The Horse Dancer

  'I guess there's nothing I need to say,' he said. 'You two seem to have it all figured out.' She shot him a strange look then, perhaps catching the edge to his voice.

  'Here,' said Sarah, returning, before either of them could say anything else. 'Thom wants to talk to you.' She stood close to Natasha as she took the phone, as if the distance between them had been bridged.

  He watched Natasha talking, his thoughts now so dense and complicated that he couldn't listen properly to what she was saying. Something had changed in her, her face softening, lightening. She had been denied motherhood, but it was as if she had found a new purpose. He turned away, conscious suddenly that he couldn't hide how he felt.

  'No, that's really not . . . Are you sure?' she said, and then, after a pause, 'Yes. Yes, I know.'

  He turned back her as she ended the call. She was looking at Sarah. 'He won't accept any money,' she said. 'He won't hear of it. He said he's headed that way in the middle of the week and he'll bring Boo back then.'

  Sarah's smile was brief and surprising, as if she was as taken aback as Natasha by this act of generosity.

  'But there's a catch,' Natasha added. 'He said that in return you have to invite him to your first performance.'

  The beauty of young people, Mac thought afterwards, was that hope could still be restored. Sometimes it took only a few words of faith to reilluminate a spark of confidence that the future could be something wonderful, instead of a relentless series of obstacles and disappointments.

  'Sound like a fair deal,' Natasha said.

  Sarah, nodded.

  If only, Mac thought, as he headed towards the car, the same was true of adults.

  Natasha fiddled with the key in the lock, and opened the front door on to a dark hallway, flicking on the lights. It was shortly after one in the morning, and Sarah, bleary with sleep, walked in and up the stairs on automatic pilot, as if she was at home. Natasha followed her, straightened her bed, handed her a fresh towel, and finally, when she was sure that the girl would sleep, came slowly down the stairs.

  It was the first time in forty-eight hours that she had felt confident Sarah would not disappear again. Something had changed; there had been a seismic shift in the ground between them. She realised that, despite the responsibility she had just taken on, despite knowing that she was effectively signing herself up to several years of financial commitment and an emotional roller-coaster, she felt - at some deep level - a kind of excitement she had not felt in years.

  Mac was on the sofa in the living room, his long legs stretched out, feet on the linen-covered footstool, car keys still in his hand. His eyes were closed, and she allowed herself a lingering glance at him, taking in the rumpled clothes, the indisputably male presence. She forced herself to turn away. It was a kind of masochism to keep looking.

  He yawned, pushed himself upright, and Natasha busied herself, afraid he would feel her scrutiny. The floor, she noticed, was carpeted with photographs, row upon row of ten-by-twelve prints, lined up on the polished wood floor where he must have left them days ago, the morning he had discovered Sarah gone. It was as she let her gaze run over the series of black-and-white images, the horses in mid-movement, the glowing tones of Cowboy John's shrewd old face, the images that heralded Mac's renewed appetite for what he did best, that her eyes fell on one in particular.

  The woman was on the telephone. She was smiling, oblivious to the camera's attentions, surrounded by the bare branches of a garden, the light low and gentle behind her. She was also beautiful: the winter sun reflected on her skin, her eyes were softened with an unknown pleasure. The camera's gaze was not a cool reflection of some shuttered image: it was intimate, a secret collusion with its subject.

  She stared at it for several seconds before she realised the woman was herself. It looked like some idealised version of her, a person she had ceased to know, a person she had believed long buried in the acrimony of the divorce. She felt something in her tighten and break. 'When did you take this?'

  He opened his eyes. 'A few weeks ago. In Kent.'

  She couldn't tear herself away from it. 'Mac?' she said. 'Is this how you see me?'

  Eventually she dared to look at him. The man before her had new lines of sadness on his face; his skin was grey with tiredness, his lips pursed as if prematurely accepting disappointment. He nodded.

  Her heart had begun to thump. She thought of Henri, of Florence, of Sarah, bravely blurting out the truth into a rainy unknown. 'Mac,' she said, her eyes still on the photograph, 'I have to tell you something. I have to tell you even if it turns out to be the stupidest, most humiliating thing I ever did.' She took a deep breath. 'I love you. I always have loved you, and even if it's too late for us I need you to know that I'm sorry. I need you to know that letting you go will always be the greatest mistake of my life.'

