they’re older, Poppy, of course we will,’ he’d say patiently. ‘But sand and nappies don’t really mix, do they? Be reasonable.’
We had gone to Cornwall once and he’d hated it. ‘I don’t get it, Poppy. I’m sorry, I just don’t. A ham roll on a freezing rock with a flapping Telegraph?’
I’d seen only my baby in the sand, little Clemmie, gazing in rapture as a minute sand crab shifted sideways down the beach at speed. Later, building a small castle; building poignant memories too. Mind you, I also remember my husband’s skinny white legs protruding from a towel and his clenched expression. It was the look of a man controlling himself in impossible circumstances. So off we’d gone to Majorca the following year, and Phil had been happy and I’d once more retired to my head. So much so that once, in a restaurant in Palma, when Phil asked me what I wanted, I said I’d have a pasty.
I’d have to keep my eye on Jennie.
12
The next day, I went to see Dad. There wasn’t any real need to ring, he was always there, doing what he always did, and was always pleased to see me, but I gave him a call anyway before I pitched up. He was there. And he was pleased too.
I found him lunging a yearling in the field behind his cottage: a nervous young filly trotting round him in circles on the end of a long piece of rope. My father’s face was a picture of rapt concentration, the only time it looked like that, aside from when he was pricking out seedlings in what passed for his greenhouse. Yes, young things: fillies, seedlings, children. I’d been lucky. And only my gran had known that when Mum died. Most people had looked at one another in horror: Peter Mortimer, with a child of eleven! A little girl! But Gran had known about his nurturing heart and had no truck with people who’d told her she should step in and take over. She lived reasonably close by and had popped in regularly – Mum’s mum, this is – and if she’d ever been appalled at the chaos, the confusion, the endless saddles and bridles slung over chairs, the hastily opened tins of beans for tea, she never said. Might have quietly cleaned up, but, looking out of the window as she washed up, would have seen me perched in front of Dad in the saddle of some huge hunter, or with him in the barn filling hay nets or water buckets, which could easily descend into a water fight in the yard, both of us running in drenched. I was always pretty grubby and oddly dressed, but I was always with him: beside him in the rattling old horse lorry off to the sales – never a seat belt and probably never a tax disc either. Dad wasn’t dishonest, but if he was up against it money-wise, which he always was, he sailed fairly close to the wind. And Gran would have left us to it. Stayed for tea – more beans – and gone away knowing I’d probably be awake until Dad went to bed. Knowing too that I didn’t always make it to school if we’d been up all night with a mare foaling, that I drove around the farm alone in a horse box with hardly any brakes, but also that I appeared to be thriving. That I was getting a different sort of nourishment.
Calling it a farm was pitching it high, I thought with a small smile as I stood at the edge of the flat, windy field, watching the filly, who, nostrils flaring, all her instincts telling her this was not right and she shouldn’t be on the end of this rope, was nonetheless falling for the patience and kindness of the man on the other end. The field was one of six, all patchy and overgrazed, which together totalled thirty acres. A smallholding, really, with a cottage, a few tumbledown outhouses and a barn, which Dad had personally divided into stalls. All the stalls were crib-bitten and crisis-managed, held together with bits of plywood and binder twine, but they were scrupulously clean and the occupants looked happy enough. Glossy, healthy and relaxed, rather as, years ago, the young occupant of the cottage had been: thriving on benign neglect.
‘What d’you think?’ Dad called softly. He’d slackened the rope and was walking towards her, stealthily winding the rope in loops around his