The Country Set

by Fiona Walker

  ‘Let’s get these stables done, shall we?’ she said now, marching towards the barrows.

  ‘You don’t have to do that, Mrs Led—Ronnie.’ It sounded all wrong.

  ‘Of course I do.’

  They took half the stables each – Ronnie licking through hers in no time – and Lester got increasingly irritated. While Pip shirked the dirty work or, if her help was needed when lots of mares were in, did what she was told very slowly while talking non-stop, Ronnie had different ideas, briskly efficient, going at warp speed and then, when he was ready for a cup of tea, marching off to the barns to look over the young-stock and mares. ‘Come on, Lester, show me what we’ve got. You know them best of all. It’s fully light now.’

  Lester prickled, following stiffly. Her familiarity, her jolliness should have been exactly what he knew to expect, but he’d lived cheek by jowl with the Percy family long enough to recognise their covering fire. Handel’s Fireworks had long since given way to Water Music, but his wariness wasn’t diluted for a moment.

  *

  Arriving at the stud earlier than usual to impress Ronnie with her helpfulness and get the low-down about the Austens’ party over coffee and biscuits, Pip found both yards deserted and immaculately swept. She admired the new stallion again, standing at some distance from his door because he scared her.

  Taking a tin of freshly baked almond thins to the house, she put on her pinny and rarely used rubber gloves to look the part, but the place was just as she’d left it. Even the kettle was cold. Nobody would have guessed it had a new occupant, apart from the dog bowls by the back door.

  Pip slipped through the house to the dining room – the dark green wallpaper was original Victorian, Ann Percy had once told her, and as glossily lustrous as a mallard’s neck if you ignored the peeling sections – imagining her Christmas gathering. The mahogany table seated twelve. Her six lonely oldies, Lester, herself and – God willing – Ronnie would be a reasonable number to fill it. There were a couple of wheelchairs and a few oxygen tanks to occupy the gaps. It was going to be perfect.

  In the Captain’s study, there were signs of life, the most official-looking post half opened, paperwork spread around, an unfamiliar bulging leather document case on top of the desk. Peeping inside, she found the leather folder crammed with all manner of records, from passports and birth certificates to legal papers, banking and bonds, health records and old personal letters. Pip glanced out of the window to check nobody was around and pulled out a few, thrilled to find some of the matching pairs to the letters at the Old Almshouses. Beneath them, poignant in their sparsity and well-worn travels, were letters from Ronnie’s children, with cards, pictures and postcards, the majority from Pax. There were mementoes too, little souvenirs from places they had all visited, shells and rubbings, a paper aeroplane made from a menu, and more personal keepsakes, like locks of hair, a small hand-crocheted dog, a clothes-peg doll.

  A movement caught her eye outside, one of Ronnie’s little dogs scouting around the stable-yard entrance. Fearing discovery, Pip put everything back, cursing as a large envelope marked with the solicitors’ address caught and ripped. An official-looking letter spilled out, an interim summary account of the late Jocelyn Percy’s estate. She slipped it back in, then stopped and looked at it again, sitting down very abruptly. She’d known the Captain died down on his uppers, but it none-the-less came as a shock to see how little was left.

  *

  Ronnie pressed her gloved hands to her face to warm it, running her little fingers beneath her eyes and blinking, looking at the herd, winter coats already tarred and feathered with mud and straw, manes and tails dreadlocked. They looked their worst, pregnant mares, strapping youngsters, gangly adolescents and teasel-puffed foals all sharing winter quarters in constantly moving kettled throngs. They’d all sported just the first fuzz of a blackberry coat when she and Blair had checked the microchips in early September, a lightweight jacket compared to this thick astrakhan insulating them against the coldest months ahead. The clouds had chased the sun around that day, she remembered. She and Blair had kept the window open the previous night, listening to the millrace rush through the old wheel, making love and imagining they were behind a waterfall.

  She turned away from Lester for a moment, tilting her chin up and composing her face as she sought to think about something other than Blair. He was threaded so intricately through the pattern of her life for the last few years that it was impossible to move around in her head without encountering him. It wasn’t the memories that were difficult, but the big thump of loss and loneliness that came with them, the immediacy of not having him any more. She missed being held. She missed being guarded fiercely, even though she’d often hated it. She dearly missed his horse sense.

