The Horse Dancer

  'Je . . . je dois aller au Tours,' she said, trying to stop her voice quavering.

  'Tu veux aller au Tours . . .' The laughter was unpleasant.

  'Je te prendrai au Tours. Montes a bord.' He patted his seat, and they all laughed.

  'Il y a quoi dans ce sac?'

  She glanced from one to another. 'Rien,' she said. They were after her bag.

  'Il est trop plein pour rien.' One of the boys, pale-skinned, his shaven head tucked under a baseball cap, had climbed off his motorbike. She tried to keep her breathing steady. They're just like the boys at home, she told herself, showing off to each other. You just have to show them you're not afraid.

  The boy walked slowly towards her. He was wearing a dirty khaki jacket, a packet of cigarettes in the top pocket. He stopped a few feet away, eyed her, and then, without warning, leapt forward, yelling, 'Rah!'

  Boo snorted and jumped backwards. The boys laughed. 'Easy,' she murmured, closing her legs around him again. 'Easy.' The boy with the hat took a drag on his cigarette, and moved forward again. They wouldn't stop now, she guessed. They had scented some new game, some fresh torture. Discreetly she scanned the distance, trying to establish the best route past them, the way out. They would know this area, would have spent hours doing what they were doing now, revving bikes around it, killing time, looking for weak spots to plunder and destroy out of frustration and boredom.

  'Rah!' This time, she was ready for him, and Boo flinched, but did not jump. She had him firmly between leg and hand now, telling him silently not to move, refusing him the chance to feel fear. He was uncertain, though. She could see his eye glancing back, his arched neck tensing, could feel his mouth at the end of the rein, playing anxiously with his bit. And as the bikes revved again, she knew what she had to do.

  'S'il vous plait,' she said, 'laissez-moi la paix.'

  'Renvois-moi et je te laisserai la paix.' He gestured towards her rucksack.

  'He! Putain! Renvois-le, ou j'en fais du pate pour chien!' The north African boy had said something about horsemeat, and the word was all the spur she needed. Sarah gathered Boo up, her legs quietly signalling her instruction. He refused to hear her for a few seconds, still transfixed by anxiety, then training took over, and he began to trot obediently on the spot, his legs lifting carefully, rhythmically, two at a time in an exaggerated version of piaffe.

  'Regardez! Un cheval dansant!' The boys began to catcall, the bikes revving, drawing closer, closer, briefly distracted by what she was doing. Sarah bit down on her fear and tried to block out the noise, concentrating, building Boo's momentum, building a secret core of energy at his centre. His head dropped to his chest, his legs lifting higher. She felt his anxiety, her heart constricting at his trust in her, that he was prepared to do what she asked of him, despite his fear. She heard one of the boys yelling something else at her, but the noise was lost in the pounding of blood in her ears.

  'Alors, comme ca on se fait valser, hein?' The boy on his feet had moved closer. His smile was hard, mocking. He reminded her of Maltese Sal. She used her right leg to move Boo discreetly away from him. Boo, now bouncing into terre a terre, fired by her growing impulsion, was also absorbing the tension in the atmosphere and it was all she could do to restrain him. An energy was building among the boys; dangerous, tensile. She could taste their hunger for trouble, for chaos. She could almost hear their thoughts, as they calculated the possibilities. Please, she told Boo. Just once. You have to do this for me.

  'Faites-la descendre!' one of the boys yelled, gesturing to the others to get her off Boo. She felt a hand reach for her leg. It was all the prompt she needed. Her heels clamped to Boo's sides, her seat telling him to rise, rise, and then she yelled, 'Hup!' and he was leaping into the air, towering above them as, with a seismic bounce, his rear legs kicked out horizontally behind him. Capriole! The world stopped, stood still, and for a second, she saw what men in battle must have seen two thousand years ago - their opponents' faces filled with terror as the great beasts rose, defying gravity, into the air, their legs, their very selves transformed into airborne weapons.

  Beneath her there was a shout of fear, of outrage. Two bikes fell over and the boy on his feet collapsed on to his rear. As Boo's front hooves hit the ground, she threw herself forward, her heels digging into his sides. 'Go!' she yelled. 'Go!' And the great horse leapt past the motorbikes, skidded around the corner, and flew down the asphalted road, back the way they had come.

