Authors: Catherine Hunt
When the splint was done, Jeff Ingham turned his attention to the other leg. As best he could, he cleaned and covered the wounds. He cut away the barbed wire as close to the leg as possible but left in the spikes – he said that if he pulled them out, the bleeding would get a whole lot worse.
Then they had to get Valentine into the trailer. Laura pulled him by the reins while the other two joined hands across his hind quarters. Using brute force they dragged and shoved him up the ramp.
She had been holding it together while she had work to do but now she couldn’t stop the tears rolling down her face. The vet drove slowly across the bumpy ground, watching her in the rear-view mirror. She was slumped in the back seat, white-faced, leaning over to the right to try to minimize the pain from her ribs. She’d taken the painkillers he offered her but refused the sedative. He wanted to drop her at the stables so she could go to hospital, but she had refused that as well. Pauline argued with her but it did no good. She insisted she was going with them to the big veterinary clinic near Lewes where Valentine would be treated. They had given up trying to talk her out of it.
Joe had met her eight months ago at the nursing home by the sea where his mother was. Not the most romantic of meetings – she had been pushing a man in a wheelchair, an old neighbour of hers, she said, who she visited occasionally because his only relative, his son, lived in Canada and never came. She had lost control of the chair for a moment and it had run into the side of his mother’s.
It had been one of those lovely, early spring days when you know for certain that winter is on the way out. Sunny with a light breeze but not enough to be cold and so he had taken his mother out into the gardens to sit and watch the sparkling sea. The chalk cliffs of the Seven Sisters towered above it, bright white in the sunlight. The blue of the water and the green of the downland stretched their rough sea beauty as far as the eye could see.
He had been entranced by her from the start. The sun gleamed on her blonde hair as it fell full and soft on her shoulders; she was slim but with an hourglass figure. She was wearing black figure-hugging jeans and high heels and he thought she would not look out of place on the catwalk. Later, when he thought about her, and he thought about her all the time, he described her in his own mind as ‘stunning’.
After the wheelchair collision he had stood, staring at her, forgetting to speak. She had thought he was annoyed.
‘I am so, so sorry,’ she said, bending down to talk to his mother. ‘Are you all right?’ And then, looking up at him, she said shyly, ‘women drivers’ and he laughed. She always did make him laugh.
She had made a fuss of his mother and he liked her for that. So often his mother was ignored, as if, because she was in a wheelchair, she was no longer a human being capable of comprehending the world around her. Instead, the speaker would address him, across his mother’s head, speaking of her in the third person. Not that his mother put up with it – she didn’t, not for a second.
They had sat together on a bench looking out to sea, the wheelchairs parked on either side. The old man said nothing. He was deaf, she said, and suffering from dementia. The nurses had told her he was increasingly disturbed by frightening visions. He did not seem to know any longer who she was and she was worried her presence might upset him and make him anxious. She wasn’t sure she should carry on visiting, but didn’t like the idea he would have no one if she didn’t come.
Joe had noticed her lips. They were gorgeous lips and he wondered what it would be like to kiss them and what colour her eyes were behind her sunglasses. He felt guilty to be thinking these things and to be fantasising about her, but he couldn’t stop himself. At the time, and for months afterwards, he could think of nothing but how much he wanted her. There was no room in his mind for anything else.
Of course, he had asked to see her again and she had agreed. And there had begun the most intense, most intoxicating love affair of his life. She was emotional and unpredictable, he knew that, but she was also vulnerable, exciting, and loving. She made him feel powerful and alive.
It was a very different relationship to the one he had with Laura. Not just from the relationship now, which had been tainted for him by his affair, but from the one he’d had at the beginning, in the good times, when he wanted to stay with her forever, have children with her, grow old and wrinkled with her. How he had admired her; successful, determined, always together, Laura. She knew what she wanted and went all out to get it.
