Wild Horses - By Dick Francis Page 0,48
like a toy, also a cold-box full of raw film and a hot-box full of coffee and breakfast. The outside air was cold; the warm car soporific. I was glad, after a while, for the driver.
We cleared Norwich and headed across the flat lands towards the North Sea, skirting the Broads and sliding eventually through the still-sleeping village of Happisburgh and slowing down a narrow lane that ended in sand dunes.
Moncrieff and Ziggy climbed stiffly out of the car and shivered. It was still completely dark outside the range of the car’s lights, and the coastal breeze was as unrelenting as ever.
‘You said to bring warm clothes,’ Moncrieff complained, zipping himself into a fur-lined parka. ‘You said nothing about playing Inuits.’ He pulled the fur-lined hood over his head and thrust his hands into Arctic-issue gauntlets.
Leaving the driver with his own separate breakfast in the car, the three of us walked onwards through the sand dunes towards the open shore, Moncrieff carrying the camera and the film box, I leading with the hot-box and Ziggy between us toting polystyrene rectangles for sitting insulation on cold salt-laden ground.
‘How did you find this God-forsaken place?’ Moncrieff grumbled.
‘I used to come here as a boy.’
‘Suppose it had sprouted casinos?’
‘I checked.’
Beyond the range of the car’s lights we paused to establish night vision, then went on slowly until the sand dunes fell away, the breeze freshened, and the sound of the restless waves spoke of timeless desolation.
‘OK,’ I said, ‘if there’s any shelter, sit in it.’
Moncrieff groaned, took a palette from Ziggy and folded himself with oaths into a shallow hollow on the sea side of the last dune. Ziggy, tougher and taciturn, found a similar place near him.
Ziggy, Ukrainian by birth, had from the nursery proved so spectacularly acrobatic on horses that he had been sent to the Moscow Circus school at the age of eight, and there, far from his rural roots, had received a first-class education along with endless practice in his special skill. Every pupil in the school, boys and girls alike, received daily ballet lessons to teach graceful movement in the circus ring. Ziggy could in consequence have joined any ballet company anywhere, but nothing interested him except horses.
Ziggy at twenty-two had left the circus behind: circuses everywhere had left town. Never political, though a favoured son, he had somehow travelled with his trade to America, and it was there that I’d seen him first, turning somersaults on a cantering horse one afternoon in an ill-attended practice for the Ringling Brothers in Madison Square Garden.
I’d offered him a job in my rodeo film and, despite union protests, I’d secured him. I’d shortened his unpronounceable surname to Keene, and he’d quickly earned such a brilliant reputation in the horse stunt business that nowadays I had to beg him for his time.
Slender, light and wiry, he took the Norfolk chill in his stride. Child’s play, I supposed, after the Russian steppes. Alternately morose and laughing, he was intensely Ukrainian in temperament, and often told me he would return soon to his roots, a threat receding as years passed. His roots, as perhaps he acknowledged, were no longer there.
At a fairly brief meeting the evening before, I’d outlined what we were looking for.
‘Film the sunrise!’ Moncrieff exclaimed lugubriously, ‘We don’t have to drive seventy miles for that! What’s wrong with the Heath outside the door?’
‘You’ll see.’
‘And the weather forecast?’
‘Cold, windy and clear.’
His objections, I knew, were not from the heart. Every lighting cameraman knew that directors could be both unreasonable and unmovable when it came to specific locations. If I’d demanded the slopes of K2, he would have sworn and strapped on his crampons.
I said, ‘As it’s the time of the vernal equinox, the sun will rise due east. And that,’ – I consulted the small compass I’d brought – ‘is straight over there.’ I pointed. ‘At the moment, looking directly out to sea, we are facing a bit further north. The coast runs from north-west to south-east, so when the sun rises, horses galloping along the sand from our left will be back-lit, but will also have the sun very slightly in their faces.’
Moncrieff nodded.
‘Can you catch gleams of sun in their eyes?’
‘Close?’
‘Heads, necks and manes in shot.’
‘Thomas,’ Ziggy said, the bass notes in his voice always a surprise from the slightness of his body, ‘you ask for wild horses.’
I’d asked him the previous evening to picture them and to suggest where we might find some. The trouble with sudden visions