Eventer's Dream

by Caroline Akrill

  “But you don’t hire her out for hunting,” I said. “Not when you know it could happen at any moment.”

  “It doesn’t happen every day,” Henrietta pointed out. “To be fair, she sometimes lasts half a season. And nobody has ever complained.” She grinned.

  “They are always too worried about the mare,” Nigella said, suppressing a giggle. “They think they have broken her leg. They are terrified almost out of their wits.”

  “They think they are going to be sued,” Henrietta spluttered. “They think we will make them pay for the horse!”

  I had to laugh. It was grotesque. It was just too awful for words. We all leaned on the bay mare and the tears poured down our cheeks. I forgot all about my sponsor and my future prospects and when Nigella suggested that I should start work next week, I was too shattered to argue.

  2

  Mutual Disagreements

  When I rang Lady Jennifer to get some hard facts about the job she was enthusiastic but evasive. “But my dear,” she cried in ringing tones when I enquired about hours of work and days off. “You will be such an enormous help to us all, a marvellous asset! We shall be most understanding about your days off. It will be such fun to have another young person about the place, we have no other help whatsoever – you can’t imagine the turmoil we live in!”

  Actually, I could imagine it only too well. As soon as I could get a word in edgeways, I enquired about the pocket money wages.

  “But of course you shall have pocket money,” Lady Jennifer trilled. “We wouldn’t dream of expecting you to help out without remuneration! We shall come to a mutual agreement the very second you arrive. You are intending to arrive?” she added with a trace of anxiety. “You haven’t changed your mind?”

  I said I hadn’t. It hardly seemed the moment to mention that I was only accepting the job on a temporary basis, until something more promising turned up.

  “And what about your parents?” Lady Jennifer wanted to know. “Do you think I should have a teeny little word? Just to reassure them that their daughter will be in excellent hands? To say how absolutely thrilled we are? After all, you are only seventeen …”

  “I don’t think so,” I said hastily. “I really don’t see the necessity.”

  My father heartily disapproved of my desire to work with horses and the fifteen interviews had left him feeling distinctly edgy, especially in view of the fact that many of my school friends were already propping up the dole queue. He had seen my six month apprenticeship at a top training establishment as a complete waste of time and energy, despite the fact that I had been accepted on a Working Pupil basis and had paid for my instruction myself with hours of hard labour every day. I had gained a qualification at the end of it, but still he wasted no opportunity to remind me that in his opinion, the horse world had nothing to offer but low pay, bleak prospects, and broken promises.

  It went against the grain to admit to myself that he might be right. Certainly there seemed to be no jobs vacant in eventing yards at all, and the two jobs I had been offered as a result of the fourteen interviews had both been in dubious little riding schools offering squalid accommodation in caravans and a few pounds in return for a 70 hour week. With the Fanes at least I would be able to hunt, and as the hunting field was supposed to be the best training ground for event horses and riders, I wouldn’t be completely wasting my time. Also, it was a relief to be able to tell my father that I had landed a job at last, but as I knew he would take a dim view of the pocket money wages, I decided that the less he knew about the job the better.

  It was agreed that I should arrive by train the following Monday. Lady Jennifer met me at the station and I could hear her voice even before I got off the train. She was a tall, thin person in a crumpled raincoat and a headscarf the size of a small tablecloth. Like the black horse, she seemed to have a lot of nervous energy and she threw the tiny station into confusion by blocking the passenger exit with her dilapidated shooting brake.

  “I won’t keep you waiting a minute longer than necessary,” she shrilled at the trapped passengers. “It’s so frightfully thoughtless of me, I can’t think why I did it. I must have been insane to park here.” She emptied her handbag on to the bonnet in a fruitless effort to find the car keys and finally located them in the ignition.

  Whilst all this was going on I was loading my case into the back. I had wondered why all the windows were steamed up and when I opened the rear doors I could see why; the shooting brake was full of hounds. They were sitting on all the seats and I couldn’t imagine where I was going to sit. I considered the passenger seat. The two lemon and white hounds who occupied it regarded me in an encouraging manner. The nearest one had a long dribble of saliva suspended from its dewlap. I decided on the back seat. The four hounds already seated shuffled up obligingly to make room and arranged their heads four deep in order to inspect my person.

