The Day We Disappeared (5 page)

‘You really deserve this,
Pumpkin,' Tim chipped in. ‘You've not enjoyed the last few
years.'

Thrilled to have the support of Le
Cloob, I allowed myself to feel truly excited. I'd worried that a vague,
forgetful, incense-burning recluse like me, who sometimes wore actual clogs, might
never fit into a company like that, but they were right: I didn't need to. I
would be up there in my lovely peaceful Annie Kingdom, a little oasis of healing and
goodness far from the corporate crowd.

‘Well, there you have it,' I
muttered dazedly. ‘This little hippie has got herself a big job in Posh
London.'

‘That's it?' Lizzy
asked. ‘That's all you have to say? You're not going to talk to us
about – oh, I don't know – your fit new boss?'

I felt my face turn tomato-red.
‘He's just my boss, Lizzy. Nothing to say.'

Stephen's hand had brushed mine as
we'd stepped into the lift earlier, and I'd nearly had one of those
spontaneous orgasms that you read about in magazines about weird people. It
hadn't escaped my notice that I'd experienced none of my usual panic
about male intimacy with Stephen. It hadn't escaped my notice either that
I'd actually enjoyed, rather than felt stressed-out by, his company.

‘Is he married? Girlfriended?
Mentally sound?'

‘I'm sure he'll be
married. Probably has a family in Surrey. Or maybe one of the trendy bits of Essex.
Where was that Essex village they had in the
Guardian
's Let's
Move to … article last Saturday? With
the Michelin-starred pub? That'd be the sort of place he'd live. With
his wife, and his …' I trailed off.

‘I can see you haven't been
thinking about him much,' Lizzy remarked.

‘Of course I've thought
about him. He's been absolutely lovely. Like a knight in shining armour. But
that doesn't mean I
fancy
him.'

Of course it meant I fancied him.
Stephen had taken me out for lunch today to offer me the package personally. Rather
than somewhere formal and starchy-tableclothed, where I would have been desperately
uncomfortable, we had gone to a funny little wholefoods café where we had chatted
about India, boy-bands and dogs.

He'd ordered us organic wine,
which was a novelty, and I'd got a fraction drunk. When he offered me the most
appealing working arrangement I'd ever heard of I'd been horrified to
see two embarrassing tears of joy plopping into my glass.

‘Ah, you see?' Stephen had
grinned broadly. ‘This is why I wanted to make the offer to you
myself!'

‘So you could watch me
cry?'

‘Ha-ha. Yes.' He rested his
chin on his hands and looked straight at me. ‘Obviously this is what my HR
team are there for but – ah, I dunno. Don't tell anyone I said this but it
means more to me than you can possibly imagine to see someone so happy at being
invited to join this firm.
My
firm. Something I made. It makes it all worth
while.' He glanced around furtively. ‘Seriously, if you ever tell anyone
I said that, I'll have to kill you. I'm meant to be a
ball-breaker.'

Another two plops
into the fruity Rioja below me. He was right. I
was
happy.

‘Pull yourself together,' I
said to myself. No man, other than my dad and Tim, had ever seen me cry: this was
terrible! And yet there was something so normal about Stephen Flint, so
safe.
Warm and sexy and – ‘STOP IT,' I hissed.

‘Yes, stop it right now,'
Stephen said sternly.

Briefly, shockingly, he touched my arm.
‘From the conversation we had the other night, it sounds like you've had
a rough time of it in recent years.'

I didn't trust myself to
speak.

‘And although it's
completely unprofessional of me to tell you, Annie, I've had quite a rough
time in my own life lately. It's left me quite wobbly. So I'm very happy
to be able to help you.'

I was surprised. Men like him
didn't have rough times. ‘Men like me don't have rough
times?' he asked, as if reading my mind. ‘Everyone in the company would
agree with you. They think I'm a corporate machine, the Big Strong Leader.
I'm still a human being, though.' He smiled. ‘Still not immune to
bad times. I like a good cry into a glass of red wine as much as the next
person.'

