Flying Changes Page 4

  I had been the last to visit St. Luke. It was barely six weeks since I had called at the vicarage to enquire after his welfare, but already it seemed colder and emptier than I remembered, especially the hall with its bare, exposed tiles.

  “Wasn’t there a carpet here?” I said. I was positive it had been there six weeks ago, thin, faded, and worn into patches, but a carpet nevertheless. Oliver, when he had been about enough to know such things, had said it was Persian and, despite its threadbare appearance, probably worth a small fortune.

  “What will we have for lunch?” Francesca opened the refrigerator. The kitchen looked almost the same, the familiar pine table was still there, the ladder-backed chairs. Only the Dutch dresser was missing. Francesca slammed the refrigerator door shut. “There isn’t anything we can eat – Where’s Mrs. Fernley?” she demanded.

  Mrs. Fernley had been the latest in the endless line of daily helps, but, neatly managing to avoid the question, St. Luke produced a bowl containing four small eggs from a cupboard. “Would boiled eggs be acceptable?” he enquired.

  “Of course they would.” I found a suitable pan under the sink and half-filled it with water. In the washing-up bowl I could see traces of last night’s supper which had been tinned spaghetti. Tonight’s supper, a solitary fishcake, was defrosting in a saucer on the draining board. Something was not quite right at the Vicarage, I felt. “Where is Mrs. Fernley?” I asked St. Luke. “Has she left?”

  “And,” Francesca added, having peered through the serving hatch into the dining room, “where is the sideboard?”

  St. Luke took the claw hammer out of his pocket and put it in the drawer with the knives and forks. One felt he was playing for time, but he was saved from having to reply because one of the eggs in the bowl exploded and the kitchen was immediately filled with the most appalling smell.

  “Oh my God!” Francesca fled to open the outside door with her hand over her nose.

  “Amen,” said St. Luke in a heartfelt voice.

  FIVE

  “Francesca,” I said, “something will have to be done about St. Luke.”

  “Really,” Francesca took hold of the grey pony’s tongue and pulled it out to an alarming length. She squirted a worming syringe into its throat. “Why?”

  Over the pony’s stiffened neck, I looked at her in exasperation. She waited whilst the pony struggled to swallow before she loosened its tongue and wiped away grey saliva on her anorak. I clipped the log and rope back onto the headcollar. “You know perfectly well what’s happening,” I said. “You can’t pretend it isn’t any of your business.”

  The grey pony lifted its head, pulling up the log to its farthest extent, raising its nose in a gesture of equine disgust, displaying long, curved, discoloured teeth.

  “If St. Luke wants to sell the furniture, if he chooses to live like a monk, if he prefers it, why should it be any of my business?”

  Francesca moved along the row of stalls towards her next victim. The fat piebald eyed the box of syringes and assumed an antagonistic expression with its ears pressed back against its furry neck. Unable to find the courage to kick, it tried to squash us against the partition instead. Francesca thumped its ribs and it shuffled over reluctantly, wrinkling its nose in outrage. I unclipped the log and rope.

  “It isn’t really the fact that he’s selling the furniture that worries me, after all, it’s his to sell, he can do what he likes with it.” I wondered if Francesca was being deliberately evasive.

  “Then why do anything about it?” She grabbed the fat piebald by the jaw and managed to force its mouth open, despite some determined resistance.

  I handed her a syringe. “But surely you realise what he’s doing with the money?”

  Francesca discharged the syringe. “No, but does it matter?”

  I buckled up the noseband of the headcollar and clipped on the rope. The fat piebald shook itself furiously as if it expected to rid itself of the smell and taste of mebendazole; as if it might fly off externally in the way that water flies in droplets from a dog’s coat. “Not if you don’t mind that he’s putting it into St. Chad’s restoration fund,” I said.

  We had moved out into the passage, having come to the last occupant of the pony stalls and were about to move on to the loose boxes. All of the stables were old and in desperate need of repair, but inside their occupants were strapped and well fed, and the straw was carefully harvested wheat, deeply laid, with thickly banked sides.

