The Country Escape - Jane Lovering Page 0,89

it wasn’t so bad. I did have to stop and lean on him a few times, but he was also leaning on me; it evened out over the miles. Every so often something – the smell of warm horse, the feel of a nose under my elbow or the way my legs ached – would remind me of the past; years and years of indoctrination were hard to get over. And, apparently, I still knew how to do it. I felt a warm glow of pride, now it was over. I’d done it. Bareback too, and I’d not had to do that once my mother was sure that my balance was good; she’d stopped sending me down the jumping lane with no saddle and my arms folded by the time I was ten.

It was a long walk back. But we eventually turned out from the footpath into the lane, where the tree still lay across the road, to see lots of lights, people running about, a huge helicopter in the field beyond the house and Gabriel, standing by the gate with a torch. He jumped as we loomed out of the dark at him.

‘Hi! I guess you made it, then.’ He waved at the helicopter, where the blades were just beginning to turn, readying for take-off. ‘The big whirly bird was a bit of a giveaway.’ The torch swung towards my face. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I need to see to Patrick,’ I said, my voice sounding flat under the weight of a new tiredness. ‘He needs cooling down properly and then rubbing down. Might need to make him up a mash too.’

‘I’d offer to do it for you, but I only recognised three of the words in that sentence.’ A hand came out from behind the torch. ‘You were incredibly brave.’

My legs were wobbling but the touch of his hand gave me strength to stand. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No. That wasn’t brave, Gabriel. Brave is what you do every day. I just rode a horse, something I was born, bred and raised to do. I don’t, not because I’m scared so much as grateful that I don’t have to any more. I’m scared for Poppy after what happened to Dad, but I’m not scared for me, so riding Patrick wasn’t brave in the least. You…’ I sighed, part tiredness, part something else that was almost an exasperation. ‘You are facing going blind, you are spending your days making beautiful things even though you think it’s going to mean a lifetime of celibacy and you walk around still seeing people who bullied you every day. Now, that is brave.’

Then I walked past him, using the bulk of Patrick to shield me from his slightly shocked expression, and began to concentrate on getting the poor horse fit to be put to bed.

16

It was a long, long night. I called up the local news on my laptop, wanting to check that nothing untoward was happening in Steepleton without actually looking as though I was being overprotective, and reports came in every ten minutes or so of trees down on roads, high tides making seafronts impassable, but no mention of trouble at any Halloween celebrations. The fire engines were out from as far afield as Taunton, clearing roads, pumping out flood water, rescuing people trapped or marooned. It seemed we’d been lucky to get the helicopter when we did, as it was now being needed to lift people from crashed cars and flooded seafront properties to hospital.

Gabriel phoned the hospital, but they wouldn’t really tell him much. As he wasn’t next of kin or even a relative, all we got was, ‘The team are doing all they can.’ I lit the log-burner and we sat, side by side on the sofa, staring into the flames and occasionally trying to chat, to lighten the atmosphere, but we were both too tightly wrapped in our separate thoughts to lighten things up much.

At last, around the small hours, I suggested we went to bed. Gabriel’s head came up. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t feel… I mean, somehow it feels as though we’d being doing something wrong, somehow. Do you understand?’

I did. Almost as though we’d brought Granny Mary’s stroke on by making love earlier in the day. ‘I’ll sleep in Poppy’s room. You take my bed,’ I said. ‘We need to sleep anyway and I’m not sure…’ I felt the heat rise up from somewhere in my chest as the memory of the way we’d