The Horse Dancer (55 page)

When there was no response to his discreet knock, Mac turned the door knob, afraid that it might prompt some new antagonism between them. But he couldn’t return to his room: she had looked so lost, her face blanched in the moonlight, the habitual self-possession dissipated.

‘Tash?’ he ventured softly. He said it again, then slowly opened the door.

She was on the canopied bed, her arms crossed over her head. He thought, for a moment, that she might be asleep. And then, as he was about to close the door quietly, he saw the movement of her shoulders, caught the smothered hint of a sob. He stood very still. Natasha had not cried in front of him for years. For a long time after he had finally left, fifteen months ago, he had recalled her expression in the hallway, her jaw tense, her face utterly composed, as she stood in her work suit and watched him haul his belongings to the car.

But that had been an age ago.

Mac walked tentatively across the wooden floor. She flinched when he placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘Tash?’

She lay there, unresponsive. He wasn’t sure whether she was unable to answer, or simply waiting for him to go away.

‘What is it?’ he said. ‘What’s wrong?’

When she lifted her face from the covers, it was pale and blotchy with tears. What remained of her mascara had run down her cheeks, and he fought the urge to wipe it away.

‘What if we don’t find her?’ Her eyes glittered.

The evident depth of her pain was shocking, and made her strange to him. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. ‘We’ll find her.’ It was all he could say. ‘I don’t understand, Tash—’

She raised herself to a sitting position, drew her knees up under her chin and buried her face in them. It took two attempts before he could make out what she was saying.

‘He trusted us.’

He sat on the bed beside her. ‘Yes, but . . .’

‘You were right. It’s all my fault.’

‘No . . . no . . .’ he murmured. ‘It was a stupid thing to say and I shouldn’t have said it. It’s not your fault.’

‘It is,’ she insisted, her voice distorted by tears. ‘I let him down. I let her down. I never looked after her like I should. But it was too . . .’

‘You did fine. Like you said, you did your best. We both did our best. We weren’t to know this would happen.’

He was astonished that something he had said could provoke such a reaction in her. Natasha had long seemed impervious to anything he did. ‘Hey, come on, it was just words . . . I was angry . . .’

‘No. You were right. I shouldn’t have walked out. If I’d stayed . . . perhaps made her open up to me a bit more . . . But I couldn’t be around you. I couldn’t be around
her
.’

He could see her thin arms in the red shirt, smeared with the inky marks of her tears. He wanted to reach out a hand to her, but he was afraid that if he did she might close herself off again. ‘You couldn’t be around Sarah?’ His voice was quiet, careful.

Her face was still now, the sobs subsided. ‘She showed me I would never have been any good at it. Having Sarah there made me see . . . that perhaps there was a reason I never had children.’ She swallowed hard. ‘And what’s happened to her since shows me I was right.’ Her voice broke, and she was sobbing again, shaking, her body suddenly diminished.

Mac was stunned by her sudden grief for their lost babies. ‘No, Tash,’ he said quietly, reaching for her hand now. Her fingers were wet with tears. ‘No . . . No, Tash. That’s not it . . . Come on . . .’ he protested, his own voice catching on the words. He pulled her close to him, put his arms around her, rocking her, hardly knowing what he was doing. ‘Oh, Christ. No . . . you would have been a great mother, I know you would.’

He rested his face on the top of her head, breathing in the familiar smell of her hair, and realised that the tear sliding down his cheek was his own. And he felt his wife’s arms creep around him so that she clung to him, a silent message that perhaps he had been needed, wanted, that he had had something to offer her, after all. They sat in the dark, holding each other, grieving, too late, for the children they had lost, the life together they had relinquished. ‘Tash . . .’ he murmured. ‘Tash . . .’

Her sobs quieted, and in their place, unspoken, a question filled the air around them, became written in their skin where it touched. He lifted her face in his hands, her bruised eyelids, her damp skin, trying to read her, and saw something in it that made thought disappear.

