‘What I need,’ he said aloud to his peacefully empty office, ‘is a white star. A bright white star, stationary in the sky, shining over a stable, saying, “Here I am. Come here to me. Come here and find me.”’
God forgive me my blasphemy, he thought; and went home at four o’clock.
In the country on that afternoon Jim and Vivi Turner spread out four newspapers on the kitchen table and studied them over mugs of tea.
‘They won’t find him, will they?’ Jim said.
Vivi shook her head. ‘A bay with a white star... common as dirt.’
Their minds wandered to the aristocratic yearling rugged up outside in their tumbledown twenty-box stable, but it was five weeks or more since they had stolen him, and time had given them a sense of safety.
‘And anyway,’ Vivi said, ‘these papers are two days old, and nothing’s happened.’
Jim Turner nodded, reassured. He would never have brought it all off, he knew, without Vivi. It was she who had said that what they badly needed, to get him going as a trainer, was one really good horse. The sort, let’s face it (she said) that no one was going to send to a newly retired jump jockey who had never risen above middle-rank and who had been suspended twice for taking bribes.
As Jim Turner would take a bribe any time anyone offered, the two suspensions had been mild. He himself wouldn’t have minded retiring to a job as a head lad in a big stable, where the chances for bribery grew like berries ripe for plucking. Vivi had wanted to be a trainer’s wife, not a head lad’s, and you had to hand it to her — the girl had brains.
It was Vivi, with her sharp eyes, who had seen how they could steal a top yearling from the sales. It was Vivi, a proper little Lady Macbeth, who had egged Jim on when he faltered, who had herself engineered the exchange in box 189; she who had taken the aristocrat and Jim who had left the changeling.
Vivi, deciding that they should use a half-bred unregistered throw-out as their entry to the sales, had bought one from a knacker’s yard for peanuts; a bay with a white star, common as dirt. There would be bound to be one a bit like him at the sales, she’d said. They would swap him for anything great that came after him in the catalogue; and, sure enough, number 189 had been perfect.
Vivi, planning ahead, would send Jim up north in the spring with all their savings to buy a cheap thoroughbred two-year-old, a bay with a white star, that looked at any rate passable. Then Jim would get the vet to fill in the new horse’s markings certificate which would match its foal certificate in the registry; and Jim Turner, racehorse trainer, would have in his stable a bay with a white star checked and registered and free to race.
Jim and Vivi knew, as the Director did, that young horses changed as they grew older, like children into men, so that there would be little chance of anyone recognising the aristocrat by sight. It could race for ever in its new identity, and no one would ever know. Vivi couldn’t see how anything could go wrong, and never thought of the long-term tenacity of the Director, who was already pondering wearisome sporadic whorl-checks of white-starred bays for years to come.
‘In the summer,’ Vivi said, ‘we’ll smarten the place up a bit. Lick of paint. Tubs of flowers. Then in autumn when the colt starts winning and people take notice, we’ll have a place new owners won’t mind coming to.’
Jim nodded. Vivi could do it. She was real bright, Vivi was.
‘And you’ll be on the map right enough, Jim Turner, and none of those snooty cows of trainers’ wives will look down on us ever again.’
There was a sudden metallic clatter just outside the back door and, immediately intensely alarmed, they both stood up jerkily and went outside.
A shambling, untidy figure stood there, with his hands fumbling through the household refuse in their dustbin, turning already to back away.
‘It’s a tramp!’ Vivi said disbelievingly. ‘Stealing our rubbish.’
‘Get off,’ Jim said, advancing roughly. ‘Go on, get off.’
The tramp retreated a few steps, very slowly.
Jim Turner dived back into his kitchen and snatched up the shot-gun with which he deterred rabbits.
‘Go on,’ he shouted, coming out again and pointing the barrels. ‘Clear off and don’t come back. I don’t want muck like you round here. Bugger off.’
The tramp went slowly away towards the road, and the Turners, righteously reassured, returned to their warm kitchen.
The landowner spent the afternoon regretting what he’d done in the morning. It was not a good day, he belatedly realised, for turning a man out of his home, even if his home was a hole in the ground.
When they’d pulled the nest to pieces, the two council workers and himself, he had found in the ruins a plastic bag full of cigarette ends. He wasn’t an imaginative man, but it came to him that everything the tramp had, his home and his comforts, he had taken away. He had looked up at the sullen sky, and shivered.
During the afternoon he walked lengthily round his land, half looking for the tramp, to quieten his own conscience; but it was almost with surprise that he finally saw him walking towards him along one of his boundary roads.
The tramp shambled slowly, and he was not alone. At his shoulder, as slowly following, came a horse.
The tramp stopped, and the horse also. The tramp held out a horse cube on a grimy palm, and the horse ate it.
The landowner looked in puzzlement at the two of them, the filthy man and the well-groomed horse in its tidy rug.
‘Where did you get that?’ said the landowner, pointing.
‘Found it. In the road.’ The tramp’s voice was hoarse from disuse, but the words were clear. They were also not true.
‘Look,’ said the landowner awkwardly, ‘you can build that house of yours again, if you like. Stay for a few days. How’s that?’
The tramp considered it but shook his head, knowing that he couldn’t stay, because of the horse. He had freed the horse from its stable and taken it with him. They would call him a thief and arrest him. In his past he had compulsively absconded from institutions, from children’s homes and then the army, and if he couldn’t face the walls of a doss house, still less could he face a cell in the nick. Cold and hunger and freedom, yes. Warmth and food and a locked door, no.
He turned away, gesturing unmistakably to the landowner to take the horse, to put his hand on its head-collar and do what was right. Automatically, almost, the landowner did so.
‘Wait,’ he said, as the tramp retreated. ‘Look... take these.’ He pulled from his pocket a packet of cigarettes and held them out. ‘Take them... please.’
Hesitating, the tramp went back and accepted the gift, nodding his acknowledgement of something given, something received. Then again he turned away and set off down the road, and the long-threatened snow began to fall in big single floating flakes, obliterating his shaggy outline in the dying afternoon.
Where will he go? the landowner wondered uncomfortably: and the tramp thought without anxiety that he would walk all night through the snow to keep warm, and in the morning he would find shelter, and eat, as usual, what others of their plenty had thrown away. The tramp’s earlier festering anger, which had flared up and focused on Jim Turner, had by now burnt away, and all he felt, as he put distance safely behind him, was his normal overwhelming desire to be alone.
The landowner looked at the horse and the white star on its forehead, and shook his head sardonically at the thought which came to him. All the same, when he’d shut the horse into a stable behind his house, he fished out the day before yesterday’s newspapers, and looked at the tabloid’s headline ‘Find the Bright Star’ and at the foal certificate facsimile in the ‘serious’ daily. And then he tentatively telephoned the police.