  “What did you say?” Clearly it had not occurred to Francesca that anything other than eccentricity and a desire for austerity was the motive for the sale of the furniture. “Are you sure about that?” Beneath her tousled fringe, her grey-green eyes were incredulous.

  “Of course I’m sure. Where else would all the money have come from? Who cares enough? Who, apart from St. Luke, sees St. Chad’s as anything other than a lost cause? And anyway,” I admitted, “I telephoned Mrs. Fernley.”

  “Mrs. Fernley?”

  “I knew she wouldn’t have left. I suspected that her services had been dispensed with for the sake of economy and I was right. St. Luke told her he no longer needed her a month ago.”

  We walked to the first of the loose boxes in silence, both of us pondering over St. Luke and his obsession. I opened the lower door and took the unsuspecting bay horse by the headcollar. Francesca tore the plastic cap from the end of the syringe with her teeth, spat it into the straw, and blew back her fringe in a business-like manner.

  “We shall have to find a way to stop him,” she decided.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “But I’m not sure how.”

  “No. Neither am I.”

  “We shall have to think of something.”

  “Oliver would know what to do.” It was instinctively said without any intent to cause offence, but the flight of the syringe was abruptly arrested in mid air. Francesca glared.

  “Don’t ever mention Oliver’s name in this establishment,” she snapped.

  “Sorry,” I said, “I wasn’t thinking. You know me, always putting my foot in it.”

  “Don’t mention his name,” Francesca warned, “don’t talk about him, don’t tell me anything about him, because I don’t want to know.”

  “Of course you don’t. I do realise.”

  “And anyway,” Francesca demanded, “since when has Oliver ever considered anyone other than himself?”

  As I had only just agreed never to mention him, there was no reply I could make to this.

  “Oliver cares for nobody,” Francesca said in a furious voice. She shot the contents of the syringe into the bay’s throat with deadly intensity. Despite this, the horse gave a sudden and violent cough and ejected the paste which landed like a grey wormcast on the front of her anorak. “Grief, Redwing, you are an awkward brute,” Francesca complained.

  I watched in silence whilst she scraped it off and re-presented it to the horse, pulling his tongue out sideways over his pointed wolf teeth, smearing the paste with her fingers as far back as she could reach. Together we held his jaws shut whilst he swallowed furiously and with deep anxiety, his ears flipping backwards with the effort of every gulp.

  “I don’t know what’s happened between you and Oliver, and I don’t want to know,” Francesca said in a bitter voice. “All I know is that you’ve always been loyal and he’s never done a sodding thing to deserve your loyalty.”

  I thought it prudent to stay silent. I did not necessarily agree with what she said, but I was not prepared to argue about it.

  “Oliver is obscene. Oliver contaminates the ground he walks on. I shall never forgive,” Francesca said, “the filthy way he betrayed and disgraced us.” She hurled the empty syringe into the bucket making the bay horse start.

  I did not want to listen to any of this. “It’s St. Luke we are concerned about at the moment,” I pointed out, “not Oliver.” I picked up the half-empty box of loaded syringes and the bucket containing the spent ones and followed her out of the stable. The bay hor
se watched our departure with obvious relief.

  Francesca strode ahead to the next box and cuffed back the excitable chestnut who, despite the fact that she alone rode him, fed him, groomed him, and loved him best of all, lunged at her in a threatening manner, snaking his head and showing his teeth. I often wondered if she minded that he did not love her back and decided she did not. After all there were many more amenable, gentler animals in the yard she could have preferred, and still she chose to love the chestnut.

  “I think we shall have to help St. Luke with his fund raising,” I said. “If he can see that we can raise money by other means, if he can see the red line rising, maybe he won’t feel it necessary to sell the furniture.” I grabbed the chestnut by the headcollar and leaned on it with all my weight to prevent him rising up onto his hindlegs.

  Francesca inserted her thumb and forefinger behind his wolf teeth, prised open his mouth, dragged out his tongue and administered the dose.

  “Fund raising? Us?” She frowned.