  In a darkened hospital room several hundred miles away, Henri Lachapelle, his head tilted to one side where it had been propped by the evening-shift nurses, woke and let his gaze settle on the blurred image of the horse beside him, waiting for it to clarify, solidify. It had somehow drawn closer while he slept, and now looked back at him, its iridescent eye gazing into his own with a kind of gentle reassurance, its patience apparently limitless. Henri's own eyes, dry and sore, closed and opened several times amid a creeping confusion. Then: Gerontius, he exclaimed, with gratitude. The horse blinked slowly, its nose dipping, as if in acknowledgement, and he tried to remember how they had ended up here. Little was clear now; it had become easier to allow himself to be carried by these new tides, to accept without fighting the ministrations, the faces of strangers.

  He could feel the stiff leather of the boots around his calves, the soft black serge of his collar on his neck, hear the distant laughter of his fellow ecuyers as they prepared themselves somewhere in the distance. The smell of woodsmoke, caramelised sugar and warm leather seeped into his nostrils, the soft breezes of the Loire valley meeting his skin. And then he was astride, riding out through the red curtain, his gloved hands light on the leather reins, his eyes fixed calmly between the cocked ears of his horse. He felt Gerontius's long, strong legs move beneath him, those distinctive, elegant paces, as familiar to him as his own stride, and a deep joy, a kind of euphoria, crept through him. Gerontius wouldn't let him down; this time he would prove himself. This time he would be a man on wings.

  Because this time something was different: he barely needed to convey his request to the horse. There was a telepathy between them, an understanding that no Grand Dieu had thought to reveal to him. Before his spurs had whispered against the horse's sides, before he shifted his weight, or uttered a word, Gerontius had anticipated him. This noble creature, Henri thought, in amazement. How could I have abandoned him for so long?

  The horse arched his neck, gathered himself in the centre of the arena, his silken coat gleaming under the arc lights, his hooves lifting beneath him, the two of them at the centre of a vortex of expectation - and then, with a whoosh, he was on his hind legs, an impossible height, not teetering or struggling, his proud head fixed and steady, looking out at the audience as if it were his right that they should glory in his achievement. And Henri was there, tilted behind him, legs braced, back perfectly straight, a gasp of exultation escaping him as he understood that this was it; they were airborne, and he need never come down.

  And it was then that he saw her: the girl in the yellow dress, standing in her seat before him, her slim hands raised above her head. She was clapping, her eyes filled with tears of pride, a smile breaking across her face.

  Florence! he cried. Florence! The applause that burst forth from the arena filled his ears, his heart, deafening him, the lights exploding in front of him - Florence - so that it became everything, bearing him ever higher, drowning out the distant shrill ringing of the machines, the urgent voices, the sudden bursting open of the ward door.

  Mac was knocking at the door of her room. 'Are you ready? Madame said dinner at eight, remember.' Natasha had put on the badly cut trousers and the thin red cotton shirt that had been the only items she could find to fit at the local hypermarket, and said, wearily, 'Give me five minutes. I'll meet you down there.'

  She heard his footsteps echoing along the corridor, bouncing off the wood panelling, and scrabbled in her bag for mascara, something that would enliven her pale, exhausted face.

  They had arri
ved in the town shortly after five. Their first stop had been the Ecole Nationale d' Equitation, the home of Le Cadre Noir, but the gates had been closed. A voice had come over the intercom, apparently irritated by Mac's insistent buzzing, to reveal that it was not open to the public until two weeks after Christmas. And, no, to Mac's next question, no English girl had arrived with a horse. Neither Mac nor Natasha's French was particularly good, but fluency had not been necessary to detect the tone of sardonic disbelief in the man's voice.

  'She would never have beaten us here anyway,' Natasha pointed out. 'We're best finding a base and taking it from there.' She had checked the credit-card company again, but there had been no new activity. Sarah had taken no money since the previous evening. Natasha didn't know whether she found this reassuring or worrying.

