A Hoof in the Door (Eventing Trilogy Book 2) Page 5

  Hounds by this time had melted away into the ring-side, and were being fed sweets and crisps and ice-cream and other forbidden things. One of them was blissfully rolling in some droppings, another sat down in the centre of the ring and scratched itself. It was not the impressive display that either the hunt or the show committee had anticipated.

  Henrietta, Nigella, Doreen and myself hid ourselves away behind the members’ tent until we heard the riding horses being called. We knew that not even the rousing cheer that went up as the hunt, remounted and reassembled, re-entered the ring to begin their parade afresh, would appease the fury of William and Forster and the huntsman, who knew full well that half of their subscribers had been standing at the rails to witness their embarrassment.

  The bad-tempered chestnut, with all passion spent, went quite well in the riding horse class. The judges gave him some long and favourable looks, and he even managed to put his ears forward at times, such as on the approach to the two small jumps he was asked to negotiate, and during his gallop. The result of this was that Henrietta came cantering out of the ring with a yellow rosette. It may not have been the one she had wanted, but in the circumstances it was very creditable.

  It was lunchtime by now, and the working hunter class was not until half past two. We despatched Doreen to fetch some sandwiches, and Henrietta and Nigella went off with their rosettes to collect the prize-money from the secretary. I was left to lead the bad-tempered chestnut back to the horsebox.

  Halfway across the ground I was dismayed to see that Forster was walking towards me. He was not alone, and there was no way I could decently avoid him. I knew he would still be simply livid about the fracas with Henrietta and the bad-tempered chestnut, and I had really hoped that I wouldn’t have to face him until things had cooled down a bit. Yet I knew I would have to apologize for the Fanes sooner or later, and I steeled myself to get it over with. I needn’t have bothered.

  The other person with Forster was Janie Richardson. Forster had his arm around her. I thought he might have removed it, when he saw me, but he didn’t. He just gave me an icy look and said, “I’d have that bloody horse destroyed, if I were you.” Then Janie Richardson giggled and slipped an arm around his waist, and they walked on, looking into each other’s eyes.

  I felt curiously numb as I led the bad-tempered chestnut up the ramp of the horsebox, unofficially borrowed from Thunder and Lightning Limited, who had ill-advisedly left it parked in the coach-house. I rugged and bandaged the chestnut and gave him a haynet. Then I turned my attentions to Legend and my thoughts towards our appearance in the working hunter class. Or at least, I tried to; but the image of Forster with Janie Richardson kept getting in the way.

  6

  A Working Hunter

  The pinewoods were inviting; they were dark and cool and silent, and very, very private. I would have given a lot to be able to ride away into them; to lose myself in their deepness, to ride through and beyond them, out into the brown and green and gold of bracken and gorse and tree-lupin, where the soil grew light and sandy, and dipped its pebbly fingers into the grey, unwelcoming turbulence of the North Sea. But as I worked Legend steadily on the edge of the showground and his head gradually came down on to the bit, and he settled into his regular, fluent stride, I was cross with myself for becoming so easily depressed about Forster, when there should be other, more important things on my mind.

  I told myself that there had never been anything at all serious between Forster and me, and there probably never would be. After all, he thought me a fool, he had told me as much often enough; and I worked for the Fanes whom he detested. There was also his reputation to consider. I had been warned about him times without number, so there was no earthly reason why I should get so overwrought about seeing him with Janie Richardson. Nevertheless, every time I thought about it, I felt as if I had been kicked in the stomach.

  I decided not to think about it. I forced myself to put it out of my mind completely. I thought about the Training Fund and the scholarship instead, and I concentrated exclusively on schooling for the working hunter class which was due to begin in less than half an hour. Legend and I trotted faithfully in circles and serpentines, and cantered figure eights with simple changes of leg, and threw in some transitions and half-halts for good measure.

