Keeping the Peace (10 page)

Pippa blinked and her brush stilled, poised millimetres from the canvas. Exhaling, she slowly withdrew her hand, placing the brush in the water jar. It was finished. She felt released, the tension in her body was gone. Her head felt clear again. As with the last painting, she turned away from it without studying its completion. She was too exhausted to go have her usual post-painting cigarette. She looked at her watch as she shrugged off her colour-spattered smock and gasped.

‘Oh, God. I’ve got to be up in three hours for work,’ she groaned. She rubbed her eyes with stained fingers. ‘Where the hell did the evening go?’

She dragged her feet along the worn and balding carpet to the door, but paused before switching off the light. She looked back to the picture, which stood loud and alive on the easel in the middle of the room. Her breath caught in her throat as she noticed something for the first time. One stable on the far left stood free from the commotion and activity. Over the half door though, an equine head looked towards her with long ears pricked, stretched out from a thin bay neck.

Tears welled in her eyes as she took in the white blaze spilling down the horse’s Roman nose and a glint of in its pleading eyes reflecting the early morning sun. The horse stood alone, ignored and abandoned by everyone around the yard. She brushed a tear away with a hasty swipe and blamed it on being overtired. But as she switched off the light, blacking out the picture, Peace Offering still gazed after her, asking her for her support.

P
ippa made a bee-line for the office’s kitchenette the following morning and scooped a double dose of caffeine into her mug. As she settled herself back at her desk, Jack walked in, shaking his sodden jacket from his shoulders and closing the door on the rain outside.

‘Good morning,’ Pippa said with a bright smile, making an extra effort to hide how tired she was.

‘Nothing good so far,’ Jack grunted in reply. His hair was plastered to his forehead and his nose was red from the cold.

‘Hot drink to warm you up?’

‘Okay. That’d be nice. Give Alan Warnock a ring at the vets to come down first though. Take Five is running a temperature and I’d like to check Try That’s leg while he’s here. The abscess in her foot has cleared up, but she’s still lame.’

Pippa beamed and tapped her pen on her desk.

‘On it right away.’

Jack shook his head at her cheeriness and stomped into his office, closing the door behind him with a thud.

‘Hello, Mr Warnock. It’s Pippa from Aspen Valley –’ She paused as the main office door opened and Finn walked in. Pippa gave him a quick wave. ‘Would you be able to come over? Apparently Take That is running a temperature and Try Five –’ She stopped at Finn’s desperate head-shaking and mouthing. ‘Ooh, sorry, ignore what I just said. Take
Five
is running a temperature and Try
That
is still lame...’

A few moments later, she put the phone down and blew her hair off her forehead in a relieved sigh.

Finn leaned his folded arms on the tall reception counter and grinned at her, shaking his head.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I owe you one.’

‘Not a bother. Although some might argue Take That might be running a temperature.’

Pippa giggled.

‘I’ll let that one slide on this occasion. How are you?’

‘All the better now. A bit o’ humour to lighten the mood, even if it was unintentional. You’da had ol’ man Warnock scratching his nod wonderin’ when in hell a pop band took up with Aspen Valley.’

Pippa lowered her voice.

‘Can you imagine what
he
would have said if he’d heard?’ she said, motioning to Jack’s closed door. ‘He certainly wouldn’t think it was funny.’

Finn shrugged.

‘Probably not, but now’s not the time to be discussin’ it with himself only ten feet away. What would be grand is if you can tell me tomorrow’s runners. And don’t be tellin’ me your made up names like you’ve just done to Warnock. I’ll be the joke of the weighing room if I announce I was riding Westlife in the next.’

With Finn dispatched back to the yard to saddle up for the next lot, Pippa knocked on Jack’s door with a steaming mug of chamomile tea in her hand. She found him frowning at his computer screen and it was a moment before he registered her presence.

‘Thanks,’ he said, distractedly taking a slurp. The next moment he’d sprayed tea over his desk. ‘What the hell is this?’ he demanded, looking at Pippa as if she’d just fed him poison.

‘It’s chamomile tea. I thought it might be good for you.’

‘Good for me?’ he said, mopping his keyboard with a handkerchief. ‘
How
?’

Pippa hesitated, deliberating how not to upset him further.

‘It’s meant to have relaxing qualities. It’s very healthy.’ She gave him an encouraging smile.

