The Horse Whisperer(11)

The following morning Robert took her in his jeep across on the ferry and delivered her safely to the Catholic convent where she was to live and teach for the coming year under the only occasionally disapproving eye of the mother superior, a kindly and conveniently myopic French-Canadian.

Over the course of the next three months, Annie met up with Robert every Wednesday when he came to buy supplies in town. He spoke Jola - the local language - fluently and gave her a weekly lesson. They became friends but not lovers. Instead, Annie lost her virginity to a beautiful Senegalese man called Xavier to whose amorous advances she remembered to say yes, loudly, and mean it.

Then Robert was transferred up to Dakar and the evening before he went, Annie crossed the river for a farewell supper. America was voting for a new president and the two of them listened in deepening gloom to a crackling radio as Nixon took state after state. It was as if someone close to Robert had died and Annie was moved as he explained to her in a voice choked with emotion what it meant for his country and the war many of his friends were fighting in Asia. She put her arms around him and held him and for the first time felt she was no longer a girl but a woman.

Only when he had gone and she met other Peace Corps volunteers, did she realize how unusual he was. Most of the others were dope-heads or bores or both. There was one guy with glazed, pink eyes and a headband who claimed he'd been high for a year.

She saw Robert once more when she went back up to Dakar to fly home the following July. Here people spoke another language called Wolof and he was already fluent. He was living out near the airport, so near that you had to stop talking whenever a plane went over. To make some virtue of this, he had got hold of a huge directory detailing every flight in and out of Dakar and, after two nights studying it, knew it by heart. When a plane flew over he would recite the name of the airline, its origin, route and destination. Annie laughed and he looked a little hurt. She flew home the night a man walked on the moon.

They didn't see each other again for seven years. Annie sailed triumphantly through Oxford, launching a radical and scurrilous magazine and sickening her friends by getting a brilliant First in English without ever appearing to do a stroke of work. Because it was the thing she least didn't want to do, she became a journalist, working on an evening newspaper in the far north-east of England. Her mother came to visit her just once and was so depressed by the landscape and the sooty hovel her daughter was living in that she cried all the way back to London. She had a point. Annie stuck it for a year then packed her bags, flew to New York and amazed even herself by bluffing her way into a job on Rolling Stone.

She specialized in hip, brutal profiles of celebrities more accustomed to adulation. Her detractors - and there were many - said she would soon run out of victims. But it didn't work out that way. They kept on coming. It became a kind of masochistic status symbol to be'done' or 'buried' (that quip had started even at Oxford) by Annie Graves.

Robert phoned her one day at the office and for a moment the name meant nothing to her. 'The tubab who gave you a bed one night in the jungle?' he prompted.

They met for a drink and he was much better looking than Annie remembered. He said he'd been following her byline and seemed to know every piece she'd written better than she did herself. He was an assistant district attorney and working, as much as his job allowed, for the Carter campaign. He was idealistic, bursting with enthusiasm and, most important of all, he made her laugh. He was also straighter and had shorter hair than any man she'd dated in five years.

While Annie's wardrobe was full of black leather and safety pins, his was all button-down collars and corduroy. When they went out, it was L.L. Bean meets the Sex Pistols. And the unconventionality of this pairing was an unspoken thrill to them both.

In bed, the zone of their relationship so long postponed and which, if she was honest with herself, she had secretly dreaded, Robert proved surprisingly free of the inhibitions she had expected. Indeed he was far more inventive than most of the drug-slackened coolsters she had lain with since coming to New York. When, weeks later, she remarked on this, Robert ruminated a moment, as she recalled him doing before declaiming details from the Dakar flight directory, and replied in perfect seriousness that he'd always believed sex, like the law, was best practiced with all due diligence.

They were married the following spring and Grace, their only child, was born three years later.

Annie had brought work with her on the train not through habit but in the hope that it might distract her. She had it stacked in front of her, the proofs of what she hoped was a seminal State of the Nation piece, commissioned at huge expense from a great and grizzled pain-in-the-ass novelist. One of her big-shot writers, as Grace would say. Annie had read the first paragraph three times and hadn't taken in a word.