Pony Stories (3 Book Bind-Up) (Red Fox Summer Reading Collections)

by K. M. Peyton

  Ruth took a deep breath. ‘I want to buy a pony.’ Her voice sounded very peculiar.

  McNair looked at her carefully. He was smart, almost dapper, in a tweed jacket and well-pressed trousers. His expression was non-committal, his eyes shrewd. He had grey hair and hard, working hands.

  ‘For yourself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘About thirteen hands? Thirteen-two perhaps. How well do you ride?’

  ‘I can’t really.’

  He smiled. ‘That’s honest. Mostly they say, “Oh, I can ride,” as if the question is an insult. About ten per cent of them can, after a fashion.’

  Ruth felt better. If he appreciated honesty, he must be honest with her, surely?

  ‘What do you want it for?’ McNair asked. ‘Wembley? Or just to keep the grass down at home?’

  ‘Oh, the grass,’ Ruth said hastily. Mr. McNair was smiling, but she didn’t notice. She was beginning to think that Mr. McNair’s ponies might cost more than forty pounds. Everything was so new and expensive, from Mr. McNair’s trousers to the first shining bolt that he was pulling back on loose-box 12. There was no rust at Mr. McNair’s, no chipped paint, no dirty straw blowing in the evening breeze. Only perfection. Ruth remembered Peter, holding Toadhill Flax on a quivering rein, while he dropped the string. Perfection. ‘This isn’t my sort of place,’ Ruth thought, and in her imagination she saw a stableyard, slightly untidy, with dipping tiled roofs and pigeons, and loose-boxes converted from the old carriage-horse stalls, with cobbles, and cats, and a faithful head looking over the half-door . . . the sort in books. She swallowed desperately.

  ‘Pennyroyal,’ Mr. McNair said. ‘Nice sort. Six years old.’

  Pennyroyal was a dark liver chestnut with no white on him, save a small star. He had a kind eye, and he gave a friendly knucker. Ruth, trying to hold back, loved him immediately, and felt doom descending. She just looked, speechless.

  Mr. McNair smiled again. He ran his hand down the hard muscle of the pony’s neck, patted his shoulder, and came out into the yard again.

  ‘I don’t tell my customers that my horses are what they’re not,’ he said. ‘I don’t tell them they’re marvellous. They’re not marvellous. I just buy horses I like myself.’ He was leading the way to loose-box 7. ‘I’m hard to please. I’ve been buying horses for thirty years now. And for every horse I’ve bought, I’d say I’ve looked at twenty.’

  None of her horse-books had described to Ruth a dealer like Mr. McNair. She was lost, and she knew it. She was far too frightened now to say that she wanted a pony that only cost forty pounds. She looked into loose-box 7, and saw a grey mare, dappled like a Victorian rocking-horse, with black legs and eyes blue-black like best coal. To Ruth she was perfect, utterly desirable, from the bold glance of her lovely eyes to the tip of her frosty tail.

  ‘Sixpence,’ said Mr. McNair.

  Ruth, in her nervous state, almost jumped out of her skin. ‘Sixpence?’

  ‘Her name,’ said Mr. McNair gently. ‘The price is somewhat more.’

  ‘Oh!’ Ruth went scarlet with horror at her idiocy.

  ‘She’s Welsh mountain. I’ve got her papers in the office. A bit on the small side for you probably. Not now, of course, but in a year or two she would be. Attractive pony, though.’

  ‘Oh, she’s lovely!’ Ruth’s voice was full of misery.

  ‘Most of the ponies are in the field. I’ll get Peter and we’ll go and see them.’

  They left Sixpence and walked down the row of loose-boxes to a gate which led to the house behind and, presumably, the field. Ruth glimpsed aristocratic heads, honest hunter heads, and the flashy gold beauty of Toadhill Flax. She paused. Mr. McNair said, ‘He takes some holding, that one. I wouldn’t offer him to a young girl. I’d lose my reputation.’

  They went through the gate, which led down between the new house and a newly planted orchard, to another gate at the bottom. As they passed the house, McNair turned his head and bawled, ‘Peter!’ By the time they got to the bottom Peter McNair was coming down behind them, a couple of halters in his hand. He joined them, leaning on the gate, and nodded to Ruth, but said nothing.

