The Country Set

by Fiona Walker

  A fraction too late, Petra made a grab for his ruff. Bounce, bounce, splash. ‘Woof!’ He was in the fast-moving water, alluring as a dolphin on the Riviera Maya as he plunged along its course. Come swim with me! He writhed around in the cool, stone-contoured shallows.

  The small dogs needed no more invitation, plunging in after him with beach-babe eagerness. All three snaked muzzles through the surface and threw up rainbow arcs.

  The diminutive blonde strode on, seeming not to notice.

  ‘Sorry!’ Petra hurried after her.

  ‘What?’ She stopped. Her eyes were astonishingly blue.

  ‘He’s the Tom Daley of this parish.’ Petra made a big look-over-there gesture at Wilf and the little dogs in the water.

  ‘Who?’ The gruff voice was last-century upper class.

  ‘He of the budgie-smugglers. As opposed to pheasant, grouse or one hundred per cent organic pasture-raised Ixworth.’

  ‘I’m hopeless with names.’ She shook her head apologetically, those blue eyes moreish.

  ‘Tom Daley, the Olympic diver.’ Petra beamed at her, realising she must sound like a dog-walking loon. ‘White teeth, spray tan, washboard stomach. Not that Wilf has that. Or a tan.’

  ‘Does he live in the village?’

  This was getting awkward. The dogs were charging up and down the stream, showing no sign of coming out. Petra longed to jump in after them. ‘Sorry. Forget I mentioned him. I have no idea why I did. I just wanted to apologise for my dog. Not that I’m implying the need to apologise for Tom Daley, who I’m sure is very sportsmanlike. Oh, God, there I go again. He’s not someone I ever think about, unless the television’s live-streaming sports and he is literally bouncing on a board, but now I can’t shut up about him.’

  Then, like birdsong, the most deliciously husky giggle bubbled up, the blue eyes creasing with fleeting, all-too-infectious amusement.

  ‘Sorry,’ Petra said again.

  ‘I’m afraid I know nothing about divers, but I do know my gundogs. That’s a fine-looking springer. Do you shoot?’

  ‘Only my mouth off.’ Petra whistled for Wilf, who ignored her.

  ‘Good for you.’ The blue gaze stayed on her face. ‘Not enough people prepared to speak their mind.’

  ‘Even if it’s full of gibberish.’

  ‘Oh, mine always is. Earworms, unidentifiable quotes, half-forgotten to-do lists, petty grudges, quiet passions, racing form. Like an old handbag.’ Her smile was enchanting.

  The dogs were plunging their noses into water-vole holes, snorting furiously.

  Petra had started to doubt this was the Bardswolds Bolter – Gill had described her as evil incarnate. ‘Are you local?’

  ‘Once upon a time. You?’

  ‘Not originally. Happy-ever-aftering.’ If she said it often enough, Petra hoped it would come true. Standing by a brook full of bouncing dogs on a hot summer afternoon with a perfect stranger, she had a curious sense that it was possible. Guiltily remembering her daughters, she turned to find they’d both climbed the fence into the hayfield that stretched from the stream to the lane and were racing towards the tumbledown wooden barn that always fascinated them. ‘Girls, you’re trespassing!’

  ‘The landowner won’t mind,’ the woman assured her, setting off at her brisk walk. ‘I always cut across it. Come on.’

  ‘What about the dogs?’ Petra had been known to lose half a day trying to coax Wilf out of Lord’s Brook.

  ‘Oh, they’ll follow.’ She was already climbing deftly over a park rail.

  They cut across the hayfield. All three wet dogs were hard on their heels, as she had predicted, snaking through the tall grass to dry off, Wilf besottedly following the little double act, not caring that the older one snapped and snarled at him.

  ‘I am your spaniel...’ Petra laughed, watching him. ‘The more you beat me, I will fawn on you.’

  She almost walked into the blonde, who had swung round to gaze at her, deathly pale.

  ‘It’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ Petra explained. ‘Hermia speaking to Demetrius.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Use me but as your spaniel – spurn me, strike me,

  Neglect me, lose me. Only give me leave,

  Unworthy as I am, to follow you.’

