The second thing that happened was that I stalled the shooting brake. The handbrake didn’t work due to Lady Jennifer’s habit of driving round with it on, and as we slipped backwards down the incline, gathering speed, the Fanes screamed, Doreen upset the corn, and all was pandemonium. After a succession of bucks and leaps I managed to set the shooting brake lurching forward again. This time we shot straight across the central reservation and narrowly avoided being cut in half by a Jaguar.
“Oh goodness, Elaine,” Nigella gasped, “are you going to kill us all?” The tone of her voice suggested it might be the best way out of a nasty situation.
The pile-up of traffic behind the horses would not let us overtake. We scuttled hysterically in its wake, being hooted at by cars and sworn at by lorry drivers, and all the time we sounded our horn and flashed our lights, waving our headcollars out of the windows and crying uselessly that we were trying to catch the horses. Then the traffic suddenly started to speed up.
“The horses must have turned off!” Nigella cried, but by this time we were stuck fast in the middle lane, carried as helpless as a stick in a stream, past the turning where the wide grassy verges bore the unmistakeable dent of horses’ hooves.
“Turn back! Turn back!” Henrietta screamed, but she could see it was hopeless. It was several miles before we reached a roundabout and sped back the way we had come, fretting and lamenting on the central reservation whilst we waited for the oncoming traffic to allow us to cross.
There was no traffic at all on the side road. We hurtled along with our eyes on the verges and it was only by sheer chance that Henrietta looked up and saw that the stampede was now coming in our direction.
“The brakes!” she shouted. “Elaine! Put on the brakes!”
With The Comet still in the lead, the horses crashed towards us up the lane. I jammed my foot on the brake and we all flew forward, only the bucket saved Doreen from being pitched on to the windscreen. The shooting brake skidded across the road. Nigella, who had opened the door and jumped out before it had stopped, vanished from sight with a horrified shriek. She reappeared, still shrieking, holding out her arms in the face of the stampede.
The Comet, observing that his route was blocked, hesitated in his stride. His gallop became a canter and his canter became a trot. Then, in his own infuriatingly cool manner, he stopped on the verge and studied the distant pinewoods with profound interest, as if the skidding hooves behind were nothing to do with him at all.
We had actually got a headcollar on The Comet and the black horse, and everything might then have been all right, but for the car which came flying round the bend. To be fair to the driver, he hardly expected the lane to be full of horses, and there was no way, brake as he might, he could have avoided hitting one of them, slamming into its side and bowling it over on the tarmac. It seemed mightily unfortunate though, that the horse he hit was Legend.
The next hour was a horrific blur. I remember Legend struggling to get back on his feet with his flank torn open and the blood spreading in an ever-widening pool. I remember Doreen’s screams and the terror in the face of the driver who shook and shook until his teeth chattered. I remember Henrietta racing along the lane like a maniac to find the nearest house with a telephone so she could summon the vet, and I know that eventually the driver had driven off with Nigella to get the horse-box.
I know that the other horses were frightened and bewildered, and that other people arrived and an elderly woman fainted from shock and had to be laid out on the verge, so that by the time Nigella drove up in the horse-box, it was just like a battle scene with the blood and the smell of sweat and the body on the grass, and the weeping and the wailing, and the anxious shouts of complete strangers who, never having been close to a horse in their lives before, struggled manfully as people will in times of crisis, to hold on to the hirelings.
There was no time for tears or recriminations as we organized the transportation of the horses back to the stables, first Legend with his sides and his legs caked with blood, then the others by degrees, and ourselves and the shooting brake. It seemed to take forever to achieve all this, but at last it was done and I was standing in the stable holding the sweating, distressed bay gelding, whilst the vet swabbed and stitched and the Fanes stood with pails of bloody water, and Doreen wept silently in a corner until Lady Jennifer came silently into the stable and took her away, gathering her up like an armful of crumpled laundry.
“You’re lucky,” the vet said finally, as he stood back to survey his handiwork. “There’s nothing broken and it looked a lot worse than it really was. He’s lost a fair amount of blood, but it was a clean injury and not too deep; it shouldn’t leave much of a scar. He’ll be as good as new in a few months.”
We tried very hard to feel lucky. Afterwards we told ourselves over and over again how lucky we were to have a horse at all when he could so easily have been irreparably injured or killed, and that the driver of the car could have been injured himself and have decided to sue. It had been luck of a kind, we supposed.
But standing in the lantern-lit stable on the blood-soaked straw, with our hair matted and our cheeks splashed with red, with the vet called from his fireside, and Henrietta in her sticky, striped apron, we didn’t feel lucky.
We looked at our bruised and battered horse, and we knew that this was the end of the two-day event, the end of the training scholarship, and for all we knew, the end of an eventing career.
12
A Substitute Eventer
“Elaine,” Nigella said, “Forster’s here.”
Friday night. I had forgotten.
“Tell him to go away,” I said.
“I have,” she said, “he won’t.”
“That’s right,” Forster agreed, “I won’t.”
