The Horse Dancer (49 page)

Mac was coming towards them now, clapping his hands, the hair at the front of his head blown upright by the wind. Watching him made her conscious of her creased suit, the slightly stale scent of her blouse. Her feet ached from walking around the town in her court shoes. She would have to buy herself a change of clothes if they didn’t find Sarah soon.

‘No sign?’

Natasha shook her head. ‘Nobody remembers seeing a horse. But they said it would have been different staff in the ticket office last night. And they wouldn’t let us see the passenger lists – data-protection laws.’

Mac swore softly under his breath. ‘Nothing from the credit-card company?’

‘That doesn’t mean anything. Sometimes it takes a few hours for it to be processed.’

They were running out of ideas. And in the absence of any firm plan, the urgency of the previous day had slowly seeped away, to be replaced by a strange melancholy.

The day dragged on. They split, and took it in turns to drive or walk around Dover, or stay in the hotel room and ring their way through the telephone directory. A sweetshop owner on Castle Street swore she had seen a girl on a horse the previous evening but could offer no more information. Mac, increasingly frustrated, stopped people on the street, shop-owners, ferry-workers. Cowboy John retreated to his hotel room, rang the hotels they had rung the previous evening, just in case, and occasionally fell asleep. Natasha fielded more calls from work, explained that, no, she was not going to be back by tonight after all, and walked the damp streets of Dover, fighting an encroaching sense of despair.

They agreed to meet at six in a pub on the sea-front. Natasha had wanted to eat in the hotel, but John had said if he spent one more minute in that sanitised hell-hole he’d go stir crazy. The pub, untouched by the vagaries of fashion, was steeped in the odour of beer and old cigarettes. On sitting down he seemed to relax. ‘Now this is more like it,’ he kept saying, patting the battered velour seats as if he’d found a home from home.

Natasha waited until the men went to the bar before she dialled the number. She sat down, pressing her other hand to her ear to drown the noise of the television that blared sports results above her.

It took him eight rings to answer. She wondered whether he had seen who was calling and been unable to decide whether or not to pick up.

‘Conor?’

‘Yup.’

‘I just wondered how you were.’

‘Have you found her?’

‘No.’

‘Where are you?’

‘Dover. She’s definitely come this way but we can’t locate her.’ She wished, almost as soon as she had said it, that she had omitted ‘we’.

‘Right.’

There was a lengthy silence. Natasha glanced behind her at Mac chatting to the barmaid, perhaps explaining what he and John were doing there. She saw the girl raise her eyebrows and shake her head. She had witnessed this response so many times over the past twenty-four hours that she didn’t need to hear the words.

‘Conor?’

‘Yup.’

‘I just wondered . . .’ She ran her fingers through her hair. ‘I wanted to make sure we were okay. I hated leaving things like that.’

A short delay before he replied. ‘You wanted to make sure we were okay?’

‘I’m sorry I had to go off like that, but you must understand that I couldn’t just leave it all to Mac.’

She heard, over the sound of the television, his breathing. ‘You just don’t get it, Hotshot, do you?’

‘I explained to you about the job. I hear Harrington was great in court today. Me not being there—’

‘No. You don’t get it.’ His voice was softer now.

‘Get what?’

‘Not once, Natasha, did you ask. Not once, when you were about to throw up your whole life for this thing did you think to ask me to help you.’

‘What?’

‘You didn’t even consider asking me, did you? What does that say about us?’

Mac was laughing with the girl now.

‘I didn’t think you’d—’ she said. ‘Given what you—’

‘No. You didn’t think to ask. I don’t know what’s going on with you and Mac, but I don’t want to be involved with someone who can’t even be honest about her own feelings.’

‘That’s not fair. I—’

But he had already rung off.

Sarah was waving a piece of bread in the air, oblivious to the fact that her high English voice was attracting the attention of French diners at the surrounding tables. ‘They’re like this kind of brotherhood, you know. They have black caps and black uniforms . . .’

