Eventer's Dream

by Caroline Akrill

  Lady Jennifer was not present at this repast, having departed for some committee meeting or other clad in a suit which dated from the New Look and a Hermes scarf with a small darn in it. When Nigella had distributed some frighteningly strong, bitter coffee and woody apples, I suggested that she might like to outline the daily stable routine for my benefit.

  “Stable routine?” Nigella said, and her eyebrows rose up and vanished into her thatch of a fringe.

  “We don’t actually have a routine,” Henrietta said absently. She dangled her apple peel which she had carefully cut into a long curly spiral from her little finger. “Do I throw it over my left shoulder or my right?” she wondered.

  “You must have some sort of routine,” I said. “You must do certain jobs at certain times.”

  “Isn’t she thinking of salt?” Nigella wanted to know. “Isn’t it salt you throw over your shoulder?”

  I said I thought it was. “What time do you start in the mornings?” I asked her. “What do you do first?”

  We feed first,” Nigella said. “Doesn’t everyone feed first?”

  “I think apple peel probably only works on Halloween night,” Henrietta said glumly. She threw the spiral over her shoulder anyway. It landed in the sink.

  “Then what do you do?” I said.

  “Then we muck out,” Nigella said.

  Henrietta went over to the sink and peered into the clutter of dirty dishes. “It’s a W,” she decided.

  “W for William,” Nigella said.

  “William!” Henrietta was disgusted. Who on earth would want William.” She came back to the table and began to hack savagely at her naked apple.

  “When do you do the watering?” I persisted. “When do you give the horses their hay?”

  “Look,” Henrietta said in an irritated tone. “You’re not at the training centre now. You can forget all about routines and things. We don’t have them.”

  I could see that I was going to have to make a firm stand if anything at all was going to be achieved. “If we are going to reorganize the yard, we shall have to work to a routine. It’s the only way to be efficient.”

  “And if there is one thing we need to be,” Nigella said in a heartfelt voice, “it’s efficient.”

  “I thought I might spend my first day mucking out,” I suggested. I knew that the loose boxes hadn’t been cleaned out properly for months, possibly years, and that the corners were packed solid.

  “It won’t take you all day,” Henrietta said. “Even if you do the lot.”

  “It might,” I said, “if I do each one properly. If I turn out all the bedding and disinfect the floors and flush out the drains. If I wash down the tiles and scrub out the mangers and the water buckets.”

  “That would be lovely,” Nigella agreed.

  I knew it wouldn’t be.

  “So if I look after the stable work,” I said, “you will both be free to cope with the exercising.”

  There was a silence.

  “We don’t exercise the horses every day,” Nigella said cautiously. “We couldn’t possibly. We only take them out on alternate days, if that. On the days they are not ridden, we turn them out for a few hours in the park.”

  “But hunters need to be taken out every day,” I said. “They should have been having steady road work every day for months already to strengthen their limbs and to build muscle, to condition their hearts and their lungs. If they are not exercised properly, how do you expect them to get fit?” I had been on a tour of inspection before supper and I knew that none of the horses was even half fit. It occurred to me that perhaps they didn’t need to be. That half a day’s hunting on one of the Fanes’ hirelings would be enough for anybody.

  “I don’t know how you expect us to exercise nine horses every day and do all the stable work,” Henrietta said crossly, “when we haven’t any staff. When you know perfectly well that we’ve been without any help whatsoever.”

  “We’ve done our best,” Nigella added. “But no two people could cope with nine stabled horses. It just isn’t possible.” She stared down at her apple pips and assumed an air of total exhaustion.

  All this was hardly encouraging, but on my tour of inspection I had discovered several deficiencies that I felt bound to mention. I decided to get it over with.

  “The tack room will have to be sorted out,” I said. “It’s a disgrace. Some of the tack will have to be replaced. We need bridle pegs and saddle brackets. We need Neat’s Foot oil and metal polish. We need thread for repairs and needles and saddle soap. And that’s not all. There are other things.”

  “Oh?” Henrietta said in an uneasy voice. “What sort of other things?”

