The Difficult Summer by Gillian Baxter

Author:Gillian Baxter [Baxter, Gillian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jane Badger Books

7

IT took them an hour and twenty minutes to reach Kensington. The team members studied the dressage test most of the way, and Bobby studied them. Inga, who radiated confidence of a rather bounding kind, appeared to be about to burst out of her tight black jacket and breeches, although the boots made her rather short legs look slimmer than usual. She wore her bowler hat on the back of her head, and her frizzy brown hair burst out all around it. Adria, on the other hand, looked extremely well turned out in her hunting clothes, although her hair as usual looked rather a mess, in its straggling bunch. She seemed rather nervous, and was frantically muttering the sequence of movements in the dressage test to herself. Vi looked even paler than usual, with too much pale powder, and a horrible purple lipstick. Her hair looked lifeless, and as though it had been recently peroxided, and she wore a very tweedy costume with high heeled sandals, a queer combination, thought Bobby, though it seemed to fascinate Mike, who was dressed in chocolate coloured breeches, brown boots, and a broadly checked hacking jacket. Dora, who had the appearance of a badly tied parcel, in her too small brown jodhpurs, yellow Aertex shirt, and creased brown hacking jacket, seemed unable to keep still for a moment. One second she was talking to one of the horses, the next she was leaning out of the window, or hearing someone’s dressage test; she fidgeted with the bridles, rubbing the bits, and straightening the reins, and generally seemed more excited and nervous than any of the team members.

The horses all travelled well, and the two club horses looked extremely well turned out. Columbia’s reddish bay coat shone, and his eyes were bright and bold. His mane and tail had been brushed until they shone like black silk. Smoke’s grey coat did not shine, but he had obviously been bathed that morning, and he was spotless. Phoenix was the most excited, looking round the box with head high and ears pricked and pawing the wooden floor at intervals. Bobby wished that he would doze like the other horses, but there seemed no hope of that. Isabel glanced at him several times with a mixture of pride and apprehension, and Bobby felt far more nervous than she would have done had she been going to ride the chestnut herself. It could do the stables so much harm if Phoenix went badly.

The box driver, who knew the way from previous occasions, made straight for the Bayswater Road when they got into London, and turned right at the top of Kensington Church Street. Isabel and Dora hung eagerly out of the window as they turned in between a pair of high, dark green gates, and jolted slowly down a wide pathway flanked by high stone walls. Then they were in Kensington Palace Paddock itself. It was a very long field, and fairly wide, with the Embassies in Kensington Palace Gardens backing on to it on the right, and the park beyond iron railings on the left.

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