Authors: Barbara Kay
Harold had resisted the divorce. A life of budgetary restraint after so many years was socially humiliating for him, and Thea understood this. In spite of her excellent reasons for divorcing him (most of them blonde and nubile), she felt obscurely guilty about his ouster from the easy life her money had provided. She, after all, had not worked for it. It hadn’t been a hardship to share it. And so it was out of her need for expiation and a sense of closure that Thea had, however reluctantly, written the cheque for $70,000, the absolute high end of the spectrum for an Eventing horse of that level.
It wasn’t Robin’s Song’s lack of talent or scope that worried Thea. Even Thea could see that the horse’s athleticism was incontestable. His natural balance and the purity of his gaits could rival any Hanoverian or Selle Français or Belgian warmblood. He could jump the moon from the laziest of trots.
She simply knew that the partnership was wrong. She didn’t trust him with Stephanie. And she’d never had a satisfactory answer as to why she felt this way.
Michel and Roch had always been very circumspect about what they said about him. They praised his abilities, but were reluctant to say anything negative. Thea assumed that this was because they knew that their criticisms might result in a lower sale price and trouble for Bridget.
They all stick together, Thea thought. Trainers with trainers against owners. Horse people in general against the world. She hoped Polo would at least be honest with her after he rode him today. Perhaps he was riding him right now.
Still, even if his opinion vindicated her suspicions, it was too late to help Stephanie. Too late for a second chance to speak out, to be brave. And for her timidity, for her unwillingness to make waves, she had paid a disproportionate price. A dead daughter seemed a very high price to pay, indeed, for simply not wanting to quarrel with one’s ex–husband.
Bridget was wrapping it all up. “…and what is the most important thing you have to remember? All of you? All the time when you’re out on that course? You tell me now. I’ve told you so many times it should be engraved in your brains.”
“Don’t be afraid,” said Lucie.
“Fear is the enemy,” said Chloe.
“There are no bad horses, only bad riders,” said Claire.
Bridget saw her students out, then gathered up her own things. She was going up to the barn to feed the stallion and hand walk him around the indoor arena.
“Don’t rush out on my account, Thea,” she said. She peered out the window. “It’s letting up a bit. Why don’t you have another cuppa’ before you go out on the course. Guy will be ‘mother’, won’t you?” she asked teasingly of Guy who had just appeared in the doorway. He smiled politely in affirmation.
“Oh, that’s all right, I really ought to be–” Thea began.
“No, stay, Thea,” Guy suddenly said quite firmly. “I was just about to fix a c–cup of tea myself. C–company would be nice.” He walked quickly to the stove before she could decline.
“‘Ta, Guy,” Bridget said. “I’m off, then.” A few seconds later her car growled to life and she was gone. Thea felt an immediate lessening of tension in the house. She wondered if it was her own presence that had produced the tension in the first place, or if Guy always relaxed a bit when Bridget went out. The kettle sang out and Guy fixed up a tray to take into the living room.
Thea followed him in and looked around with curiosity. She’d been so intent on her duties before that she hadn’t noticed the rather oddly arranged living quarters. Guy was watching her puzzlement with amused understanding.
“That’s Bridget’s corner over there,” he said, nodding to what should have been the dining room end. It looked to Thea like an office that had been vandalized. There was a desk, barely visible under a heap of papers, folders, horse passports, framed eventing photographs, and other evocative testimony to a life spent in equestrian sport. To Thea it seemed as though a huge garbage pail had been emptied over the desk.
A filing cabinet stood in the corner with its drawers yawning open, and files half–pulled or lying on top of the rest. A year’s accumulation of
Eventing Magazine
from England rested precariously on a small table. A box of chocolates sat open on top of the pile. Folders with paper sticking out everywhere were stacked up on the floor beside the desk. A Xerox machine stood on its own little rickety stand, too low for a user’s comfort. There were papers and a telephone sitting on top of it. A fax machine squatted on the floor next to a dog bed where a chocolate–coloured labrador slept with his drooling mouth resting on the machine’s panel of instructions.
Viscerally insulted and mentally aghast, she turned to Guy and shook her head in speechless wonder. He simply nodded sympathetically. There was nothing one could say.