  Lady Jennifer got into the driving seat and slammed the door. This acted like a starter’s pistol to the hounds, who dived into position for the journey. The two on the passenger seat put their front paws on the dashboard and pressed their noses to the windscreen. My neighbours put their paws on the back of the front seats and craned forward avidly as the shooting brake bucketed away. The smell of dog was overpowering.

  “You won’t mind if we drop the young entry off first?” Lady Jennifer enquired, swerving to avoid a cyclist and causing a hound to slip off the dashboard and hit its chin on the glove compartment. “We walked them this summer and they will keep coming back. I can’t tell you how inconvenient it is. The Hunt Staff get furious.”

  I hoped the young entry didn’t live very far away. If they did I thought I should possibly suffocate before we got there. I wound down the window in an effort to get some fresh air. As soon as they got wind of this, all four hounds launched themselves across me and jammed their heads out as far as their shoulders, pinning me in the seat. I managed to extract myself from the jungle of hind legs and waving sterns and gained the comparative comfort of the empty end of the seat. I didn’t dare open the window.

  Lady Jennifer applied the brakes smartly outside a collection of whitewashed buildings. A sign announced that we had arrived at the Midvale and Westbury Hunt Kennels. This was a relief, but as soon as the shooting brake juddered to a stop our hounds dived under the seats as one man. They refused to budge. Lady Jennifer and I were obliged to drag them out by the scruff of their necks whilst they pretended to be dead. Once out of the brake they crept across the yard with their sterns dragging on the concrete. They looked anything but happy to be home.

  Lady Jennifer unbolted the iron grille door of the exercise yard with furtive care and we stuffed our hounds inside. In a trice they had cheered up and were indistinguishable from the rest of the pack. We might have got away undetected but they put their paws up on the bars with the rest and set up a terrific racket. The noise brought a young man in a white kennel coat to the door of one of the buildings. He looked rather cross.

  Lady Jennifer decided that attack was the best form of defence. “William,” she shrilled indignantly. “Your hounds have been trespassing again. They have upset all my refuse bins. I simply will not tolerate it. If it happens again I shall have them shot.”

  William looked taken aback by this. He went rather red. He opened his mouth to say something, but Lady Jennifer was already on a different tack.

  “Elaine,” she said briskly, “This is William, the Second Whipper-in. William, this is Elaine, our new groom.” She made for the shooting brake. It was all very awkward.

  “Hello,” I said. “I’m sorry about the hounds. I’m sure she wouldn’t really have them shot.”

  William didn’t reply. He just stared. He ran his hand through his ginger hair and left it standing in peaks, stiff with bran. “New groom,” he said in disbelief. “New groom?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “New groom.”

  William still didn’t know what to make of it. He turned and shouted to someone inside the
building. “Hey Forster! Come out here a minute! The Galloping Fanes have gone and got themselves a groom!”

  I wasn’t sure that I liked the sound of this. I looked round for the shooting brake but Lady Jennifer was having trouble of her own with the gears. Terrible crashing and grinding noises accompanied the shunting backwards and forwards.

  Forster had the kind of looks that belong to dangerous young men in novels. He had a dark handsome face and black hair that curled almost to the collar of his coat. I could tell he thought himself rather special by the way he leaned indolently against the door frame and looked me up and down in an amused sort of way.

  “You must be barmy,” he drawled, “to go and work with that collection of old screws.”

  For one terrible moment I thought he meant Lady Jennifer and her daughters. Then I realised that he was referring to the horses.

  “You have seen the place?” William wanted to know. “You do know what it’s like? You have seen the horses?”

  “Horses!” Forster gave a contemptuous laugh. “There isn’t a sound animal in the yard, or a properly fed one either. The Fanes don’t need a groom, they need a knacker.”