Mac lowered his face to Natasha’s and, with a low murmur, kissed her bottom lip, his hands tracing the planes of her face, strange yet familiar. For a moment, he felt her hesitate, and some distant part of him stalled too –
What is this? Do we stop?
– but then her slim fingers were clamped around his own, delicate animal sounds escaping her as her lips sought his.

And Mac was pressing her down, a sigh of relief and desire escaping him. He kissed her neck, her hair, fumbled with the buttons of her crumpled blouse, smelt the musk of her skin and became clumsy with desire. He felt her legs hook around his back, and observed, with some distant, still-thinking part of him, that she had never been like this. Not for years. That this Natasha was someone new, and his feelings about this were more complicated than he could begin to deal with.

He opened his eyes and looked down at her in the faint light from the window, the smeared mascara, the unwashed hair, the faint pulse in her arched, pale throat, and the tenderness he had felt was smothered by something dark and male. It answered something in him that he had not been able to acknowledge to her in the days of their marriage. This was not a matter of retreading old ground. This was not someone he even recognised.

‘I want you.’ He heard her voice in his ear as if it were a surprise to her, husky with something of her own, something greedy and desperate. ‘I want you,’ she said again, and Mac, pulling his shirt over his head, understood that although it had not actually been a question there was only one possible answer.

 

 

 

A white bird was circling above her; it moved in huge, lazy circles, emitting a droning hum that grew louder and then, when the noise became unbearable, receded. Sarah blinked, unable to distinguish it clearly against the bright light behind it, pleading with it silently to quieten.

She lay very still as the noise grew in volume, and this time the ground vibrated beneath her so that she frowned, conscious of the pain in her head, in her right shoulder. Please, she willed it, no more. It’s too loud. Her eyes screwed shut against it, this brutal invasion of her senses. Finally, as it became unbearable, the noise stopped. She felt a vague gratitude, before it was interrupted by a different kind of noise. A door slamming. An exclamation.

Ow,
she thought.
My shoulder
. Then:
I’m so cold. I can’t feel my feet
. The light was dimmed and she opened her eyes a fraction to see a dark shape looming above her.

Panic took hold even before her conscious self had understood why. Something was wrong, very wrong. She blinked, the pain forgotten as she made out the shape of a man staring down at her. She discovered she was lying in a drainage ditch. She clawed herself upright, scrambling backwards until she met a concrete post.

Men. Motorbikes. Terror.

The farmer stood a few yards from her, his face concerned, his huge yellow agricultural machine a short distance away, its door hanging open where he must have jumped down.

‘
Que faire?
’ he said.

Sarah’s eyes refused to focus. She glanced around, beginning to make out the expanse of ploughed field, the distant sheds of the industrial estate. The industrial estate. A leap into the dark.

‘My horse,’ she said, jumping to her feet and letting out an involuntary yelp of pain. ‘Where is my horse?’

The farmer was backing away, gesturing at her to stay where she was. ‘
Je telephonerai aux gendarmes
,’ he said. ‘
D’accord?
’

She was already stumbling forwards, along the road, trying to clear her head, her vision. ‘Boo!’ she shouted. ‘Boo!’

She didn’t see the farmer’s suspicion as his thick, square fingers hesitated on the buttons of his mobile phone. If she had, she might have read it. Drugs? it said. Madness? There was mud all down one side of her, a bruise on her face; some kind of trouble?

‘
Tu as besoin d’aide?
’ he said, cautiously.

She did not hear him.

‘Boo!’ she shouted, clambering on to a concrete post, wincing as she tried to keep her balance. Her body ached; her vision refused to clear. But even she could see that the fields were empty, except for a few distant crows, the steam of her breath. Her voice simply disappeared into the still morning air.

She turned back to the man. ‘
Un cheval?
’ she pleaded. ‘
Un cheval brun? Un Selle Français?
’ She was trembling; a mixture of cold and fear. This couldn’t be happening. Not now, not after all this. Fear gripped her hard, shaking her awake, incapacitating her with the enormity of what had happened. It was too big a thing, too terrible a prospect. He could not have gone. Of course he could not have gone.