“And that’s my space,” he indicated, inclining his head to the other end of the room. The contrast was actually shocking. Here was an oasis of order and routine. A clean desk, except for three folders, an open cheque book and a pen, and an excellent, expensive–looking study lamp. Bookshelves full of medical tomes and journals, all neatly ranged and catalogued. One section featured books and periodicals devoted to fish and aquarium literature. A small computer unit module with printer and paper storage components to the side of the desk. A pretty little jewel–toned Persian rug on the threadbare broadloom beneath.
Between the two camps was the living room, which consisted of a sagging leather couch and two shabby wing chairs facing an
armoire
, a television and VCR set on a trolley, and a drably beige arborite coffee table. Newspapers and horse magazines were tossed about everywhere.
Instinctively Thea moved closer to Guy’s workspace, the only corner in the house that looked as if anybody cared about it. Surreptitiously she ran her finger along the desk edge. Clean. How very strange it all was. She looked down at the folders on his desk. One was marked ‘Hydro’, one ‘Telephone’, and one ‘Misc’.
She looked inquiringly at Guy who had followed her movements with comprehending eyes.
“Those are the bills we share in c–common,” he explained. “I l–like to know where they are,” he said without a trace of irony. “I keep my research notes and v–vetting records up at the office at
Le Centre.”
“In the filing cabinets? Polo said they weren’t locked. That surprised me.”
“They usually are. Perhaps Marie–France forgot before leaving.”
Thea nodded gravely. “Lucky they weren’t tampered with by the vandals.”
“Yes. Y–Yes, of course that
was
lucky.”
Thea looked again at Bridget’s end of the room and shook her head. “How do you tolerate it, Guy?” And then, quite rudely, knowing it was none of her business, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t ask, but this kind of environment–” she gestured at his space–“I mean, the way you are–”
Guy smiled and nodded again, not at all insulted. “I l–like it here, Thea. Bridget is g–good company. We don’t–well, we d–don’t
interfere
with each other.” He looked from one end of the room to the other. “We just ex–p–press our need for privacy in d–different ways.”
Thinking about his unhappy past, Thea nodded. She could see the attraction. He didn’t have to live alone this way–total solitude would be too much to bear–and yet here he could carry on with invisible walls all around him. The British are so very good at that sort of thing, Thea reflected grudgingly. They understand the necessity of doors between rooms, invisible barriers between people, secrets kept, the obvious unmentioned. They do not intrude.
“But also b–because she gives me enough s–space,” Guy added.
“Well, yes, that’s what you just said,” she replied, puzzled.
“No, no,” he said, with a rare laugh, “I mean s–space. Real s–space. For”–he gestured with an outstretched arm across the hall.
Thea then turned and looked across the hall and gasped. Practically the whole wall on the other side of the house was an explosion of tropical colours.
The reef tank! Guy’s famous reef tank.
“Ohh!”
Guy’s face lit up with pleasure. He motioned an invitation to come closer. She walked over to it and Guy quickly produced a second chair to sit alongside his own.
“It’s–it’s so
huge
!”
“Five hundred gallons,” Guy said proudly. “I had to have the floor reinforced.”
“My goodness. It’s–it’s beautiful! The colours!” Her eyes were darting everywhere, hungrily trying to take it all in at once. “Can you explain it to me, what everything is?”
Could he
explain
it! He looked at her with blissful gratitude and launched himself into his personal paradise. The moment he turned to look at the tank, he stopped stuttering.
“Well, those rocks you see piled up everywhere. They’re all covered with that heathery, mossy vegetation now, but when I first got them from Bali–”
“From Bali?”
“Oh yes, it’s living rock. It has to come from the tropics. At first when you get it, it’s bare, it looks just like pieces of lunar landscape. Then when you get the water temperature and salinity and bacterial levels just right, after a few weeks things start to grow and come out of the rock. Those anemones there–the pink ones–they fasten on and spread themselves out, so now the rocks are kind of fused together by the vegetation and the corals and all–”
“Oh, I thought they were grass, those fronds waving like that–”
“Oh no, they’re alive, and so are those yellow wheaty things–if you touch them, they shrink down and close right up”–
“–and the gorgeous little mushrooms there? The blue things? Like Ladyslippers?”
