Even I didn't have the heart to go on. There were limits to the pleasure one could obtain from other people's distress, and distressed she clearly was. It was not a condition I was used to observing in my mother, who had always seemed to be in complete control of any and every situation. It was more usually a state she created in others rather than suffered from herself.
As Ian Norland had said, something very strange was going on.
I went for a walk outside before going to bed. I had done something similar all my life, and the loss of a foot wasn't going to be allowed to change my lifestyle more than I could help it.
I wandered around the garden and along the concrete path to the stables. A few security lights came on as I moved under the sensors, but no one seemed to care and there was no halting shout. There was no one on stag here, no sentries posted.
Not much had changed since I had run away all those years before. The trees had grown up a bit, and the border of bushes down the far side of the house was less of a jungle than I had remembered. Perhaps it was just the effects of the winter months.
I had loved that border as a child and had made no end of "dens" amongst the thick undergrowth, fantasizing great adventures and forever lying in wait for an unseen "enemy," my toy rifle at the ready.
Not much may have changed in the place, but plenty had changed within me.
I stood in the cold and dark and drew deeply on a cigarette, cupping the glowing end in my hand so that it wasn't visible. Not that anyone would be looking; it was just a force of habit.
I didn't really consider myself a smoker, and I'd never had a cigarette until I first went on ops to Iraq. Then that had changed. Somehow the threat of possibly developing lung cancer in the future was a minor one compared to the risk of having one's head blown off in the morning.
It had seemed that almost everyone smoked in Afghanistan. It had helped to control the fear, to steady the hand, and to relieve the pressure when a cold beer, or any other alcohol, for that matter, was strictly against standing orders. At least I hadn't smoked opium like the locals. That was also against standing orders.
I leaned against the corner of the house and drew a deep breath into my lungs, feeling the familiar rush as the nicotine flooded into my bloodstream and was transported to my brain. Finding the opportunity for a crafty smoke in the hospital had been rare, but here, now, I was my own master again, and I reveled in the freedom.
A light went on in the first-floor room above my head.
"Why the bloody hell did he have to turn up? That's all we bloody need at the moment."
I could clearly hear my mother in full flow.
"Keep your voice down, he'll hear you."
That was my stepfather.
"No, he won't," she said, again at full volume. "He's gone outside."
"Josephine," my stepfather said angrily, "half the bloody village will hear you if you're not careful."
I was quite surprised that he would talk to her like that. Perhaps there was more to him than I thought. My mother even took notice of him, and they continued their conversation much more quietly. Annoyingly, I couldn't hear anything other than a faint murmur, although I stood there silently for quite a while longer, just in case they reverted to fortissimo.
But sadly, they didn't, and presently, the lights in the room went out.
I lifted the leather flap that covered the face of my watch. The luminous hands showed me it was only ten-thirty. Clearly, racehorse trainers went to bed as early as hospital patients, even on Saturday nights. I was neither, and I enjoyed being outside in the dark, listening and watching.
I had always been completely at home in darkness, and I couldn't understand those who were frightened of it. I suppose it was one thing I should thank my mother for. When I was a child, she had always insisted I sleep with my bedroom lights off and my door firmly closed. Since then the dark had always been my friend.
I stood silently and listened to the night.
In the distance there was music, dance music, the thump, thump, thump of the rhythm clearly audible in the still air. Perhaps someone was having a party. A car drove along the road at the bottom of the driveway, and I watched its red lights as it traveled beyond the village, up the hill and out of sight.
I thought I heard a fox nearby with its high-pitched scream, but I wasn't sure. It might have been a badger. I would have needed a pair of army-issue night-vision goggles to be sure, or better still a U.S. military set, which were far superior.
I lit another cigarette, the flare of the match instantly rendering me blind in the night. Out in Afghanistan I'd had a fancy lighter that could light a cigarette in complete darkness. Needless to say, it hadn't accompanied me on my evacuation. In fact, nothing I had owned in Afghanistan had so far made it back to me.
