by
Caroline Akrill
First published 1988 by Armada
1993 J A Allen & Co Ltd as The Silver Bridle
This ebook edition 2015
Copyright © Caroline Akrill
The right of Caroline Akrill to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the copyright holder.
This is a work of fiction.
The author would like to stress that that no character in this book relates to any person living or dead and that all incidents are entirely imaginary.
Other books by Caroline Akrill
Non-fiction:
Not Quite a Horsewoman
Showing the Ridden Pony
Fiction:
Eventer’s Dream
A Hoof in the Door
Ticket to Ride
Make Me a Star
Catch a Falling Star
CONTENTS
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
“Mr Goldstein,” Angel Sylvester was saying in a strained voice as I arrived at the tackroom door, “we’ve got a hearse with one black horse we can let you have tomorrow, but the hearse has shafts, not a pole; you can’t just add another horse because you feel like it, not with shafts… Yes, I’m afraid it’s one black horse or nothing, Mr Goldstein… Yes, two coffins, purple drapes, black plumes or purple… No, Mr Goldstein, not black and purple plumes, black or purple… Well, no of course they won’t fall off, they’re screwed into a special attachment on top of the bridle; what do you think we do, stick them straight into the horse’s head like acupuncture or something?”
Some financial haggling followed which resulted in a figure of two hundred and fifty pounds an hour being agreed for the hire of the hearse with one black horse, plus a flat fee of one hundred pounds for one driver, one pall-bearer and a widow in weeds. “Yes, Mr Goldstein, I think we can make Pinewood by eleven, I just wish you’d given me proper notice, that’s all.” The telephone receiver crashed down. I waited a few seconds before presenting myself in the doorway.
“Excuse me,” I said, “I’m Grace Vincent.” I used my real name, not my stage name.
Amongst an indescribable jumble of period horse accoutrements; caparisons, armour, plumes, saddlery, and a formidable array of weapons, Angel stood. She looked flushed and cross. She was not very tall, and was slimly built with an extravagant amount of long, dark, curly hair. She was wearing jeans with worn suede chaps on the top, elastic-sided boots, and a cobalt blue shirt which exactly matched the spectacular colour of her eyes. She looked at me in an aggrieved sort of way, as if I had no right to be there, although I had spoken to her by telephone earlier so I knew I was expected.
The strawberry roan with the long white stockings had greeted me with more enthusiasm. Now he stood to attention by my side with his front hooves together. “The horse met me on the drive,” I volunteered. “He seems to be loose.”
Angel frowned. “He seems to be loose,” she said in exactly the same strained tone she had used with Mr Goldstein, “because he is loose. He’s loose because if I shut him in a stable he spends all his time trying to get out and he frets so much that all the flesh drops off him in a week. He’s loose because there isn’t a fence or a hedge on the place that can contain him.” As if to forestall any further criticism, she added, “He’s loose because he likes to be loose.”
Angel looked with exasperation at the horse who liked to be loose. The strawberry roan dropped his head in a modest sort of way and feigned an interest in the handles of my holdall, nudging them with his velvety nostrils, making gentle blowing noises. Seeing the holdall appeared to remind Angel that, however inconvenient it may be, I had come to stay and something must now be done with me.
“I expect you would like to know where you can dump your things,” she said, “before you start work.”
“Work?” Despite the fact that I had introduced myself, I wondered if she was still preoccupied with Mr Goldstein and imagined me to be someone else. “I haven’t actually come to work,” I explained, “I’m here to learn to ride. I’m an actress. I’ve been sent here by ATC.” In case she was not familiar with the abbreviation I added, “By ATC I mean Ace Television Company.”
“Oh, I know that.” Angel tapped the strawberry roan’s shoulder with her fingernails and watched with a critical eye as he took a few steps backwards. “But you won’t be able to ride all the time; it would be a physical impossibility, wouldn’t it? And anyway, if you’re not intending to help out, what on earth will you do all day? There isn’t much in the way of entertainment on offer in the country, you know. It isn’t London, after all. It isn’t exactly Soho.”
Did she imagine I thought it would be? I had never met Angel before today, but already I was annoyed by her attitude. I could see I would have to make a stand in order to preserve my rights as a fee-paying customer. “I’m not expecting to be entertained,” I said firmly. “When I’m not having lessons, I shall be reading the script for the series; I shall be learning my part.”
Angel frowned.
“A major part in a television serial takes quite a lot of learning,” I pointed out. “It isn’t something you can memorize at the last minute.”
“No,” Angel was forced to concede, “I don’t suppose it is.”
“So I won’t have all that much free time to lend a hand,” I told her, “although I shall be pleased to help out when I can, naturally.”
“Oh,” Angel said. “Naturally.” She gave me a speculative look. “You do have the script then?”
It was difficult to know what to say in reply to this because up to that moment I had not received it. Yet I saw no advantage in giving Angel an excuse to set me to work in the stables. “If I didn’t have it,” I said, “I couldn’t learn it, could I?”