I wanted to ask him more, find out what
could possibly go wrong for a man as gorgeous and successful as him, but I was
tongue-tied.
I was having lunch with a man!
And although for most people a
low-key lunch would be no big bananas – nothing was happening, after all, save some
vague bonding over unspecified crappy times – it was an enormous step for me.

‘How did you start
FlintSpark?' I asked. ‘You're very young to be a CEO.'

‘How old do
you think I am?'

I blushed hotly. ‘I don't
know. Please don't make me guess.'

‘I'm thirty-eight. And it
all happened quite easily, really. That's the thing about business. If
you're a natural, it doesn't need to take half a lifetime to get to the
top.'

I drank some more naughty lunchtime
wine. The drunker I got the easier it felt to be here, doing this … this
thing.
I kept waiting for the usual thoughts to kick off – he's
trying to trap me; he's probably going to write a hideous contract I'll
never escape from; he's going to find out I'm a total waste of space and
sack me – but none of them came. I just felt good.

‘I started out on a graduate
programme like everyone else,' Stephen explained, ‘and I was sacked
after six months for being “too good”. That's what they told me
and, by the way, I'm not being big-headed. I worked at a couple of other
places but similar things happened – people felt threatened by me. I got fed up with
it all and decided to set up on my own. Clients wanted to come with me, because they
knew they were in good hands, and I persuaded a load of stinking-rich venture
capitalists to invest. And boom. Here we are.'

‘Wow.' Imagine being able to
do that! ‘How did you get the investors to give you so much money?'

‘Oh, mostly I lied,' Stephen
said airily. Then, catching sight of my face, he added, ‘They expect you to
lie, Annie – and they lie right back. As long as everyone makes money,
everyone's happy. Those guys are laughing all the way to the bank
now.'

I hated the sound of business.

‘It's ugly,' Stephen
admitted, ‘very ugly at times, but it's
what I was born to do. And I send literally millions of
pounds to charities. We've built five schools in rural Cambodia and
we've set up literacy projects across the world. We've dug wells,
provided doctors and funded infrastructure in some of the very poorest countries. I
go out and meet every single community we help. It's not all bad, you know.
And, as I said, I'm still a fairly nice bloke. An average bloke who's
never really got used to daytime drinking and who is currently a bit squiffy. Oops.
Can we order lots of desserts, please?'

I looked at Stephen and had a thought
that excited and terrified me:
I wonder what it would be like to kiss you.
That was when I stopped drinking.

Le Cloob were still looking as dazed as
I felt.

‘I need to see a picture of
him,' Lizzy decided. Embarrassingly, there was already a Google image search
on when I got my phone out. ‘Ha! You've been stalking him!' She
giggled as she took my phone. ‘Oh, blimey,' she muttered. ‘Kiddo,
he is
hot
.'

Claudine coolly removed the phone from
Lizzy's hands and took a look. Expecting her to say some sexy-sounding French
words, I was a bit disappointed to see her brow knitting. ‘Oh,' she
said.

I took the phone back. ‘What does
that mean?'

She shrugged. ‘I do not like
him.'

‘Why?' Lizzy asked.
‘Did you go blind?'

Claudine frowned. ‘I just do not
like him. He looks … obvious
.
'

‘Guys, he's not my
boyfriend. He's just my new boss. Who I'm NOT INTERESTED IN.'

Claudine studied my face for a few moments. ‘Okay.
Okay.'

Claudine never approved of any of my
crushes. It was like she actually wanted me to be single. It was like she wanted me
to reach thirty-three in May and have had sex only one and a half times. ‘Even
Kate likes him,' I lied. She definitely would like him – she'd love him,
but I wanted to call and tell her my news tomorrow.

Tim gave me a sideways hug, which Lizzy
watched from across the table with interest. She was convinced we were secretly in
love with each other.