  “As long as they don’t call us,” William said, grinning. “We don’t want them. All the hirelings boiled up together wouldn’t feed hounds for more than a week.”

  I didn’t want to listen to any more of this.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I have to go.”

  “Wait a minute,” William said. “I asked you if you had seen the place. You wouldn’t be going there sight unseen would you? You haven’t taken the job blind?”

  There was genuine concern in his voice but I was so offended by their attitude that I hardly noticed.

  “Yes, I’ve seen the place,” I said crossly. “And I’ve seen the horses, so I know what it’s like. But it might interest you to know that things are going to be rather different in future. We are going to reorganize the yard and the business. There are going to be a lot of improvements.” I looked round anxiously for the shooting brake and saw that it was moving in my direction.

  “And who is going to pay for these improvements?” Forster enquired in a sceptical tone.

  “That’s my affair,” I snapped. As the shooting brake came alongside with the passenger door flapping, I jumped in and slammed the door as hard as I could. The crash caused Lady Jennifer’s foot to slip off the clutch. As we bounced away Forster was laughing his silly head off. The last impression I got of him was that his teeth were sickeningly white.

  If Lady Jennifer was alarmed by this show of temper in her new employee, she didn’t show it. She hummed a little tune as she drove in her erratic manner along the Suffolk lanes heaped with golden leaves. I was too preoccupied to notice the glory of it. I sat in silence and I wondered, not for the first time, what I had let myself in for. I realized that the callous comments which had made me so angry, were probably no more than the truth. But if I had been a fool to accept responsibility for a bunch of old crocks, if I had been a worse fool to accept a job with no prospects and quite possibly no money either, I didn’t want to be told so, not yet, and certainly not by Forster or William. I had to give it a try first. I had to give it a chance.

  As the shooting brake flew along the lanes, leaving eddies of leaves in its wake, I grew more optimistic. It would give me great satisfaction, I decided, to show the Midvale and Westbury Hunt a thing or two. In my imagination I saw the Fanes’ tumbledown yard restored to its former grandeur. It could be the finest livery stable in the county. We could have the most luxurious loose boxes, the most magnificent stable yard, the cleanest tack and the fittest, best turned-out horses that ever graced the hunting field. Not only that, but we could have the best hirelings available anywhere. My imagination soared. By my own skill I saw myself turning my collection of lame ducks into beautiful equine swans, so expertly produced, so superbly schooled, that people would queue up to ride them.

  Untrimmed branches pinging against the sides of the shooting brake brought me back to earth. We turned in at the lodge gates where one vulpine creature leered down from the top of its post and the other lay nose down in the grass, choked with ivy.

  “Welcome to Havers Hall,” Lady Jennifer said. She leaned over unexpectedly and squeezed my hand with her long, bony fingers as the shooting brake bucked and leapt over the pot-holes.

  Nigella and Henrietta were waiting, a reception committee of two on the front steps. If anything, they looked even scruffier than I remembered them. They grabbed my cases and bore me up into the hall as Lady Jennifer swerved off round the back of the house in a shower of gravel.

  “Welcome to our humble home,” Nigella said brightly. “Family seat of the Fanes for eight generations”

  “Clobbered by death duties, turned down by the National Trust,” Henrietta added. “And shortly to be condemned by the local council.”

  I wasn’t sure if this was supposed to be a joke or not. I smiled politely. The hall was vast and icy cold. There were no carpets and precious little in the way of furniture either. The ornate plaster ceiling was patched with damp and mould. The two huge stone fireplaces which dominated either end were heaped with dead ash.

  “It isn’t very cosy, is it?” Henrietta said. “I expect it’s a bit stark for your taste?”

  “It’s certainly very large,” I said. “And very grand.”

  “Was very grand, you mean,” Henrietta said peevishly. “You may as well say what you think.”

  “Take no notice of Henrietta,” Nigella said. “She gets a bit prickly at times. She can’t help it. She finds it hard to accept that she is one of the nouveaux pauvres.”