The farmer was standing by the door of his machine now. ‘
Tu as besoin de mon aide?
’ he said again, less keen somehow this time, as if hopeful that this foreigner would announce that, no, she was fine.

In fact Sarah, already limping down the road, not sure where she was going to look first, was too busy shouting her horse’s name to hear him. The sheer blinding shock of Boo having gone overrode the pain she could feel in her shoulder, the repetitive hammering in her head.

She had walked almost the whole length of the ploughed field before she realised that her horse was not the only thing that was missing.

Almost thirty miles away, Natasha also woke to an unexpected sense of absence. Even before she worked out that the sound she had heard was Mac disappearing into the bathroom, she had been aware of the loss of his body beside hers. She still felt the weight of his arm across her, the solid length of his leg pressed into the back of hers, his breath warm on her neck. Without him she was untethered, as if she was floating loose in space instead of tucked cosily into a vast double bed.
Mac
.

She heard him lift the loo seat and allowed herself a small smile at this indication of domesticity. She burrowed deeper under the covers, lost in the fug that told of hours of pleasure, of desire met and reciprocated. She thought of him, of his lips on her, his hands, his weight, the intensity in the way his eyes had examined her, as if all the previous year had not been washed away but made irrelevant by the strength of their feelings. She thought of her own actions, her lack of inhibition, the desire, this thing, that had sprung so unexpectedly, as if it were quite separate from who she had thought she was. It was as if their past arguments, their cruelties, the things that had kept them from being themselves with each other, had heightened everything. She had surprised him, she knew, and she had surprised herself. How long had it been since she had felt like the better version of herself in his eyes?

She slid over to his side of the bed, breathing in the still warm imprint of his skin. She heard the lavatory flush, the sound of running water as he washed his hands. Would it be wrong to wrap herself around him again before they got up and restarted the search? Would it be wrong to use his lips, his hands, his skin, to fortify herself against the day ahead? What would it feel like to bathe in that huge, claw-footed bath, to reclaim that strong body as hers, inch by soapy inch? I love him, she thought, and the knowledge came as a relief, as if to admit it meant she could stop struggling.

She sighed with contentment. Then, prosaically, she rubbed her eyes, conscious of the mascara smears of the previous evening, tried to smooth her hair, which was matted at the back of her head. Her body glowed, prickled with anticipation and she urged him silently to hurry. She wanted him against her, around her, inside her. She felt a hunger for his physical self that she had thought did not exist in her any longer. She never felt like this with Conor. She had felt physical desire, yes, but it had been like quenching an appetite they both acknowledged, rather than this giddy, visceral feeling of being one half of a whole, of feeling even a temporary absence like an amputation.

It was at that point that she heard the voice. At first she had thought it was someone out in the corridor, but as she lay, straining to hear, she realised Mac was talking. She climbed out of bed, wrapping the bedspread around her, padded barefoot to the bathroom door, hesitated for a moment, then rested her ear against the old oak panel.

‘Sweetheart, let’s talk about this later. You – you’re impossible.’ He was laughing. ‘No, I don’t . . . Maria, I’m not going to have this discussion now. I told you, I’m still looking. Yes, I’ll see you on the fifteenth . . . Me too.’ He laughed again. ‘I’ve got to go now, Maria. I’ll speak to you when I’m home.’

For years afterwards, Natasha would struggle to disassociate a smell of beeswax from a premonition of disaster. She backed away from the door, the smile gone, the glow transformed as if by alchemy into ice in her blood. She had just made it to the bed when he emerged from the bathroom. She slowed her breathing, rubbed her face, unsure how to appear to him.

‘You’re awake,’ he observed. She could feel his eyes on her. His voice was roughened by lack of sleep.

‘What’s the time?’ she asked.

‘A quarter past eight.’

Her heart was beating uncomfortably inside her chest. ‘We’d better get going,’ she said, casting around on the floor for her clothes. She didn’t look at him.