Eventer's Dream

by Caroline Akrill

  “Sit down Elaine,” Nigella said. “You must write our reply. And I will post it when I go out with the second lot of horses.” She sat beside me and looked expectant. Henrietta managed to unearth a clean sheet of notepaper with the family crest in one corner, and a ballpoint pen which turned out to be red. This necessitated another search. Finally I was able to begin.

  Dear Mr Jones (I wrote)

  Thank you for your enquiry. I am pleased to confirm that we have sufficient vacancies to accommodate your three hunter liveries for the coming season …

  “That’s good,” Nigella said appreciatively. “That’s really good.”

  I also have pleasure in quoting our terms, which are as follows:

  I looked up at the Fanes. “What are our terms?” I said.

  Henrietta shrugged her shoulders in a vague sort of way.

  “We don’t actually have any set terms,” Nigella said. “So you can put what you like.”

  “You must have some idea of what you charge,” I said. “What about Doreen? What about Brenda?”

  “Ah,” Nigella said uneasily. “They have been here a long time.”

  “And they pay for their own foodstuffs,” Henrietta pointed out. “They pay the blacksmith, and they do all their own exercising.”

  “All the same,” I said, “I would like to know what they pay.”

  “Actually,” Nigella admitted, “it’s five pounds.”

  I was astonished by this piece of information. The rent of the stable alone was worth five pounds a week, and the Fanes had been supplying hay and straw, not to mention the labour involved in mucking out and feeding.

  “You’re crazy,” I told them. “You’re absolutely mad. You deserve to be bankrupt.”

  “If we charged more, they might have found somewhere cheaper,” Nigella protested. “Then we wouldn’t have had anybody.”

  “And ten pounds a week in cash,” Henrietta added, “is very handy.”

  “Ten pounds a week for two liveries,” I said crossly, “is pathetic.”

  “All right,” Henrietta said, nettled. “If you think you are so jolly clever, you fix the livery rates.”

  “You are quite right, of course,” Nigella said hastily. “We haven’t been charging enough. You had better adjust the prices, Elaine. We are completely in your hands; make it ten if you like.”

  I turned my attention back to the letter. There was no point in starting an argument. When it came to costing, the Fanes were hopeless. They hadn’t a clue.

  Full Livery (I wrote) £25 per week

  Shoeing and Veterinary Fees extra.

  “Twenty-five pounds,” Nigella gasped. “For a week!”

  “They won’t pay it,” Henrietta said in a scandalized voice. “Twenty-five pounds for a livery is far too expensive. Honestly Elaine, sometimes I wonder whose side you are on. This may be our one chance to make a success of the yard, and you are going to price us out of business!”

  “Twenty-five pounds a week is reasonable,” I said firmly. “At the training centre, the hunter liveries paid thirty-five.”

  “But we are not the training centre,” Nigella said. “We haven’t the staff for one thing, or the facilities.”

  “And we are rather fed up with hearing about the training centre,” Henrietta said. “We find it very boring.”

  “And I find you very boring,” I snapped. “I thought you wanted to run a high class yard? I thought you wanted to attract quality liveries?”

  “We do,” Henrietta said in a grumpy voice. “You know we do.”

  “We are only trying to be realistic,” Nigella pointed out. “We are not trying to be difficult.”

  “If we agree to charge twenty-five pounds,” Henrietta said, “What about Brenda? What about Doreen?”

  “Their rates will have to go up as well,” I said. “And if they don’t like it, they will have to move out.”

  “I realize that we have to be economic,” Nigella sighed, “but it does seem a bit hard. After all, they are old clients and Brenda is sure to take it badly. She can be very difficult.”

  “You can leave Brenda and Doreen to me,” I said. “If they want to stay, they can have their livery at a slightly reduced rate. Brenda is no fool, she must know how much it would cost to keep her horse elsewhere. We are not going to be a cut price establishment.”

  “Better a full cut price establishment,” Henrietta grumbled, “than an empty high class one.”

