Two If by Sea (7 page)

The child nearly knocked Frank off his feet. He had come from nowhere, now clad in antique denim overalls and a red shirt with kangaroos all up the arms. Like a cub, the child climbed Frank, resting his head on Frank's shoulder with a clinging softness and strength. Frank laid a hand on the boy's back and felt the silent, regular throb of his heart. Carefully, he carried him into the kitchen, not bothering to knock.

“You've a friend,” Tura said. “He's been out running all day.”

“How old do you think he is?”

“Three and a bit. He's small but he can take good care of himself. The toilet and so forth. I had a deal of work to keep him out of the stable. Everywhere Cedric went, he went, and mimicking the way Cedric walks. Kate was laughing and Cedric, too.” With a sharp stitch of fear, Frank imagined the kid slashed by Glory Bee's hooves as she performed her daily martial-arts routine.

“You didn't let him in by Glory Bee?”

“Good God, no, Frank. Cedric throws that horse's food over the wall and leaves her.”

What would become of Glory Bee when Frank left?

Cedric would sell her for the glue if he had to.

Frank would hate that. Glory Bee was the only horse he had ever truly cherished. As much as she hated Cedric, she loved Frank in her way.

Unlike the men of his family before him, Frank had no special feeling for animals. Horses were big, odd, and generally dumb. They did not feel about people the way people felt about them. Only in training Tarmac for the force in Chicago, and in moments with Glory Bee, had Frank experienced the lyric properties of man and horse, the ones his father insisted were just south of sorcery. Tarmac would have done anything Frank asked, and had, more than once, wading into harm's way with the implacable grandeur of a warhorse on a Roman fresco. Tarmac, however, had literally been that, a warhorse, not like Glory Bee, a finely strung fluty thing meant for the airs above the ground. Tarmac demonstrated no more feeling for Frank, personally, than a car would have shown. In fact, during his first months at Tura Farms, Frank had done grunt work and stayed away from training. The old man finally combusted, taking the piss out of Frank for what he called “false pride.”

“If you can't be the trainer your grandfather was, you'll take your bat home, that it?” Cedric roared.

“Not even a little!” Frank, who was not given to roaring, roared back. “I've spent more than thirty years trying not to follow in their footsteps.”

“Then pack your kit,” Cedric said. “I won't work around a dosser who says he's Jack Mercy's grandson.” Frank did pack his kit, and left for a week. When he returned, there were no words between him and Cedric: Frank simply moved into the bunkhouse and put his back into it, humbly emulating Cedric's nephew Miles, fifteen years Frank's junior and an incarnate centaur. He learned the language of the outsized, glossy beasts, who didn't know they could kill anything they chose and cringed from a fallen leaf like kindergarten girls at a picnic. He learned that he did have what Cedric called a sense, that he never had to speak sharply, or above a normal tone of voice; the horses listened. They seemed to wait for him.

No one was more shocked when one of Frank's riders placed high up in All Australia. He was stuck, then—train or emigrate. He trained.

The horses, properly speaking, were all Tura's: they came on airplanes from the working breeding farm in Yorkshire where Tura had grown up, where she had met Cedric and his family. She'd come out to Australia with her mother and all her earthly goods, as Cedric and his sister had done. If Cedric vexed her, she reminded him that all his bluster and skill were nothing without her mounts, and that she could always leave him and go back to her own place. Every year, with Kate, Tura did go back, for a visit, and every year, she returned to dusty Queensland longing visibly for the haphazard heather and the imperial purple-ink cloud banks massed on the hills of her rocky moorland home and the unretouched goodwill of those who lived there. Increasingly, Tura spoke of going back—now not just to infuriate Cedric but as a woman yearning homeward as the evening light grew shorter. To Frank, who'd never been to Yorkshire, or to England at all, she issued an open invitation to go and spend time at Stone Pastures.

