The Country Set

by Fiona Walker

  Having seen Kit’s handsome, unsmiling face crop up in a lot more of Orla Gomez’s Instagram selfies in recent weeks, Pip had a shrewd suspicion it wasn’t a full chorus-line outing. There were tell-tale kissy mming noises now among the laughter. ‘Theatre companies always get super-close, don’t they?’

  ‘You said it,’ he murmured, hugely distracted but no longer hysterical with laughter. ‘Listen, I’ve promised the kids I’ll try to come back for Samhain as usual, so I’ll call and let you know if that’s happening.’

  ‘Sowing?’

  He spelled it out, the same word she’d seen in the daughter’s card: ‘Celtic festival day – it marks winter beginning, the dark half of the year. It’s a bit like the Mexican Day of the Dead.’

  ‘Hallowe’en, you mean?’

  ‘No pumpkins or sweets, just a big fire. It’s the most important one of the four feast days.’

  ‘I’ll decorate the cottage.’ She brightened at the thought. ‘Skulls and red roses, a few glow-in-the-dark bones, maybe.’

  ‘Please don’t.’

  Pip was chattering happily about the Hallowe’en bargains already for sale in Poundland when she realised he’d hung up on her. How rude! Wasn’t it supposed to be the city that never slept? And she hadn’t even found the manual.

  She attacked the tumble-dryer door with renewed venom, eventually springing it open with the help of a fish slice and a pizza wheel.

  As she gathered the rest of Ronnie Percy’s letters together, she remembered she had an old-fashioned one of her own to write. The future of the stud was depending on her. She stripped the beds, tidied any last signs of George’s rampage, threw away the burned scones and wheeled out the bins for collection, then locked up.

  As Pip reversed out of the drive, she almost flattened Blair, who was walking back along the lane, now reunited with George.

  ‘Watch where you’re going!’ he snarled.

  Pip knew exactly where she was going; she was going home to write to his wife.

  Her phone pinged: Tinder notifying her that she had a match.

  *

  Hearing voices in the arrivals yard, Lester stole in through his back door and upstairs to observe from the window, taking his asthma inhaler with him. His breath was still coming in shallow gulps. It hadn’t been this bad in a long while.

  The good-looking event rider was back again. Lester had to hand it to Ronnie, she had a fine eye for a man, although they usually belonged to somebody else.

  They were getting into the open-top car, three dogs lined up on the back seat, argument raging. Ronnie was obviously furious that she was going to be late for a solicitor’s meeting, the way her hands moved when she was angry reminding him of Ann: when she’d shouted at him, Lester had always imagined she was conducting Beethoven’s Eroica. The children would be furious if she let them down, she wailed.

  Lester thought it thirty years too late for that. He unbuttoned his rat-catcher and put it on its hanger, reaching for the ivory-backed clothes brush. Outside, the birdsong was drowned as the sports-car accelerated away. Only the magpies were audible, taking off from the drive and chattering noisily to the horse-chestnuts.

  He didn’t need to look outside to count the piebald birds.

  ‘Seven for a secret never to be told.’ Lester looked down at Stubbs, snaking his bearded nose against the rug to scratch it. The fox cub in the ferret cage was yet another secret, his little enemy on the inside.

  ‘The day I set that little bugger free, I’ll be ready to tell her,’ he promised Stubbs. ‘But I’ll bet my eye teeth she’s bolted off again long before that.’

  *

  Do U Want 2 meat up, babe?

  JD was not much of a conversationalist.

  Let’s have a chat on here first, Pip suggested, trying to think up some questions to ask.

  He was on his tea break, he replied to her opener. Strong and milky three sugars, came his second reply, then KitKat followed by the affirmation that he liked cake. The fact that he was a labourer was his biggest revelation. She told him she was manager at a stud with a side-line in baking, research and property maintenance, the George Osborne of the Comptons, ha-ha! He seemed quite taken with that and asked if she wanted sex.

  Not yet. I’ve got scones baking. She wanted to extract enough information out of him to google him, but he told her he had to stop because his break had ended.

  Catch U l8r yeah, babe?

  I’ll be here!

