Fly-by-night Page 4

  ‘Well — no. Not unless it’s very small. There’s never anything under eighty.’

  ‘I’ve only got forty,’ Ruth muttered.

  ‘Forty?’ Peter’s voice was doubtful, but not scornful. ‘You’d only get a young pony for forty, an unbroken pony. Or some old crock.’

  ‘A young pony? Like Woodlark, you mean?’

  ‘Oh, heavens, you don’t want a pony like Woodlark! She’s not worth anything at all. You want a quiet one. Mr. Marks, at Ramsey Heath, has young ponies quite cheap, sometimes. You ought to go and see him.’

  ‘Mr. Marks?’ Ruth fastened on the name, with a great uplifting of her spirits. ‘You mean he might have one for forty?’

  ‘He might. A two-year-old. He buys them at the sales, for a sort of hobby. If you get one with a quiet temperament, you ought to be able to manage all right. He lives at Bramhall, the farm on the right past the pub.’

  In that instant, Ruth’s world was transformed. She turned to Peter with an eager, shining face. ‘I shall go and see him. Thank you for telling me. Oh, thank you!’

  Peter looked quite surprised. He smiled, which made him look much more human. Ruth noticed that he had freckles, and was quite ordinary, on the ground. She pushed her bike through the gate and he shut it behind her.

  ‘Thank you very much!’ she said again, fervently. As she pedalled away down the road, she thought, ‘He thinks I’m barmy. But I don’t care!’ And she started to sing, free-wheeling down the hill.

  The next evening she pedalled to Bramhall, and found herself jerking down a rutted lane, with high out-of-control hedges on either side and ditches full of stinging-nettles. Bramhall was a collection of ramshackle old buildings, dung-heaps and picking hens, hemmed in with elms full of cawing rooks. It looked to Ruth far more like a forty-pound place than McNair’s, and she liked it instinctively. She liked the faded rose-red of the stable bricks and the thatch with grass growing out of it, and the sour smell of an early elderberry. She was full of hope. She left her bicycle by the gate, where it looked quite smart, and went into the yard. A youngish man was just shutting three cows into a cowshed. He turned round and looked at her with a cheerful grin.

  ‘I’m looking for Mr. Marks, about buying a pony,’ she said.

  ‘I’m Marks,’ said the man.

  He was not frightening at all, and Ruth was able to say quite easily, ‘I want a pony, but I only have forty pounds. Peter McNair said you might have one.’

  ‘Oh, you’ve been to McNair’s, have you? I’ll bet Mr. McNair didn’t offer you one for under a hundred, eh?’

  ‘No, he didn’t.’

  ‘Smart place, McNair’s.’

  ‘Yes, very.’

  ‘Somebody has to pay for it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Let’s see what we’ve got, then, eh? It’s for you, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He told you they’re only partly broken? You can catch them, and halter them and handle them, but they’re only youngsters. Two-year-olds. I got this lot from Beaulieu — the New Forest sales. I got a dozen, last September, but I’ve sold most of them. There’s four left now. They’re down in the bottom field. We’ll go along. Just a moment.’

  He went into a shed and fetched a sieve of oats and a halter, and then led the way down a rutted track between more massive rampant hedges. It was a dull day, and Ruth had a sense of the earth, fed on damp, overwhelming Mr. Marks’s property with its swaggering growth. The verges were lush with forward grass, the budding branches tossed over their heads with an uncultivated abandon. The gate to the ponies’ field was set deep in rampant hawthorn, with gnarled Constable oaks on either side; the field was not very large, and sloped down to a stream and a thick wood full of crows. Ruth was enchanted with the old-fashionedness of it; the lovely scorn of modern clearance, the encouragement of crows and vermin-sheltering hedges. Later, she could see, it would be all knee-high buttercups and cow-parsley, like a Victorian painting. ‘There will be a pony here for me,’ she thought. ‘It is a “me” place. Not like McNair’s.’ A little shiver of excitement ran through her.

  Mr. Marks gave a shout and a whistle, and the four ponies converged upon the gate. They were all rough and muddy and, after McNair’s, definitely of a half-price breed. Except for one. Ruth’s eyes went past the thick-legged grey, the wall-eyed skewbald and the nondescript black, and rested on the pony that held back from the others. ‘That is for me,’ she thought.