“No,” Angel agreed, “you couldn’t.” Rather unexpectedly she picked up my holdall. Angel was not a fool. She knew at once that the holdall was too light to contain a serial script weighing several pounds, and a single sweeping glance confirmed that I had no other luggage. Triumph flickered momentarily in the cobalt blue eyes. She led the way across the yard with a jaunty step. The strawberry roan watched us go with a benevolent eye.
We skirted a barn whose open doors revealed a motley collection of horse-drawn vehicles. We walked along a row of stables, some of which were occupied, some of which had been swept clean of straw. We circumnavigated a muckheap as big as a cottage which radiated steaming clouds of intense fungoid heat.
The stable yard with its pink-washed, peg-tile buildings had been tidy and well-maintained, but behind the muckheap nature had gained the upper hand. Now Angel led the way along an overgrown path beset on either side by towering nettles, and as she did so her jauntiness faded, her step slowed, her shoulders began to droop. I could see why.
At the end of the path was a long, low farmhouse. The roof was bowed and many of its tiles were missing. The barge-boards and the window-frames were rotten. Plaster had detached itself from the walls in chunks, revealing ancient wattle and daub. It was a depressing sight.
“Look, I may as well warn you that you’re going to find the accommodation a bit primitive,” Angel warned as the path became even narrower, the nettles more ominou
sly close. “We keep promising ourselves we’ll do it up – you know, treat the beams, mend the windows, get a new roof, that sort of thing…”
A gap in the nettles revealed a moat. Its stagnant water was topped with an unwholesome froth of bright green scum and choked with fallen branches. A pair of mallard took fright at our passing and rose into the air, quacking with hysteria.
“The trouble is,” Angel continued, “there’s always something more important to be done first. New fencing to erect, a carriage to be restored; you know how it is.”
By this time we had reached a vast double oak door whose ancient timbers were bleached and cracked by exposure, and whose ornate and mighty hinges were furred with rust. Angel heaved open one of the doors and led the way inside.
Such an entrance hall must once have been fine, with its floor of honey-coloured pammets, its unstained panelling, and its twin fireplaces of arched Tudor brick, but it was not so fine today. The plaster ceiling was crumbling and discoloured, and the twin fireplaces overflowed with twigs and soot. There were no carpets on the dirt and straw-strewn floor, there were no curtains at the grime-streaked windows, nor was there a single item of furniture. But Cinderella’s coach was there, its interior upholstered in threadbare ivory silk, its exterior stuck all over with yellowing light bulbs, and its dusty silver harness studded with glass diamonds hung from the walls.
“It may not look much when you get this close,” Angel said, “but when you see it from the stalls it’s an absolute wow.”
We squeezed past the coach. We walked up a carved and worm-eaten staircase which had never known a sweeping brush to judge by the accumulated dust, chaff and lumps of mud adhering to its treads. At the top the staircase divided itself into two landings, both lit by narrow, inadequate windows, both unbelievably gloomy. Angel set off along the landing which led to the left, flipping a light switch in an experimental manner and being rewarded by feeble illumination from the only one of six identical cobwebby wall-lights to be favoured with a bulb.
At the end of the landing Angel dropped my holdall outside a plank door and, after a brief struggle, managed to press down the latch. Because of ancient settlement, the upper floor of the farmhouse sloped at a perilous angle. The door swung inwards of its own accord. What was revealed was less of a bedroom and more of a theatrical costumier’s nightmare.
The floorspace was almost totally occupied by clothes-racks, each roughly nailed to the floorboards to halt its inevitable progress down the slope towards the outside wall. Every clothes-rack was bowed by the weight of miscellaneous period clothing. There was no order. Everything looked as though it had been rammed onto its hanger by someone in a demented frenzy. It was chaos. Hunting dress of every era was crammed together with fine Persian battledress; jockey silks in vivid hues were crushed by the sombre weight of coachmen’s many-layered greatcoats; Edwardian side-saddle habits, extravagantly trimmed, were squashed up against the distressed leather, the check and the denim of the cowboy; circus spangles were flattened by military uniforms, and the whole room was pervaded by the unspeakable odour of unwashed clothing, of dust, of musk, and moth.
I am not normally stuck for words. An actress has the mouthings of a host of characters to call upon in extremis, after all, but I could find nothing to say in the face of this. The unexpected eccentricity of the place had taken away my voice. I had not liked the look of the farmhouse from the outside. I had liked it even less from the inside. Now I stood on the threshold of what was to be my room, my refuge, for the next four weeks, and I was appalled.
“I expect you’ll feel quite at home amongst the costumes,” Angel said in a confident tone. “Actresses are usually born in dressing rooms, aren’t they? Cradled in a trunk, or something?”
I wondered if she was slightly deranged. Certainly she was confusing legitimate theatre with life in Variety, when family acts travelled the circuit, and artistes like Vesta Tilley first trod the boards at four years of age. But there was no point in going into all this. “Now look here, Angel,” I managed to say, “if you’re expecting me to sleep in a trunk, or to roll up for the night in a bundle of old costumes, you can forget it, because I shall ring ATC and make them find me decent accommodation in the village.”
Now it was Angel’s turn to be scandalized. “Decent accommodation in the village?” The cobalt eyes regarded me indignantly from above a clothes-rack. “When we’ve gone to the expense of buying a new bed?”
