Fly-by-night Read online

  When she got home, Ted, Ron, and Peter were eating beans on toast in the kitchen. Ruth came in feeling exhausted. With an excess of chivalry Ron offered to hot up the beans for her, and Ruth was able to flop down at the table and pour herself a cup of tea.

  ‘How was it?’ Ted asked.

  ‘Oh, bits were all right.’ Ruth said cautiously. She felt she had learned a lot, if only a more exact knowledge of what she could do. ‘It’s those gymkhana games,’ she added. ‘We did games in the afternoon. Fly just doesn’t know about games.’

  ‘Fly’s always playing games.’

  ‘Not these sort of games. Bending and things. You have to go in and out down a row of bamboo canes. All the good ponies canter and turn on a sixpence and come back again. Fly just trod on them, or missed them altogether, and went half-way across the field before I could turn him round.’

  Ruth ate her baked beans, and told the humiliating story of how Fly had bolted across the field and she had had to be rescued by Major Banks. Ted and Ron made sympathetic faces, and passed a few facetious remarks about horseplay, then went back to discussing a magazine which they had laid out on the table showing the specifications of the latest Metisse frame. Ruth reached for the sugar, and realized that Peter was watching her, saying nothing as usual. In her preoccupied state she had forgotten all about him and now, seeing his politely inexpressive look, she wanted to throw the sugar-basin at him. She hated him for knowing so much, and herself for knowing so little.

  Ron pushed his chair back and closed the magazine. ‘You won’t go again, I take it?’ he said to Ruth.

  ‘I jolly well will,’ Ruth said fiercely.

  Ron grinned. ‘A martyr to the cause.’

  The next day was hot again, with a sweet breeze blowing up from the river. It was the sort of day to be utterly content, yet Ruth could not feel it. She was all ruffled up inside, and rode down over the stubble fields to the creek without hearing a single note of the skylarks’ music cascading from the sky, or the summer purr of the distant combines. The tide was high and Peter was drifting about in an old inner tube with another boy from the estate. They kept tipping each other out, ducking and spluttering. Ruth rode along the sea-wall and watched them, aloof from their enjoyment. She knew she was in a bad mood, and felt no better when she saw Pearl trotting down the hill towards her on Milky Way. Milky Way was trotting lame, as she often did. The ground was very hard, and Ruth frowned. She rode off down the wall and went to meet her.

  ‘Hullo,’ Pearl said. ‘What was it like? Do you know how to make your pony behave now?’

  Ruth’s eyes sparked. She felt anger fizzing up inside her, but was very careful when she spoke.

  ‘I know enough not to ride my pony when it’s lame,’ she said shortly.

  ‘Riding her doesn’t make it any worse,’ Pearl said. She was holding Milky Way in so tightly that the mare took a step backwards. Ruth looked at the perfect animal, her gleaming white coat, the flexed neck with the fine mane blowing out in the breeze, the black Arab eyes and wide nostrils, like a horse in an old painting, and felt her bad mood pricking her like a pair of spurs. What could you say to anyone like Pearl? she wondered in despair. Pearl’s long hair blew out; she wore a white polo-necked jersey and spotless jodhpurs. Ruth hated her.

  They rode on together. ‘What did you do?’ Pearl asked, and Ruth told her, leaving out all the humiliating bits.

  ‘It sounds terribly dull. And do you mean to say that Fly really did all those things, bending and all that? I didn’t think he could.’ Pearl’s pale green eyes slid round to look at Ruth, slyly provoking.

  ‘Oh, didn’t you?’ Ruth said sharply. ‘Well, he did.’ Under her breath, and to herself, she added, ‘After a fashion.’

  ‘Let’s canter,’ said Pearl.

  Not wanting to continue the conversation, Ruth cantered, seething, after Pearl. Pearl did a large circle of the field and Fly-by-Night followed, snatching at his bit, bouncing horribly. Ruth remembered the girls at the Pony Club cantering small circles, very collected, very slow. She lifted her face up to the hot sun and knew that, today, nothing would please her. Her bad mood had been encouraged by Pearl. Pearl rode with her toes down and gaps under her knees. Major Banks would shout at her, Ruth thought.

  Milky Way pulled up, dropping one shoulder, on the path that ran up to the sea-wall. Peter and his friend were lying on the sea-wall, sucking grass. The friend had a transistor playing. The inappropriate row, all mixed up with the skylarks, exacerbated Ruth’s ill temper.

