The Horse Whisperer (5 page)

They told her there was a
tubab
living nearby who would surely put her up. Without the faintest idea of what a
tubab
might be, Annie found herself being led in a large posse bearing her bags along winding jungle tracks to a small mud house set among baobab and papaya trees. The
tubab
who answered the door—she later found out it meant white man—was Robert.

He was a Peace Corps volunteer and had been there a year, teaching English and building wells. He was twenty-four, a Harvard graduate and the most intelligent person Annie had ever met. That night he cooked her a wonderful meal of spiced fish and rice, washed down with bottles of cold local beer and they talked by candlelight till three in the morning. Robert was from Connecticut and was going to be a lawyer. It was congenital, he apologized, eyes wryly aglint behind his gold-rim specs. Everyone in the family had been lawyers for as long as any of them could remember. It was the Curse of the Macleans.

And, like a lawyer, he cross-examined Annie about her life, forcing her to describe and analyze it in a way that made it seem as fresh to her as it did to him. She told him how her father had been a diplomat and how, for the first ten years of her life, they had moved from country to country whenever he was given a new post. She and her younger brother had been born in Egypt, then lived in Malaya, then Jamaica. And then her father had died, quite suddenly, from a massive heart attack. Annie had only recently found a way of saying this that didn’t stop the conversation and make people study their shoes. Her mother had resettled in England, rapidly
remarried and packed her and her brother off to boarding schools. Although Annie skimmed over this part of the story, she could tell Robert sensed the depth of unresolved pain beneath it.

The following morning Robert took her in his jeep across on the ferry and delivered her safely to the Catholic convent where she was to live and teach for the coming year under the only occasionally disapproving eye of the mother superior, a kindly and conveniently myopic French-Canadian.

Over the course of the next three months, Annie met up with Robert every Wednesday when he came to buy supplies in town. He spoke Jola—the local language—fluently and gave her a weekly lesson. They became friends but not lovers. Instead, Annie lost her virginity to a beautiful Senegalese man called Xavier to whose amorous advances she remembered to say yes, loudly, and mean it.

Then Robert was transferred up to Dakar, and the evening before he went Annie crossed the river for a farewell supper. America was voting for a new president and the two of them listened in deepening gloom to a crackling radio as Nixon took state after state. It was as if someone close to Robert had died and Annie was moved as he explained to her in a voice choked with emotion what it meant for his country and the war many of his friends were fighting in Asia. She put her arms around him and held him and for the first time felt she was no longer a girl but a woman.

Only when he had gone and she met other Peace Corps volunteers did she realize how unusual he was. Most of the others were dope-heads or bores or both. There was one guy with glazed, pink eyes and a headband who claimed he’d been high for a year.

She saw Robert once more when she went back up to
Dakar to fly home the following July. Here people spoke another language called Wolof and he was already fluent. He was living out near the airport, so near that you had to stop talking whenever a plane went over. To make some virtue of this, he had got hold of a huge directory detailing every flight in and out of Dakar and, after two nights studying it, knew it by heart. When a plane flew over he would recite the name of the airline, its origin, route and destination. Annie laughed and he looked a little hurt. She flew home the night a man walked on the moon.

They didn’t see each other again for seven years. Annie sailed triumphantly through Oxford, launching a radical and scurrilous magazine and sickening her friends by getting a brilliant First in English without ever appearing to do a stroke of work. Because it was the thing she least didn’t want to do, she became a journalist, working on an evening newspaper in the far north-east of England. Her mother came to visit her just once and was so depressed by the landscape and the sooty hovel her daughter was living in that she cried all the way back to London. She had a point. Annie stuck it for a year then packed her bags, flew to New York and amazed even herself by bluffing her way into a job on
Rolling Stone
.

She specialized in hip, brutal profiles of celebrities more accustomed to adulation. Her detractors—and there were many—said she would soon run out of victims. But it didn’t work out that way. They kept on coming. It became a kind of masochistic status symbol to be “done” or “buried” (that quip had started even at Oxford) by Annie Graves.