  There were about ten ponies in the field, which was large, stretching away to a line of elms on the top of a rise. Some of them raised their heads and looked towards the gate; two walked towards them in a hopeful fashion; one looked, gave a shrill whinny, and galloped away. Against the ridge of the hill, the gallop looked splendid, wild and free, and Ruth watched admiringly.

  McNair said, ‘Damned animal!’

  The pony was a bright bay, not bold in the way of Toadhill Flax, but with an airy, fine action. It seemed to float over the grass. Its gallop set off two or three of the others, but none of them was in earnest like the bay. They wheeled round a few times and went back to grazing. The bay stopped when it was on the horizon, and stood with its head up, watching.

  ‘We made a mistake, turning her out in this field,’ Mr. McNair said to Ruth. ‘Woodlark, a Dartmoor, T.B. cross. But wild as they come. There’s a lot of work there, to make anything of that one. Peter, fetch Sandalwood first.’

  Ruth watched Peter walk away across the field, feeling guilty to be causing all this trouble, when she knew now, with a deep-down, horrid certainty, that none of Mr. McNair’s ponies cost as little as forty pounds. Half of her longed to enjoy this feast of ponies; the other half trembled with fear at the thought of telling Mr. McNair of her paltry savings. Even when buying things like toothpaste, she did not like to cause the assistant any trouble. She always took the first one she saw, even if she did not like the taste, rather than ask the person to go to any trouble looking. And now here she was, having all this time and trouble spent on her by the exalted McNairs, and it would be to no avail. In silence she watched Peter approach a group of three ponies talking to them quietly. One came up to him, nuzzling his pockets, but he walked on to a bay that was still grazing, and offered it something out of his pocket. It came up and he haltered it, and one of the other ponies came up, pushing in for a titbit. There was a squeal of jealousy and a great show of teeth and laid-back ears, but Peter disentangled his pony with quiet tact and brought it back to the gate. It was a stocky bay gelding with a thick black mane and tail, a homely pony. Ruth could see him nicely in her back garden, a dependable sort who would go calmly past a dustcart and stop when she fell off. He was not as handsome as the others, but she could love him easily. He looked at her with humble, patient eyes.

  ‘A good beginner’s sort,’ said Mr. McNair. ‘Nothing spectacular, but foolproof. Eight years old.’

  ‘Oh, he’s lovely,’ Ruth said despairingly.

  ‘Ginny, I think,’ McNair said to Peter. ‘Then I think that’s the lot, at the moment.’

  Peter went away and came back with a dark bay mare with a mealy nose and a lot of wild mane. Ruth leaned on the gate, clenching her sticky hands over the top bar, as if she were being tortured. The two ponies stood, heads up, utterly desirable in every way, and she looked at them as if she knew what she was looking for, feeling only this terrible despair, and not able to utter a word of sense. McNair went on talking, but Ruth did not take in what he said. It was no use. They let the ponies go and walked back up to the yard. McNair said, ‘Those are the ones that are suitable, just now. In a week or two I may have something else to offer you. We have new ponies in nearly every week.’

  Ruth knew it was her turn to say something. They were back in the tidy yard. Peter stood just behind his father, saying nothing, and there was a pointed silence. Mr. McNair looked at Ruth. Gathering up all her courage, and feeling herself going scarlet, she said, ‘What – what is the price of – of –’ All the ponies’ names completely eluded her. The only one she could remember was Toadhill Flax. ‘– of – them?’

  ‘I could let the bay go for a hundred and twenty. And Ginny, perhaps. The others . . . Pennyroyal, say, a hundred and fifty. He’s quite a useful jumper, and is good in gymkhana events. The Welsh mare the same: she’s a little winner,
and you could get some good foals out of her later.’

  Her worst fears confirmed, Ruth felt her scarlet fade, and the cold despair take its place. All her instincts had been right. Not only twice but three times as much as her miserable forty pounds . . .

  She said, ‘I shall have to ask my father.’

  At that moment a large car drove into the yard and Mr. McNair said to Peter, ‘Here’s Matthews,’ and to Ruth, ‘Excuse me a moment.’ He hurried over to the car and Ruth, grateful to Matthews, whoever he was, was left standing with the silent Peter. Her tumbled emotions no longer disturbed her. It was all useless. She looked down at her feet and mumbled, ‘Thank you. I’ll go now.’

