The Country Set

by Fiona Walker

  ‘I want to keep the ride.’

  They listened through Diamond Dogs, each country corner taken as slowly and precisely as a dressage test. Blair’s right foot thumping down involuntarily.

  ‘I’ve had one idea that might work, but you won’t like it.’

  ‘Try me.’ Blair rubbed his face, then raked his hair which stood up, like a silver-fox version of Ziggy Stardust. ‘Anything to glue our shit back together, unless it’s buying back the stallion. You know I can’t ask that one.’

  ‘I know.’

  The mention of Beck stalled them, as it always did, the needle jumping on the record. Not talking about Blair’s marriage also encompassed never talking about the horse she’d sold them, which infuriated Ronnie. Beck was being wasted, just as in her darker moments she knew Blair was. It was a constant static between them.

  Ronnie had just buried her father. She didn’t care how loudly the needle scratched across the tracks. That Blair wouldn’t leave his wife was sacrosanct. That Ronnie would never ask was stubbornness.

  She took a deep breath.

  ‘Don’t talk about Vee,’ he anticipated.

  ‘I’m not. Unless you want to.’

  The silence between them ticked.

  ‘If I stay in Wiltshire, we have to talk about it at some point.’

  ‘I’ll make a note in my diary. Are you staying?’

  There was another long pause as Ronnie played it through again in her mind, a long shot she wasn’t yet sure added up. ‘I could bring in a manager to run the stud.’

  ‘Good idea.’ His eyes slid aside to meet hers, bright at the prospect of things staying unchanged. ‘Who did you have in mind?’

  Her fingers rapped faster on the wheel, little hoof beats galloping away. ‘He’s one of the O’Brien family.’

  ‘Show-jumping O’Briens? Talented buggers.’

  She nodded, remembering the Midas touch with a smile. ‘They call him the Horsemaker. He’s exceptional. I met him on a dealing yard over here, and the way he could turn a raw youngster round in no time was something else. Our paths crossed again in Germany a few years later. All the studs there wanted him. He can triple a stallion’s fee, add ten per cent to a grading and put a zero on the end of a foal’s price-tag. He’s in Canada now.’

  ‘Why would he come to Compton Magna?’

  ‘If I ask, he’ll come.’

  There was a long pause. As he sucked in a deep breath, it was obvious Blair knew precisely what that meant.

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  *

  ‘Is that your Saab parked outside?’ Petra asked Janine, when she dashed back from the wake, flushed from reliving her more flirtatious moments with Bay in her head every two or three minutes.

  ‘No, just the blue van, love.’ Janine was dusting the porch with thou-shall-not-pass swipes of her fluffy rod.

  ‘Oh, God, don’t tell me the house-sitters are here already?’ Petra fretted, fishing the post from the cage behind the letterbox, a set of car keys among it. ‘I haven’t finished their list.’

  ‘Nobody’s called in.’ Janine hovered, blocking her way. ‘I tell a lie. The old boy next door came around with some courgettes and spuds, but that’s it.’

  ‘Maybe they left it here and went for lunch at the pub.’ Petra looked through the side window at the sleek black Swedish car, as out of place on the Gunns’ very British gravel carriage circle as an Ikea wardrobe in a costume drama. Which reminded her. ‘I must, must pack.’ She had to get it all done by the time she picked up the girls and Ed, plus the house-sitters were arriving for a briefing – and presumably to lay claim to their Saab – any minute.

  ‘Um, you might want to go out to the horses first.’ Janine was holding her feather duster up like a pike now.

  ‘Why?’ she asked anxiously. There was no time for a crisis.

  ‘Fitz can explain.’

  Outside, Fitz was looking sheepish as Carly sat in a stable with a snoring Shetland’s head on her lap.

  ‘Mum, the fleekiest thing’s happened,’ he explained. ‘When the little hairy beast got stuck in the larder—’

  ‘Not my larder?’

  ‘It’s all cool. Janine tidied it up. Thing is, he was seriously stuck in there. We had to take the shelves out.’

  ‘My larder?’

  ‘Yeah. And he was kicking shit out of everything, me included.’

  ‘This is my larder we’re talking about?’