  It was, in fact, nothing special in its looks: a gelding of an unusual bay-roan colour, like a bright bay that had been left out in the frost. His legs were black and his head was dark, with a small crescent of white between the eyes; the forelock was black and the mane grew whiter as it went down towards the withers where the frosty mantle seemed to have fallen most thickly. The stocky quarters were almost pure bay, and the thick tail black. ‘Circus pony,’ Ruth could almost hear Ted say. But the pony had a look, a presence, a way of standing which made the other three ponies look like cab-horses. He did not come up, but stood behind, head up, watching Ruth.

  ‘Oh, I like that one,’ Ruth said.

  Mr. Marks gave a grin and said, ‘You watch him.’

  He started to give each of the other three ponies a handful of oats out of the sieve, and immediately the little bay roan came up, shouldering the black and the skewbald roughly out of the way. His eyes, large and lively, showed no white, only his ears went back with greed and he plunged eagerly for Mr. Marks’s hand. The other ponies moved over for him, making jealous faces. Ruth had seen his cocky walk, the firm planting of his round, rather shaggy feet: it was jaunty, sure.

  ‘He’s the boss around here,’ said Marks, smiling. ‘You’re our fly boy, eh? Our smart one? That’s what we call him, Fly. He’s fly all right.’

  ‘Oh.’ Ruth was dubious now. What was fly, as an adjective? As a noun, and a name, it was horrid. As a description, it was rather worrying. Did Fly qualify, she wondered, for Peter McNair’s stipulation: a quiet temperament?

  ‘Is he — is he all right? I mean, quiet?’

  Mr. Marks pursed his lips. ‘Well now, if you’re looking for a real quiet one, I’d take the skewbald. Or the black. You can do anything with those two.’

  Ruth looked at the skewbald and the black. But beside Fly they were nothing ponies. They were nice, because they were ponies; they had gentle, interested faces. But they hadn’t got the — the — Ruth groped for a word and could not find it — the thing that Fly had. Fly was a character.

  ‘But Fly — he’s quiet?’ She had to persist.

  ‘He’s got no vices. Wouldn’t kick or bite you. But he’s got more spirit than the others. I reckon he’ll be a more lively ride, when you get a saddle on him. I’ll be honest with you, you see. If it’s really quietness you’re looking for, you should have the skewbald or the black.’

  But Ruth could no longer consider the skewbald or the black. She knew already that it was going to be Fly. She only wanted Marks to tell her that he wasn’t actually bad.

  ‘Is he forty pounds?’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose so. If you want him that bad. I was asking fifty really. He’s a three-year-old, this one. He’s ready to be ridden. But I haven’t the time to school him myself. It takes too much patience for me. And my kid’s too little yet to ride.’

  Ruth, having found that Fly, by the nod of her head, could be hers, was suddenly petrified. She stared at him. She looked for all the things in the books, the faults with the strange names, and deficiencies of conformation, the signs of vice, and the indications of dire disease. And Fly stared back at her, four-square on his black hairy legs, and she could see nothing that the books mentioned, only the pony of her heart, as perfect as Shakespeare’s bit in all the anthologies, out of ‘Venus and Adonis’. ‘Oh, I must be sensible!’ she thought to herself. And Fly was looking at her boldly as if it was she who had the faults, knock-knees and rickets and pigeon-toes: it was a straight look, with a glint in it. It was not a look to make her feel sen
sible. It quenched her fright and her doubts.

  ‘Oh, please, I would like him,’ she said to Mr. Marks. ‘I’ve only got forty pounds.’

  ‘Well then, we’ll call it a deal,’ said Mr. Marks comfortably. He did not strike Ruth as a worrier. ‘He’s a good pony. The vet’s seen ’em all and can’t find anything wrong, so you’ll be all right there.’

  Was it that easy, after all? Ruth could hear her heart thudding, as if it had grown into two. She gripped the top bar of the gate, looking at Fly. She saw him going round the Hunter Trials course at Brierley Hill, and herself sitting easily in the saddle, confident, easy . . . He had bold, wide nostrils, and was wide between the forelegs. But he wasn’t common.

  ‘Is — is he New Forest?’ she asked Mr. Marks.

  ‘He hasn’t any papers,’ Marks said. ‘But he came from the forest. I’ll bring him down your place, if you like — I know a man with a truck. Save you walking along the road. Where do you live?’