“Yes, they’re alive too.” Guy’s normally sallow face was rosy and his eyes sparkled behind his glasses.
“Ooh, look at that funny praying mantis–but all candy–striped–”
“No, that’s a shrimp. I had two, but one of the fish ate him.” Guy’s face darkened and his tone lost energy.
“Oh, what a shame.”
“Yes, it was my fault. I took bad advice from a so–called expert. I should have checked for myself whether a hawkfish would fit in to this particular eco–system. And now I’m stuck with him.” Guy was quite gloomy now. “There he is. Can you see him?”
“You mean that pretty purple and yellow fish?”
“No, no, behind that rock. He’s sort of brown and spotted, with eyes like antennae, and he kind of jumps from rock to rock. He’s a
stalking
fish. I’ve been trying to get him out, but he’s wily, you see. It’s as if he knows what the net is for. You wouldn’t think a fish could be intelligent, but this one is–”
“So how will you get at him?”
Guy sighed. “I may have to take the whole thing apart.”
“Oh, but that would be terrible. Everything else is so perfect. And the time–it would take so much time and energy.”
“I know. But I have to protect the others, you see. It isn’t fair to them.”
“You really love this, don’t you Guy? Stephanie used to tell me about your hobby, but I never took it very seriously. I didn’t realize what a–what a
world
it is.”
“You used the right word, Thea. A reef tank
is
a world unto itself. A complete eco–system, self–perpetuating and flourishing once you get things going. You don’t even have to feed it. It’s all symbiotic.” He frowned and pushed his slipping glasses up his nose. “It was inexcusable for me to make an error like that hawkfish.”
“That’s life, Guy,” Thea said lightly, becoming a little uneasy with his fixation on the one problem.
“No, Thea,” Guy said intensely, jabbing a finger toward the door. “
That’s
life, out there. Or our human life at least. But in here, where I have the power to be in control of what I do, I shouldn’t make mistakes. A reef tank is the most complete captive environment you can create, and the most easily manipulated if you prepare things properly…”
Thea suddenly felt strangely empathetic to the change of mood and Guy’s extraordinary intensity. She was not convinced they were even talking about reef tanks any more. She felt sure Guy was unconsciously referring to the dark secret in his own life that he had shared with her daughter.
She said, testing, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could keep the life we humans create as safe as the creatures in a reef tank?”
“Some people should not have the right to create life at all,” Guy said with a curious lack of affect, still staring moodily at the tank.
“What do you mean, Guy?” Thea asked quietly.
“Look at my creatures, Thea,” Guy answered. Obediently Thea turned her eyes back to Guy’s enchanted Eden. She saw sparkling, clean blue water and weird–shaped, brilliantly–tinctured fish–purple, yellow, blue, orange–gliding effortlessly in and around the mossy grottoes and limpid shoals of the rocks. She saw anemones dancing and swaying to the pulse of the currents. Snails and shrimps made their slow, delicate progress wherever atavistic impulse demanded. It was extraordinarily beautiful, protected and peaceful.
“I know what happened to you, Guy,” Thea finally said. “Stephanie told me.”
Guy drew into himself. Like an anemone when it’s threatened, Thea thought. “She shouldn’t have,” he said softly.
“She cared about you, Guy. She felt terrible about what happened to you at that school. The headmaster. And you never telling. Protecting your family. Protecting
his.
His own sons at the same school. Unthinkable, really. She felt very privileged that you shared this with her. But it was disturbing. She had to share her pain. It was only me–she never told anyone else. And I never did. Or would.”
“Don’t feel sorry for me, Thea. I have things under control. I’m pretty happy with my life on the whole.” Guy spoke gently, but there was a warning underneath.
Don’t try to get close.
“It’s not pity I feel. It’s sympathy. And indignation. Anger, too.” She paused, groping for the right wording. “Did you never want revenge of any kind, Guy? You hear nowadays about lawsuits, successful often”–
Guy shuddered visibly. “I could never,
never–
in public–the publicity–and my parents–no, no,
never
. And then, I was raised to be a Christian, you see. I believed what I was taught. So revenge–well, it’s just not the right thing.”