  ‘Let’s go back across here,’ Pearl said. She hauled Milky Way round so that she faced a broken gap in the fence that ran up from the sea-wall, separating the grassy ride from a field that had been recently combined. The straw bales were still lying on the red-gold stubble. Pearl stopped beside the gap and turned round to Ruth. ‘After you,’ she said maliciously.

  Pearl knew perfectly well that Fly-by-Night would not jump the gap without a lead from Milky Way. She sat there, grinning, looking at Ruth, and Ruth knew that she was being paid out for lying about Fly-by-Night’s prowess at the Pony Club. Ruth realized the justice of the situation, and the neatness of Pearl’s trap, and knew she was helpless. If she was to turn up the path and say, ‘I’m going home this way,’ it would be as obvious an admission of failure as if she went through with the fiasco of trying to make Fly-by-Night jump.

  Pearl said in a loud, clear voice, ‘I bet you my new pair of jodhpurs your pony won’t jump that fence without Milky leading.’

  Ruth almost snorted with rage. She would gladly have seen Pearl drop dead in that moment. All her bottled anger and frustration came to boiling-point, and she snatched Fly-by-Night’s head up from the grass with a wrench that was worthy of Pearl herself. She looked at the gap, which consisted of a bar about two feet off the ground, and a tiny ditch, and knew that Fly-by-Night would no more jump it for her than take off and fly, but such was her blind anger that she was no longer capable of retiring from the argument. She turned Fly-by-Night round so that he was facing the gap and pressed him forward.

  ‘Hey, Ruth!’

  As Fly-by-Night, sensing what was in store for him, was already going sideways instead of forward, Ruth had no difficulty in stopping him at the interruption. She looked up and saw Peter coming down the sea-wall, still sucking his grass. He came over to her and said in a low voice, ‘That was a jolly good offer. Get off.’

  Ruth just stared at him.

  ‘They’re Moss Bros.,’ Peter said. ‘Come on, let me have him.’

  Ruth slid out of the saddle, too amazed to say anything. Peter took the reins out of her hand, and Fly-by-Night stood like a rock while he mounted, ears pricked up. The stirrup-leathers were too short, but Peter just crossed the irons over the front of the saddle.

  ‘I say,’ Pearl said. ‘That’s not fair.’

  Peter turned Fly round so that he was facing the gap squarely and grinned at Pearl. ‘You said the pony. We’ve got witnesses.’ With no indications to Fly at all that Ruth could see, he then put him straight into a canter and jumped the gap. On the other side he pulled up, turned on a sixpence and came back, jumping it again and pulling up beside Pearl.

  ‘One pair of jodhpurs,’ he said.

  Pearl was white with anger. ‘You cheated!’ she said furiously. ‘You’ve got nothing to do with it! I was talking to Ruth!’

  ‘You said “I bet your pony won’t jump”,’ Peter said. ‘You didn’t say anything about the rider. Isn’t that right, Biffy?’ he called up to his friend with the transistor.

  ‘That’s what she said,’ Biffy agreed.

  ‘You owe Ruth those jods, then. And if you don’t give them to her, we’ll come up and debag you in person.’

  ‘Oh, you beast! My father would throw you out!’

  ‘I bet your father doesn’t make bets he doesn’t keep. You jolly well owe Ruth those pants, and I’ll tell him so. And you shouldn’t ride a pony as lame as that. I’ll tell him that, too.’

  ‘You mind your ow
n business, you interfering — oh!’ Words failed Pearl. She wrenched Milky Way round and disappeared up the hill at a flat gallop, all pale flying hair and tail. Ruth stood watching, acutely happy. Even Biffy’s transistor now seemed to be playing celestial music.

  ‘There,’ said Peter, looking rather pleased. ‘That showed her.’ He slid off Fly-by-Night. ‘You make sure she sticks to what she said.’

  ‘Look,’ Ruth said, ‘how did you get him to jump that?’ Peter looked surprised. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He won’t jump it for me.’

  ‘Oh, they get to know what they can get away with, I suppose.’

  ‘You mean it’s me, all the things he won’t do?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know.’

  ‘Look, I won’t ask you ever again, but just this once, while you’re in the mood, would you just see if you can get him to jump that again, and go up the field in and out of the bales, as if it’s bending, and canter a circle and — oh, you know, the Pony Club sort of things? Will you?’

