Keeping the Peace by Hannah Hooton Page B

photographs of Virtuoso’s Gold Cup win and Black Russian’s Champion Hurdle win.
    She needed to get this horrible feeling of depression off her chest. She opened a new email window.
    Hi Tash,
    How’s you? You’re not giving poor Liam a hard time I hope? I’m going to apologise now because I need to have a good rant and you’re my only ally at the moment. Jack Carmichael is an absolute shit! He’s bossy, miserable and shouts too much. Can you believe I’ve been here over a week and he hasn’t said one nice thing to me? It’s exhausting to have abuse thrown at you the entire time.
    I cocked up on the entries this morning, which I feel bad about – really, I do – but Jack acted like it was either going to start a world war or someone was going to die because of it.
    What have I done? Is Peace Offering really worth all this trouble? Life in London wasn’t exactly rosy and I’m trying to enjoy the cottage even though it’s hard work, but is this some sort of punishment for wanting to enjoy my life? I’m not surprised Jack’s old secretary upped and left him in the lurch. I’d be inclined to do the same if it wasn’t for Peace Offering. God knows he hasn’t done anything to deserve any less.
    “Jack fucking Carmichael is proven to be an extremely crazed bastard without question” . That seems more appropriate than “Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs” .
    Right, I feel better now. Thank you for listening to me. I’m now going to see out the rest of the afternoon in peace since thankfully, Jack is at the races. Speak to you soon.
    Love ya,
    Pip
    xxx

     
    Pippa dropped her brush into the water-filled jar beside her easel. She rolled her shoulders and stretched, letting the last bars of Puccino’s O Mio Babbino Caro seep through her aching muscles. Without glancing at the picture in front of her, she turned away to hunt her cigarettes down in the kitchen.
    As she huddled beneath the front door’s overhang in the dark she chewed her bottom lip, her thoughts still consumed by her day at work.
    Was Peace Offering really worth it, she asked herself for the twentieth time? She sighed and tapped the ash from her cigarette, because, for the twentieth time, she couldn’t come up with a definitive answer.
    To say no would be to turn away from the magic she had seen in the racehorse’s eyes and to turn her back on Dave’s dream to run him in the Grand National.
    To say yes, he was worth it, was to consider this new life an improvement on the one she had led in London. To say yes was to believe that Peace Offering could fulfil his late owner’s dream.
    Pippa took a deep drag, hearing the soft crackle of burning tobacco, such was the quiet of her surroundings, and she acknowledged that to say yes, meant the dream had to be her own as well as her uncle’s. With a defeated shake of her head, she stubbed her cigarette out in an empty flowerpot beside the door and went back inside into the warm.
    When she returned to the spare bedroom to look at her completed painting for the first time, she smiled with satisfaction. Hazyvale Dawn burst out of the canvas just as it had burst through the window on her first morning. The long sweeping watercolour strokes of peach and apricot mist swirled across the page; the sun was a soft gold orb as opposed to a hard amber ball as the moisture in the air blurred its outline.
    ‘Perfect.’
    Satisfied, Pippa picked up a fine-tipped brush and dabbed her signature in a red rosewood hue in the lower right hand corner. Holding the page with reverent care, she teased it away from the rest of the pad and laid it out on a table like a mother lowering her sleeping child into its cot. She sat back down on her stool in front of her easel, the urge to create still not quelled inside her. She twiddled the brush in her fingers, unsure what image could fulfil this craving.
    She thought back to her first morning driving to work; how the frost had turned the countryside silver, of the tractor