  While Pip’s second batch of scones was baking and Good Morning was on an ad break, she remembered to check out the freebie theatre tickets she’d been given, which she now hoped would do for Lester’s birthday.

  Her mouth fell open as she read them properly. Poldark the Musical. Who could resist tap-dancing in a tricorn hat? Its headline star was a pop legend. Its wizened patriarch, Charles, was being played by an old-school luvvie, Midsomer regular and one of the Donnes’ oldest friends. He’d been around so long even Lester would have heard of him.

  Pip buzzed, feeling sprinkled with celebrity star-dust. The pop legend headlining as Ross was one of her pin-ups, almost up there with Shane Lynch in smouldering sex appeal and boy-band dancing. It certainly beat JD and his KitKat.

  Casting her tablet aside to take a tray of perfect golden scones out of the oven, Pip wondered whether to leave Lester to his own devices this afternoon and dedicate herself to watching all three series of Poldark in anticipation. He’d only want help turning all the horses back out, and she always found that terrifying. Plus she wanted to keep her head down in the village for a bit.

  Working her way through the scones, Pip checked Facebook quickly. Still no reply from Petra, who had gathered dozens more likes for her comments and a few replies accusing Pip of being monstrously rude.

  Hurt, she couldn’t resist looking at Roo Verney’s wall again.

  Battery recharged and back home, Roo had posted more evidence of that morning’s surly countrymen and stroppy hunt-followers, along with a message: I must thank my secret saviour, whose job I won’t jeopardise by naming her. You know who you are. A gutsy woman and a Wicked Lady (I hope!). Friend me. Follow me. Call me. Xx Pip ‘liked’ this, then upgraded it to a heart and just as quickly downgraded it again: she didn’t want to give the wrong impression.

  Friendship was a much-prized achievement in Pip’s life. She clicked the request. The acceptance came almost straight away. Flushed, she navigated away without leaving a message. She didn’t want to get into the whole dinner-date thing: she had JD’s feelings to consider now.

  He messaged again at lunchtime: On dinner break. Do you want sex l8tr or not, babe?

  Staying in to write a letter, sorry!

  From the row of suggestive emoticons, he seemed to think this was a sex act.

  Pip thought wistfully of his inked six pack. Maybe a drink sometime?

  He sent an emoticon of a row of beer kegs and googly eyes and they left it there, anticipation hanging excitingly in the air.

  Pip settled down to reread the original letter she’d posted to Verity. No wonder it had gone straight into the bin. It read like a marketing flyer. She found an old Basildon Bond writing pad in her father’s desk and slotted a cartridge into one of his beloved fountain pens, shaking ink to its nib, then making her handwriting as bold and round as the one she’d seen earlier in letters to Hermia. The best way to talk to a drunk was very directly, she decided. No beating about the bush or buttering up.

  Verity,

  Please let him go. He will want for nothing. He will have lots of sex. He will be happy. He will feel young again. He will live in the most beautiful surroundings, on high pasture.

  Surely you can’t deny him that?

  I await your call.

  She signed it P, adding a little tail that was open to interpretation. If it was mistaken for an R, then so what? The erstwhile Lady Verney was bound to take the entreaty of someone from a long line of horse-breeders more seriously than the daughter of a machine-parts-factory payroll
accountant. Sealing it in an envelope and propping it on the hall tidy, Pip felt gripped by positivity and purpose.

  In the mood for reaching out, she worked her way through more Basildon Bond writing a letter to her one surviving family member, her mother’s unmarried sister who lived in a care home on the Isle of Wight with an encyclopaedic knowledge of television trivia, and with whom relations had long been strained: I know we had our differences after Mum and Dad’s funeral about the carriage clock and the Harrods fur coat, Auntie Sylvia, but I hope it’s all forgotten. Would you like a visit soon?

  Then she called Lester.

  He answered after fifty-three rings. ‘Stud.’

  ‘Pip here! I’m so sorry I can’t help today. Unavoidable. All okay?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Good morning out with the hunt?’

  ‘Fair.’

  ‘Sorry about the dog thing. Genuine mistake.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Are you pissed off with me?’

