Flying Changes

by Caroline Akrill

  FLYING CHANGES

  by

  Caroline Akrill

  First published 1985 by Arlington Books.

  Copyright © 1985, 2013 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.

  Disclaimer:

  This is a work of fiction.

  The author would like to stress that no character in this book relates to any person living or dead and that all incidents are entirely imaginary.

  Acknowledgments:

  Jennie Loriston-Clarke for the loan of DUTCH COURAGE for the book jacket, Peter Egan for giving Oliver substance, Charles Harris for help with dressage technicalities, Elaine How for artistic endeavour beyond the call of duty.

  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

  Stars Don’t Cry

  Catch a Falling Star

  For my mother and father with love

  ONE

  Oliver was livid when he found out. John Englehart had warned that he would be, but still it took me by surprise. What made matters worse was that I didn’t even tell him properly, it just slipped out by accident.

  He had just finished one of his celebrated exhibitions and he came into the commentary box in his tail coat with the doeskin waistcoat and the suede-seated white breeches.

  “Make a note, Kathryn,” he said in his precise way, “that next time I would like the music switched after the flying changes and before the passage; the tempo of the second piece is more suited to collected movements.”

  He looked, as ever, incredibly cool and elegant. The only sign that he had performed for two solid hours on four different horses were the sweat clouds on the inside of his boots and the rein-welts across the fingers of his white kid gloves. Experts maintain that only the supremely confident can afford to wear white gloves for dressage, but naturally, Oliver always had the most perfect hands.

  I had lodged in my mind at that particular moment an irritant of a different nature, concerning the non-appearance of the Swedish Decanters. These graceful objects had been delivered earlier in the day, each one enclosed in polystyrene and crated against the journey, and as Oliver had done the choosing they were in the very best taste; a perfectly plain claret shape in heavy glass with a bubble suspended in the base and a matching bubble stopper. The trouble with the bubble stoppers had been that they refused to budge, and when I had tried to loosen the wax seal under the tap, the water had been unexpectedly hot and the first decanter had divided neatly into two halves. So now, with Question Time imminent, and Oliver confidently expecting the sponsor’s obligatory sherry to be dispensed from the decanter instead of the bottle – he strove hard against the stigma of commercialism, even though the place was owned, down to the stable staff anoraks and the paper napkins, by Tio Fino – the Swedish decanters were still lying in their polystyrene shrouds with their bubble stoppers stuck fast, and one of them was broken.

  Preoccupied with this discomfiting knowledge, I pushed the demonstration folder (in the inevitable Tio Fino beige with the blue and ruby border and the discreet trademark of an Andalusian horse) over to John Englehart, who was gathering together his commentary notes in the nervous fluster Oliver’s presence induced in him, and asked him to make the alteration.

  “Because next time,” I countered, as he raised his brown, spaniel eyes in reproach and shuffled anew to locate a pen, “I won’t be here, if you remember.”

  Within the few seconds of silence which followed upon this ill-considered announcement, the unfortunate John Englehart, knowing himself revealed as an accessory, appeared to be affected by paralysis, the pen fixed above the page, whilst I, the decanters forgotten in the face of this new dilemma, stared at Oliver, holding my breath, praying that he hadn’t heard; that by a miracle, the significance of my indiscretion had somehow escaped him. It had not.

  Oliver just stood, and after the briefest flash of incredulity, his eyes froze into chips of ice. “And where will you be Kathryn,” he enquired in a smooth and interested voice, “when you are not here to remind Mr. Englehart to change the music?”

  I didn’t know what to say. The tactful presentation of unwelcome news has never been my forte, and if I have ever achieved it, it has not been without a good deal of agonised rehearsal. Now, totally unprepared, I faced the most convoluted rendition of my life.

  “Well, Kathryn?”

  I could have lied, I suppose. It would have been the easiest thing to have invented a dental appointment, or an unexpected invitation with which to explain my absence on the day of the next demonstration and Oliver would have believed it – why wouldn’t he? And it would have been simple after that, to pack my belongings and steal away, leaving a brief note containing a partial explanation for my departure. In the circumstances, it might have been the most sensible way, but:

  “I won’t be here, Oliver,” I said, “because I am about to give you notice. I’m leaving.” I was surprised to hear how mater-of-fact it sounded.

  Oliver didn’t look surprised. He was too well disciplined now to show emotion. It seemed to me that the discipline of his art had taken over his life, and that his art had filled his life to the exclusion of everything and everyone not connected with it. Even so, something about the way he looked caused a little knot of emotion to unravel itself in a wholly unwelcome and frightening manner inside my chest. I knew it was neither the time nor the place for explanations, but I could not be silent.

  “I can’t stay, Oliver,” I said, “because if I do I shall probably go mad. I just can’t cope. The atmosphere is beginning to affect my nerves. I’m beginning to mislay things. I forget things. I even break things …” Already my voice had taken on a hysterical note as I prepared to confess to breaking the decanter, but John Englehart, revived by the possibility of an unpleasant scene in which he might be called upon to take my side against his employer, towards whom his feelings veered hourly between dog-like devotion and vicious resentment, applied a sharp elbow to my ribs.

