the sarcasm out of my words, but I knew she’d reinsert it anyway ‘… he’s from that.’
Parked in the pull-in, where the lane became briefly wide enough between its tree-laden edges to allow a passing place, stood a caravan. One of the old-fashioned gypsy caravans, with a glorious bow top and painted front, a gilded split door surmounted by a little window and covered in gold-painted designs. The shafts were propped against the gate.
‘Oh,’ Poppy breathed, ‘it’s beautiful. He’s beautiful. Do we get to keep him? If he’s on our land, I mean?’
‘No.’ My voice was tight. I could smell the pony now, that mix of hay and newly mown grass and sweat and hooves and mud. ‘Of course we can’t. I’d better go and wake up the inhabitant and ask them to move.’
Poppy gave me a look. ‘You better get dressed first, Mum. You don’t want to look like a skank if you’re knocking on someone’s door at this time in the morning.’
In the spirit of not caving in to what my daughter thought of me, I climbed over the gate and cautiously approached the caravan door. I could feel the weight of Poppy’s stare between my shoulder blades, and the horse wasn’t helping either.
‘Excuse me?’ I tapped on the door. ‘Hello?’
The door swung towards me, unlatched, on a waft of fried-food smells.
‘Er, I live in the house…’ I poked my head through. ‘Your horse…’
The inside of the van was scrupulously tidy, beautifully ornate, and completely devoid of occupancy.
2
I have no idea how I managed to get Poppy to leave off cuddling the horse and go to school. She probably decided it was better to go and be able to boast about the pony that turned up in her field, than to stay at home with her mother being heavily disapproving at her. Either way, she dragged her uniform on and went to stand in the lane, where the minibus picked her up, together with a bunch of others from local farms, and dropped them all down in the village of Christmas Steepleton, from where they were all collected by the larger school bus. It was, as Poppy repeatedly told me, ‘a drag’, and if I’d been any kind of mother I wouldn’t have removed her from her natural London habitat. Where her Starbucks addiction and her desire to try on every outfit in Oxford Street had been close to bankrupting me, but I hadn’t mentioned that. I’d just told her that her dad and I finalising the divorce meant that the flat had to be sold, and the amount of money it gave me had just about been enough to buy Harvest Cottage and move to the Dorset coast.
Guilt, I told myself. Not just the thing making the outside of that inexplicable deserted caravan shiny. I looked out of the kitchen window, where the sun was busy highlighting the fact that nobody had dusted or cleaned for what looked like a decade, across into the orchard. The pony was grazing as though he hadn’t seen grass for weeks, although the width of him indicated he’d been extremely well fed up to this point. His black ears stuck up from the overlong grass that hid the rest of his face, looking like two skinny crows having a conversation, and the rest of his black-and-white-patched body seemed relaxed. I had a brief thought about laminitis, reasoned it was too late in the year for him to be affected, and went back to cleaning. He wasn’t doing any harm, and it was possible that the caravan’s occupant had just popped down to Steepleton to get some shopping. My lane was on the way, sort of, if you didn’t mind squeezing between the overhanging oaks that lined it, before it climbed up and over the hill to join the main road and begin a final – and, in a horse-drawn caravan, probably fatal – drop down into the village. In the other direction lay another steep descent, a narrow ford and then miles of meandering grey tarmac, broken by weeds and salted with farm trackways, before it met the Bridport road.
Yes, that would be it. Someone had gone shopping and hadn’t realised that Harvest Cottage was now occupied. After all, it had been empty for nearly five years, apparently, following a disputed bequest. Nobody had technically owned it, so nobody could sell it, and it had sat here in its damp fold in the Dorset hills with dereliction becoming an increasing likelihood.