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

by K. M. Peyton

  ‘A bit different from the sea-wall!’ Peter said, pulling up to wait.

  Fly-by-Night barged into Woodlark’s quarters, but Peter turned the mare instantly, before she had time to think about kicking. ‘We’ve made a Hunter Trials sort of course through the rides here. All the jumps are very low. I bet Fly-by-Night will do it, if Woodlark gives him a lead. Do you want to try it?’

  Ruth, getting her breath back, nodded. She was frightened, and longing to do it at the same time. She felt as if the trees were pressing down on her. It was like being indoors. There was a cracking of dry twigs and Woodlark was away, cantering over the thick, soft humus. Ruth felt Fly-by-Night go, without her telling him, and she sat there, head down, her throat dry with fright, but all her instincts up over the jumps ahead of herself. This, she recognized, was the very stuff of her dreams: Peter giving Fly-by-Night a lead and herself learning what it would be like at Brierley.

  The jumps came at her at all angles; she just got a warning in time by the flick of Woodlark’s black tail ahead of her. Fly-by-Night crashed through regardless, carrying away loads of brush on his thrashing hoofs. Ruth had a vision of Woodlark disappearing suddenly, as if over a precipice, then herself teetering on the edge of a peaty bank, looking down on Peter. She saw Woodlark stretched out, bounding away from her, then she was flying through the air as Fly-by-Night plunged in pursuit. Amazingly, at the bottom, she landed back in the saddle, although she was convinced that she had come down the bank quite independently of her pony. There was a jolt; she clutched a handful of mane, and stayed with him as he went over a log and away down a stinging ride, hoof-fuls of peat from Woodlark’s hoofs flinging up in his face. For a moment she had time to enjoy it, the muffled ground running beneath, the smell of wet bark and pungent leaf, and the sourness of fungus and decay; then Peter had turned right-handed ahead of her and they were flying a bank into a thicket. There was running water below, and the clutching of brambles. Ruth shut her eyes. Fly-by-Night stopped suddenly.

  ‘Still there?’ she heard Peter say, and they were out on the edge of the open fields again, pulling up on familiar slippery grass. Woodlark’s nostrils were red as she curvetted to a standstill, all feminine elegance, Peter’s hands taking her up, strong but not rough. Fly-by-Night stopped in three bounds, tearing up streamers of turf. Ruth landed up his neck.

  ‘Oh, heavens!’ Ruth muttered. How did Peter have time to think? she wondered. How would she ever do it, alone?

  ‘Lots of that is what you want,’ Peter said. ‘It’s very good for getting them handy. If you came up every week-end, he’d soon be going round without any trouble.’

  ‘Oh, if I could –!’

  ‘But why not?’

  Wracked with fears, longings, and doubts, Ruth left Fly-by-Night in the McNair paddocks and cycled home on Peter’s bike. She had half-expected to see the removal van outside and all their possessions on the pavement, but when she asked her mother, ‘Did they buy it?’ Mrs. Hollis looked at her in amazement, and laughed. ‘Gracious me, you’re in a hurry! We’ve had three lots of people to see, but nobody’s falling over themselves to give us a cheque. These things take time, as a rule.’ Ruth, without Fly-by-Night in the garden, felt bereaved. ‘This is what it will be like if we move,’ she thought. What good would a pony be to her half across the county, a Saturday pony? A pony was for talking to when you went out of the back door, and for looking at out of your bedroom window, and riding even if you only had half an hour before tea. What good would Fly-by-Night be, left in a paddock, even a McNair paddock, if nobody bothered with him except at week-ends? Now, just when her dreams of Peter helping her were coming true, satisfaction was bludgeoned by all the other circumstances. Ruth wept. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ her mother asked.

  ‘It’s her age,’ Ted said, which was a family joke to explain the unpredictable.

  Fly-by-Night was shod and Ruth rode him home. In his field that night he whinnied for his lost companions, and roamed up and down the hedges. ‘He’d have friends if he lived at McNair’s,’ Ruth thought. ‘But he wouldn’t have me.’ She didn’t think he would mind terribly, not having her, but she minded. She wept again. Her mother gave her two aspirins and a drink of hot lemon.

