was no vet.

 

 

T
he atmosphere back in the house was frosty, to put it mildly. Positively subzero, and it had nothing to do with Pharmacist or any of the other horses. It had to do with money.

“Josephine, we simply can’t afford it.”

I could hear my stepfather almost shouting. He and my mother were in the little office off the hallway, while I was sitting very quietly out of sight in the kitchen, eavesdropping. They must have been far too involved in their discussion to have heard me come in from the yard, so I had simply sat down and listened.

Some might have accused me of being somewhat underhanded in secretly listening to their conversation. They would have been right.

“We must be able to afford it,” wailed my mother. “I’ve had the best year ever with the horses.”

“Yes, you have, but we’ve also had other things to contend with, not least the ongoing fallout from your disastrous little scheme.” My stepfather’s voice was full of incrimination and displeasure.

“Please don’t start all that again.” Her tone was suddenly more conciliatory and apologetic.

“But it’s true,” my stepfather went on mercilessly. “Without that, we would’ve easily been able to buy you a new BMW. As it is . . . well, let’s just hope our old Ford doesn’t need too much work done on it. Things are tight at present.”

I wondered what disastrous little scheme could have resulted in things being so tight financially that one of the top trainers in the country was unable to upgrade her old Ford to a new BMW. But she had never before seemed to care about what sort of car she drove.

I would have loved to listen to them for a while longer. However, I really didn’t want to get caught snooping, so I carefully stood up and silently swiveled back and forth on my good foot from the kitchen table to the back door. It was a technique I had developed to get around my hospital bed at night once I had removed my prosthesis. I was getting quite good at heel-andtoeing, as the physiotherapists had called it.

I could still hear my mother at high volume. “For God’s sake, Derek, there must be something we can do.”

“What do you suggest?” my stepfather shouted back at her. “We don’t even know who it is.”

I opened the back door a few inches, then closed it with a bang.

Their conversation stopped.

I walked through from the kitchen to the hall, my right foot making its familiar clink whenever I put it down. My mother came out of the open office door.

“Hello,” I said, as genially as I could.

“Hello, darling,” she replied, again placing too much emphasis on the “dar.” She took a step towards me, and I thought for a fleeting second she was going to give me a kiss, but she didn’t. “Tell me,” she said, “how much longer are you planning to stay?”

“I’ve only just arrived,” I said, smiling. “I hadn’t thought about leaving just yet.”

Oh yes, I had.

“It’s just that one has to make plans,” my mother said. “It’s not that I want you to go, of course, it’s just I would like to have some idea of when.”

“I haven’t even worked out where I would go,” I said.

“But you would go back to the army.” It was a statement, not a question.

“It’s not as simple as that. They want to give me time to get over the injuries. And even then, they’re not sure they actually want me anymore. They’ll decide when I go back after my leave.”

“What?” She sounded genuinely shocked. “But they have to have you. You were injured while working for them, so surely they must have an obligation to go on employing you.”

“Mum, it’s not like any other job,” I said. “I would have to be fit and able to fight. That’s what soldiers do.”

“But there must be something else you could do,” she argued. “They must need people to organize things, people to do the paperwork. Surely those don’t have to be fit enough to run round and fight?”

My stepfather came to the office door and leaned on the frame.

“Josephine, my dear. I don’t think Tom here would be prepared to be in the army simply to push paper round a desk.” He looked me in the eyes and, for the first time in twenty-four years, I thought there might be some flicker of understanding between us.

“Derek is so right,” I said.

“So for how long have the army sent you home on leave?” my mother asked. “How long before they decide if they want you back or not?”

“Six months.”

“Six months! But you can’t possibly stay here six months.”

That was clearly true. I had arrived only eighteen hours previously, and I had already been there too long for her liking.

“I’ll look for somewhere else to go this week,” I said.

“Oh, darling, it’s not that I want to throw you out, you understand,” she said, “but I think it might be for the best.”

Best for her, I thought ungenerously. But perhaps it would be the best for us all. A full-scale shouting match couldn’t be very far away.

“I could pay you rent,” I said, purposely fishing for a reaction.

“Don’t be a silly boy,” my mother said. “This is your home. You don’t pay rent here.”

My home, but I can’t stay in it. My mother clearly didn’t appreciate the irony of her words.

“A contribution towards your food might be welcome,” my stepfather interjected.

Things must have been tight. Very tight, indeed.

 

 

I
lay on my bed for a while, in the middle of the morning, staring at the molded ceiling and wondering what to do.

Life in the hospital had been so structured: time to wake up, have a cup of tea, read the paper, eat breakfast, have a morning physiotherapy session in the rehab center, return to the ward for lunch in the dayroom, have an afternoon physiotherapy session, return to the ward, watch the evening news, read a book or watch more television, have an evening hot drink, lights out, sleep. Every day the same, except there was no physio on Saturday afternoons or all day Sunday. A strict routine, regular as clockwork, with no decisions having to be made by me.

