The Horse Dancer

  Sarah froze. She didn't know what to tell him. Would Papa think it was okay to tell John where she was? Or would he want her to keep going? Telling the truth had had a habit of backfiring.

  'I need to speak to Papa,' she said. 'Can you put him on, please?'

  'Sarah, you need to tell me where you are. We got people looking for you.'

  'No,' she said firmly. 'I don't want to talk to you. I want to talk to Papa.'

  'Sarah . . .'

  'It's important, John. Really important. Please do this for me. Please don't make it difficult . . .' She was close to tears.

  'I can't, sweetheart.'

  'You can. I spoke to him the day before yesterday. If you put the phone to his ear he can still hear what I--'

  'Sarah, girl, yo' grandpa's gone.'

  She stared at the wall. Someone had turned on a television in the bar, and she could hear the distant roar and excited commentary of a football match. 'Gone where?'

  A long pause. 'Sarah, baby, he's gone.'

  A new cold crept over her, flooding her from the ground up.

  She shook her head.

  'No,' she said.

  'Baby, you need to come home now. It's time to come back.'

  'You're lying,' she said. Her teeth were chattering.

  'Sweetheart. I'm so sorry.'

  She slammed down the phone. Her whole body was shaking, and she wanted to sit down. She sank, very quietly, to the linoleum floor and sat there, while the room travelled gently around her.

  'Alors!' She was not sure how many minutes had passed, but she was dimly aware of the woman shouting for her husband, and two pairs of hands hauling her to her feet. She was walked through to the main bar, sat gently on one of the red leatherette banquettes, and then the woman was placing a steaming mug of hot chocolate in front of her and unwrapping cubes of sugar, which she stirred into it.

  'Regardez!' another customer was saying. 'Elle est si pale!'

  Someone else muttered something about shock. She heard them as if from a distance. She was aware of more faces, sympathetic smiles. Someone removed her riding hat and she was ashamed of her dirty hair, the mud under her fingernails. There was nothing left. Papa was gone. Boo was gone.

  The woman was rubbing her hand now, encouraging her to drink the hot chocolate. She sipped politely, wondering if she might throw it up.

  'Tu as perdu ton cheval?' someone was saying, and her brain felt so strange that it took her several attempts to nod.

  'De quelle couleur est il?'

  'Brun,' she said dully. She felt weightless, heard everything at a remove. She wondered, briefly, if they stopped holding her hands, whether she might float up into the atmosphere and disappear. Why wouldn't she? There was no one left to anchor her to the earth, no one who cared about her. There was nothing to go on to, nothing to return to. Boo was probably lying dead in a ditch like the one she had been found in. The boys might have chased him for miles. He would be stolen, crashed into, absorbed into this vast country and never seen again. And Papa . . . Papa had died while she had been gone. She would never see his hands again, never see his strong old back grooming, dipping and brushing, his jaw set with the effort. They would never sit in front of the television, commenting on the news. Nothing made sense.

  She had a sudden vision of herself, a small dot, completely alone in the universe. There was no place for her now, no person, no home of her own. That sudden knowledge was so enormous she thought she might faint. Then she realised that the people were staring at her and wished they would go away. She thought, abruptly, that she might lie down on the banquette and sleep for a hundred years.

  There were murmurings of concern. She felt her eyelids droop, and then the woman was pushing the mug to her lips again.

  'C'est le secousse,' someone said, and actually lifted her eyelids to check.

  'I'm fine,' she said, wondering how you could say something so patently true yet untrue at the same time.

  'Mademoiselle.' A thin man with a cigarette was standing in front of her. 'Le cheval est brun?'

  Sarah looked up at him.

  'Il est de quelle taille? Comme ca?' He held his hand high, close to his shoulder.

  Suddenly she could focus. She nodded.

  'Come, come,' he said. 'Please come.' She felt the woman's supporting arm under her own and was suddenly grateful for it. Her legs no longer seemed to belong to her. They felt weak, like pipe-cleaners that might bend under the least pressure. She blinked, the glare of the morning light too bright after the gloom of the bar. And then the woman was climbing into the back seat of a car with her, the thin man getting into the front. They could be taking me anywhere, Sarah thought absently. She was doing everything Papa had told her not to. Somehow she couldn't work up the energy to care. Because Papa is gone. She rolled the words around in her mind, but nothing happened. I cannot feel anything, she thought.