  “There only seems to be one set of grooming tools. We need more. The horses need to be clipped. We need clippers and blankets, rugs and rollers and bandages.”

  Nigella was looking alarmed.

  “Is that all?” Henrietta enquired. “I wonder you can’t think of anything else. Perhaps we can find you a pencil and some paper. Then you can make a nice long list.”

  “What a very good idea,” I said.

  There was another silence whilst I waited for the pencil and paper. Nobody moved.

  “We never make lists,” Nigella said awkwardly.

  “I shall need the vet,” I continued, “to rasp Nelson’s back teeth. He has some nasty sharp edges very high up and he can’t chew his food properly. I shall need the blacksmith as well. There is hardly a horse in the yard whose feet don’t need attention and anyway, I need him to pare away some of the black horse’s hooves so that I can treat the thrushy bits.”

  “Hrmm,” Henrietta said.

  “What exactly do you mean by ‘hrmm’?” I said impatiently.

  “Heavens,” said Nigella hastily. “Did you say thrush?”

  “Also,” I said, warming to my theme. “There isn’t much feed in the feed room.”

  “There almost never is,” Nigella admitted.

  “There’s hardly any bran left. The corn bin is only a quarter full.”

  “I don’t know why you are telling us all this,” Henrietta grumbled. “It isn’t as if we don’t already know.”

  “The horses need to put on condition,” I said. “They are far too poor to start the season. As they are, they won’t last a month. We need high protein food. We need fatteners. Some of the horses need boiled food, especially the old.” I stopped myself just in time from adding “the lame and the sick”.

  “You are absolutely right,” Nigella said. “We do.” She stared unhappily into her coffee. It had gone cold and it was covered with a fragile metallic skin.

  “We need barley and linseed. We need chaff for mixing, and sugar beet pulp. We need high energy foods, oats and barley and cubes. There isn’t any rock salt.”

  “All these things we suddenly need,” Henrietta said in an acid tone. “We never needed them before.”

  “You need them now,” I said.

  “Only because you say so,” Henrietta snapped.

  I tried not to lose my temper, but it was hard to understand their attitude. They seemed totally unwilling to grasp the realities of the situation.

  “Look,” I said. “Either you want to run a decent yard, or you don’t.”

  “Oh, we do,” Nigella assured me. “We really do.”

  “What you don’t seem to realize,” Henrietta said, “is how incredibly difficult it is to manage. How impossibly expensive things are. Look at hay, for instance.”

  “I did,” I said. “There’s only half a ton in the barn.”

  “Is that all?” Nigella said. “I didn’t realize we were as low as that. Half a ton won’t last any time at all.”

  “It certainly won’t,” I said. “Especially if we feed by the book and allow the horses all the hay they can eat.”

  “As you seem to do everything by the book,” Henrietta said waspishly, “maybe you should consult it on our behalf. It might tell you how we are going to pay for all these things you expect us to provide a
t the drop of a hat. Or perhaps you intend to pay for them out of your own pocket?”

  “I can’t pay for them,” I said. “I’m absolutely broke. I’ve been out of work for four months and I’m down to my last pound note.”

  “Then you know how we feel,” Henrietta said, “because we haven’t a bean either.”

  “Not to put too fine a point on it,” Nigella said despondently, “we’re at a very low ebb. Financially, I mean.”

  I could see by their faces that this was the truth.

  There was a lengthy silence whilst we all thought about it. Henrietta filled in the time by picking little bits of crinkly wool from the sleeve of her jumper. Then she piled the bits into a pyramid on her plate.

  “Of course,” I said eventually, “increased efficiency doesn’t necessarily have to cost money.”

  “A few minutes ago,” Henrietta pointed out, “it sounded very expensive.”

  “After all,” I said, trying to be optimistic, “the hunting season is only a couple of weeks away.”

  “Is it really?” Nigella said. “As soon as that?”

  “And that means,” I went on, “that there will be money coming in from the hirelings.”

  “Which, according to you,” Henrietta reminded me, “won’t last a month.”

