Eventer's Dream

by Caroline Akrill

  “So you think you go to an event yard, eh?” he had said. “You think you find a place to take you, with no trouble? And you think, even if it happens, that you are allowed to ride these event horses? You, with no experience at all? And you imagine that these kind people you find, because you work hard and they are pleased, that they let you compete on these horses, these good horses worth so many thousands of pounds? You think it will happen this easy?”

  I had nodded. Standing there in all the euphoria of my newly awarded qualification, I had been sure that it would be.

  But now I knew differently. And as I walked slowly up the dusty oak treads to my bedroom and started to repack my cases I was glad that Hans Gelderhol, The European Champion, The Golden Boy of Eventing, couldn’t see me now.

  5

  Liquid Assets

  I waited until the Fanes came into the kitchen for their tea. Then I told them I was leaving.

  “Leaving?” Nigella said in tones of the very greatest astonishment. “But you have only just arrived!”

  “I know,” I said. “And I’m sorry. But I thought I could be useful. I really thought I would be able to cope.”

  “I knew she wouldn’t stay,” Henrietta exclaimed. She turned to Nigella in exasperation. “Didn’t I tell you she wouldn’t? Didn’t I warn you that she was just using us as a stopgap? Only taking our job until she found something better?”

  “I’m not leaving because I’ve found something better,” I said. “I haven’t found another job. I haven’t anything else in mind at all.” This was true. I had considered applying for the job with Felix Hissey and I had decided against it. For one thing I didn’t want to get involved with Nick Forster and his sordid affairs, and for another I hadn’t the face to take a job where I would be bumping into the Fanes every five minutes. Then there were the horses. I had to steel myself not to think about them. I had made up my mind that the only thing to do was to make a clean break. A quick break. I had to leave the area, creep back home with my tail between my legs and start again, scanning the Situations Vacant. The prospect was depressing, to say the least.

  “But if you haven’t found another job; if you haven’t anywhere else to go,” Nigella said, mystified, “why are you leaving?”

  “I’m leaving because things are worse than I ever imagined,” I said. “I’m leaving because of these.” I threw the sheaf of unpaid invoices on to the kitchen table.

  The Fanes stared at them in silence.

  “Oh,” Henrietta said eventually in a flat voice. “Those.”

  “You can’t run a yard without money,” I said. “No one can. You have to pay the bills. You didn’t tell me you were bankrupt.”

  “We are not exactly bankrupt,” Nigella said in her careful way. “At least,” she added, “not yet.”

  “Where did you find them, anyway?” Henrietta demanded indignantly. “We didn’t employ you to pry into our private affairs. Or to search through our drawers.”

  “I was looking for a telephone directory,” I said wearily. “I wanted to ring the blacksmith.”

  “I’m rather glad you didn’t,” Nigella said with a hollow little laugh. “He would have been awfully cross.”

  “I’m the one who is entitled to be cross,” I pointed out. “You should never have employed me. You can’t afford to employ anyone. I wonder you even had the nerve to place the advertisement. No wonder you wouldn’t discuss my wages.”

  “You’re not entitled to any wages yet,” Henrietta flared. “You’ve hardly done anything!”

  Nigella picked up the invoices. She flipped through them in a desultory manner. “They do seem to have built up a bit,” she admitted. “But I expect we will manage to pay them off. After all, the hunting season is almost here, and there will be money coming in from the hirelings and the liveries. You said so yourself.”

  “Hirelings have to be fed,” I reminded her. “They also need to be shod. And your liveries are leaving.”

  “What do you mean our liveries are leaving?” Henrietta cried. “That’s a lie!”

  “It isn’t a lie,” I said. “I saw Doreen and Brenda this morning. They told me.” After the traumatic visit of the young entry I had completely forgotten to mention it.

  “They don’t mean it,” Nigella said. “They keep on saying it. They just use it as a threat. But they would never actually leave. I’m sure of it.”

  “They do mean it,” I said. “They’ve given you a week to get the blacksmith and the mineral supplement. Otherwise,” I added, remembering Brenda’s words, “they’re off.”