That was how it had been with him. She had come to see a play he was in, had recognized his name in the programme and talked to him afterwards. They’d met years ago, she said, when they were both still at school, had dated a couple of times. It made her laugh that it took him so long to remember. Clearly, the seventeen year old Laura hadn’t made much of an impression on him, she joked.
It was only when she mentioned that he’d wanted to take some rather too sexy photos of her, that he’d smiled and the penny had dropped. He recalled that she had refused and he’d lost interest in her. He’d had other girlfriends who were more obliging.
After the meeting at the theatre she had been the one to get in touch, to chase. He was used to that. He was a good looking man and women came easily to him. But this had been special. Never before had he been chased by a high flying, high earning and highly desirable lawyer. He was flattered and pleased and he chased her back.
Laura worked hard for her success, worked the longest hours, took the cases that no one else wanted … and won them. He’d known her for six months before he realized why. She told him one night when she’d had too much to drink. It was a way of burying her demons, the guilt and self-doubt that had come to her with the knowledge of what her mother had endured while she had been blind to it. The harder she worked on other people’s problems, the less she focused on her own; the higher she climbed up the greasy legal pole, the more chance she’d start believing in herself and her confident shell would morph into her real self. It had been a choice, she said, between work and the vodka bottle.
After a year or so, he had moved in to the house in central London that Laura owned. Two years after that, when his mother had her stroke, Laura had been keen, more than keen, to leave London and head for Sussex so that Joe could take up his new role with Greene’s. The demons were in retreat and she was ready to move on with her life.
They married, sold the London house, and bought an old Sussex farmhouse just outside Rooks Green, a few miles from Brighton. Laura loved it – the change of pace, the countryside, and best of all, catching up again with friends she had almost lost touch with in her frenetic London life. He loved it too; it had given him a new start on a more equal footing with his wife.
Gradually, almost without realizing it, Joe had grown less enamoured of Laura’s success, less willing to bask in her reflected glory, less willing to accompany her to the legal functions she needed to attend. As his own career went nowhere, it became an irritation. But once they were out of London and he had a business to run, it stopped bothering him.
It was a very different problem now. He had loved Laura, had never meant to cheat on her. He had not wanted to, he told himself, it had just happened and there was absolutely nothing he could have done about it. It wasn’t his fault.
One thing was sure, it could not go on much longer, this double life. He might be an actor, albeit an unsuccessful one, but it was a part he couldn’t play anymore. It was well past time for the curtain to come down.
In the last few days Laura’s life had done a rare thing – it had skittered a little bit out of her control. She had been scared, put on the back foot and she’d needed his support. It had made him think hard about what he was doing.
He stared at himself in the mirror. ‘What am I becoming?’ he muttered. Only a monster would behave the way he was. And he was not a monster. Was he?
Blood bubbled from the holes as Jeff Ingham wielded a pair of pliers and pulled the spikes of barbed wire from Valentine’s flesh. He stitched and dressed the wounds. There was a lot of tissue damage and he was worried about infection.
All the time that he and the rest of the surgical team worked Laura stayed with them, assisting wherever she could. She didn’t say much, just asked a few details about what they were doing. In her mind, lurking behind her immediate fear and grief for the horse, was suspicion; suspicion that what had happened was not an accident at all, an uneasy, intuitive feeling that would not go away.
The vet had done the X-rays and she watched him studying the pictures which would show how bad the break was, nervously awaiting his verdict. He ran a hand through his unruly hair, turning the pictures around, frowning in concentration.
‘I can’t be sure,’ he said. ‘There’s some good news. No evidence of a major break or a multiple break or a shattered bone. With a bit of luck it might be a fairly simple fracture, maybe even a hairline one. But there’s some serious swelling near the knee where the skin is broken.’
He guessed any fracture was hidden by the swelling, saying it was often difficult to see the break straight away. After ten days or so, when it started to heal, it would be easier to spot on an X-ray because the new bone forming at the fracture site would show up.
‘We should wait then?’ she asked eagerly. ‘Give him a chance.’