  “And then there are the liveries,” I continued.

  “When they pay,” Nigella said. “Which doesn’t seem to be too often.”

  “I shall make sure they pay,” I said firmly, “and as we improve the yard, we shall get more.”

  “Get more liveries?” Nigella said, interested. “How will we get more?”

  “By recommendation,” I said. “We could even advertise.”

  “We’re not very good at advertisements,” Henrietta reminded me.

  “There are plenty of spare boxes,” I said. “There’s no shortage of room. We are in the ideal position; the Hunt is almost on the doorstep. Even one really high class livery would add tone to the yard.”

  “Tone,” Nigella said warmly, “is exactly what we need.”

  “The boxes are beautifully built,” I said. “The yard is rather splendid.” I pushed away the memory of the missing tiles, the broken windows and the peeling paint. Even the empty corn bins receded. “The hacking must be marvellous, especially now, when there are miles and miles of stubble fields; and where else could livery clients ride in such a beautiful park?”

  “It’s true,” Nigella agreed. “Our facilities are ideal. We are in the perfect situation. I can’t imagine why we get so depressed.”

  “We’ll give it a try,” Henrietta decided. “You can have a free hand. We will do it your way, even though it entails lists and graphs and charts. And whenever it is possible, we will do it by the book.”

  “And in the morning, Henrietta and I will exercise every horse,” Nigella promised. “We will make a fresh start. With your expert assistance we simply can’t help but be successful.”

  It seemed to me that we couldn’t afford not to be.

  4

  If Something Isn’t Done …

  True to their word, the next morning Nigella and Henrietta prepared to give their attention to the exercising.

  “How many hours of exercise does each horse have to be given on this daily routine of yours?” Henrietta enquired, peering over the half door into the black horse’s stable.

  “Two,” I said. I was scrubbing out the black horse’s feet with soap and water and he wasn’t enjoying it one little bit. Finding his legs immobilized, he was obliged to content himself with rolling his eyes, snaking his neck, and rotating his tail like a windmill.

  Nigella’s head appeared beside Henrietta’s. “Two hours?” she exclaimed. “You do realize that means eighteen hours of exercising every day? Nine hours solid riding for each of us. You can’t be serious.”

  “Of course I’m serious.” I said. “You can double up. You can take two horses each.” I let go of the black horse’s foot and he pumped his leg up and down a few times in an anxious sort of way, to reassure himself that it still worked. I had scrubbed out the evil-smelling gunge in the cleft of his frogs and trimmed the ragged bits. He didn’t seem to be lame and I thought that if I could treat the rotten bits with Stockholm tar and keep him on a dry bed, he probably wouldn’t need professional treatment. He did need the blacksmith though; his shoes were paper thin.

  “I don’t see why we shouldn’t,” Nigella said. “One of the liveries has lost a shoe, so he can’t do any road work: that leaves eight horses to exercise, so if we take four out at a time …”

  “Four at a time,” Henrietta said in alarm. “Four!”

  “Not four each,” Nigella said patiently. "Two each. Four altogether. One lot in the mornings and one in the afternoons.”

  “Better still,” I said, “one lot before breakfast, and one lot after. Then we shall have more time.”

  “More time for what?” Henrietta wanted to know.

  “More time for strapping, tack cleaning, renovating, painting and weeding,” I said. I stepped out of the way of the black horse who was having an experimental trot round the box, lifting his scrubbed feet like a hackney.

  “Sometimes,” Henrietta said in her clear voice as they departed in the direction of the tack room, “it’s better not to ask.”

  For the first period of exercise, Nigella decided to ride the old bay mare and lead the black horse, and Henrietta elected to ride the bad-tempered chestnut and lead The Comet. There was a bit of a fracas when the old bay mare decided she didn’t like the idea of communal exercise and refused to leave the yard. She suddenly dug in her toes and jibbed so strongly that Nigella was forced to let go of the black horse. He decided that his stable was the safest place and dived off past the bad-tempered chestnut who, not being one to let a golden opportunity pass by, lunged forward with bared teeth and almost displaced Henrietta, who was fiddling with her stirrup leathers. The Comet, unimpressed by all these goings-on, stood rocklike on the cobbles, even though his withered leading rein had snapped and dangled uselessly under his chin. Eventually, the black horse was captured, an even more withered rein was clipped onto The Comet, and the Fanes clattered off leaving me to do battle with the black horse’s drains.