  Things were going very smoothly by the time I heard the first call for the working hunters. I rode Legend back to the horsebox, pleased by his swinging stride, his row of immaculate plaits, the eager curve of his black-tipped ears, and the silky gloss of his bay coat.

  “Legend doesn’t half look lovely,” Doreen said in a wistful voice. She held him whilst Nigella put an extra gleam to his coat and his black legs with a rubber, oiled his neat hooves, and applied Vaseline highlights to his nose and round his dark, thoughtful eyes. Henrietta pulled off his tail bandage and brushed out the bottom of his straight, sleek tail exhorting me to hurry and put on my jacket. Then, with my hat brushed and my boots shining after the ministrations of Nigella’s rubber, I set out for the main ring on my sponsored potential event horse, glad of the new, nut-brown double bridle we had purchased out of the Training Fund, but hoping that the stirrups wouldn’t fly off the saddle.

  We left Doreen walking Legend round the collecting ring whilst we walked the course. There were five fences to be jumped and they were well spread out, with lots of grass between them because, unlike a show-jumping course which has to be jumped with precision and accuracy involving much placing and collection, they were to be jumped at a good, hunting pace, not a gallop, but a fairly brisk canter.

  The first jump was a plain, brush fence about three feet high, constructed of birch. “Like the Point-to-Point fences, only smaller,” Nigella commented. The second was a log pile made of old railway sleepers stacked one on top of another to a height of about three feet six. The third was a gate with the top bar painted white.

  “That needs to be jumped fairly accurately,” Henrietta said, pushing it with her foot and setting it swinging on its pins. “It isn’t fixed.”

  The fourth fence was a combination which consisted of a hay rack with a rail in front of it, and an upright rustic post and rail. Nigella paced the distance and we decided that it would be three good strides between the two. I could see that I would have to be cantering fairly fast to get it right, and I could also see that the post and rail was narrow and had no wings; it would be all too easy for a horse to dodge out to the side of it and Legend, although he hardly ever refused a fence, was not averse to dodging out of a difficult one, if he thought he could get away with it. The combination fence was going to be my bogey.

  The last fence was a bank made with a double row of straw bales covered with artificial grass and topped with a hog’s back of silver birch poles. It was over four feet high, with a spread of about five feet six, and it was set at a crafty angle, so that after flying the combination, you had to steady up immediately in order to negotiate a hair-pin bend, then muster enough impulsion to manage the spread. It was a cleverly designed course which demanded absolute control, brain-power, and a bold horse with plenty of scope, yet to the crowd at the rails, accustomed to the thrills of the Puissance and the colourful fences of the show-jumping arena, it must have looked incredibly boring; five drab fences to be galloped over in the shortest possible time.

  When we got back to the collecting ring, the steward was chalking up the numbers in the order of jumping which had been decided by means of a draw. He recognized Henrietta by the length of her plaits. “The hunt is parading again at four,” he said, giving her a jovial poke in the ribs with his chalk. “I hope you won’t let us down. We’re expecting it to be just as good as the last one.” Henrietta flushed at this reference to her earlier catastrophe; she was not yet ready to regard it as a joke.

  I was fifth to jump which was just where I would have chosen to be. I would hate to be drawn first, because I needed to see how the other riders tackled the course, and I wouldn’t want to be further down the list because of the s
uspense of waiting a long time to jump. As it was, Henrietta, Nigella and I stood at the rails to watch the first few. The judges were standing in the centre of the ring with their clipboards, the jump stewards took up their positions, and the first of the working hunters, a flea-bitten grey with a roman nose and pink-rimmed eyes, cantered round the ring, waiting for the bell. Doreen was still walking Legend round the collecting ring.

  When she heard the bell, the aged woman-rider of the grey cantered one more circle before turning into the first jump. The grey pricked his ears at the brush fence as if it was the one obstacle in the world he had been longing to jump. He cantered at it with evident enthusiasm, then suddenly changed his mind and dug in his heels at the very last moment, stopping on a violent skid, gouging two deep channels out of the turf, and landing with his pink nose on the clipped birch.

