by Fiona Walker
‘Marvellous.’ Short and broad-girthed, with a neat black d’Artagnan beard, a bald pate and hair curling over his ears (‘I model myself as a fat Shakespeare,’ he was fond of saying), Ferdie always looked as if he was two bottles of wine up even when he’d slept off his considerable capacity. ‘How long until lunch? Donald’s eaten all the chocolates we brought for my mother and is about to start on the pot-pourri.’
‘It’s almost there.’
‘Excellent.’ Ferdie tapped his large red nose. ‘Better have a cuppa and get dressed.’ Pouring Merlot into two mugs, he carried them back into the bedroom, pausing at the door to listen. ‘Strings are too loud.’ Whether he was talking about the Oratorio or The Happy Prince was unclear.
‘Ten minutes to curtain!’ Kit warned.
59
After half an hour in the saddle, meandering happily into Eyngate Park to ride up to the folly and pop some logs, Ronnie had been uncomfortably aware that she should have had a wee before she set out. After an hour, hurrying to find the start of the three-mile point, she was in age-old pelvic-floor-twitching territory. After two, having diverted so far around a flooded culvert near Manor Farm trout hatcheries that she’d practically ended up in Broadbourne, she was sitting as tight-buttocked as a hussar, wishing she had somebody with whom to share the joke. She shouldn’t have stayed out so long, but the winter sun was so warm and the views so beautiful that she hadn’t been able to drag herself away from old familiar fields and tracks, unable to bear the fact she was about to leave it all behind again.
Thank goodness Dickon was forgiving and still full of oomph, happy to bowl towards home along the verges.
But as she rode back past the church, pelvic floor threatening to burst, like its poor leadless roof, Ronnie knew home turf was too far, and she had to find a discreet bush.
Typically the post-prandial villagers were now coming out in force, dogs being walked to burn off too many pigs in blankets, children pedalling new bicycles.
‘Merry Christmas!’ she greeted each one, as she thundered past, increasingly desperate, almost mowing down a middle-aged male couple, one as short, sallow and black-bearded as the other was tall, dark-skinned and white-bearded.
‘Now that’s a magnificent sight, madam!’ boomed the short one, laughing as he leaped aside.
When she spotted the Old Almshouses, Ronnie almost wept with relief. She knew where the key was kept. This was an emergency. And Pip had even asked her to check the place while Kit was away for Christmas, so now she could.
She unhitched the gate faster than a Pony Clubber at a hunter trial and rode straight up to the door, abandoning Dickon there with his reins hastily knotted round his neck – she trusted him to wait a few minutes, he was a collie of dependability – and searched round the porch beneath the boot-scraper.
They weren’t there.
‘Bugger.’ She pressed her forehead to the door, quickly girding her bursting loins to nip round the back and make do with a bush in the garden. With a click, the half-latched door swung open. The house smelt of sumptuous cooking and expensive aftershave. In her experience, burglars didn’t splash out on Jo Malone and microwave an M&S chocolate fondant mid-raid.
‘Hello?’
There was no sign of life. She was too desperate to question herself as she hurried inside.
*
Filled to the brim with five-bird roast, Kit had sought out the sofa and nodded off in a Scotch-and-Malbec-induced slumber while Ferdie and Donald washed up. Unaware that they’d gone out to walk the dog, he dreamed he’d gone back to visit Hermia’s grave, far more elaborate in his sleep-scape, guarded by a gold-leafed stone angel, with sapphire eyes and a ruby mouth.
When he heard a voice say, ‘Bugger’, he half woke, uncertain if the figure hurrying through his house was part of his dream. A flash of blonde hair. Slight and light. Another husky curse as a knee caught a chair. The Ghost of Christmas Past.
‘Hermia?’
But she was already gone. He closed his eyes again. He had to cut down his drinking. He’d quit through January to work on Sassoon.
He awoke very definitely when the cistern flushed. The house had old plumbing. It always sounded like a plane taking off.
He watched the figure steal back across the room.
‘Hello.’
‘Shit!’ The blonde figure spun round. ‘Hi! Happy Christmas!’
Kit sat up, rubbing his forehead in his palms. He should have guessed.