  Her voice had begun to quaver, breathlessness hijacking it. She held the picture between trembling hands. 'So now you know. And if you don't love me, it's okay. Because I've told the truth. I'll know I did everything I could, and if you don't love me, there's absolutely nothing that would have changed that.' She finished in a rush.

  'Actually, it's not okay,' she added. 'In fact, it'll probably kill me a little bit. But I still had to tell you.'

  His usual relaxed charm had deserted him. 'What about Conor?' he said, almost snappy.

  'It's over. It was never . . .'

  'Fuck,' he said. Then he stood up. 'Fuck.'

  'Why are you--?' She stood up, shocked by his outburst, the uncharacteristic cursing. 'What do you--'

  'Tash,' he said, striding across his photographs, which skidded across the polished floor. He was inches from her. She held her breath. He was so close she could feel the warmth of his skin. Don't say no, she willed him. Don't make some terrible joke, and find a diplomatic reason to leave. I can't do this a second time.

  'Tash.' He took her face in his hands. His voice was low, broken. 'Wife.'

  'Do you mean--'

  'Don't shut me out again.' His words were almost angry. 'Don't shut me out.' She had begun to apologise, but the words were lost in their kisses, their tears. He picked her up and she wrapped herself around him, her legs, her skin against his skin, her face buried in his neck.

  'It'll be a long way back,' she said, much later, when they walked up the stairs to their bedroom. She was holding two of his fingers. 'Do you really think we can . . .'

  'One step at a time, Tash.' He lifted his head towards the sleeping girl above them. 'But at least we know it's possible.'

  Epilogue

  'A horse is a thing of beauty . . . None will tire of looking at him as long as he displays himself in his splendour.'

  Xenophon, On Horsemanship

  The journey from the house that Mac had built to the little side-street behind Gray's Inn Road took forty-five minutes in the daytime, half an hour on top of that if attempted in rush-hour. Natasha glanced at the clock, calculating that she had only minutes to finish her paperwork before she had to leave.

  'Going to beat the traffic?' Linda came in with a pile of legal-aid papers that needed signing.

  'Probably not,' Natasha said. 'Not on a Friday.'

  'Well, have a good one anyway. And don't forget we've got that new chap in at nine on Monday. The immigration specialist.'

  Natasha had stood up and was gathering things into her bag. 'I haven't forgotten. Don't you stay too late, will you?'

  'I'll be a while longer. I want to sort out the filing. That temp last week completely mucked up my system.'

  Macauley and Partners had suffered a difficult birth, but almost eighteen months on, Natasha was beginning to feel that her choice to set up on her own had been right. There had been little point in remaining at Davison Briscoe; it wasn't just that Conor had taken her news so badly - he had perhaps believed she and Mac to be together long before they had reunited - but the scars of the Persey case were visible in the way Richard had no longer treated her as a partner-in-waiting. In fact, from the day
she returned, he had barely seemed to see her as a worthy addition to the firm at all. When she had discovered he was inviting Ben out to lunch more often than he was speaking to her, she had known it was time to move.

  Thank God for Linda. Having her trusted assistant jump ship with her to run the office had kept her afloat, not just professionally but emotionally. She suspected Davison Briscoe had missed Linda Blyth-Smith almost more than they had missed her.

  'Have a good weekend, Lin.' She threw her coat over her arm, ready to run down the stairs.

  'You too. Hope it all goes well.'

  Gray's Inn Road was already thickening with traffic, the queues snaking all the way to the West End. It was a couple of minutes before she spotted him, pulling in on the other side of the road. She glanced to each side of her, then ran across between the slowly moving vehicles, her bundle of papers clasped to her chest.

  'Dead on time,' said Mac, as she leant across to kiss him. 'How about that for service?'

  'You're a marvel.' She dumped her papers in the footwell. 'And you,' she said, peering past him at the baby beaming at her from his car seat, 'have wiped banana all over your dad's jacket.'

  'You're kidding,' said Mac, glancing behind him. 'How could you, mate?'