  Peter was right about the house not being sold very quickly. Ruth, Ted and Elizabeth got used to putting everything away and keeping the place excruciatingly tidy for the couples who would call inconveniently in the evenings and poke round their bedrooms and in the airing-cupboard and the bathroom. Mr. and Mrs. Hollis went to look at flats, and came home with long faces, saying nothing. Because she was going to leave it, Ruth loved the grassy tracks down to the creek more and more. The stubble was ploughed, snow fell on the saltings and piled up in big drifts against the sea-wall. The winter was as bad as the summer had been good, and there were only a few Saturdays when Ruth was able to ride over to Hillingdon. Even then the wood was bogged down and the ground too wet for jumping. She would hack through the fields with Peter and they would come back into the house for platefuls of steaming risotto round the fire, then Ruth would hurry home along the darkening roads, wincing at the sluicings from passing cars. But Fly-by-Night had enough to eat, because Mr. McNair came down in the estate car and left sacks of pony-nuts and some bales of good hay.

  One Wednesday evening a middle-aged couple who had looked at the house earlier called back and left Mr. Hollis a deposit on it. ‘They don’t want to move in any great hurry,’ Ruth heard him say, ‘but I suppose we’d better decide what we’re going to do.’

  ‘The flat over the butcher’s shop, next door to Woolworth’s was the best of the last batch,’ Mrs. Hollis replied.

  Ruth felt sick. Her parents asked her if she would like to go and see it with them, but she shook her head, white and silent. Ted went, and came back and said, ‘It’s all right. There’s a good yard round the back for a motor bike. Near Ron, too.’

  It was snowing softly. In the field Fly-by-Night’s back was melting the snow as it fell, but his roan made it look as if it was lying on him. He whinnied impatiently for his nuts, shaking drops of moisture off his muzzle hairs. Ruth stroked his hard neck. Under its roughness, his coat was shining with Mr. McNair’s good feeding, and he was fit, and his hoofs shapely from the blacksmith. Ruth went up the garden and cried again, over the washing-up, and her mother said sharply, ‘Ruth, for heaven’s sake! At least you can keep him – what more do you want?’ But the flat next to Woolworth’s was fifteen miles from Hillingdon.

  Three days later, when the thaw set in, Ron called. As he unwound all his layers and wrappings in the kitchen, his nose shining red in his good-natured, unhandsome face, Ruth put the kettle on to make him a cup of tea.

  ‘There was an ambulance going down the lane at the bottom. Asked me for Mr. Lacey’s. So I went along to show ’em the way. He’s got his daughter over there from London, but she said the cold was too much for him. He’s got pneumonia. He looked bad. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the finish of him.’

  ‘Oh, poor Mr. Lacey!’ Ruth said. ‘I didn’t know.’ And even as she spoke the words, an unworthy thought came into her head. She looked at Ron and saw that the unworthy thought was in his head, too. Flushing slightly, she turned away to fetch the tea-caddy. They neither of them said anything more about Mr. Lacey.

  It snowed again the next week, and Ruth, unable to resist the temptation, went down the lane and walked up Mr. Lacey’s garden path. The pear trees, loaded with snow, seemed to lean against the dilapidated lean-to kitchen. Big puddles lay on the stone flags inside. Ruth could not see her mother there, somehow. With a set face she peered in through the living-room windows. The ceilings were cracked and flakes of plaster lay on the carpet like indoor snow. She could see the narrow staircase curling up, and the brick floor. At the back there was a conservatory with a vine in it. Ruth turned her head away and walked on down the garden. The old fruit trees made arched roofs of snow over her head; every move on her part brought a rushing avalanche. Beyond the trees w
ere the old sheds, a line of them, with sagging roofs, cluttered about with old water-butts and roll’s of wire-netting and rotted rabbit hutches. Beyond again, a gate, and two acres of virgin snow, quilted with birds’ feet, stretching towards the marshes. Ruth stood in the snow and squeezed her face up with longing. ‘Oh, God, please! Please could it happen? He needn’t die; he could just go and live with his daughter.’

  But when she got home her mother said Mr. Lacey had died that afternoon.

  12

  A DAY OF DECISIONS

  ‘OH, THE MESSINESS of it!’ Ruth said to Ron. ‘The not knowing. The misery of it!’

  She sat at the kitchen table, with the Hunter Trials entry form in front of her. There was a month to go, and a smell of spring in the air outside.

  ‘Woe, woe, woe!’ Ted wailed. ‘Oh, misery me!’ He reached over for a box of crisps that stood on the table and ducked his hand in.

