‘Oh dear...’ The slow tears came. ‘I was dreaming it was all right. That that foal was a dream, only a dream...’
‘You and your father,’ I said. ‘Are brave people.’
She sniffed a little, pressing against her nose with the back of her hand. ‘Do you mean,’ she said slowly, ‘that whatever happens, we mustn’t be defeated?’
‘Mm.’
She looked at me, and after a while nodded. ‘If we have to, we’ll start again. We’ll work. He did it all before, you know.’
‘You both have the skills,’ I said.
‘I’m glad you came.’ She brushed the drying tears from her cheeks. ‘God knows what it would have been like without you.’
I went with her out into the yards for evening stables, where the muck-carrying and feeding went on as always. Ginnie fetched the usual pocketful of carrots from the feed room and gave them here and there to the mares, talking cheerfully to the lads while they bent to their chores. No one, watching and listening, could ever have imagined that she feared the sky was falling.
‘Evening, Chris, how’s her hoof today?’
‘Hi, Danny. Did you bring this one in this morning?’
‘Hello, Pete. She looks as if she’ll foal any day now.’
‘Evening, Shane. How’s she doing?’
‘Hi, Sammy, is she eating now OK?’
The lads answered her much as they spoke to Oliver himself, straightforwardly and with respect, and in most cases without stopping what they were doing. I looked back as we left the first big yard for the second, and for a moment took one of the lads to be Ricky Barnet.
‘Who’s that?’ I said to Ginnie.
She followed my gaze to where the lad walked across to the yard tap, swinging an empty bucket with one hand and eating an apple with the other.
‘Shane. Why?’
‘He reminded me of someone I knew.’
She shrugged. ‘He’s all right. They all are, when Nigel’s looking, which he doesn’t do often enough.’
‘He works all night,’ I said mildly.
‘I suppose so.’
The mares in the second yard had mostly given birth already and Ginnie that evening had special eyes for the foals. The lads hadn’t yet reached those boxes and Ginnie didn’t go in to any of them, warning me that mares with young foals could be protective and snappy.
‘You never know if they’ll bite or kick you. Dad doesn’t like me going in with them alone.’ She smiled. ‘He still thinks I’m a baby.’
We went on to the foaling yard, where a lad greeted as Dave was installing a heavy slow-walking mare into one of the boxes.
‘Nigel says she’ll foal tonight,’ he told Ginnie.
‘He’s usually right.’
We went on past the breeding pen and came to the stallions, where Larry and Ron were washing down Diarist (who appeared to have been working) in the centre of the yard, using a lot of water, energy and oaths.
‘Mind his feet,’ Larry said. ‘He’s in one of his moods.’
Ginnie gave carrots to Parakeet and Rotaboy, and we came finally to Sandcastle. He looked as great, as charismatic as ever, but Ginnie gave him his tit-bit with her own lips compressed.
‘He can’t help it all, I suppose,’ she said sighing. ‘But I do wish he’d never won any races.
‘Or that we’d let him die that day on the main road?’
‘Oh no!’ She was shocked. ‘We couldn’t have done that, even if we’d known...’
Dear girl, I thought; many people would personally have mown him down with a truck.
We went back to the house via the paddocks, where she fondled any heads that came to the railings and parted with the last of the crunchy orange goodies. ‘I can’t believe that this will all end,’ she said, looking over the horse-dotted acres, ‘I just can’t believe it.’
I tentatively suggested to both her and Oliver that they might prefer it if I went home that evening, but they both declared themselves against.
‘Not yet,’ Ginnie said anxiously and Oliver nodded forcefully. ‘Please do stay, Tim, if you can.’
I nodded, and rang the Michaels’, and this time got Judith.
‘Do let me speak to her,’ Ginnie said, taking the receiver out of my hand. ‘I do so want to.’
And I, I thought wryly, I too want so much to talk to her, to hear her voice, to renew my own soul through her: I’m no one’s universal pillar of strength, I need my comfort too.
I had my crumbs, after Ginnie. Ordinary words, all else implied; as always.
‘Take care of yourself,’ she said finally.
‘You, too,’ I said.
‘Yes.’ The word was a sigh, faint and receding, as if she’d said it with the receiver already away from her mouth. There was the click of disconnection, and Oliver was announcing briskly that it was time for whisky, time for supper; time for anything perhaps but thinking.
Ginnie decided that she felt too restless after supper to go to bed early, and would go for a walk instead.
‘Do you want me to come?’ I said.
‘No. I’m all right. I just thought I’d go out. Look at the stars.’ She kissed her father’s forehead, pulling on a thick cardigan for warmth. ‘I won’t go off the farm. You’ll probably find me in the foal yard, if you want me.’
He nodded to her fondly but absentmindedly, and with a small wave to me she went away. Oliver asked me gloomily, as if he’d been waiting for us to be alone, how soon I thought the bank would decide on his fate, and we talked in snatches about his daunting prospects, an hour or two sliding by on possibilities.
Shortly before ten, when we had probably twice repeated all there was to say, there came a heavy hammering on the back door.
‘Whoever’s that?’ Oliver frowned, rose to his feet and went to find out.
I didn’t hear the opening words, but only the goose-pimpling urgency in the rising voice.
‘She’s where?’ Oliver said loudly, plainly, in alarm. ‘Where?’
I went quickly into the hallway. One of the lads stood in the open doorway, panting for breath, wide-eyed and looking very scared.
Oliver glanced at me over his shoulder, already on the move.
‘He says Ginnie’s lying on the ground unconscious.’
The lad turned and ran off, with Oliver following and myself close behind: and the lad’s breathlessness, I soon found, was owing to Ginnie’s being on the far side of the farm, away down beyond Nigel’s bungalow and the lads’ hostel, right down on the far drive, near the gate to the lower road.
We arrived there still running, the lad now doubling over in his fight for breath, and found Ginnie lying on her side on the hard asphalt surface with another of the lads on his knees beside her, dim figures in weak moonlight, blurred outlines of shadow.
Oliver and I too knelt there and Oliver was saying to the lads, ‘What happened, what happened? Did she fall?’
‘We just found her,’ the kneeling lad said. ‘We were on our way back from the pub. She’s coming round, though, sir, she’s been saying things.’
Ginnie in fact moved slightly, and said ‘Dad.’
‘Yes, Ginnie, I’m here.’ He picked up her hand and patted it. ‘We’ll soon get you right.’ There was relief in his voice, but short-lived.
‘Dad,’ Ginnie said, mumbling. ‘Dad.’
‘Yes, I’m here.’
‘Dad...’
‘She isn’t hearing you,’ I said worriedly.
He turned his head to me, his eyes liquid in the dark of his face. ‘Get an ambulance. There’s a telephone in Nigel’s house. Tell him to get an ambulance here quickly. I don’t think we’ll move her.... Get an ambulance.’
I stood up to go on the errand but the breathless lad said, ‘Nigel’s out. I tried there. There’s no one. It’s all locked.’