  “Not now Kathryn,” he said in a scandalised voice, “you can’t possibly go into all that now, not when people are waiting, there isn’t time.”

  Oliver’s face was glacial. And, of course, there wasn’t time. He knew perfectly well that his audience would be waiting: the BHS students nursing their carefully prepared questions about renvers and travers; the professional instructors and judges, looking to analyse, longing to criticise, seeking to fault his performance even when no fault could be found, hoping in their secret hearts that this time they would find him less perfect than the last. There would be the handful of international experts, secure enough in their own position to be fulsome about the suspended elevation of the passage, the rhythmic spring of the piaffe, the perfectly cadenced bound of the pirouette. And there were the ladies, always for Oliver, the ladies; the young and the not-so-young, waiting their opportunity to speak to him, to stand close to him, to touch him, to ask for autographs, photographs. Because at twenty-seven years of age, my brother, Oliver Jasny, was the darling of the dressage set; the fêted, talented, stunningly aristocratic exponent of haute école.

  It was at this point that one of the caballerizos (the Spanish grooms) who had been hovering in an agony of uncertainty outside the partition, in all probability despatched to remind Oliver that his pres
ence was not only passionately desired, but paid for in advance, managed to summon up enough courage to tap upon the glass to gain his attention. Oliver, whose only perceptible movement so far had been a tightening of the jaw, shot him a glance savage enough to send him scuttling away down the gallery steps. Then, in a deliberately controlled gesture, he pulled off his gloves one finger at a time and dropped them singly onto the demonstration folder.

  I might have imagined that only I knew how angry he was, but I noticed John Englehart flinch, and I looked at his agonised face and resolved that I at least, should not be intimidated. And so I was able to meet his icy gaze in a resolute, if not entirely dispassionate manner, but even so, I was not unaffected by that marvellously beautiful face. It sounds extreme I know, when used to describe a man, but beautiful was the only way to describe it; the fine regularity of the features, the fair, golden hair, straight and swept above the dark curve of the eyebrow, the thick-lashed glamour of the brilliantly contemptuous blue eyes, the sensual mouth.

  But now, the sensual mouth was clamped into an uncompromisingly tight line, and the brilliant blue eyes were like flint, and as the door of the insubstantial commentary box slammed against the abrupt departure and the entire structure quivered, John Englehart lunged forward not quite in time to prevent his commentary notes from slipping off the table.

  “I told you he’d be a bitch about it,” he said.

  TWO

  “Sherry, Kathryn?” Oliver raised an enquiring eyebrow over his own particular blend of super-dry fino.

  “Why not?” I sat on the edge of a wing chair wanting nothing but to have the whole thing over with. How odd life is, I thought, when hundreds of people, thousands, would give anything to be in Oliver Jasny’s private sitting room and just at this moment, I would give anything, everything, to be somewhere else.

  Oliver poured a second glass and handed it to me without comment. He knew I hated it. He walked slowly over to the French windows and stared out in the direction of the stables. He never drew the curtains. It didn’t seem to occur to him that someone, unknown and unseen in the darkness, might be out there, watching him. That, lit from within like an actor on a stage set, he was exposed and vulnerable in his own home. Or perhaps it did occur to him and he was indifferent to it.

  I was not going to speak first. I turned the glass of pale, undrinkable liquid in my hands, and my eyes wandered restlessly around the room. It was furnished sparsely and with typical refinement; two wing chairs, a Pembroke table to hold the drinks, a Knowle settee. Touches of the sponsors were evident in the long coffee table with the tooled Spanish leather top, and the branched wrought-iron lamp. There were no ornaments, no photographs, nothing personal, only a John Skeaping bronze on the mantle shelf, and above it, a watercolour of Oliver riding San Domingo, his best and most famous horse. It was a masterly portrait, painted by a leading artist, displaying all the power and brilliance of the magnificent Andalusian, but it was not a picture to delight a dressage enthusiast. The bay coat was flecked with foam, the neck overbent, the mane unplaited. There was a wildness about the horse wholly inappropriate to the art of dressage, and yet in comparison, Oliver’s self-discipline was complete as, hatless and unsmiling, he controlled the horse with the lightest touch on the rein. If the painter had exercised artistic licence in his portrayal of San Domingo, he had clearly been under severe restraint when it came to his rider. Oliver’s elegance, his effortless style, his chilling disdain had been captured to perfection, but there was not a hint, not the slightest glimpse of the person underneath. It had occurred to me more than once during the last two months that there might no longer be a person underneath; that the Oliver I had worshipped all through my childhood had gone forever. But common sense told me that this could not be so, and I still believed that somewhere beneath the seemingly impermeable shell of condescension and indifference with which he surrounded himself, I would find the Oliver I had once known, the Oliver who had once loved and needed me, and perhaps still did. I turned away from the picture. I took a tentative sip of the super-dry fino. I thought it might descale a bathtub nicely.