Ronnie was standing close to the door, the smile illuminated by the casement glass. Blue eyes as bright as buttons on a sailor suit, her face too intelligent and defiant to be so silly, so rude, so alive. It caught his heart in a mousetrap pinch.
‘Just checking all A-OK. Pip asked. No idea you were in situ. Sorry. I’ll go. Horse outside.’
‘Wait, I—’ He started to speak, but the words caught, like a bone in his throat.
She stood as asked, still beaming apologetically. ‘God, this is awkward.’
Dry-mouthed, Kit reached for his glass, forgetting that Ferdie had got the fifty-year-old cask malt out before he’d nodded off. Flames scorched their way down his throat.
‘Chide me, dear stone,’ he stood up and walked towards her, ‘that I may say indeed. Thou art Hermione.’
The smile got very confused. If Kit had been directing an actress to play The Winter’s Tale trial scene he’d have asked for just that – the way it dropped away and danced, her eyes darkening like opened camera shutters.
‘But yet...’ He tilted his head, noticing for the first time how high her cheekbones were, the old-fashioned dimples, the weathered skin.
‘Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing so aged as this seems,’ she finished, that deep, hypnotic purr of laughter in her voice. God, she was quick, far quicker than his wine-soaked reactions. He could see the thoughts condense, process, emote on her face.
Now the smile came back, bolder and more arrogant. ‘Kit! What a great surprise.’
‘Ronnie.’ He pulled his chin back, tilting his head the other way. ‘What a bad lie. Merry Christmas.’
‘I really am enormously sorry, barging in like this.’
‘Let’s call that truce.’ He held up his hands, backing away as though held at gunpoint, unable to face a barrage of overpolite Jeeves and Wooster apologies. ‘You were quite right. We should try to be cordial, for Hermia’s sake, if only for today.’ He found himself adding, ‘Stay and have a drink.’ God, he must still be half cut.
He watched her face across the room, saw the mask slip then re-form, the smile as blinding as the low winter sun. ‘A Christmas peace pipe?’
‘An armistice.’ He nodded, pouring her a slug of Ferdie’s malt and moving across to hand it to her.
She took it, her nose tipping away from it. Her face was running its gamut of expressions again. It was fascinating in its fruit-machine emotion. Three jokers came up, a mask of badly judged good manners. ‘Aren’t we supposed to share cigarettes and play football? Swap photographs of sweethearts?’
‘Take your bloody pick.’ He waved his hand at the many shots of Hermia, mood instantly darkening, whisky meeting Malbec dyspepsia, like a firework thrown into an oil barrel.
But she just danced closer to the flame. ‘I had no idea you’d be back! I heard you were away until New Year.’
‘I changed my mind. I like it here.’
‘We can all do that. I like it here too.’
They both registered a moment of surprise, more in their own sentiments than each other’s.
‘This house is very special,’ she said.
‘Noisy plumbing.’
‘I never trust plumbing that doesn’t sing like a church organ.’
From what little he knew of Ronnie, he might have guessed she was the sort to commandeer a loo if she needed one.
You will love her.
‘Drink your Scotch.’
‘I might need some water in it.’
‘Ah, yes, the temperance disciple.�
�
‘And the Bacchanalian.’
They looked at one another levelly and, for the first time since they’d met, shared a wide smile.
*
Kit Donne had eyes like a fox. Ronnie hadn’t noticed their vulpine quality before. Wily, predatory, instinctive.
Conversationally, she was waving a loaded gun. She couldn’t stop herself. Every time she tried, the trigger squeezed. ‘How lovely to be spending Christmas here!’ There she went again, fully loaded with vapidities.
The eyes drew hers again. Hermia had rescued a fox once, like Lester’s cub, only hers had been released back into the wild where she remained convinced that it came back each year to watch them perform in the church meadows. Mr Fox, the theatre critic.
He plucked the glass from her grip and went to pour water into it. At last she could breathe properly. Scotch reminded her too vividly of Johnny. Heaven to kiss, hell to try to keep pace with drinking.
Ronnie watched Kit standing at the sink. He had reading glasses on a rope around his neck and a red-wine smile, like Joker from Batman, on his scowling lips. And fox eyes. Seeming to forget the drink was hers, he knocked it back himself.