At first I had hated to have such a straitjacket to my existence, but I’d become used to it. I suppose one gets used to anything.

Abruptly, here in Lambourn, I was on my own, free to make my own choice of activity without a hospital regime to do it for me. And all of a sudden I was lost, unable to make up my mind, mostly because I was at a loss to know
what
to do.

It was a new and alien sensation. Even in the boring times between contacts in Afghanistan I’d had things to do: clean my weapon, fix my kit, train my men, make plans, even write a note home. I had
always
had something to do. In fact, most of the time I had far too much to do, and not enough time.

Yet try as I might, I couldn’t think of a single thing I had to do now.

Maybe I could have written a note of thanks to the staff at the rehab clinic, but both they and I would know I didn’t mean it.

I had hated feeling that I was being treated like a child, and I hadn’t been slow to say so.

Looking back, even after just one day away from it, I could see that my frustration, and my anger, hadn’t helped anyone, least of all myself. But it had been the only way I’d known to express my fury at the hand that fate had dealt me. There had been times when, if I’d still had my sidearm with me, I am sure I would have used it to blow my brains out, such had been the depth of my depression.

Even in recent weeks, I had often thought about suicide. But I could have walked out and thrown myself under the wheels of the London bus right outside the hospital if I’d really wanted to, and I hadn’t, so at least I must be on the way up from the nadir.

My life needed targets and objectives.

In the hospital my goal had been simply to be discharged.

Now that I had achieved it, a void had opened up in front of me. A future seemingly devoid of purpose and direction. Only a tentative “we’ll see” to give me any hope. Was it enough?

I looked at my watch.

It was twenty to twelve, and I had been lying on my bed doing nothing for nearly three hours, ever since I had walked away from a stormy encounter with my parent out on the driveway.

She had been inspecting her car and I hadn’t been able to resist telling her that it was high time she changed her old blue Ford for a new, smarter make.

“Mind your own bloody business,” she had hissed at me, thrusting her face towards mine.

“I’m sorry,” I’d said, feigning surprise. “I didn’t realize the matter touched such a sore nerve.”

“It doesn’t,” she’d replied, back in some sort of control. “And there’s nothing wrong with this one.”

“But surely a trainer of your standing should have a better car than this. How about a BMW, for example?”

I had really believed she was about to cry again, and quite suddenly, I had been angry with myself. What was I doing? I tried to see myself as she would have, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it one bit. So I had turned away and climbed the stairs to my room like a naughty boy.

How long, I wondered, should I remain in my room before I had paid sufficient penance for my misdeeds? An hour? A day? A week? A lifetime?

I sat up on the side of the bed and decided to write to the staff at the rehab center to thank them for their care
and
to apologize for my consistent lack of good humor.

Maybe then they might just believe that I meant it.

T
he remainder of Sunday proved to be a quiet day at Kauri House Stables, with the human residents managing to stay out of arguing distance.

In the afternoon I ventured out into Lambourn, deciding to go for a walk, mostly just to get me out of the house but also because I was curious about how much the place had changed over fifteen years. I didn’t intend to go very far. It had been only a week or so since I’d thrown away the crutches, and my leg tended to tire easily.

There were a few more houses than I remembered, a new estate of smart little homes with postage-stamp gardens having sprung up in what once had been a field full of ponies. But overall, the village was as familiar as it had been when I’d delivered the morning papers as a teenager.

And why wouldn’t it have been? The previous fifteen years may have changed
me
a great deal, but it was a mere blink of an eye compared to the long history of human habitation in Lambourn.

Modern documented Lambourn dated from the ninth century when the church and village were named in the will of King Alfred, the mighty king of the Saxons, the only monarch of England to have ever been designated “The Great.”

But Lambourn had a history that stretched back far further than medieval times. Numerous Bronze Age burial grounds existed on the hills just north of the modern village, together with The Ridge-way, the Stone Age superhighway that had once stretched from the Dorset coast to The Wash.

Nowadays, Lambourn and its surroundings were known as The Valley of the Racehorse, but the racing industry was a relative newcomer. First records show that racehorses were trained here in the late eighteenth century, but it was not until the arrival of the railway a hundred years later that Lambourn became established as a national center for racing, and jump racing in particular, to rival that at Newmarket. Trains enabled the horses to be sent to racetracks farther and farther from home, and hence a national sport was established.

But the major factor that made Lambourn such a wonderful place for horses was simple geology, and had nothing to do with man.

Whereas the rolling Berkshire Downs certainly lent themselves so ideally to the formation of the gallops and the training of the horses, it is what lay beneath the turf that made the real difference. The Downs, together with the Chiltern Hills, were created many millions of years ago, laid down as sediment in some prehistoric organism-rich sea. Billions and billions of primitive sea creatures died, and their skeletons drifted to the bottom, over time being compressed into rock, into the white chalk we see today. It is almost pure calcium carbonate, and the grass that grows on such a base is rich in calcium, ideal for the formation of strong bone in grass-eating racehorses.