  ‘There are far too many horses here,’ she told Lester.

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘And none of the four- and five-year-olds are broken?’

  ‘You can start them off, Mrs Le—’ He cleared his throat. ‘Ronnie.’

  ‘I don’t do that any more, Lester.’

  He nodded. ‘Young man’s game.’

  ‘Or woman’s,’ she corrected, although she knew in this case it would be a man. Lester would approve of that at least, being a terrible old sexist. He was at his most curmudgeonly this morning, threatening their shaky entente cordiale. She doubted he was ready for Mrs Le Ronnie to call the shots just yet, but as they started walking back to the yard – his once-rapid stride a cautious shuffle – she was reminded of the urgency. Lester was always going to be obdurate, the routine unalterable, the tack-room diary still filled in with neat copperplate logging each horse’s care, the hunters all immaculately fit for the start of the season, as though her parents had paid their subs.

  ‘You riding today?’ He held a gate open for her, poker-faced and backed.

  ‘I’ve hung up my boots.’ Ronnie had walked almost to the first archway before she realised she’d left him behind. He was standing holding the gate, small and hunched, glaring at her.

  She walked back, Olive bounding ahead, Enid sitting grumpily in wait under the arch in her padded jacket.

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Last Wednesday. I’ll let the pros do the work.’

  ‘You’re the pro, Mrs Le—Ronnie.’

  ‘Back in the day.’ She laughed as they walked on together and she quashed an urge to nip at his ankles, like her dogs, to speed him up. ‘Not any more. Daddy gave up too, remember.’

  ‘That’ll be the black dog.’

  ‘He didn’t ever speak to me about that.’ It made awful sense to Ronnie, amazed she’d never recognised depression in her father, or perhaps just never acknowledged it. His increasing withdrawal, his rages, his lack of forgiveness and reason. Lester, normally so circumspect and tight-lipped, had just revealed a corner of a paternal jigsaw that she’d never found, yet it matched her own perfectly. ‘Poor Daddy.’

  ‘Bloody big beast it was. Went straight under his horse. Labrador belonging to one of the guns on Sandy Austen’s shoot. Killed instantly.’

  ‘You’re talking about a real dog?’

  He glanced across at her curiously. ‘That’s what I said. Black dog. Never wanted to ride again after that. Lost his nerve like you.’

  ‘I haven’t lost my nerve, Lester. I’ve just stopped.’

  ‘You’ll come riding with me then,’ he said firmly, whistling for Stubbs, who was ratting under the hay bales.

  It was an order, Ronnie registered, hiding a smile. Her old horse-master was calling the shots, shouting at young Veronica to remount, sit up, kick on and never take a pull. For a second she was back in the glory days, almost feeling her ponytail bobbing and Hermia tight on her heels, shouting, ‘Your line!’ the fences coming thick and fast, clustering up for the dressing fence they had to jump together, knees clashing, like polo players’.

  How badly she wished Hermia were still alive to talk to. She’d know how to break it to Lester that things had to change.

>   ‘Morning, all!’ Pip Edwards was crossing the yard, carrying a bucket, sweet but ridiculous in pink salopettes, coat and bobble hat.

  ‘Hello! You look in the pink!’

  ‘You are funny!’ She laughed over-brightly, her face colour-matching her clothing as she trotted into a stable with a droopy-lipped black head hanging over the door. ‘I’m giving Horace a dust.’

  ‘It’s what she calls grooming,’ Lester explained, now so desperate for a cup of tea he was half-passing across the frozen yard towards the stable cottage like a figure skater.

  Ronnie pas-de-deuxed with him. ‘Oh, right. Which one is Horace?’

  ‘Point-to-pointer. Came back from training in September because nobody paid the bill.’

  ‘Any form?’

  ‘Three wins last year.’

  ‘We’d better sell him, then.’

  ‘Break Pip’s heart. Dotes on him. He’s her favourite. This place and the horses are family to her.’

  She glanced across at the pink figure flapping about in the bay’s stable unbuckling his rugs, door wide open, bucket dumped in the entrance. ‘We need to pull our boots up around here a bit, I think, Lester.’

  The half-pass halted suddenly and indignantly. ‘With respect, Mrs Le—Ronnie, you’re the one who hung them up too soon, not me.’

  ‘You need more help.’

  ‘That’s why you’re here.’

  ‘Yes, but I’m not planning to... That is, I want to bring in somebody more overarching.’

  ‘What,’ he cleared his throat, ‘is “overarching” when it’s at home?’

  ‘Listening to The Archers broadcasts, repeats and omnibus!’ a voice giggled.

  They both jumped to find Pip alongside, holding a pink grooming kit.

  ‘Just my little joke!’ She bustled away to Horace’s open stable. He was now standing halfway out, rug slipped round his neck, like a bib.

  ‘Let’s talk about it over a cup of tea.’ Ronnie hadn’t meant to bring it up like this, but the sight of so many unbroken horses made her jumpy, not to mention Pip Edwards in her pink Pony Clubber gear wielding a fuchsia body brush on the yard’s best realisable cash asset.

  ‘I’d rather talk about it now.’ Lester had dug in on the cobbles, Stubbs settling by his side, both giving her beady looks.

  ‘I have someone lined up to run this place. With you.’ Oh, God, she hadn’t mentioned Lester in her call to the Horsemaker. Why? ‘Face it, we’re neither of us young breakers any more. We need a fall guy.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I say so. He’s super at starting them off. Jolly experienced in the covering barn too.’

  ‘I do the stallion work. There’s a lad from the riding school up the Micklecote road comes and holds the mares. I suppose he can help handle the grey bugger,’ he added grudgingly.

  Ronnie let this pass, reminding herself to drip-feed. ‘You’ll like him. He’s very laid-back. And this place needs new blood.’

  ‘You brought that. Best-looking stallion we’ve ever had in a stable here, that foreign horse.’ He said it quickly, and she could tell how much it hurt him to admit it. Which would make it even harder to break it to him what she intended to do with Beck.

  ‘Does the family agree to your over-archering plan?’ His chin lifted.

  ‘It’s all to be discussed,’ she said vaguely.

  He’d side-shuffled as far as the door to his garden, his hand on the latch. ‘The family has to agree to decisions like this, as I understand it, the stud being in trust.’

  ‘I know that.’ She eyed the door, remembering the awfulness of the day she’d thrown it open to reveal a heartbreaking truth.

  ‘Trust.’ He repeated the word darkly.

  She caught his eye, suspecting they weren’t talking about a new yard manager any more but a very old secret he guarded, like a dragon at a cave’s mouth. ‘You can trust me, Lester. I want what’s best for my children. I always have.’

  His voice was barely more than a whisper. ‘You should have come back for them, then.’

  ‘You know I wanted to and I tried. You know why I couldn’t.’

  He shook his head, eyes fierce in their creased curtains. ‘I kept my promise. You should have come back.’

  They both looked away as Pip whisked past with a plastic shovel, laughing. ‘He’s just done a poo!’

  Ronnie closed her eyes, realising how badly she’d judged this, how ridiculous it was to try to keep calm and carry on when, years earlier, they’d left things in utter turmoil, love flipped to hate.

  ‘This place is my life, Mrs Ledwell,’ Lester said quietly. ‘You might think you know it all because you’ve jet-setted across Europe, and that I’m not good enough to run this yard any more but—’

  ‘That’s not true! When I said we have to pull up our boots, all I meant—’

  ‘Let me finish, young lady!’ Lester had only got angry a handful of times in Ronnie’s memory. He was one of the most self-contained, self-controlled men she had ever met, but now he rose up six inches in his shiny brown boots and used every decibel of the army-parade voice that had once hollered at her to jump again, get on again, dry tears, kick on, live to ride another day. Lester didn’t make speeches. He stabbed short, sharp bayonets of truth with a rifleman’s angry scream. ‘I do not need to pull my boots up! The Captain waited thirty years for you to come back. I pulled my boots on every day. He bred horses for you to compete on, too many horses. I pulled my boots on and worked them. He raised the children you left behind. I pulled my boots on and taught them to ride. He tried to stop the husband you left behind drinking himself to death. I pulled my boots on and carried his coffin. I carried your father’s coffin too. I will die here with my boots on whether you overarch me or not.’