  “It didn’t take you long to foul things up, Busy Bee,” Brenda commented when I told her that her livery had gone up to twenty pounds, but as a concession to her long residence she would no longer have to pay for her own foodstuffs. “I thought something like this was in the wind. Well, I can’t say things haven’t improved, so I expect I shall have to cough up; but Doreen won’t. She’s only a kid. She won’t be able to afford it.”

  “I’ve thought about Doreen,” I said. “Her livery is only a pony, so it won’t cost so much. It doesn’t need the corn for one thing. I thought we would charge her fourteen pounds a week, and as she likes to hang around the yard perhaps she could help out sometimes, in the evenings perhaps, or at weekends. If we paid her a pound an hour, we could deduct it from her livery bill. We could do with an extra pair of hands, and it isn’t as if she would have to do it all the year round; her pony goes out to grass in the spring.”

  “I’ve got to hand it to you, Busy Bee,” Brenda said grudgingly. “You’ve got all the answers.”

  The Fanes, who were secretly terrified of Brenda, were much impressed with these negotiations, but they were alarmed at the thought of having to pay Doreen a pound an hour. They were slightly mollified when I explained that they would not actually be required to hand over hard cash, which was something they were incredibly mean about and would go to inordinate lengths to avoid. As soon as there was some regular income coming into the yard I meant to pin them down on the subject of my pocket money wages. There was no point in mentioning it until then, because the Fanes were as broke as I was.

  We didn’t get any more replies from the advertisement, so we were more than a bit anxious about the response to our letter from Thunder and Lightning Limited. Every day Nigella ran down to the postbox at the end of the drive and every day she returned with another bill we couldn’t pay. But there was no reply to our letter.

  “I told you twenty-five pounds was too much,” Henrietta said bitterly. “I told you they wouldn’t pay it.”

  “If they can’t afford twenty-five pounds a week,” I retorted, “we don’t want them anyway.” But even I began to wonder if I had pitched our prices too high to start with; that maybe we would have been better to start low and fill the yard as Henrietta had maintained.

  One morning when Nigella came back from the postbox there was a letter for me. It was from my father. Now that I had landed a job which had lasted all of a fortnight, and rather more especially, I suspected, because the Fanes had a title and a grand-sounding address, he had softened in his attitude. He was prepared to come to visit me.

  This change of heart was something of a mixed blessing. Whilst I was pleased to think that at last my father might be beginning to accept my choice of career, I was vastly alarmed at the prospect of having to introduce him to the Fanes. I knew that Havers Hall and its occupants would not be quite what he expected. Also, that seeing me in such down-at-heel circumstances, he would immediately smell exploitation and demand to know how much I was being paid in wages, if I was covered by Employers’ Liability Insurance, if my National Insurance Contributions were being paid, and a dozen other niggling little details he considered important. To further complicate matters, the date he had suggested for his intended visit was the day we had planned to take some of the horses cubbing, as a pipe-opener for the opening meet. It was all very inconvenient.

  I mentioned the last problem to Nigella who, with her customary tact, said that I should on no account try to put him off, for fear of causing offence.

  “He doesn’t want to com
e until mid-morning anyway,” she pointed out. “And as the meet is at eight-thirty, you could leave early and be back by then. When they meet in the village, they always end up by drawing the edge of the park, so it isn’t as if you will be far away. And Mummy will be home. It isn’t her Meals-on-Wheels day and she would be delighted to meet your father.”

  Mummy was indeed delighted. Lady Jennifer immediately identified my father as a Good Cause.

  “But Elaine,” she shrilled. “How simply marvellous! Of course your father must pay us a visit. I shall be absolutely thrilled to entertain him.”

  The day before the entertainment was due to take place she bucketed down to the village store in the shooting brake and returned with a box of livid iced fancies and a packet of custard creams which, in the Fane household, represented the height of extravagance.

  I hadn’t the heart to tell her that my father refused to eat commercially produced confections of any kind because he was convinced that the white sugar they contained poisoned the system.