An infantry soldier's life at war was carried around with him in his backpack, his Bergen. Either that or on his body in the form of helmet, radio, body armor, spare ammunition, boots and camouflage uniform. Then there was his rifle and bayonet to carry in his hands. It all went everywhere with him. Leave a Bergen unattended for even a second and it was gone, spirited away like magic by some innocent-looking Afghan teenager. Leaving a rifle unattended could be a court-martial offense. Everything and anything would "walk" if not tied down or guarded.
The Taliban have described the British soldier as a ferocious fighter but one who moves very slowly. Well, Mr. Taliban, you try running around with seven stone of equipment on your back. It was like carrying your grandmother into battle, but without the benefits.
I wondered where my Bergen had gone. For that matter, I wondered where my uniform had gone, and everything else too. Thanks largely to the dedicated and magnificent volunteers of the CCAST, the Critical Care Air Support Teams, I had arrived back in England not only alive but less than thirty hours after the explosion. But I'd woken up in the Birmingham hospital, naked and without a foot, with not even a toothbrush, just a pair of metal dog tags around my neck, embossed with my name and army service number, an age-old and trusted method of identifying the living, and the dead.
There had been a letter to my mother in the breast pocket of my uniform, to be posted in the event of my death. I wondered where that was too. My mother obviously hadn't received it. But there again, I hadn't died. Not quite.
Eventually, it was the cold that drove me inside.
I went slowly and quietly through the house so as not to disturb those sleeping upstairs. In the past I would have removed my shoes and padded around silently in bare feet, but now, as I could have only one bare foot, I kept my shoes on.
Good as it was, my new right leg had an annoying habit of making a metallic clinking noise every time I put it down, even when I moved slowly. I didn't sound quite like a clanking old truck engine, but an enemy sentry would still have heard me coming from more than a hundred paces on a still night. I would have to do something about that, on top of everything else, if I was ever to convince the MOD major.
I went up the stairs to my old bedroom. My childhood things were long gone, packed up by my mother and either sent to the charity shop or to the council tip just as soon as I had announced I wasn't coming back.
However, the bed looked the same, and the chest of drawers in the corner definitely was, the end now repainted where I had once stuck up bubble-gum cards of army regimental crests.
This wasn't the first night I had been back in this bed. There had been other occasional visits, all started with good intentions but invariably ending in argument and recrimination. To be fair, I was as much, if not more, to blame than my mother and stepfather. There was just something about the three of us together that caused the ire in us to rise inexorably to the point of mutual explosion. And none of us were very good firemen. Rather, we would fan the flames and pour petrol on them in gay abandon. And not one of us was ever prepared to back down or apologize. Nearly always I would end up leaving in anger, vowing never to return.
My most recent visit, five years previously, had been optimistically expected to last five days. I had arrived on Christmas Eve all smiles, with bags of presents and good intent, and I'd left before lunch on Christmas morning, sent on my way by a tirade of abuse. And the silly thing was, I couldn't now remember why we had argued. We didn't seem to need a reason, not a big one anyway.
Perhaps tomorrow would be better. I hoped so, but I doubted it. The lesson of experience over expectation was one I had finally begun to learn.
Maybe I shouldn't have come, but somehow I had needed to. This place was where I'd grown up, and in some odd way it still represented safety and security. And in spite of the shouting, the arguments and the fights, it was the only home I'd ever had.
I lay on the bed and looked up at the familiar ceiling with its decorative molding around the light fixture. It reminded me so much of the hours I had spent lying in exactly the same way as a spotty seventeen-year-old longing to be free, longing to join the army and escape from my adolescent prison. And yet here I was again, back in the same place, imprisoned again, this time by my disability but still longing to be in the army, determined to rejoin my regiment, hungry to be back in command of my troops and eager to be, once more, fighting and killing the enemy.
