The Country Set

by Fiona Walker

  ‘Paul is very fond of Ikea,’ Gill said glumly. ‘He always forgets the horror of flat-pack.’

  ‘It’s a true test of a marriage,’ Petra sympathised, the Redhead starting to dance as the bridleway widened to grassy tractor track, ‘self-assembly furniture.’

  ‘Especially if it’s one’s marital bed,’ Gill muttered bitterly. ‘Thank goodness John Lewis was there to stop Paul wrestling with a bent Allen key in our bedroom for hours on end.’

  ‘A relief to Allen Key too, I should imagine,’ Bridge murmured, as Petra was gripped with giggles.

  ‘Apparently one in three Britons are conceived in an Ikea bed.’ Gill hadn’t noticed.

  Bridge’s brows shot up, green eyes wide. ‘That’s amazing, considering those places are really well lit.’

  Petra’s giggles were giving her a stitch. “Wow!”

  This saw the Bags into all-out canter, the view across the vale beneath them as wide as a tapestry. Like a sprinter in a jumper, the woolly Redhead forged in front of the newly clipped bay with its shiny Lycra buzz-cut. Wind in her ears and on her goose-bumps, Petra tried not to dwell on the coat change ahead of her from riding jacket to book jacket. She was hanging onto the holiday glow. She needed to keep her mood as indefatigably cheerful as the rays breaking between gathering clouds, those warm embers of summer fun. The Gunn brood might be disbanding – Ed had been delivered to boarding school last night – but the farmhouse still burbled and banged with family noise. The girls had three days’ grace before the long daily run began.

  ‘Fitz looking forward to a new start this week?’ Gill asked over-brightly, as she drew alongside, compensating for the fact that her rebellious, volatile daughter, Dixie, had defied expectations and achieved nine GCSEs while smart, level-headed Fitz had reversed predictions by totally bombing out.

  Petra counted down to a gracious smile, knowing that Gill meant well. ‘Very much.’ Then she kicked on, grateful the mare could outrace the dressage pro.

  It was under a starry Tuscan sky that a penitent Fitz had finally admitted his forecasted sweep of A stars was molto esagerato, preparing his parents for the shock of returning to see him receive appalling results. That their bright, confident son had kept schtum about the awfulness of his exam flunk until the last possible moment had come as a horrible shock to Petra, who counted it a personal failure that she hadn’t spotted the signs of stress. Charlie had taken it as a personal insult. He’d accused Fitz of idleness and arrogance, of drug-taking and porn-bingeing, unable to believe it possible that he wasn’t being rewarded with a full house of A stars after all the years of school fees.

  Fitz remained tightly buttoned on the subject, waving away his mother’s suggestion of counselling or teen therapy, equally firm in his refusal to attend the crammer Gunny was prepared to pay for. Instead he’d asked if he could retake the entire academic year locally – ‘I won’t let you down, I promise,’ he’d told his shocked parents.

  Petra was relieved, Charlie less so: ‘He bloody well flew through his mocks. He doesn’t need to retake the year, just resit the exams.’

  But Fitz was adamant about what he wanted, and Petra had persuaded Charlie it was a very grown-up solution, playing down her own selfish motivation for wanting her firstborn living at home in term-time.

  Tomorrow he would start at the local academy in Chipping Hampton. She only hoped she was right to trust him. Fitz was incredibly hard to read, not just because a strange fringe, hoodie and dark glasses combination covered his face most of the time. He’d retreated into his own world more than ever since Italy, which didn’t bode well for a new start, the big confession doing little to dissipate the sullen tension that buzzed round him. Constantly plugged into his phone, listening to music or messaging old friends, he endured his mother’s over-jolly attempts at making family time with stiff-jawed discomfort. He’d been particularly prickly around Charlie, whose annual Scottish shooting break with old school cronies had been met with much muttered teenage scorn, not helped by Charlie winding him up in return: ‘Forget grouse moors. It’ll be skate park and shopping malls for you and your new homies if you don’t pull your finger out.’ Petra found it a strain to be in the same room as them, worrying that the atmosphere would get a whole lot worse once her working hours put her out of play. As a final straw, Gunny had rung last night, inviting herself for autumn half-term (‘I know you’re putting together one of your racy romances, but it’s the Shakespeare Book Festival and I’m hoping to see Hilary Mantel in conversation. Now, she really can write history’).

