The Horse Dancer (6 page)

Horses, perhaps more so than any other creature, were made by man. They might be naturally spooky, or fearful, or bolshy, but their reactions to their world were shaped entirely by what was done to them. A child would give you a second chance because it hoped to be loved. A dog would return to you slavishly, even after you’d beaten it. A horse would never let you – or anyone else – near him again. So Papa never shouted at him. He never lost his temper, or got frustrated, even when it was clear that Boo was being as mischievous or unruly as any teenager.

And now he was eight years old, grown. He was educated enough to have manners, clever enough that his paces floated, elegant enough, if Papa had judged this as correctly as he seemed to judge everything else, to carry Sarah away from this chaotic city and on to her future.

Cowboy John leant on his broom and looked through the gates at the park where the girl was making the horse canter small, steady circles in the corner by the trees, slowing occasionally to praise him or let him stretch out. She wasn’t wearing a hat – a rare act of rebellion against her grandfather, who would not allow her so much as sit on that horse without one – and the sun gleamed off her hair as brightly as it did the horse’s quarters. He saw the postman cycle past, yelling something to her as he went, and she lifted a hand in greeting, her face still turned to what she was doing.

She was a good kid, not like a lot who came here. They would race their horses on empty streets till their hooves cracked, slinging them back in their stables, sweaty and overwrought, before they ran home, promising that their mums or dads would be along with the rent money the very next day. They would cheek the adults, spend their feed money on cigarettes, which he confiscated when they were in the yard. ‘I couldn’t care jack about your lungs. But I ain’t about watching my old boys git barbecued,’ he would say. This was usually accompanied by a meditative pull on his own cigarette. The last packet he had taken had come from a kid of no more than eight.

He doubted Sarah Lachapelle had smoked a cigarette in her life. The Captain kept her on as tight a rein as he kept that horse: no playing out late, no drinking, no smoking, no hanging about on street corners. The girl never seemed to chafe against it. It was like he’d trained her too.

Not like her mother.

Cowboy John removed his hat and wiped his forehead, already feeling the heat of the day seep through the battered leather into his skin. Maltese Sal had assured him that if he took over the lease the Captain’s horse would be safe here, as would that of anyone else who was not in arrears. The place would remain as it had been for forty years, a stables.

‘I need a base,’ he kept saying to John. ‘This is near my home. My horses are comfortable here.’ He spoke as if it was already decided. And this ramshackle old yard would be a useful front for whatever you buy and sell, John wanted to answer him, but you didn’t say that to a man like Sal. Especially when he was offering the kind of money he was suggesting.

Truth was, Cowboy John was tired. He quite fancied the idea of retiring to the country, swapping his house for a little cottage with a plot of land his horses could graze on. City life was getting uglier and he was getting older, tired of fighting the council, tired of picking up the broken bottles that the drunks and idiots threw over the gates every night for the animals to cut themselves on. He was tired of arguing with kids who didn’t want to pay what they owed. Increasingly, he could picture himself sitting on a porch somewhere, looking at a horizon that was a single line of green.

Sal would keep it as a yard. And he was talking a good sum of money, money enough for John to make his dream reality. But still . . . Despite the money, despite the lure of peace, of watching his old boys swish their tails in the long grass, part of him was reluctant to let it go to that man. He had a sneaking feeling that Sal’s promises carried all the weight of diddly-squat.

Sarah, fiddling to get the key out of the lock, stepped into their flat and heard her grandfather’s voice before she saw him. She smiled. ‘
Merci!
’

She had thought he might have laid the kitchen table with a birthday cake, as he had the previous year, but instead she walked down the hall to find him standing in front of the television. ‘
Voilà!
Sit, sit,’ he instructed, having kissed her on both cheeks. He was wearing his best tie.

She peered at the little kitchen table. ‘We’re not having tea?’

‘Pizza. Afterwards. You choose,’ he said, pointing to a menu. Takeaway was a rare treat.

‘After what?’

She put down her bag and sat on the sofa, feeling a jolt of excitement. Papa seemed so pleased, a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. She couldn’t remember the last time he had looked like this. Since Nana had died four years ago, he had retreated into himself, emerging only when Boo arrived. She knew he loved her, but his love was not the kind you saw on television: he didn’t tell her he loved her, didn’t ask what was on her mind. He made sure she was fed, washed and up to date with her homework. He taught her practical stuff, about money, mending things and horsemanship. Between them they had long since mastered the washing-machine, the housekeeping and the cheapest way to do a weekly shop. If she was sad, he would lay a hand on her shoulder, perhaps tell her to keep a perspective. If she was giddy with excitement he would wait until she had calmed down. If she did wrong, he made his displeasure known with a certain curtness, a disapproving glance. In short, he probably treated her a little like he treated a horse.

‘First,’ he said, ‘we are going to watch something.’

She followed his gaze, seeing now the DVD player that had not been there when she had left that morning. ‘You bought me a DVD player?’ She knelt down and ran a finger across its shiny metallic surface.

‘It’s not new,’ he said apologetically, ‘but it is
parfait
. And it is not stolen. I bought it from the house clearance.’

‘We can watch anything?’ she exclaimed. She would be able to rent films like the other girls at school did. She was always years behind when anyone talked about movies.

‘Not just anything. We are going to see
un spectacle
. But first . . .’ He reached behind him to a bottle, opened it with a flourish and poured. ‘Fourteen, eh? Old enough for some wine.’ He nodded as he handed it to her.

She took a sip, trying not to look as unimpressed as she felt by the sour taste. She would have preferred Diet Coke, but didn’t feel she could spoil the moment by asking.

