Flying Changes Page 2

  “You knew, Kathryn, when you came here, that I could only offer you a position as my personal assistant,” Oliver said sharply.

  I said nothing. What was there to say? Of course I had known it, but the truth was I would have accepted any job, I would have washed the windows, swept the floors, I would have cleaned out the drains if that was what I had to do to be reunited with Oliver.

  “I told you exactly what your duties would be. I explained most carefully.”

  This was also true. But other, more important things had not been explained. Four years of discipline in the dressage schools of Europe had turned my brother into a stranger who intimidated and terrified everyone who worked under him, and yet this same cold, elegant stranger was himself stage-managed from above by the omnipresent, omnipotent hand of the sponsor, and moved in such an atmosphere of highly-charged tension that the very air around him seemed charged with a feverish emotion. I had seen my brother in many compromising situations before, and all of his own choosing, but never one as potentially unhealthy as this.

  “I think we should both admit that it was a mistake for me to come here,” I said. “I should have known that I would never enjoy secretarial work. I should have realised I would never be happy working away from the horses.”

  Oliver frowned. “It is impossible for me to offer you a position with the horses, Kathryn, you now that.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of asking you to. Everyone knows you never employ female labour in the yards.” I was unable to keep the edge out of my voice.

  “I was not responsible for that decision,” he replied in an even tone, “Tio Fino made the rule.”

  Yes, I thought, but you agreed to it, but then you would, wouldn’t you Oliver? I did not actually trust myself to speak. I was too chilled by the proximity of thin ice to open my mouth.

  “If you are thinking of going back to work for Francesca,” Oliver said, “I am sure you will have considered the substantial drop in salary.”

  “Monet isn’t all that important to me.” I looked at him in irritation. It was disturbing and somehow even shaming to realise he still knew me well enough to guess what my plans were when I no longer knew him at all.

  “… I believe it is something of an understatement to say that the accommodation is abysmal …”

  I thought of the accommodation, the dilapidated cottage with its sweating floors, its black beetles, its rotting soleplate, its damp-mottled walls. I gritted my teeth.

  “… the absence of an indoor manège means you will have to work outdoors even in the most disagreeable weather …”

  “Do you think I don’t know it?” I snapped. I was trying to stay calm, but already my palms were damp and I could feel my heart speeding ominously in my chest. He was speaking to me as if I was an imbecile and totally incapable of giving any consideration to what was involved.

  “… the hours will be endlessly inconvenient, and Francesca – well …” He leaned back in the chair and surveyed me in a cool and slightly amused manner as he evaluated Francesca, “Francesca is not always … congenial.”

  Congenial! I wanted to shout: Who the hell are the congenial people here, Oliver? You, who barely allow yourself to acknowledge that I exist? John Englehart, who can’t wait to see the back of me so that he can make himself even more indispensable to you? Or the caballerizos, so much in awe of you that they tremble at your approach, and so jealous of their charges that even to reach out a hand towards a silky, Andalusian neck is to invite a hostile glance. Congenial, I could have shouted, don’t make me laugh, Oliver! But instead, by a superhuman effort of self-control, I managed to stay silent. I did not look at him. I kept my eyes on my glass. At times like this, I thought, it must be very soothing to be able to reach for a cigarette, but I had never smoked.

  We sat in silence for a while, my brother and I, the one coolly watchful, the other trembling with suppressed fury and trying not to show it.

  “Of course,” Oliver said eventually, “there is a possibility that we could agree to a compromise.”

  “A compromise?” I had not expected this. I looked up. “What kind of compromise?”

  “If you would agree to stay, I could speak to Tio Fino. There is a possibility that I could persuade them to allocate you a horse.”

  “Allocate me a horse?” I stared at him stupidly.

  “But why not? You have the experience. You trained, as I did, with Count Von Der Drehler, and you are perfectly capable of teaching dressage at the basic level. I need a second rider, and if Tio Fino approved your change of status you need no longer concern yourself with office duties, you could work with me.” And because I continued to stare at him dumbly, he added, “That is what you wanted, is it not?”