  ‘And your firstborn child. The thing is, when Carly put her hands on him, he just lay there like he was drugged. After that, he did everything she asked, moving his little legs exactly where she told him, and when we’d got him out and he started to look a bit ill and kick his stomach—’

  ‘He colicked?’ she gasped. ‘I’m calling Gill.’

  ‘He’s fine now,’ Fitz insisted. ‘Look at him.’

  The Shetland had one eye open, watching Petra warily, expecting a telling-off. He did look remarkably contented.

  ‘I did what it says in my book,’ Carly explained. ‘I walked him round a lot and he perked up no end. It’s not rocket science.’

  ‘She’s being modest. She has a serious gift,’ Fitz insisted. ‘He was really sick. Like he could not walk. And Carly healed him. How amazing is that? She’s a healer.’

  She hadn’t heard Fitz so animated about anything since Thunderbirds when he was ten. His teens had switched off his enthusiasm button. Not that she believed any of his tosh about healing miracles. Her Shetland, who had once eaten an entire sack of King Edwards with no apparent ill effects, had the constitution of a waste-disposal unit.

  ‘Gosh. Well, that’s great. Thank you, Carly.’

  ‘It’s cool.’

  ‘You could use it in a book, Mum,’ Fitz urged. ‘Make Carly the heroine.’

  Petra was nodding automatically, guiltily aware that her head was deep in her wardrobe once more, trying to remember if she had any swimwear that would leave minimal tan lines. ‘Mm, yes, I might. Well done, Carly. Now, Fitz, I need to talk to you about drones.’

  ‘Why?’ Two dark red spots appeared in his cheeks, which, had she been in a less distracted frame of mine, Petra might have ascribed to more than just the hot weather.

  ‘Does yours have night vision?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Damn. Bay Austen needs to borrow one – his is up a tree – but it must have night vision. He’s got a problem with poachers. They’re going in with a small army tonight to see them off.’

  ‘When you say army,’ Carly said coolly, ‘what do you mean?’

  Again, Petra was not at her most intuitive, now happily imagining Bay in flak-jacket and combats. ‘Oh, shotguns and walkie-talkies and lots of the hunt heavies charging around on quad-bikes with flashlights, I should imagine. They’re terrible thugs under all that tweed.’

  In the stable, Carly chewed her lip and pressed her face to the Shetland’s mane. As Petra whisked off to weigh up tankinis versus flimsier modesty triangles, she hugged his solid bulk tightly, grateful for her get-out-of-jail-free card.

  Fitz lingered awkwardly. ‘Sorry about Mum. She’s got a bit of a thing about the local toff farmer. Embarrassing.’

  ‘I like her.’

  ‘She means well, and she never stops. Not like Dad, who’s a total slacker. I must take after his side as they’re about to find out.’

  Carly watched his face twist this way and that, unable to hold onto a truth. ‘Spit it out.’

  ‘What my parents don’t know is that I wrote my name at the top of every GCSE paper I sat this summer, and not a lot more. Hardly a word in fact.’

  ‘More than I did.’

  ‘Yeah, but I’m supposed to be a lawyer or an accountant or something one day. You’re married to a war hero.’

  ‘That’s not actually a job,’ she pointed out wryly. ‘Although there’s nothing stopping you marrying your own war hero yourself one day, if it makes you feel better about having no qualifications. It’s all legal.’

  ‘I’m
not gay!’

  ‘I wasn’t saying you are. Plenty of war heroes with vaginas, these days.’

  He looked at her in amazement, the red stains in his cheeks deepening.

  ‘Female reproductive organs,’ she corrected herself. ‘No wonder you bombed biology, kid.’

  ‘I’m not a kid.’ Now he moved to sit beside her on the straw, far too close, lowering his voice so it croaked. ‘I’m sixteen. It’s all legal.’

  ‘So show a bit of maturity.’ She stood up abruptly, the Shetland grunting in surprise. ‘Tell your parents you had mind-freeze – talk through your options.’

  ‘I might join the army.’ He gazed up at her, lounging artfully in a pool of dusty sunlight, all golden youth, floppy hair and big dark eyes.

  ‘Don’t. War fucks you up.’

  ‘So does being a middle-class underachiever.’ He lay back against the Shetland now. ‘If you put your hands on me, perhaps my brain-freeze will thaw. It’s that or soldiering.’