Robert phoned her one day at the office and for a moment the name meant nothing to her. “The
tubab
who gave you a bed one night in the jungle?” he prompted.

They met for a drink and he was much better looking than Annie remembered. He said he’d been following her byline and seemed to know every piece she’d written better than she did herself. He was an assistant district attorney and working, as much as his job allowed, for the Carter campaign. He was idealistic, bursting with enthusiasm and, most important of all, he made her laugh. He was also straighter and had shorter hair than any man she’d dated in seven years.

While Annie’s wardrobe was full of black leather and safety pins, his was all button-down collars and corduroy. When they went out, it was L.L. Bean meets the Sex Pistols. And the unconventionality of this pairing was an unspoken thrill to them both.

In bed, the zone of their relationship so long postponed and which, if she was honest with herself, she had secretly dreaded, Robert proved surprisingly free of the inhibitions she had expected. Indeed he was far more inventive than most of the drug-slackened coolsters she had lain with since coming to New York. When, weeks later, she remarked on this, Robert ruminated a moment, as she recalled him doing before declaiming details from the Dakar flight directory, and replied in perfect seriousness that he’d always believed sex, like the law, was best practiced with all due diligence.

They were married the following spring and Grace, their only child, was born three years later.

   Annie had brought work with her on the train not through habit but in the hope that it might distract her. She had it stacked in front of her, the proofs of what
she hoped was a seminal State of the Nation piece, commissioned at huge expense from a great and grizzled pain-in-the-ass novelist* One of her big-shot writers, as Grace would say. Annie had read the first paragraph three times and hadn’t taken in a word.

Then Robert called on her cellular phone. He was at the hospital. There was no change. Grace was still unconscious.

“In a coma, you mean,” Annie said, her tone challenging him to talk straight with her.

“That’s not what they’re calling it, but yes, I guess that’s what it is.”

“What else?” There was a pause. “Come on Robert, for Godsake.”

“Her leg’s pretty bad too. It seems the truck went over it.” Annie took a wincing little breath.

“They’re looking at it now. Listen Annie, I better get back there. I’ll meet you at the train.”

“No, don’t. Stay with her. I’ll get a cab.”

“Okay. I’ll call you again if there’s news.” He paused. “She’s going to be alright.” “Yes, I know.” She pressed a button on the phone and put it down. Outside, sunlit fields of perfect white altered their geometry as the train sped by. Annie rummaged in her bag for her sunglasses, put them on and laid her head back against the seat.

The guilt had started immediately upon Robert’s first call. She should have been up there. It was the first thing she said to Don Farlow when she hung up. He was sweet and came and put his arm around her, saying all the right things.

“It would have made no difference Annie. You couldn’t have done anything.”

“Yes I could? I could have stopped her going. What
was Robert thinking of, letting her go out riding on a day like this?”

“It’s a beautiful day. You wouldn’t have stopped her.”

Farlow was right of course but the guilt remained because it wasn’t, she knew, about whether or not she should have gone up with them last night. It was the mere tip of a long seam of guilt that snaked its way back through the thirteen years her daughter had been alive.

Annie had taken six weeks off work when Grace was born and had loved every minute. True, a lot of the less lovable minutes had been delegated to Elsa, their Jamaican nanny, who remained to this day the linchpin of their domestic life.

Like many ambitious women of her generation, Annie had been determined to prove the compatibility of motherhood and career. But while other media mothers used their work to promote this ethic, Annie had never flaunted it, shunning so many requests for photo spreads of her with Grace that women’s magazines soon stopped asking. Not so long ago she had found Grace flipping through such a piece about a TV anchorwoman, proudly pictured with her new baby.

“Why didn’t we ever do this?” Grace said, not looking up. Annie answered, rather too tartly, that she thought it was immoral, like product placement. And Grace had nodded thoughtfully, still not looking at her. “Uh-huh,” she said, matter-of-fact, flipping on to something else. “I guess people think you’re younger if you make out you haven’t got kids.”

