Sheltering Rain by Jojo Moyes

a trainer about selling him one of our yearlings.”
    Sabine sighed in ill-disguised boredom, the information already filtering past her unrecorded.
    â€œNow, your grandfather will want his lunch at one o’clock on the dot. He’s asleep in his chair upstairs, so make sure you wake him a good hour beforehand because he will probably want to smarten himself up. Mrs. H will prepare his lunch and leave it in the little kitchen next to the dining room, and one for you so that he doesn’t eat by himself. But you’ll have to lay the table because she’ll be busy this morning, taking the windfalls around to the neighbors. Don’t bother Thom in the stables—they’ve got a lot going on. And don’t let the dogs upstairs. Bertie got into your grandfather’s room again yesterday and ate his hair brush.”
    Can’t see how it can be of any great loss, thought Sabine. He’s got only about two hairs left to brush.
    â€œI’ll be back after lunch. Have you gotten everything?”
    â€œLunch at one. Don’t be late. Don’t bother Mrs. H. Don’t bother Thom. Don’t let the dogs upstairs.”
    Her grandmother stared at her for a moment, with her curiously blank gaze, so that Sabine couldn’t tell if she was noting her tone of insurrection or whether it simply filtered past. Then she pulled her head scarf over her head, tied it firmly under her chin, and with a brief, adoring word of farewell to Bella, who had been standing anxiously at her feet, turned and walked briskly out of the front door.
    Sabine stood in the hallway for a few minutes until the slam of the door had reverberated into silence, and then gazed around her, wondering what to do. She seemed to spend vast swathes of her day here wondering what to do. All the elements that had effortlessly filled her days at home—MTV, the Internet, hanging on the telephone with her mates, just mooching around the Keir Hardie estate, seeing who was around, what was happening—had been withdrawn, leaving her with this vast, vacuous space to fill. There was only so much time she could spend organizing her room (besides, the blue shag pile made her feel physically sick), and if you didn’t like horses, what the hell was there?
    She didn’t want to go out to the yard, because she knew Thom would just start going on at her about riding that stupid horse. She couldn’t watch television because there was nothing on Irish television in the day. And last time she had tried to surreptitiously turn it on in the afternoon, her eardrums had been virtually blasted. “It’s so your grandfather can hear the news,” shouted Mrs. H, who hurried upstairs to see what the noise was. “You’d best leave it alone.” Every night at ten, wherever she was in the house, Sabine could hear the thunderous roar of the news theme tune. Her grandfather would sit, peering at the screen as if he still had trouble hearing, while those around him read their newspapers, politely pretending they weren’t being deafened.
    Still, she thought, walking slowly upstairs, followed by Bella, her grandmother’s absence did confer something of a sense of release. She hadn’t realized how anxious the older woman’s presence made her until its absence revealed this hitherto unknown sense of calm. A half day of freedom. A half day of boredom. She didn’t know which was worse.
    Sabine spent the best part of an hour lying on her bed, earphones on loud, reading a 1970s potboiler that Mrs. H had brought her. Mrs. H had evidently decided she understood what young girls needed—romance and more cake—and the way Sabine felt, Mrs. H had gotten it just about right.
    It wasn’t exactly literature. There was, however, lots of panting in it. The women were divided into sluts who panted with ill-concealed lust over distracted male heroes, who were just trying to get on with saving the world, or virgins,