  ‘Hasn’t she made her mind up yet?’ Ron said.

  ‘Oh, reely, I don’t know what to do for the best, Mr. ’Ollis,’ said Ted in a mimicking voice. ‘George says sell the place and Edie says keep it, it’ll be worth a lot of money for building one of these days. And our Ada says we could use it for a summer cottage. And Joe says keep it in the family; our Tom has hankerings after being a farmer, and he’s only a year more to do at school and we could set him up in tomatoes, like, if we had a bit of ground. And our Ethel says –’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ said Ruth. She wanted to buy Mr. Lacey’s house so badly that she could not bear Ted to joke about it. Her father wanted to buy it, too, and her mother, not at all enthusiastic, at least agreed that it could be made into something habitable. But their own house was sold and in six weeks they were going to have to move out, and Mr. Lacey’s only daughter could not make up her mind whether to accept Mr. Hollis’s offer or not. Ruth prayed for her every night, prayed for the woman’s addled mind to clear, for her to agree to sell it. If it had not been for the Hunter Trials coming so close, so that they now filled her mind largely to the exclusion of everything else, she did not think she could have stood the suspense for so long. Mr. Lacey’s place was paradise, and Ruth felt as if she were standing at the gates, looking in, and Mr. Lacey’s daughter was fumbling in her large untidy handbag for the key. For weeks and weeks she had been fumbling. Ruth had gone thin again, and edgy, and her father said, ‘It doesn’t matter that much, Ruth,’ as he had once said about buying a pony, but this time he did not say it with any great conviction, because he, too, wanted to buy Mr. Lacey’s cottage almost as much as Ruth. ‘You really could do things with a place like that,’ he would say, standing dreamily in front of the fire, jingling his money in his pocket. ‘You’ll need to, believe me,’ Mrs. Hollis would say, rather sharply. ‘I’ll sweep it up for you,’ Elizabeth told her. ‘It only wants dusting. It’s a nice house.’

  Ted, looking for another motor bike to buy with his insurance money from the accident, had ear-marked one of the sheds for a workshop. He was back at work again, and happy. Ruth had hoped that even if they didn’t get Mr. Lacey’s house they might have stayed where they were now that Ted was working again, but her parents were not going back on their decision to move.

  ‘We must get a cheaper place,’ Mr. Hollis said firmly. ‘I’m not changing my mind.’

  He did not like his work very much, Ruth knew, so she supposed it must be a poor life for him to work without joy merely to pay for necessities like a roof and food, and with no money left over for having a bit of fun. Sometimes in the summer he would walk down to the river to watch the sailing, and come back very quiet, and rather short-tempered. Ruth knew he would like a boat, although he never said so. Even a holiday, which they had not had now for five years.

  But Ruth, when she got to thinking about it too much, had only to turn her mind to the Brierley Hunter Trials to know what real apprehension was. The days were drawing inexorably nearer. If she had thought – as she had thought last year – that she had no chance at all of getting Fly-by-Night round the course, she would not have bothered; she would have admitted her failure. But she knew now – thanks to the McNair schooling grounds – that he had a chance. He was not hopeless. If he was in the right mood he would go like Woodlark herself. Peter no longer had to give him a lead. Anyone else but herself, Ruth thought, would be looking forward to the date with a pleasurable anticipation, but she could only face it with near panic. But she was going.

  ‘Will you be going?’ she had asked Peter at school.

  ‘Oh, I might. When is it?’ Peter said, very off-hand. Ruth told him the date and he said, ‘If there’s nothing else to do I might.’

  When Ruth rode out with Pearl, Fly-by-Night could give the Arab mare a lead over the gap into the stubble field. Pearl, unwilling to accede that Fly-by-Night had improved, said, ‘It’s Milly being off colour, with this stiff leg of hers.’

  ‘Haven’t you got the vet yet?’ Ruth asked her.

  Pearl shook her head, but looked rather chastened. ‘I will,’ she said.

  Two days later she came round to Ruth’s on her bicycle and said, ‘What do you think? Mr. Richards came round today to look at Milly, and he said she’s got navicular. Apparently it’s incurable, so Daddy’s buying me a new pony.’

  Ruth looked at Pearl in astonishment.

  ‘But what will you do with Milly?’

