Longshot (33 page)

“Well ... I should think so. But five miles or so from here,” I said.

“And it was summer,” he commented. “Warm. Leaves on the trees.”

“Mm.” Imaginative of him, I thought.

“She wanted to kiss me,” he said with a squirm.

Both Coconut and I looked at him in astonishment.

“I’m not as ugly as all that,” he said, offended.

“You’re not ugly,” I assured him positively, “but you’re young.”

“She said I was growing up.” He looked embarrassed, as did Coconut.

“When did she say that?” I asked mildly.

“In the Easter holidays, last year. She was always out there in the yard. Always looking at me. I told Dad about it, but he didn’t listen. It was Grand National time and he couldn’t think of anything but Top Spin Lob.” He swallowed. “Then she went away and I was really glad. I didn’t like going out into the yard when she was there.” He looked at me anxiously. “I suppose it’s wrong to be glad someone’s dead.”

“Is glad what you feel?”

He thought about it.

“Relieved,” he said finally. “I was afraid of her.” He looked ashamed. “I used to think about her, though. Couldn’t help it.”

“It won’t be the last time someone makes a pass at you,” I said prosaically. “Next time, don’t feel guilty.”

Easier said than done, I supposed. Shame and guilt tormented the innocent more than the wicked.

Gareth seemed liberated by having put his feelings into words and he and Coconut jumped up and ran around, throwing mock punches at each other, swinging on tree branches, getting rid of bashfulness with shouts and action and shows of strength. I supposed I’d been like that too, but I couldn’t remember.

“Right,” I said, as they subsided onto the seats and panted while I packed away our food wrappings (which would have started a dinky fire). “Which way to the Land-Rover?”

“That way,” said Gareth immediately, pointing east.

“That way,” Coconut said, pointing west.

“Which way is north?” I asked.

They both got it instinctively wrong, but then worked it out roughly by the sun, and I showed them how to use a watch as a compass, which Gareth half remembered, having learned before.

“Something to do with pointing the hands at the sun,” he guessed.

I nodded. “Point the hour hand at the sun, then halfway between the hand and twelve o’clock is the north-south line.”

“Not in Australia,” Gareth said.

“We’re not in Australia,” Coconut objected. He looked at his watch and around him. “That way is north,” he said, pointing. “But which way is the Land-Rover?”

“If you go north you’ll come to the road,” I said.

“What do you mean ‘you’?” Gareth demanded. “You’re coming too. You’ve got to guide us.”

“I thought,” I said, “that it would be more fun for you to find your own way back. And,” I went on as he tried to interrupt, “so as you don’t get lost if the sun goes in, you can paint the trees as you go with luminous paint. Then you can always come back to me.”

“Cool,”
he said, entranced.

“What?” Coconut wanted to know.

Gareth told him about finding one’s way back to places by blazing the trail.

“I’ll follow you,” I said, “but you won’t see me. If you go really badly wrong, I’ll tell you. Otherwise, survival’s up to you.”

“Ace,” Gareth said happily.

I unzipped the pouch around my waist and gave him the small jar of paint and the sawn-off paintbrush.

“Don’t forget to paint so you can see the splash from both directions, coming and going, and don’t get out of sight of your last splash.”

“OK.”

“Wait for me when you hit the road.”

“Yes.”

“And take the whistle.” I held it out to him from the pouch. “It’s just a backup in case you get stuck. If you’re in trouble, blow it, and I’ll come at once.”

“It’s only a mile,” he protested, slightly hurt, not taking it.

“What do I say to your father if I mislay you?”

He grinned in sympathy, giving way, and put the best of all insurances in his pocket.

“Let’s go back the way we came,” Coconut said to Gareth.

“Easy!” Gareth agreed.

I watched them decide on the wrong place and paint the first mark carefully around a sapling’s trunk. They might just possibly have been able to find the morning’s path if they’d been starting again from the road, but tracking backwards was incredibly difficult. All the identifiable marks of our passage, like broken twigs and flattened grass, pointed forward into the wood, not out of it.