  Politely, still saying nothing, Peter followed her across the yard to where her shabby bicycle was propped against the wall. They passed McNair and his visitor, talking hard on the steps of the office, and McNair called out to Peter as he passed, ‘Stay around, Peter. We’ll get a saddle on that Woodlark tonight if it’s the last thing we do.’

  ‘All right,’ Peter said, without any expression.

  Ruth picked up her bike. ‘Thank you,’ she said again, awkwardly. ‘Good-bye.’

  ‘I’ll come down to the gate. It’s supposed to be shut.’

  Ruth would rather have shaken off Peter’s unforthcoming company, but was obliged to walk on with him down the drive. It then occurred to her that she would never have such an opportunity again to seek advice. At least to Peter she could admit her forty pounds, if not face to face with Mr. McNair.

  ‘Doesn’t your father ever have anything cheaper?’ she asked him. ‘I haven’t got that much money.’

  ‘Well – no. Not unless it’s very small. There’s never anything under eighty.’

  ‘I’ve only got forty,’ Ruth muttered.

  ‘Forty?’ Peter’s voice was doubtful, but not scornful. ‘You’d only get a young pony for forty, an unbroken pony. Or some old crock.’

  ‘A young pony? Like Woodlark, you mean?’

  ‘Oh, heavens, you don’t want a pony like Woodlark! She’s not worth anything at all. You want a quiet one. Mr. Marks, at Ramsey Heath, has young ponies quite cheap, sometimes. You ought to go and see him.’

  ‘Mr. Marks?’ Ruth fastened on the name, with a great uplifting of her spirits. ‘You mean he might have one for forty?’

  ‘He might. A two-year-old. He buys them at the sales, for a sort of hobby. If you get one with a quiet temperament, you ought to be able to manage all right. He lives at Bramhall, the farm on the right past the pub.’

  In that instant, Ruth’s world was transformed. She turned to Peter with an eager, shining face. ‘I shall go and see him. Thank you for telling me. Oh, thank you!’

  Peter looked quite surprised. He smiled, which made him look much more human. Ruth noticed that he had freckles, and was quite ordinary, on the ground. She pushed her bike through the gate and he shut it behind her.

  ‘Thank you very much!’ she said again, fervently. As she pedalled away down the road, she thought, ‘He thinks I’m barmy. But I don’t care!’ And she started to sing, free-wheeling down the hill.

  The next evening she pedalled to Bramhall, and found herself jerking down a rutted lane, with high out-of-control hedges on either side and ditches full of stinging-nettles. Bramhall was a collection of ramshackle old buildings, dung-heaps and picking hens, hemmed in with elms full of cawing rooks. It looked to Ruth far more like a forty-pound place than McNair’s, and she liked it instinctively. She liked the faded rose-red of the stable bricks and the thatch with grass growing out of it, and the sour smell of an early elderberry. She was full of hope. She left her bicycle by the gate, where it looked quite smart, and went into the yard. A youngish man was just shutting three cows into a cowshed. He turned round and looked at her with a cheerful grin.

  ‘I’m looking for Mr. Marks, about buying a pony,’ she said.

  ‘I’m Marks,’ said the man.

  He was not frightening at all, and Ruth was able to say quite easily, ‘I want a pony, but I only have forty pounds. Peter McNair said you might have one.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve been to McNair’s, have you? I’ll bet Mr. McNair didn’t offer you one for under a hundred, eh?’

  ‘No, he didn’t.’

  ‘Smart place, McNair’s.’

  ‘Yes, very.’

  ‘Somebody has to pay for it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let’s see what we’ve got, then, eh? It’s for you, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He told you they’re only partly broken? You can catch them, and halter them and handle them, but they’re only youngsters. Two-year-olds. I got this lot from Beaulieu – the New Forest sales. I got a dozen, last September, but I’ve sold most of them. There’s four left now. They’re down in the bottom field. We’ll go along. Just a moment.’

  He went into a shed and fetched a sieve of oats and a halter, and then led the way down a rutted track between more massive rampant hedges. It was a dull day, and Ruth had a sense of the earth, fed on damp, overwhelming Mr. Marks’s property with its swaggering growth. The verges were lush with forward grass, the budding branches tossed over their heads with an uncultivated abandon. The gate to the ponies’ field was set deep in rampant hawthorn, with gnarled Constable oaks on either side; the field was not very large, and sloped down to a stream and a thick wood full of crows. Ruth was enchanted with the old-fashionedness of it; the lovely scorn of modern clearance, the encouragement of crows and vermin-sheltering hedges. Later, she could see, it would be all knee-high buttercups and cow-parsley, like a Victorian painting. ‘There will be a pony here for me,’ she thought. ‘It is a “me” place. Not like McNair’s.’ A little shiver of excitement ran through her.