  It took me ages to clear all the sour, soggy straw out of the stable and to scrape out the sides and the corners. I trundled six wheelbarrow loads to the steaming, sprawling muckheap behind the barn. Then I swept out the stable and prised off the drain cover. I poked about hopefully for a while with the end of the pitchfork, but it was packed solid. In the end there seemed nothing for it but to unblock it by hand. I steeled myself to the task and laid a sack down on the bricks. I was lying on my stomach with my arm down the drain up to my armpit, groping in the unspeakable depths, when I heard footsteps. Footsteps and voices.

  “I’ve just about had a beakful of this place,” an angry female voice proclaimed. “I can’t stand the lousy dump a minute longer. What’s more,” the voice went on, getting angrier by the second, “I’m going to find the Misses Fane and tell them so, just you see if I …”

  The voice tailed off as the footsteps came to an abrupt halt outside the stable. A large person wearing pink dungarees stretched to the very limits of their endurance appeared in the doorway. She had cropped hair dyed a stark white blonde, and her red, rather puffy face was decorated with a cupid bow of chalky pink lipstick, hooped eyebrows, and a matching pothook at the corner of each eye drawn with thick black pencil.

  “Who the devil are you?” she demanded in a belligerent tone.

  A dead white face framed by a floppy pageboy haircut peered round the dungarees. When the face spotted me lying on the sack it gave a little yelp.

  “I’m Elaine,” I managed to say. “Hello to you too. I work here.” I couldn’t get up at once because I had finally managed to get my fingers round the last solid plug of filth. It came away suddenly, with a loud sucking plop and a shower of evil-smelling black droplets. The Pink Dungarees didn’t flinch, but the w
hite face ducked.

  “Work here?” the Pink Dungarees exclaimed in tones of disbelief. “Since when?”

  The owner of the white face came out from behind the dungarees in order to gape at me in stupefaction. She was a small, mousey-looking girl of about fourteen. I scrambled to my feet. I was splattered all over with liquid manure and I knew that I reeked.

  “Since this morning,” I said. “I’ve only just started, so I haven’t had time to get anything organized yet.” I wiped the worst of the black stuff off on to the sack in case anyone offered to shake hands. They didn’t.

  “And who the hell are you to organize anything?” Pink Dungarees said scornfully, planting her hands on her hips.

  “I’m qualified,” I said. “I’ve got my Horsemasters Certificate.”

  “You and a thousand others,” Pink Dungarees scoffed. “Who do you think you’re going to impress with that?”

  “I trained with Hans Gelderhol,” I said.

  A glimmer of interest appeared between the pothooks. “Gelderhol the eventer?”

  “Is there another Gelderhol?” I enquired.

  “Gelderhol,” the white-faced girl said in a breathless voice. “You trained with Gelderhol?”

  “Shut it, Doreen,” Pink Dungarees snapped. She was determined not to be impressed.

  “All the same,” Doreen breathed. “Gelderhol.”

  “Gelderhol or not,” Pink Dungarees said. “It’ll take more than you to lick this hole into shape. It’ll take an army.”

  “I may get one,” I said. “I may take working pupils.” I had only just thought of it. It seemed a splendid idea.

  “Trainees,” Pink Dungarees said in disgust. “They’re all we need. Anyhow, who’d want to train in a dump like this?”

  “It won’t be a dump when I’ve finished with it,” I said in an annoyed tone. I wasn’t prepared to spend the morning sparring with Pink Dungarees. I had far too much to do.

  “You’re not being very fair, Brenda,” the white-faced girl said, suddenly showing a bit of spirit. “You’re not really giving her much of a chance.”