  He said nothing. Pip gritted her teeth.

  ‘I’m taking you on a treat for your birthday.’

  ‘There’s no need.’

  ‘Poldark the Musical.’

  Another silence.

  ‘It’s in Oxford. You like Oxford, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s pleasant enough.’

  ‘Help me out here, Lester. Be excited.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  Part 4

  MICHAELMAS GOOSE AND HIGH WINDS

  29

  ‘Stud.’

  It had taken eighty-four rings for Lester to pick up the phone.

  ‘Happy birthday!’

  ‘Pip, it’s not yet six in the morning.’

  ‘I know! But you’re always an early bird. I’ll be over in half an hour to help you muck out. I’ve made special breakfast pastries and a cake for later. We’re on the eight o’clock train. I thought we’d go to the Ashmolean first, or Pitt Rivers if you prefer.’

  ‘There’s a hurricane blowing in. I’m not coming.’

  ‘You must come, Lester.’ She gave it her best Elizabeth Taylor wobble. ‘I’ve planned it all. It’s Poldark the Musical. There’s horses and cliffs and waves.’

  ‘I’m not happy leaving the place.’

  ‘The media always exaggerate these things because they know we’re obsessed with weather.’

  ‘And there’ve been some funny types driving past this week.’

  ‘Alice is going to be at the stud all day.’

  ‘She’s only a slip of a thing.’

  ‘She’d beat you in a fight.’

  She could tell from the silence he’d conceded the point, but he wouldn’t budge on his desire to remain here. Refusing to be defeated, she played her trump card.

  ‘Oh, and I forgot to say Alice texted me last night to say that Ronnie is calling by the stud this morning on the way to somewhere. She’s especially eager to talk to you apparently.’

  ‘I’ll come to Oxford.’

  Pip smiled. Best not to mention why Ronnie was coming. It was to do with her selling some of the horses. He definitely wouldn’t want to leave if he knew that. She’d promised Alice she’d pass on the message, but had decided it was best to break it on the train coming home. She didn’t want Lester stressing about it today. She’d be sorry to miss Ronnie – the second time this month – but she’d baked a huge batch of ginger biscuits to leave in the tack room for her, with fresh milk and the best tea mugs, as she told Lester proudly now.

  ‘Pip, have you slept?’ Lester asked warily.

  ‘Oh, you know me. Cat naps. See you in half an hour!’

  Pip picked up her other phone and admired a new picture message of a large, pierced penis artfully resting against novelty Union Jack underpants with KitKat crumbs on them. As well as baking, she’d spent a lot of the night swapping selfies with Tinder match JD, who turned out to be a fellow night owl and, also like her, was a big fan of binge-watching box sets and online role-play gaming. They had a lot more in common than she’d first imagined. She’d now given him the number of her Dark Phone and they communicated regularly on WhatsApp, which largely involved him trying to persuade her to meet him for sex. He’d sent lots more shots of his tattoos, and other exciting parts of himself – this was the fifth dick shot for her collection – and she’d sent him some intimate pictures screen-grabbed off random Tumblr NFSW pages.

  Nice one! she messaged now, uncertain what the correct reaction was.

  He sent a smiley face and a love heart.

  Pip sensed JD had a softer side too. He liked her describing her baking, and he was very interested in her work at the stud, which she’d bigged up.

  U really not free 2nite? Want you to sit on it babes.

  Poldark the Musical!!! She reminded him. She was taking Lester to The Grand Café for high tea afterwards. JD knew all about it.

  He sent a row of crying emoticons and love hearts.

  Pip hugged the phone. She was determined to play it very slowly – she had quite a lot of weight to lose before she met him, not to mention the intimate waxing – but she had a very warm, fuzzy feeling inside her about this one. She might just have found her very own Shane Lynch at long last.

  *

  Three weeks into her new trilogy, Petra had gone off the hero. All her meticulous research throughout the summer had given her unrealistic expectations before the claustrophobia of close focus. She’d barely got beyond her first description of Sir Thomas Fairfax’s long black hair and piercing, warmongering gaze before her crush withered on the branch, unable to shake off the mental image of Russell Brand. She’d tried to imagine him as Johnny Depp or craggy event rider Blair Robertson, and even Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, but each time she faced the page he leered out at her, all teeth and eyes in skinny jeans, saying, ‘I tells ya!’ and talking anarchic politics.