‘To our brilliant Annie!'
Tim said, raising his glass. ‘Well done again, Pumpkin. I'm so proud of
you.' I sighed happily, comfortable in his lemony armpit, until Claudine
interrupted to say she still thought Stephen looked cheesy and self-satisfied and
that his approach to hiring people sounded completely subjective and in no way
professional.

‘You should have married
Tim,' Lizzy slurred, when he and Claudine had stumbled off home. Being Lizzy,
she was waiting for an Uber taxi, and being me I was waiting with her until it
arrived because I was nervous about getting on the tube so late at night and was
dithering over ordering a cab of my own.

‘Timmy,' Lizzy continued.
‘You and him are like bloody brother and sister. I get quite jealous, you
know.'

‘Oh, shush.'

‘I'm serious,' she
said, staring at me. Suddenly – and it didn't happen often – I had
Lizzy's full attention. ‘Tim and you are the best people on earth and
it's crazy that you're not together. I'm quite sure you love
him.' She actually
seemed sad for
us. ‘And he loves you. Kate said exactly the same thing when she was over for
New Year's Eve.'

‘I don't love him,' I
repeated, for the millionth time. ‘And he doesn't love me. I'd
love to love Tim, Lizzy, but I don't and thassat. Kate should know bet-better
… God, I'm drunk. Where's your cab?'

‘It'll be here soon. Go
home! I'll be fine.'

‘No.'

‘Moron.'

‘Twatfink.'

‘Love you.'

‘Love you more.'

 

 

It's a heatwave, everyone's saying. Going to last two weeks! Right
through to the end of summer! Maybe through autumn too!

For the girl, in this moment, there is no autumn, no September, no consciousness
of anything that might be to come. There is just the shimmering heat, the smell
of peaty green grass, the delicate splitting of daisy stems. She focuses all her
attention on the pearly crescents of her fingernails, and the hairy little daisy
stalks with their curious smell. She holds her breath every time she picks a new
daisy and doesn't let it go until she has threaded it through the slit of
the last.

They are making a daisy chain, the tenth of the morning, but if her mother has
tired of the game she doesn't show it. She strokes her daughter's
hair, running her hand down the plait she attempted earlier that morning. It was
the first time her child had asked for one and the request – so clear and formal
– had made her laugh and kiss her all over.

‘Today I would like a plait,' she had said, absolutely confident in
her mother's ability to do what the other mothers did. ‘I want you
to start it on the top of my head so that I look like Carrie. She says
it's called a French plait.'

The plait had little blonde horns poking out of it and a kink like a broken
mermaid's tail, but she was delighted with it. She had stood smiling at
herself in the mirror, holding the plait in both hands as if it might fall
off.

‘What would you like to do with your birthday morning, sweetheart?'
her mother had said. She'd given her daughter the day off
school. No child should have to spend their seventh
birthday in a hot classroom with whistles and rules and shouty books.
She's still not convinced she won't take both of her girls out of
school and set up the home-education group she's been talking about with
two other mothers in the village. It just doesn't sit right with her. They
should be outdoors more at this age. Playing. They live in the middle of a
National Park! Surely that's the best classroom a child could ask
for.

For today, though, it's all about her seven-year-old girl with her fat
plait and her white cotton dress. She'll do anything her daughter wants.
She loves her today with the same ferocity that she loved her when she came out
seven years ago, a squashed, messy bundle, so perfect she could barely breathe
as she held her in her arms.

‘I want to be outside all day,' her daughter had announced.
‘Let's start with some daisy chains and maybe then we can pick me
some special birthday flowers. And apples, let's look for
apples.'

The woman had smiled. My little hippie, she thought proudly. ‘We'll
go up behind Woodford Farm,' was what she said. ‘It's still
covered with daisies there.'

