The Country Set

by Fiona Walker

  After he’d left the room, Ronnie had set the dog back carefully on the mantelpiece and tied the scarf around its neck to combat the chill. Not long afterwards, she had started her affair with Angus Bowman. If Johnny was looking for an excuse not to love her, she gave him one.

  Ronnie’s middle-aged face staring back at her from the breakfast room’s speckled mirror now struck her as out of place, like the shiny Kitchen Aid next door. This house belonged to another era of her life, a cosseted childhood, an ill-judged marriage, early motherhood, adultery.

  ‘You don’t belong here any more,’ she told it firmly.

  Throwing open the door to the drawing room, quite another smell overwhelmed her. Sherry. The Percys had been big on sherry, the family stirrup cup as well as sun-downer, always in the saddle flasks and doled out by the gallon at meets, or dashed into Bloody Marys along with Tabasco after cubbing.

  They’d held an annual autumn breakfast here when the Captain and Sandy Austen had been joint masters, one a five-generation traditionalist, the other a sociable pretender twenty years his junior, back in the day when the stud’s land had stretched right down to the Fosse Way, its holding twice that of the Austens’, the rivalry between the two families never more ridiculous than when one’s kedgeree took on the other’s home-bred black and white puddings, Patum Peperium versus smoked mackerel pâté, white nursery toast versus brown malted, sherry versus champagne, old versus new. When Johnny had taken over the mastership from his father-in-law, those breakfasts had become legends of hard-drinking endurance, often lasting late into the afternoon, Hogarthian in their excess.

  It was at one such marathon that Angus Bowman had stood beside Ronnie in the mullioned window overlooking the front paddocks and said, so quietly that only she could hear, ‘You do know I’m totally in love with you, don’t you?’

  Bowman was a garrulous, daredevil amateur jockey, who occasionally hunted with the Fosse and Wolds, always flirting shamelessly with Ronnie if she was in the field. A blond, blue-eyed, smooth-tongued demi-god, he was all too easy on the eye and ear. Recognising what Hermia called a ‘gene-crush’ – a long-lost twin from another lifetime – Ronnie had laughed off his approaches at check and point many times.

  Going to bed with unhappily married wives was Angus’s forte. Bit between his teeth, he’d quickly stepped up the ante, introducing her to a group of friends who wanted to buy several young event horses for Ronnie to compete and had very deep pockets. It was a big coup for the stud, whose best home-bred stars Ronnie usually lost rides on as soon as they made the grade and were sold. The Captain encouraged the deal: ‘Do whatever it takes to screw the most out of them.’ She and Angus duly negotiated and flirted.

  Soon three of Ronnie’s top string belonged to the syndicate. Each time she went away to compete, Angus seemed to find an excuse to be there to help, cheering, supporting and flirting. Finding her old form, Ronnie started winning big competitions, her name back on the lips of team selectors. She left the children at home with their jolly nanny: campaigning back at top level took her further afield, regularly camping overnight in the lorry park. The rosettes and points piled up. She and Angus celebrated. She won her first three-day event in seven years. The next morning, she woke up with Angus.

  He was a total revelation in bed. Ronnie couldn’t believe her body was capable of such persistent pleasure, exhausting and addictive, shamelessly decadent. It was pure reflex, the same kind of involuntary joy that gripped her with laughter or woke her with a sudden start when a dream left an impossible craving. An adept and confident lover, Angus made her laugh, come and crave non-stop. As their affair took off, it spiralled into high-risk hedonism that neither could hope to stop, their encounters conducted breathlessly in the back of horseboxes, borrowed cottages on estates hosting horse trials, motels near race courses and, one legendary autumn morning, beneath the picnic-table fence at a three-day event while everybody was busy at the pre-course walk briefing.

  She was leading two parallel lives. While the village and family saw only the ever-smiling, hard-working wife and mother they adored, the eventing world knew precisely what was going on, and counted down to the inevitable explosion.

  The couple were blindly infatuated with each other. Angus, thirty-four when the affair started and ready to settle down, was already engaged. Ronnie was almost ten years his junior, but life as Captain Percy’s daughter meant a full dance-card from cradle to grave, marriage tethering her young, her greatest duty already dispatched in mothering three children. Johnny Ledwell’s animal husbandry skills – infinitely better developed than his human ones – would see the stud into the next century. Meanwhile Ronnie struggled to see beyond the next week.