  Compton Windmill came into view now, a grand seventeenth-century limestone domed tower on pillars, which always reminded Petra of an elephant standing in glorious isolation on the highest point of the Fosse ridge. As they cantered towards it, one of the sheep clouds herding steadily across the sun was black, unexpected rain spitting into their faces. The Redhead, humping her back disapprovingly, snatched at the reins and dropped her head lower to race for shelter. Bridge’s little grey kept pace, and they charged across unploughed stubble, making their riders whoop. Ignoring Gill’s protests, they covered the final few hundred metres at Cheltenham speed.

  *

  Driving her little open-top car along the die-straight, narrow lane that led up from the Fosse Way to the Comptons, Lou Reed blaring and the dogs on the parcel shelf, Ronnie broke cover from the wooded tree tunnel and high banks to coast between familiar golden stone walls with mile-wide views to either side. She reached across to Blair, who started awake and lifted the rim of his baseball cap. ‘We here?’

  ‘Almost.’

  Everything was achingly familiar, none more so than the sight that made her curse under her breath as she slowed down to edge past hunt foot-followers’ cars banked up on verges and in field entrances, binoculars glinting across to nearby woodland. The Fosse and Wolds were autumn hunting.

  It wasn’t yet nine. The mounted field would be circuiting the valley for at least another two hours, which meant Lester would be spared crossing her path again today, no doubt deliberate timing. His dignity remained a fragile hull, and Blair’s tongue could be a torpedo.

  The Australian was looking up at the woods, dark bruises beneath his eyes from a sleepless night spent making love between arguments. ‘Uncle Fester is out with them, I take it?’

  ‘Don’t call him that.’ He’d taken against Lester in the same way he’d set himself against her children. That was the way love affairs went, she’d found. Protecting your little bubble against the outside world inevitably made it explode.

  They’d stayed at Le Mill, finally testing out the four-poster overlooking the millrace itself, grateful to channel anger into sex, their battle of wills temporarily calmed by intimacy and the prospect of horse-trading. They had stolen less than twenty-four hours together, as always pragmatically coinciding with a legitimate task – Blair taking an overnight detour on the way from Burghley to stop off and look at the stud’s youngsters, she visiting Compton Magna this morning for the paperwork the solicitor needed to account for the stud’s stock.

  ‘So how many three-year-olds do I have to buy to keep you in Wiltshire?’

  She waved away the question without answering, both knowing it would take more than selling off a few youngsters to lift her obligation to her father’s estate. A near-bankrupt stud was not given away to one’s children easily, its assets still frozen and tied up in legalese. Having seen the size of the debts, Ronnie no longer had her sights set on signing everything straight over, and a quick fix looked impossible. If she’d thought on the day of the funeral that she could ride back on her white charger and make everything right, she had been mistaken. The place was in far too much of a mess, and white chargers were a rare commodity. She’d sold the one with the breeding to turn around the stud’s fortunes.

  ‘How many?’ he pushed.

  ‘The lot,’ she said, to shut him up. A sense of foreboding assailed her that their relationship was wired for explosion and ticking down.

  Sh
e slowed to pass a closely bunched gaggle of hunt-followers’ trucks and off-roaders, at the midst of which two small, defiant figures with cameras were surrounded by an army of camo, donkey jacket and tweed. Everyone was shouting at once.

  ‘God, they’re bullies.’ Ronnie pulled up and switched off the car stereo, leaning across Blair to address one of the camo men. ‘Leave those poor women alone!’

  ‘Be a good girl and bugger off.’ An ancient bulldog of a foot-follower in a flak-jacket turned to wave her car on while the women carried on shouting and filming. In their forties or fifties, one was marathon-runner thin with a pink fringe, the other a stout blonde in a checked Puffa and Hermès scarf, who looked as though she’d come straight from a church coffee morning.

  ‘Shit!’ Blair sank instantly out of sight, reaching back between the seats for the checked blanket kept there to pull over himself.

  Taking no notice, Ronnie called at the women, ‘Are you two all right?’

  ‘I thought I told you to keep your nose out of this,’ the wizened bulldog growled, then did a double-take and wheezed, ‘Begging your pardon, Mrs Ledwell. Didn’t recognise you there.’

  She identified the wolf eyes, cauliflower ears and Popeye chin as belonging to a Turner family elder. He tapped his walking stick on a threadbare waxed-cotton shoulder nearby. ‘Barry, tell the lady here what’s what.’