He looked across at her as though he’d forgotten she was there and was astonished to see her all over again. He seemed miles away, years away maybe.
She tried for a hearty farewell, the rough shot turning a few more circles, firing out a hail of plastic-bullet smiles. ‘Like I say, I really am very sorry. Terribly bad manners.’ Hermia would be laughing like a drain now, once all too familiar with holding an extra set of reins when her friend got caught short out hacking. ‘Too many sherries before lunch. Shoot me.’
Still unsmiling, he held up two fingers, like a gun, to the sky, narrowed his eyes and lowered them on target.
‘Bang,’ she said good-humouredly, taking the shot with an understated feigned death against the door frame. She and Hermia had once been very fond of staging melodramatic mock-deaths.
‘Awful,’ he critiqued.
Ronnie jumped back to life. The fox eyes stared.
‘Shoot me again.’
He ran his hands through the oaky pelt of his hair with a rather cranky sigh and aimed again, a double-handed shot this time, looking one-eyed down the sights, the voice loquaciously dry: ‘Bang.’
She gave it the full swoon, face contorted, clutching her chest, reeling, pirouetting, pinpointing her landing spot, and then death.
‘Worse.’
‘Well, you bloody do it!’ She stood up.
‘I’m not an actor.’
‘Neither am I.’
‘Could have fooled me. You’re more theatrical than most green rooms I’ve been in recently. Have you ever thought of taking it up as a second career?’
‘Not if I can’t die.’
‘Immortality looks great on the CV. That, horse riding and sword fighting.’
She smiled, realising it was getting dark outside. She’d abandoned long-suffering Dickon, who would be waiting patiently, like a mustang outside a saloon. An evening of couch-potato television and naff snacks beckoned. Lester may yet be persuaded to join her. ‘I must go.’
‘I think I was too hasty to judge you, Ronnie,’ he said. ‘I apologise.’
‘Likewise. I hope perhaps we can make friends.’
‘I’d like that.’
‘How long are you staying?’ she asked.
‘On and off, indefinitely. You?’
‘Two days, on and off.’ She smiled apologetically, wishing it was longer.
The door opened behind her, amid much bass chatter and laughter, and Ronnie turned to find two bearded bystanders with a waggy-tailed cockapoo, the jovial little and large she’d met out when riding.
‘Ferdie, Donald, this is Ronnie.’ Kit introduced them all.
‘My God, you look like—’ Stout little Ferdie stopped himself.
They were both terribly excited.
Donald said, in his deep, rumbling bass: ‘You do know there’s a horse in your greenhouse?’
*
‘You’ve got to hand it to Ronnie Percy.’ Barry Dawkins’s round pink cheeks glowed like coals as he stood at Gill Walcote’s elbow, watching a horse wearing a metal greenhouse frame, like medieval armour. ‘She adds to the entertainment round here. Never a dull day.’
The drama of the horse trapped in the greenhouse on Christmas Day had united the Compton Magna village faithful. All hands were somewhat drunkenly on deck, delighted to rally to the rescue.
Feeling peckish, Dickon had spotted the debris of recently pulled weeds close to the old glasshouse, had ambled up for a sniff and a munch, following the trail inside and getting stuck. Lifting his head in surprise, he’d hoisted the entire frame off its brick course. Potentially dangerous as it was, Dickon was an immensely patient, self-protective horse and had stayed put, waiting for rescue to come.
While the village rallied and Kit seethed once again – he could forgive most things, but not horses – Ferdie and Donald cracked open another bottle of Malbec and watched the proceedings.
‘She does look extraordinarily like Hermia,’ they observed, as Ronnie alternately thanked, helped, praised, apologised and – in unguarded moments – looked impossibly sad, gazing round at the villagers, the brightly moonlit lane and the church.
‘Amazingly expressive face.’
‘Do you think she and Hermia had the same father?’ Ferdie, thoroughly excited by so many strapping young village men carrying plate glass across the garden, was in a reverie of imagined illicit rural affairs.
They watched Kit stalking inside, slamming the door.
‘My only love sprung from my only hate!’ Donald intoned.