  “That’s blackmail,” Henrietta muttered. “They’ve no right.”

  “They’ve every right,” I said.

  Nigella put the invoices back onto the table. “Things are pretty bad,” she said. “We may as well admit it.”

  I wondered if she realized quite how bad things were. “In a week,” I said, “the oats will be gone altogether. In a week there won’t be a horse left in the yard with a full set of shoes on.”

  “It won’t worry you,” Henrietta snapped, “since you won’t be here.”

  “In a week,” I said, “you won’t have any hay left at all.”

  There was a silence in which Nigella stared at the invoices in a distressed manner, and Henrietta picked angrily at her sleeve which was now unravelled almost as far as the elbow. I told myself that I shouldn’t feel emotional about it. There was nothing I could do. It wasn’t my problem. I blinked hard and studied a sepia photograph on the kitchen wall. Under the flyblown glass, Lady Jennifer, willow-slim and elegant, posed her hunter for posterity. Something about the horse was familiar. I looked closer and saw that it was the old bay mare, fit and sleek and in her prime. The photograph was pasted to a piece of cardboard scattered with thunder flies, and in one of the lower corners there was some writing in faded ink. “Little Legend” it said, “1947”. The old bay mare was nearly forty years old.

  I stared at the photograph and I wondered when she had stopped being Little Legend and become just the old bay mare. It didn’t take much imagination to picture the steady decline of the stables, to know that every year there would have been less to spend and less people to care. Like a gallant old pensioner, the old bay mare had weathered the hard times. She had lost her comfort, her youth and her looks, but she still had her spirit. She deserved a better end.

  “Nigella,” I said. “If there was some way; if things were not quite so hopeless, I wouldn’t leave.”

  “I know,” she said, “and there is a way.”

  Henrietta looked up from her elbow. “Which way is that?” she enquired in a suspicious tone.

  “We shall have to sell something,” Nigella said. “Although to be honest, there is not a lot left.”

  “Well, don’t look at me,” Henrietta said. “I only have my secretaire; and I’m not selling.”

  “Then it will have to be my vases,” Nigella decided.

  Selling the vases meant that I had to drive the shooting brake to London. I had passed my driving test before I left the training centre, but since then I had not driven at all. My father flatly refused to allow me behind the wheel of his beloved Morris Minor. It was his most cherished possession and he was very proud of the fact that it was still in the same gleamingly pristine condition as when he had driven it out of the showroom twenty years ago. So I was a bit alarmed at the thought of having to face the London traffic with a valuable cargo of vases.

  The next morning, after a herculean effort in the stables and a shortened form of communal exercise, we peeled off our anoraks and wellingtons and rushed upstairs to change into town clothes. It only took me a few seconds to flip through the hangers in the wormy, carved wardrobe and realize that I hadn’t anything resembling town clothes with me at all. I couldn’t even find a clean shirt. I flew along the passage to tell Nigella and bumped into Henrietta, who was already changed. She had added fluorescent purple socks and scuffed pink spikey-heeled shoes to her awful drainpipe jeans and topped it all with
a horrific moth-eaten fur coat with padded shoulders. She didn’t look as though she had even combed her hair.

  After that I settled for jeans and a roll-necked jersey under my hacking jacket which made a nice rustic contrast to Nigella, who appeared in something that looked suspiciously like a pink openwork bedjacket which tied at the neck with a grubby piece of satin ribbon, the inevitable drainpipes and red tap-dancing shoes.

  I set off gingerly down the drive, steering the shooting brake in and out of the pot-holes, trying to avoid the bumps. The Fanes sat nursing the vases on the back seat.

  “Heavens,” Henrietta grumbled. “I hope you’re not going to drive like this all the way to town. Can’t you drive in a straight line?”

  “You’re jolly lucky I can drive at all,” I pointed out. “It wasn’t a requirement of the job. It wasn’t mentioned in the advert.”