  'She's going to be so proud of us.' Natasha chuckled, did up her seat-belt and gazed around her at the mobile dustbin that was Mac's car.

  It had become a running joke, Mac and Natasha's appearance at such events. They inevitably arrived in Mac's increasingly battered car, with epaulettes of baby sick or smelling slightly of whatever nappy had exploded on the way. Surrounded by the gleaming four-wheel-drives and vast Mercedes of the other parents, they had found they came over like mischievous schoolchildren. The day they had brought Cowboy John with them to visit (no dope, they had made him promise, no, not even a little bit), Mac had taken particular delight in introducing him to the headmaster's wife as 'Sarah's previous teacher'.

  'You teach a lot of circus skills here?' Cowboy John had enquired innocently. And then, when the woman had looked blankly at him, 'Lady, are you ever in the market for a few trays of real good avocados?'

  John lived an hour's drive from Sarah's school, in a weatherboarded white cottage with his two elderly horses in a nearby field, and continued to sell produce of uncertain origin to passers-by. On Sarah's return, he had apologised to her, uncharacteristically awkward, saying he had let her down. He'd let the Captain down. He still couldn't work out what the Sam Hill Sal had been playing at; John had paid off the Captain's debt and Sal had known it. Sarah had glanced at Natasha. 'I should have talked to you,' she said quietly. 'I should have told someone.' By tacit agreement they had never mentioned Sparepenny Lane stables again.

  'So what's this we're going to again?' Mac asked. The traffic flowed gently across the Westway, feeding the London traffic out into the green of the suburbs and on.

  'It's an . . .' Natasha rummaged for the letter '. . . end of year celebration for gifted and talented pupils. We get to listen to some kids playing instruments, a poetry reading--' here Mac groaned '--and Sarah's singing. Not really,' she said, as his head turned. 'Sarah . . .'

  '. . . is doing what Sarah does. She won't notice what we look like,' Mac said, pulling out into the queue of cars. 'Soon as she's anywhere near Boo, that girl's head is somewhere in the clouds.'

  Everyone knew the refrain of working mothers about the impossibility of balancing childcare with work, Natasha thought, as they made their way slowly across the city. But it was impossible to take in the sheer brain-frazzling relentlessness of the juggling act until it happened to you. In her own case, she had acquired two children and a horse within nine months. The great irony was that, after all those years of being told to reduce her stress levels, drink less, think positive thoughts and have carefully timed sex, she had conceived during the most fraught, drunken three days of her life.

  But that, they agreed, when they lay on each side of him, gazing at his fat limbs, his cheeks, his Mac-like thatch of hair, was the beauty of it. He had come because he was meant to.

  The Kent house had long gone, replaced by a new rented cottage, the London house taken off the market. Mac, Natasha and the baby spent weekdays there while Sarah was at a select boarding-school just beyond the north-western tip of the M25, one of the few schools in the country that didn't just accept horses but could offer tuition at the level Sarah needed. The cost was crippling, even with her scholarship. 'But, hey,' Mac would say, when the termly request for funds arrived, and they would deflate a little over the kitchen table, 'no one ever said families came cheap.'

  They didn't begrudge the money. There, Sarah had flourished, unremarkable among other teenagers whose families were absent for a variety of reasons. And although she would never be particularly academic, she had worked hard, made friends and, most importantly, acquired a faint sheen of happiness.

  At weekends, when they drove up to their rented house four miles from the school, and she stayed with them, her conversations were dominated not just by Boo's behaviour in the arena, his many achievements or minor disappointments, but increasingly by the activities of her friends. She would never be the most gregarious of girls, but she had brought a couple to meet them. Nice teenagers, polite, focused, already looking towards their lives beyond school.

  Equally, she would never be the most open or affectionate of people: there was a natural diffidence, a wall that rose swiftly if she felt unhappy or insecure. But, comfortable with them in the little house, she would chat away about David and Helen and Sophie, and so-and-so's horse that wouldn't box when they went to the event at Evesham, and Natasha and Mac would exchange a silent look of satisfaction across the kitchen table. They had come a long way. Each of them.

