“Oh,” Francesca said, taken somewhat by surprise by this unexpected offer, “can we?”
“Yes,” I said firmly, “we can.”
“I promise there won’t be any more crow-scarers,” Simon Hooper said.
“I should think not,” Francesca said in an ungracious tone. “What about the wire?”
“No more wire.”
Francesca did not know what to make of this. She looked at Simon Hooper suspiciously. “And the farm machinery across the rides?”
“No more farm machinery across the rides.”
“And ploughing the headlands?”
“I do have to plough the headlands,” he pointed out, “but I shall be sure to leave room for the bridleway, and,” he added, before Francesca could add to her list of grievances, “I won’t put any more padlocks on the gates.”
Francesca stared at him, clearly wanting to be convinced, but bewildered by the unexpected nature of all these promises, so cheerfully and willingly made, and, viewed in the full knowledge of her past difficulties, so impossible to believe.
“Why are you saying this?” she demanded. “What for? Why these promises all of a sudden?”
Simon Hooper grinned, obviously delighted to tell us, “Because I’m taking over the farm from my Father; because I’m twenty-one next week and on that day, Moor Park Farm becomes my property, and because I think it would make life a whole lot pleasanter if we were on speaking terms,” he said.
Now it was me who could hardly believe it. This was the most marvellous, stupendous news. To have a friend installed at Moor Park Farm would make a world of difference to us. However, Francesca was not at all impressed.
“Taking over the farm?” she exclaimed, her incredulous expression intimating that she didn’t consider Simon Hooper capable of taking over an allotment. “You?”
“I’m afraid so.” Unruffled by her astonishment, and perhaps even because of it, he laughed. I thought him very young to be taking over such a large and intensively cultivated farm, but then I supposed he had grown up with an interest in the land, knowing that it would be his one day, and farming it would already be second nature to him. It was always easier, I thought with a twinge of resentment, for people who inherited things. My resentment though, was short-lived in the face of his pleasure, and the future prospect of untrammelled bridleways.
“I’m very pleased for you,” I said. “How lovely it must be to have your entire future so securely planned.”
Francesca did not think it lovely. She did not offer any congratulation, nor did she look in the slightest degree pleased. She looked somewhat out of countenance. Instead of welcoming the news, she seemed baffled by it, offended even.
“What will happen to your father then?” she wanted to know, “Won’t he come to Moor Park any more?”
“Only to visit. Moor Park isn’t our only farm, you know. It’s quite a way from home. We’ve never lived there.”
“And will you live there?” I thought of the gloomy old farmhouse with its shuttered windows and its broken down conservatory, but more than that, I thought of the rows of empty looseboxes in the yard, and the empty barn, and the home paddock, bristling with thistles and docks. Life isn’t really fair, I decided, whichever way you look at it.
“I hope to eventually. I shall do the old place up. I’m actually quite looking forward to it.”
Fair or unfair, there was no doubt that this was encouraging news for us, but Francesca looked dismayed. In her odd, illogical way, I realised that she was going to miss the old man. The battles they had fought over the wire and he farm machinery, the shouting matches they had waged over the padlocked gates, the vitriolic letters they had sent back and forth, these had been part of her life, she had enjoyed them. I looked speculatively at Simon Hooper, trying to see in him adequate compensation for the loss of a respected adversary, but all I saw was a pleasant, cheerful, rather fortunately-placed young man, who would never have to want for much, or struggle for a living, and it was hard to see how he could be made attractive to someone like Francesca, who seemed to thrive on conflict and uncertainty. All things considered however, his take-over of the farm, and his unexpected gesture towards the establishment of amicable relations were steps in the right direction, and I felt we should now celebrate the new entente with Moor Park in some way. There was no chilled champagne at Pond Cottage Riding school, no Tio Fino decanted into Swedish glass. The best we could offer was the cheapest brand of the supermarket instant coffee in a chipped mug. Nevertheless: “Would you care to join us for elevenses?” I asked him, “It’s almost time.”
