Nicholas Evans - The Horse Whisperer

Later, as he lay sleepless with the light out and the house long fallen quiet, Tom felt something float heavily within him and settle on his heart. He now had the picture he'd wanted or as much of it as he was likely to get and it was a picture as dark and devoid of hope as he'd ever known.

There was no delusion, nothing foolish or fanciful about the way Pilgrim had assessed the horrors that had befallen him. It was simply logical and it was this that made helping him so hard. And Tom wanted so very much to help him. He wanted it for the horse itself and for the girl. But he knew too - and knew at the same time that it was wrong - that above all he wanted it for the woman he'd ridden with that morning and whose eyes and mouth he could see as clearly as if she were lying there beside him.

The night Matthew Graves died, Annie and her brother were staying with friends in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica. It was the end of the Christmas holiday and her parents had gone back down to Kingston and left them up there for a few more days because they were having such fun. Annie and George, her brother, were sharing a double bed, tented by a vast mosquito net into which, in the middle of the night, their friends' mother came in her nightgown to wake them. She turned on the bedside light and sat on the end of the bed waiting for Annie and George to rub the sleep from their eyes. Dimly through the gauze of the mosquito net, Annie could see the woman's husband, hovering in his striped pajamas, his face in shadow.

Annie would always remember the strange smile on the woman's face. Later she understood it was a smile born of fear at what she had to say, but in that moment when sleep and consciousness elide her expression seemed humorous, so when the woman said she had bad news and that their father was dead, Annie thought it was a joke. Not a very funny one, but still a joke.

Many years later, when Annie thought she should do something about her insomnia (an urge that came upon her every four or five years and led only to large amounts of money being paid to hear things she already knew), she had been to see a hypnotherapist. The woman's technique was 'event oriented'. This apparently meant that she liked her clients to come up with some incident that marked the onset of whatever particular mess they were in. She would then pop you into a trance, take you back and resolve it.

After the first hundred-dollar session the poor woman was clearly disappointed that Annie couldn't come up with an appropriate incident, so for a week Annie had racked her brain to find one. She'd talked it over with Robert and it was he who came up with it: Annie being woken at the age of ten to be told her father was dead.

The therapist nearly fell off her chair with excitement. Annie felt pretty pleased too, like one of those girls she'd always hated at school who sat in the front row with their hands in the air. Don't go to sleep because someone you love might die. It didn't come much neater. The fact that for the next twenty years Annie had slept each night like a log didn't seem to bother the woman.

She asked Annie what she felt about her father and then what she felt about her mother and after Annie had told her, she asked how she felt about doing 'a little separation exercise'. Annie said that would be fine. The woman then tried to hypnotize her but was so excited she did it too fast and there wasn't a hope in hell it would work. Not to disappoint her, Annie did her best to fake a trance but had a lot of trouble keeping a straight face when the woman stood her parents on spinning silver discs and dispatched them one by one, waving serene farewells, into outer space.

But if her father's death, as Annie actually believed, had no connection with her inability to sleep, its effect on almost everything else in her life was immeasurable.

Within a month of his funeral, her mother had packed up the house in Kingston and disposed of things around which her children had felt their lives revolved. She sold the small boat in which their father had taught them to sail and had taken them to deserted islands to dive among the coral for lobsters and run naked on the palmed white sand. And their dog, a black Labrador cross called Bella, she gave to a neighbor they hardly knew. They saw the dog watching from the gate as the taxi took them to the airport.

They flew to England, a strange, wet, cold place where nobody smiled and their mother left them in Devon with her parents while she went up to London to sort out, she said, her husband's affairs. She lost no time in sorting one out for herself too, for within six months she was to marry again.

Annie's grandfather was a gentle, ineffectual soul who smoked a pipe, did crossword puzzles and whose main concern in life was avoiding the wrath or even mild displeasure of his wife. Annie's grandmother was a small, malicious woman with a tight white perm through which the pink of her scalp glowed like a warning. Her dislike of children was neither greater nor less than her dislike of almost everything else in life. But whereas most of these things were abstract or inanimate or simply unaware of her dislike, from these, her only grandchildren, she derived a much more gratifying return and set about making their stay, over the ensuing months, as miserable as possible.

She favored George, not because she disliked him less but in order to divide them and thus make Annie, in whose eye she was quick to spot defiance, all the more unhappy. She told Annie her life in 'The Colonies' had given her vulgar, slovenly ways which she set about curing by sending her to bed with no supper and smacking her legs, for the most trivial of crimes, with a long-handled wooden spoon. Their mother, who traveled down by train to see them each weekend, listened impartially to what her children told her. Inquests of stunning objectivity were held and Annie learned for the first time how facts could be so subtly rearranged to render different truths.

'The child has such a vivid imagination,' her grandmother said.

Reduced to mute contempt and acts of petty vengeance, Annie stole cigarettes from the witch's purse and smoked them behind dripping rhododendrons, greenly contemplating how unwise it was to love, for those you loved would only die and leave you.

Her father had been a bounding, joyous man. The only one who ever thought she was of value. And since his death, her life had been a ceaseless quest to prove him right. Through school and through her student days and on through her career, she'd been driven by that single purpose: to show the bastards.

For a while, after having Grace, she'd thought the point proven. In that pinched pink face, hungering so blind and needy at her nipple, came calm, as if the journey were complete. It had been a time for definitions. Now, she told herself, now I can be what I am, not what I do. Then came the miscarriage. Then another and another and another, failure compounding failure and soon Annie was again that pale, angry girl behind the rhododendrons. She'd shown them before and she'd show them again.

But it wasn't like before. Since her early days at Rolling Stone , those parts of the news media that followed such matters had dubbed her 'brilliant and fiery'. Now, reincarnated as boss of her own magazine - the kind of job she'd vowed never to take - the first of these epithets stuck. But, as if in recognition of the colder fuel that drove her, 'fiery' transmuted to 'ruthless'. In fact, Annie had surprised even herself with the casual brutality she'd brought to her latest post.

Last fall she'd met an old friend from England, a woman who'd been at the same boarding school and when Annie told her about all the bloodletting at the magazine she'd laughed and said did Annie remember playing Lady Macbeth in the school play? Annie did. In fact, though she didn't say this, she remembered being rather good.