Nicholas Evans - The Horse Whisperer

'I don't mean now,' he said gently. 'When you're ready. And only if you want to.' Something beyond her caught his eye and she followed his glance and saw her mother coming out onto the porch. Grace turned back to him and nodded.

'I'll think about it,' she said.

Robert propped his glasses up on the top of his forehead, leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes for a long time. He had his shirtsleeves rolled up and his tie lay crumpled among the layers of papers and law books that covered his desk. Along the corridor he could hear the cleaners moving systematically through the other offices, talking to each other now and then in Spanish. Everyone else had gone home four or five hours ago. Bill Sachs, one of the younger partners, had tried to persuade him to come with him and his wife to see some new Gerard Depardieu movie everyone was talking about. Robert said thanks but he had too much work to get through and anyway he always found something faintly disturbing about Depardieu's nose.

'It looks, you know, kind of penile,' he said.

Bill, who could have passed as a psychiatrist anyway, had peered at him over his hornrims and asked in a comic Freudian accent, why Robert should find such an association disturbing. Then he got Robert laughing about two women he'd heard talking the other day on the subway.

'One of them had been reading this book that tells you what your dreams mean and she was telling the other girl how it had said if you dreamed about snakes it meant you were really obsessed by penises and the other one said, phew, that was a relief, 'cause all she ever dreamed about was penises.'

Bill wasn't the only one who seemed to be making a special effort to cheer him up at the moment. Robert was touched but on the whole he wished they wouldn't. Being on your own for a few weeks didn't justify this level of sympathy and so he suspected his colleagues sensed in him some deeper loss. One had even offered to take over the Dunford Securities case. God, that was about the only thing that kept him going.

Every night for nearly three weeks now he'd been up till way past midnight working on it. The hard disk on his laptop was almost bursting with it. It was one of the most complicated cases he'd ever worked on, involving bonds worth billions of dollars being shuffled endlessly through a maze of companies across three continents. Today he'd had a two-hour conference call with lawyers and clients in Hong Kong, Geneva, London and Sydney. The time differences were a nightmare. But curiously it kept him sane and, more important, too busy to dwell too much on how he missed Grace and Annie.

He opened his sore eyes and leaned across to press the redial button on one of his phones. Then he settled back, staring out of the window at the illuminated coronets on the spire of the Chrysler Building. The number Annie had given him, for this new place they'd moved into, was still busy.

He'd walked to the corner of Fifth and Fifty-ninth before he flagged a cab. The cold night air felt good and he'd toyed with the idea of walking all the way home across the park. He'd done it before at night though only once did he make the mistake of telling Annie. She'd yelled at him for a full ten minutes and told him he was insane going in there at night, did he want to get himself disemboweled? He wondered if he'd missed something in the newspapers about this particular hazard, but it didn't seem the right time to ask.

From the name posted on the dashboard of the cab, he could tell the driver was Senegalese. There were quite a few of them nowadays and Robert always enjoyed blowing their minds by casually addressing them in Wolof or Jola. This young man was so amazed he almost drove smack into a bus. They talked about Dakar and places they both knew and the driving got so bad that Robert began to think the park might have been a safer bet after all. When they pulled up outside the apartment building, Ramon came down and opened the cab door and the driver said how grateful he was for the tip and that he would pray that Allah bless Robert with many strong sons.

After Ramon had given him an apparently white-hot piece of news about a star player just signed by the Mets, Robert took the elevator and let himself into the apartment. The place was dark and the clunk of the door as he shut it echoed through the lifeless labyrinth of rooms.

He walked through to the kitchen and found the supper Elsa had cooked for him and the usual note saying what it was and how long it needed in the microwave. He did what he always did and scooped it guiltily into the garbage. He'd left her notes thanking her but saying please not to bother cooking for him, he could get takeout or cook something himself. But there it still was every night, bless her.

The truth was, the aching emptiness of the apartment made him morose and he avoided being here as much as he could. He felt it most acutely at weekends. He'd tried going up to Chatham but the loneliness there had been even worse. It hadn't been helped by arriving to find that the thermostat on Grace's tropical fish tank had failed and all the fish had died of cold. The sight of their tiny, faded corpses floating in the tank had upset him profoundly. He hadn't told Grace, nor even Annie, but had pulled himself together, made careful notes and ordered identical impostors from the pet store.

Since Annie and Grace had left, talking to them on the phone had become the high point of Robert's day. And tonight, having tried for hours and failed to reach them, he felt a sharper need than ever for the sound of their voices.

He sealed the garbage bag so that Elsa wouldn't discover the shameful destiny of the supper she'd cooked. As he was dumping the bag outside the service door, he heard the phone and he ran back down the corridor as fast as he could. The answering machine had already clicked in by the time he got there and he had to speak loudly to compete with his own recorded voice.

'Hold on, I'm here.' He found the off-button. 'Hi. I just got in.'

'You're all out of breath. Where were you?'

'Oh, out partying. You know, doing the bars and clubs and things. God, it's tiring.'

'Don't tell me.'

'I wasn't going to. So how're things where the deer and the antelope play? I tried calling all day.'

'I'm sorry. There's just the one line here and the office has been trying to bury me in fax paper.'

She said Grace had tried calling him half an hour ago at the office, probably just after he'd left for home. She'd gone to bed now but sent him her love.

As Annie told him about her day, Robert walked through to the sitting room and, without turning the lights on, settled himself on the sofa by the window. Annie sounded weary and downcast and he tried, without much success, to cheer her up.

'And how's Gracie?'

There was a pause and he heard Annie sigh.

'Oh. I don't know.' Her voice was low now, presumably so that Grace wouldn't hear. 'I see how she is with Tom Booker and Joe, you know, the twelve-year-old? They get on really well. And with them, she seems fine. But when it's just the two of us, I don't know. It's gotten so bad she won't even look at me.' She sighed again. 'Anyway.'

They were silent for a while and in the distance he heard a wail of sirens out in the street, on their way to another nameless tragedy.

'I miss you, Annie.'

'I know,' she said. 'We miss you too.'

Annie dropped Grace at the clinic a little before nine and wove her way back to the gas station in Choteau center. She filled up alongside a little man with a face like leather and a hat brimmed wide enough to shelter a horse. He was checking the oil of a Dodge pickup which was hitched to a trailerload of cattle. They were Black Angus like the herd at the Double Divide and Annie had to fight the urge to confide some knowing remark about them based on the little she'd gleaned from Tom and Frank on branding day. She rehearsed it in her head. Good lookin' cattle. No, you wouldn't say cattle. Healthy-lookin' beasts? Fellas? She gave up. In all truth she had no idea if they were good, bad or flea-bitten, so she kept her mouth shut and just gave the man a nod and a smile instead.