Chapter 7
Seven
I’m still wondering if I’m making the right decision when I shut the door of Jasper’s Land Rover on Monday morning and watch as he trundles back down the long drive of Maycourt.
‘You can do this,’ I whisper to myself, tugging down on the hem of the smart blazer I’m wearing, trying to ignore the butterflies flitting around my stomach as I force my feet to walk in the direction of the stables.
Straight away, I step into a pile of horse muck, grimacing as I shake it off my barely worn Chelsea boots.
Taking a deep breath, I regroup, and then continue across the yard.
Reaching the stables, I walk in and look down at the rows of ponies, their heads hanging over their half-doors staring at me.
The smell in here, an earthy mix of hay, dust, leather and horse hair, is at once nerve-racking and comforting, haling me right back to the time I spent in stables as a kid when I didn’t want to be anywhere else, yet still felt like I didn’t quite belong.
The latter part still rings true. A horse whinnies down the way, the sound echoing around the stables.
‘Can I help you?’ a clipped, formal voice says behind me.
I jump, spinning round to see a girl standing behind me carrying some kind of rope. Her light-blue eyes peer out from beneath a fringe, her brown hair tied back into a ponytail. She’s about my age or a bit younger and wearing a t-shirt and faded blue jeans.
Her wrist is in a sling.
‘Are you Julia?’ I ask, brightening at finding the person I’m supposed to.
‘Jules,’ she corrects.
‘Jules, sorry. I’m Ash. Lady Maycourt said she’d tell you to expect me.’
‘Oh right,’ she says slowly, her eyes roaming down me and back up again, deeply unimpressed. ‘The new groom who isn’t a groom.’
‘That’s me,’ I confirm, my heart sinking at the lack of a warm welcome.
‘I didn’t think you were coming,’ she says, turning to go put the rope away in a small room to the side.
I follow her, peering in at all the saddles, bridles and equipment hanging in there. This must be the tack room.
‘Well, I am here and ready to start,’ I say chirpily.
‘You should have been ready to start about four hours ago.’
‘Four…’ I trail off, pulling my phone out my pocket to check the time. ‘It’s nine o’clock.’
‘Exactly. You’re very late.’
‘You start work at five in the morning?’ I say in disbelief.
‘You’ve missed most of the day,’ she claims, turning to face me. ‘Grooms start at five when we give the ponies their breakfast, clean out the stalls and exercise them. If you want to help with working sets, you have to be here bright and early.’
‘Working what?’
‘Riding a set.’ She stares me down. ‘You do know what that is, don’t you?’
‘Afraid not,’ I say, trying hard to stay polite and cheerful in the face of weary hostility.
‘It’s when you ride one horse while you pony three others.’
I blink at her. ‘How do you pony… ponies?’
‘It means you lead the others off the side of the horse that you’re riding,’ she says impatiently, looking at me as though I’m an alien. ‘So you really know nothing about being a polo groom?’
‘I thought your mum would have told you that.’
‘She did, I just didn’t expect…’ She exhales. ‘I’m not sure this is going to work out.’
I frown at her quick dismissal. ‘We haven’t even started.’
‘Yeah, but we’re starting from scratch with you. I mean, you don’t even know the language and you’re dressed for a Country Life magazine fashion shoot, not a day’s work in the stables,’ she points out, exasperated.
I glance down at my blazer, crisp white shirt, designer blue jeans and boots.
‘I doubt you can help with one pony, let alone seventy,’ she concludes.
My jaw drops. ‘You have seventy ponies here? Fucking hell. That’s… a lot.’
‘Uh, yeah?’ She wrinkles her nose at my alarmed reaction. ‘It’s a polo yard. See? This is what I mean. You don’t know anything about anything. I don’t think this is worth my time.’
She marches past me and I stand still for a moment, astounded, until a bubble of rage swells inside my chest and I spin round to go after her, refusing to scuttle away from this job with my tail between my legs before it’s even started.
‘You won’t give me a chance?’ I call out, my voice echoing through the stables.
She stops and sighs heavily, turning to face me. ‘It’s not personal, okay? But this is a busy place and I don’t have—’
‘So let me help you,’ I interrupt, taking a few more steps towards her and gesturing to her broken wrist. ‘You’re slowed down so take advantage of someone offering to do the jobs you can’t do right now.
I know I’ve got a lot to learn, but I’m here, aren’t I?
Surely having someone to help you is better than having no one. ’
She doesn’t look convinced.
‘Oh come on,’ I say, lifting my eyes to the ceiling.
‘You can’t think I’m that useless. You haven’t let me try yet.