I had not realized there was a bed behind the clothes-racks. But on inspection, hedged in on three sides by dusty costumes, there was a new-looking single divan, complete with duvet and a cheerful buttercup-yellow cover. Somehow the knowledge that whoever ‘we’ comprised had spent money on a bed expressly for my comfort, when there were horses to feed, fences to erect and carriages to restore, softened my heart. I was grateful. “Oh really,” I protested, “you shouldn’t have bothered.”
“Well I know we shouldn’t have bothered.” Angel bounced my holdall on to the duvet in an impatient manner. “I did tell my brother it was a waste of money. I said you would be just as happy on the camp bed, but he wouldn’t listen, he bought it all the same.” Her face assumed a browbeaten expression. “Well, you know what Anthony’s like,” she said in a despondent tone, “you can’t tell him anything.”
As I had no idea what Anthony was like, having not as yet been introduced, I could neither agree nor disagree with this criticism of his character, but I was vastly heartened to think I had such an ally. With a bed I would dare to sleep in and a friend like generous, strong-minded Anthony, I thought I might just manage to survive four weeks of Angel and the incredibly awful farmhouse.
It was not that I had expected luxury, far from it. I had known that whatever accommodation was offered would be spartan. I had even been prepared to share a room with another girl, or be bunked in a dormitory like a boarding school. But I had expected to arrive at an equitation centre; a briskly efficient, purposeful place, with acres of grazing enclosed by immaculate white-painted post and rail fencing, with covered schools and paddocks of show jumps striped in bright, primary colours. What I had expected was an educational establishment, a place of learning, full of other students, staffed by trained instructors with strings of qualifications as proof of their ability. The peeling sign at the end of the lumpy drive had been the first indication that this was not to be the case. MOAT FARM STABLES, it had read. HORSES AND EQUIPAGES SUPPLIED FOR FILM AND TELEVISION WORK.
In a way perhaps I should have been pleased by this, even relieved. I was an actress after all, and to me a professional riding establishment, hair-netted, booted and BHS approved, would have been an alien place. Moat Farm sounded closer to my world. Why, it was almost showbusiness. But somehow I had not been pleased. I had felt uneasy. I had been suspicious. Eleven months looking for work under the wing of an unlicensed agent who worked from a corner booth of a Soho café had taught me many things, amongst them that nobody was to be trusted in the world of stage and screen, and that nothing could be counted on, nothing was binding, not even a contract signed by both parties on the bottom line. Forty-nine weeks in the dole queue and over thirty unsuccessful auditions had shown me that if anything could go wrong, it would go wrong. I had been made wary.
Standing at the foot of the drive, staring at the sign, I had begun to feel the first prickling of doubt about the television company who had sent me to Moat Farm. I wondered why. I wondered if for some reason they considered me unworthy of a proper training establishment, or if they were under-financed and would gradually reveal themselves as insolvent and cheeseparing; if this was an example of how things were going to be achieved – on a low budget, at cut-price, on the cheap.
Angel was now wandering up and down the floorboards, poking at the clothes-racks in a desultory manner. “These costumes need a good brush,” she decided, “they ought to be put into bags, but think of the time it would take.”
I sat on the buttercup-yellow duvet, wishing she would leave.
/> “If I left you a brush, I don’t suppose – in your spare time…?”
“I won’t have any spare time,” I said.
“Does anyone have any spare time these days?” Angel wondered. “I know I don’t. There’s always far too much work to be done and never enough hours in the day, and it’s Anthony’s fault. He won’t have anyone unskilled about the place, and he won’t hear of getting cheap labour on the pretext of training youngsters for examinations like the riding schools do.”
“Good for Anthony,” I said. And if you imagine you are going to use me as cheap labour for the next few weeks, I thought, you can think again.
“As for properly trained people,” Angel continued, “they ask for the most colossal wages, and they can get more than we can afford to pay on the dole these days.”
I knew all about the dole. I also knew how much Mr Goldstein was paying for the hire of the hearse with one black horse, a driver, a pall-bearer, and a widow in weeds. So I was not prepared to offer sympathy to Angel as she pleaded penury.
“If you wouldn’t mind,” I said impatiently, “I need to unpack and change into something suitable for riding. I can find my own way back to the yard.”
“Are you expecting a lesson this afternoon?” Angel gave me a foxy look. “I thought you had something far more important to do.”
“Such as what?”
“Such as learning the script you haven’t got.”
I thought her jodhpur boots made a quite unnecessary din as she rattled triumphantly down the staircase.
The landing window opposite the plank door opened easily, but the one in the room with the clothes-racks and the bed was stuck fast to its frame, despite its rotted appearance. From a pile of equestrian accessories heaped up anyhow in a corner, I extracted a heavy brass stirrup, shaped like a slipper with a pointed toe. I was quite prepared to use it as a battering ram, but the little window surrendered at the first assault, jumping open as if in fright, letting in the cool afternoon air and creating enough of a through draught to blow away the musty smell.
Stars Don't Cry (The Silver Bridle Book 2) Page 1