‘Ah. I knew it would be about fashion,’ Thom teased.

Sarah ignored him. ‘. . . and they can get their horses to do absolutely anything. They’ll jump a chair about a foot wide. You know how hard it is to jump a chair?’

‘I can imagine.’

‘Papa always said that when he came to Le Cadre Noir it was the first time in his life he had felt understood. Like there were just a few other people in the world who spoke his language and all of them lived in that one place.’

‘I know that feeling.’

‘But they worked so hard. He would start riding at six in the morning, and sometimes go on all day, working on different horses, different movements. Some were at the
basse école
stage – that’s more basic – and some at
haute école
. The horses all specialise in different movements. He had this favourite horse that specialised in
capriole
. You know what that is?’

‘No.’

She blew out her cheeks. ‘It’s one of the most difficult things you can ask a horse to do. It comes from a battle manoeuvre and dates back thousands of years. The horse leaps up, using its back legs, and then when it’s, like, suspended in mid-air, it kicks out behind. I used to think about what it would be like to be on a battlefield and you go to stab someone and then this horse is up and – yah!’ She motioned the kicking out of his back hooves.

‘Pretty scary.’

‘Well, it must have worked or they wouldn’t have kept doing it for so long.’

She had insisted on paying. He hadn’t felt entirely comfortable about his supper being financed by a stolen credit card, but she had assured him she would pay back every penny when Papa was better, and the thing about Sarah was that you couldn’t help but believe her.

When they had arrived in France and made their way down the
autoroute
she had become more and more animated, so that it was hard to reconcile the chatty, confident girl with the silent, wary child of the previous evening.

‘Papa’s friend John always jokes that what we do are circus tricks, but there are no tricks. You can only understand it when you see it. The horses do it because they love to. It’s about training them to want to do it. That way when they perform there’s no strain, no tension. And for that reason they’re brought on really slowly, bit by bit, so that they understand how to do their job without resisting.’ She took a mouthful of chocolate mousse. ‘Is that how they train them in racing?’

Thom nearly choked on his coffee. ‘No. Not really. No.’

The door to the service-station café opened and closed, allowing in another French family. They watched, eating, as the mother spoke to the two children, pointing out the things they were allowed to have from the buffet.

‘So how long have you and your granddaddy been on your own?’

‘Four years.’

‘You never stayed in touch with your mum?’

‘She died before Nana.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I’m not. I don’t mean to sound horrible but . . . she was the kind of person who causes problems. I was really young when she left me. I miss my nana, though.’ Sarah tucked her feet under her and broke off a piece of chocolate.

‘Me, my nana and papa were really happy. People don’t believe me when I say I don’t miss my mum, but I never did. Not one day. Everything from that time, when I was with her, feels bad. I don’t remember much, but I remember being scared. When my grandparents took me I never once felt scared. One day,’ she said, gesturing at the French countryside, ‘I’m going to bring Papa back here. We were meant to visit in November, you see. He really wanted to. But then he had his stroke and everything got . . .’ She was silenced, then appeared to compose herself. ‘When he hears I’m there, I think it will help him. When he’s fit he can come over. He’ll be happy.’

‘You’re pretty sure you can make all this happen.’

‘My grandfather was one of the best riders in France. He could make a horse float in the air, do things it didn’t know were possible.’ She put the chocolate into her mouth. ‘All I’m trying to do is ride a few miles.’

Tom looked at her, this child, her stowaway horse. She made it sound like perfect sense.

Natasha flipped her phone shut and swore. It was dark and the three of them were driving aimlessly around Dover, having just returned from a cashpoint situated in a sleepy, industrial area of the town, full of car workshops and nondescript low office blocks. This, according to the credit-card company, was the last place that money had been withdrawn. To be so close, and yet to have no sign of her, was steadily ratcheting up the tension in the little car. No one mentioned the earlier promise to call the police: they
knew
she must be close by. That little piece of plastic proved it. But why would a girl on a horse end up in a place like this?

