‘I never went.’

‘I know, but to Grumps, you were his superstar. Every class I won, you’d won it first. Every horse I broke would have been just your type. I was poor compensation.’

‘And then I came back and unwittingly stole the first boy you fell in love with.’ Ronnie’s eyes had lost their sparkle, her face etched with remorse.

‘I never wanted to get on a horse again.’

‘Even now?’

Pax thought about the restless, belly-deep need she always felt around horses. The galloping she’d done in her imagination, the hooves in her ears through her listless marriage; horses galloped alongside every car she drove, every train she took, every nightmare from which she ran away to wakefulness. They were the percussion to her life, the stampede that told her there was something better over the horizon. They’d stayed with her no matter how far removed she’d become from the little red-haired girl in the photographs on Lester’s walls, no matter how hard she’d tried to disassociate herself from her, to punish her for never being good enough.

Bulimia had come first, long before leaving the stud: public self-denial, private gorging, that oh-so-secret solace, then the purge of forcing the comfort straight back out, acid and loathsome. For a brief while, drugs fast-tracked her to a secret headspace, offered a release. Later alcohol, her hand over the glass at dinner parties before excusing herself to her host’s downstairs loo to neck vodka straight from the bottle hidden in her handbag. Now moonlit riding, trying to get a reckless kick replicating the heroines of the pony books she’d read as a child: By day, Patricia was a frilly Pollyanna cossetted amongst nannies and governesses, by night Pax and her pony owned the moors. Who was she kidding?

Ronnie stepped closer, a hand on her arm. ‘What’s stopping you doing it now, Pax?’

‘I’m frightened it might feel like coming home.’

At that moment, she realised she was already there.

*

On a narrow, sunken section of lane, Luca was being heeled by the rattling diesel of a Land Rover, the barking dogs inside causing the skittish youngster he was leading to jump up the bank while his mount stayed determinedly on the tarmac. Disconcerted, he found himself leading a horse with its hooves at head height. Even more alarmingly, the Land Rover was now trying to squeeze past before they reached a passing place.

Battling to keep the younger horse calm and close without it breaking loose or jumping back down on top of him, Luca raised an arm in warning, calling, ‘Wait!’

Still the Land Rover edged onwards, drawing level, passenger window lowering. In the seat, a rumpled brunette with smudged red lipstick. Stretching across her, Bay Austen was in cashmere and Schoffel, a trace of the same lipstick on his lower lip.

‘Luke, isn’t it? Keep meaning to pop in and see how you’re doing?’

‘Just grand.’ He hung onto the plunging youngster.

‘Give my regards to the girls! Tell Pax we’ll do that lunch soon.’ As he rumbled off, the youngster sprang off the bank like a deer, clean over Luca’s head, landing remarkably sure-footedly on the lane to trot amiably alongside again.