by Fiona Walker
Pip licked her lips, tasting fresh scandal. ‘The party’s all anyone can talk about this morning.’ She tried to think who she could get to talk about it. Petra had gone very cold on her lately.
Already drawing ahead with her course-walking stride, Ronnie called over her shoulder, ‘Getting caught wrapped round Bay Austen is the least that’s expected of me, Pip. Tell the village I’ve hardly got warmed up.’
Pip hurried back to share this with Lester over almond thins, but he’d finished his tea and was strapping down the cob vigorously ready to tack up, Handel’s Ariodante playing too loudly for her to get a word in edgeways.
Across the yard, a slim figure in ripped skinny jeans was leaning over the foal’s stable doors, his pink nose tousling her trendy tangle of root-dyed blonde hair. Crossing her arms territorially, Pip recognised her as one of Janine’s Feather Dusters cleaners. ‘Can I help?’
‘He looks so well, doesn’t he?’ She turned, the foal’s nose pressed against her arm. ‘Ronnie said I could come and see him. Is she here?’
‘Walking her dogs.’ Pip marched across. ‘I’m surprised you didn’t bump into her on the drive.’
‘Came over the fields. It’s my shortcut to work.’
‘Best you don’t.’ Pip thought uncomfortably about JD and the tack theft, and how easy it was to give information accidentally to criminals. The girl was a Turner after all. It would do no harm to get the word out that the stud was now Fort Knox. ‘We’re putting in new security measures – CCTV, more powerful electric fencing, guard dogs, that sort of thing.’
‘What sort? I like dogs.’ She turned to tickle the foal’s neck. ‘Those little bat fink things Ronnie has are tough little characters, aren’t they?’
‘That’s Mrs Ledwell to you, and they’re pedigree Lancashire heelers!’ a voice shouted across the yard, as Lester detoured from a trip to the tack room and marched across to them, Stubbs at heel. ‘I’ve warned you about this before. This isn’t a petting zoo.’
‘She said it was fine to see him any time.’
‘That’s as may be, but this is a professional stud and we can’t allow people to just wander in when they feel like it. You are most welcome to call and make an appointment in advance, should you wish to see him again.’
‘And you can do one.’ She laughed.
‘Do what?’
‘It’s a modern phrase that means “get lost”,’ Pip translated helpfully.
Two shiny boot heels clicked together, the voice a menacing hiss. ‘Then I must respectfully ask you to “do one” also, young lady. I won’t take impertinence on this yard from you or anybody else. I am still in charge here, and you are leaving. You have two minutes.’ Stubbs snarled his approval.
Pip felt a shiver of gratification. Lester could be Field Marshal Montgomery scary when he was angry.
*
Kit marched across Church Lane, red coat flapping, and let himself into the graveyard, crunching across the white-tipped grass to Hermia, manic with the adrenalin of sleep-deprived focus, of ideas forming faster than he could write them down.
The flowers he’d laid yesterday were already blighted by frost, brown-edged and shrivelled, their heads bent.
‘I’ve read all three books, made a thousand notes and talked to you a lot, as you know,’ he told her, lifting them from the vase, ramming them under his arm. ‘I am now going to get into a bed for the first time in three days. Our daughter has dangled these confounded things all over the house.’ He threaded a large dream-catcher through a ski pole he’d found in a cupboard and propped it in the vase. ‘I can no longer sleep with you, but you walk through my head here all the time, my darling. Here’s all my naps. I’ll bring more tomorrow. Sweet dreams.’
He kissed his fingers, touching them to her stone before crunching away, head bowed, trying to keep every bursting thought inside, his vision slewed with the need to rest.
Someone was coming through the gate as he reached it. He stepped aside, watching eight short hairy legs and two longer booted ones march in. The gate was held open.
‘Thank you.’ He went through it, not looking up.
‘My pleasure.’ A familiar curl of dry amusement.
Already halfway across the road, Kit hesitated, grimacing as he realised who it was.
He turned slowly, bracing himself politely. ‘I owe you an apolo—’
But she was already striding away across the graveyard.