  ‘Wychwood. On the new estate.’

  They started walking back to the farmyard. Ruth was in a daze. ‘I’ll have to get my money cashed. It’s in National Savings.’

  ‘Tomorrow do you?’

  ‘Oh, yes. But I won’t have the money by then. At least, not all of it. I can give you some.’

  ‘No hurry. I’m not worried. What house is it?’

  ‘South View.’

  ‘About six, then.’

  ‘Yes, thank you very much.’

  Ruth found she was cycling home. Her head was filled with the image of Fly, standing there with his legs planted out so firmly, the wind in his tail. She thought, ‘Fly is a horrid name, if you think of fly like the thing that makes spots over the windows and sits on cream-cakes in the summer. But if you think of Fly as in flying, up in the sky, it is a lovely name. He will be that sort of Fly. Fly. Fly-by-Night.’ Ruth was pleased with Fly-by-Night. ‘He can be Fly, short for Fly-by-Night. In the Hunter Trials he can be down in the catalogue as Fly-by-Night.’ Ruth was cycling through the village and up the concrete road of Sunnyside Estate, her eyes seeing nothing.

  ‘I’ve bought a pony,’ she said to her father, who was having his supper.

  He looked up. ‘Really bought it?’

  ‘Well, I’ve got to get the money out. But the man doesn’t seem to mind about waiting for it. He’s bringing the pony tomorrow . . .’

  ‘Tomorrow!’ said Mrs. Hollis, spinning round from the sink. ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, Ruth, surely —’ Even her father looked rather annoyed. Her mother was speechless, gesticulating out of the kitchen window. ‘Where on earth —?’

  Ruth, feeling rather cold, looked out of the kitchen window and remembered that the back-garden, or field, was full of bricks. There was wire-mesh between it and the adjoining two gardens, but nothing round the sides of the house and at the bottom, save a hedge full of holes. She looked at it forlornly, thinking of the lush spring bounty of Mr. Marks’s field. Fly would surely find life here a little different.

  ‘Oh, I’ll have it all right by tomorrow,’ she said.

  Her assumption that a fence would grow out of the ground before the following evening made her parents exchange despairing glances. Fortunately at this moment Ted came in with his friend from work, Ron. Ron, like Ted, was seventeen, tall, skinny, and amiable, with a beloved motor bike.

  ‘We’re going to work on Ron’s camshaft tonight,’ Ted said happily.

  ‘I think,’ said Mr. Hollis, ‘that you’re going to build a fence.’

  A vast cattle-truck, trailing small clots of dung, laboured up the slight incline to ‘South View’ and parked incongruously outside.

  The driver leaned out of the cab and yelled towards the house, ‘Six cows for Hollis!’

  Ruth ran blindly down the drive and into the road. ‘It’s my pony! The pony from Mr. Marks?’

  ‘That’s right, miss,’ said the driver, grinning. He let down the back ramp with a crash and shower of straw, and from the depths of the big lorry Fly’s dark eyes stared at Ruth, wild and shining.

  ‘I’ll get him, miss. He’s a bit scared like.’ The man went into the lorry and untied Fly’s halter. Fly charged for the daylight, his hoofs drumming the wooden floor, pulling the driver with him.

  ‘Hey, hey, steady on, my bold fellow!’

  He crashed down the ramp, skidded on the concrete, and pulled up, quivering, nostrils wide, held sharply by the rope halter. A quiet one, Ruth remembered, was what she should have had. No animal that she had ever seen, she thought at that moment, looked less quiet than Fly.

  CHAPTER IV

  PROBLEMS

  THAT NIGHT, ALONE in the pock-marked field, Fly-by-Night galloped up and down the makeshift fences, whinnying for his companions. Ruth lay in bed with the pillow over her head so that she would not hear the pitiful noise. When he stopped whinnying she got out of bed to see if he was still there, and saw him standing with his ears pricked up, gazing into the distance, the moonlight washing his frosted back. She kept going to the window, longing to see him grazing, or dozing, but he did not settle. Ruth would have gone out to him, in the cold moonlight, but she knew that her presence made no difference to his behaviour, for she had spent the hours before bedtime trying to soothe him, and he had ignored her, brushing past her in his agitated circling, looking past her with anxious eyes. The neighbours had watched him, amazed, worried about their wire-mesh, and Ruth’s parents had shaken their heads and asked her what had possessed her to choose such a mettlesome beast.