They consulted their watches and moved north through the trees, looking back and painting as they went. They waved once and I waved back, and for some time I could see their bright jackets in the dappled shade of the afternoon sun. Then, when they had gone, I began slowly to follow their splashes.

I could go much faster than they could. When I saw them again I dropped down on one knee, knowing that even though they were constantly looking back they wouldn’t see me at that low level, in my nature-colored clothes.

Besides the map, I’d brought along my faithful compass, and by its reckoning checked the boys’ direction all the time. They wandered off to the northeast a bit but not badly enough to get really lost, and after a while made a correction to drift back to north.

The pale-cream splashes were easy to spot, never far apart. Gareth had intelligently chosen smooth-barked saplings all the way, and all the marks were at the same height, at about waist level, where painting came to him most naturally, it seemed.

I kept the boys in sight intermittently all the way. They were talking to each other loudly as if to keep lurking wood-spirits at bay, and I did vividly remember that teenage spooky feeling of being alone in wild woodland and at the mercy of supernatural eyes. Even in sunshine one could be nervous. At night a couple of times at fifteen I’d been terrified.

On that day, as I slowly followed the trail, I simply felt at home and at peace. There were birds singing, though not yet many, and apart from the boys’ voices the quiet was as old and deep as the land. The woods still waited the stirring of spring, lying chilly and patient with sleeping buds and butterflies in cocoons. The smells of autumn, of compost and rot, still faintly lingered into the winter thaw, only the pines and firs remaining fragrant if one brushed them. Pine resin, collected by tapping, dried to lumps that made brilliant firelighters.

It was a slow-going mile, but towards the end one could hear occasional cars along the road ahead and Gareth and Coconut with whoops crashed through the last few yards, again, as the week before, relieved to be back in the space age.

I speeded up and stepped out behind them, much to Gareth’s surprise.

“We thought you were miles back,” he exclaimed.

“You laid an excellent trail.”

“The paint’s nearly finished.” He held it up to show me and the jar slipped out of his hand, rolling the remains of its contents onto the earth. “Hey, sorry,” he said. “But there wasn’t much left.”

“Doesn’t matter.” I picked up the jar, which was slippery on the outside from dripped paint and, screwing its lid on, dropped it with the brush into a plastic bag before stowing it again in my pouch.

“Can we get some more?” Coconut asked.

“Sure. No problem. Ready to go home?”

The boys, both pumped up by their achievement, ran and jumped all along the road to the Land-Rover that we found around the next bend, and rode back in euphoric good spirits.

“Terrific,” Gareth told Tremayne, bursting into the family room after we’d dropped Coconut and returned to Shellerton. “Fantastic.”

Whether they wanted to or not, Tremayne, Mackie and Perkin received a minute-by-minute account of the whole day with the sole exception of the discussion about Angela Brickell. Tremayne listened with veiled approval, Mackie with active interest, Perkin with boredom.

“It’s real wilderness,” Gareth said. “You can’t hear
any
thing. And I took lashings of photos—” He stopped, suddenly frowning. “Hold on a minute.”

He sped out of the room and came back with his blue knapsack, searching the contents worriedly.

“My camera’s not here!”

“The one I gave you for Christmas?” Tremayne asked, not overpleased.

“Perhaps Coconut’s got it,” Perkin suggested languidly.

“Thanks.” Gareth leaped to the telephone in hopes that were all too soon dashed. “He says he didn’t see it after lunchtime.” He looked horrified. “We’ll have to go back at once.”

“No, you certainly won’t,” Tremayne said positively. “It sounds a long way and it’ll be getting dark soon.”

“But it’s luminous paint,” Gareth begged. “That’s the whole point, you can see it in the dark.”

“No,” said his father.

Gareth turned to me. “Can’t we go back?”

I shook my head. “Your father’s right. We could get lost in those woods at night, paint or no paint. You’ve only got to miss one mark and you’d be out there till morning.”

“You
wouldn’t get lost.”

“I might,” I said. “We’re not going.”

“Did you drop it on the path back?” Mackie asked sympathetically.

“No . . .” He thought about it. “I must have left it where we had lunch. I hung it on a branch to keep it from getting damp. I just forgot it.”