  ‘I want you to leave him,’ Angus had whispered by the window in the drawing room that morning after autumn hunting. ‘Run away with me.’

  ‘I won’t leave my children.’

  ‘They come too. That’s the deal.’

  He must have asked her to leave Johnny a hundred times in six months, but she always refused. As the affair warmed them through a bitterly cold hunting season, it brought Angus within dangerously close quarters. The temptation to flee grew almost overwhelming. She was certain Johnny hated their sour, atrophied marriage as much as she did, yet he remained icily indifferent, drinking to blot out all feeling, caring more about his studbook than the writing on the wall.

  Ronnie had spent sleepless nights forming a plan. Johnny would do the honourable thing and move out, surely. He could rent somewhere in the village to stay close to the children. They had to come first, things taken at their pace. She and Angus would need to move slowly. Once the divorce was final, they could get to know each other better away from the adrenalin rush of adultery. The children were already big fans of ‘Gangus’, which helped, and her father rated the jockey highly. Her parents would come around eventually.

  Desperate for an ally, she’d longed to talk to Hermia, but her friend was off radar on a theatre tour, and Ronnie had hidden her unhappiness for far too long to spill it all to a pay-phone in a dressing-room corridor. Eventing friends were all pro-Angus, but she needed balance and compassion. Johnny wasn’t the one having the affair; he was the father of her children; he didn’t get angry and didn’t argue even when blind drunk. He just didn’t love her.

  Had Ronnie ever stopped to question why he drank, and whether that had anything to do with love, she might have stumbled on the answer sooner. But by that point she was already hurtling towards the door, her need to run from it overwhelming and instinctive.

  She heard hoofs trotting briskly up the drive.

  ‘Oh, hell.’ She hurried to look through the grubby glass, almost completely overgrown with wisteria. Was Lester coming back early?

  She knew she must go straight out and get the reunion over with. Far worse to let him stumble across Blair. She hurried to the study to collect the last of the stud-files boxes. But coming out of the rear courtyard and through the gate to the stables, she found no sign of Lester or his horse. Abandoning the archive box on the car bonnet with the others, she went through the archways in search of him, but he’d vanished. The stable awaiting his hunter remained open, sweat rug over the door, bed made ready for his return. She wondered if she’d imagined it.

  A step behind made her spin round. Blair was emerging from the shadow of the clock-tower, his face breaking into a shrewd, crease-eyed smile. ‘You knew I’d bloody love them, didn’t you?’

  ‘I thought they’d be your stamp.’ She was relieved.

  ‘They’re the whole package – FedExed, air-mailed, signed-for tough types.’ They walked together out to the modern barn where the long faces of the oldest unbroken homebreds were lined up like piano keys, watching them eagerly over sheep hurdling. ‘They’re like little Aussie cattle horses with more timber.’

  ‘And they’re cheap,’ she reminded him. ‘Which is why you like them so much.’

  Blair’s craggy smile widened as he put his arm round her and pulled her unde
r his chin to tousle her hair. He was an alchemist when it came to turning base metal into eventing gold. He’d never bought an expensive horse in his life. Apart from the birthday present for his wife.

  ‘In that case, I’ll take the lot.’ He kissed the top of her head. ‘And you’ll stay in Wiltshire. Deal?’

  ‘Let’s not go there.’ She held up her hand, breaking free to turn and call her dogs away from sniffing around Lester’s cottage door, his little terrier barking inside. As she did so, she realised Blair’s wanderlust dog was missing. ‘Where’s George?’

  ‘Got bored of me checking out horses.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘Gone rabbiting, I should think. He’ll be back.’

  ‘Anything you especially like the look of?’ Ronnie cast her eye over the oldest unbroken homebreds.

  ‘The little buckskin colt turned out over there.’ He pointed at a small flurry of action in the nursery paddock.

  ‘Not for sale.’ She went to check beyond the hedge. Furious to be separated from his new best friend, the foal was storming up and down its far side, pink nose in the air. ‘And he’s a baby. You want ones you can start straight away.’