  “Quite a lot of things weren’t mentioned in the advert,” Nigella remarked, cranking down her window to dispose of some withered dahlias which had been sitting in the neck of her vase. “It’s a bit of a sore point.”

  None of my previous driving experience, not even suffering brake failure after stalling the Land Rover whilst ferrying Hans round the cross-country course, had prepared me for the terrors of negotiating the London traffic. It was fearful.

  The Fanes were no help. Whilst I was being honked and hustled and trapped in the wrong lanes, narrowly avoiding being rammed by taxi cabs or mown down by buses, they yelped and clutched their vases and bounced up and down in their seats, shouting out conflicting directions as to the quickest way to get to Knightsbridge.

  Finally, after whirling round and round a one-way system in a state of near hysteria, we arrived at an underground car park. There was a portable sign blocking the entrance saying FULL. In a trice, Nigella was out of the shooting brake and had heaved the sign aside.

  “Drive on in,” Henrietta commanded. “We shall have to bribe someone to find us a space.”

  I drove into the gloom and almost knocked over the attendant who was hot-foot after the person who had removed his sign. He leapt aside and banged angrily on the roof with his fist. I stamped on the brake, released the clutch and stalled the shooting brake. Henrietta, who was holding both vases, shot forward in her seat and screamed, and Nigella, who was coming along behind, walked into the rear doors.

  The attendant took advantage of the confusion and grabbed Nigella by her bedjacket, demanding to know what she thought she was up to, moving his sign. Full was full, he said. And that meant Everybody. It took Nigella quite a while to calm him down, but eventually she tripped round the front of the shooting brake and stuck her head in at my window.

  “Has anyone got any money?” she enquired.

  There was a silence.

  “He says he’ll do it for a pound,” she said urgently. “If we leave the car unlocked and the keys in the ignition, he’ll move it into the first vacant space.”

  The attendant leered at us. Regretfully I handed over my last pound coin. I was not too sure when or if I would ever see another.

  We took it in turns to carry the vases through the streets. They were very large. They were also very heavy. They had fat bulbous bodies and little thin necks with nasty little handles shaped like ears attached to them. Not only that but they were decorated all over with ladies and butterflies and trelliswork in vivid shades of gold and burnt umber. They were the most hideous vases I had seen in the whole of my life. I couldn’t imagine that anyone could possibly want to buy them.

  We turned into the main entrance to Harrods and stepped onto the escalator.

  “Nigella,” I said as we sailed majestically upwards. “What if they don’t want them?”

  Nigella was standing in front of me with her hands clasped around the belly of her vase and its neck lodged under her chin. “It’ll be all right,” she said in a muffled voice. “Honestly.”

  “Of course they’ll want them,” Henrietta interposed from behind in an acid voice. “We’ve been dealing with Harrods for years. We should know what they want by now.”

  When it seemed that we could go up no further, we stepped off the escalator and began to weave our way through an endless maze of tapestry armchairs. At the end of it all there was a glittering chandelier, an empty suit of armour, and the entrance to the Fine Arts Department.

  Almost as soon as we had stepped inside, the Fine Arts Gentleman came hurrying over. He eyed the vases with obvious pleasure and ushered us into an inner sanctum. He had an orchid in his buttonhole and seemed to be an old friend.

  “What is it this time?” he said, relieving us of the vases and placing them reverently on a baize-topped table. “Central heating perhaps? Or a winter holiday in the Canaries?”

  “No such luck,” Nigella said. “We need to refurbish the stables. The cost is horrendous.”

  “I can imagine.” The Fine Arts Gentleman pulled out an immaculately folded handkerchief on which to polish his eyeglass. “Provenance?” he enquired.

  Henrietta rummaged in the pockets of her verminous fur coat and handed him a screwed up piece of paper. He smoothed it out carefully on the table and studied it.

  “They’ve been in the family for two hundred years at least,” Nigella said. “They’re Cantonese. They are supposed to be rather valuable.”