  “Why not?” The chestnut, enraged by the efficiency and swiftness of our onslaught, drew his head into his chest, causing the glands around the cheeks of his jawbone to stand out like marbles, then snaked out his neck and grabbed Francesca’s anorak in his teeth. She slapped his nose smartly in well-practised retaliation and he backed off into a corner, snapping sulkily at the air with his teeth. His viciousness was largely bluff, but he could have become a tyrant in less capable ownership.

  “You mean flag selling – that sort of thing?”

  “Not quite. I thought we might organise things in the village, you know, a Bring and Buy sale, a Fête perhaps, a Gymkhana …”

  “No gymkhana,” Francesca said firmly.

  “Why not?” I looked at her in surprise. Of the three things I had suggested I had thought a gymkhana would appeal most of all.

  “Because.” She slid the bolt of the chestnut’s loose box decisively. His neighbour was the roan cob with the long, white stockings. He gave us a gentle whicker of welcome and eyed the advancing syringe with composure.

  “Because of what?” I said impatiently. I could see that fundraising was going to be impossible if every suggestion I made was to be dismissed without good reason.

  “Because there have been more than enough gymkhanas in our lives already.” The roan cob, anxious to oblige, opened his mouth and swallowed the dose with equanimity.

  “But that’s nonsense,” I protested, “why, we haven’t been to a gymkhana, we haven’t even watched gymkhana games since … since …” I tailed off as I remembered, “… since Bickerton,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  The roan cob watched with benign interest as we gathered up our equipment. He walked beside us to the door in a companionable manner. It is St. Luke we are trying to help, I thought indignantly, it is St. Luke we should be thinking about, and yet it is Oliver who dominates our thoughts. “Bickerton was ten years ago,” I said.

  “Was it?” Francesca pulled open the door of the next loose box. A barren Arabian mare with spectacular looks and two large splints regarded her with caution. “It doesn’t seem like ten years to me.”

  I handed her a syringe. The Arab mare backed into a corner.

  “Whatever you say, whatever anybody says, it all started at Bickerton,” Francesca said, “It was her fault, you know, everything was all right until he met her.”

  I sighed as I took the unwilling mare by the headcollar. This was an old argument. Francesca had never ceased to blame Charity Ensdale for the way Oliver had behaved, insisting that if she had not lured him away, flattered him, given him a taste for expensive horses, for adulation, things would not have ended the way they did. Of course, this was not necessarily true; Oliver may well have become the person he became notwithstanding Charity Ensdale, or anyone else for that matter, but the accusation was not entirely without foundation. Because Charity Ensdale took Oliver away from us when she was thirty-one years old and he was seventeen, and there was not a single thing we could do about it …

  SIX

  We had never seen Charity Ensdale until the day of the Bickerton Show, but we had certainly heard of her, who hadn’t? Hunters and hacks from her yard had won practically every major prize on offer, and the Ensdale prefix was well-known in breeding and showing circles. Francesca and I had often ridden past the low, half-timbered farmhouse where she lived, breathing in the warm, musky scent of the geraniums which filled the borders and the window-boxes, reining-in our ponies to gaze enviously over the hedges at the thin-coated, graceful thoroughbreds we so coveted, when all we had were our cobby ponies. Even Oliver, in those days, had a pony; a hot chestnut mare with two white stockings called Simpson, who flew in and out of bending poles like a startled woodcock and was unbeatable at musical poles. Fellow competitors groaned aloud when Oliver rode Simpson into the collecting ring because they knew that the first prize was as good as won. One might have imagined that some of his gymnastic brilliance would have rubbed off onto Francesca and myself, but it never did. Francesca was too hot-headed for gymkhana games, and I was thwarted by the natural sloth of my pony, The Admiral. Oliver did try to coach us once or twice but to no avail. Francesca was short on both patience and temper, and I was soon frustrated into apathy by The Admiral’s lack of enthusiasm. Oliver, swinging down effortlessly to lift a flag as the game little mare stretched her neck and streaked across the paddock, was baffled by our incompetence. “I can’t see why you find it so difficult? It’s the easiest thing in the world.”