46
Pip’s disappointing morning got worse. Petra was out, the strange teenage son reported from behind the door chain, even though Pip had definitely seen her ducking out of sight of the kitchen window. Old Mrs Hedges’ daughter had taken her out for the day, leaving a long list of very dull tasks she expected Home Comforts to fulfil. Further down the lane, Kit Donne had barricaded himself in with all the doors locked and curtains drawn, jazz playing loudly, the parkin she’d delivered yesterday still on the porch shelf. She added the boxes of millionaire’s shortbread and almond thins, shouting through the letterbox, ‘Are you all right in there, Mr Donne?’
A tiny upstairs window opened above the porch. ‘Is there a problem?’
She stepped backed to look up. His hair stood on end, eyes buggy from sleep. ‘Just dropping off some home baking! All part of the service.’
‘Along with wake-up calls.’
‘Were you in bed? You do know it’s almost ten?’
‘I was up all night.’ He glanced along the lane at the sound of approaching hoofs.
‘Were you at the party at Manor Farm? I heard it was wild.’
‘No, I wasn’t.’
‘Oh, you missed a treat. Apparently Ronnie Percy was all over Bay Austen. They have history, of course. A Mrs Robinson-type thing when he was a student.’
The hoofs stopped.
Pip felt a sudden rash of nerves. Surely Lester and Ronnie had gone the other way, sticking to the tracks. She’d seen them set off.
But it was Gill Walcote’s big ringside voice that called, ‘Are you missing your megaphone and roller-skates, Pip? I don’t think they quite heard you in the vicarage.’
Pip scowled. She’d never liked her.
Above her, Kit tried to disappear through his little hatch window, but Gill had spotted him through the cherry trees. ‘Kit! Welcome back! Are you staying long?’ She trotted up to the driveway.
‘I’m working, er...’
‘Gill!’
‘Gill, of course. I’m working. The aim is to avoid all interruptions.’
‘Like housekeeping,’ muttered Pip, under her breath.
‘Oh, say no more! We have a friend who does that. Lives in your old house, in fact.’
‘What a coincidence. Now, good morning to you all.’ This time he succeeded in retreating, the window closing like a cuckoo-clock hatch.
Pip hurried to the pavement to greet the riders, realising disappointedly that Petra wasn’t among the group of ladies out for a hack now the frost had burned off.
Gill was giving her a Paddington Bear stare ‘What were you saying about Ronnie?’
‘It’s old news,’ she said nonchalantly. ‘She and Bay date back years.’
‘My God,’ whispered Gill. ‘Petra suggested as much yesterday.’
‘It’s no wonder he’s top of her SMC list,’ Pip said smugly.
Three jaws dropped open above her.
‘No!’ Mo gasped.
‘She wouldn’t fecking grass, would she?’
‘Pip, did Petra tell you about SMCs?’ Gill asked tightly.
‘We share a lot. Although I was surprised.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Bay’s so tall and broad, you’d think he’d be in proportion, you know.’ She waved a hand over the general crotch zone, wondering how close they got to the small male cocks on their chart to judge.
The jaws stayed open. Gill was first to recover her composure. ‘So, how are things at the stud, Pip?’
‘Very tense.’ She used her best BBC foreign-correspondent voice, stepping forwards. ‘Ro
nnie’s new stallion is too beautiful for words, but Lester says it needs better manners. They had a right old ding-dong this morning. She wants to make some overarching changes. Something to do with putting on boots for mating season, I think she said.’
‘Covering boots are standard practice.’ Gill nodded.
‘Lester was furious. Told her he was the one who always wore the boots.’
‘Sounds all very Freudian.’ Irish Bridge on the grey let out a suggestive whistle.
‘Dad used to say Lester burned a candle for Ronnie.’ Mo Dawkins’s eyes were wide in her big shiny face. ‘They were very close in the eighties when she was a pretty young eventing star.’
‘Nonsense,’ dismissed Gill. ‘He’s much older than her, a father figure.’
‘That means nothing,’ said Bridge. ‘Aleš’s uncle ran off with his best mate’s teenage daughter.’
Although Pip often pondered Lester’s love life – her whole Christmas lunch plan was an attempt to find him a lady friend, after all – she didn’t like it being spoken about by others.
‘Well, he’s not enamoured of her right now, I can assure you,’ she said possessively. ‘He told me last night that Ronnie will introduce frozen semen over his dead body.’
‘Definitely Freudian.’ Bridge snorted.
‘She obviously prefers toy-boys,’ chuckled Mo.
‘She’s a lovely lady,’ Pip defended stoutly. ‘She already says she doesn’t know how she’d survive without me.’
Ronnie hadn’t said this in quite so many words, of course, but Pip was certain she would, just as she would let Pip stage the ultimate heart-warming village Christmas for her. Pip knew she must find a way to win her affection. Her being aligned with Compton Magna’s exciting dangerous femme fatale already had Petra’s friends agog.
‘Where is Petra?’ she asked.
‘She claims she has to entertain her mother-in-law,’ Bridge rolled her eyes, ‘but we think—’
‘That she has to entertain her mother-in-law,’ Gill said firmly, waving the riders on, with a brusque farewell and a final glance up at Kit Donne’s little attic window.
*
Ronnie was grateful that Lester preferred not talking when riding out. It gave them both time to climb down off high horses onto fit middleweights, dopamine kicking in, a bright wintry sun throwing their shadows up across the ridge and down into furrow, rising and falling with the grassy undulations like carousel riders.
They cantered twice round the Sixty Acres boundary while it was still Percy land, witnessing Bay’s men chopping up the cedar to take away on trailers. Ronnie sensed this was a scene Lester deliberately wanted her to see and commit to memory, the Percy tree dismantled. Yet all that he had said in forty minutes’ matching each other’s pace was ‘No good reason for you to give up when you still ride better than most of them.’
Clattering back up the drive to the yard, steam still rising from the cob’s copper coat and Dickon’s dark bay, the silence was considerably more companionable than it had been when they’d set out. Ronnie would have liked to explain she did have a good reason for not wanting to ride the old familiar tracks again, one that she couldn’t ignore for ever, but she hadn’t told anybody that yet, and his advice was probably right. To live at the stud and not ride was like living in a closed order and not praying. This was her religion, and she mustn’t jump the gun. Dickon, in his twenties now, still enjoyed his work on the days he wasn’t too stiff. They had many a good gallivant left in them.
‘Thank you, Lester. I enjoyed that.’
‘Likewise, Mrs—’
‘Ronnie.’
He nodded curtly and limped to the tractor to take a round bale out to the covered barns, while she retreated inside to pick up the house phone, listening to the purr of the dial tone, letting out a long breath as she prepared for its claws to spring out.
Alice picked up in two rings, recognising the number as the stud’s. ‘Lester! At last. What’s she up to?’
‘Settling in well, thanks. How are you all?’
‘We’re fine.’ Her voice went monotone. ‘Did you sign the contract and title transfer for the land?’
‘Yes.’ When she explained the price change, she was met with mollified silence. From the background clatter, bleats and chanting Tannoy, Ronnie guessed Alice was at a sheep auction. ‘Will you come and see me, Alice?’
‘I’m very busy, Mummy.’
‘I can come to you.’
‘I don’t think so. Really, we’re flat out until Christmas.’
‘What about then?’ She refused to be deflected, her tone boisterously jolly because she knew Alice would recoil from anything more emotional. ‘Let’s get together in the spirit of armistice. A Massty.’
Dating back to Major Frank’s days, the Percys had gathered for an indulgent high tea of mince pies, Stollen, fruit cake, yule log, sloe gin, Glühwein and all things sweet known as ‘Massty’, a festive family tradition of which the Captain had been especially fond, usually hosting his on Christmas Eve, although it was a movable feast that had been known to take place at any time from Advent to Twelfth Night. ‘You name the day.’
‘We’re totally committed.’
‘Rabbit, I have something I need to tell you. I can’t do it over the phone.’
‘Put it in a Christmas letter.’ She hung up.
Ronnie had expected no different, but it made her kick a chair.
She called Tim next, listening to his blustering apology that he was going to be overseas for the foreseeable future, the line breaking up appallingly. ‘Sorry I’ve not been in contact since the funeral... Alice is very upset. We all are. It’s all a bit bloody unfair, don’t you think?’