Jack paused, his attention caught by his computer screen. He looked up at her, his lips parted and his brow furrowed. His gaze went back to the screen then across to the mug of tea. She noticed him hesitate, whatever sharp comment on his tongue withheld when he clamped his mouth shut.

‘Er – okay. I guess I could give it a try,’ he said.

‘Great,’ she beamed, relief that he wasn’t having a complete meltdown. ‘Alan Warnock is on his way. He asked if you’d isolated Take Five in case he has a virus.’

‘Um, yes, of course.’

‘Okay, then. Are these today’s declarations?’ she asked, pointing to a ring-bound tea-splattered notepad set aside on the heavy desk.

Jack nodded.

‘Great. I’ll get onto these right now.’

She turned to take her leave, but stopped as Jack called her name.

‘Pippa. I’m going to give Peace Offering a fast workout later this morning. Maybe you’d like to come watch?’

A grin spread across her face and she clasped the notebook to her chest. Excitement burned through her, tingeing her cheeks. She hadn’t been on the Gallops yet. Hell, she’d hardly had any contact with the horses since she’d been here. She wasn’t sure what had caused this allowance in Jack’s usually inhospitable nature (surely the chamomile tea wasn’t that effective?), but she wasn’t about to question it.

‘I’d love to. Let me get these done. Just yell if you want anything. I’ll be ready whenever you need me to be.’ Without waiting for a reply, she hurried back into the reception to her computer to declare Aspen Valley’s runners, a spring in her step.

‘Ready?’

Pippa looked up from her emails an hour later to see Jack standing in his office doorway, his jacket zipped up and his hands in his pockets. She stopped typing mid-sentence and jumped to her feet.

‘Absolutely.’

‘Good. Bring your coat. You’ll need it.’

The reappearance of his brusque manner did nothing to daunt Pippa’s enthusiasm and she unhooked her red midi-coat from the back of her chair and trotted after Jack into the yard. The rain sluiced their hunched figures as they hurried towards his Land Rover in the car park. Pippa pulled her coat tighter around her in response to the brisk wind which reached its icy fingers into every available crevice of her clothing. Jack opened his door and was pushed aside by his arthritic black Retriever-cross, Berkeley.

‘In the back today, buddy,’ he said, unscrupulously downgrading the dog to the backseat.

Once inside the dry but decidedly dirty interior of the vehicle, Pippa was met with a blast of hot air as Jack turned on the ignition and the heater roared into life. With an uncomfortable shift, she removed a pair of binoculars from beneath her and tried, without success, to place her wet feet where they wouldn’t dirty the carpet of
Racing Post
s littering the footwell. Under the loud drone of the heater she could just make out music playing from the rear speakers.

‘Bruce Springsteen?’ she said as they bumped over the uneven road.

Manoeuvring the Land Rover between the hay barn and the indoor school, Jack nodded, looking uncertain whether to turn it up or turn it off.

‘Hmm,’ Pippa mused, taking the initiative and increasing the volume. ‘Makes sense.’

‘Why?’

Pippa sang the chorus to
Born To Run
in an off-key baritone. ‘It’s apt.’

Jack snorted, a smile creasing the lines beside his eyes.

‘I don’t think Bruce had horseracing in mind when he wrote this, but okay. Do you like Bruce Springsteen?’

Pippa shrugged.

‘He’s all right, I guess. He goes on a bit about motorbikes and guitars and USA though.’

‘So if bikes and guitars aren’t your style, what sort of stuff do you listen to?’ Jack asked, turning to glance at her.

‘I don’t know. Depends on what mood I’m in. Stuff like Bruce Springsteen and Meatloaf is great on the open road. When I paint, I listen to classical music, sometimes a bit of opera.’ Pippa looked out of her window as they climbed the grey weather-blurred hillside along the Gallops. She thought of how Ollie had always mocked her taste in music, especially when she had been painting. So she had tried to paint when he wasn’t around, but when acting roles had become few and far between, he had spent so much time at the flat, those snatched moments with paint and Puccini had lost their magic. She’d then tried to paint without music, but her inspiration had dwindled, as if the brush in her hand had been a conductor’s baton, waving it around in front of an empty orchestra pit.

‘Ah, yes. You’re an artist. I forgot about that. How’s that coming along? Have you had time to do anything since you’ve moved out here?’