  ‘Any trouble and he’ll have to go back,’ Mrs. Hollis said. ‘Thank goodness we haven’t paid the man yet.’

  ‘It’s all strange to him,’ Ruth cried out. ‘He’ll settle down! He misses the other ponies.’

  Shaken with doubts of her own, nothing would now have induced her to admit that Fly was not a wise buy. More than anything her parents could say, the words of Peter McNair, who knew, kept repeating themselves in her head: ‘If you get a quiet one . . .’ But she did not want the grey, or the black, or the piebald. She was possessed by Fly, with his cocky walk and his questing eyes. ‘He will be all right,’ she said, ‘when he’s settled down.’

  ‘Tell the man to go and bring this animal’s pals,’ Ted said, reinforcing his fence hastily with whatever was handy (the dustbin, the clothes-line, two motor tyres, and a wardrobe door that was in the garage), ‘before he goes and fetches them himself.’

  ‘He’ll be all right in the morning.’

  But in the morning Fly was still whinnying, and roaming round the field close by the fences, so that he wore a trodden path. Even to Ruth’s eyes the grass in their field did not look very palatable: it was sparse yet, and full of docks. The drinking-water was in an old cistern that Ted had mended with solder. She thought that some hay might occupy the restless pony, and took five shillings out of her money-box, and went on her bicycle to the nearest farm, where a surly old man took her money and dropped a bale on to her handle-bars.

  ‘We ain’t got too much ourselves just now.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ Ruth said, full of gratitude for the favour.

  She pushed the awkward load home and dropped a precious armload of the stuff on to the ground for Fly. He came up and snuffed it, ate a little, and trampled a lot of it into the mud. Ruth put the rest of the bale into the garage, but when her father came home and put the car in, the hay had to come out. Ruth put it on the porch, by the front door.

  ‘Ruth, for heaven’s sake!’ her mother said.

  ‘Where else, then?’ Ruth asked, in desperation. Her money-box had only another half-crown in it, and the hay was precious. She knew now that she would have to buy a hay-net, and a halter, too, and after that there would be a saddle and bridle, and a dandy-brush, and saddle-soap, and a hoof-pick. And more hay. Fly was still cantering along his track by the wire mesh, and scratching his hind quarters on the posts, which now leaned towards their neighbours’ gardens. The neighbours on one side told Mrs. Hollis tha
t they didn’t like the whole business.

  ‘He’ll settle down,’ Ruth said. She was white, and had dark shadows under her eyes. She went down to the paper shop and signed on to deliver papers to Mud Lane and the road down to the creek, an unpopular route because the houses were far apart and a lot had nasty dogs. ‘Eleven shillings a week,’ the man said.

  ‘Oh, thank you very much,’ Ruth said, once more deeply grateful. At least, on eleven shillings a week, Fly could not actually starve. She would wear her thickest trousers, and gum boots, for the dogs.

  ‘Look, really,’ Mrs. Hollis said, surveying the motor tyres and the dustbin and the wardrobe door from the front drive, ‘we can’t go on looking like this. We’ll have the estate people on to us. It looks like a slum. You’ll have to buy some stakes and wire and make a proper fence.’

  The stakes cost half a crown each, and the wire was nearly three pounds a roll. Mr. Hollis bought them, grimly, and handed them over to Ted and Ron to install. Ted had to borrow a sledge-hammer from the builders. That night Ruth was summoned to a serious talk with her father.

  ‘All right, you’ve got the pony,’ he said. ‘But it depends on a lot of things, whether we keep it or not. You understand, Ruth, that it’s not because I don’t want you to have your pleasure. I want it as much as anybody. But it’s a hard fact of life that our budget is already stretched to its uttermost limits, and it’s only because. Ted has started work and things are that much easier that we were able to buy this new house. And the mortgage repayments on this house are going to take all our spare cash for some years to come. In fact,’ he added, ‘I sometimes wish we’d gone for some old shack down Mud Lane myself — only your mother would never have stood for it. I don’t like this millstone round my neck. I wish — oh, but that’s beside the point. But you understand what I’m getting at, Ruth? It’s not easy, and if we find we have made a mistake, you will just have to take it.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Ruth said miserably. ‘But I will keep him, with my paper round.’

  ‘You’re a good kid. But you’ve just got to know how things are.’