  Off she strode through the grass, diminutive in stature but long in shadow, dogs bounding behind. Petra hurried after her, the remainder of the ice-cream melting in the bag. At the big field’s midpoint there was a huge cedar, incongruously tall, which she had often admired from a distance. Her girls had already scaled its lower branches and were sitting astride them. ‘Mummy! Look!’

  ‘Wow!’ She gazed up at it in awe. Rows of iron horseshoes had been hammered onto its fat trunk, spiralling upwards. There had to be close to a hundred, as though a herd had defied gravity and stampeded up to the top.

  Beside her, the blonde’s jaw had that fixed tetanus look of the well-bred when outraged, distraught, in severe pain or all three. ‘The family tree,’ she muttered, as she gazed up too, blue eyes squinting against the hot afternoon sun lasering through its branches. ‘Every Bingham-Percy born at Eyngate Hall got a horseshoe nailed up there by the estate workers.’

  ‘That’s so cool,’ said Prudie. ‘Can we plant one, Mummy?’

  ‘Why don’t you both go and pick some wildflowers for Gunny?’ Petra suggested, sensing that climbing it must be deeply disrespectful. As they slithered down, she looked from one shoe to the next, each a little bit of romantic history that fired her imagination.

  ‘That threesome is Great-great-granny Mary, who couldn’t make up her mind.’ The blonde was pointing up at a high row of rusty crescents. ‘A ribbon-tied shoe was added whenever a Percy married, and only real philanderers had a full set. Above Mary, Howard outlived three wives. The shoes were painted black when one died, although it wears off in a year. When I was little I thought that was the point at which their souls went up to Heaven. Now I know it’s just oxidisation.’ She reached up and patted one, large and robust with studs still screwed in it. ‘Second-cousin Philip sold the entire village after the war to pay for repairs to the Hall once the garrisoned soldiers left.’

  Petra knew exactly who she was. How could she have doubted it? ‘Are you up here?’

  ‘We’re on the other side.’ She marched round the trunk where a far more modest track of shoes made its way up. ‘Guess which I am.’

  Petra cast her eye up the metal latticing, spotting an upside-down loner overhead, hanging by just one loose nail. Righting it and pressing the nail back into its hole, she turned back questioningly.

  A husky, infectious laugh sounded out. ‘Dear queer Uncle Brooke never stays the right way up. I’m the racing plate over there. Fast, lightweight and never rusts. Your girls are beautiful.’ She nodded at Prudie and Bella, one as tall and willowy as the other was small and solid, already clutching enough meadow flowers to have Gunny reaching for the Piriton.

  ‘I think so too. Thank you.’

  Ronnie traced three horseshoes on the trunk and turned away with a sad half-smile.

  They parted company at the standing stones without ceremony. Gathering one very reluctant spaniel and two midsummer-fairy daughters with arms full of great burnet, ox-eye daisy and devil’s bit, Petra took her liquid ice-cream home.

  ‘Who was that lady?’ Bella asked, as they made their way through the apple orchards.

  ‘She never said, but I think she’s called Ronnie.’

  ‘Does she live in this village?’

  ‘I’m hoping she might.’ She could hear the Black Beauty theme tune in her head.

  *

  Ronnie’s mobile rang at exactly seven fifteen – even bereavement didn’t stop Alice listening to The Archers – the incoming number assigned to a favourite old photograph of a small, determined child on a pony. It was the first time it had ever lit up as an incoming call on her screen. The milestone was a blunt one.

  As deliberately emotionless as a fifties housewife dictating a
shopping list to her butcher, Alice offered an abrupt summary of those she’d spoken with and possible funeral dates, reasserting her control of the situation. ‘Pax flies into Birmingham tomorrow morning at ten and will come straight to the farm. Tim can’t make it until after the weekend.’ Ronnie sensed a pencil ticking off points. ‘The vicar will call in at the farm tomorrow, as will the Austens and the funeral director. Please don’t come to pick up your horses before eleven. I think we’re all agreed it’s probably best you don’t hang around, yes?’

  Johnny had done the same, retreating behind bullet points shouted like hounds’ names and hunt commands – that need for sharp consonants: Palmer, Petrel, Pontiff, Hoik! Doublet, Dainty, Damage, Ware Riot! Hopkins, Horace, Hornet, Forrard! You. Will. Not. Forsake. This. Marriage.

  ‘I’ll come at eleven,’ she said wearily, hurrying out to her balcony to light a cigarette.

