by Manda Scott
And so it wasn’t, after all that, me that made the lunch. Sandy Logan seemed uncommonly interested in meeting the rest of the ponies and so I introduced him, one at a time, to the remaining seven. Don’t ask me why. I don’t usually introduce my string to complete strangers. Particularly not in the middle of March. Granted, none of them is as flighty as Rain; trekking ponies can’t afford to be flighty, but they’re never overfond of visitors in the holidays and they were definitely well pissed off with being kept inside. They took to him well enough though—even Midnight, who was through her colic surgery by then and was more than a touch cranky with strangers.
MacDonald had no real need to meet the ponies afresh. He spent half the winter after Bridget died helping me to muck out and he knew the farm as well as I did, possibly better. There were still parts of the hills I hadn’t ever explored. He saved them for me like treats for a child and took me out on the days when he thought I needed cheering up. There had been a fair few of those after that Christmas.
It’s not that he was ever specifically invited, you understand, and equally, he had never asked if he could come. He just turned up once in a while when he had some time off and took the dog out ferreting or helped me stack the bales that had just come in off the lorry or built up the fire while I was on the phone to Galbraith’s, wheedling down the cost of another month’s feed for the ponies. It worked well enough. It still does. He’s there when he’s wanted and he’s not when he’s not. On the whole.
So he knew me well enough to look in the Rayburn for the potatoes, to rescue them before they turned into small lumps of charcoal and then to rake through the debris in the fridge and the larder to produce something approaching an edible meal. When he was ready, he banged a wooden spoon on the back of a metal tray and the sound carried, just about, above the noise of the rain.
I heard it before the gnome did. He was standing with his ear to Balder’s left nostril, listening to the crackles of the big bay’s breathing in much the same way the rest of us would listen to the sound of an engine firing on three cylinders.
‘It’s better when he’s out in the paddock, aye?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’ Naturally. That’s a feature of airborne allergies: remove the allergen and the condition improves. Out in the paddock equals no more hay. No more hay means no more spores to breathe in. No more spores, no more cough. Simple. Except when it’s raining. And I didn’t make it rain.
The tea-tray rattle carried across the yard for a second time.
‘I think that’s MacDonald,’ I said. ‘We should …’
The little man was looking upwards, pensive. Scanning the barn, skirting round the area where the white-wash of the walls meets the tiles of the roof. His eyes narrowed. There were cobwebs. There have always been cobwebs. Even in the four years when Bridget was in charge, there were cobwebs. It’s simply that I don’t normally look up at the eaves and count them.
‘Look,’ I tried again. ‘We really ought to …’
‘Prevailing wind’s from the west, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘From over the village?’
What? ‘Yes, I think so. Why?’
‘You could open up the brickwork,’ he said. ‘Up there, see?’ He nodded upwards, jutting up with the peak of his cap like a duck grabbing bread. ‘Put in some ventilation tiles. With baffles on them on the western side. It wouldn’t stop it, mind, but it would help the old lad’s breathing.’ He rubbed the big horse on the muzzle and Balder, knowing that the gnome was absolutely not responsible for the rain, shoved his nose gently into the crook of his arm. ‘See? He thinks it’s a good idea.’
Oh good. That’s it settled then. What more could we possibly ask?
‘We’ll start work in the morning,’ I said, without pausing to consider whether gnomes understand the meaning of irony.
‘No, no,’ he shook his head. ‘After the weekend will do.’ He smiled his gap-smile and patted me on the shoulder in a paternal fashion and pointed again with his cap, this time in the direction of the house from which the clatter of the tea-tray sounded for a third time. ‘I think we’re being called inside,’ he said.