  A mile or two on they were pulling into a farmyard, down a driveway littered with rusting farm machinery; huge towers of baled straw shrink-wrapped in shining black plastic. A goose hissed angrily as they got out, and the thin man shooed him away.

  Then, turning the corner of a huge shed, she saw him: he was standing in a cow byre, his saddle and bridle placed neatly at the far end of the gate. 'Boo?' she said disbelievingly, the pain in her shoulder forgotten.

  'Il est le votre?' the man said.

  Boo whickered, as if to answer conclusively.

  'Le fermier l'a trouve ce matin, en haut par le verger. En tremblant comme une feuille, il a dit.'

  She barely heard him. She wrenched herself from their grasp and propelled herself towards him. She clambered over the gate and half fell into the shed, her arms around his neck, her tear-stained face pressed against his skin.

  Who would have thought a girl could cry so much for a horse? they said, in the bar tabac, some time later, long after Sarah had been sent on her way with another hot chocolate and half a baguette inside her. She had cried solidly for thirty minutes, while she bandaged the horse's poor bloodied knees, while she stroked him and cooed to him, and refused to leave his side. It wasn't quite normal to see a girl so emotional about an animal.

  'Ah. You know these girls,' the woman from the bar said, running a duster over the bottles. 'Passionate about animals at that age. I was the same.' She paused and nodded at her husband, who had been distracted briefly from his newspaper. 'Still am, of course,' she added, with a snort, and, to the laughter of the customers, made her way back into the kitchen.

  Mac waited for Natasha to climb into the car before he fired the ignition. She had barely spoken to him all morning. Every time he attempted to say something, to make some reference to what had happened, she would adopt what he thought of as her marital face, showing pent-up disapproval and unspoken recrimination. It was hard to work out how to respond to it: she had wanted him last night - it wasn't as if he had forced himself on her. Why the hell was she treating him like this?

  Mac knew he had done the right thing, but it was hard to reconcile the needy, passionate creature of last night with the cold, shuttered woman beside him. He had woken wrapped around her, his lips pressed in sleep to the nape of her neck, and his first thought had been a kind of excitement. There were possibilities: something had cracked open between them, revealed itself. Perhaps, he had thought, it was not too late. It wasn't just the sex, although that had frankly astonished him. It was as if she had peeled away a layer of herself, allowed only him to see something she had closed off for so long. Afterwards, she had cried again, through release this time, and holding her, whispering to her, he had felt that she had granted him something. It had seemed astonishing to him that they could have wasted so much time apart.

  I want you.

  So, how to explain this morning? Mac knew he loved this mercurial, complicated wife, but he didn't know if he had the energy to keep breaking down the barriers she seemed so determined to erect between them. You're right, he told her silently. Men do get fed up with 'difficult'
women, and this is why: you take a glorious situation and create something toxic within it.

  'Did you hear me on the phone this morning?' he asked suddenly.

  She'd never been any good at lying. Her cheeks flushed. 'No,' she said.

  'We're not together, me and Maria, if that's what this is about. We're friends. We were meant to be doing a job together today. I had to cancel.'

  She waved a hand. 'Look. Here we are.'

  'She has a new boyfriend,' he said, but she was already out of the car.

  They had pulled up at the Ecole National d'equitation, and now Mac followed her to the offices where a young woman, her hair tied back in a ponytail, her glowing skin telling of a life spent outside, shook their hands. She apologised for the misunderstanding of the previous day: they had not understood the situation, she explained, or their connection to Le Cadre Noir.