  ‘Well, if you like.’

  Peter got on again, and lengthened the stirrups. ‘One dressage display coming up.’

  Fly-by-Night went over the gap again, jumping big, his ears pricked up. To Ruth, never having seen him being ridden before, he looked magnificent, all shining bounce and jauntiness. He flexed his neck to Peter’s hands, carrying himself with the same boldness that she had once admired in Toadhill Flax. Peter seemed not to do anything, just sit there, but Fly-by-Night went up the lines of bales, in and out, at a canter, without once poking his nose or even attempting to run out. At the top he turned and came back, first at an extended trot, then at a collected trot, then at a slow, collected canter. Opposite the gap once more, Peter cantered him in a circle on the correct leg, then changed direction and sent him off in a circle on the other leg. He then halted and got him to stand out, show-wise, all collected and square on his four legs. He reined back four paces, did a turn on the forehand, and jumped back over the gap to halt in front of Ruth.

  ‘There. I’d do a levade, too, but I haven’t got my cocked hat with me,’ he said.

  Biffy shouted from the sea-wall, ‘When you’ve finished assing about down there, we were on our way to look for a Comma, if you remember.’

  Peter got off again and handed Ruth the reins. ‘He’s nice,’ he said. ‘Reminds me of Toad, only smaller.’ He picked another piece of grass to suck and ambled away to join Biffy. Half-way up the sea-wall he turned and said, ‘Those jods are yours, remember. Biffy’ll be a witness.’

  ‘Come on,’ Biffy said. ‘Wasting blooming time with girls’ stuff.’

  The two of them disappeared over the sea-wall, and the strains of the transistor faded away across the saltings. Fly-by-Night put his head down and started to graze, as if he had never seen grass before, and Ruth stood looking at him, in a daze. She felt as if something had come out of the sky and hit her. There was nobody in sight at all, just herself and Fly-by-Night on the edge of the stubble-field, and the distant hedges all shimmering in the heat.

  ‘Fly-by-Night,’ she said.

  Fly flicked an eye at her, pulling at the grass. Then, just like a pony in one of her books, he lifted his head and gave a little flutter of his nostrils, and rubbed his head against her arm in a friendly way. Ruth felt weepy all of a sudden, elated and weepy altogether, in a strange, dazed way.

  ‘It’s the heat,’ she said to herself, and mounted Fly-by-Night. He cleared the gap in one bound, and cantered away up the stubble-field.

  The next morning, when Ruth did her paper round, she found a brown paper parcel on the doorstep of ‘The Place’, addressed to herself. Inside were the jodhpurs, with the Moss Bros. label still new and unsoiled.

  CHAPTER XI

  RIDING AT HILLINGDON

  ONE AFTERNOON AT the end of August when Ruth came in from her ride she found her mother in the kitchen drinking cups of tea with Mrs. Challoner.

  ‘Do you know where Peter is?’ Mrs. Hollis asked Ruth.

  ‘He’s down the creek somewhere, I think. Do you want him?’

  The two women looked at each other warily, and Mrs. Hollis said, ‘No hurry, I suppose.’

  Mrs. Challoner, looking relieved, said, ‘I’ll leave it to you to tell him, then?’

  ‘Yes, all right.’

  When Mrs. Challoner had gone Ruth said nervously to her mother, ‘Tell him what?’

  ‘That his father’s married a Neapolitan opera-singer.’

  Ruth looked at her mother to see if she was joking, but she did not look particularly amused.

  ‘Do you mean it? It doesn’t sound — er — well —’ Ruth was at a loss. Neapolitan opera-singers did not ride horses, nor stand in cold collecting-rings in sheepskin-lined jackets calling out the numbers.

  ‘They want Peter to go home.’

  ‘Oh, no!’

  ‘He’d have to go back soon, in any case,’ her mother said. ‘I only hope he’ll find a new mother an added attraction.’

  Amazingly, Peter did. ‘What’s she like?’ he asked cautiously.

  ‘All Mrs. Challoner told me, dear, is that she’s rather fat and speaks no English at all, but smiles all the time.’

  Ruth listened to the conversation, wondering if it was real. It didn’t sound like the sort of thing that actually happened to ordinary people. Afterwards, when she was alone with Peter, she said to him, ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘It can’t be worse than it was before,’ he said.

  ‘Why, what was it like before?’

  ‘Well, at least someone smiling all the time will be nice to have around, won’t it?’