He came into Lady Jennifer’s little sitting-room behind Nigella, took her by the waist and placed her outside the door, closing it in her face.
“That wasn’t very polite,” I said.
“I’m not a very polite person. What are you doing?”
“I’m writing a letter.” This wasn’t exactly true. I was sitting at the bureau with a blank piece of notepaper in front of me and a pen in my hand, but I hadn’t started to write, not yet.
Henrietta came in. She was wearing scuffed, pink, stiletto-heeled shoes, lurex tights, her black leg-warmers and a mini-skirt.
“Goodbye, Miss Fane,” Forster said pointedly.
“Oh,” Henrietta said, surprised, “do you want me to go? I thought I was invited. Before this happened, we were all going out together.”
“All?” Forster looked at me suspiciously. “All?”
“Yes,” I said wearily. “All. It was to be a sort of revenge.”
“I see,” Forster sat down on a small Edwardian chair and rocked back on it, staring at me with narrowed eyes.
“Don’t do that,” Henrietta told him, “you’ll break its legs.”
“And if you don’t leave the room,” Forster said, in a conversational tone, “I’ll probably break yours.”
“I’d better leave,” Henrietta said apologetically, “in case he does.” She went out, resigned to more jam making for the Red Cross.
Forster got up and wandered over to the mantelpiece. He picked up a sepia photograph in a cracked rosewood frame. “Is this old Lord Fane?”
“It was,” I said. “He died about ten years ago. He wasn’t very good with money; I believe he drank.”
Forster set the photograph down again. “I should think his family drove him to it.”
“I do wish,” I said, “that you wouldn’t be quite so scathing about the Fanes.”
Forster came over to the bureau. He wasn’t dressed for going out. He was wearing cords and a jersey and a Husky waistcoat. “Who are you writing to?”
“I’m writing to the BHS to resign from the training scholarship,” I said. “I thought if I wrote straightaway, they would have time to invite someone else to the two-day event in my place. I haven’t actually started
it yet,” I admitted, “it isn’t going to be a very pleasant letter to write.”
“Then don’t write it,” he said, “it isn’t a good idea.”
I stared at him curiously. “What do you mean it isn’t a good idea? What did you come for, anyway? You must have heard about the accident. You must have known.”
“Of course I knew,” he said, “the whole village knew. The whole county probably knows by now.”
“And you knew how I’d be feeling; you knew I wouldn’t want to go out?”
“I knew that as well.”
“Yet, still you came?” I said wonderingly.
“I still came.” Forster leaned one elbow on the top of the bureau and rested his chin on his hand. I looked up at him, and he looked levelly back at me.
“You could have gone out with Janie Richardson instead,” I said.
“I could.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No, I didn’t.”
Henrietta poked her head round the door. “Would you care for some coffee?” she enquired.
“Go away,” Forster said. He didn’t shift his gaze from mine.
The head withdrew. “If she keeps popping in,” Forster said, “I might easily break her neck as well as her legs.”
“Why did you come?” I said.
“I came,” he said, “just in time to stop you writing a letter you might regret.” He pulled away the notepaper and crumpled it into a ball in his fist.
“But if I don’t write it now,” I said, “it will still need to be written; if not today, then tomorrow, or the next day, or the next.”
“No,” he said fiercely, “it needn’t!” He hurled the crumpled piece of paper into the fireplace. “You can’t give up as easily as that!”
I looked at him in astonishment, not knowing whether to feel hurt or angry. “I’m not giving up easily,” I told him, “or because I want to, only because I have to!”
Forster turned away. He pushed his hands into the pockets of his waistcoat and glowered at the threadbare carpet. “Elaine,” he said eventually, “this scholarship means a hell of a lot to you.”
“You mean it did,” I said carefully. “It would have meant that Legend and I had a really good start, with all the professional help we needed. It would have given us a foot in the door of the eventing world; and of course, it would have been nice to have earned it ourselves, not to have been dependent on the Fanes to finance it. Yes,” I admitted sadly, “the scholarship meant an awful lot, and I’m very, very sorry to have lost it.”
“But you might not have completely lost it,” he said.
“I could try again next year,” I admitted, “but the way things are going I might not have a horse next year; if the Fanes get really hard-pressed, Legend could be the first to go.”
“I don’t mean next year,” he replied, “I mean this year. I mean now.”
I looked at him, surprised to find he still didn’t completely understand. “But I have,” I said, “I’ve completely lost Legend for this year, he won’t be fit enough to do anything for at least three months. The two-day event’s next week!”
“You’ve lost Legend, yes, but you could go on another horse, you could take a substitute! They allowed somebody to take a substitute last year; horses are always going lame at the last minute, they accept that!”
“Another horse?” The idea had not crossed my mind. It hadn’t occurred to me that I could compete in the two-day event on any horse other than Legend. “But ride another horse …”
To tell the truth I didn’t really want to ride another horse. How on earth would I be able to do justice to a strange animal in the short time there was left to train before the competition? Always supposing there was a suitable animal to be had, which was exceedingly unlikely.