  The Chateau de Verrieres was in the centre of the medieval town; it backed on to the Ecole de Cavalerie. The chateau itself was vast, ornate, a thing of beauty; the kind of place they had stayed during the early days of their relationship when they had been trying to prove something to each other, when Mac had used aftershave and complimented her on whatever she had chosen to wear. When she had found something funny or endearing in behaviour that, within two years, she would be complaining about.

  'I guess we may just as well stay in a nice place as a chain,' Mac said. He was trying to be cheerful, but she knew that since they had hit French soil his own fears had escalated, as had hers. They had been careful with each other, these last hours. It was as if the situation had grown so large, so weighty, that it left no room for other feelings. Perhaps it was that neither of them was as confident now as they had been of the outcome.

  She arrived downstairs to find Mac seated in front of a boisterous log fire, explaining the situation to the chateau's owner. The Frenchwoman heard the story out with polite incredulity. 'You think the child has ridden here from Calais?' she repeated.

  'We know she's headed for Le Cadre Noir,' Mac explained. 'We just need a way to speak to someone there - to find out if she has come.'

  'Monsieur, if a fourteen-year-old English child had turned up here unaccompanied on a horse, the whole of Saumur would know. Are you sure she can come this far?'

  'We know she withdrew money outside Paris yesterday evening.'

  'But it is over five hundred kilometres . . .'

  'It's possible,' said Natasha, firmly, thinking of Ali Ahmadi. 'We know it's possible.' She and Mac exchanged a glance.

  'Nobody will be there now,' the woman said. 'If you like I can call the gendarmes and ask if such a thing has been reported.'

  'That would be very helpful,' Mac said. 'Thank you. We'll take all the help we can get.' Then, as the chatelaine disappeared to check their food:

  'You okay?'

  'Fine.' She stared out of the window, willing the child to emerge from behind the trees at the far end of the bay hedge. She had begun to see Sarah everywhere; behind parked cars, fleetingly at the end of narrow lanes. She will be here. But when she recalled Ali Ahmadi, she did not think of his triumph of will, of a bunch of flowers awaiting her in her office, but of her own failures. She felt, with a sick dread, that she had made a colossal error.

  Face to face with Mac over dinner, in such a romantic setting, she found she was not hungry and drank instead. Three, four glasses slipped down without her noticing. By tacit agreement, they decided not to talk about Sarah, but she couldn't think of anything to say and didn't know where to look. Facing Mac, her eyes rested on his hands, his skin, his ruffled brown hair. Unusually, he didn't speak much either, just wolfed his dinner and, periodically, made little sounds of approval.

  'Delicious, isn't it?' he said, before he saw that she was barely pushing hers around her plate.

  'Lovely,' she said. He seemed wary, as if he wasn't sure what to say next, and his awkwardness fed her own, so that when he refused dessert, saying he was going to take a long bath, they deflated a little with relief.

  'I might walk around the grounds,' she said.

  'You sure? It's pretty cold out there.'

  'I need some air.' She tried to smile, but failed.

  The cold air knocked the breath from Natasha's lungs, and she pulled her coat tightly round herself. It carried the faint tang of woodsmoke. To her right, she could make out the huge classical facade of the academy and, a short distance away, the wide, honeyed-stone streets of Saumur.

  She walked towards a horse-chestnut tree and, on reaching it, stopped to peer up through the elegant branches at the sky, a vast, inky expanse unpolluted by urban glow, glittering with a million tiny pinpricks of light. She no longer thought of her job, her lost case, her ruined relationship. She dared not think of Sarah, and where she might be. She thought instead of Ahmadi, who had not lied to her. She felt ashamed of how quickly, how easily her opinion of him had been corrupted.

  She was not sure how long she had been out there when she heard footsteps on the gravel path. It was Mac, and her heart lurched.

  'What is it? Is it the police?' she said, when she realised he was holding a phone. 'Did they find her?'

  His hair was dry - he couldn't have had a bath. 'That was Cowboy John.' His face was grave. 'It's the old man, Sarah's grandfather. He died this evening.'

  She couldn't speak. She waited for him to be Mac, to laugh and apologise, tell her it had been a sick joke, but he did none of these. 'Jesus, Tash,' he said, finally, 'what the hell do we do now?'