  He did not say any more, but his remark seemed very reasonable to Ruth.

  She had known that he was going back when his father came home, but had put off thinking about it. It was not that he had, in fact, helped a great deal practically in schooling Fly-by-Night since the day he had ridden him down by the creek, but his having shown Ruth what was possible had helped her immeasurably. Her confidence had increased, which Fly-by-Night had seemed to sense, and the better the pony did for her the more sure she became, so that she felt that their mutual progress was like a snowball, steadily building up. They still had plenty of bad patches to put it all in perspective, but these did not cast Ruth down with the same force as they had earlier in the year. She was more philosophic about it all.

  ‘You’ll get fat at this rate,’ Ron said approvingly. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

  The Pony Club no longer held her in awe, expecting the worst. After two or three more times, Fly-by-Night stopped his whinnying and displays of astonishment, and settled down to doing what he was told (even if it was only because all the other ponies were doing the same thing). Ruth made some tentative friends, but none who lived within riding distance, so that her love-hate relationship with Pearl continued as far as riding out was concerned.

  ‘Why do you go out with that horrible girl?’ Peter asked her.

  ‘Because she calls for me. And she was honest about the jodhpurs.’ Ruth felt bound to defend poor Pearl.

  ‘She couldn’t have wriggled out of that,’ Peter said. ‘She made the offer in a loud enough voice, so that everyone would have to take notice.’

  ‘Take notice of me not being able to make Fly jump the gap.’

  ‘Yes, well, we fixed her, didn’t we?’ Peter said with great satisfaction. ‘Has she got the vet yet?’

  ‘No.’

  Milky Way was still a source of grief to Ruth. ‘I would give anything,’ she said, ‘to own Milky Way.’

  ‘She’s not worth anything, the way she is,’ Peter said. ‘That’s not the point. It’s her nature that I love.’

  Peter said, ‘There’s only one pony that I’ve ever liked. I mean liked as — as — oh, you know. More than just something to ride. A pony that was like somebody.’

  ‘Who was that? Woodlark?’

  ‘Woodlark? Ugh! No, it was Toad.’

  ‘Toadhill Flax? What happened to him?’

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p; ‘Dad sold him,’ Peter said. ‘He said I could have him for my own, then a week later someone offered a good price for him, and he sold him.’

  ‘Your father’s horrible!’

  Peter grinned. ‘But I’ve got a lovely mother — a big, fat, enormous, spaghetti-eating, smiling opera-singer.’

  Ruth was shocked.

  Peter went home, and Ruth did not see him until she went back to school. Even then they did not have much opportunity to talk, but Ruth gathered that Peter thought his home vastly improved. ‘My father’s a new man,’ he said. ‘You won’t recognize him. He’s taking singing lessons. And we have spaghetti every day. Truly. All oozing with lovely, greasy gravy, and garlic in it.’ Ruth did not know whether he was making it up, or whether he meant it. It still just did not sound quite real to her. She went home and told her mother, and her mother was pleased.

  ‘Just what the place needed, I should imagine. Mrs. Challoner told me, when she first went there, that the house was just like an extension of the stables, all littered with gear and sale catalogues, and linseed on the cooker, stinking the place out. No fires, just a bit of old cheese in the pantry. No wonder Peter got fed up.’

  Ruth missed having him at home dreadfully. They all did. Ted, not yet fit enough to go back to work, was morose with boredom. The first coal of the winter was delivered, and Ruth heard, with a familiar feeling of dread, the mutterings of her father over the bill. She realized that he had got steadily quieter over the past year, more and more worried looking, and less given to making the jokes that had made them all laugh. She heard him say to her mother, ‘This winter will find us out. I really think we’ll have to move before the next one. But heavens know where to.’

  ‘A flat would do us, now the children are growing up,’ Mrs. Hollis said.

  Ruth could not bear to listen. She did not think anything so bad could happen. ‘That’s what you thought when Ted had his accident,’ she reminded herself. ‘And that happened.’

  Ted went to the doctor to get permission to go back to work, but the doctor would not hear of it. ‘Come the New Year, and we’ll consider it,’ the doctor said. Ted, who was still under treatment at the hospital for the injury to his back, was not surprised, but his frustration increased. Always an active person, the enforced idleness came hard, and the fact that his disability was adding substantially to the family’s financial difficulties gave him a guilt complex that made him gloomy and pessimistic.