‘Some. Last night, I...’ The words faded on her lips as she recalled the seemingly mesmeric trance in which she had painted the racing yard scene and the inadvertent inclusion of Peace Offering in the picture.

Jack took his eyes off the road to look at her, waiting for her to continue.

‘Last night, I did some painting,’ she said. ‘I didn’t get to bed until quite late.’ Just the thought of how little sleep she had got made her yawn.

Jack’s shoulders shook as he chuckled. He swung the steering wheel and brought the Land Rover to a halt halfway up the hills’ incline.

‘As long as you don’t fall asleep on the job, you can stay up as long as you like.’ He jerked the handbrake and twisted in his seat to reach behind them. ‘Right. Binoculars for the owner. I’ll take the ones you’ve got on your lap, if you don’t mind. They’re the ones I usually use.’

They swapped and Pippa fiddled with the woven black straps, excitement building up inside her again. She was here to watch
her
horse gallop. No longer was she Pippa Taylor, waitress at Vivace Restaurant and Ollie Buckingham’s housekeeper. Now she was Pippa Taylor, racehorse owner and artist.

‘Don’t get too excited. This is just a pipe-opener for him –’

‘A
what
?’

‘To clear his airways,’ Jack explained. ‘He’s up against three others, one of whom is Silver Dollar, who is a decent two-and-a-half-miler. Belongs to my favourite owners, Lord and Lady Pennington. Peace Offering’s one asset is his stamina, not his turn of foot so I don’t expect him to blaze the trail.’

‘Okay,’ Pippa said, nodding. ‘Is that them at the bottom of the hill there?’ She held her glasses up to her eyes for a closer look. ‘Yes! There’s Peace Offering! Are we going to get out and watch?’ She turned to Jack, her eyes pleading.

He craned his head to look at the sky and grimaced.

‘If you really want to.’

‘Yes, please,’ Pippa said, already halfway out the door.

With their collars turned up against the elements, they stood by the bonnet of the Land Rover, their binoculars both trained on the approaching horses. Pippa forgot how to breathe as the muffled drum of hooves drifted across the dank haze to them. Silver Dollar’s grey face spearheaded the quartet and with a hop and a squeak of excitement, Pippa identified Peace Offering galloping hard about four lengths behind. The thunder of hooves grew steadily louder and Pippa lowered her binos as the horses neared them. The ground began to reverberate beneath them. In a heartbeat they had galloped past, the murk punctuated by their abrupt dragon-breaths with Silver Dollar still held up in front and Peace Offering pushed along in third.

Pippa gasped and jumped up and down, succeeding in planting her heels into the sodden ground and splashing mud on her legs. Overcome, she clapped her hands. Looking at Jack, she tried to rein in the wide smile that lit up her face. Jack’s attention was still held by the horses and as they galloped on, he picked up his glasses again.

By the time the horses had reached the top of the Gallops, Peace Offering had narrowed Silver Dollar’s lead to just a length.

‘Oh, my God,’ Pippa cried. ‘Did you see how fast they were going?’

Jack nodded.

‘I saw. I’m more interested in how they pull up though. Come on. Let’s get back in before we’re both soaked.’

‘Was that Emmie riding Peace Offering?’ she asked as they got back into the vehicle.

‘Yes. She usually rides out on him. She – and the others – can give us a better account of that workout when we’re back at the yard.’ Jack put his arm round the back of Pippa’s seat and looked over his shoulder to reverse the Land Rover. Pippa felt the damp material of his sleeve brush the back of her neck and she looked across at him.

‘Thank you,’ she said, her voice soft with sincerity. ‘I’ve really enjoyed this.’

Jack paused in manoeuvring the car to look at her.

Pippa was struck by the crystalline blue of his irises, encircled by a much darker shade. The colour wheel inside her head spun as she tried to pinpoint what paints she would need to nix to capture the distinct shades.

He averted his gaze first and removed his arm from behind her to change into first gear.

‘It was just a gallop,’ he replied. ‘Lots of owners want to watch their horses do fast work.’

‘And I can see why,’ Pippa grinned. ‘I can’t wait to go racing.’

Jack’s lips tightened into a grim line and he stared at the bumpy track leading down the hill.

‘Let’s hear what Emmie and the others have to say first.’