  “I’m not poor,” Henrietta objected. “Can anyone be described as poor,” she asked me, “who owns a Vile secretaire?” She led the way up the wide dusty staircase. Her wellingtons squeaked on the bare oak treads.

  I wasn’t sure what a secretaire was. “I wonder you keep it,” I said. “If it’s so awful.”

  Henrietta paused to look at me in astonishment. “It isn’t awful,” she said. “It’s magnificent.”

  “Vile is the name of the maker,” Nigella explained. “William Vile. Henrietta’s very proud of her secretaire; it’s her dowry.”

  We walked along a gallery landing lined with darkened oil paintings. Now and again there was a gap and a rectangular patch of lighter coloured wall.

  “Do people have dowries these days?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Nigella said. “It’s a pretty feudal idea. Still, Henrietta has hers.”

  Henrietta opened one of the doors along the landing and I followed them into a large, dark room filled with an unwholesome smell of damp. There was a chill in the room which brought out gooseflesh at the back of my neck. In the half light I could make out a vast, carved wardrobe, a bed of unusual height and solidity and another huge, empty stone fireplace. The only other furniture was a dark oak chest, shaped like a coffin. Henrietta began to heave mightily at some wooden shutters which stretched from floor to ceiling.

  “Well?” Nigella said in an uncertain tome. “What do you think?” She dumped my case on the single piece of threadbare carpet. “Do you like it?”

  I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the dark, or the cold, or the smell. As my eyes got used to the gloom I saw other things that I didn’t like. There was a dead jackdaw in the hearth. There was an angry Elizabethan lady on the wall. She clutched an orb to her chest and she glared at me balefully, as if the whole of her misfortune must surely be my fault. It was terrible. It was frightening. I had never been in such an alarming room in all of my life. I tried to work out how I was going to tell Nigella that I couldn’t sleep here. Not possibly. I wouldn’t dare to close my eyes even for a minute. I tried to find the right words to explain how I felt without causing offence. And all the time Henrietta yanked at the shutters and Nigella waited for me to speak.

  I took a deep breath and suddenly Henrietta and the shutters flew aside with a resounding crash. October sunshine f
looded over us and the room was filled with the warm, earthy smell of grass and dying leaves and plough. Across the park I saw old turf like worn velvet, and oak trees, red and golden. The river lay like a blue and silver ribbon and all along the banks the willows leaned. Beyond, the Suffolk landscape stretched, brown and green and gilded and somewhere, even beyond that, was the sea.

  “Oh,” I said. “It’s perfect. It’s absolutely beautiful.”

  “I’m so glad,” Nigella said with relief. “It wouldn’t be everyone’s idea of a comfortable room.”

  After a conducted tour of the mahogany panelled bathroom and a recital of its deficiencies, Nigella left me to unpack. Henrietta didn’t follow straight away. She stood thoughtfully in the doorway and watched me stow my belongings in the giant wardrobe. She had picked up the dead jackdaw and she swung it by the legs in an absent-minded manner, as if it were a handbag.

  “You must have been pretty desperate for a job to come here,” she said unexpectedly. “I don’t expect you will stay.”

  “Not stay?” I said. “Why shouldn’t I stay?”

  “Because you want to event. Because you only took the job until you can find something more suitable. Because this is an awful place,” Henrietta said. “And you know it.”

  “It isn’t true,” I said. “It’s a very nice place. Of course I shall stay.”

  I couldn’t look at her. I kept my eyes on my new breeches, my eventing breeches, strapped with soft creamy suede, and still in their tissue wraps. Unworn. When I looked up, Henrietta had gone.

  I covered up the Elizabethan lady with my tweed jacket. She didn’t seem quite so angry any more, but I couldn’t stand the accusation in her eyes.

  3

  A Nice Long List

  Supper was served at the kitchen table. Nigella grabbed roaring hot plates out of the Aga which, she explained, was having one of its over-enthusiastic days. The plates warmed our faces and stuck to the table. They were crusted with dried up mince decorated with solidified potato and peas like lead shot. It was probably left over from the Meals on Wheels.