He was upset enough for me to say, “I’ll get it tomorrow afternoon.”

“Will you?” Disaster swung back to hope. “Oh, great.”

Tremayne said doubtfully, “Will you find one little camera hanging in all those square miles of nothing?”

“Of course he will,” Gareth told him confidently. “I told you, we left a
trail.
And oh!” He thought of something. “Isn’t it lucky I dropped all the paint, because now you can see where the trail starts, because we didn’t paint any trees once we could see the road.”

“Do explain,” Mackie said.

Gareth explained.

“Will you really find the trail?” Mackie asked me, shaking her head.

“As long as someone hasn’t parked on the patch of paint and taken it all away on their tires.”

“Oh, no,” Gareth said, anguished.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’ll find your camera if it’s still in the clearing.”

“It is. I’m sure. I remember hanging it up.”

“All right then,” Tremayne said. “Let’s talk about something else.”

“Grub?” Gareth asked hopefully. “Pizza?”

O
n Monday morning, first lot, I was back on Drifter. “He’s entered in a race at Worcester the day after tomorrow,” Tremayne said as we walked out to the yard at seven in the half-dawn. “Today’s his last training gallop before that, so don’t fall off again. The vet’s been here already this morning to test his blood.”

Tremayne’s vet took small blood samples of all the stable’s runners prior to their last training gallop before they raced, the resulting detailed analysis being able to reveal a whole host of things from a raised lymphocyte count to excreted enzymes due to muscle damage. If there were too many contraindications in the blood, the vet would advise Tremayne that the horse was unlikely to run well or win. Tremayne said the process saved the owners from wasting money on fruitless horse-box expenses and jockey fees and also saved himself a lot of inexplicable and worrying disappointments.

“Are you going to Worcester yourself?” I asked.

“Probably. Might send Mackie. Why?”

“Er ... I wondered if I could go to see Drifter race.”

He turned his head to stare at me as if he couldn’t at once comprehend my interest, but then, understanding, said of course I could go if I wanted to.

“Thanks.”

“You can gallop Fringe this morning, second lot.”

“Thanks again.”

“And thanks to you for giving Gareth such a good day yesterday.”

“I enjoyed it.”

We reached the yard and stood watching the last preparations as usual.

“That’s a good camera,” Tremayne said regretfully. “Stupid boy.”

“I’ll get it back.”

“Along his precious trail?” He was doubtful.

“Maybe. But I had a map and a compass with me yesterday. I know pretty well where we went.”

He smiled, shaking his head. “You’re the most competent person ... Like Fiona says, you put calamities right.”

“It’s not always possible.”

“Give Drifter a good gallop.”

We went up to the Downs and at least I stayed in the saddle, and felt indeed a new sense of being at home there, of being at ease. The strange and difficult was becoming second nature in the way that it had when I’d learned to fly. Racehorses, helicopters; both needed hands responsive to the messages reaching them, and both would usually go where you wanted if you sent the right messages back.

Drifter flowed up the gallop in a smooth fast rhythm and Tremayne said he would have a good chance at Worcester if his blood was right.

When I’d left the horse in the yard and gone in for breakfast I found both Mackie and Sam Yaeger sitting at the table with Tremayne, all of them discussing that day’s racing at Nottingham. The horse that Tremayne had been going to run had gone lame, and another of Sam’s rides had been withdrawn because its owner’s wife had died.

“I’ve only got a no-hoper left,” Sam complained. “It’s not bloody worthwhile going. Reckon I’ll catch flu and work on the boat.” He telephoned forthwith, made hoarse-voiced excuses and received undeserved sympathy. He grinned at me, putting down the receiver. “Where’s the toast, then?”

“Coming.”

“I hear you played cowboys and Indians all over Berkshire with Gareth and Coconut yesterday.”

“News travels,” I said resignedly.

“I told him,” Mackie said, smiling. “Any objections?”

I shook my head and asked her how she was feeling. She’d stopped riding out with the first lot because of nausea on waking, and Tremayne, far from minding, continually urged her to rest more.