  The aged woman-rider, who had shot up his neck and lost her hat, struggled back into the saddle, applied her stick to his ribs and set him back at the fence. The grey sailed over. This performance was repeated at every fence, but the pair were totally defeated by the combination, and the judges were forced to ping their bell for elimination. On the way out the grey cleared the first two fences in reverse order and without hesitation, which must have been simply infuriating for the aged woman-rider.

  The next horse to jump was a little black cob with three white stockings and a blaze. He looked the sort of horse you see on chocolate boxes and calendars, but he was not the sort of horse you expected to see in a working hunter class.

  “He’ll be in trouble over this course,” Henrietta commented. “He’s very short-coupled and short-striding, he just doesn’t have the scope.”

  The little black cob sailed over the brush and the sleeper-pile in fine style, but he tipped the gate, which swung wildly and fell as he approached the combination. He cleared the hay rack, took an incredible five and a half short strides, and screwed himself up and over the rustic post and rail, dislodging the top rail with his hind legs and almost losing his rider in the process. The hair-pin bend, though, presented no problem at all, and by whipping up a certain amount of speed, his rider bustled him over the spread. The crowd gave him a round of applause for a game effort.

  The third horse was a handsome chestnut gelding ridden by a determined-looking young man in a bowler hat and brown butcher boots. They cantered round the ring looking as if they meant business, and they did. They achieved a perfect round and a burst of spontaneous applause as they finished. I missed the last half of it because I was looking for Legend. When I had been ready to mount, neither he nor Doreen were anywhere to be seen in the collecting ring. They were finally found half-way across the showground, Doreen having decided to join the queue for a milkshake, and taken the horse with her. Henrietta delivered them back, Doreen by the scruff of her neck, still gripping a blue and white straw between her teeth. Nigella, displaying sound economic reasoning in the midst of high tension, said she should be allowed to go back and finish it, milkshakes being the price they were.

  “One day,” Henrietta promised, as she bolted back across the showground, “I’ll wring her skinny little neck.”

  After a few cantered circles in the collecting ring, I put Legend at the practice jump. It was a thin, rustic pole balanced on two jump stands, not at all like the solid fences we had constructed in the park, and he clipped it carelessly with his heels. The second time he jumped it with inches to spare, so I left it at that and walked him over to the main ring entrance to wait our turn. The last horse to jump before us was very hot. It raced at its fences and went into the combination so fast that it couldn’t even take off in time for the second part and crashed through it, taking the rails on its chest.

  There was a short delay after this, whilst the judges decided whether it counted as a knock-down or a refusal, but as the horse had not actually left the ground, it was counted as a refusal, and the rider was told to jump the combination again. This time the horse managed to scrape over with one and a bit strides in between the fences, but it completely failed to negotiate the hair-pin bend and flew straight past the bank instead of jumping it. After another circuit of the ring, the rider managed to steer it into the bank and the horse cleared it like a steeplechaser, and galloped past us into the collecting ring.

  “Goodness,” Nigella gasped, “it’s almost as bad as The Comet.”

  “It’s worse,” said Henrietta. “The Comet jumps a lot better than that; at least he doesn’t flatten over his fences.”

  It was my turn. Legend and I trotted into the ring to a breathless shriek of, ‘Good luck, Elaine!’ from Doreen, who had torn herself away from the milkshake stand and arrived in the very nick of time to see Legend perform.

  I had been very nervous just before the class, but now I was actually in the ring, and although I was very much aware of the crowd pressed against the rails, my nerves were steady. With the soft thud of Legend’s rhythmically cantering hooves in my ears, and the supple reins of the double bridle between my fingers, I was ready and waiting for the bell, and as soon as it went I turned Legend into the first fence.

  I was half-expecting him to put in one of his silly, exaggerated leaps over the birch brush, but he didn’t; his ears pricked forward, his stride lengthened into it, and he jumped it perfectly. On we thudded, over the sleeper-pile, across the springy turf and into the swinging gate. We cleared it with no trouble at all. Now for the combination.