“I should love to,” he said.
We went into the tack room where I set the kettle upon the electric ring. Francesca looked slightly disapproving, making it clear that she considered my offer of hospitality excessive. Rather grudgingly, she spooned the coffee into three mugs.
Simon Hooper looked round at the saddle racks, the rows of bridles, and the headcollars with their professionally short-coiled ropes. We badly needed replacement saddlery, but the hideously wet spring meant that there would be feed bills to face long after the winter was over, and so there would be none. In spite of this, every piece of leather was soaped and supple, every bit and stirrup shone.
“What a nice harness room,” he said appreciatively, “and such a nice smell.”
“Tack, not harness,” Francesca corrected, “harness is for driving and draught horses.”
“I see. I didn’t realise.”
“This is a tack room,” Francesca said, “a tack room usually contains saddlery, and saddlery is used on riding horses. A bridle, even a broken one, is an essential item of saddlery.” Having ended her lecture on a sour note, she handed Simon Hooper a mug of coffee.
“I’ve always rather fancied the idea of learning to ride,” he said, “but somehow, I’ve never got round to it.”
It was an encouraging remark but typically, Francesca quite failed to take advantage of it.
“We do realise,” she said in a disparaging manner, “how busy you must have been; putting up wire, setting up crow-scarers, ploughing up the bridleways.”
“Francesca,” I said crossly, “I thought we had agreed to forget all that.”
Over the rim of her coffee cup she looked at me artlessly. “Oh yes,” she agreed, “so we had.”
As a celebration, it was not an unqualified success and I was obliged to follow Simon Hooper out into the yard and apologise for Francesca’s attitude.
“Please try not to be offended,” I said, “it’s such a struggle for her to keep going at all, and the loss of even two or three weekly pupils for whatever reason, upsets her terribly. She is rather difficult at the moment, but I’m sure she will get over it if you persevere.” I was afraid that he would not, that he would dismiss her as ungracious and quick-tempered which, to be perfectly honest, she often was. And yet I knew the other side of Francesca, how courageous she was, how tenacious, how immeasurably patient with her equines and her young pupils and underneath, well-hidden by her quirky humour and her suspicious and somewhat irritable demeanour, how sensitive she was, and how vulnerable.
“You will come again,” I begged him, “It’s been such a long-standing feud, and it’s high time there was a truce.”
Simon Hooper paused with his hand on the gate. I noticed again what a nice face he had, and what a pleasantly uncomplicated, trustworthy person he appeared to be.
“I know I can’t make amends in five minutes,” he said, “I don’t expect to, so don’t worry that I’ll give up too easily, because I won’t. By the way,” he added rather unexpectedly, “I don’t suppose you would care to come out to dinner one evening?”
I was not sure I could handle this. I looked at him cautiously. “You are not just asking me, are you? You are inviting both of us?”
He looked somewhat taken aback, but he was too well-mannered to deny it. “Well, yes,” he said, “I suppose I am.”
“What a perfectly lovely idea. Did you h
ave any particular evening in mind?” I thought it best to pin him down, before he had an opportunity to think about it.
“Well,” he admitted, “almost any night would do, I don’t have a wild social life. What about Thursday?”
“Thursday is fine for me,” I said, “But I will just go and make sure Francesca is available.” I sped across the yard and put my head round the tack room door. “Simon Hooper wants to take us out to dinner,” I said, “would Thursday evening be alright?”
Francesca was rinsing the coffee mugs. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.
“I’m not being ridiculous, this is serious. Francesca, you will come,” I urged.
“Why on earth should I?” She up-ended the mugs on the wooden draining board. “It’s probably you he wants to take out anyway, otherwise he would have mentioned it before.”
“He was afraid you would refuse,” I said, “please say you’ll accept. It’s in your own interest to make friends with him, after all, and it will do us both good to go out, we never go anywhere.”
“No,” Francesca agreed, “that’s true enough.”
I took this to be an encouraging sign. “Then you will come? Do hurry up and tell me because he’s waiting for your answer.”
From beneath her untidy fringe of auburn hair, Francesca grinned at me. From behind the door I grinned back, hoping to detect a softening of her attitude.
“Of course I won’t go,” she said.
“Francesca,” I said in exasperation, “you can’t just refuse for no reason at all, you might be charitable enough to give him half a chance? What on earth will I tell him?”
“How about go and jump in the river?” she suggested.
It was no good. I would just have to work on her later. I went back to Simon Hooper. “Francesca says to tell you she’ll be delighted,” I told him.
TWELVE
The door of the Vicarage stood open to all comers, but St. Luke was not within. The hall chairs were also absent, but the circular table was still there, and on it a scrap of paper. I picked it up, thinking it might be a message.
“… and there shall be a tabernacle for a
shadow in the daytime in the heat, and
for a place of refuge, and for a covert
from a storm and from rain.” Is.5
I could not bring myself to inspect the rest of the house, to find out what further sacrifices had been offered. I walked in the sunshine down the neglected path with its broken barleysugar edging bricks, towards the paddock. Half a dozen bullocks gambolled up to the gate in friendly curiosity. Their coats gleamed even though they had never felt a brush, and pressed together, they rubbed their curled heads against my fists. One of them raised its spotlessly pink nose and licked my palm with its rough, endless tongue. You are sacrifices too, I thought, but you will never know it.
In this paddock our childhood had been played out, and in this paddock it had ended. Here, Simpson had been found dead of a twisted gut, and on this grass The Admiral had stood, arthritic and uncaring, for the humane killer. In this paddock Francesca had planned to start her riding school, but the Diocese had refused to allow it, and now they were doubtless intending to sell it for development. It was all very melancholy, and I wished I had not come.
After the appalling incident which had resulted in the death of Sinbad, Francesca never returned to the Ensdale yard. Soon afterwards she had left to undertake a year’s training at a north country equitation centre, working in return for her training, as is the custom, her living expenses paid for by St. Luke. She never saw Oliver again. She never mentioned him.
“St. Luke has told me there is some money from my mother which will be mine when I am eighteen,” she told me. “There is not much, it’s hardly a fortune, but it’s enough to make a start, to buy some ponies, and when I come back, when I’m qualified, I shall open my own riding school here at the Vicarage. We will do it together. I want you to promise to help me, will you promise?” I had promised.
Then there was only St. Luke and myself at the Vicarage and I was alone in the Ensdale yard. It was a difficult time. We had lost, in one fell swoop, the person who schooled the ponies, and our rider for the horses. The ponies we were already showing in the ring were not a problem. Mrs. Ensdale exhibited them in hand and, thanks to Francesca’s skill and newly discovered patience, the local riders who exhibited them under saddle knew their job. The ponies would be carried by their own momentum to the end of the season, and already their numbers were thinning because sales had been very satisfactory. There would be no more youngsters coming on for the present, but that could not be helped.
The horses were a different matter. I was able to ride the hacks and one or two of the lightweight hunters, and I was more than willing to do what I could, but I was still relatively inexperienced and a lightweight myself. Many people maintain that physical strength is not a necessity in a horseman, but nevertheless there were times when I was no match for a stroppy, powerful middleweight hunter. I had not the strength in the seat and legs to enable me to sit into him and hold him together, I found it hard to effect discipline. I lacked Oliver’s steely nerve and his muscle. There was also the indisputable fact that the clients were expecting Oliver to prepare their horses. It was Oliver they wanted, he was the chief reason they had sent their horses to the yard after all, and Oliver had gone.