  “Is it?” I managed to say.

  “I rather thought so.” The golden head was resting on the back of the chair, and one eyebrow was raised in an enquiring manner. “Well Kathryn, what do you think?”

  “What do I think?” I looked across at him and the thick-lashed blue eyes looked back at me steadily. I thought him shameless and heartless, and very, very beautiful. “I think you are a swine, Oliver,” I said, “I think you had this in mind all the time, I think you could have done it from the beginning, but you chose not to.”

  Abruptly, the glass which had been twirling idly in the talented fingers stopped twirling.

  “I think you brought me here to teach me a lesson, to punish me for choosing to stay with Francesca instead of following you to Europe five years ago. I think you deliberately set out to demonstrate your indifference to me and, if I think correctly, you have succeeded better than you know.”

  Oliver’s expression did not change. Only his eyes gave an indication of the lowering temperature.

  “I also think,” I continued somewhat shakily as I struggled, and failed to disguise my anger, “that you don’t believe I really want to leave at all, you think I would actually prefer to stay. I think you consider me as much in thrall as the rest of your sycophantic followers, ready to fly to your side at the lifting of an eyebrow, at the raising of your little finger.”

  “And am I wrong in that assumption?”

  “You are,” I said. “I have been your alter ego, your underling all my life, Oliver, but this is the end of all that. You will not persuade me to stay by any means.”

  “I see.” Oliver got up from his chair. He seemed untouched by the anger in my voice. He walked over to the Pembroke table and replaced the glass upon the silver tray.

  I got up to leave. In retrospect, it would have been wiser not to have said any more, but I was enraged by his attitude, by the way he had ignored and humiliated me, by the way he had offered me the opportunity to become second rider only now, when I had thought to leave him, and by the way he took my compliance completely for granted.

  “You still don’t believe I’ll go, do you,” I demanded. “I wonder why that is? Is it because you think I can’t live without you? Or is it because you think this place is so marvellous, so fantastic, that nobody of sound mind would ever want to work anywhere else? Is that it?

  The criticism inherent in the latter question appeared to have some effect. Oliver turned. “I would have imagined that working for me would have been vastly preferable to working for Francesca,” he said in a cold voice.

  Somehow this reference to Francesca was the last straw and all of my earnest desire to say nothing I might later regret was forgotten.

  “My God, but you’re an arrogant snob, Oliver,” I cried, “as well as a manipulated fool! Do you really think I have enjoyed working here? Can’t you see what a precariously artificial set-up it is? Don’t you realise that you’re being stage-managed every step of the way? Would you really like to know what I think of your bloody precious dressage horses, your frightened little caballerizos, your bloody mixed-up sidekick, John Englehart? Shall I tell you Oliver? Shall I?” I was about to tell him anyway, because I could not stop myself. “Don’t you care that you are being exploited?” I raged at him
, “Don’t you realise that it isn’t art any longer, but show business that you are into? Don’t you know that you are being packaged like a detergent, marketed, hyped by your sponsors for commercial gain? Can’t you see that when they have capitalised on your talent and exhausted your popularity, they will dump you out with the garbage without a second thought …” The expression of controlled fury on his face prevented me, warned me, not to go on. Already my own anger had evaporated. Already I was appalled.

  “Oliver,” I said desperately, “I didn’t mean it. You know what I’m like; that somehow, I always manage to say the wrong thing …”

  He did not look at me. He did not speak.

  “I was angry … you made me angry … you made me say it …”

  He walked over to the door. He opened it.