  At the other end of the line, she heard a matching spark striking and a deep inhale. Her heart cracked a little more. She stubbed hers straight out. ‘Alice, we have to make peace.’

  ‘Mummy, please don’t fuck this up.’ The call ended.

  Horses, hunting and cigarettes were probably the only enduring things that Ronnie had ever had in common with aloof, taciturn Johnny Ledwell, but by the time they’d discovered that, they’d been riding twenty and smoking forty a day, trapped in the grind.

  Ronnie and Johnny, a rhyming couplet for a domestic tragedy that was never going to work. One was gregarious, impulsive and determined to make a better fist of family life than her starchy, detached parents. The other, brought up ducking a father’s fist, was monosyllabic socially and held an idealised, archaic view of a wife; his flame-haired Irish mother had died when he was young; he greatly admired his in-laws for their solid fortitude.

  The marriage had started to go downhill almost as soon as the honeymoon car snaked into the Fosse valley and Ronnie had stroked her handsome new husband’s thigh, fingers creeping towards his crotch.

  A hand had clamped over hers, wedding ring shining. ‘I’m driving.’

  Johnny was an alpha in bed, as uncommunicative between the sheets as between guests at a dinner party. The aggressive, stolen moments of enthusiasm that Ronnie had mistaken for passion before their marriage turned out to be her husband’s only gear. Obsessed with breeding – cattle, then hounds, horses and now his own lineage – he wanted to start a family straight away.

  ‘I’ve got a dozen horses to compete and I’m long-listed for the Olympics!’ Ronnie had laughed disbelievingly. But she’d never been destined to go to Los Angeles, her career course already walked, the maternity suite the next fence ahead: Johnny had sired his first child with the same determination as the Captain’s latest acquisition, a wiry little flat-racing stallion newly put to work in the covering barn. He’d been bought to strengthen the stud’s famous line, much as his son-in-law had been. Clamping onto the mare’s back, teeth deep in her withers, half a dozen thrusts and it was over, the first of a new generation on its way.

  An unheated hunt cottage was by then deemed too damp for babies and the career of huntsman too unsociable. At Jocelyn’s insistence, Johnny had resigned his position as huntsman and moved with his pregnant wife the short distance from the Ludd-on-Fosse kennels to Compton Magna to manage the stud. He worked closely alongside his father-in-law and Lester, with whom he developed a strong bond, both men taciturn and fanatical about pedigree. All three regularly sat in the Jugged Hare in Compton Bagot until the early hours, planning bloodlines. It was where the trio received the news, phoned in to the landlord by Ann, that Ronnie had given birth to a daughter.

  ‘Better luck next time.’ The Captain had famously patted his son-in-law on the back and bought a round for everybody.

  The village loved the Ledwells, babies apparently coming easily to Ronnie, like the stud’s best broodmares foaling year after year, first dark, then blonde, then Titian, her bumps riding out proudly to the fore until weeks before the births, then strapped into basket saddles as soon as they could sit up to follow the Fosse hounds on Shetlands, towed by a stern grandmother shouting, ‘Up! Down!’ and a jolly nanny hired to enable Ronnie to keep competing the stud horses.

  Very few onlookers had ever guessed all was not well in the Ledwell marriage. Ronnie was too good a performer, adept at welcoming, placating, charming and distracting, and far too grateful for company to frighten it off.

  By the time Pax had arrived, the Ledwells’ marriage had become lonely and loveless, thereafter sexless too. Brought up to stay the distance, Ronnie had buttoned up her show jacket and got on with the job. She’d grown up in a household of hard-drinking, hard-riding misogyny; her mother insisted that men always went a bit off the boil when their wives were milky new mothers. Friends like Hermia, free-wheeling her way around London in an orgy of boom, bust and marching-dust eighties parties, had no experience of marriage, and Ronnie wouldn’t have dreamed of troubling them for advice, striking on positively, her children and horses her focus.

  Determined to keep riding and competing, she had gathered her growing family to heel as naturally as the terriers that had always travelled with her, horsebox gypsies rattling between one-day events, catching happiness where she could, infectiously passing it through to the children, who always got the best of both their parents. They were too young to pick up the toxicity that consumed the Ledwells out of hours. Although no longer campaigning at the highest level, Ronnie had remained something of a local celebrity, welcomed at village events, a child on each hip and one at foot, all wearing smiles as wide as a Cotswold horizon.