  ‘Well put.’

  ‘With respect, Mrs Ledwell, I am going to make myself a cup of tea.’ The gate creaked open. ‘Be ready to ride at nine thirty sharp. You’re pulling your boots on too.’

  It slammed behind him, the lid on the shared secret.

  *

  Ronnie wrapped her arms tightly around herself and looked down at the cobbles, counting down from high emotion. When she’d got to thirty, which was enough for her to be able to find a tiny gap for breath around the lump in her throat and the fire in her lungs, she looked up to find a pink, smiling face in front of her.

  ‘I’ve got time for a cup of coffee before I go. I’ve baked almond thins. You look like you need a friend.’

  ‘Thank you, Pip. That’s very kind, but I must apologise to Lester.’

  Pip scrunched up her face with a little head shake. ‘Best leave him a while. He’s a crotchety old thing, these days. Needs to simmer like a pudding to soften and sweeten.’

  ‘Then I’ll walk my dogs while he steams.’ She had no desire to be annexed with Pip again, already wise to the Miss Marple curiosity and manipulative streak.

  ‘Before you go, I should just mention Christmas. It’s for Lester, so I know you won’t mind.’

  Ronnie half listened as Pip revealed her open invitation to the frail and lonely of the village, led by her elderly Home Comforts posse. She was a forceful little character, clearly a great adopter of people as well as animals. Ronnie rather admired her unbridled enthusiasm. If, as Lester said, the horses were her babies – Ronnie had doubts – she had no desire to separate mother and children without a more careful audit: the stud clearly needed her help. But when she realised that Pip wanted to host her Christmas Day lunch here at the house – ‘You will be guest of honour, of course’ – she held up both hands.

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘We’re all very friendly, very supportive. I have elderly clients suffering with life-threatening conditions, but everyone deserves a little Christmas cheer, don’t they?’

  ‘Quite so, but please don’t involve me, Pip.’

  ‘I can use Percy Place, though?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  She dropped her voice to a breathy pant. ‘But I’m
setting Lester up romantically. He’s so lonely. He needs a companion.’

  Ronnie stared at her in astonishment. ‘Who with?’

  ‘I’ve shortlisted half a dozen ladies, like a village The Bachelor, although Mrs Lane-Drew is probably a non-starter because she’s allergic to horses, and the Misses Evans come as a double act, which might be a bit much for him – what do you think? Most men fantasise about identical twins, don’t they? My friend Petra, the famous writer, wrote a scene once with identical twins doing outrageous things to Lord Byron.’

  ‘Not Lester, Pip. And absolutely not the Misses Evans.’ Petra was going down even faster in Ronnie’s estimation.

  ‘At least think about letting me cook Christmas lunch here. I’ll let you mull it over, shall I? I’m going to take old Mrs Hedges her millionaire’s shortbread this morning and she’s so looking forward to it. And I’ve some lovely gentlemen on my books if you’d like me to—’

  Both hands went back up. ‘Absolutely not.’ She turned to whistle her dogs.

  *

  Pip scuttled after Ronnie as she started marching towards the drive with the heelers, her plans crumbling. She’d been so looking forward to befriending Ronnie, to telling her all the village gossip, the portfolio of Compton secrets she’d pieced together on Facebook feeds or listening to her oldies talking, about Kit Donne, his messy house and love life, about Petra, her racy books and strange son. Most of all she’d been looking forward to Christmas all together at the stud, a new family emerging after the Captain’s rule ended, making up for Ronnie’s troubled relationship with her own kin, and the village’s mistrust of her. Pip wanted to reassure her that she was onside.

  ‘Think of the positive PR, what with all the rumours about –’ she mouthed Mr Austen ‘– flying around.’

  Ronnie didn’t break her stride, tutting crossly. ‘I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise news has spread already. This place never changes, and Bay was bound to dine off the Black Widow returning to kiss and make up. What are they saying? Actually, don’t tell me. I don’t care.’