  7

  A Friend of a Friend

  The cubbing morning was dry and bright, with just the right amount of autumnal nip in the air. The meet was at the Westbury crossroads, which meant that we could hack there.

  Our party consisted of Nigella on the mare-who-sometimes-slipped-a-stifle, Henrietta on the black-horse-who-never-stood-still, myself on the bad-tempered chestnut, and Doreen, who, because her pony had not completely recovered from its cough, had been allowed to take the old bay mare. There was also a solitary client, a Mr McLoughlin, described by Lady Jennifer as a friend of a friend, who after much deliberation had been allocated The Comet, the only horse in the stable who was up to weight.

  To our consternation, when he arrived, Mr McLoughlin turned out to be small and spindly and not very experienced. However, there was no time to do anything about it and he professed himself overwhelmed to be presented with The Comet who, clipped and newly shod, with a neatly pulled mane and tail, looked a picture.

  Now that there were three of us and Doreen working in the yard, the horses were beginning to look reasonably presentable. They were still rather too lean, especially the old bay mare, whose age was against her, and Nelson. Nelson had found having his jaw put in a metal clamp and a file rasped along his back teeth up to his eye sockets an alarming experience. He had spent the rest of the day rattling his mouth in the water bucket, which by evening stables was topped with froth and lined with tooth chippings. The next morning, though, he had cheered up and when I went into his stable I found him standing on bare brick; during the night he had not only eaten his corn feed and the contents of his haynet, but also his bedding. I had high hopes of Nelson.

  The black horse still looked like a racehorse after the Derby. His nervous energy would never allow him to maintain any condition, but his thrush was drying up, his coat was glossy, and he had a certain dashing attraction that captured the eye. The Comet, the bad-tempered-chestnut, and the mare-who-sometimes-slipped-a-stifle all looked smart and well-covered. They were not one hundred per cent fit by any means, and they lacked muscle, especially behind the saddle, but I couldn’t help feeling pleased as we set out in the watery sunshine with our breath hanging in the air like smoke, the horses bright-eyed and well-shod, and the saddlery, even if it was not new or even very modern, soaped and, thanks to Nigella’s hideous vases, mended and safe.

  The only dubious note was struck by the Fanes themselves who didn’t appear to possess any riding garments other than the drainpipe jeans. Even so, with the addition of old-fashioned leather riding boots with laces up the front, baggy tweed costume jackets which probably originated from the Oxfam Shop, and their hair in long plaits beneath their bowler hats, they achieved a certain period charm. All the same, I hoped they would manage something rather better for the opening meet.

  Hounds were already waiting at the crossroads when we arrived; the black horse went into a piaffe at the sight of them. The Master, a round, red-faced man with a waxed moustache, wished us a cheery good morning as we clattered up, and the Huntsman, who looked lean, hungry and irritated, favoured us with a curt nod. The rest of the field consisted of two middle-aged women on big raw-boned thoroughbreds, a boy on a piebald cob, and a tall, thin, nervous-looking man on a threequarter-bred bay gelding.

  Nigella, Doreen, Mr McLoughlin and I stood our horses quietly in the lane a little way apart from the others. The black horse fussed and fidgeted about and arched his neck and swished his tail. His neck and shoulders were already patched with sweat. Mr McLoughlin, with his stirrups too short and his toes pointing firmly towards the ground, seemed to be perfectly happy and confident on The Comet, leaning forward every now and again to clap him affectionately on the neck. I had ridden The Comet out to exercise several times and I had found him an obedient and intelligent horse, if at times rather world-weary in his attitude. At some time in his life someone had schooled him with great care and I found it hard to reconcile this with the Fanes’ assertions that he was a confirmed bolter. If this was so, he had yet to show his true colours.

  “I wonder if the pups are out,” Nigella said. She stood up in her stirrups, scanning the pack for familiar faces. “The trouble is that when they are all together, it’s nearly impossible to tell them apart.”