Apparently satisfied, he adjusted his spectacles, peered at the remote control and, with a hint of flamboyance that suggested he had practised this earlier in the day, pressed a button. The television screen flickered into life and he settled into the sofa beside her, still upright despite the collapsing cushions. He took a sip of his wine. She glimpsed his look of quiet pleasure and leant against him.

The music began, classical music, and a white horse pranced across the screen.

‘Is it . . . ?’

‘Le Cadre Noir,’ he confirmed. ‘Now you will see what we are aiming for.’

Even those people who knew about horses had rarely heard of Le Cadre Noir. It was an arcane organisation of élite French riders that had existed since the 1700s, and still did in a form recognisable to its originators, an academy at which debate might revolve around the exact angle of a horse’s hind legs when it performed the thousand-year-old manoeuvres of
croupade
, or
levade
, and the riders wore an ancient black uniform. It admitted no more than one or two new members a year, and aimed not to make money, or to bestow its skills and knowledge on the masses, but to pursue excellence in things that most people could not even see. If you knew this you might question the point of it, yet nobody who saw those horses moving beneath their sombre riders, lined up in perfect symmetry or defying gravity with astonishing leaps, could watch their strange, dancing steps, the muscular acceptance of their riders’ wishes, without being profoundly moved by their obedience, their beauty, their astonishing agility. And perhaps, even if you did not particularly like horses – or the French – you would feel glad that such an organisation still existed.

Sarah watched the forty-minute display in silence. She was mesmerised. She wanted to go to Boo and copy what she had seen. He could do this, she knew it. He was finer, stronger, than some of the horses she had seen on the screen, but he had the same power: she had felt it beneath her often enough. As she watched, her hands and feet twitched, riding the screen horses, encouraging them into the outlines, the movements that had been performed since ancient Greek times.

Her personal arena might have been a bare-patched, litter-strewn park rather than the vast palace of an historic French town, her outfit jeans and a T-shirt instead of a formal black jacket, gold braid and a peaked cap. But she knew how those men felt: when the camera had lingered on their faces, taut with effort and sympathy, with wanting, she had felt kinship as she never had with the girls at school. All the things Papa had been teaching her began to slot into place. He said they had years of work ahead of them. He said letting her try would be like Cowboy John attempting a marathon, cigarette in hand. And now she saw what he was aiming for, the great goal:
capriole
. The most complex, demanding and beautiful movement a horse could make, taking all four hooves off the ground into a balletic leap, lifting as if it was weightless, kicking out behind in mid-air as if it scorned the laws of gravity. Beautiful. Fearsome. Awe-inspiring.

Sarah had never been able to say what she felt when Papa went on and on about the French school, which was, what chance did they really have? Despite what he said, she had never been able to translate her life at Cowboy John’s and their training sessions in the park into the future he had described. Now, as she watched the credits, she realised the DVD had had the opposite effect to the one he had wanted. It had simply confirmed that Papa was indulging a dream. It didn’t matter how good her horse was. How could anyone make the most gravity-defying leap of all, from the back-streets of London to the polished glory of Le Cadre Noir?

She felt guilty almost as soon as she had thought it. Her eyes went to him, and she wondered if her thoughts were as transparent as they seemed. He was still staring at the screen. It was then that she saw the tear running down his cheek.

‘Papa?’ she said. His jaw tightened. He took a moment to compose himself, and then he said quietly, ‘Sarah. This is how you escape.’

Escape what? She had never felt that her life was quite as bad as Papa seemed to think it was.

‘This is what I want for you.’

She swallowed.

He held up the DVD case. ‘I have a letter from Jacques Varjus, my old friend at Saumur. He tells me they have accepted two women now. For hundreds of years the academy will not take a woman, will not consider it, and now they do it. You don’t have to be from the military. You just have to be excellent. This is a chance, Sarah.’

She was a little unnerved by his intensity.

‘You have this ability. You need only the discipline. I don’t want you to waste your life. I don’t want to see you here, hanging around with these
imbéciles
, ending up pushing a pram around this place.’ He gestured out of the window towards the car park.

‘But I—’

He held up a hand. ‘I have nothing to give you except this. My knowledge. My efforts.’ He smiled, tried to soften his tone. ‘My girl in black, eh?
La fille du Cadre Noir
.’

She nodded mutely. Her grandfather was never emotional, but now he looked vulnerable, regretful, and she was a little frightened. It was the wine, she told herself – he rarely drank. The wine had heightened their emotions. Fiddling with her glass, she tried not to look at his face. ‘It was a nice present.’

He dragged himself back to her, seemed to get his emotions under control. ‘
Non! Un demi cadeau
,’ he said. ‘You want to know the second part?’

She grinned, relieved. ‘Pizza?’

‘Pff! Pizza!
Non, non – regards
.’ He pulled out an envelope and handed it to her.

‘What is it?’

He nodded at it.

She opened it, scanned the contents, and her hands stilled. Four tickets. Two for a coach-and-ferry journey. Two for a performance of Le Cadre Noir.

‘From Varjus.
En novembre
. We are taking a holiday.’

They had never been abroad, not even when Nana was alive. ‘We’re going to France?’

‘It’s time. Time for you to see, for me to return. My friend Varjus is now the Grand Dieu. You know what that is? The most important, the most experienced horseman in Le Cadre Noir. Non – in France.’

She stared at the leaflet, at the dark-clad riders, the gleaming horses.

Papa seemed filled with new zeal. ‘I have filled in the passport forms. All I need is your photograph.’

‘But how did you afford it?’

‘I sold a few things.
Pas du tout
. You are happy? A good birthday?’

It was then she noticed he wasn’t wearing his watch. The Longines had been his wedding present from Nana. So precious that as a child she had not been allowed to touch it. She wanted to ask, but the words had jammed in her throat.

‘Sarah?’

She stepped into his embrace, unable to murmur her thanks into his soft, worn jumper because the words wouldn’t come.