  “Oliver,” I pleaded, “Oliver, please …”

  He held open the door and stood, waiting for me to leave. Only a few feet of carpet separated us, but it might as well have been a continent. I knew I would never reach him now, never. There was no way I could retract what I had said, and why should there be? Who was I to criticise when I had never achieved anything noteworthy in my life, and anyway, what was wrong with commercialism in a commercial age? How else could Oliver have achieved all this by the age of twenty-seven without sponsorship, and what sponsors would have backed him if he had not had magic? Magic, talent, ambition, dedication and glamour. There was never any doubt, especially in my own mind, and even at that very moment, that my brother had all these attributes, and more.

  I thought it best to leave. On my way out I tried once more to apologise but was silenced by a dismissive wave of his hand. Once again he was elegantly composed, the impeccable façade was intact. The damage, if there had been any, had been swiftly repaired, the blue eyes were disinterested, the sensual mouth disdainful. His manner was as one who had been slightly inconvenienced by an unexpected visitor whose departure must be hastened without any obvious lapse of good manners. It was as if my outburst had never occurred. As if I had dreamed it.

  Grabbing the outside handle, I slammed the door for all I was worth.

  THREE

  “If we take a leading rein each, and sandwich the rest of the little blighters between us, we might just get them all back alive,” Francesca said in a grim voice.

  We stood in the stable yard surrounded by a mêlée of ponies and children and fretting parents. For once, it wasn’t actually raining, but the air was unwholesomely cold and damp, beading every possible surface with moisture and making me wish I had worn something more waterproof than a jersey.

  “I suppose it is inevitable they go out on another hack?” a parent enquired, “Davina much prefers a formal lesson, and she did say she received very little personal attention last week. It isn’t that one doesn’t comprehend the problem, but one is paying for instruction, after all.”

  There were many suitable replies I could have made to this: that the black ash manège had been entirely swallowed by the mud; that it was unrealistic to expect personal attention on a hack when there were so many novice riders to supervise; that riding out was in itself a form of instruction, instilling road sense and country lore, encouraging observation and independence, and that many children, Davina excluded, preferred it. However, two weeks at Pond Cottage Riding School had convinced me that the paying client was God and instead I heard myself promising to make the child my own personal responsibility.

  I helped shivering children into damp saddles, tucked slimy leather into keepers, tweaked up girths, adjusted hat-straps more firmly under infant chins, altered stirrup leathers, clipped a leading rein onto a fat piebald and mounted a roan with long, white stockings and a blaze which ended in a pink, vulnerable nose. I wondered if riding school work quite suited me.

  Francesca, mounted on an excitable chestnut, rode towards the gate with her beginner in tow, calling the ride into some semblance of order behind her. Her jodhpurs were ingrained with dirt, her anorak torn, her boots smeared and caked with mud. Her hair was twisted into a ragged pigtail, her cheeks were chapped, her lips flaking, and the classically perfect nose which lifted her looks above the merely pretty, was red at the tip from exposure. In marked contrast, the chestnut’s coat gleamed, its mane was neatly laid, its tail immaculately pulled at the dock and trimmed below the hocks. I had long ceased to ponder the logic of Francesca’s priorities. The morning after I had arrived I had appeared in the yard wearing jeans, and Francesca had been shocked. “I never wear jeans,” she had said, “I like to look professional. We must keep up appearances.” It had been on the tip of my tongue to point out that appearances might be better maintained in clean jeans than in jodhpurs that no amount of washing could restore to their original colour, but previous indiscretions had left their mark, and I said nothing. Since then I had worn jodhpurs as well, but mine were brown, as a defence against the sweat, the horse hairs, the glycerine saddle soap, the mucking out, and the appallingly insidious mud.

  I took up my position at the rear of the ride with the fat piebald at my side and Davina, a thin, grave child mounted on a placid dun, in front. The hooves of our cavalcade clattered cheerfully along the lane which bordered Francesca’s land, but the view from the saddle was far from cheerful. Beyond the scrappy, wire-reinforced hedge the mud of the manège was hock deep. Alongside lay the flooded jumping paddock with its scattering of rusted oil drums, its listing wings, its stacked banks of tyres; and as if this were not depressing enough, on either side of us stretched the poached, impoverished acres of grazing where the gateways were impassable and where no blade of grass showed. I wondered if Francesca, when she had made her decision to start her own business from scratch, starting at the bottom, catering for children and beginner riders at grass-root level, had realised that the bottom would be quite so low-lying, and that the grass roots, if there were any, would be drowning.