  Pearl shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She’s useless, according to Mr. Richards. He said it never gets better, and the pony stumbles a lot and is unsafe to ride. So Daddy says I can have a new one!’ She was obviously far more excited about the new pony than concerned about the fate of Milky Way. Ruth looked at her coldly.

  ‘Will you keep Milky Way?’

  ‘Mr. Richards says we should breed a foal from her. But we shall want the stable for the new pony. I don’t know what we’ll do.’

  ‘A foal . . .?’ Ruth’s eyes opened wide at this entrancing idea. ‘You won’t sell her? You can’t sell her! Oh, it would be lovely to breed a foal!’

  ‘Yes, but I want something to ride, don’t I?’

  At school the next day Ruth reported to Peter. ‘What is navicular anyway?’ she asked him. ‘Is it as bad as she makes out?’

  ‘Yes, it gets gradually worse with age, so a horse with navicular disease isn’t really any good. It’s always liable to go lame. It’s a sort of inflammation of one of the bones in the foot. My father wouldn’t touch a horse if he thought it had navicular.’

  ‘I wonder what they’ll do?’ Ruth mused.

  ‘They could sell her to someone for breeding. She’d still be quite valuable – that’s the big advantage with mares, when something like that crops up.’

  Ruth drifted through the next lesson in a dream, choosing a sire worthy of Milky Way, seeing the mare grazing peacefully under summer trees with her Arab foal. Her head was full of dreams: of Fly-by-Night winning the Hunter Trials, of her father buying Mr. Lacey’s house . . . ‘Ruth Hollis, stop biting your nails,’ the teacher said acidly.

  There was a fortnight to go to the date for Brierley . . . a week. Ruth started to worry about getting there, because it was a long way to hack, all on the roads. Her mother was worried about moving, because they had nowhere, as yet, to move to at the end of the month. ‘You must give that woman an ultimatum,’ she said to her husband. ‘We can’t wait for her to make up her mind for ever.’ ‘All right,’ said Mr. Hollis. Ted was completely involved in buying a new motor bike, going round looking at machines with Ron every evening. Pearl’s father was driving all over the countryside looking at expensive ponies for Pearl.

  ‘What a mess it is all at once,’ Ruth thought again. ‘So many things going on, everything so untidy . . .’ But just then, in her mind, only the Saturday of the Hunter Trials mattered. All the other things could wait until afterwards. Triumph or disaster would happen on Saturday, and all the other things would sort themselves out, too, shortly afterwards . . . triumph or disaster. ‘One thing at a time,’ Ruth thought.

  On the Thurs
day Peter said to her at school, quite casually, ‘We’re taking Woodlark to Brierley on Saturday. We’ll pick you up if you like. It’s not out of the way.’

  ‘Fly-by-Night, you mean? In the horse-box?’ Ruth wanted to get it quite right.

  ‘Yes. We’ll take the big one.’

  ‘Thank you. That would be a terrific help.’ Ruth spoke calmly, but the offer was such a relief that she could quite easily have embraced Peter on the spot.

  ‘By the way,’ Peter grinned suddenly, ‘Father-of-Pearl called yesterday, to see if we had any animals suitable for his dear daughter.’

  ‘Oh, and did you?’

  ‘They fancied – wait for it – get ready to laugh – you’ll never guess –’

  ‘Woodlark?’

  ‘Right first time!’ Peter was grinning. ‘That’s why we’re taking her to Brierley, as Father-of-Pearl wants to see what she’ll do. Of course, she’ll go round like a bomb, so we’re not worried. Father tried to tell Father-of-Pearl what an absolute beast she was, but he kept saying, “My girl’s a splendid little rider. She can handle anything.” So after a bit Father piped down. And Pearl was doing her uppity act, treating Father like a shop assistant, so he came in hopping mad and said, “Let them buy her, and good luck to ’em.” It was a real laugh. I enjoyed every minute of it.’

  Ruth could not help smiling, picturing Peter taking it all in with his non-expression on his face, not saying anything.

  ‘If she rides Woodlark like she rides Milky Way, she’ll get bucked off in double-quick time, splendid little rider and all,’ Peter said.

  Ruth knew that Woodlark was a pony who would stick up for herself; she was as bold, and crafty, as Milky Way was sweet and kind. Ruth had no wish that Pearl should come to a bad end, but she hoped more that Milky Way would be made happy.