The kitchen smelt warm. MacDonald had banked up the fire and hung his jacket across a chair back in front of it. The filter of peat-smoke met with the steam of the wool and both wove in with the cacophony of food smells coming from the far side of the room. Two full plates sat on the breakfast bar and the kettle hissed quiet curses to itself amidst a clutter of cats on the Rayburn. MacDonald sat in one of the two big armchairs by the fire with his feet up on a low stool, a copy of the Scotsman spread out on his knee and his plate balanced on the arm of his chair. Two of the younger kittens lay on the floor and tied knots in his laces. The dog lay peacefully at his feet. Very domestic.
I like the farm. It has a sense of belonging that the flat off Byres Road never had. I spent four years living in town and it was one of the bigger mistakes in my life. There wasn’t a day when I didn’t miss the farm and the woman I had shared it with and now, even with her gone, I don’t often pass through the back door without a sense of relief at being back home again.
But I don’t have visitors often. Not new ones, at any rate, and so the gnome’s entrance into my domain had a fair degree of novelty value. I found myself looking at the place with a stranger’s eyes and, like the cobwebs in the barn, patches of grime on the windowledge suddenly came to light. There were fingerprints on the window, too. The small leaded one above the sink that looks out over the duck pond. I tend to throw the remains of the morning toast to the birds and must, on occasion, have the odd bit of butter on a finger. There were more cat-hairs, too, than I would have thought likely. Random clumps of grey and orange, tawny and white hairs were scattered on the chair backs, on the cushions, on the windowledges and in small piles in the corners. And there were cobwebs, of course. There are always cobwebs somewhere if you look for them.
It shouldn’t be too surprising. Nobody expects a working farmhouse to be perfect. Not one this old. The place that is now my home is older than Nina’s cottage by a couple of centuries, and although Bridget and I did a frantic round of decorating when we first moved in, I’d left before it was time for a second round and no one else had thought to do it instead. The day Sandy Logan came to visit, it needed a fresh coat of paint in much the same way that the barn needed a fresh set of tiles but I’d been back home for less than six months by then and I had better things to do with the intervening time than watch paint dry on the walls.
MacDonald looked up as we entered, his mouth full. He waved a fork at the plates and went back to his reading of the paper. ‘You don’t mind me starting without you?’ he asked and then, not to me: ‘Majesty Blaze came in at 7 to 1 at Newark.’
‘Aye, I saw.’ The gnome took the plate I offered him and settled, without being asked, in the second of the two big chairs by the fire. I am used to MacDonald treating my home as his own. It was a little unsettling to watch somebody else do the same. I took my own plate and sat on one of the high stools by the breakfast bar where I could keep an eye on both of them and try to figure out what was going on. Why, for instance, MacDonald should suddenly evolve so unlikely an interest in racing. I’d known him for nearly half a year by then and in all of that time, I’d never seen him show the slightest interest in the back pages of the papers.
‘Sandy’s dad was a trainer,’ said MacDonald. ‘In Ayrshire.’
The man reads minds. It’s one of his less endearing features.
‘Archie Logan,’ said the gnome, and they both looked at me as if I was supposed to say something.
I took a mouthful of baked potato and said nothing at all.
‘He trained the 1959 Derby winner,’ said MacDonald. ‘You might have heard of him.’
You have to be joking.
I refuse to choke on my meal just to satisfy this man’s warped sense of the ridiculous.
I bit down hard on a fragment of overdone skin and did my best to stare him down. MacDonald absorbed the look with compl
ete equanimity and let his eyebrows drift upwards for the second time in one day.
I wasn’t in the best frame of mind to play games. ‘I wasn’t born in 1959, Inspector,’ I said. ‘And I wouldn’t remember the Derby winner if I was.’
I haven’t called him Inspector since the night he shot the man who was trying to kill me. It made the point well enough. He grinned peaceably and withdrew from the field of battle.
The gnome carried on the charge.
‘Are you as young as that?’ he asked, with some semblance of awe. ‘You don’t look it, right enough.’ He grinned his faerie, gap-toothed smile.
I really don’t like playing games. I like it even less when I’m the ball.
‘Do you want to tell me,’ I asked carefully, ‘exactly why you’re here?’
