was that I’d had no idea of the scene while we were at the pre-production stage, and so had not arranged a wild herd in advance. Wild horses didn’t grow on batwillows.
Circus horses, Ziggy had said. Too fat and sleek, I’d objected. Moorland ponies no good, he’d said: too slow and stupid. Think, I’d urged him. Tell me in the morning.
‘Thomas,’ Ziggy said, as always emphasising the second syllable of my name, ‘I think it must be Viking horses, from Norway.’
I gazed at him. ‘Did you know that Viking ships once regularly raided this coast?’
‘Yes, Thomas.’
Viking horses. Perfect. Where on earth could I get any? From Norway, of course. So easy.
I asked him, ‘Have you ever worked with Norwegian horses?’
‘No, Thomas. But I think they are not true wild. They are not ridden, but they are, I think, handled.’
‘Could you ride one without a saddle?’
‘Of course.’ There wasn’t a horse alive, his expression said, that wouldn’t do what he asked.
‘You could ride one in a nightgown and a long blonde wig?’
‘Of course.’
‘Bare feet?’
He nodded.
‘The woman is dreaming she is riding the wild horse. It must be romantic, not real.’
‘Thomas, she will float on the horse.’
I believed him. He was simply the best. Even Moncrieff stopped grumbling about our mission.
We ate our hot vacuum-packed bacon breakfast rolls and drank steaming coffee while the black sky slowly greyed and lightened and grew softly crimson far out at sea.
With adjusted eyes we watched the world take shape. Around us and at our backs the irregularly heaped sand dunes were revealed as being patches of scrubby marram grass, fringes of long dried stalks leaning in the wind. Slightly below us the sand remained powdery, unwashed by the tide, but blowing back to add to the dunes; and below that, hard-packed sand stretched away to distant white-fringed waves.
The tide, I reckoned, was as low as it ever went. Too low, really, for the best dramatic effect. One week ahead, the tide at dawn would be high, covering the sand. We needed, I thought, to arrange to film the horses on a mid-tide day: better, I supposed, during an ebb tide, as a flooding tide could race over these flat sands and maroon the cameras. Say ten days to the next mid-tide ebb at dawn. Too soon. Add two weeks to the next opportunity; twenty-four days. Perhaps.
I told Ziggy the time frame. ‘We need the horses here on the beach twenty-four days from now. Or else fourteen days later; thirty-eight days. OK?’
‘I understand,’ he agreed.
‘I’ll send an agent to Norway to arrange the horses and the transport. Will you go with him, to make sure we get the sort of horses we need?’
He nodded. ‘Best to have ten,’ he said. ‘Or twelve.’
‘See what you can find.’
Moncrieff stirred, abandoning breakfast in favour of art. Faint horizontal threads of clouds were growing a fiercer red against the still grey sky, and as he busied himself with camera speed and focus, the streaks intensified to scarlet and to orange and to gold, until the whole sky was a breath-gripping symphony of sizzling colour, the prelude to the earth’s daily spin towards the empowerment of life.
I had always loved sunrise: was always renewed in spirit. For all my life I’d felt cheated if I’d slept through dawn. The primaeval winter solstice on bitter Salisbury Plain had raised my childhood’s goose pimples long before I understood why; and it had ever seemed to me that dawn-worship was the most logical of primitive beliefs.
The glittering ball rimmed over the horizon and hurt one’s eyes. The brilliant streaks of cloud flattened to grey. The whole sun, somehow losing its magic, nevertheless lit a shimmering pathway across the ruffled surface of the sea, and Moncrieff went on filming, breathing deeply with satisfaction. Slowly on the wind, he and I became aware of a deep rhythmic humming that grew into a melody seeming age-old and sad: and as if of one mind we understood and laughed.
Ziggy was singing.
This was a dangerous coast as, flat as it looked, a few miles out to sea unrelenting sandbars paralleled the shore; underwater invisible hazards, shipwrecking the unwary. Graveyards in the coastal villages were heaped with memorials to sailors drowned before accurate depth charts were invented.
Too much background music, I decided, would ruin the atmospheric quality of this historic shore. All we would need would be the wind, the waves, the clip of the horses’ hooves, and perhaps Ziggy’s own distant song, or maybe a haunting plaintive chant from