  I knew I had to keep up a fairly brisk pace to get the stride right, and I also knew that the tendency is for both horse and rider to slow up instinctively when two fences loom ahead instead of one. In my anxiety to do the right thing, I pushed on too hard and I rushed Legend out of his stride. It was entirely my fault that he met the hay rack slightly wrong and took off too late and too close to the fence. He went up like a lift, both stirrups flew off the Fanes’ hateful old saddle, and I crash-landed back on to it only just in time to stay with him as he put in two racing strides and soared up over the post and rails. He could so easily have run out instead, because I wouldn’t have been able to do a thing about it, but he carried on and took me over without so much as a look to left or the right.

  I was back in balance with him in time to make the hairpin bend, and we cantered on towards the bank, lengthened into it, met it exactly right and flew over, stirrupless but triumphant, landing to the sound of applause and the shouts of the jump steward who came running with the stirrups and leathers.

  The Fanes were delighted although their delight turned to agitation as six out of the fourteen horses left to jump went clear, which meant that eight of us went into the next phase of the class with similar marks.

  But I didn’t doubt for a moment that Legend would win the class. In the showing phase he performed as impeccably as I had known he would. He trotted and cantered and galloped and stripped better than any of the others; even the handsome chestnut gelding ridden by the young man in the brown butcher boots was well and truly outclassed. When everything goes so well, it all begins to have a dreamlike quality, and I was in a daze by the time the judges had hooked the triple-tier red rosette on to Legend’s new double bridle. I almost forgot the lap of honour and followed the other prize-winners into the collecting ring. I had to be shooed back by the steward.

  We cantered in front of the grandstand whilst the band played If You Knew Susie in quickstep tempo and the crowd did a handclap which turned to cheers as we gave them a spirited gallop along the rails. Legend would dearly have liked to do it again, knowing that it was really his triumph, but I brought him back to a trot as we neared the collecting ring, and rubbed his neck gratefully with my knuckles. I knew he had won the class in spite of my riding, not because of it.

  There was a splash of scarlet at the ringside. It was worn by someone who stood alone at the rails beside the blackboard which still had the numbers chalked upon it. Forster didn’t smile or acknowledge me at all; but our eyes locked for a brief moment before he turned and walked away.

  7
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  The Message of the Dressage

  “Working trot down centre line, at L circle to the left twenty metres diameter, X to M leg-yielding …” The pages of Training the Event Horse fairly flew, as Nigella went in pursuit of the explanation to this new mystery.

  I knew all about leg-yielding, having spent hours watching Hans Gelderhol, the golden boy of eventing and three times European Champion, instructing dressage riders at the training centre where I had studied for my Horsemaster’s Certificate. “It’s just a matter of the horse giving to the lateral aids and moving on four tracks,” I explained, “it’s a perfectly simple exercise.” I didn’t add that I had never actually tried it.

  “It doesn’t sound simple to me,” Henrietta said grimly, “it sounds jolly difficult. How on earth can any horse move along on four tracks all at once?” Henrietta hated dressage.

  “There seems to be a separate track for each leg,” Nigella said, having finally come to rest at the appropriate page of her Bible. “The horse moves along at a slight angle to the side of the arena, with his head slightly bent away from the movement, and the rider uses the lateral aids, the leg and the hand on the same side. When the horse is on four tracks,” she read, “one hind leg moves to a position between the forelegs, and the other moves outside the forelegs. Here, you can see how it works in this photograph.”

  Henrietta took the book with a sigh of resignation. “I shall never understand it,” she groaned. “I don’t even see why I have to try.”

  “You have to try because I need all the help I can get if I’m to stand any chance at all of winning a scholarship,” I said severely. “I must have someone standing in front to check if Legend is actually moving on four tracks; I won’t be able to tell for myself. Somebody has to know what we’re aiming for!”