As I told Mateo yesterday, I didn’t come looking for this job.
Lady Maycourt came to me. She thinks I might be good at it and I don’t know,’ I shrug, throwing my hands up in exasperation, ‘I want to see if she’s right. ’
Jules is watching me quizzically. ‘You spoke to Mateo yesterday?’
‘Yeah. He was as doubtful about me as you are.’
‘And you persuaded him you were right for this.’
‘Not exactly. He just didn’t persuade me I was wrong for it.’
She nods, looking a little more swayed. I seize on the opportunity.
‘Let’s at least give it a try and if it’s a complete disaster, I promise I’ll bow out,’ I assure her. ‘I have the job back at the pub ready and waiting for me.’
She lifts her chin in the air. ‘All right, Ash. We’ll give it a try.’
‘Great.’ I shrug off my blazer and go to toss it on the floor of the tack room. ‘Where do we start?’
‘We need to do some cleaning and then we’ll prep the ponies that the players want to use for stick and ball this morning,’ she says.
‘Okay, I know I’m a beginner, but you don’t need to dumb the sport down quite so much to “stick and ball”. You can call it polo.’
She purses her lips. ‘Stick and ball is what you call the practice of hitting the ball with the mallet. It’s training exercises for the players.’
Whoops. ‘Oh. Got it. Makes sense. Stick and ball.’
I force a laugh. She doesn’t laugh with me. But at least she doesn’t tell me to go home. Instead, she rolls her eyes and jerks her head to the other end of the stables before heading that way. I follow, my cheeks blushing at my ignorance.
‘In polo, there’s a lot of tack,’ she tells me briskly.
‘You’ve got bridles, saddles, standing martingales, running reins, bandages, breastplates, bits.
After tack is used, the grooms give it a wipe down, but once a week, we give everything a thorough clean.
’ She stops in front of a large box that contains a variety of buckets, sponges, cloths, disinfectants, oils and, somewhat strangely, toothbrushes.
‘It’s difficult for me to do that with one hand but, lucky for me, you’re here to help now. ’
I start unbuttoning the cuffs on my shirt so I can roll up my sleeves.
‘Tell me where to start,’ I say.
It was a blink and you’ll miss it kind of moment, but I swear Jules looked almost impressed.
*
By the time I’m done washing and scrubbing the tack, I feel like I’ve done a solid workout at the gym.
My clothes are damp and dirty from the splatter of the wash buckets, a thin layer of sweat has formed on my forehead and back of my neck, and my hands are covered in gunk, grime and grease.
I’ve learnt that there’s such a thing as leather conditioner, which smells like lavender and eucalyptus, and that a toothbrush is a really good way to get to the nooks and crannies that can be hard to clean: for example, buckles.
It’s not just about brushing and scrubbing when cleaning tack either; you have to take it all apart and put it back together again.
It turns out there are a lot of pieces when it comes to bridles and I was not quick to get which bit goes where.
‘That’s the throat latch,’ Jules told me wearily when she asked me to grab the cheek pieces. I put that down and tried again. ‘That’s the noseband. Nope, that’s the browband.’
‘Okay, why are there so many bands?’ I muttered under my breath.
I picked up another one and held it up for her.
‘That’s the throat latch again,’ she said.
Honestly, I felt just about ready to strangle myself with whichever band of the bridle was closest, but I didn’t crack under the pressure of Jules watching me like a hawk.
Instead, I practised lots of deep breathing, listened carefully, and finally, by the time I’m done, I feel like I have a much better handle of all the tack and what goes where.
Relieved to have finished, I’m wiping my brow with the back of my hand when another of the grooms comes in carrying more tack after exercising one of the ponies.
An Argentine man in roughly his forties with kind dark eyes and a bashful smile, he speaks to Jules in Spanish.
She responds to him in Spanish before gesturing to me.
He nods and then walks towards me, holding out the tack expectantly.
I assume he wants me to take it from him, so I do, my tired arms almost buckling from the weight of the saddle.
‘Gracias,’ he says, before leaving.
I look to Jules. She shrugs and says, ‘You’d better go refill the bucket.’
Fighting the urge to collapse, I casually put the tack and saddles down and pick up the bucket as though it’s not a bother, even though my limbs feel like they’re about to fall off.
‘Wait, Ash,’ Jules says, stopping me before I exit the tack room. ‘You have to change.’
She points at a navy polo shirt folded on one of the shelves. Lowering the bucket, I go to pick up the shirt and see that it’s a Maycourt branded one. I spin round to beam at her.
‘Is this your way of saying I’m officially one of the team?’ I ask eagerly.