  The school playing-fields were packed with cars, their gleaming paintwork creating a glossy patchwork across one side of the cricket pitch. Parents were making their way across the grass, the women in high heels laughing, clinging to their husbands as they sank into the ground. Sarah had seen them even before the steward had motioned Mac's car into a space. She was running over, her immaculate jodhpurs and white shirt gleaming. 'You made it,' she said, as Natasha climbed out, feeling her skirt stick to the back of her legs.

  'Wouldn't miss it,' said Mac, kissing her cheek. 'How are you, sweetheart?'

  But Sarah was already wrenching open the car's rear door. 'Hello, Henry, my little soldier! Look at you!' She wrestled with his seat-belt, and then she had him, held in front of her, grinning as he reached for her hair. 'He's grown again!'

  'You'll get banana all over that shirt. Hello, love.' Natasha kissed her, noting that the baby was not the only one to have grown. Each week when they saw her, Sarah was morphing subtly into womanhood. There was little of the skinny child they had first known. She was taller than Natasha, as solid and glossy as her horse. 'Are you all prepared, then?'

  'Yup. Boo's going beautifully. Ooh, I missed you. Yes, I did. Yes, I did.' Sarah was hugging Henry, prompting the same delighted response she always elicited from him.

  Henry had cemented their new family, Natasha thought, as she often did. When they had revealed Natasha's pregnancy to Sarah, several weeks after they had recovered from the shock, the social workers had expressed concern that she might feel pushed out, that it might heighten her sense of instability. But Natasha and Mac had suspected the opposite, and they had been right. It had been so much easier when there was a little person she could love unconditionally.

  They began to walk to the arena where the seats were already filling. A boy in uniform handed them a programme of the evening's events. Sarah's interpretation of Le Carrousel got top billing, Natasha noticed, with pride.

  'Do you want me to babysit this weekend?' Sarah was saying, deftly untangling Henry's fingers from her hair. 'I don't mind. I haven't planned anything.'

  'I thought you had a party.' Natasha was searching in her bag for a wet-wipe. The tell-tale smears of banana were already marching across Sarah's white-clad shoulder.
'Weren't you going somewhere with those girls from the sixth form?'

  It was the smallest glance, but Mac caught it. 'Uh-oh. What's this about?'

  'What? Can't I just offer to babysit?'

  Mac's tone was mock-stern. 'What are you after, young lady?'

  'I've saved you really good seats. Look, I didn't get one for Henry, but I thought you'd have him on your lap. You'll be able to see everything here.'

  Mac paused. 'Come on, you. What is it?' He'd always been better than Natasha at reading her.

  She tried to look embarrassed, but she was beaming. 'I've been accepted for the course.'

  'What course?'

  'At Saumur. The summer training course. Six weeks under Monsieur Varjus. I got a letter this morning.'

  'Sarah, that's wonderful.' Natasha hugged her. 'What an achievement. You didn't think you had a chance.'

  'The teachers here sent a CD of us and wrote in support. Monsieur Varjus said in his letter he could see definite signs of progress. He actually wrote to me himself.'

  'Well, that's wonderful.'

  'I know.' She hesitated. 'But it's really expensive.' She whispered the sum.

  Mac whistled. 'That's a hell of a lot of babysitting.'

  'But I've got to go. If I do well at this, it'll stand me in good stead when I make my application. Please! I'll do anything.'

  Natasha pictured the estate car she and Mac had inspected in the showroom the previous week, and watched it disappear. 'We'll find it. Don't worry. There might be some of your Papa's money left . . .'

  'Really? Really?' Someone was calling her, their voice lifting over the crowd. She glanced behind her, and then at her watch, swearing softly under her breath.

  'You'd better go.'

  The orchestra was tuning up. Sarah thrust Henry at Natasha, gasped an apology and ran towards the stables. 'Thank you!' she yelled, waving over the heads of the spectators. 'Thank you so much! I'll pay you back some day. Really!'

  Natasha held her son close to her, watching her go. 'You already did,' she said quietly.

  Sarah adjusted her girth and straightened, running her hand lightly over the neat plaits she had spent all morning sewing into Boo's mane. From this space, behind the hastily erected screens, she could see the crowd settling, could just make out Natasha handing Henry to Mac, then delving into her bag. A camera. She saw Mac take it from her, shaking his head fondly.