  It had ben memorably hot for the Bickerton Show that year. Francesca and I had sought the dappled shade of an oak tree at the far end of the exercising area and our ponies, with Simpson, were tied beneath its branches by their headcollar ropes, wafting their tails at the flies, and making half-hearted attempts to nibble bark in agreeable languor. We had braved the stifling camaraderie of the licensed marquee for bottles of light ale and cream soda and now we waited, with rising impatience, for Oliver to return with the sandwiches.

  “If I had realised he was going to be this long, I would have gone myself,” Francesca said in an irritated voice. She had pulled off her boots and her socks and she lay on her stomach with her feet in the air. The collar of her shirt was undone, her tie hung loose, and by means of a twig she had managed to secure her thick, auburn plaits to the top of her head. Her cheeks were flushed from the heat, her brow furrowed with annoyance as she squinted across the showground, and a burst of freckle had appeared on her nose. Despite this, Francesca had an enviable attractiveness which I had never begrudged for the simple reason that she herself had never valued it. She never cared how she looked, nor did she seek to capitalise upon the fact that her smile could melt the stoniest reserve, because mostly Francesca frowned. She was frowning now.

  “Oh come on, Oliver! Kathryn, you don’t think he could have forgotten?”

  I shrugged, partly because the heat had taken away my appetite, and partly because my eyes were glued to an approaching horse. It was a bay thoroughbred with a coat like satin, a tail like a fall of black silk, with its mane stitched into a row of perfect buttons along the elegant length of its neck, and in the saddle – Oliver!

  Simultaneously, we scrambled to our feet. Oliver rode up to us, smiling, not hurrying, sitting on the bay mare in that easy way of his, as if riding was the most natural thing in the world, as if there was nothing to it.

  “Oh, what a gorgeous thing!”

  Some people, romantics maybe, are irresistibly drawn to grey horses; others, liking a bit more show, are attracted to the fiery chestnut or the dazzling palomino. Francesca always admired a coal black horse, but all my life I have adored bay horses and this one was exquisite. Her coat was the colour of a newly-shelled conker, her mane and tail were black, her ears black-tipped, and around the eyes and nostrils where the coat faded, the skin was dark brown velvet. As Oliver loosened the reins of the double bridle, she lowered her beautiful head, positioning next to my face a large, thoughtful eye, in which the p
upil waved like an anemone in a deep pool. I laid my cheek against her muzzle, her breath was warm and sweet. I thought I might possibly die for love of her.

  “Oliver, where are the sandwiches?” Francesca demanded. Barefoot and indignant, she squinted up at him. “And whose horse is this anyway? Where did you get it?”

  From the tone of her voice one might have imagined it to be a gypsy horse, plucked in the night from its tether and discovered in the morning, lame and abandoned by the roadside.

  “It belongs to Mrs. Charity Ensdale. I’ve been asked to ride it in the Equitation Class.”

  “You?” Francesca was incredulous, you would have thought that Oliver was incapable, that he had never ridden, “but you can’t. How can you? You haven’t any clothes.”

  “Of course I’ve got clothes,” Oliver said, “and I’m to borrow a jacket and some long boots, although they’re half a size too small, I expect they’ll pinch.” Looking down at my besotted face, he grinned. “She is gorgeous isn’t she? But it appears that she has no particular talent. She doesn’t jump, she’s too small to race, and not bold enough for hunting. Mrs. Ensdale plans to show her as a hack.”

  “If she were mine, I wouldn’t care if she couldn’t do anything at all.”

  Already my expectations of the equine race were realistic. I knew it was possible to have an ugly horse who could jump higher and gallop faster than the rest, if you didn’t mind the fact that it hated you, but if you had a beautiful horse who could jump higher and gallop faster than the rest, and it loved you, then the chances were that it would twist a gut, or develop navicular, and break your heart. So it seemed to me that a horse as beautiful and sweet-natured as the bay mare had no need of any particular talents, that it was unreasonable and unrealistic to expect it. Running my hands over the shimmering neck, marvelling at the softness and the closeness of the coat, I said: