Roz slid off Nimmitabel to a little round of applause from everyone watching. ‘Thanks!’ she called breathlessly. ‘Can I wash her down and put her away? When do you think she’l1 be ready for her first start, by the way?’
‘A month or so,’ said Les. ‘Barring accidents and shin soreness, etcetera, but you don’t have to …’
‘I want to,’ Roz said firmly.
‘But Adam …’
‘What Adam doesn’t know can’t hurt him. Come on, Bel, it’s just you and me this morning, as it used to be,’ Roz said softly to the horse, and led her away.
But as she worked on the horse, walking her to cool her off, hosing her down, then walking her again and finally attending to her feet before putting her into a stall where a feed awaited her, Roz was aware of a decision——or at least the need to make a decision growing within her.
She watched the filly tuck into the feed bin hooked on to her half stable door and played with her forelock for a time, then wandered away to a secluded spot where she could see the track and the horses working undisturbed.
She found herself thinking that she had unwittingly got on to shaky ground. And that the crux of it all seemed to be that she had been deluding herself. She’d thought she had hidden her inner torment from Adam; she’d thought, well, I sleep with him whenever he wants it, I don’t make a fuss, and if I hate myself afterwards that’s my business …
Yes, I did think that, she marvelled, and never even considered that he might know me so well. But why should I be so surprised? He certainly knew what would make me marry him. No, that puts him in the wrong light, it wasn’t like that really, if I’m honest.
She plucked a stem of grass and chewed it with eyes narrowed as she tried to concentrate and to wonder a little desolately where she’d gone wrong, why she’d gone wrong, why her best intentions had misfired …
She shrugged and watched two horses working together, pounding down the straight, then she closed her eyes and sniffed the air and simply listened for a while, to all the sounds that made up the life of a racing stable, the faint cracking of whips as the two horses on the track reached the winning posts, the clatter of hooves on concrete, horses snorting indignantly, soft voices, hoses gushing, buckets clanking. And there were the smells-—molasses, manure, the smell of straw and tar, dust and grass, leather.
Adam Milroy had acquired his wealth in a variety of ways—he was good at wheeler-dealing, he had once told Roz. In fact, she’d learned that when he was a child, two things had fascinated him—electronics and horses, both of which he had acquired considerable understanding of. But it was his flair for computers that had seen the mushrooming of his small electronics business——started on a shoestring, Flavia always boasted—to a nationwide company.
And that, for a boy from the bush, Flavia always added, is really something. But Roz now knew that the ‘bushie’ tag was somewhat overdone. Werrington might have been an outback cattle property, but the Milroys had always contrived, through good times and bad, to
send their children away to good schools, whatever else they might have gone without. And they had placed great store on not only education but culture, particularly Charles Milroy, who had read aloud to them every evening and conducted his own classes on a wide variety of subjects whenever he could lay his hands on his flock. He should have been a teacher, not a grazier, Margaret had told Roz once. He was mad about literature and music. So was her mother, and it became quite a battle of wits to evade their little sessions. ‘Oddly enough,’ said Margaret, ‘Aunt Elspeth used to help us. She thought it was a lot of nonsense. Very down-to-earth and practical is our Aunt Elspeth. I think that’s where Adam got his streak of practicality—it certainly wasn’t from his father. Uncle Charles was a real dreamer.’
What about his mother? Roz had asked, and Margaret had thought for a bit, then shrugged and agreed that Aunt Flavia was actually quite a practical person too, yet in a different way from Aunt Elspeth, whose motto in life could be summed up in two words—no frills.
But it was his success in the electronics world that had allowed Adam to indulge his other passion, horses, although by the time he had grown up it could be said, and had been sometimes, that he had three great interests in life——beautiful women being the third.
Yet, while he made a profit on his breeding and racing involvements——Roz found it unthinkable that anything would mean so much to Adam that he would be prepared to lose money at it, and was oddly comforted by this thought—he had never raced or bred a champion.