“There isn’t a horse I can think of who could take Legend’s place” I said finally. “Animals of his quality don’t exactly grow on trees, you know; they’re very hard to find.”
“I realize that,” Forster stared at the carpet. “It just seems such a wicked waste of an opportunity to get so far, and then have to give in.”
“I know,” I said.
“So if there was something, anything, that was nearly good enough to be a substitute at least you wouldn’t be out of the running altogether. You’d still have a chance.”
“Yes,” I said doubtfully, “I suppose I would,.”
“After all,” he went on, “they are assessing potential, they must have seen potential in your own performance, and they would certainly have seen it in Legend.”
“I suppose so,” I agreed.
“And in three months he’ll be working again, so the chances are that he’ll be completely fit by the time the course begins.”
I nodded in agreement.
“So you owe it to everyone to try; to yourself, to Legend, even to the Fanes.”
I frowned. “Well, if you put it like that …”
“Elaine,” Forster said, “is there no other horse, even remotely suitable, that you could take to the two-day event?”
I stared at him silently, thinking of a grey horse who never lost his courage, a horse who could gallop, a horse who never, ever, flattened over his fences. It was a risk, I knew, but: “I do believe,” I said, “that there is.”
I went into the kitchen. The heat and steam and the sickly smell were overpowering. Lady Jennifer was ladling the Red Cross jam into jars. Henrietta was sitting at the table writing labels with her tongue between her teeth and her hair was clinging damply to her forehead in little tendrils. Nigella was weighing sugar.
“Where’s Forster?” they wanted to know.
“He’s gone,” I said. “I’ve just shown him out. And I would like you to know that I’m still going to the two-day event.”
“As a spectator?” Nigella said. “Won’t that be rather depressing?”
“Not as a spectator,” I said, “as a competitor.”
Henrietta looked up from the labels with her mouth open. “But you haven’t got a horse,” she objected. “How can you possibly …”
“I’m going on The Comet,” I said.
“Not The Comet!” Nigella cried. “Not possibly! You can’t be thinking of taking The Comet to the two-day event!”
Henrietta pushed damp hair off her face and looked at me speculatively. “What about the cross-country?” she wondered. “Will he run away?”
I shrugged. “The only question is, will he run in the right direction?”
“But the schooling,” Nigella cried in agitation, “and the dressage! Will we have time to prepare?”
“We’ll make time,” I said.
I dipped my finger into one of the pots of jam and sucked it reflectively. It tasted a lot better than the last batch.
Everyone was silent, deliberating this new turn of events. Henrietta had stopped writing labels. Nigella’s sugar lay forgotten on the scales. Only Lady Jenifer continued to fill up the jam jars.
“I should think The Comet might be frightfully good at eventing,” she said.
13
An Evening with the Pony Club
“Are you sure you don’t want any help with your dressage, Elaine?” Nigella said. She was walking by my stirrup as we left the little grass rick-yard which made an ideal, enclosed arena for our show-jumps. The Comet had jumped everything we had constructed, steadily and with the minimum of fuss. We had decided not to tempt fate by taking him over the cross-country course in the park; we had had enough anxiety and accidents, and the grey horse’s performance over fences at speed had never been in doubt.
“No,” I told Nigella. “Quite honestly, I would rather work by myself. It’s a completely different test, so I’ll ride a few movements at a time and learn it as I go along.”
Nigella went off to help Henrietta hose Legend’s legs. He had been on three corn feeds a day at the time of the accident, and the enforced idleness had caused his legs to become puffy and heated. He was now on a non-heating diet of bran, sugar beet p
ulp and sliced roots and we were hosing each leg with cold water for fifteen minutes twice a day. His flank was healing nicely.
I rode The Comet out into the park and began to ride the test through. The hirelings ambled over and stood in an aimless little group outside the markers, watching our circles and our halts, our transitions and our serpentines. The Comet was stiff at first, and uncertain, but as time went on he became better and better and it was clear to me that at some time he had been schooled to a very high standard indeed. I rode him back to the stables, pleased with the way he had performed, but at the same time, slightly troubled.
Before he had left on Friday evening, Nick Forster had asked me out again, and this time I had promised faithfully not to bring the Fanes. I hadn’t been looking forward to telling them that I was going out without them, but in the event I was saved by Thunder and Lightning Limited who sent four complimentary tickets for a local DiscoNite at which they were making a live appearance. When I refused mine because I was already going out with Nick, the Fanes decided to give the extra tickets to Doreen and Brenda, so everyone was happy.
When it came to getting ready though, I hadn’t a clue what to wear. I looked at the clothes in my worm-eaten wardrobe and I didn’t seem to have anything suitable at all.
“Where are you going with Forster,” Henrietta wanted to know, “that you have to make such a fuss?” Henrietta never made a fuss about clothes. She had thrown together an alarming outfit for the DiscoNite consisting of the lurex tights, the black leg-warmers, an elongated purple jersey that barely covered her thighs, and her scuffed pink satin stiletto shoes.
A Hoof in the Door (Eventing Trilogy Book 2) Page 9