  At the head of the procession Francesca struck out at a steady trot, setting the uneven line of velvet caps bobbing. Beyond the roan cob’s pricked ears, Davina rose up and down, stiff-backed, her fingers too tight upon the reins, and, level with my stirrup, a chubby infant bumped happily in the saddle with the frighteningly loose innocence of the very young, lurching forward in a heart-stopping manner in order to pat the fat piebald on its damp neck and giving me the benefit of a radiant smile. I was greatly troubled by responsibility.

  Pond Cottage Riding School, as I saw it, had two serious deficiencies. The first was lack of capital, and the second as a direct result of the first, was lack of land. The cottage, its buildings and its six waterlogged acres belonged to a local speculative builder who had bought it in the hope that he might eventually be granted planning permission, but the council had so far proved intractable, and Francesca had now been I residence for five years. The fact that her position was precarious, that the council might one day recant, rendering her stable of twenty equines homeless, was something Francesca didn’t allow herself to think about.

  “Why worry myself hairless over something which may never happen?” she had said when I mentioned it, “Why cross bridges before I come to them?”

  “Why bury your head in the sand? Why not face facts and be prepared?” I might have replied – but didn’t.

  In common with many small riding schools in greenbelt areas, Francesca’s establishment was welcomed by those who patronised it, and loathed by local residents who liked their countryside tidy and picturesque. Thus they complained to the council that she made use of the footpaths where they exercised their dogs and demanded that stiles be erected to prevent equine access. They despatched a spokesman to demand that she remove her manure bags from the side of the lane where they had been displayed for sale, the better to catch the eye of passing motorists. Even the wide, laneside verges, previously utilised as a refuge from speeding traffic and to save shod steel, now carried council-erected signs which proclaimed NO HORSE RIDING.

  Francesca also waged a fierce battle against a local farmer who periodically t
ried to discourage her from exercising her legal right to use a bridleway which crossed his land by blocking the ride with heavy farm machinery, ploughing right up to the headlands, and padlocking the gates on the pretext that people had been letting his cattle out. Such concentrated opposition might have disheartened others, but not Francesca who, her brows knitted with annoyance over her grey-green eyes, wrote letters of complaint to the council and the British Horse Society Bridleways Officer, resulting in the eventual removal of the machinery, the flattening of the headland, the unpadlocking of the gates. Now, her face set, she reined in the chestnut at the head of the ride and stared down at two bright strands of newly-erected barbed wire which stretched across the entrance to the bridleway.

  “Would you believe it,” she said in a furious voice, “the swine’s wired us off!” Scandalised, she jumped down from the chestnut and began to untwist the ends of the wire with her bare hands, watched anxiously by her pupils as they struggled to prevent their ponies from grazing the roadside grass.

  I didn’t like the look of this. “Francesca,” I called, “wouldn’t it be less trouble to keep to the roads?”

  “Keep to the roads?” Along the wintry skeleton of the hedgerow, Francesca glared at me. “You can keep to the roads, Kathryn, if you like, but I’m using the bridleway!”

  Several velvet-capped heads turned in my direction in order to observe my reaction to this fevered response, but I just shrugged in acquiescence. My life had recently been too full of conflict to enable me to enter lightly into argument.

  With Francesca back in the saddle and the wire left looped provocatively over a convenient bough, we rode onto the bridleway. It was not an auspicious start to a Saturday morning, and as the children fell into casual groups of twos and threes in order to resume their chatter, Francesca stood in her stirrups and hawked the surrounding area for any sign of her opponent. Her manner was uncompromisingly militant and I hoped there would not be a confrontation. I wanted no part in other people’s hostilities.