MacDonald knows me well enough to see when he’s reached the limit. I’ve never thrown him off the premises yet, but that doesn’t mean I won’t if I have to. He put his plate on the floor and, with it, laid down the various layers of dissemblance.
‘Has the lassie changed her mind?’ he asked.
‘Caroline? No. Of course not. She won’t.’ She has no reason to. And she’s not being unreasonable. Or even illogical. She just wants a life of her own. I may not like it, but I can hardly argue against it.
He smiled thinly and nodded as if all of this was somehow relevant. ‘So are you still going to sell the ponies?’
‘Yes. I don’t have any choice, Stewart. We’ve been through this before. Several times.’ Almost daily, in fact, since the day after Christmas when Caroline Leader broke it to me that she couldn’t handle the myriad ghosts of the farm and she wanted to sell her half of the business so that she could move back to her old life in the West End. She didn’t mention that she was taking Elspeth with her, of course, but it became apparent very shortly afterwards.
I shook my head. ‘Nothing has changed.’ And I don’t particularly want to air my personal crises in public, thank you.
He heard what he was supposed to hear and ignored it anyway. ‘Sandy here’s got a wee bit of a proposal for you,’ he said.
A proposal. Has he indeed? If MacDonald is old enough to be my father, then this man is old enough to be my grandfather. Easily.
The mind boggles.
Stability suddenly seemed more prudent than height. I slid down off the stool and sat on the floor. ‘What kind of proposal?’ I asked.
And so they told me.
The gnome’s father trained racehorses in Ayr and Sandy started off life as a stable lad with plans to be Champion Jockey, at least in the UK, if not internationally, by the time he was twenty-one. Fate and better riders stopped that one in its tracks and the young Sandy, never one to be second grade at anything, took to farriery instead. A heaven-sent decision if there ever was one. In shoeing horses, he found his forte. He set up shop in Newmarket and made serious money getting up at four in the morning and travelling round the racing yards shoeing and reshoeing before the early gallops. He would probably have spent the rest of his life there if a well-placed kick from a particularly scatty two-year-old hadn’t shattered his lumbar spine and put him in the orthopaedic ward at Addenbrooke’s for the best part of the next twenty-four months. By the time they let him out and taught him how to walk again, his juniors had the business well in hand and Sandy had realised there was more to life than horseshoes. His fingers were swollen with arthritis and his back was too sore to be worth bending over for six straight hours a day, however much money he was making. And, besides, he was homesick. He wanted to spend his winter years in the place he’d grown up. Somewhere with hills instead of the endless flat fens of East Anglia where the closest things to a mountain is the half-mile of one-in-ten slope that makes up the training run of Newmarket Heath.
So he sold the farriery business and all the goodwill that went with it to the people who had been doing the job so well without him and headed back home to Scotland to spend his fortune breeding the perfect racehorse.
That was it. They sat there in their armchairs on either side of the fire and waited for me to look suitably impressed.
The gnome laid his plate on the floor and took off his cap. He’s bald on top—completely, shiningly bald with a rim of white fuzzed hair flaring out just above ear height. There is no good reason why being bald should render a man more human, but it did. One simple movement and suddenly I was not sitting with a gnome at all. Simply an old man with crippling arthritis and a lot of time on his hands. And a lifetime’s worth of horselore that he didn’t want to lose.
‘I still don’t understand the offer,’ I said.
‘He wants to buy into the business,’ said MacDonald, patiently from his side of the fire. ‘So you don’t have to sell the ponies.’
If only.
‘The money’s only half the problem, Stewart,’ I said. ‘You know that. Even with the cash, I can’t manage the business on my own.’
‘So then, you need a partner. Someone you can trust. Someone who knows horses and has the time to spend looking after them. You have the farm and the horses and the land. Sandy here has the time.’
Segments of my life drifted urgently across my field of vision.
‘I’m not selling the farm,’ I said. ‘Not until I absolutely have to.’