  Mac took a moment, while Natasha was explaining, to study some of the photographs, sepia-tinted, of horses frozen in mid-air at impossible angles, men in peaked caps and braided uniforms perched on them calmly as if there was nothing odd in riding an animal that was standing on two legs at an angle of forty-five degrees. Further up, there was a black roll of honour; all the ecuyers of Le Cadre Noir since the 1800s, their names, just one or two a year, outlined in gilt. One jumped out at him: Lachapelle, 1956-60. He thought of the old man, who had probably never known that his time here had been commemorated, that he had been honoured in this way, and was sad that someone whose life could have been spent in the pursuit of beauty, of excellence, should pass his last years where he had. He understood a little better now the old man's fervent desire, his fierce instruction of Sarah. What could you want for your children other than excellence and beauty? Or satisfaction in the art of pursuing it?

  'Here,' he said, pulling out a folder of photographs. 'This is Sarah and her horse. You can see her face a bit better in this one.'

  The woman examined them, nodded. 'She rides very well.' It was hard to see whether she was humouring them.

  'Her grandfather's name is Lachapelle. That's him.' He pointed at the roll.

  'Is he with you? We have many reunions. We have a publication, Les Amis du Cadre N--'

  'He died last night,' Natasha said.

  'Is this why she has run away?'

  'No,' Natasha said, glancing at Mac. 'We think she doesn't know yet.'

  The woman handed Mac the photographs. 'I'm sorry we cannot be of more help, but if we hear anything, Madame, Monsieur, we will of course let you know. Would you like to look around while you are here?'

  A young man was appointed to give them a tour, and they walked out into the Carriere Honneur, a vast outdoor sand school where a man in a black cap was riding a sprightly chestnut, watched by a dozen horses from an immaculate row of stables. He cantered one way, then another, his mount snorting with the effort.

  As they walked, the young man began to explain: this was where the show horses were kept, that way were the dressage horses, over here were the show-jumpers. There were some three hundred altogether. It was a world of order, of high standards met and maintained. Mac felt curiously reassured that a place like this still existed.

  'Why are we sightseeing?' Natasha would grumble occasionally, as they walked on through an avenue of trees to the next stable block, the next sand arena, a world devoted to a pursuit neither of them understood. But he knew she felt as he did: what else could they do? At least here they had a greater understanding of what Sarah was aiming for. Several hundred miles from home, it was, paradoxically, the closest they had come to her.

  Natasha flipped open her phone. 'I'll try the credit-card company again,' she said. 'It's been a couple of hours.'

  'You are on holiday here?' their guide said, in heavily accented English, as Natasha strode away.

  'Not quite,' Mac replied.

  'Photographer,' the young man said, pointing at Mac's bag.

  'Yes. But I'm not here for work.'

  'You should photograph Le Carrousel. This is the show that marks the end of the student year. All the ecuyers perform.'

  'Excuse me a moment.' His phone was ringing.

  'What is it?' Natasha said, breaking off from her call.

  He turned away from her, running his hand over his head as he listened. 'Oh, Christ,' he said, closing his phone.

  'She knows,' Natasha guessed. 'She knows he's dead.'

  Mac nodded.

  Her hand flew to her mouth. 'Then she knows she's got nothing left.'

  Mac wondered if the colour had drained from his face as well as hers. They stared at each other, oblivious to the horses, the beauty of the setting. 'Put a block on the card, Tash,' he said finally. 'If she's decided she's not coming here after all, we have to stop her going anywhere else.'

  'But then she'll be at greater risk. We've got to make sure she has enough money to eat, to sleep under cover. It's freezing at nights.'

  'But we could chase her around France for weeks. There are a million places where you could park a horse. We've got to stop this.'

  'I know that, but cutting her off from her only source of support isn't the way.'

  'If we'd cut off that financial support in England she wouldn't have made it half so far.' It sounded like he was blaming her. He couldn't help it.

  'She'd have found another way.'

  'But we've been looking for two days and two bloody nights and we still have no idea where she--'

  'Monsieur?' The young guide was pressing his walkie-talkie to his ear. 'Monsieur? Madame? Attendez, s'il vous plait.' He spoke in rapid French. Then: 'There is an English girl here. A girl with a horse. Mademoiselle Fournier says you should come with me.'

  It was not how she had imagined it, her triumphant arrival. For the first two days of her journey she had pictured it repeatedly, the elation as she reached the place that would surely feel like a second home to her. It was her destiny. It was in her bones, as her grandfather had said.