‘They’re a bit long in the tooth to be star-cross’d.’
‘You’re right. And who wants to end up dead in a crypt with a family reunion going on?’
‘If it be love indeed, tell me how much.’ Ferdie gave his husband his best Egyptian-queen eyes.
‘There’s beggary in the love that can be reckon’d.’ Never had Antony been darker, deeper or sexier.
‘I’ll set a bourn how far to be belov’d.’
‘Then must thou needs find out new Heaven, new Earth.’
‘Now that’s more like it. He falls on his own sword and she’s bitten by a snake. Thoroughly Cotswolds.’
They looked at each other hopefully, then watched as Ronnie knocked on the door in the porch.
*
Bracing herself for his most irascible demeanour, Ronnie sucked her teeth and rolled her lips as the door opened. In the glow of dim lighting, the fox eyes gleamed.
‘I apologise again for my horse. I have arranged for a new greenhouse to be delivered tomorrow.’
‘Tomorrow-tomorrow? As in Boxing Day?’
‘Sorry – is that inconvenient? Someone called Skulley, who was helping out here, is going to deliver and erect it. Apparently he has a ready supply. He’ll fix the lead flashing on this porch while he’s about it. He seems charming. Bit of a Yorick theme going on with the tattoos.’
‘Right. Thank you. Well, bon voyage, if I don’t see you before you go.’
‘It might be slightly longer than two days, actually.’
‘Right. Good.’ The fox eyes gleamed more brightly.
‘Merry Christmas.’
‘And to you.’
*
Lester was sweeping the yard after putting in afternoon hay nets when Ronnie came up the drive leading Dickon. Putting down his brush, he hurried to her side, taking the reins from her. ‘You all right, Mrs Le—Ronnie? You’ve been gone hours.’
‘Thank you, I’m fine.’ She stooped to greet her dogs, who raced forward. ‘Lester, I’ve decided I’m staying on here after all. I’m not going to Germany.’
He couldn’t immediately speak, but she could tell from the way his eyes creased that he was happy.
‘Beck’s staying too. You’re right. The Horsemaker should be allowed to try to work with him.’
‘If yo
u say so.’ He looked slightly less delighted.
‘I say so. And what I say goes around here.’
60
Kit Donne took delivery of a new greenhouse the following morning, a pretty Victorian oak-framed one, far comelier than the bent, broken-glassed armour that had preceded it. Painted lichen green, it came complete with finials, opening roof vents and a sticker with a delivery address in Worcestershire that the skull-tattooed erector scratched off while Donald and Ferdie were plying him with tea and biscuits, asking eagerly about horticultural matters.
With the greenhouse came a packet of seeds and a note that Kit propped up on his kitchen windowsill. ‘Don’t let’s throw any more stones. Your friend, Ronnie Percy.’
He couldn’t wait for everyone to bugger off so he could crack on with Sassoon.
*
In Chipping Hampton market square, under another snow-heavy sky, the Fosse and Wolds Foxhounds were admired and patted by the crowds at the Boxing Day meet, stirrup cups passed around the hundred or more mounted followers. Today they were being field-mastered by dashing Bay Austen, his cool Dutch wife at his side for once, keeping very close tabs on him, wrongly imagining that Ronnie Percy might be joining them and trying to muscle in on both its handsome joint-master and a mastership of her own next season.
Being marked closely didn’t stop Bay riding across when he spotted Petra on foot, laughing his head off. ‘I thought you were anti, Mrs Gunn.’
‘I’m silently protesting,’ she insisted, having been press-ganged into bringing mother-in-law Gunny, who used it as an excuse to dash off to the sales, and Bella, who was sulking because Tilly and Grace were both riding. Charlie was shooting, her parents and the other three children taking Wilf up to the windmill, where she longed to be too.
‘What did Santa fill your stockings with?’ Bay growled, in an undertone.
‘Varicose veins and swollen ankles.’
‘Stop pretending to be anything other than gorgeous, Mrs G. You must bring Bella round to play before they all go back to school, mustn’t she, Moni?’ he called, as his wife charged up, like a polo player about to ride off for a ball. ‘Bring Bella round to play with Tilly.’