by Fiona Walker
‘Your father?’
‘Keith Moon. He walked away afterwards. Daddy slammed a Subaru Forester into a horse chestnut on the A46. Not so lucky.’ She read a reply from Muir, who inevitably texted as though writing a telegram: Disembark train 14.45 hrs. ETA bungalow 15.00 hrs. Be advised fish lunch. M&MF.
That’s much later than agreed, she replied. Can you drop Kes off at the stud on your way home?
Negative. K can stay overnight with us if preferred. M&MF
‘Piss off,’ she told the phone, good mood evaporating as she typed: Will be there 3 p.m. sharp. Be advised, NOT happy about this.
‘We might as well go back, Luca,’ she said distractedly. ‘They’re running late.’
She wanted to scream and kick the footwell. They’d be calling Mack now, she guessed. He would log the exchange in his meticulously kept records. Records that would undoubtedly catalogue the many, many times she’d drunk a whole bottle of wine to herself in an evening, sometimes two, not to mention the swigs from the cooking wine box in between, the vodka bottles he’d found hidden behind the recipe books, miniatures in her knicker drawer. The evidence was all there against her. She needed her own to prove that she was changing all that.
Luca hadn’t started the car. He was waiting.
‘Okay, I’ll go with you to a meeting next week.’ She had to work hard not to add ‘you bastard’ as prickles of irritation returned like a plague of ants, adding instead, ‘On one condition.’
‘Which is?’
‘You tell your story. Right now. To me.’ That would see the engine started and get them back home in five minutes, she predicted.
The smile was back. ‘I can’t do that.’
‘Why not? Afraid I’ll tell?’
‘It’s not that.’ He glanced across at her warily.
‘You don’t have to talk about yourself to a room of strangers. Just me.’
He brandished the smile again, overpowering in the small space.
She mirrored it, fed up with all the hush and myth surrounding the Horsemaker, with strange incoming calls and multilingual outgoing ones, their International Man of Mystery in breeches. Was he even a drinker at all?
‘What’s stopping you?’
‘You just want to shame me, Pax.’
She laughed, looking away, hating the truth bared. ‘You think I’m that cruel?’
‘I think you’re that pissed off with me.’
‘It’s them, not you.’ She shook her phone, as if little voodoo dolls of the Forsyths would rattle around inside and break a few bones. ‘And I do want to know your story.’ As she said it, she realised it was true. She’d never met anyone who had openly admitted to sharing the same problem. ‘It might help. I won’t shame you, I promise. We have time. The Grand-Forces’ train is barely pulling out of Cheltenham.’
The smile fought her off. ‘You really think it’ll help?’
‘Yes.’ Curiosity catching hold, Pax pushed harder. ‘Tell me how you reached your plum gin moment?’
In the back seat, Knott stood up to stretch and curl back down again. The car rocked as a gust of wind caught it.
Pax turned her phone to airplane mode. There was something strange happening inside the Noddy car, a shift in atmosphere she couldn’t place, but it made her nerve ends tingle, her resolve deepen. She was known in the family for her ability to get blood from a stone, as well as her patience. She crossed her arms and settled back. This was a stand-off.
Luca stared out at the road. ‘You’re a stubborn woman.’
‘Yip.’ The car rocked again in the wind. ‘When did it start?’
‘A while back. I’ve always liked a few jars with the lads, you know? I was no lightweight.’
‘What changed?’
‘Oh, the usual. Unlucky in love.’
‘Get dumped, get drunk?’
‘Her dad had other plans for her and warned me off, but yeah, same end result.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Late twenties. I took a job out in the Middle East afterwards. Muslim country, but we all drank more than a night on the lash back home. Hard liquor, none of your Beamish and lager. I got my taste for Scotch there, I guess. I was downing a hell of a lot more by the time I came back.’ He threw a glance at her, eyes intense.
‘Go on.’
‘Things had gone badly out there. They didn’t get much better when the fella who’d warned me off his daughter offered me my old job back in Canada. I figured I’d got over it enough, and I wanted to stay out of Europe. Grand yard, he has, middle of nowhere. He can out-drink anyone and still jump off fastest against the clock. I kind of carried on in that fashion.’
‘Nothing to do with the daughter?’
‘She married someone else.’ His eyes flashed. ‘They moved away.’
‘This is where you were working before you came here?’
He nodded. ‘I went back most years. Your man there breeds horses like you’ve never seen, cool-headed as fighter pilots and scopey as hell, not like your tough hot bloods here. It’s a big old place – a thousand hectares, near enough – easy to find your own headspace. Never as many stars in the sky as there.’ Smiling, he looked away again.
The Irish brogue lent him a natural storyteller’s voice, his enthusiasm bewitching.
‘There’s a fifty-acre lake in the woods with a log cabin the family use for fishing trips. We’d drive up there to work on our functioning alcoholism. It’s probably thanks to him training me up that I eventually got so I could drink a bottle of liquor a night and still ride ten the next day.’
‘You should be dead.’
‘It was only in the last few months it got that bad. Winters there are harsh. The man’s a showjumping legend, but he’s a hard bastard with people, especially his family. Five Olympics his horses have competed in, one for each of his marriages.’
‘A difficult character, then?’
‘No more than many. I’ve worked with him a decade on and off; we understand each other. They treat me like family when I stay, and he protected me from some bad stuff going down after the job in the Middle East. But I went against his wishes, let him down.’
Pax remembered the call before he’d arrived, the death threat that had so shocked poor Lester and amused Ronnie.
‘What happened to the daughter who got married? The one who’s the reason you started drinking in the first place?’
He studied the road ahead. ‘She had an affair.’
‘With you?’
‘It’s over now. I drank way too much; I had to break the habit. That’s my story.’
‘That’s barely an elevator pitch!’ Pax complained. ‘If it took you from highballs on the pontoon to suicide in a saddle, that’s some love affair. I know what it takes to drink, remember? What changed?’
There was a long pause. Pax waited, sensing its energy crackle.
‘I found out one of her kids is mine.’
She turned, open-mouthed.
‘Her daughter, our daughter,’ he corrected. ‘She’s six.’
Pax tried to imagine the shock of discovering he’d fathered a child older than Kes was now, a fully loaded little person, features shaped by genetics, character formed, loyalty forged to the parents who had raised her. ‘What’s her name?’
‘Dizzy.’
‘It’s a sweet name.’
‘Opening a bottle alone to toast my shock entry into fatherhood wasn’t my finest hour.’
‘It’s a lot to take in.’ No wonder he didn’t want to tell it to a meeting room of scraping chairs and strangers. ‘You never suspected?’
‘They’d moved to the States by the time Dizzy was born; I was back in Europe. It was ten months after the wedding, so everyone always assumed she was a honeymoon baby.’
‘The affair happened when she’d just married?’
The smile flashed uncomfortably. ‘The wedding marquee was being taken down the day I arrived back there after drinking myself stupid in the Middle East,’ he explaine
d. ‘Her dad’s a cruel bastard. He wanted me to get the message loud and clear that his princess was taken.’
Pax envisaged the princess, wholesome in checked-shirt and jeans, ponytail swinging, perched on white post and rails. ‘What’s she like?’
She waited out a long pause.
‘Fierce, funny, fearless.’ Green eyes met hers. ‘She’d been the original wild child. It drove the boss mad, even though we all knew she was a daddy’s girl at heart. I was a part of her rebellion. She married another hard-bastard showjumper like her dad, a protégé of his.’
A car swept by with a swish of displaced air.
‘And you flew back in to find the wedding tent still up?’
The green eyes held hers. ‘They were living at the farm while they were waiting for their new yard to be built in Vermont. She used to come and talk to me, cry on my shoulder. Said that her husband was cold, all ego, useless in bed, that she’d never wanted to go through with it. I was still more than a bit in love with her, so you can guess the rest.’ A finger tapped fast on the wheel.
Pax wanted to grab it and still it.
But the metronome cranked up to allegro. ‘It was crazy exciting. I suppose we both got off on all the secrecy. We decided to make a run for it, planned a fresh start in Ireland together; I bought the tickets, drank vodka in my coffee, rum in my Coke, fantasising myself as Hemingway. When she couldn’t stop chucking up every morning, I thought it was nerves; I threw up plenty myself, knowing her dad would kill us both if he found out what we planned. Then, the day we were due to fly, she told me she couldn’t go through with it. There was no talking her round. Said she wanted to make her marriage work. My first experience drinking myself stupid long-haul. Not my last.’
‘She didn’t tell you she was pregnant?’ Pax felt a crash of empathy for the new young wife, forced to choose between safety and freedom, her first life-changing decision as a mother.
‘I had no idea.’
‘How long before you went back?’
‘A couple of years. The old man wasn’t letting me go and, if I’m honest, I needed the money. There’s not many bosses who don’t care if you ride drunk or sober as long as you ride well. I could go months without a drop, but then I’d just go off on one, y’know?’ His gaze stayed fixed on hers.
‘My habit’s more of a daily dose.’
Luca nodded. ‘You mould your life round it, don’t you? I’d started taking jobs for that rather than the horses, places where hard-drinking was a part of the culture: big Dutch and German barns full of Slovak workers with their vodka, the South African dipsos, macho Brazilians lunchtime drinking. My Canadian friend was by far the worst for running a bar through the day, from Bloody Mary breakfast to triple measure nightcap; I went back there every year after that.’
‘Did you ever see her?’
‘Never saw, never asked. Her dad’s not the sort to talk about family. There are pictures of horses on walls there, not grandchildren. But then last summer I flew in and she was living back home.’
‘She left her husband?’ Another rush of empathy.
‘Oh, she’ll never do that. He was there too, backslapping me like I’m a long-lost brother, saying the yard in Vermont cost too much to run so they’d brought his horses back over the St Lawrence to set up with her dad. Then he introduced me to their three kids: two little dark-haired, dark-eyed boys, the spit of their parents, and a girl with curly blonde hair and green eyes.’
‘Dizzy.’
‘She shakes your hand like a president and rides a fence like a deer. Pure O’Brien.’
‘Oh God, that must have been agony for you.’
‘Don’t blaspheme. It was. It is.’
‘What did you do?’
He glared at the windscreen, smile flashing like gunfire. ‘I said nothing, did nothing. Drank. Went out on the lash with the boss. Drank some more on my own.’
‘But you knew Dizzy was definitely yours?’
‘Do two bays breed a palomino? Her mother was in a bad way, saying she’d never let herself believe it, that her husband was a devoted dad who lived for his kids even if the marriage was lousy and she suspected him of being unfaithful. She bought a home paternity test kit and sent off swabs from my mouth and Dizzy’s, just so there was no doubt. Maybe she wanted it to be his, a miracle to make the marriage sparkle again. Back it came five days later telling us what we already knew. I’m Dizzy’s natural father. She couldn’t stop crying. Our love affair started again that night.’ He raked his fingers through his hair, eyes wincing self-critically.
‘I knew it was a mistake, but she thought so little of herself, I couldn’t hurt her. She was right about her husband’s infidelity. I’d been along on her dad’s boys’ only nights, playing poker for hours in the back room of this big old bar in Ottawa he liked, the sort with more hostesses than decent whiskys, y’know? While dad stayed in the game, husband threw in his hand to get straight on it, buying himself a private dance or two, and the rest. Wanted me as wingman, but I was having none of it. The drinks cost too much for a start.’ He cast her a sideways smile, and Pax got a brief hint of the easy-going hellraiser who was happy to party with the devil all night as long as the bar was free.
‘What about Dizzy?’
‘I wanted the truth out in the open, but her mother insisted that the kids were too tiny, that she needed more time. Every time I made to leave, she’d win me back round, beg me to stay longer. She’d sneak to my apartment over the garages in the dead of night with a bottle of President to mix Raymond Massey cocktails – that woman could drink me under the table, always has – and we’d argue until dawn. She likes arguing, picking fights. It’s her opera, her theatre. I was her audience.’
‘Do you still love her?’
‘What sort of a question’s that?’
‘An honest one.’
‘She made me feel consequential, you know?’
She looked at him curiously. That bloody smile was in the way again. Without thinking, she reached up a hand to mask it from her line of vision like a spotlight. He jerked his head away violently.
‘Sorry,’ she said, recoiling.
‘Have you heard enough now?’ He was cornered and angry, veins high in his neck, pupils flooded. He looked, she realised, like her mother’s grey stallion.
‘Yes.’ Pax looked away, ashamed.
But her head worked on, shocked to find itself thinking back to the night in the hotel airport, to her own drowning, out-of-control unhappiness. Comfort and care were instincts to Luca, even when it was the last place in the world he wanted to be. Pissed or sober, he gave comfort; in extremis, in transit, in loco, he put others’ needs first. He’d be the medic on the front line, saving lives as mortars rained down.
‘Actually, no.’ She turned back. ‘Tell me, did she hit you?’
The smile sent the eyes darting away for cover, fingers rubbing his chin. ‘Is that another honest question?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sometimes, she hit me.’ She could feel the mortification rippling off him.
‘And you hit her?’
‘Never.’
Pax rubbed her face. ‘Sorry.’
‘Why are you sorry?’
‘It can’t be an easy thing to admit to.’
‘Sure, I work with horses, Pax. I’ve been kicked, bitten and trampled by plenty who’ve lost all trust in humans. I don’t blame the horse, I blame the person who hurt them in the first place.’
‘Horses don’t drink a bottle of Scotch a night to blot it out.’
‘Fair point.’
No matter how awful her marriage had become, how much he’d goaded her, Pax had never once got close to hitting Mack. His self-control was pure steel, the mental pain he inflicted dosed in metronome blows. In a passionate love affair, by contrast, sex and violence sometimes had a dangerously thin line between them. She remembered trying to slap Bay earlier that day and her hand burned in her lap.
‘It wasn’t all bad. I’d never stayed
past September before. Autumn in Canada was my compensation, all golden trees and blue sky, pretending nothing was wrong. I used to go to the lake cabin after work, watch the moon on the water, play the fiddle, drink myself numb. Ronnie’s invitation to come here was heaven sent.’
‘How did they react?’
‘I’d agreed to stay to the end of the year, so there was no point starting fires on ice. It’s a long siege out there in winter – you can’t imagine how cold it gets. The snow just falls and falls. I had the job of ploughing clear the track to the lake. I’d stay up there some nights, sitting by the fire in the cabin trying to compose a letter telling her I was leaving. I was drinking so much I’d blank for hours, find pages I’d written I had no memory of. One night she drove up there after the family had gone to bed and told me she wanted us to run away to Ireland again, only this time she promised she wouldn’t change her mind.’
‘And the children?’
‘She insisted we’d come back when things had cooled down, spend summers in Canada, make it work. She said they belonged on the farm, that their father and grandparents would look after them better than we could.’
Pax felt the punch of recognition to her throat, her voice winded. ‘Just like my mother.’
‘When I said I didn’t see a future for us any more, she went full-scale banjax and said she’d tell her dad I’d pushed myself on her the summer she’d got married and that Dizzy was the result.’
‘That’s awful!’
‘No worse than Mack’s threats, I’ll bet.’
Pax chewed her lip, knowing Mack had no need to lie about her shabby past, and that his discretion was something she could no longer rely upon. She shivered. Without the engine running, the car was turning into an ice box.
‘We’d a filthy row,’ Luca went on. ‘We’d both had a skinful by then. She knows stuff about me that could get me into a lot of hot water. When you drink and argue, you get to the stage where there’s nothing you won’t threaten, don’t you? She held my fiddle over the fire saying she’d burn it if I didn’t change my mind. It was my great-grandpa’s; I’d lugged it so many times round the world I’d lost count.’
