an ambulance, but she’s up to Bridport hospital and they think she’s had some kind of stroke. She called me and asked me to come and check up on Patrick. I wonder if you’d mind keeping an eye on things until she can get back to pick it all up?’
Oh, Lord. Maybe this was why my Streatham friends – none of whom had visited yet, despite the fact that they’d all said they’d come down for weekends – had warned me about life in the sticks. All this ‘up in everyone’s business’?
‘Look, I’m not sure…’
‘It’s Patrick, really. I don’t know how bad this stroke is – she’s still communicating but I think it would take more than that to shut Mary up. I had her on the phone for an hour this morning to make sure I knew what to do. In fact, I think even death would have a tough job slowing Mary down. I reckon she’ll be running round Steepleton as a corpse, trying to make sure everything goes her way.’ There was a pause. ‘Yeah, that’s not a great image, now I come to think of it, sorry.’
A blackbird sang into the resulting silence.
‘Well, I’m sorry, but the horse can’t stay.’ I wiped my hands down my front again. ‘We’ve only been here two weeks, my daughter is protesting enough about having to change schools and I don’t want her to have any excuse for not going, and, believe me, having to look after a horse that is going to have cleared all the grass from the orchard within a week will be excuse enough. Can’t you arrange to have it all moved to wherever it is that you live?’
I tried to eyeball him strongly, but the fact that he stood in near-complete shadow and I was backlit by the sun streaming through from the kitchen whilst wearing an apron and rubber gloves like some kind of Vision of Nineteen Fifty, rather took the edge off.
‘Granny Mary might have something to say about that.’ The man shifted and some branches pinged around. It was a bit of a closely confined space at the front of the cottage, where the little gate onto the lane had clearly only ever been used as a last resort. The resulting mossy undergrowth had turned the whole of the path to the door, and most of the outside of the porch too, into something that Sleeping Beauty’s prince would have approached with caution and a chainsaw. ‘Look, I’m sorry. We seem to have got off on the wrong foot here. I haven’t even introduced myself. Gabriel Hunter.’
A hand extended and I shook it without removing my rubber glove. ‘Whichever foot we might be on,’ I said, somewhat stiffly, also embarrassed that I hadn’t taken the glove off, ‘the horse has to go. The caravan can stay if we pull it into the field. It’s probably not safe to leave on the side of the road like that, the lane is narrow enough as it is. But I can’t look after a horse. The orchard is barely an acre – it’s not enough grazing at this time of year, he’s going to need hay and feed too, and then there’s all the poo.’
‘Good for the rhubarb,’ said Gabriel, robustly. ‘Granny Mary says you can use the van, if you want, to keep it aired out. Even couple up Patrick and take it round the lanes – it’s a great way of seeing the countryside.’
I looked behind me through the house. The horse, who I now assumed went by the name of Patrick, was rubbing his backside against one of the trees to the accompaniment of over-ripe apples plopping down around him. One hit him square on the withers. He looked like an illustration in a pony book, drawn by someone with an eye for realism.
‘I don’t need to see the countryside. I live here,’ I said, tartly. ‘And I don’t want to look after someone else’s horse.’
The man sighed. ‘Okay, yes. Sorry. I’m beginning to realise that Mary might not have thought this through.’ A hand raised and was, presumably, running through his hair. ‘Can I just come through and check him over? So I can tell her he’s all right for now? I’ll have to try to sort somewhere for him to go.’
I indicated, with a flopping yellow rubber hand, the path that squeezed its way around the outside of the cottage, between the wall and the overgrown hedge. Moss had furred its outline so it was hard to tell what was path and what was grass edging. ‘You can go round that way.’ He wasn’t coming into my house, that was for certain. All those things I’d told Poppy about not letting people inside unless you knew them well were probably more related to London, but even so. ‘I’ll meet you out there.’
I closed the front door firmly, in case he was going to insist on the shortcut, and flew through the house whilst tearing off the rubber gloves. He was probably fine, but I hadn’t even seen his face yet and that didn’t inspire me with trust. Besides, I was starting to feel slightly proprietorial towards the horse, and if this bloke turned out to be a horse thief with no sense of discernment and a taste for beasts that looked like barrels on legs, well, I’d at least be there to help him load up.
When I reached the orchard, the man was already there. He was standing with his back to me, one hand on Patrick’s neck and the horse’s muzzle deep in his pocket. He was murmuring to him; the faint Dorset accent, the thick rays of sun striping down through the trees, and the hum of birds and bees made it feel like the closing-credit scene in some bucolic film. Tess of the D’Urbervilles swam briefly to mind, until I realised that that wasn’t really the serene image I was looking for.
The blackbird sang again, now high in the apple tree.
Behind me, the kitchen door slammed in a gust, the badly fitted windows rattled, and the man and horse both looked up at me. Now in sunlight, I could see the man better. He was tall, long-haired, with one of those faces that look as though they’ve been designed by computer, all cheekbones and eyes and chin. He was wearing a pair of glasses so thick that his eyes were magnified, and a designer stubble that gave him the look of an off-duty Burberry model. With the piebald horse blowing softly at me over his shoulder, it was all a bit Country Life photo shoot for me.
‘He’s fine,’ I said, stiffly, horribly aware of my hair tied up with a J-Cloth, and that my apron had a pattern of ducklings all across the pocket. ‘He’ll need some water though.’
The man, Gabriel, looked back at the horse, and murmured a few more soft words, then patted the rough neck and stepped away. ‘Have you got a bucket? I’ll leave him some and then if you could refill it?’ He put his hands into the front pockets of his jeans, pulled them out again and then folded his arms, as though having to deal with limbs were a new problem for him. ‘And then I’m going up to Bridport to slowly murder Granny Mary for putting us both in this position.’
He’d looked away again, watching the enormous splayed hooves picking their way past the tree roots, and his words had been quiet, but heartfelt. I immediately felt defensive on the part of the absent Granny Mary. ‘Well, he’s not doing any harm for now. At least she had the sense to put him somewhere with decent fencing, rather than leaving him roaming out on the lane.’
This elicited a small smile. ‘Well, Patrick and the van are her pride and joy. Even something like a stroke isn’t going to come between Mary and Patrick’s welfare.’
Another silence resulted, broken only by the determined sound of equine teeth ripping up my grass. Eventually, because we were both just standing there, I cleared my throat. ‘So, you’re going to find somewhere else for him to go, and I’ll just keep an eye on him in the meantime.’ I spoke briskly, to break the deadlock. I had the feeling that if I didn’t move this along a bit, he’d stand here in the orchard for the rest of the day, and I had paintwork to be washing down.
‘Er. Yes.’
He still had his arms folded, and was staring at the ground.
‘And I suppose we ought to pull
