Читать книгу Rough Magic - Lara Prior-Palmer - Страница 11

III

“She is not going to Mongolia, Julia! Julia, do you hear me?”

My father had discovered my plan to ride in the world’s longest horse race and was insistent I wouldn’t go. I listened from the next room as he bellowed at Mum in the kitchen.

“It’s too”—his foot stomped the floor—“opportunistic!”

Dad had encouraged opportunism in the past, but when it came to horses, he was keen for me to steer clear. He often told people how he’d made it a condition of marriage that my mother give up horse riding. Years after the summer of the Derby, I would overhear him shouting at her once more. “Lara’s been to Stanford University, Julia. I am not having her riding horses.”

My father, Simon, is a large-foreheaded man with Victorian characteristics, who grew up alongside his horse-mad sister, Lucinda. He is anti-riding, anti-horses: waste of time, waste of money (and please don’t talk about them at mealtimes). Aunt Lucinda’s Olympic riding career had coincided with their father going into overdraft, while Dad worked long hours in the City. The story of him tying his sister to the oak tree when they were little circulates frequently in the family.

“Julia, are you listening?” I heard him move closer to Mum at the sink.

Lodged in the thicket of my father’s anger, we would often find ourselves flapping with no clear way out. Mum quietly carried on with the washing up. If my father is a man who speaks clearly and interrupts often, my mother can be the catatonic opposite.

“Oh, I like prattling in the background,” she says whenever I tell her she’s mumbling, though she once followed up by saying, “I think I need to go on an assertiveness course.”

Mum is generally taken with the idea of horses (my older brothers used to jest that she married Dad just to get closer to his sister) and had been all wide-eyed when I first mentioned the Mongol Derby to her. Although my father’s fury had me bracing myself, it also summoned a sense of victory, since his anger seemed to speak from a powerlessness. Simon had no way of preventing me from going to Mongolia.

It seemed you needed to know how to ride to do this race, but the type of riding you did—the particular discipline—didn’t matter. I couldn’t say I myself had grown up riding—my parents did not ride, nor did my three brothers. Although Aunt Lucinda set me up with lessons when I pleaded for them aged seven, I lived and went to school in the city so horses were confined to Saturdays. More recently I’d been able to try Lucinda’s sport, eventing, but that only required riding for a mere hour or two at a time. A month after my nineteenth birthday, I would arrive in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, to discover that half the Derby competitors were experienced in endurance, which involved riding up to 160 kilometers from dawn until dusk. I had never even heard of such a sport.

One of my father’s fears had always been that I might turn out to be a horsewoman like his sister. Unfortunately for him, by my teenage years I sneezed and itched when around the creatures—symptoms of uncontainable excitement rather than an allergy—and could possibly be classified as a pony girl: I dreamed of saucy centaurs. I’d once hallucinated, while sober, an azure blue horse cantering towards me. And I was truly taken with the romance of those rolling English parklands where my aunt laid down her horse histories.

Yet my equestrian imagination was tethered to my urban home, a hearty part of me city-slick, London-sly. My schoolfriends and I grew up fast in the capital, leaping across it alone on the Tube and pacing its streets with elastic courage. But I felt empty in the concrete nowheres. Truly, I only loved the city for letting me leave—on Fridays, we eased our way out through darkened traffic jams, arriving centuries later in the village of Appleshaw.

Appleshaw floats in a shallow valley where the tameness of Hampshire stops and the wilds of Wiltshire begin. Weekends there sent me out to make mud-balls with my brothers, walk miles without purpose, and swim away from time. The city basin, tasked with curating our futures, drew us back every Sunday night. My brothers and I slotted into the week as dirty plates do into a dishwasher. The routine days crawled by until the eventual swing back to Appleshaw on Friday, holy Friday.

In this way, privilege had us always on the move, and it shaped me—an in-betweener ungrounded, too spacey for London, too colorful for the country, probably suspended in particles above some motorway between the two. Certainly the M3 has more of me than most places do.

Within a week of my application, Katy, the Mongol Derby organizer, returned from plotting the course on the steppe and sent me an acceptance email. I might’ve been gleeful were it not for the phenomenal entry fee. She said most riders had entered the previous year with sponsorship secured. For several nights, preparing to let the dream decay with the remaining magnolia leaves.

There’s no knowing why Katy gave me 50 percent off when I asked for a discount, nor why she granted another $650 off when I couldn’t afford the halved amount. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I had name-dropped my aunt, Lucinda Green, on my application—Katy turned out to be a “bit of a fan.” Or perhaps it was my opening sentence: I am extremely competitive and want to become the youngest (am 18) person to finish.

I trotted down to the bank with my head held delusionally high and poured out a lifelong collection of pennies from my checkered plastic pig, hoping they would top up my balance to near enough the asked-for price. Prior to that, I had refused to spend any of my savings, and it’s endearing to me now that I was willing to hand all of it over for a horse race I might not last very long in.

I was expecting quite the holiday—a green steppe stuffed full of feisty ponies, with hunky riders from all over the world. One to trump the sightseeing and sunbathing holidays I was used to. Earlier that year I had wound my way through India, stopping at temples highlighted by a Lonely Planet guidebook, viewing the world through a manicured prism as any good tourist does—but my eyes had run out of space. By the time I applied for the Derby, I was no longer keen on touring the world’s buildings with awestruck stares. My thighs were strong and my heart was raw, yearning for my own motion.