  ‘C’mon, Ron,’ Blair followed, his deep voice cajoling, ‘that’s not fair. He’s the best of the lot by far.’

  ‘Which is why he’s not for sale.’

  ‘You’re Ronnie Percy.’ He grinned as he sauntered after her. ‘Everything’s for sale. You’d sell the shirt off your back for profit.’

  ‘Not if I didn’t have a decent bra on.’

  ‘You’d sell that too if the money was right.’

  She looked over her shoulder disbelievingly. ‘You think that?’

  ‘Take it as a compliment.’ His brows shrugged up, furrows deepening in his forehead. ‘You don’t give a shit. It’s what I like about you. That and your arse.’

  They shared a kiss to stop another row bubbling, his hand-span so wide in the back of her neck as he drew her up on tiptoe that his thumb was beneath one ear while his fingers stroked the other. His mouth tasted of strong coffee and sweet tobacco.

  Ronnie had always been attracted to competitive, unreconstructed men who knew what they wanted and took it, which in the horse world made for rich pickings. Selfishness was easy to read, and highly competitive men like Blair never took their eye off target. Triers like Ronnie never stopped racing to ride the faster line.

  ‘I know you say that Vee won’t let the stallion go,’ she said, watching his face adopt its customary visor-down look of a knight preparing to gallop towards a jousting opponent. ‘Hear me out. The horse is totally wasted. Why not loan him to stand at stud here for a season? That way you know he’s safe. Vee’s safe. We’re safe.’

  The dark eyes burned into hers through the visor grille, the conversation over before it started. ‘Not my decision, mate.’

  The do-not-go-there shutdown was the rule she broke most often. ‘You know it is, Blair. Don’t hide behind her.’

  ‘Nobody hides behind Vee.’

  ‘Think of the horse.’

  ‘There are lots of horses out there. I only have one wife.’

  ‘And one mistress.’

  ‘Let’s keep it that way.’

  She held up her arms.

  Despite the diffident air that often lulled the opposition into a false sense of security, Blair’s way of riding across country betrayed his tactical nature, a man seemingly utterly committed to one line yet able to change course at speed, a quick-thinking maverick whose ability to stay in the saddle through every twist and turn was legendary.

  He changed course now, pressing his forehead to hers, the bitter-chocolate eyes intense. ‘If you live here, you’re making it impossible for us to carry on as we are.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘I can’t just slip out to walk the dog and come to see you.’

  ‘Your dog might still be rabbiting here. Lot of warrens out there. Daddy lost a terrier for six months once.’

  He laughed gruffly, glancing over his shoulder at the fields. In profile, she could see a muscle ticking in the hollow of his cheek, the tense sinews in his neck. ‘I’m not ready to let us go, Ron.’

  ‘We agreed we could walk away from “us” at any time.’

  ‘So you want to walk?’ He turned back to touch foreheads again, eyes even darker. When they were on a level with hers it was very hard to resist that Aussie magnetism, as rough-hewn and pure gold as a chunk of Mount Carlton. He was fiery and nonconformist, immensely practical and knowledgeable, unstinting and a fantastic lay. She wasn’t ready to lose ‘us’ either, even if it had to adapt to survive.

  ‘I think driving’s the better option between here and Wiltshire, don’t you? If I decide to live here, you’re just going to have to collect these youngsters one at a time in a single trailer. But there’s a lot to sort out before that happens.’ She looked back to the yards for Lester.

  ‘Yeah, like finding my bloody dog.’ He turned to holler up at the fields. ‘George! George, c’mere!’

  Ronnie’s two little heelers were snorting furiously at the door in the wall beside the tack room that led through to the little garden at Lester’s cottage.

  ‘Could George be through here?’ She strode back through the arches towards it. Beyond it lay his walled private plot, a miniature sanctum immaculately laid out with soft fruit, cold frames and geometrically planted vegetables. The thought of it made her hands shake, but she refused to let in the memories.

  ‘Doubt it.’ Blair ground out his cigarette and wandered after her. ‘Uncle Fester rode in there a little while back. Didn’t you see?’

  ‘But that’s his garden.’ She went to hammer on the door.