  Another follower turned, much younger, florid-faced, broad-beamed in moleskin and checked cotton, thrusting a weathered farmer’s hand into the open top of the car to shake. ‘Barry Dawkins, hunt supporters’ committee.’ He had a Gloucestershire accent as broad as the River Severn. ‘Good to meet you. These women are known troublemakers. With respect, we’ve got it covered.’

  ‘Well, uncover it – your boys are all over them!’

  ‘You of all people should know the nuisance these people cause to a good day’s sport.’

  ‘Barry, we both know the hunt has nothing to hide.’ She gave him a wise look. ‘These ladies should be encouraged to film as much as they like.’

  ‘Stop stirring,’ a voice muttered from beneath the blanket, as the pink-fringed woman stepped forwards, shaking off her beefy markers gratefully.

  ‘Thank you, sister!’ Her soft Brummy voice was laced with a smoker’s crackle. ‘Are you Liz from Evesham? We heard you’d been delayed.’

  ‘No, I’m Ronnie Percy from the Compton Magna Stud. And I’m very happy to help if this lot’s bothering you, but set one more foot on my land and I’ll have you arrested for trespass.’

  A quad-bike shot out of a field entrance further up the lane and whizzed to their gateway, its driver shouting to clear the way for hounds.

  Ronnie reversed, watching the seething stream of speckled white, tan, yellow and black cross the road, huntsman shouting at individual hounds to keep them in order, the hunt staff’s long whips trailing, red coats standing out brightly from the tweed of the field. The names were all too familiar and historic – ‘Cornet, hoic! C’mere, Chasuble! Careless, Cupid, over!’ Johnny had used the same names many generations ago, each year’s puppies christened with successive letters of the alphabet, like storms, his rolling Worcestershire burr a country anthem. He’d been such a dashing huntsman, his pack devoted to him, working hounds in an era when he was a deemed a local hero, not an elitist criminal. She’d fallen in love with Johnny Ledwell so fast, she should have joined the Tumblers Club, the ignoble band of mounted followers who paid a cash forfeit when they parted company with their horse. She’d still be paying off the debt now, especially given she’d fallen out of love again so soon afterwards, the landing far harder.

  The monitors vigilantly filmed the hounds pass, although the three hunt staff in their scarlet coats were just moving them on between coverts and letting the master give his mounted field a pipe-opener.

  Those riders crossed shortly afterwards, led by Bay Austen, wide-shouldered and narrow-hipped in sharply cut umber herringbone, cream shirt showing off his tan, his bowler brim down on his nose. So arrogantly, anachronistically handsome. And he knew it, pulling up by the heathen foot-mob and winding up the monitors with a charming ‘Good day, ladies,’ and a devilish smile, before turning to look up the road. ‘Good morning, Ronnie!’ The air-force-blue eyes gleamed. ‘Call me back soon, will you? We have a deal to make.’

  Hidden behind dark glasses, annoyed at being spotted, Ronnie raised an index finger from the steering wheel in acknowledgement, muttering, ‘Bloody man.’ She remained furious that her father’s trust was obliged to sell the land he was riding into now, its coveted coverts full of adders and fox, metaphors for the battle between the two families.

  He rode on, leading the field. Midway back, Lester looked fit for a show championship in bowler hat, houndstooth check and the shiniest brown boots. He didn’t glance in Ronnie’s direction as they passed, but she had a strong suspicion he knew she was there, his cheeks hollow, eyes fixed, heart probably beating as hard and tight as hers.

  This was ridiculous. He had to face her soon. None-the-less, she intended to get this morning’s task over with as swiftly as possible.

  As the autumnal cavalcade followed the huntsman’s lead like leaves blowing along behind a rolling windfall russet apple, Ronnie put the car into gear, frustrated to see the foot-followers intimidating the monitors again. The two biggest bullies, wide-necked as nightclub bouncers, were deployed to obstruct their path while the rest jumped into their vehicles to race to a better viewpoint.

  ‘Back off and let them past!’ Ronnie tried again. Then, when they ignored her, she yelled, ‘Bike! Get back to ’im! Bike!’ in the same way that a huntsman would order hounds to back off.

  They took a reluctant pace back.

  There was a bronchial laugh nearby as the old bulldog climbed into portly Barry’s battered Land Rover, waggling his walking stick. ‘Ronnie’ll be master of foxhounds within the year, lads, you wait and see!’

