‘Drinking pails?’
‘No. They don’t always have the same pails. I mean, when Lenny fills them he doesn’t necessarily take them back to the particular boxes they come from. The pails don’t have the stallions’ names on, if that’s what you mean.’
I didn’t mean anything much: just grabbing at straws.
‘Straw...’ I said. ‘How about an allergy? An allergy to something around him? Could an allergy have such an effect?’
‘I’ve never heard of anything like that. I’ll ask the Research people, though, on Monday.’
He got up to pour us both a drink. ‘It’s good to have you here,’ he said. ‘A sort of net over the bottomless pit.’ He gave me the glass with a faint half-smile, and I had a definite impression that he would not in the end go to pieces.
I telephoned then to the Michaels’ house and Gordon answered at the first ring as if he’d been passing nearby. Nothing good to report, I said, except that Ginnie sent Judith her love. Gordon said Judith was in the garden picking parsley for supper, and he would tell her. ‘Call tomorrow,’ he said, ‘if we can help.’
Our own supper, left ready in the refrigerator by Oliver’s part-time housekeeper, filled the hollows left by lunch, and Ginnie went to bed straight afterwards, saying she would be up at two o’clock and out with Nigel in the foal yard.
‘She goes most nights,’ Oliver said. ‘She and Nigel make a good team. He says she’s a great help, particularly if three or four mares are foaling at the same time. I’m often out there myself, but with all the decisions and paperwork as well I get very tired if I do it too much. Fall asleep over meals, that sort of thing.’
We ourselves went to bed fairly early, and I awoke in the large high-ceilinged guest room while it was still blackly dark. It was one of those fast awakenings which mean that sleep won’t come back easily, and I got out of bed and went to the window, which looked out over the yard.
I could see only roofs and security lights and a small section of the first yard. There was no visible activity, and my watch showed four-thirty.
I wondered if Ginnie would mind if I joined her in the foaling yard; and got dressed and went.
They were all there, Nigel and Oliver as well as Ginnie, all in one open-doored box where a mare lay on her side on the straw. They all turned their heads as I approached but seemed unsurprised to see me and gave no particular greeting.
‘This is Plus Factor,’ Oliver said. ‘In foal to Sandcastle.’
His voice was calm and so was Ginnie’s manner, and I guessed that they still hadn’t told Nigel about the deformities. There was hope, too, in their faces, as if they were sure that this one, after all, would be perfect.
‘She’s coming,’ Nigel said quietly. ‘Here we go.’
The mare gave a grunt and her swelling sides heaved. The rest of us stood silent, watching, taking no part. A glistening half-transparent membrane with a hoof showing within it appeared, followed by the long slim shape of the head, followed very rapidly by the whole foal, flopping out onto the straw, steaming, the membrane breaking open, the fresh air reaching the head, new life beginning with the first fluttering gasp of the lungs.
Amazing, I thought.
‘Is he all right?’ Oliver said, bending down, the anxiety raw, unstifled.
‘Sure,’ Nigel said. ‘Fine little colt. Just his foreleg’s doubled over...’
He knelt beside the foal who was already making the first feeble efforts to move his head, and he stretched out both hands gently to free the bent leg fully from the membrane, and to straighten it. He picked it up... and froze.
We could all see.
The leg wasn’t bent. It ended in a stump at the knee. No cannon bone, no fetlock, no hoof.
Ginnie beside me gave a choking sob and turned abruptly towards the open door, towards the dark. She took one rocky pace and then another, and then was running: running nowhere, running away from the present, the future, the unimaginable. From the hopeless little creature on the straw.
I went after her, listening to her footsteps, hearing them on gravel and then losing them, guessing she had reached the grass. I went more slowly in her wake down the path to the breeding pen, not seeing her, but sure she was out somewhere in the paths round the paddocks. With eyes slowly acclimatising I went that way and found her not far off, on her knees beside one of the posts, sobbing with the deep sound of a wholly adult desperation.
‘Ginnie,’ I said.
She stood up as if to turn to me was natural and clung to me fiercely, her body shaking from the sobs, her face pressed hard against my shoulder, my arms tightly round her. We stood like that until the paroxysm passed; until, dragging a handkerchief from her jeans, she could speak.
‘It’s one thing knowing it in theory,’ she said, her voice full of tears and her body still shaking spasmodically from after-sobs. ‘I read those letters. I did know. But seeing it... that’s different.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘And it means...’ She took gulps of air, trying hard for control. ‘It means, doesn’t it, that we’ll lose our farm. Lose everything?’
‘I don’t know yet. Too soon to say that.’
‘Poor Dad.’ The tears were sliding slowly down her cheeks, but like harmless rain after a hurricane. ‘I don’t see how we can bear it.’
‘Don’t despair yet. If there’s a way to save you, we’ll find it.’
‘Do you mean... your bank?’
‘I mean everybody.’
She wiped her eyes and blew her nose, and finally moved away a pace, out of my arms, strong enough to leave shelter. We went slowly back to the foaling yard and found nobody there except horses. I undid the closed top half of Plus Factor’s box and looked inside; looked at the mare standing there patiently without her foal and wondered if she felt any fretting sense of loss.
‘Dad and Nigel have taken him, haven’t they?’ Ginnie said.
‘Yes.’
She nodded, accepting that bit easily. Death to her was part of life, as to every child brought up close to animals. I closed Plus Factor’s door and Ginnie and I went back to the house while the sky lightened in the east to the new day, Sunday.
The work of the place went on.
Oliver telephoned to various owners of the mares who had come to the other three stallions, reporting the birth of foals alive and well and one dead before foaling, very sorry. His voice sounded strong, civilized, controlled, the competent captain at the helm, and one could almost see the steel creeping back, hour by hour, into his battered spirit. I admired him for it; and I would fight to give him time, I thought, to come to some compromise to avert permanent ruin.
Ginnie, showered, breakfasted, tidy in sweater and shirt, went off to spend the morning at the Watcherleys’ and came back smiling; the resilience of youth.
‘Both of those mares are better from their infections,’ she reported, ‘and Maggie says she’s heard Calder Jackson’s not doing so well lately, his yard’s half empty. Cheers Maggie up no end, she says.’
For the Watcherleys too, I thought briefly, the fall of Oliver’s business could mean a return to rust and weeds, but I said, ‘Not enough sick horses just now, perhaps.’
‘Not enough sick horses with rich owners, Maggie says.’
In the afternoon Ginnie slept on the sofa looking very childlike and peaceful, and only with the awakening did the night’s pain roll back.