Some Kind of Fairy Tale Read Online Free PDF Page B

was made redundant.
    With two very young children it wasn’t a great moment to be out of work. At the time no one could find a plumber. When he calculated out what plumbers were earning he wondered why the hell he’d bothered studying for a degree in social psychology to become a chocolate salesman; and so he decided to look into retraining as a plumber. Dell and Mary were mortified. Peter had hauled himself out of the working class only to parachute right back in among it.
    But then Peter heard that no one could find a farrier, either, and that there was a living to be made shoeing the horses and ponies of leisure riders for anyone who had a strong back. What’s more, a local, ancient, and crusty farrier had died and his cottage was up for sale, complete with an old forge. That’s what the cottage was called: The Old Forge. So Peter, with his redundancy check in hand, put in an offer.
    “Christ,” Genevieve had said. She had Jack gamely hanging off one tit at the time and Zoe had only just finished breast-feeding.
    “I’ll retrain.”
    “Christ.”
    “Are you up for it?”
    Genevieve shifted a tumbling curl out of her eye and hitched baby Jack higher on her nipple. “Do I get to look at the place?”
    The property was ramshackle. It needed heating installed and fixing up and decorating from top to bottom. The forge itself was antiquated and hardly in working order, but Peter pointed out that it didn’t need to be: most farrier work these days was mobile and done from the back of a van.
    Genevieve was not, like her husband, of working-class origin. In fact, she was very minor aristocracy. Her cousin was thirty-ninth in line for the throne of England. Or something. Her own family was broke, but luckily she was high enough in the social order not to give a damn about social appearances. Had she been a little less upper-class she might have insisted on a showroom home with a touch of Regency-style furniture. But she wasn’t. She’d married so far beneath her in the social order that it couldn’t be interpreted as anything but an escape and a relief.
    Peter knew that the decision, ultimately, was hers to make. “Are we taking it?”
    “Christ. Yes.”
    So, twelve years on and just two days after Christmas, he found himself in his workshop, sorting horseshoes that didn’t need sorting, just so that he wouldn’t have to feel angry about Tara.
    Genevieve had appeared at the workshop door. “Leave the sodding things, Peter. You promised yourself a week off. Come and play with the kids.”
    “Right. Coming.” He clattered some shoes into a wooden box, where they rang like tuning forks.
    TWO DAYS LATER HE was sitting in his car outside Richie’s house again. This time he had taken the step of switching off his engine. It was raining. The windshield and the side windows of the car had steamed up and he had to wipe the glass to see out. Not that there was a lot to see.
    Peter sat there for maybe fifteen minutes. A light burned in Richie’s house—the same dim table lamp he’d seen before, deep at the back of the house. No one seemed to move in front of it, anyway, and no one went into or out of the house.
    The condensation on the windshield glass matched Peter’s state of mind. He was misted, paralyzed between the act of getting up and knocking on the door and sinking farther into his seat. He and Richie had been childhood friends up to and until shortly after Tara’s disappearance. They shared a lot of history: childish things, stupid things.
    One time, when he was eleven, Peter had been foolish enough to walk across a frozen pond. In the middle of the pond he’d dropped straight through the ice. His weight had cut a perfect and circular hole. As he struggled to haul himself back onto the ice it splintered in his hands and gave way again and again, each time sending Peter plunging back down into the freezing water. Richie did everything you are instructed not to do in such a situation: he walked calmly across