On my first morning working at Mark
Waverley's yard I stumbled down the thirty-three steps to the kitchen feeling
like I'd been hit round the head with a fence pole. It was six thirty a.m.,
still pitch black and bitingly cold, and it felt like only five minutes had elapsed
since Becca had finished tutoring me late last night.

I was sick with nerves and
sleeplessness. In spite of the deep exhaustion that had pinned me to my bed,
I'd lain awake for hours, missing my family and wondering if there was any way
I could reasonably contact them. My subsequent acceptance that I couldn't had
been terrible. There was a grief that went beyond tears, I often thought, and at
that moment it had settled over me, like a pillow pressed to my face.

I needed toast. I could start a day
without a shower, without a newspaper and certainly without human contact. I could
not start the day without toast.

Joe, the groom, was sitting by a
radiator eating a piece of cheese. In spite of the freezing cold he was wearing only
a stripy T-shirt and jodhpurs, and in spite of the devastating hour, he was wearing
a gigantic grin. He moved his hair out of those naughty eyes and winked at me.

‘Galway!' He beamed, patting
a chair near to him.
‘Come here to
me and tell me stories of the Twelve Bens mountains. And feed me cheese.'

I dithered. Joe's eyes had lit up
as soon as I'd opened my mouth when I'd arrived in the kitchen last
night. ‘Well, if it isn't a flame-haired little lady of Eire for me to
fall in love with!' he'd shouted joyfully. ‘Happy St
Patrick's Day, my dear
compadre
!'

‘Happy St Patrick's
Day,' I'd whispered uncomfortably.

‘That's a strange accent you
have there, my green-eyed princess. Mayo, perchance?'

‘Galway,' I'd
croaked.

‘The wild west.' He grinned.
‘Wonderful!' Joe was a little taller than me, as lithe and muscled as a
whippet. Like everyone else there, he was quite young but his face had a sandblown
quality, presumably from spending all his time on the exposed hills of Exmoor.

‘Tell me now, Galway.'
He'd poured me a glass of wine. ‘What brings you here?'

‘Left my job in Dublin for a
career change,' I'd trotted out. The wine was disgusting but as
necessary as oxygen. ‘Couldn't cope not being around horses. I've
horses in my blood.'

Becca, arranging socks on the rack above
the Aga, had smiled approvingly.

Joe had got me mildly drunk, told me I
was gorgeous and asked me to marry him twice.

Now, at six thirty-five, he was taking
calm mouthfuls of a big block of Cheddar and chatting away as if it were still last
night. ‘I've a mate, Sean Burke, up in Kilgevrin. Do you know
Kilgevrin?'

‘I don't … I moved to Dublin
years ago.'

‘It's
a bit of a shitehole, Galway. Anyway, he …'

I zoned out, standing by the toaster
while my bread had the moisture sucked out of it. Tiredness aside, I really
wasn't sure if I could do this. Any of it.

Tough
, I said to myself.
You have nowhere else to go, remember?

My toast popped and I searched for a
plate. I had to make it work here, and that would be a lot easier to achieve if I
stopped thinking about home. And all of the Bad Shit.

‘Galway?'

Joe was still eating straight from the
cheese block. Little crumbs of it fell on to the large terracotta floor tiles.
‘Galway, are you fantasizing about us having sex, there?'

I shook my head, forcing a smile. Last
night, with the wine and the warmth of a kitchen full of people, I'd found him
funny. Now I was struggling.
Come on
, I chided gently.
Crack a smile,
Brady.

Joe wrapped up his cheese and put it in
the vast American-style fridge. ‘Ah, Galway, you're going to drive me
wild,' he said cheerfully, putting on a jumper. ‘You and all that
gorgeous red hair. Well, I'm going to get Kangaroo tacked up. Best give me
your number so I can call if I need anything.' He pulled a hat on.

‘My number?'

‘It's a big farm,' he
explained, digging his phone out. ‘We call each other all day.' He stood
in front of me, his phone in his hand.