  She grinned, touched by his posturing. ‘You could start a war with your charm.’

  ‘You could put an end to one with those healing hands.’

  ‘Get out of church!’ she scoffed, cuffing his hair affectionately as she passed on her way back outside. ‘Common sense is what I’ve got. Comes from being common.’

  Janine was pacing the kitchen with a duster. ‘There you are! Petra bloody loves you. Gave us a huge tip for helping get that pony shifted – look.’ She pulled two twenties out of her tabard pocket that Carly already knew she wouldn’t see again. Upstairs they could hear Motown music pounding in the master bedroom. ‘You did good, Carl.’

  Carly was hailed even more of a Turner hero when she broke the news of Bay’s vigilante poacher-catching mob to Janine in the van on the way back. ‘They’ll have to cancel it, won’t they? We won’t be going.’

  ‘Too bloody right. Steer for me!’ Janine was straight on her phone, telling Jed and the boys to call it off, insisting Carly should get all the credit.

  ‘When the boys go out again, you’ll be guest of honour,’ she told her afterwards. ‘Welcome to the family, Carly girl. Now you really are one of us. No argument, I’m doing your nails with my best jazzles and sparkle transfers. My treat.’

  *

  In the Bulrushes late that night, her bedroom lit by only a glowing screen, Pip was horse-trading: the Comptons’ only baking sleuth was on a mission. Had she been a City dealer, Pip’s ability to read trends, dig out historic trails, see a pattern emerging and – adding it all together – act swiftly on an impulse could have made her millions, the original Working Girl beating Sigourney Weaver to the big-deal steal. Instead she was simply out to keep herself in employment and the stud’s horses in oats.

  She’d started out by writing a Facebook direct message before realising that a woman who hadn’t updated her status since #bingate was trending almost certainly needed a more traditional approach. It was years since Pip had written an old-fashioned letter.

  Dear Verity, she typed.

  Pip’s mother, Jean, who had written regularly to the BBC, their local MP, the council, newspapers, Birds Eye and Budgens in complaint, would have been appalled at the informal approach, but Pip wasn’t sure if Lady Verity had retained her title after dumping Lord Verney for Blair. For once Google wasn’t very helpful on how to address the former wife of an earl.

  Finding a YouTube version of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ to listen to for inspiration, she launched straight in:

  Please forgive the unexpected nature of this letter, but the future of British sports horse breeding depends on you...

  Part 3

  SCHOOL UNIFORMS, BLACKBERRYS AND RAT-CATCHERS

  22

  The final ball had been bowled in the village cricket league and the jam judged in the Compton Bagot Show, ploughs were being fixed to tractors and blackberries ripened in hedges. Today’s early-morning hack marked the season’s change for the Saddle Bags. It was the week the schools went back, the summer swansong for horsy mothers. Book bags and sports kits had been unearthed, names stitched, glued and Sharpied into uniforms, and from tomorrow onwards the wake-up alarm would be ringing in ever-darker starts to school runs.

  Chins determinedly up, the riders sped through the Comptons at a brisk trot, chasing shadows cast by a rising sun, which blazed on and off, clouds as fat as unsheared ewes barging across it.

  Petra, who regretted showing off her fading Italian tan in short sleeves and golden goose-bumps, was willing the day to heat up as Gill led the way up onto the most windswept flank of the valley, navigating the bridle-path that cut through Sanson Holdings’ land towards the old windmill on the ridge, its track a barren brown stripe through vast, hedge-free fields of newly seeded rape. Up here they were far from the hammering hoofs and hound cry of the Fosse and Wolds Hunt, who had met at dawn at Manor Farm and were drawing coverts all over Austen land. The Bags were consequently one woman down, Mo taking advantage of the free farmer’s cap to join the field on her steady cob and treat daughter Grace to one last holiday blast on her pony.

  ‘I don’t know how she can bring herself to do it,’ complained Bridge, newly dyed pink bunches bouncing as the Connemara skittered and plunged, alert to the distant cry of hounds. ‘Poor Grace subjected to that cruel, archaic bollocks.’

  ‘Mine loved it,’ Gill reassured her.

  Carried by a light breeze, the huntsman’s horn was faintly audible lower in the valley as unruly young hounds were called to order.