Glory Bee was one of five foals born out there the first year Frank lived at the farm. She was ravishing, with, Tura claimed, not a single white hair on her coaly hide, a dynasty horse whose only flaw was her temperament. She looked like a great jumper, and moved like one, unless anyone came near her. Even then, it would have been possible, just, to make a great broodmare of her, had it been possible to convince anyone that it would be possible to touch, much less ride, one of Glory Bee's offspring. Frank adored her, although every morning he had to start with her anew, as she pitched and plunged and pawed, her eyes rolling, more white than brown, foam in drifts at the corners of her mouth. He sometimes imagined he could hear Glory Bee's thoughts, and that there was an implicit apology in her resistance. This isn't personal, she seemed to be telling Frank as she strained and strived, this is how I'm wired.

Cedric would not go near Glory Bee, not even to feed her. The sire, a big red Dutch Warmblood, a steeplechase horse called Say Amen, had the same exquisite gait, height, musculature, natural ability, and the same personality—according to Cedric, who'd been back to Yorkshire exactly twice in thirty years, that of a serial killer. Cedric, who had recently trained the great young stallion Airborne, and now made more than a good living from Airborne's progeny, and he hoped Frank could train Glory Bee. If Glory Bee could medal reasonably, she could go out to auction. Frank, who loved their battles, couldn't bear to think even of that.

But he couldn't stay.

“I've made something to eat, Frank, nothing really, some pasta and beans.” Tura was a horrifying cook. Still, Frank sat and ate, with a grim will, as though he was trying to medal in food consumption, beside the child who silently and politely spooned up everything in his small bowl. “The clothes belonged to Miles. Ceddie's sister kept some here for him, so many years ago. I'm as bad a housekeeper as there is to still have them.” Frank glanced up. “No word about our Miles.” Tura pressed her lips together and went on. “The lad doesn't say a word. But I know he hears what I say. He hears the telephone.”

Frank shrugged. “Maybe he never could talk. Some kids can't.”

“He does a funny thing with his hands.” Tura held her hands out before her and swung both of them, once, left and right.

“I know,” Frank said. “Do you think that's autism?”

“Frank, for heaven's sake, no. It's a sign. It's speech of some kind. Sign language.”

“I've never been around a kid, Tura. How would I know?”

Cedric banged in at the door, meticulously sluicing off his mucking boots in the foundation that sloped down from the slop sink, slapping his gloves and his duster. Frank stepped behind him and pushed the door open. The day was cooler, but still thick with the promised punishment of withheld rain. Tura said, “I've told the boy he wants a sleep. He doesn't seem to agree.”

“You can lie down,” Frank told the child. “For just a little while. Just here. You don't have to go in the bed. On the sofa.” The boy held up his begrimed hands and Frank lifted him to wash him off at the kitchen tap. Frank had lifted newborn lambs that weighed more. After he'd covered him with a blanket, Frank came back and sat down with the Bellinghams. “I've seen Natalie's brother. He survived. And I've seen Natalie.” There was a beat of silence. Then another beat.

“Natalie,” Tura said.

“Yes,” said Frank. “I wouldn't say she suffered.” He hadn't let himself think about it. Drowning was not the easy death people liked to imagine. There was a great deal of air in the submerged body. It took time and the body fought.

Lethal injection, he thought; now, that was a good death.

“She was a lovely girl,” Cedric said. “Will you still go back to the States now, Frank? The way you and Natalie talked about?”

Frank said, “Yes.” He added, “Later. I have to . . . I don't know what you do.”

“Call your agent,” Cedric said. “Ask the funeral fellow. There are forms.”

Cedric meant that Frank should call his lawyer. Frank didn't have one. A real-estate lawyer had signed papers when they bought the condo.

The telephone rang. No one moved. It rang three times and stopped, no message given. It rang again. Finally, Tura got up and answered, on the fourth ring. Plainly as if the telephone had been a bullhorn, her face said that Miles Bellingham had been found dead. Tura listened, punctuating her nodding with murmurs of “Oh, my dear . . .” and “Of course, anything . . .” She gestured to Cedric, who shook his head severely. Finally, she put the phone down.

“Right,” Cedric said, and wheeled, clumsily vaulting the stairs two at a time.

“He's said we'll stop,” Tura said. “If Miles died.” She sat down heavily. “It's too much, really, Frank. It's too much to take in. I think we will go home, finally. We will.”