The old man leaned over and laid his hand on my arm. ‘I’m not offering to buy the farm, lass,’ he said gently, and his voice had lost the sing-song lilt it took on when he was telling his story. ‘Just the business. Not the land, or the barn or the house or the ponies. Just the business itself.’
‘But I’ve got no idea what it’s worth. We could take months sorting it out. I haven’t got that kind of time.’
‘I’ve got a lawyer who’ll do it over the weekend,’ said the gnome. ‘If you don’t like the answer, you can find someone else.’
I could. But Bridget used to be my lawyer. I know too much about the inside workings of the legal profession to trust many of them after that. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Yours will do as good as any. If I really don’t like the numbers, you and I can argue it out without the sharks making a killing from both of us.’
The gnome spat on his hand and held it out. Foul habit. Can’t imagine that goes down too well in the high-bred stables of Newmarket. ‘So it’s a deal?’ he offered.
‘What’s all the hurry?’ I asked.
‘Trekking season starts in three weeks. The barn needs a lot of work before we start having folk running through it for the summer. You’ll need the cash to get it fixed,’ said MacDonald.
‘The breeding season’s gone three months in,’ said Sandy Logan. ‘I’ve a mare I’ve got my eye on and I want her in foal before the month’s out.’
Of the two, the latter seemed by far the more rational reason to hurry.
I took his hand, ignored the sliding sensation as I gripped his palm. ‘Deal,’ I said.
Oddly enough, it has worked. It’s not perfect, but it’s a great deal better than it could have been.
Without Sandy, I’d be back in a flat in the West End by now, and bitter into the bargain. As it is, three years down the line, I have the farmhouse to myself, a thriving business, a handful of yard lads and lasses—most of whom seem to harbour ambitions to be Champion Jockey one day (and who am I to disillusion them?)—and a field at the back of the hill that is quite clearly lodged at the end of some horse-loving leprechaun’s rainbow. The first crop of foals raced as two-year-olds last season and, of the seven, we had three placed, including one group winner, which is better than most make in a lifetime. We even have our own small-scale pony-breeding programme, designed to produce the best trekking ponies seen this side of the Highland line. Sandy Logan never does anything that’s not going to be a winner.
And so on this particular Friday evening, somewhere towards the middle of April, I made my way across the yard in the dark and the wet, and the only real problem in my life was that Gordon had dropped off the next week’s sack of potatoes after Sandy went home and it was sittin
g just outside the back door getting wet. I heaved it into the porch and then spent a peaceful half-hour feeding the dog and clearing up the debris left by the cats and dithering over whether or not to bother lighting a fire, and so it was later than it should have been when I found the note that Sandy had left wedged under the kettle. That, in itself, was odd. Odd enough to make me stop and read it through when I might otherwise have carried on playing with the fire. I don’t get notes often from Sandy. He doesn’t write much if he can help it. The joints in his right hand get worse with each passing winter and holding a pen is difficult to the point of impossibility.
The words smudged across the paper, all sharp angles and painful curves.
Friday 6:15
Sorry. Got to go. Rain’s off her food. Could be foaling. Not milked up yet. Not straining. Keep an eye on her. West Acre Paddock. S.
Rain. My Rain, blossomed now from shy filly to strong-minded, full-bellied, maiden mare. She was ten days over dates by then but maidens go over all the time. I learned that the first year when I stayed up with the first one of Sandy’s maidens, watching her hourly through the nights for close to two weeks. She dropped her foal at four o’clock in the afternoon while I was at work and it took me a week of early nights to catch up on the lost sleep. After that, I stopped worrying about first-foaling mares, even Rain.
And so I did, after all, take the time to build up the fire and to make a sandwich and to sneak a quick look at the headlines while I ate it and it was somewhere after ten o’clock when I finally pulled on a jacket and dug the big torch from the cupboard under the stairs and forayed out into the wild and the wet to see if Rain had dropped for Sandy the filly he wanted.