  “Kathryn,” Oliver said, “this evening was terrible.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “I know.”

  “Where were the decanters?”

  “I couldn’t get the stoppers out,” I said, “and then I broke one.”

  “You broke one.” He was wearing silver-grey corduroy trousers with a black silk shirt open at the neck to show a thick chain of Spanish silver. He did not turn towards me as he spoke. His voice was as dry as his sherry.

  “It was an accident, Oliver. I tried to free the stopper under the hot tap and the whole thing cracked in half.”

  “You could have read the instructions. They were perfectly clear. You soak out the stoppers in warm water to which you have added …”

  “… a little detergent. I know. I found the instructions later, they were in the bottom of the crate, under the decanters; by that time it was too late.” It was galling to realise that he had checked, that he already knew.

  “And the books, Kathryn. What happened to the books?”

  I sighed. In my anxiety over the decanters I had omitted to put out the books. We usually sold at least two dozen copies of Oliver Jasny’s Dressage after each demonstration. This time there was no excuse to be made and I made none.

  “And the videos?”

  My heart dropped. I had not even remembered that I had forgotten the videos, and whilst I had decided to put forward my inefficiency as one of the chief reasons for my departure, I had not envisaged being made to feel I might be understating my case.

  “Oliver,” I said, “all this proves that it was a mistake for me to come here. I shall never be any use to you in an administrative capacity because I am not suited to the work, you must see that.”

  There was a pause whilst Oliver walked back to the sherry and refilled his glass. This time he did not invite me to join him. “All I can see, Kathryn,” he said with asperity, “is that you appear to lack application. It is only a matter of organisation. I do not ask you to do a lot – the work is not difficult.”

  I looked down into my glass, knowing just how difficult it had been, but also knowing that if I considered the duties which comprised my organisation of Oliver’s working day, I would be forced to agree with him, because the work was not difficult. In the morning I sorted his mail, paid his bills, sent out signed photographs, set aside his personal correspondence, attended to the filing. I then had to select two classical tape cassettes and deliver them to John Englehart in the commentary box. Oliver’s class of promising riders, each individually auditioned and selected for training by the Dressage Improvement Board, would already be assembling below in the Olympic sized arena with its vast mirrors and polished kicking boards, and it was John Englehart’s task to welcome them, to oversee their riding-in, and to prepare them for Oliver. The riding-in and part of the instruction was given to a background of music as an aid to fluency and relaxation. On the previous day to the accompaniment of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Oliver had made his entrance, bareheaded and on foot, in cream breeches and brown boots, his open-collared shirt topped with a leather gilet, just as one of his protégés had been soundly deposited upon the tan by a particularly mischievous fly-buck. Casually he had stretched out an arm and taking the rein of the horse as it cantered past him, had arrested its flight and returned it to its rider, whom, with the politest of attention, he assisted back into the saddle before turning to greet the class as a whole. As an entrance, as a piece of timing, it had been magnificent, and yet there had been nothing contrived about it, nothing planned.

  “Sometimes,” John Englehart had said in a constricted voice, “it makes me sick just to watch him.”

  After the class I collected the fees; thirty pounds from each pupil and not a penny of it subsidized by the Dressage Board. It was considered an honour to be chosen, a privilege to pay, and no one ever intimated that it might be excessive. Naturally, Oliver
was never seen to handle money or to indulge in small-talk after the class. It hardly mattered. The elevating combination of Beethoven and Oliver Jasny had such an intoxicating effect that the pupils emerged from the indoor school emotionally shattered, coiling gamgee and bandages with unsteady fingers, leading their expensive horses up the ramps in a euphoric daze, clipping the gateposts with their Range Rovers and trailers as they drive away. The rest of my day was spent either on the telephone, in liaison with the sponsors over expenses, publicity, arrangements for demonstrations, teach-ins, and the touring dressage clinic, or at the typewriter, answering general correspondence, fending off social invitations which rained in for Oliver in a never-ending stream and were never, under any circumstances, accepted, in making out stable duty lists for the caballerizos, in preparing commentary notes for John Englehart.

  “No,” I admitted finally, “it isn’t difficult.”

  “Oh,” Oliver turned at last, affecting mock surprise. “You agree?”

  I felt the first stirrings of exasperation. “Well of course I agree. It couldn’t be described as a difficult job. Almost anyone could do it.”

  Oliver sat down on the other wing chair and stared at me. “But Kathryn,” he said in a perplexed tone, “you do not seem able to do it.”

  His formal manner, the stilted language he used, the way he chose to ignore the fact that I was his sister, speaking to me as if I was just a recalcitrant employee, infuriated me. And yet I had resolved not to lose my temper. I did not want things to end badly between us.

  “It isn’t that I can’t do it,” I explained, “only that that I don’t have an aptitude for it – typing, filing, office duties, have never appealed to me. I find it hard to apply myself. I lose concentration.” I wondered why it should be necessary to explain how I felt when once there had been no need of explanations, when once a glance would have told us all we needed to know. “Any job is made easier,” I said peevishly, “if the work is enjoyable.”