‘That’s why I want to talk to you all. I’d hoped we could see each other at Christmas at least.’
‘We’re back in the new year.’
‘I won’t be – that won’t be convenient.’
‘Sorry, Mum. I’ll try to call you over Christmas. Don’t break the place, will you?’
There was every chance Pax would visit, Ronnie reassured herself. They’d made their peace once, and they could surely do so again. She was sure it was Pax who had laid fresh flowers on her grandparents’ grave, late Michaelmas daisies and rose hips.
Pax was hands-free in Buckinghamshire, late for an appointment, the satnav barking out instructions as they spoke. Like Alice, she pleaded a packed schedule. Unlike Alice, her regret and unhappiness were almost palpable, the cello chord pulling at Ronnie’s heartstrings.
‘Mum, I can’t promise anything.’ Her deep voice rattled with stress. ‘Mack’s parents only moved down from Scotland a couple of months ago so it’s their first Christmas here. And I must think about Alice’s feelings too – we’re all going there on Christmas Eve. I’ll call if we can make it work. I have to go, sorry.’
Remembering Bay’s lips all over hers last night, she felt a wave of hot nausea that sent her to the sink to splash cold water over her mouth and face.
None of which put her in the best frame of mind to find Petra Gunn clanging on the front doorbell, dark rims under her kind brown eyes, teeth raking at her lower lip. Her waggy spaniel was the only one who looked pleased about the visit.
‘I came to apologise,’ Petra said shakily.
‘I should bloody well think so. Come in.’
*
Petra felt as though she was sleep-walking through the sort of bad dream where clothes fall off, toilet doors won’t close and one finds oneself on stage with no idea what one’s lines are. Her eyes had stayed stubbornly open all the previous night, her mind constantly reliving the moment she’d thrown her miracle pants into the garden and caution to the wind.
I kissed a man who isn’t my husband and I liked it.
She’d girded her loins all morning to come here and apologise, determined to laugh it off, blame the time of year – and month – the booze and her host. She’d agonised about whether she should bring a present – what was the perfect gift for a c
ombined welcome home/thank you for pretending to be the one snogging a married man last night? – but it felt far too awkward. She was just slightly scared of Ronnie Percy.
‘I take it you’d like a coffee?’ Ronnie said sharply.
She followed her through the house. ‘Only if you’re making one.’
‘I rather thought I’d make two.’ Even when pissed-off, Ronnie had a tickle of mirth in her voice.
Now that she was walking back into Flambards, Manderley and Follyfoot all rolled into one, Petra felt even more vulnerable. She’d forgotten how grand the house was, mouldering magnificently beneath a heavy weight of tapestry, oak panelling and horse portraits. Although barely used in months, it was so infused with decades of open fires, hanging game and wet hunting coat, it smelt as though a raucous house party had just charged through the hallway in search of a top-up, the echoes of their laughter just a room away. Here, bloodlines were thicker than the watermarks streaking the hand-painted wallpaper.
It was Birtwick Park. She had known it all along. She could feel ringlets forming, the urge to canter Beauty around the orchard overwhelming.
The kitchen – so decked with old rosettes it felt like a twisted Pony Club version of the Great British Bake Off marquee – had faded buttercup-yellow walls and wooden surfaces branded with black burn scars, its cupboards as kicked, scratched, scuffed and split as the stable doors in the yards. London picture editors would pay a small fortune to drape a Cara Delevingne lookalike, with a cynical pout and a Sabatier, across the vast butcher’s block in vintage Bruce Oldfield. It was precisely what Petra’s ludicrously expensive ‘distressed’ kitchen was pretending to be.
‘What a wonderful house,’ she bleated nervously, as Ronnie filled the kettle.
‘You didn’t come here to say that.’
‘No. I wanted to say—’ As soon as it was switched on, the kettle made such a rattling, shrieking racket it sounded as though someone was laying a road through the kitchen. ‘I CAME TO SAY...’ the kettle let off a volley of what sounded like rapid gunfire ‘...TO SAY THAT I’M REALLY—’