  The real Black Tom had been a brave and noble general, intoxicatingly in love with his fiercely loyal wife, but the man Petra had invented was evangelically pious, manipulative and pompous, and Anne Fairfax a possessive control-freak in white cuffs and felt hat. Petra no longer wanted to spend time with them. It was like being trapped in a coach with Neil and Christine Hamilton.

  She had no excuse, her preparation off pat. The girls’ morning school run was already down to her fastest ever time, afternoons covered by the army of mums and chums she gratefully relied upon for after-club lifts; Fitz caught the bus to and from his new school; the Redhead and the ponies were all still out at grass and needed little hands-on work; the chickens put themselves to bed. She’d filled the freezer with home-cooked meals that summer, ready for the long siege. She allowed herself two hours’ family time each evening and one chivvying in the morning, keeping her phone and WiFi switched off the rest of the time to write uninterrupted. Or think and worry about writing, at least.

  Three weeks of a silent house by day, alone with her reimagined history, had already given her cabin fever. Her mind drifted continually, stewing everyday worries and finding a hundred unnecessary chores to occupy herself around the house as her five carefully planned day-shifts shrank to nothing. She had to jump over the edge and commit to her characters soon. That Friday feeling was no longer a good one. The end of the week not only spelled her failure to write as much as she’d planned, it also brought Charlie home.

  Her “imaginary husband”, as the Saddle Bags jokingly called him, was Petra’s weekday chimera, her overactive mind unable to hold focus elsewhere, the state of her uncommunicative semi-detached marriage chief among the worries. Their weekends together were once again neatly topped and tailed with ‘How was your week?’ and ‘Have a good week!’ with platitudes traded in between. While they still co-parented on Saturdays and Sundays with the stagey energy of the Chuckle Brothers, the intimacy of Italy already felt a lifetime ago, a mere holiday romance. Petra had retreated into her imaginary world, he into his compartmentalised one. She’d deliberately steered clear of asking him about his work, not wanting to ste
p on a landmine or, worse still, a lie; he didn’t ask how her book was going, but then again he never had. He was tetchy and changeable, lost to shooting and screen time most of the weekend while she played taxi to their children’s packed diaries and over-egged the jolliness. They were seldom in the same room long. Even the messages they exchanged during the week were abbreviated to ‘subtexts’, her sharp one-liners blunted by Charlie’s breezy ability to close down a conversation with a lower-case kiss-off. He kissed her more by text than in person, these days.

  They hadn’t had sex since Italy. Lurking in the back of her mind was an unpleasant suspicion that she couldn’t write about a devoted, passionately connected marriage because she wasn’t part of one.

  It was Friday again, birdsong insisting dawn was about to break, the end of the week stomach-churning at its peak. Having lain awake most of the night, her head full of worries, she got out of bed and stole out to the Plotting Shed, thermal mug of tea in hand, determined to make Thomas smoulder puritanically from the page. But she just found more worries staring back at her from the screen, none of which she could put into words. She dragged herself away for breakfast and the school run, without a word written. She was slipping ever further behind on her schedule, mired by self-doubt and frantic displacement, her temper fiercely short.

  ‘How are we feeling today? Happy, happy, happy!’ She bounced into the kitchen, like a children’s party entertainer.

  Hedge-haired and sleepy-eyed, the girls carried on watching Newsround, the presenter excitedly warning that the first big storm of autumn was on its way today. Standing over the toaster, waiting for it to pop up, mod cool in his black blazer and loose tie, Fitz cast his mother a withering look from behind his fringe. ‘Nobody’s convinced, Mum. You’re always completely squippy at the beginning of a book.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Like majorly.’

  ‘Oh.’ Petra wasn’t sure whether to feel relieved or not. Did one simply forget the agony each time, like childbirth? Was one’s husband bound to be just a little bit less supportive and engaged each time? Wasn’t there a hugely increased chance of complications in one’s forties?