Grudgingly, I pulled mine out and
searched for my number.

‘Never understand people who
don't know their own number.' Joe chuckled, punching it in.

‘From a man who eats Cheddar for
breakfast and makes
marriage proposals at
first sight,' I tried lightly. I even forced a shadow of a smile.

‘Grand!' Joe tucked his
phone away. ‘Now I can send you dirty messages … Ah, Christ, Galway,
don't blench like that! I'm jokin' with you!'

He pulled his gloves on, watching me.
Just for a moment, the naughty twinkling stopped and a shadow of compassion passed
across his face. ‘You'll be fine, Galway,' he said kindly.
‘We don't bite. Unless you ask us to.'

He left, and I started mechanically to
eat toast, leaning against the rail of the Aga.
You'll learn
, I
reassured myself.
You'll learn to relax. These are decent people, Kate
Brady, you can be happy here.

The grooms' house was a beautiful
old threshing barn with a large, Mexican-tiled kitchen that had once been a grain
store. The ground floor was made up of several different reception rooms, ‘So
it doesn't feel like a hall of residence,' Sandra had explained during
my interview. There was a grown-up sitting room, a pool room, a TV room and even a
reading room, but it seemed that most of the grooms at Mark Waverley's yard
spent their time in the kitchen or in the laundry room where they washed and dried
all the horse stuff.

Everyone other than me had lovely big
rooms with views across the rolling moorland that led eventually to the Bristol
Channel, although my own view of the horse yard wasn't too shabby. It was a
rather lovely scene: an old stone stable block centred around a big square courtyard
with a still-functional iron water pump in the centre: unusual and lucky to have so
many proper old stables, Sandra had told me; none of those American-style barns with
all that ugly
metal. The doors and
woodwork were painted a deep marine blue, which stood proudly against the yellowed
stones of the stable walls. Behind the main courtyard, an ancient oak overhung a
further oblong of stone stabling.

Last night I'd also met Tiggy, the
Head Girl, who'd been friendly enough. In a very confident,
this-is-my-empire-and-if-you-cross-me-I'll-have-you-run-over sort of a way.
Like all posh women who worked with horses she had blonde hair in a messy bun and
one of those attractive, capable faces that had been genetically supplied with ruddy
skin and good teeth.

Tiggy.
For God's sake.
You couldn't make it up.

Almost all of the jobs Becca had
explained to me last night involved the removal of horse poo from one place to
another. ‘Horses are veggies,' Becca had reassured me, ‘so it
don't smell too bad, pet. Although their wee's pretty bad, with all that
ammonia, and they do like to take a good fart on you when you brush out their
tails.'

Her final piece of advice had been about
Joe. ‘Don't go there,' she'd advised. ‘He's had
a go on everyone. He's gorgeous, if you're into that sort of thing, but
it's not worth the pubic lice, my pet. Okay?'

‘I may not know a horse's
arse from its elbow,' I'd said, ‘but I do know that I'm not
looking for romance.'

‘Hock.' Becca had smiled.
‘Horses don't have elbows. They have knees and hocks.'

I finished my toast and pondered my next
move. Neither Becca nor Tiggy had come downstairs yet and, other than stand and eat
toast that I was too anxious even to taste, I hadn't the faintest idea what to
do.

I wandered across the warm kitchen floor
– it was
heated, I realized gratefully –
and stared at a black-and-white photo of Mark Waverley on a beautiful horse. He was
wearing a top hat, a tail coat and white gloves, and he was making the horse do a
very boxy, poncy sort of a move. This, I remembered from the Olympics, was that mad
dressage thing, where riders made horses do ballet in a long rectangular arena.

‘He got twenty-six on that
test,' Becca said, sliding into the kitchen. ‘Fuckin' sensational.
Don't think anyone's ridden a test like that in years.'

I smiled politely. ‘Oh,
right.'

Becca sighed. ‘You don't
know what I mean, do you?'