Natasha turned in her seat to face Cowboy John. ‘Tell me something, John. How did Sarah’s grandfather end up living where he did? It wasn’t . . . Well, it’s not the nicest place, is it?’

‘You think he set out to live somewhere like that? You think that was what he wanted from his life?’

Mac shrugged. ‘We don’t know anything about him other than that he seems to have raised a child who can defy gravity.’

John settled back in his seat with an almost palpable air of contentment. ‘Okay. I’ll tell you about Henri. He came from a pretty rough and ready background. Farming people, somewhere in the south. There were problems with his dad, and when Henri was young he got out fast as he could and joined the military.’

She had guessed John was the kind of man who liked to tell a story and was happy to listen: it stopped her thinking. And Mac wouldn’t mind: he loved hearing about people’s lives; it came from years of indulging his photographic subjects.

‘From there he ended up on horseback, mounted cavalry or some such, and in the 1950s he worked his way up until he was accepted by Le Cadre Noir, when they were building up again after the war.’ He eyed the two people in front of him. ‘That ain’t no small achievement, you know. They’re like, the top percentage of the whole country. It’s an élite academy. Man, he loved that place. When he used to talk about it he’d stand a little straighter – you know what I’m saying?’

‘Then how the hell did he end up living at Sandown?’

‘Women.’ John scowled at Natasha, as if she should somehow bear shared responsibility. ‘He fell in love.’

Le Cadre Noir had been on one of its first international tours in 1960 when Henri Lachapelle had noticed the small, dark-haired woman at the front of the audience. She was there for each of the three performances. The great joke was she didn’t really like horses; she had come with a friend, but had been transfixed by the young man in the stiff black collar who had made riding a horse look magical.

He had come out to see her after a performance one evening and, as he had described it to John years afterwards, it was as if everything in his life up to that point had been a rehearsal.

‘I don’t think he’d had too much in the way of love, and it hit him real hard,’ John said, lighting another cigarette. ‘They had three more evenings together, and then they wrote and visited for the best part of six months, getting together when they could. Problem was,’ he said, ‘being apart from her made him cranky. You know what young lovers are like, and Henri was never one to do things by halves. He started off not paying attention, then his performances suffered. He began to question things they were telling him in the school. In the end they told him it was their way or the highway and, in a fit of temper, he went. Got to England, married his girl and . . .’

‘Lived happily ever after,’ Natasha concluded, thinking back to that photograph. The woman who was well loved.

John’s glare was withering. ‘Are you kidding me?’ he said. ‘Who the hell gets to live happily ever after?’

 

 

 

Henri Lachapelle realised almost within the first year that he had made a terrible mistake. It wasn’t Florence’s fault: she loved him, kept herself pretty and tried to be a good wife. It wasn’t her fault that her anxiety about his happiness made him feel little more than guilt or that this frequently manifested itself in a kind of irritation.

He had asked Florence to marry him the evening of Le Carrousel, breathless, bloodied and still covered with sand. The audience in the seats around her had stood and cheered. They had walked the streets of Saumur for hours, negotiating the drunks and the motorbikes, planning their future, cementing their passion, giddy with dreams. The next morning he had not appeared for early training but had packed his few possessions in his kit-bag, and asked to see Le Grand Dieu. He had informed him that he wished to be released from his position.

Le Grand Dieu had peered at Henri’s black eye, his swollen cheek. He put his pen on his desk. There was a lengthy silence.

‘You know why we take the hind shoes off our horses, Lachapelle?’ he asked.

Henri blinked painfully. ‘So they cannot hurt other horses?’

‘And so that when they are learning to find their feet, when they flail and thrash and kick out, as they inevitably will, they do not accidentally hurt themselves.’ He placed his hands on the table. ‘Henri, if you do this, you will hurt yourself more deeply than you can know.’