“Miles was a great kid,” Frank said. “I'm so sorry for your loss.”

“It's more than that,” Tura said. “We loved him dearly. Moira's life won't ever be real again. He was her only, her bonny boy. And for Cedric, without him, and might I say also, without you, none of this will mean a thing. We wanted a bucket of land when we came here, land as far as you could see, on the cheap. Now a smaller place, I think. Something quiet.”

“It's a farm as well, in England. And horses.”

“But a different thing,” Tura said. “A world you can manage. We should travel, though. Before we go back to Yorkshire. We should go to the States. I've never been.”

“You always have a place there. With me.”

“I'm afraid to think of there being another day, and doing the same things, making the tea, putting a roast in the oven.” There were few times in anyone's life when it was ever possible for one person to say he knew what another person was feeling. But Frank knew exactly what Tura meant, about the horror of witness embedded in the urgent banalities of ordinary life.

Frank said, “It feels . . .”—he would only say this to Tura—“like pieces coming loose.”

Tura nodded. “I'd run if I could. I'd run from all this. Wednesday and Thursday and then sometime, next year, another Christmas Eve. I would go home now, but what about Kate? And what about my mum? This is Kate's home, her friends, all she knows, and my mother lives for her church.” Frank glanced at the presents heaped on a table. Randomly, Tura began pulling out and unwrapping them. “Here,” she said. “That was to be for you, in any case.” She gave Frank a waterproof pullover and a sweater, and a few pairs of jeans reinforced at the inner thigh, the kind riders wore, a heavy diving watch, an Omni, just the kind Frank had play-begged for from his doctor wife, and a barometer for the wall, because Frank, like all farm-raised people, was foolish about weather. An irony now. Tura kept going. Black corduroy slacks with a hem, a fine brown leather jacket, a linen shirt and vest. Frank understood that these last ones had been for Miles, and accepted them, kissing Tura on the cheek. He was broader across the chest than Miles, but about the same height. Natalie liked him to dress well and keep his hair cut shorter than he was used to. After leaving the force, he enjoyed letting his hair curl around his collar. She called him a hippie.

Their son would have had dark hair.

None of Natalie's brothers was bald, and Frank's hair was still a thick brown tightly curled pelt. Frank had suggested they call their son Donovan. Natalie said that was madness, but he caught her smiling.

His wife and his son.

“You have nothing but what you're standing up in,” Tura said. Frank had forgotten. It seemed that his memory would be like old Jack's, a series of events closed off like the windows on an Advent calendar, each one a surprise to him when he glimpsed it again.

They both turned as they heard Cedric making his way down the stairs. Existence narrowed to a commonplace. Cedric, despite his lame leg perhaps the fittest man Frank had ever known, had done just what it said in paperback novels, and aged twenty years in thirty minutes. The very flesh of his face was looser and a paunch had appeared, as well as an old man's stoop. He crossed the room to the alcove where the boy lay flung out in sleep, and straightened his limbs and pulled the gaudy afghan up around the thin shoulders. It was impossible not to think of the motions of tucking this child in as meant for the younger Miles, for Miles's long rest. As though he was alone in the room, Cedric brushed the little boy's hair off his face with the tips of two fingers. Then he stood up and faced Frank.

“I've been thinking while I did the stalls up. Now I'm sure. I'm done here. I take it you'll want Glory, that savage bitch.”

“I don't know what will become of my life now, Cedric. She's four. She can be a great mare. Maybe Grand Prix. With a few years of good work, maybe less, you could get plenty for her at auction, and if she settles down, and I think she will, she could be bred and her foals—”

“I would like you to have her,” Cedric said, suddenly absorbed in a fly spot on the window across the room, which he quickly addressed with one of his massive handkerchiefs. “I didn't ask you to give me money for her. I would like you to have her, as your own.”

“What do you mean, Cedric?”

“Start your life over a bit.”

“It's too soon to think of that.”

But Natalie had said as much.
You'll want to train your own horses . . .

“Train a jumper and a rider for what America has that passes for an equestrian world team. It can't compensate. I'm not suggesting anything like that.”

“For Natalie?”