  William and Forster were holding up hounds on the little grass triangle in the middle of the crossroads. When William saw us, his jaw dropped and he stared at the horses in open astonishment. After that, when he wasn’t paying attention to hounds, he stared at Henrietta instead. Henrietta ignored him. Forster on the other hand, immaculately mounted on a grey, hardly gave us a glance. But when one of the young entry recognized Nigella’s voice and came gambolling across the lane to greet us, he kicked his horse after it and sent it scuttling back.

  He lifted his hat to the Fanes. I hoped with all my heart that he wouldn’t say anything about the job. I felt myself grow hot and I lifted my saddle flap and fumbled with the straps, pretending to tighten my girth.

  “I tried to ring you on Wednesday,” Forster said. “There seemed to be something wrong with the telephone.”

  “We’ve got a faulty line,” Henrietta said smartly. “It’s a cable fault.”

  “Is that so?” Forster gave her a cool look. “The operator seemed to think you had been disconnected.”

  Henrietta shot him a glance of pure hatred before being carried out of earshot by the black horse, who was executing a passage.

  “I take it you’ve decided against the job,” Forster said, “otherwise you would have let me know.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I would … I mean, I have … and if you wouldn’t mind, I would rather not discuss it.” I felt hatefully embarrassed. Forster had kept his voice low so that the others wouldn’t hear, but all conversation had stopped and I knew everyone was staring. My face had turned scarlet.

  Forster seemed to find it very amusing. It was obviously the kind of situation he enjoyed. “I shall have to come and visit you at the Hall,” he said, and this time he didn’t trouble to keep his voice down. “I’m sure Lady Jennifer won’t object.”

  Nigella gave me a startled look. I opened my mouth to protest but I was saved from having to reply by the bad-tempered chestnut who, realizing that my hands had turned to jelly on the reins, took advantage of the situation to dive forward with flattened ears in order to sink his yellow teeth into the neck of Forster’s grey.

  The grey horse shot backwards in dismay and bumped one of the thoroughbreds, who began to spin round like a top, lashing out at everything in sight. The tall, thin, nervous man’s horse leapt in the air and catapulted him out of the saddle on to the lane. In the resulting confusion, Nigella and I sought the refuge of the grass verge where the rest of our party had collected.

  “Serve him right,” Henrietta commented in a valedictory tone. “Ought to have been his neck.”

  Soon afterwards, the Master decided it was time to move off. We followed hounds along the lane and across a track towards the fir
st covert. The tall, thin, nervous man rode in front of us, holding his horse tightly and shouting at it. The horse was upset and refused to walk; it pranced along unhappily and kept shaking its head, making the man more nervous than ever.

  “I do wish people wouldn’t overmount themselves,” Nigella said in a low voice. “He’ll ruin that lovely animal; not only that, but he’ll frighten himself to death at the same time.”

  “I’ll keep an eye on him,” Henrietta promised. “If the horse has him off again, I shall offer him fifty pounds for it. He’ll probably be only too pleased to accept.”

  At the first few coverts of the day there was not a lot of action; as it was so close to the new season, the hunt didn’t want to cull the cubs, just scatter them. We were told to ring the coverts with orders not to send the cubs back, but to let them get away. The coverts seemed to be full of foxes. They ran out everywhere, streaking away across stubble and plough, whilst hounds blundered about in the undergrowth. At one point a young fox ran straight between the black horse’s front legs, causing him to go totally rigid for at least a minute. It was, Henrietta declared, the longest she had ever known him to stand still on his own account.

  As a reward for scattering the cubs, the Master informed us that we could expect a run at the next draw if hounds were diligent enough to put out an old dog fox who had given good sport for three seasons without losing a hair of his brush. The draw was a long straggling copse and we were positioned at set intervals on the ride that surrounded it, each person out of sight and sound of the others. The draw was planned like a military operation and everyone was given a part to play, something that is never possible after the opening meet, with fields of hundreds for the Master to control.

  I was sent to watch a triangle of scrub at the end of the copse, which finished in a vast field of plough, stretching off into a sky speckled with gulls and pewits. The bad-tempered chestnut and I stood on the ride, listening. The silence was total.