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I sat down on the edge of the bed and removed my prosthesis, rolling down the flesh-colored rubber sleeve that gripped over my real knee, keeping the false lower leg and foot from falling off. I slowly eased my stump out of the tight-fitting cup and removed the foam-plastic liner. It was all very clever. Molded to fit me exactly by the boys at Dorset Orthopedic, they had constructed a limb that I could walk on all day without causing so much as a pressure sore, let alone a blister.
But it still wasn't me.
I looked again at the mirror on the wardrobe door. Now my reflection didn't appear so normal.
Over the past few months, I suppose I had become familiar with the sight of my right leg finishing so abruptly some seven inches below my knee. Familiar, it might have been, but I was far from comfortable with the state of affairs, and every time I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror without my prosthesis, I was still shocked and repulsed by the image.
Why me? I thought for the millionth time.
Why me?
I shook my head.
Feeling sorry for myself wasn't going to help me get back to combat-ready fitness.
The front-page headline of Sunday's Racing Post couldn't have been more blunt. The paper lay on the kitchen table when I went downstairs at eight o'clock to make myself some coffee after a disturbed night.
I wondered if my mother or stepfather had been down to the kitchen yet, and if so, had they seen the headline? Perhaps I should hide it. I looked around for something to casually place over the paper, as I could hear my mother coming down the stairs, but it was too late anyway.
"That bastard Rambler," she was shouting. "He knows sod all."
She swept into the kitchen in a light-blue quilted dressing gown and white slippers. She snatched up the newspaper from the table and studied the front-page article intently.
"It says here that Pharmacist was distressed after the race." My mother was shouting over her shoulder, obviously for the benefit of my stepfather, who had sensibly stayed upstairs. "That's not bloody true. How would Rambler know anyway? He'd have been propping up a bar somewhere. Everyone knows he's a drunk."
I shifted on my feet, my false leg making its familiar metallic clink.
"Oh, hello," said my mother, apparently seeing me for the first time. "Have you read this rubbish?" she demanded.
"No," I said.
"Well, don't," she said, throwing the paper back down on the table. "It's a load of crap."
She turned on her heel and disappeared back upstairs as quickly as she had arrived, shouting obscenities and telling all the world how she would "have Rambler's head on a platter for this."
I leaned down and turned the paper around so I could read it.
"From our senior correspondent Gordon Rambler at Cheltenham" was printed under the headline. I read on: Josephine Kauri was at a loss for words after her eight-year-old Gold Cup prospect, Pharmacist, finished last in the Janes Bank Trophy yesterday at Cheltenham. The horse clearly did not stay the three-mile trip, and finished at a walk and in some distress. The Cheltenham stewards ordered that the horse be routine-tested.
This is not the first time in recent weeks that the Kauris' horses have seemingly run out of puff in big races. Her promising novice chaser Scientific suffered the same fate at Kempton in December, and questions were asked about another Kauri horse Oregon at Newbury last week, when it failed to finish in the first half-dozen when a heavily backed favorite.
Is Josephine losing her magic touch that had won her such respect as well as numerous big prizes? With the Cheltenham Festival now only five weeks away, can we expect a repeat of last year's fantastic feats, or have the Kauri horses simply flattered to deceive?
Gordon Rambler had pulled no punches. He went on to speculate that Mrs. Kauri might be overtraining the horses at home, such that they had passed their peak by the time they reached the racetrack. It would not have been the first time a trainer had inadvertently "lost the race on the gallops," as it was known, although I would be surprised if my mother had, not after so many years of experience. Not unless, as the paper said, she had lost her magic touch.
But she hadn't lost her touch for shouting. I could hear her upstairs in full flow, although I couldn't quite make out the words. No doubt my stepfather was suffering the wrath of her tongue. I almost felt sorry for him. But only almost.
I decided it might be prudent for me to get out of the house for a while, so I went for a wander around the stables.
The block nearest the house, the one over which Ian Norland lived, was just one side of three quadrangles of stables, each containing twenty-four stalls, that stretched away from the house.