  ‘Kids should be watching Power Rangers and eating sugary cereal at this hour,’ Bridge grumbled.

  ‘Or a healthy breakfast alternative.’ Petra shot her a sympathetic smile. Bella had spent all week eagerly begging to be taken along because friends Grace and Tilly would be there, the latter’s father Bay field-mastering that day. But Petra had refused to be talked into it, her feelings about hunting ambivalent, those for handsome MFHs less so. Both pursuits were old-fashioned, romantic adrenalin rushes best viewed at a distance through a lens that filtered out morality, she felt – something of a career requirement for a historical novelist.

  Last year, Charlie had badgered her to do it as a part of his campaign to be invited to the Well-hung Party, a brace of dawn starts amounting to nothing, followed by several white-knuckle rides once the season proper started, expensively complicated to orchestrate with grandparents in situ babysitting and work days lost. None of it had won him a peg, not even the children’s meet, where Charlie had towed Bella around the headlands in his Le Chameau boots name-dropping hunting solicitors nobody had heard of. Petra had been too awe-struck by Bay to wish him more than good day and good night back then, let alone make lewd small-talk. She’d also run horribly over deadline, writing night and day over Christmas to make up for it.

  This year, determined to deliver her book before her goose was cooked, Petra needed to hibernate, not develop an unhealthy new addiction. The Redhead’s coat was already thickening its velvet pile, and she felt every tiny hair on her skin prick up and cluster in sympathy, the stove and biscuit tin in her garden office – affectionately known as the ‘Plotting Shed’ – a tempting prospect. This was no Indian summer: the sun had lost its heat days after their return from Tuscany, like Charlie’s smile. How quickly holiday season vanished. She’d always hated the slow autumnal cool-down that stole holidays and horseplay while softening the ground for tills and tines.

  Like teacher and farmer, Petra’s working year started in September, writing a book each school term to re-create an epic historical romance in three easy portions. By the time the green woods below them had blazed through gold, orange and red to skeletal brown, their leaves all dropped, she would have delivered the first part of her annual trilogy. It was a far cry from her early career in which one full-length novel would be meticulously planned and researched for more than a year before she wrote a single sentence, but that was a privilege she could no longer afford. These days, she needed iron self-discipline and zero distractions, the first
book after the summer always a daunting undertaking, the all-consuming focus it required a sudden departure from leisurely research and holiday-lounger binge-reading. She’d guzzled ten novels back-to-back in Italy, marvelling at other writers’ seamless talent, doubting her own.

  ‘I remember thinking, as a child, that cubbing was very dull,’ Gill was saying, horn signalling far below, shrill as a curlew.

  ‘It’s autumn hunting now,’ Petra corrected, reeling out the reins as the Redhead stooped to scratch her nose on one knee.

  ‘Just plain cruel whatever you call it,’ Bridge muttered, as her grey pony trotted impatiently on the spot, like a jogger at traffic lights.

  ‘Yes, all that standing about and being told to keep quiet is terribly harsh on little ones.’ Gill was defiantly old school. ‘If there was a big breakfast afterwards it made up for it. The stud one was always the best – Ann Percy knew how to put on a spread.’

  ‘Maybe Ronnie will resurrect it,’ Petra suggested.

  ‘If she comes back. Dickie Carter’s just done the probate valuation on the stud – I doped one of his hunters for clipping last week – and he said Alice showed him round in a distinctly proprietorial fashion.’

  ‘No breakfast muffins at Percy Place this year, then?’

  ‘The Austens have that gig now. Dickie seems to think they’re definitely buying the land by the church meadows – there are two legendary Wolds coverts in there, Scorpion Spinney and Compton Thorns, where Shakespeare and some cronies were supposed to have been caught poaching deer as young bloods.’ She gave Petra a downcast look. ‘I knew the stud would be broken up.’

  ‘At least it’s safe from hobbit houses.’ Petra tried to emphasise the bright side.

  ‘Just not prats in red coats chasing poor foxes,’ Bridge grumbled.

  ‘They follow a pre-laid scent, these days, Bridge,’ Petra reminded her.

  ‘Yeah, like I follow the one-way path in Ikea when my every instinct tells me I can break through sofa-beds straight to the meatballs and lingonberry? I think not.’