The Country Escape - Jane Lovering Page 0,3
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