  But for the last five miles Sarah had held the words to her as a crutch, the thing she required to keep moving. She had plodded through Saumur, oblivious to the elegant wide streets, the honeyed buildings, the timeless beauty of the river front. Boo, exhausted, drew curious looks with his bandaged knees, passers-by occasionally tutting with disapproval, as if she should not be riding an injured animal. She knew she looked barely less odd, with her bruised face and muddy clothes. Twelve kilometres, eight kilometres, four kilometres . . . She had urged him to keep moving, had bitten down hard to stop herself crying at the pain in her shoulder, the headache that wouldn't go away.

  She had almost let out a sob when she saw the signs for the Ecole de Cavalerie, then recognised on a residential street the Georgian facade of the horseshoe-shaped building. But there were no horses: the men who walked its courtyards wore no black but the camouflage of modern warfare. 'Le Cadre Noir?' she had asked one, as he crossed the place du Chardonnet.

  'Non!' He had looked at her as if she was mad. 'Le Cadre Noir n'a pas ete ici depuis 1984. C'est a St Hilaire de Fontaine.' He pointed towards a roundabout. 'C'est pas loin d'ici . . . cinq kilometres?' She had thought, briefly, that she could not go on. But she had braced herself and followed the soldier's instructions around several roundabouts, through a small town and then, so far away now that she feared she was lost again, up a long, verdant path, flanked by fields of horses.

  And suddenly there it was, larger than she had thought, more modern in aspect. This was not the elegant antiquity of Papa's pictures, a courtyard full of uniformed people. There were security gates, six Olympic-size arenas, restaurants, car parks, a tourist shop. She rode through the open gates, few people paying her attention, her eyes almost closing with exhaustion, until she saw the sign, 'Grand Manege des ecuyers', that told her her journey was at an end.

  She walked Boo around the covered arena, past the front entrance, where the next performances were listed with ticket prices, along its length and round to the rear, where sawdust hoofprints and a concrete path from the
stables told of an equine route in. From the other side of the huge wooden doors, she could hear a man's voice. She straightened a little, took a deep breath, then leant across, wincing, and banged, several times on the door. There was a brief silence inside, broken by someone instructing, 'Hup!' Sarah took a breath and banged again, her fist insistent on the wooden panels.

  She heard a bolt slide away from her and the door opened to reveal a cavernous interior: a modern cathedral floored with sand. Around its edges stood a number of horses, all mounted, their riders in the distinctive black and gold uniform she knew from her childhood, as if engaged in some kind of dress rehearsal. The air was hushed, reverential, each man focused on the movements of his glossy, muscled horse.

  The man who had opened the door stared at her, then castigated her in French, flapping his arms. She was so tired she could barely make out what he was saying, but she cut across him: 'I need to speak to the Grand Dieu,' she said, her voice cracking with tiredness. 'Je dois parler au Grand Dieu.'

  There was a brief, stunned silence, and she took advantage of the man's momentary inaction to ride past him. Boo pricked his ears.

  'Non! Non!' A man with a walkie-talkie was hurrying after her.

  'Que faire?' An old man in a peaked cap came towards them from the other end of the school. His face was scored with lines, his eyes hooded. His black uniform was immaculate, starched, as if it might be holding up the body within.

  'Desole, Monsieur.' The younger man had taken hold of Sarah's reins and was pulling Boo round towards the exit. 'Je ne sais pas ce que--'

  'Non!' Sarah pushed Boo forwards, swatting at the man's hand. 'Let go of him. I need to speak to Le Grand Dieu.'

  The man strode up to her. He looked at Boo's bandaged knees, then at Sarah. 'Je suis le Grand Dieu.'

  She sat a little more upright.

  'Mademoiselle,' he said, his voice low and grave, 'vous ne pouvez pas entrer ici. C'est Le Cadre Noir. C'est pas pour--'

  'I have to ride for you,' she interrupted. 'Je - je dois monter mon cheval pour vous.' She was aware that the other riders were gradually stopping what they were doing, that she had become the focus of attention. 'I can't go back. You have to let me ride.'

  He was lifting a hand to motion her out. 'Mademoiselle, I am sorry, this is not a place for you. You and your horse are in no condition . . .'