  She could hear the gentle creaking of the plane tree's branches in the breeze and felt, with exquisite clarity, the cold on her face. 'We find her,' she said, her voice odd and reedy is her ears. 'We have to find her. I don't see what else we--'

  Something was rising in her chest, a horrible unfamiliar choking sensation that briefly filled her with panic. She brushed past him and walked briskly, then ran towards the house. She went through the elegant, cavernous hallway, up the mahogany stairs to her room. The tears came even before she had lain on the vast bed, face down, her arms over her head. She let the heavy coverlet absorb them, not sure why she was crying: for the girl, alone in a strange country, whose last link to her beloved family had been severed, the orphaned boy whose life she had misjudged, or even the catastrophic mess she had made of her own. Now, freed perhaps by alcohol, the strangeness of her surroundings, the wrong country, the dislocation of the past two days, Natasha's sobs racked her frame, seeming to haul their way up from her very depths. She cried silently, not knowing how she would ever stop.

  She could hear the bikes behind her. She was galloping flat out now, breathing in short bursts, gripped by fear. Boo ran, his neck ramrod-straight, his hooves sending up sparks beneath her in the darkening light. She wrenched his head to the right, flying towards what looked like a road, heard tyres squeal behind her, another threatening cry of 'Putain!' and found she was in a supermarket car park.

  She galloped across the parking spaces, dimly aware of shocked couples pushing trolleys, a driver, halted in mid-reverse. The motorbikes had spread out now; she could see them from the corners of her eyes. She tried to pull Boo back - if she headed close to the supermarket there would be too many people for the boys to do anything to her - but his neck was rigid; impervious. Boo, terrified, was lost in a world of his own.

  She leant back, the road markings blurring beneath him. 'Boo! Whoa!' she cried, but realised, with terror, that she was not going to be able to stop. Briefly recognising that she should just stay on, she jumped a small rail, a pot-hole, flew past an empty car park and saw she had reached the edge of the estate, that the black nothing beyond the low wall was empty countryside. She stood in her stirrups, hauling at one rein, an old trick that should have swung him into a tight circle, killing his speed.

  But she had not understood how close the wall was, how impossible the angle she had created for him. She, like the horse, had not seen the drop on the other side of the wall, so that when he took off, still blind with fear, it was only as his front feet soared into mid-air that both horse and rider saw his mistak
e.

  The sounds of the bikes disappeared. Sarah flew into the dark sky, dimly aware of a scream that might have been her own. And then Boo stumbled, his head disappearing beneath her, and Sarah was falling. She saw a brief flash of illuminated road surface, heard a terrible crunch, and everything went black.

  When there was no response to his discreet knock, Mac turned the door knob, afraid that it might prompt some new antagonism between them. But he couldn't return to his room: she had looked so lost, her face blanched in the moonlight, the habitual self-possession dissipated.

  'Tash?' he ventured softly. He said it again, then slowly opened the door.

  She was on the canopied bed, her arms crossed over her head. He thought, for a moment, that she might be asleep. And then, as he was about to close the door quietly, he saw the movement of her shoulders, caught the smothered hint of a sob. He stood very still. Natasha had not cried in front of him for years. For a long time after he had finally left, fifteen months ago, he had recalled her expression in the hallway, her jaw tense, her face utterly composed, as she stood in her work suit and watched him haul his belongings to the car.

  But that had been an age ago.

  Mac walked tentatively across the wooden floor. She flinched when he placed a hand on her shoulder. 'Tash?'

  She lay there, unresponsive. He wasn't sure whether she was unable to answer, or simply waiting for him to go away.

  'What is it?' he said. 'What's wrong?'

  When she lifted her face from the covers, it was pale and blotchy with tears. What remained of her mascara had run down her cheeks, and he fought the urge to wipe it away.

  'What if we don't find her?' Her eyes glittered.

  The evident depth of her pain was shocking, and made her strange to him. He couldn't take his eyes off her. 'We'll find her.' It was all he could say. 'I don't understand, Tash--'

  She raised herself to a sitting position, drew her knees up under her chin and buried her face in them. It took two attempts before he could make out what she was saying.