  “They are indeed,” the Fine Arts Gentleman agreed. “They are an extremely fine pair of Cantonese porcelain baluster vases. Circa 1780, unless I am very much mistaken." He screwed in his eyeglass and turned one of the vases upside down in order to examine the base. A thick brown soup rolled slowly out of the neck, down his trouser leg, over his beautiful suede shoes, and spread in a glutinous pool on the carpet. The inner sanctum was suddenly filled with the most disgusting smell.

  “Oh!” Nigella gasped in dismay. “Mummy’s dahlia water!”

  The Fine Arts Gentleman recoiled, catching his breath.

  “We’re most terribly, awfully sorry,” Nigella cried. She tried to mop up some of the soup with a paper handkerchief. It was thick and slimy. I thought that if I didn’t go outside, I should probably be sick. Henrietta had already backed away as far as the door and had her hand clamped across her mouth.

  When the Fine Arts Gentleman had recovered himself sufficiently, he paid us two thousand pounds for the vases. It would not be quite enough to pay all the bills, but it was enough to get us out of trouble; enough to buy us some time. On the way home, Henrietta composed a little song to mark the occasion. It was the first time I had heard her sing. She was surprisingly good.

  6

  Thunder and Lightning

  A few days later we were in the thick of preparations for hunting, when Nigella came back from the postbox at the end of the drive, gleefully waving a letter.

  “It’s in reply to our advertisement,” she shouted. “Come and see!”

  The Fanes had placed another advertisement in Horse and Hound, but this time I had been allowed to compose it.

  Small High Class Livery Yard in the Midvale and Westbury Hunt Country (I had put) has a few vacancies for the coming season. Apply: Havers Hall, Westbury, Suffolk.

  There had been little point in adding a telephone number since our line had been disconnected. There hadn’t been enough money left to buy clippers and pay the telephone account, and the clippers had seemed more important. We were desperate to attract more liveries because we needed a regular source of income; the vases had certainly bought us time, but already the bills were building up again.

  At the time of the letter, Henrietta and I were engaged in clipping the black horse. It was no easy task. Backed into a corner and held firmly by the nose and a foreleg, we managed to make him stand fast, but he soon discovered that if he put his mind to it, he could send ripples along his skin like wind through winter wheat. It slowed up the clipping considerably, and the motor had begun to overheat. We were glad of a break.

  Henrietta released the black horse who immediately shook himself like a dog and began to sag at the knees
as a preliminary to getting down in the box for a good roll. We thwarted him by tying him to the hayrack. I threw a blanket over his naked hindquarters and we left him to have a good fidget whilst we went up to the house to investigate the letter.

  Nigella was in the kitchen making coffee. The letter was lying on the table. I picked it up. It was typed on beautifully thick, cream paper and there was a business heading at the top. “THUNDER AND LIGHTNING LIMITED” it said, and underneath there was an address in Clapham.

  “It’s obviously a double glazing firm,” Nigella said in a jubilant tone. “One of the very best. You only have to look at the paper - it’s embossed.” She chipped enthusiastically at a lump of solidified sugar and dropped the bits into our mugs. There weren’t any biscuits; we had no time for cookery.

  “Read it out, read it out,” Henrietta said impatiently jiggling my elbow. “Don’t keep it all to yourself.”

  Dear Sirs (I read)

  Having noticed your recent advertisement in Horse and Hound I am writing to enquire if it would be possible for you to take three hunters at full livery for the coming season? Owing to the nature and timing of our engagements, we are not able to hunt more than two or three times a month, but my colleagues and I have found it unsatisfactory to hire horses in the past.

  Should you have a vacancy, I would be grateful if you would quote your terms, in order that we may come to a decision as soon as possible.

  Yours faithfully,

  JP Jones

  pp. Thunder and Lightning Limited.

  “Glory,” Henrietta gasped. She sat down on a kitchen chair with a thump. “Three liveries! Three!”

  “And business types,” Nigella gloated. “Exactly what you wanted, Elaine. High class liveries to add tone to the yard.”

  “We had better write back,” Henrietta said, becoming agitated. “We must reply immediately. They may have written to other places. We must get in first.” She ran into the office and began to search frantically for notepaper and a pen.