  Compton Magna had been prouder than ever of their stud in those days, its beautiful progeny and its long history of brave, blond Percys. ‘Such a lovely family!’

  Until the day that had changed everything: the day the Bardswolds Bolter had run.

  Her phone rang again, a teenage photograph, gawky and doe-eyed, hair as red as a fallow deer. The blast of guilt was always instant.

  ‘Pax.’ She wanted to sympathise, share the shock, ask how she was bearing up, but her throat had constricted as though swallowing a poison draught.

  ‘Where are you, Mum?’ Her daughter’s voice was a soft cello D string. There were crickets in the background, and a hum of music.

  ‘The Mill.’ Ronnie looked up at the stars – how had it got so dark? They blurred and disappeared, like sugar stirred into black coffee.

  ‘You’ll be at the farm tomorrow?’

  ‘Briefly.’

  ‘Wait for me. You have to wait for me.’

  ‘Please don’t worry. I told Alice I don’t want any of it.’ The poison was working through her chest now, pulling her lungs in, tightening the cage of her ribs, a silent thief that took her breath away. She sank down on the deck as grief mugged her, jaws clamped with the effort of sparing her daughter its messiness.

  ‘We’ll see about that.’ The D string drew a long sigh. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  As soon as the call ended, Ronnie let loose the sobs, cut through with grateful laughter when the small, elderly alpha dog of her two-pack marched out and deposited a neat pile of chopped one hundred per cent organic pasture-raised Ixworth fillet beside her, swiftly and disapprovingly regurgitated, then sat down to peer at it with distaste.

  ‘Neither of us must behave like this tomorrow,’ Ronnie told her, with a sympathetic scratch on the back, wondering if she could load up the horses and steal away at dawn.

  Her phone lit up with Blair’s face, that bloody cello D string again, deep within the four chords opening Elgar’s Concerto. She’d change it to something more cheerful.

  ‘How are you bearing up?’ he asked, road noise rumbling.

  Big ploppy tears. Bloody grief. ‘Great! You?’

  ‘Vee tried to go riding again.’ It was a day for breaking rules.

  ‘Oh, fuck.’

  ‘It’s fine. She didn’t even get the tack on. But I’ve got to get rid of the horse.’

  ‘I’ll take him back.
’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I sold him to you.’ Ronnie sat back on the deck and looked up at the stars, clearly focused now, Venus flying like a kite above the moon. That stallion could jump the moon with Venus between his knees. She should have guessed he’d turn out to be as unruly as Sleipnir, Norse god Odin’s legendary eight-legged warhorse who could out-leap, out-gallop and outwit all others.

  An owl shrieked overhead. It repeated in stereo on her phone. She heard the car park gravel crackling beneath tyres in stereo too. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I just pulled into the hotel. I can see your silhouette.’

  ‘Keep the engine ticking.’

  ‘You can’t run away from this, Ronnie.’

  10

  ‘Feather Dusters calling!’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your cleaner. I’m Carly. I’ve been ringing this thing ten minutes.’

  Opening the electric gates and peering around her front door, Petra blinked sleep from her eyes. ‘You know it’s twenty to eight?’

  ‘I’ll make sure you’re not charged for the late start.’ A whip of energy bustled in with a cleaning tray and a Henry Hoover, blonde hair scraped back to reveal two inches of far prettier dark root. ‘Janine texted you, yeah? I’ll start down here, shall I?’

  Petra’s phone had been left in her handbag overnight, a regular accidental sleepover that placed her off radar. She fished it out now. Finding a signal, the device gave its usual neglected fandango, battery striking off with below-ten-per-cent chirrup. Then eBay strummed in, telling her a watched item was ending; the Guardian noisily striped her screen with urgent news alerts about the White House, Syria and the Booker shortlist; and a fast-bullet ricochet of chimes told her she had tens of messages queuing for an answer. No doubt the majority were from her mother-in-law, who would arrive in a cloud of brimstone and sulphur later that morning, expecting boutique-hotel standards and all her food cooked to recipes devised by a Michelin-starred chef (‘Nigella is for slatterns, Jamie for slobs and the Hairy Bikers for northerners’).