When my mother had acquired the place from her first husband there had been far fewer stables, laid out in two lines of wooden huts. But by the time my father had packed up and left nine years later, my mother had built the first of the current redbrick rectangles. The second was added when I'd been about fifteen, and the third more recently in what had once been a lunging paddock. And there was still enough of the paddock remaining to add a fourth, if required.
Even on a Sunday morning, the stables were a hive of activity. The horses needed to be fed and watered seven days a week, although my mother, along with most trainers, still resisted the temptation to treat Sunday as just another day to send strings of horses out on the gallops. But that was probably more to do with having to pay staff double time on Sundays rather than any wish to keep the Sabbath special.
"Good morning," Ian Norland called to me as he came out of one of the stalls. "Still here, then?"
"Yes," I said. Surely, I thought, I hadn't implied anything to him the previous afternoon. "Why wouldn't I still be here?"
"No reason," he said, smiling. "Just…"
"Just what?" I asked with some determination.
"Just that Mrs. Kauri doesn't seem to like guests staying overnight. Most go home after dinner."
"This is my home," I said.
"Oh," he said. "I suppose it is."
He seemed slightly flustered, as if he had already said too much to the son of his employer. He was right. He had.
"And how is Pharmacist this morning?" I asked, half hoping for some more indiscretion.
"Fine," he said rather dismissively.
"How fine?" I persisted.
"He's a bit tired after yesterday," he said. "But otherwise, he's OK."
"No diarrhea?" I asked.
He gave me a look that I took to imply that he wished he hadn't mentioned anything about diarrhea to me yesterday.
"No," he said.
"Does he look well in his eyes?" I asked.
"Like I said, he's just tired." He picked up a bucket and began to fill it under a tap. "Sorry, I have to get on." It was my cue that the conversation was over.
"Yes, of course," I said. I started to walk on, but I stopped and turned around. "Which stall is Pharmacist in?"
"Mrs. Kauri wouldn't want anyone seeing him," Ian said. "Not just now."
"Why on earth not?" I said, sounding aggrieved.
"She just wouldn't," he repeated. "Mrs. Kauri doesn't like anyone snooping round the yard. Won't even allow the owners to see their own horses without her there to escort them."
"Nonsense," I said in my best voice-of-command. "I'm not just anyone, you know. I'm her son."
He wavered, and I thought he was about to tell me when he was saved by the arrival of his employer.
"Morning, Ian," my mother called, striding around the corner towards us. She had swapped the light-blue dressing gown and white slippers for a full-length waxed Barbour coat and green Wellington boots.
"Ah, morning, ma'am," Ian replied with some relief. "I was just talking to your son."
"So I see," she said in a disapproving tone. "Well, don't. You've talked to him too much already."
Ian blushed bright pink, and he stole a glance of displeasure at me.
"Sorry, ma'am," he said.
She nodded firmly at him as if to close the matter. Ian's rebuke may have been short, but I had the distinct impression that his indiscretion would be remembered for much longer. But for now she turned her attention to me. "And what are you doing out here, exactly?" she asked accusingly.
"I was just having a look round," I said as innocently as I could.
I was thirty-two years old and still a serving captain in Her Majesty's British Army. Until recently, I had been commanding a platoon of thirty men fighting and killing Her enemies with zest and gusto, but here I was feeling like a naughty ninth grader caught having a smoke behind the bike sheds by the school principal.
"Well, don't," she said to me in the same tone that she had used towards Ian.
"Why not?" I said belligerently. "Have you something to hide?"
Ian almost choked. It hadn't been the most tactful of comments, and I could see the irritation level rise in my mother's eyes. However, she managed to remain in control of her emotions. There were staff about.
One didn't fight with family in front of staff.
"Of course not," she said with a forced smile. "I just don't want anyone upsetting the horses."
I couldn't actually see how wandering around the stable blocks would upset the horses, but I decided not to say so.
"And how is Pharmacist this morning?" I asked her.
"I was on my way to see him right now," my mother replied, ignoring the implication in my voice. "Come on, Ian," she said, and set off briskly with him in tow.