Free The Other Half of My Heart by Stephanie Butland

the living room. ‘I’m not very bright any more, I’m pretty average, and so I can get on with my life. At Oxford, I’m you!’
    And it seemed that he was good at being at Oxford, his friendliness and social ease making up for the gap between his background and that of many of his peers there, the opposite of Tina’s experience at work. But Tina had her horses, so she didn’t mind about the people so much.
    And then comes Roddy Flood. And she finds that she really, really minds about him. Of course, the son of Fred and Fran has always been part of stable life. But when he pulls her into his orbit, nothing is the same, ever again.
    Roddy is the closest thing Missingham has to a rock star. He’s tipped for the 2000 Olympic showjumping squad, and when he’s riding, he is immaculate, polished and pressed and clean-shaven. When he’s working in the yard, he wears old jeans and boots and T-shirts like the rest of them, but he somehow wears them better. If he goes out, it will be in much smarter, much tighter jeans, cowboy boots with pointed toes and a silver band around the top of the heel, a white shirt with silver tips on the collar, and a bootlace tie with a horse’s head that fastens it. Next to the other young men in the Green Dragon, all in loose pastel shirts and low-slung jeans, he looks smarter, and sleeker. And one hell of a lot sexier. But if Roddy notices the effect he has on women, he doesn’t show it.
    Everyone at the stables admires Roddy, according to their lights. Some of them lust after him. Some envy his untroubled grace on horseback, some his fearless assaults on any jump, and his ability to make any horse fearless with him. The family dogs follow him, one Labrador nose to each knee. His memory is legendary; he knows the genealogy of every horse in the yard. (‘Would you know if he was making it up?’ Sam asks one evening, obviously bored with Tina’s non-stop stable yard talk. ‘Of course I would,’ Tina replies, and their mother tells Sam not to tease her and Tina blushes.) Those who are immune to his good looks and way with horses long for a ride in his car, a Sierra RS Cosworth that, apparently, is quite something, although to Tina a car is a car and that means travel sickness and not a lot else, whether or not it has a spoiler on the back.
    What Tina has always liked best about Roddy is the way that, when he is with a horse, he ignores everything else. While the rest of the staff, mucking-out or grooming in pairs, gossip and laugh, Roddy just focuses. Tina notices, and copies, and her understanding of these animals that have absorbed her all her life grows.
    Of course, because away from the horses Roddy is easy company, generous and funny and full of stories, his quiet concentration on his horses becomes a part of his legend. Tina, who has never got the knack of being in a group, although she can talk very happily to one or two people she knows well, finds that her emulation of Roddy just adds to her outsider status. But, as she reminds herself on the walks to and from work, she is in it for the horses. And she intends to be a yard manager one day, which she knows will be another isolated position, if Charlie, who manages the yard for the Floods now, is anything to go by.
    â€˜Give me a hand, will you,’ Roddy calls across the stable yard sometimes, and everyone holds their breath to see if theirs is the name he will call. The first time he calls Tina, Fudge has to prompt her, because although it had sounded as though he was asking for her, she didn’t see how he really could be. She feels invisible among the louder, more confident girls. Although Roddy is on speaking terms with everyone, Tina doesn’t compete for his attention the way that the others do. She doesn’t think she crosses his mind, unless she happens to be standing in front of him. But he has called her name.
    â€˜I need to give Foxglove a spring