Looking back, even after just one day away from it, I could see that my frustration, and my anger, hadn't helped anyone, least of all myself. But it had been the only way I'd known to express my fury at the hand that fate had dealt me. There had been times when, if I'd still had my sidearm with me, I am sure I would have used it to blow my brains out, such had been the depth of my depression.

Even in recent weeks, I had often thought about suicide. But I could have walked out and thrown myself under the wheels of the London bus right outside the hospital if I'd really wanted to, and I hadn't, so at least I must be on the way up from the nadir.

My life needed targets and objectives.

In the hospital my goal had been simply to be discharged.

Now that I had achieved it, a void had opened up in front of me. A future seemingly devoid of purpose and direction. Only a tentative "we'll see" to give me any hope. Was it enough?

I looked at my watch.

It was twenty to twelve, and I had been lying on my bed doing nothing for nearly three hours, ever since I had walked away from a stormy encounter with my parent out on the driveway.

She had been inspecting her car and I hadn't been able to resist telling her that it was high time she changed her old blue Ford for a new, smarter make.

"Mind your own bloody business," she had hissed at me, thrusting her face towards mine.

"I'm sorry," I'd said, feigning surprise. "I didn't realize the matter touched such a sore nerve."

"It doesn't," she'd replied, back in some sort of control. "And there's nothing wrong with this one."

"But surely a trainer of your standing should have a better car than this. How about a BMW, for example?"

I had really believed she was about to cry again, and quite suddenly, I had been angry with myself. What was I doing? I tried to see myself as she would have, and I didn't like it. I didn't like it one bit. So I had turned away and climbed the stairs to my room like a naughty boy.

How long, I wondered, should I remain in my room before I had paid sufficient penance for my misdeeds? An hour? A day? A week? A lifetime?

I sat up on the side of the bed and decided to write to the staff at the rehab center to thank them for their care and to apologize for my consistent lack of good humor.

Maybe then they might just believe that I meant it.

4

The remainder of Sunday proved to be a quiet day at Kauri House Stables, with the human residents managing to stay out of arguing distance.

In the afternoon I ventured out into Lambourn, deciding to go for a walk, mostly just to get me out of the house but also because I was curious about how much the place had changed over fifteen years. I didn't intend to go very far. It had been only a week or so since I'd thrown away the crutches, and my leg tended to tire easily.

There were a few more houses than I remembered, a new estate of smart little homes with postage-stamp gardens having sprung up in what once had been a field full of ponies. But overall, the village was as familiar as it had been when I'd delivered the morning papers as a teenager.

And why wouldn't it have been? The previous fifteen years may have changed me a great deal, but it was a mere blink of an eye compared to the long history of human habitation in Lambourn.

Modern documented Lambourn dated from the ninth century when the church and village were named in the will of King Alfred, the mighty king of the Saxons, the only monarch of England to have ever been designated "The Great."

But Lambourn had a history that stretched back far further than medieval times. Numerous Bronze Age burial grounds existed on the hills just north of the modern village, together with The Ridge-way, the Stone Age superhighway that had once stretched from the Dorset coast to The Wash.

Nowadays, Lambourn and its surroundings were known as The Valley of the Racehorse, but the racing industry was a relative newcomer. First records show that racehorses were trained here in the late eighteenth century, but it was not until the arrival of the railway a hundred years later that Lambourn became established as a national center for racing, and jump racing in particular, to rival that at Newmarket. Trains enabled the horses to be sent to racetracks farther and farther from home, and hence a national sport was established.

But the major factor that made Lambourn such a wonderful place for horses was simple geology, and had nothing to do with man.

Whereas the rolling Berkshire Downs certainly lent themselves so ideally to the formation of the gallops and the training of the horses, it is what lay beneath the turf that made the real difference. The Downs, together with the Chiltern Hills, were created many millions of years ago, laid down as sediment in some prehistoric organism-rich sea. Billions and billions of primitive sea creatures died, and their skeletons drifted to the bottom, over time being compressed into rock, into the white chalk we see today. It is almost pure calcium carbonate, and the grass that grows on such a base is rich in calcium, ideal for the formation of strong bone in grass-eating racehorses.

I wandered down to the center of the village, past the Norman church that sometime in the twelfth century had replaced the earlier Saxon version. Even though I was not what was known as a "regular" churchgoer, I had been into Lambourn Church many times, mostly along with the other boys and girls from the local primary school. My memory was of somewhere cold, and that was not just because the temperature was always low. It was also due to the realization that people were actually buried beneath my feet, under the stones set in the church floor. I could recall how my overactive childhood imagination had caused me to shiver, as I did so again now.

I stopped and thought it anomalous that the bodies of those buried so long ago could still have such an effect on me, whereas the bodies of the Taliban, those I had so recently sent to their graves, seemingly had none.

I walked on.

The center of the village was mostly unchanged, although some of the shops had different names, and others had different purposes.

I went into the general store to buy a sandwich for lunch and waited for my turn at the checkout.

"Oh, hello," said the woman behind the till, looking at me intently. "It's Tom, isn't it? Tom Kauri?"

I casually looked back at her. She was about my age, with long, fair hair tied back in a ponytail. She wore a loose-fitting dark gray sweatshirt that did a moderate job of camouflaging the fairly substantial body beneath.

"Tom Forsyth," I said, correcting her.

"Oh yes," she said. "That's right. I remember now. But your mum is Mrs. Kauri, isn't she?" I nodded, and she smiled. I handed her my sandwich and can of drink. "You don't remember me, do you?" she said.

I looked at her more closely.

"Sorry," I said. "No."

"I'm Virginia," she said expectantly.

I went on looking at her, obviously with a blank expression.

"Virginia Bayley," she went on. "Ginny." She paused, waiting for a response. "From primary school." Another pause. "Of course, I was Ginny Worthington then."

Ginny Worthington, from primary school? I looked at her once more. I vaguely remembered a Ginny Worthington, but she'd definitely had black hair, and she'd been as thin as a rake.

"Dyed my hair since then." She laughed nervously. "And put on a few pounds, you know, due to having had the kids."

Virginia Bayley, plump and blond, nee Ginny Worthington, skinny and brunette. One and the same person.

"How nice to see you again," I said, not really meaning it.

"Staying with your mother, are you?" she asked.

"Yes," I said.

"That's nice." She scanned my sandwich and the can of drink. "Such a lovely woman, your mother. That's three pounds twenty, please." I gave her a five-pound note. "A real star round here." She gave me my change. "Real proud of her, we are, winning that award." She handed me my sandwich and drink in a plastic bag. "Lovely to see you again."