  Mr. Marks gave a shout and a whistle, and the four ponies converged upon the gate. They were all rough and muddy and, after McNair’s, definitely of a half-price breed. Except for one. Ruth’s eyes went past the thick-legged grey, the wall-eyed skewbald and the nondescript black, and rested on the pony that held back from the others. ‘That is for me,’ she thought.

  It was, in fact, nothing special in its looks: a gelding of an unusual bay-roan colour, like a bright bay that had been left out in the frost. His legs were black and his head was dark, with a small crescent of white between the eyes; the forelock was black and the mane grew whiter as it went down towards the withers where the frosty mantle seemed to have fallen most thickly. The stocky quarters were almost pure bay, and the thick tail black. ‘Circus pony,’ Ruth could almost hear Ted say. But the pony had a look, a presence, a way of standing which made the other three ponies look like cab-horses. He did not come up, but stood behind, head up, watching Ruth.

  ‘Oh, I like that one,’ Ruth said.

  Mr. Marks gave a grin and said, ‘You watch him.’

  He started to give each of the other three ponies a handful of oats out of the sieve, and immediately the little bay roan came up, shouldering the black and the skewbald roughly out of the way. His eyes, large and lively, showed no white, only his ears went back with greed and he plunged eagerly for Mr. Marks’s hand. The other ponies moved over for him, making jealous faces. Ruth had seen his cocky walk, the firm planting of his round, rather shaggy feet: it was jaunty, sure.

  ‘He’s the boss around here,’ said Marks, smiling. ‘You’re our fly boy, eh? Our smart one? That’s what we call him, Fly. He’s fly all right.’

  ‘Oh.’ Ruth was dubious now. What was fly, as an adjective? As a noun, and a name, it was horrid. As a description, it was rather worrying. Did Fly qualify, she wondered, for Peter McNair’s stipulation: a quiet temperament?

  ‘Is he – is he all right? I mean, quiet?’

  Mr. Marks pursed his lips. ‘Well now, if you’re looking for a real quiet one, I’d take the skewbald. Or the black. You can do anything with those two.’

  Ruth looked at the skewbald and the black. But beside Fly they were nothing ponies. They were nice, because they were ponies; they had gentle, intereste
d faces. But they hadn’t got the – the – Ruth groped for a word and could not find it – the thing that Fly had. Fly was a character.

  ‘But Fly – he’s quiet?’ She had to persist.

  ‘He’s got no vices. Wouldn’t kick or bite you. But he’s got more spirit than the others. I reckon he’ll be a more lively ride, when you get a saddle on him. I’ll be honest with you, you see. If it’s really quietness you’re looking for, you should have the skewbald or the black.’

  But Ruth could no longer consider the skewbald or the black. She knew already that it was going to be Fly. She only wanted Marks to tell her that he wasn’t actually bad.

  ‘Is he forty pounds?’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose so. If you want him that bad. I was asking fifty really. He’s a three-year-old, this one. He’s ready to be ridden. But I haven’t the time to school him myself. It takes too much patience for me. And my kid’s too little yet to ride.’

  Ruth, having found that Fly, by the nod of her head, could be hers, was suddenly petrified. She stared at him. She looked for all the things in the books, the faults with the strange names, and deficiencies of conformation, the signs of vice, and the indications of dire disease. And Fly stared back at her, four-square on his black hairy legs, and she could see nothing that the books mentioned, only the pony of her heart, as perfect as Shakespeare’s bit in all the anthologies, out of ‘Venus and Adonis’. ‘Oh, I must be sensible!’ she thought to herself. And Fly was looking at her boldly as if it was she who had the faults, knock-knees and rickets and pigeon-toes: it was a straight look, with a glint in it. It was not a look to make her feel sensible. It quenched her fright and her doubts.

  ‘Oh, please, I would like him,’ she said to Mr. Marks. ‘I’ve only got forty pounds.’

  ‘Well then, we’ll call it a deal,’ said Mr. Marks comfortably. He did not strike Ruth as a worrier. ‘He’s a good pony. The vet’s seen ’em all and can’t find anything wrong, so you’ll be all right there.’