  ‘She’s always preferred being a mistress,’ muttered the stowaway.

  Ignoring him, Ronnie shouted back, ‘I’d never put up with behaviour like this from you lot if I was in charge.’

  ‘Just like her father.’ The old Turner guffawed, as Barry started his engine, rattling away in a plume of diesel fumes, arm raised out of the window.

  ‘That’s my cover blown,’ she muttered, through a fixed smile as she pulled away, raising her hand to wave.

  ‘Mine too,’ said the blanket.

  ‘The Fosse and Wolds won’t have a clue who you are.’ She lifted it. ‘Besides, you have a perfectly legitimate reason to be here.’

  ‘It’s not the hunt I’m concerned about,’ the craggy smile was unapologetic, ‘it’s the ruddy monitors.’

  ‘They’re hardly going to film you.’

  ‘The blonde’s Roo Verney.’ The blanket was cast to one side as Blair sat up, hair on end. ‘Mad as a box of frogs with a dingo thrown in. Used to be a full-on balaclava-and-wire-cutters sab. She runs the South Midlands Hunt Monitors group now.’

  ‘That’s the rebel niece?’ Ronnie glanced in her mirrors. ‘A chum of mine from Beaufort country says she’s the bane of every huntsman between Warminster and Warwick.’

  ‘She’s none too keen on me either. The Verneys play her down, but Vee always had a very soft spot for outlaws before she got too—’ He stopped. Blair never wanted to say it out loud, especially not today. The smile flashed up again, bright as a shield. ‘You okay?’

  ‘I’m fine!’ she said over-brightly, switching the stereo up so they racketed on to the village outskirts accompanied by ‘Satellite of Love’. ‘We’re here to count horses.’

  Both were pros at pragmatism.

  They turned up a drive as deep as Moses’ divided Red Sea. While the paddocks surrounding them were neatly shorn and well-tended, the poplars along the verges were sinking fast in a rising green tide. The lawned borders ahead looked fit to be cut and baled, Nature all too quick to reclaim her territory. The grass must have grown a foot in a month.

 
‘Pretty house.’ Blair looked up at its beguiling, golden face as Ronnie parked beside her father’s old Subaru, thick with dust.

  ‘You saw it on the day of the funeral.’ She jumped out, Blair’s pointer and her younger Lancashire heeler springing from the back, like synchronised divers. The old heeler waited patiently to be lifted down.

  ‘Only from the road.’ Blair unfolded himself from the tiny front seat to climb out too, turning to admire the clock-towered archway into the first of the Victorian stable-yards. ‘It’s dinky. It suits you.’

  Like most eventers, Blair was accustomed to getting up close and personal with stately piles of far grander proportions than Percy Place. While these were largely admired from horseback and horseboxes on the far side of ha-has, the familiarity lent him a certain laissez-faire when it came to architecture. He strode under the arch, his pointer bounding ahead.

  ‘Everything’s in the barns and home paddocks just beyond the watchtower,’ she called after him. ‘See what you think of the herd.’

  An advantage of the hunt meeting in the village was that all the broodmares and young stock had been brought in to minimise their stress. Unhappy with the auctioneer’s valuation of the stud’s stock as a job lot, the probate team had insisted that each horse must be individually itemised as a matter of urgency, but the Captain’s record-keeping had become increasingly eccentric in his final few years. The task of cross-checking over twenty horses against their passports and covering certificates had been somewhat reluctantly delegated to Ronnie ahead of today’s solicitor’s meeting. Asking for Lester’s help to do this might have been politic – the family would certainly think so – but he knew as well as Ronnie did why it might also bring down the house of cards. In a very starchy email to her mother, Alice reported that Lester – who could identify each horse in his care blindfold and recite its pedigree through five generations – had developed sudden amnesia, no doubt fearful that his favourites might be sold.

  It’s just a straightforward headcount, the email had instructed. For God’s sake, get the cheap vets from Ludd-on-Fosse to scan the microchips, not Gill Walcote who’ll charge a fortune and tell everyone in the village what’s going on. Alice had forgotten that her mother was a canny operator, having lived on a shoestring for years. Borrowing Blair’s microchip scanner meant they could cut out the vet entirely. And once Ronnie learned her daughters weren’t intending to be there, borrowing Blair with it made the task much more bearable, especially if he took a few youngsters home with him. The stud was horrifically overstocked with winter approaching.