‘Nope.'

‘Mark's an eventer, right?
That means someone who competes in horse trials. Dressage, cross-country and
show-jumping all in one competition. Like a triathlon, I suppose,' she said,
pulling a large box of Shreddies out of a cupboard. ‘In the dressage phase you
build up penalties for imperfections. Meaning that Mark got only twenty-six
penalties.
Nobody
gets dressage scores like that.'

‘Go away!' I said, genuinely
impressed. ‘So he really is good, then?'

‘The best,' she said
proudly. ‘He may be an arsehole but he rides a beautiful dressage test.
Especially on Stumpy.'

‘Dressage, show-jumping,
cross-country,' I repeated to myself, aware of the need to learn fast.
‘Dressage, show-jumping, cross-country. That's a lot for one horse to do
in a day.'

Becca smiled. ‘At Mark's
level, these things take place over three to five days,' she explained.
‘Otherwise, aye, the horse'd die. So would Mark. So would we.'

I shook my head
ruefully. ‘I'm useless,' I said. ‘They'll rumble me in
seconds.'

‘Nonsense, pet. And if you
don't mind me saying, you're not going to get very far with an attitude
like that.'

‘Hmph.'

‘We'll just stick to the
story that you've had a few years off horses, so you're a bit rusty.
They really don't care, sweetheart. They've got enough to worry
about.'

Tiggy marched briskly into the kitchen,
reeking of efficiency and good breeding. ‘Come on, then, folks,' she
commanded. ‘Let's get this show on the road.'

But before anyone had time to get a show
on the road, the door opened and suddenly the atmosphere darkened.
‘Morning,' a male voice said crisply.

‘Morning!' we all
tinkled.

Mark Waverley. Younger than he looked in
a riding hat. More handsome, too, with his dark hair and warm-toned skin, a strong,
slightly Roman nose and guarded eyes. Something about him threw me straight off
balance. Not in a good way.

‘Who are you?' he asked. His
eyes were appraising me as they might a new horse, although he didn't
necessarily seem happy with what he saw. Maybe I had bad hocks.

‘Kate,' I said, giving him a
firm, confident handshake. ‘Kate Brady, your new trainee yard assistant. Great
to meet you. I'm a real fan of your work.'

I'm a real fan of your work?

‘You're Irish,' he
said tonelessly.

‘I am. I've heard we make
the finest yard assistants on earth.'

Mark just stared at me.

‘I'm
armed and ready for action!' I added, although my voice was trailing off.

‘I forgot you were starting
today.' He glanced around the room where everyone had suddenly stopped eating
and talking. Instead they were zipping up coats and rolling colourful horse
bandages. ‘My mother hired you without passing on your CV or telling me
anything about you,' Mark continued, in that cold, slightly detached tone.
‘Can you come to the main house at lunch with your CV? You can tell us a
little more about yourself. One p.m. sharp,' he added, and turned away.

Becca gave me a reassuring smile.

‘The indoor school hasn't
been raked,' Mark told Tiggy. ‘I told you last night I'd be in
there doing flatwork at seven fifteen.'

‘We'll get straight on to
it!' Tiggy said, as Mark left, without recourse to such pleasantries as
‘thank you' or ‘see you later'.

‘You'd better take care of
that,' Tiggy said to Becca. ‘Teach Kate how to operate the Tank. Chop
chop, team …'

Becca muttered about Joe being a lazy
fucker, riding his own horse in there last night and not bothering to rake it
afterwards. ‘Come on, pet.' She sighed.

And then we were out in the freezing
air, dark as night except for the old black pendant lamps, haloed by drizzle, that
studded the outer walls of the stable block. Gravel crunched, ice-like, under my
stupid wellies and a deadly wind made my eyes water.

This is it, I thought flatly. The first
day of the rest of my life.

`I need to buy
some proper clothes.' I shivered as we crunched round to the stable-block
entrance. ‘Today.'