Free Sheltering Rain by Jojo Moyes

never seen anyone in the house, with the exception of her grandfather, moving at anything less than a rate of knots. And as she had seen the old man only sitting, she couldn’t be sure about him.
    But it wasn’t just the house, and its labyrinthine rules. Sabine, cut off from her friends, with only one brief, unsatisfactory telephone call to her mother, felt isolated and removed from everything she had known. She was an alien in these surroundings, as nonplussed by her elderly relatives as they apparently were by her. She had left the house and its grounds just once so far, to accompany her grandmother to a kind of hypermarket in the nearest town, where, had she been inclined, she could have purchased anything from processed cheese to white plastic garden furniture. There was that, and a post office, and a tack shop for horse stuff. No McDonald’s, no cinema, no arcade. No magazines. Seemingly no people under the age of thirty. With the Daily Telegraph and Irish Times her only contact with the outside world, she didn’t even know what was number one in the charts.
    Her grandmother, if she noticed Sabine’s steady descent into depression, had evidently decided to ignore it, or treat it as some kind of teenage foible. She “organized” Sabine at the beginning of each day, giving her a succession of tasks, such as dropping off papers at the office, or fetching vegetables from the kitchen garden for Mrs. H, and treated her with the same brisk detachment with which she seemed to treat everyone around her. Except the dogs, that is. And, more significant, the Duke.
    That had been their worst falling-out so far, worse than her grandmother’s insistence that vegetarianism couldn’t possibly embrace chicken. It had come two days later, when, swinging on the door as the Duke was led stiffly back into his stable, Sabine had forgotten, as requested, to kick the bottom bolt across, and had subsequently had to watch, aghast, as with a skittishness worthy of a much younger and less lame animal, the old bay horse had worked the top bolt with his teeth, and made his elegant bid for freedom across the yard to the open fields beyond.
    It had taken her grandmother and both lads, with the aid of six apples, and a bucket of bran mash, almost two hours to catch him, tramping grimly around the top fields as he came tantalizingly close and veered away again, tail held high like a banner of defiance. When, as it began to get dark, he eventually strolled over, head low with exhaustion and sporting an air of something like embarrassment, he was limping badly. Her grandmother had been furious, had first shouted at her that she was a “stupid, stupid girl” and then, almost tearfully, had focused all her attention on her “boy,” alternately rubbing at his neck and scolding him in soft tones as they walked stiffly back toward the stables. What about me? Sabine, now tearful herself, had wanted to yell at her departing back. I’m your bloody granddaughter and you’ve never said so much as a kind word to me!
    That had been the point at which Sabine had begun plotting her escape. And avoiding her grandmother, who managed, while never referring to the incident again, to somehow make Sabine feel the weight of her disapproval. She had not tried to hug Sabine again after that. In fact she had apparently found it hard to say anything much to her for a day or two; her mood only lifted when the vet announced that the inflammation in the Duke’s leg was on its way down.
    So Sabine spent most of her time with Thom and the two lads, Liam and John John, both of whom, like Mrs. H, seemed to be some kind of distant relatives. Liam was a libidinous former jump jockey, almost incapable of saying anything that didn’t swell into some kind of double entendre, while John John, his eighteen-year-old protégé, was almost silent, his desperation to graduate into the nearby racing yard etched into his