This comment and the fact that it was uttered without a trace of malice had given Annie such a shock that for several weeks she thought of little else than her relationship
with Grace or, as she now saw it, her lack of one.

It hadn’t always been so. In fact until four years ago when she’d taken her first editorship, Annie had prided herself that she and Grace were closer than almost any mother and daughter she could think of. As a celebrated journalist, more famous than many of those she wrote about, her time until then had been her own. If she so chose, she could work from home or take days off whenever she wanted. When she traveled, she would often take Grace with her. Once they’d spent the best part of a week, just the two of them, at a famously fancy hotel in Paris, waiting for some prima donna fashion designer to grant Annie a promised audience. Every day they walked miles shopping and sightseeing and spent the evenings guzzling delicious room service in front of the TV, snuggled in a gilded, emperor-size bed like a pair of naughty sisters.

Executive life was very different. And in the strain and euphoria of transforming a stuffy, little-read magazine into the hottest read in town, Annie had at first refused to acknowledge the toll it was taking at home. She and Grace now had what she proudly referred to as “quality time.” From her present perspective, its main quality seemed to Annie to be oppression.

They had one hour together in the mornings when she forced the child to do her piano practice and two hours in the evening when she forced her to do homework. Words intended as motherly guidance seemed increasingly doomed to be taken as criticism.

At weekends things were better and the horse riding helped keep intact what fragile bridge there remained between them. Annie herself no longer rode but, unlike Robert, had from her own childhood an understanding of the peculiar tribal world of riding and showjumping.
She enjoyed driving Grace and her horse to events. But even at its best, their time together never matched the easy trust that Grace shared with Robert.

In myriad minor ways, it was to her father that the girl first turned. And Annie was by now resigned to the notion that here history was inexorably repeating. She herself had been her father’s child, her mother unwilling or unable to see beyond the pool of golden light encircling Annie’s brother. Now Annie, with no such excuse, felt herself propelled by pitiless genes to replicate the pattern with Grace.

The train slowed in a long curve and came to a halt in Hudson and she sat still and looked out toward the restored verandah of the platform, with its cast-iron pillars. There was a man standing exactly where Robert normally waited and he stepped forward and held out his arms to a woman with two small children who had just climbed down from the train. Annie watched him hug each of them in turn, then shepherd them toward the parking lot. The boy insisted on trying to carry the heaviest bag and the man laughed and let him. Annie looked away and was glad when the train started to move out again. In twenty-five minutes she would be in Albany.

   They picked up Pilgrim’s tracks farther back along the road. There were spots of blood still red in the snow among the hoofprints. It was the hunter who saw them first and he followed them, leading Logan and Koopman down through the trees toward the river.

Harry Logan knew the horse they were looking for, though not as well as the one whose mangled carcass he had just watched them cut from the wreckage of the jackknifed trailer. Gulliver was one of a number of
horses he looked after up at Mrs. Dyer’s place but the Macleans used another local vet instead. Logan had noticed the flashy new Morgan a couple of times in the stable. From the blood it was trailing, he knew it must be badly hurt. He still felt shaken by what he had seen and wished he could have got here earlier to put Gulliver out of his misery. But then he might have had to watch them taking Judith’s body away and that would have been tough. She was such a nice kid. It was bad enough seeing the Maclean girl whom he hardly knew.

The rushing noise of the river was getting loud and now he caught sight of it down there through the trees. The hunter had stopped and was waiting for them. Logan stumbled on a dead branch and nearly fell and the hunter looked at him with scarcely veiled contempt. Macho little shit, thought Logan. He had taken an instant dislike to the guy as he did to all hunters. He wished he’d told him to put his goddamn rifle back in the car.

The water was running fast, breaking over rocks and surging around a silver birch that had toppled from the bank. The three men stood looking down at where the tracks disappeared by the water.