His answer was brutally frank.
‘I have to tell you that Valentine is a very sick horse. Because of the number and combination of his injuries there is a high risk of infection in one or both of his legs. Even if he avoids that, there are other major complications that may occur. His road to recovery will be hard and it’s likely to distress him badly.
‘He’ll need at least eight weeks of box rest for his cut leg. As for his fractured leg, on the best outcome, it’s likely to be a year before he can walk on it properly again. He’ll be immobile and probably on painkillers for much of that time. It would not be the wrong decision to put him to sleep. You shouldn’t feel guilty about it.’
‘Would it be the wrong decision to keep him alive?’ she asked quietly.
He hesitated. ‘No, I wouldn’t say that. As long as you’re willing to pull the plug if things go badly, if he’s suffering and can’t stand the strain.’
Laura imagined Valentine going crazy because of her misguided effort to save him, because she was too stubborn and too self-centred to see sense.
‘I understand and I will do that,’ she promised.
She stayed with them another hour. Valentine had had a full anaesthetic and to get him upright again, and keep him upright so that the fracture could be joined, he had to be put in a full body sling. She watched as 560 kilograms of unconscious horse was hoisted into the air and gently manoeuvred into the sling. It was a strange and unnerving sight and it left her full of doubt.
It seemed to take forever to get it right. His hindquarters must be properly supported so he would not tip backwards out of the sling. His weight must be evenly distributed and the multiple straps adjusted to avoid pressure points on his abdomen. He would be in the sling for some time and there were many dangers: his lungs could get compressed and congested; his digestion could be upset giving him colic; he could develop bad pressure sores. He would have to get used to sleeping in the sling and having his meals fed on a platform.
When it was finally done Valentine stood immobile, dead to the world, his abdomen and chest supported by the contraption. The team began to unravel the Bob Jones bandage, then they would put a plaster cast on his leg.
Laura stood up to go. On tiptoe, she kissed the white star on Valentine’s forehead.
‘You’ll make it,’ she whispered to the unconscious horse, swallowing hard on the lump rising in her throat, and limped out of the stable.
The clinic’s receptionist, relaxing after the morning surgery, saw Laura coming towards her and smiled. The arrival of Valentine and his battered rider, determined to save him, had been a major excitement. The receptionist was keen to hear full details of the drama straight, so to speak, from the horse’s mouth. She was disappointed. Laura, in pain and obsessed by the suspicion nagging at her mind, just asked if she’d mind calling a minicab then rapidly disappeared into the ladies toilet.
Her left hip and her back hurt like hell and so did breathing; if she breathed in too deep her ribs shrieked in pain. She took off her riding hat and washed the dirt from her face. Her hair was tangled and sweaty. She found a gash on the side of her leg which had bled a lot on her trousers. It looked quite deep but it wasn’t bleeding much anymore, so she cleaned it with some toilet paper and forgot about it. There was something she had to do and none of these injuries was going to stop her.
She called Joe again, and again he didn’t answer. She texted him and left another message telling him about the accident. That word again. When the vet had said it, out on the hillside, it had hit her like a jet of cold water. Suddenly she had known, without any doubt whatsoever, that it had been no accident. But the certainty had faded and now she couldn’t be so sure. She was left with a feeling of unease and misgiving and an urgent need to know the truth of it.
She scanned through the photos she’d taken of the scene, wincing as she saw the stricken horse. There was nothing obviously suspicious but she realized there were no detailed photographs of the exact spot where it had happened. Valentine’s momentum had taken him some way further on and her pictures were mostly of the place where he had fallen to the ground. The rest were too general. She needed to go back for another look and she needed to do it now.
The minicab driver was the chatty type and the bedraggled state of his passenger interested him. He was full of questions and when he heard her answers, told her she should be looking after herself instead of traipsing round the countryside again. It would be better if he took her to hospital for a check-up – she said no – better if he took her home – politely, she refused – where was her husband then? Good question, she thought.