  ‘He didn’t look like a man who wanted to be followed,’ Blair warned her.

  ‘Lester, are you there?’

  A horse whinnied.

  ‘Now’s not a good time, Mrs Ledwell,’ came a firm voice.

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Perfectly, thank you. You get on with whatever it is you’re doing. I’ll not bother you.’

  ‘If you’re sure?’

  ‘Perfectly sure.’

  ‘Lester, you and I do have to talk at some point.’

  Apart from the jangle of a bit and the sound of a horse snorting, all was silence.

  Raking her hair back in frustrated bewilderment, she turned to see Blair watching her, brows lowered. ‘You heard the guy. We’d better press on. Where’s that scanner?’

  She headed back to her car to fetch it, then held it out for Blair to take.

  He crossed his arms. ‘What’s the deal here, Ronnie?’

  ‘There is no deal.’ She grabbed a roll of livestock stickers, which she dropped into the box of equine passports, balancing the scanner on top, then picked it all up and turned to him. ‘If you sticker the ones you like, I can check the breeding on those first.’

  Taking the box from her, he peeled a sticker and placed it on her chest.

  ‘Past her prime,’ she muttered, removing it. ‘Unreliable sort. Doubtful lineage.’

  Faster than a shop worker with a label gun, he applied sticker after sticker all over her until, laughing, she snatched back the roll, losing her grip on the heavy box as she did so.

  Fifty passports fell to the ground as his hands reached for her face, drawing it to his, lips on hers. ‘That’s all I bloody want right now. Stay in Wiltshire.’

  25

  Petra bade farewell to the Bags at her gates, saluting them. ‘I’m trading Redhead for Black Tom, but I’m only a phone call away.’

  ‘Good luck!’ Bridge saluted her back, eyebrows at sad angles. ‘We’ll miss you.’

  ‘I’ll call you later, then.’ Gill dismissed Petra’s theatrical curtain call with a disparaging look. ‘And we’ll all see you at the Goose Walk.’

  Greta Garbo would find it impossible to live in a Cotswolds village, Petra reflected, as she and the chestnut mare crunched up the drive just in time to see a quadcopter swooping over her house roof.


  ‘Fitz, just what are you up to with that drone?’ she shouted towards his open window. ‘If I find you’ve hidden in there the whole time while your sisters maxed out on CBBC and Frosties again, there’ll be hell to pay!’

  He appeared around the corner of the house, croquet mallet in one hand, a bag of carrots and marrows in the other, pouch pocket of his hoodie bulging with what could be all manner of gadgetry and drone controls, although Petra was too shocked to see him dressed and outside before nine to dwell on it.

  ‘Just setting up a game for the girls.’

  ‘Wow. Great. Isn’t it a bit early for croquet? The lawn’s still wet.’

  ‘You said give them breakfast croquet.’

  ‘Croquettes, Fitz. Bacon and avocado croquettes. In the bottom oven. No sugary cereal.’

  ‘On it. Oh, Mr Thing next door just handed me this.’ He gave her the bag of vegetables. ‘Plus that weird woman who posts crap on your Facebook page came to the door earlier, but I didn’t invite her in. She took the tin of cakes away. Major fail.’

  ‘You did good.’

  Wondering how Pip knew the code to the electric gate, Petra fed the mare the carrots and turned her out, then hastened inside to face the consequences of her negligent mothering.

  The bacon and avocado croquettes had been eaten straight from the baking tray, Petra suspected more by Fitz and Wilf than the squabbling divas at the kitchen table: its oilcloth housed a Manhattan of cereal packets with an Ellis Island milk carton offset.

  Being overseen by their big brother inevitably turned Prudie and Bella from sweet, sleepy preppers to pre-teen monsters. In pulled-up hoods, hot-pants and neon Crocs, they were fighting over possession of their brother’s iPhone with which they were taking selfies, its low-battery warning beeping.

  ‘Enough. Give that to me.’ Petra confiscated it, taking in the Nutella beards and smelling a recent burned-toast binge. That the sisters were dressed lifted Fitz’s childcare skills greatly in her estimation. It might have come late in the holiday, but he was showing terrific responsibility.