To be fair to him, Oliver had been prepared to honour his show ring commitments for the rest of the season, even though he was already riding tests on the Count’s horses. The car and driver would bring him to the show in time to give the exhibit a brief riding-in within the confines of the exercising area before he rode it into the ring. Immediately after the class he would hand over the horse again and be driven away. It was obviously an impossible situation for everyone.
From necessity, Chastity Ensdale accepted the arrangement for a time, but unwillingly, knowing the horses were suffering by it and, naturally, so was she. She had been badly affected by Oliver’s desertion. Before he left there had been angry, emotional scenes which Oliver had countered in his usual manner with icy restraint and unshakeable resolve, so that gradually, albeit painfully, common sense had begun to reassert itself.
Charity Ensdale was still a business woman at heart, and a professional. We were in the thick of a season with several major shows still to come, and some of our exhibits already qualified for the Horse of the Year Show. We had a lot at stake, and if Oliver was not to be of use to us, then there had to be someone else. The problem was that every single rider with any talent at all was already engaged to ride. We needed an experienced rider desperately, but we did not know where to look.
“If only there was somebody we could think of, even somebody we could work on,” Charity Ensdale said in despair “I can think of any number of teenage girls, but what we need is a man, somebody who is going to look right on the horses.”
I badly wanted to help. Oliver was my brother, and if she considered he had treated her shamefully, she had never allowed me to suffer by it. She could have thrown me out and replaced me with, as she had said, any number of teenage girls who would have been only too eager to take my place, but she had been generous enough not to have done so, and I had appreciated it. Now I tried to think of a way to repay her. I looked across the tack room over the nut-brown leather of a straight-seated saddle I was soaping.
“Do you really think we might have time to work on somebody?”
She chewed her lip, pausing in the whitening of a tubular lampwick girth, whilst she considered it. “Well … provided he was experienced enough, and provided he had proven ability to start with.”
I put down my sponge. “Then I know someone,” I said.
I found him on one of the adjoining farms, tinkering with the insides of a tractor which was almost past service, but still used to plough the few furrows necessary to save the hedgerows from the flames of the stubble burning. I rode up to him on The Admiral, and I waited for him to acknowledge me. For a while it did
not look as if he ever would, but finally he raised his head. He did not say anything. We had not met since the incident in the barn.
“Sandy,” I said, “I’ve come to see you because we … because Mrs. Ensdale … needs your help.”
He stared up at me, narrowing his eyes suspiciously. He wore his habitual denims, baseball boots, and a filthy string vest. His ginger hair had grown longer and now stood up in a crest like a cockscomb. It was hard to picture him in the show ring but the situation was desperate and he was the only person I could think of.
“We need a rider for the horses,” I told him, “and I thought you might be able to take them over for us.”
“Me? Have you gone bloody crazy all of a sudden?” he laughed derisively, “I’ve never ridden a bloody show horse in my life!”
“Neither had Oliver,” I pointed out.
“Ah well,” Sandy Headman leaned back on the tractor and looked at me in a reflective manner. He knew that Oliver had left. Of course, everyone in the neighbourhood knew, the news had spread like wildfire.
“Oliver was different, wasn’t he? And I’m not Oliver, am I?”
“No,” I conceded, “but I think you might do the job very well.” I looked at him critically. He was the right size for the big horses anyway, about six feet, the same as Oliver, and broad in the shoulder through labouring on farms, yet slim through the waist and hips with, as they say in horsy circles, a good leg for a boot.
“Sandy,” I pleaded, “if Charlie agrees to release you so that you can come and work for us, will you give it a try?”
He shrugged his peeling shoulders as if he could not care less, but the calculating eyes behind their bleached lashes told me a different story.
“Please?” I begged.
“I don’t know,” he said, “I might.”
“Good,” I said in delight, “I’ll go and tell her.” I clapped my heels into The Admiral’s sides and surprised him into a canter.
“I didn’t say I would!” Sandy Headman shouted after me, “I only said I bloody might!”
Flying Changes Page 9