Polo

by Jilly Cooper

Not having eaten for forty-eight hours, and suddenly feeling dizzy, she sat down and took a croissant.

  ‘But I don’t understand. Angel’s so poor.’

  ‘Angel have very extravagant family. He had to sell family land to pay his father’s debts after the Malvinas war. The family has not forgiven him. I would help heem out, but my husband, the brother of Angel’s father, is very tight,’ she rubbed her thumb and forefinger together like a cicada, ‘he go through all my cheques. He would keel me if I gave Angel money but he is away in Europe, so Angel can stay ’ere till he get back.’

  ‘This is delicious coffee,’ said Bibi gazing into its sable depths. ‘Angel could be a great polo player – but he is so proud.’

  Aunt Betty shrugged. ‘We are the eighth-generation Spanish-Irish. Angel have all zee aristocratic insteencts of his father and grandfather, but no money to back it up. It’s difficult for him to, how you say, lick the bottom. When he was eighteen, his mother was so worried about him, she sent heem to a psychiatrist. After two sessions, the shreenk say there is nuzzing I can do: Angel have indelible superiority complex.’

  Bibi started to laugh, then jumped out of her skin-tight dress as the lift clanged outside the door.

  Reaching for her bag, she frantically fluffed her hair and daubed blusher on her blanched cheeks.

  ‘I leave you,’ said Aunt Betty.

  ‘Please don’t,’ said Bibi in panic. ‘He may still be mad at me.’

  Angel looked pale and desperately tired, and went paler still when he saw Bibi.

  ‘Why you ’ere?’

  ‘To say I’m sorry – to ask you to come back.’

  ‘Nevair. Your father, he betray me.’

  ‘Why don’t you both go for a walk in the park? Take the Mercedes, Angel,’ said Betty.

  Angel gazed moodily at the maniacal traffic which roared and raced round them and said nothing until they passed a vast heroic statue of a field marshal in a Napoleonic hat astride a prancing horse with a woman with flowing hair in a long dress leaning against the plinth.

  ‘That is one of my relations on my mother’s side,’ said Angel.

  ‘Trust an Argentine to ride while the woman walked. I expect she was searching for his fifty-two,’ said Bibi.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ snapped Angel.

  Grudgingly he showed her the airport which the anti-pollution lobby were clamouring to close down, and the great Hippodrome at Palermo, where the greatest polo tournament in the world, the Argentine Open, took place, and then down the Avenida del Libertador, full of embassies and softened by huge trees.

  ‘My cousin Sylvestre lives there.’

  ‘How beautiful,’ said Bibi, impressed.

  ‘Not beautiful,’ growled Angel, ‘just beeg. I show you better house.’

  Five minutes later he drew up outside some huge iron gates, flanked by a high spiked fence. Inside loomed a truly beautiful house built at the turn of the century and influenced by the petits hôtels of France. The gravel path up to the peeling, dark green front door was choked with weeds. Two lichened urns spilled over with pale pink geraniums. A lawn on the right grew three feet tall and was filled with nettles and willow herb. Angel opened the front door with a latch key.

  ‘I lived here as a boy,’ said Angel as they wandered from room to vast room. ‘In the holidays we went to the country. This was the Chinese room where the tradesman come and my grandmother pay the bills. This was the drawing room where Pedro and I were allowed down for tea with my parents.’

  On the walls was a sepia mural of gods and goddesses. The frame of a vast mirror was covered in gold leaf. The glass itself was so coated with dust that Bibi’s reflection gazed back at her softened, huge-eyed and strangely beautiful. Workmen had left beer cans on the marble fireplace.

  ‘Who does it belong to now?’

  ‘It has been bought by a foundation,’ said Angel bitterly. ‘Different designers will decorate each room free to show off their skills, a landscape gardener will redesign the garden to suit the time the ’ouse was built. The public will pay to see over it. The money will go to open a clinic. I wish they give it to me to buy ponies.’

  ‘You must have been so happy here,’ said Bibi humbly.

  ‘I didn’t appreciate it then. When the sun shone we were always trying to get to the camp to play polo. My grandmother’s ’ouse down the road has been turned into a school.’

  In the garden, two huge trees were covered in the same shocking pink blossom.

  ‘What’s that tree?’

  ‘Jacaranda,’ said Angel. ‘No, zat’s blue. It’s called pala borracho, that is drunken stick. It means the end of the summer.’ Standing behind her, he could feel her legs quivering and see the languorous curve of her waist into her hips. What a backview! If she never turned round he could love her. There was an old mattress in the corner. Angel turned her round to face him. Her breasts were pretty lovable too.

  ‘Why you come here?’

  ‘To see you.’

  ‘Where you stay?’

  ‘The Plaza.’

  ‘Ouf, don’t tell my grandmother. She’ll try and borrow money off you.’

  He examined her face. She wasn’t beautiful, and Argentine men want to feel proud of their wives, and he was reluctant to admit how much he’d enjoyed making love to her and how he now longed to throw her down on the dusty mattress in the corner and set her alight again. He knew she was crazy about him and he could manipulate her like a bendy toy. Her vast income could buy him the best horses and if he took American citizenship he could beat the Argentine ban and play in England. Suddenly he had a vision of the languid British officer with the cold Falklands light falling on his even colder face with the butt of jaw and the turned-down, curiously unemotional, blue eyes. He also remembered the voice which grew softer as it became more brutal: ‘You do want to play polo again, don’t you, Rafael? The sooner they operate on that knee of yours the better. Just give me a few details.’

  They hadn’t tortured him except to allow him no morphine and to make him stand on his damaged knee hour after hour. Then, after he’d fainted and come round, the British officer had continued talking: ‘There’s no way Argentina can beat the Brits. No-one will know what you tell us. It’ll just end the war quicker and fewer of your mates will get killed. I play polo too. My handicap would probably have gone up to seven if it hadn’t been for this bloody war. Polo’s an addictive game.’

  ‘Angel, are you OK?’ Bibi was suddenly terrified of the expression on his face. ‘You’re miles away.’

  ‘About 1,800 miles,’ said Angel tonelessly.

  Bibi took a deep breath. ‘D’you think it’s possible to fall in love in forty-eight hours?’

  ‘Is possible in forty-eight seconds,’ said Angel and pulled her into his arms.

  Under the dusty chandelier, her hair was a light bay.

  ‘I want to marry you,’ mumbled Bibi into his bomber jacket which said World Cup 1985 on the back. ‘If it didn’t work out, we could always get divorced, but at least you could stay in the States. We could find a home and a barn of our own, away from my father, and you wouldn’t have to work for him any more.’

  Angel put up his hand to still her trembling lips.

  ‘I don’t want to be keeped.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be,’ sobbed Bibi. ‘It’d be your money too. I’ve got loads for both of us.’

  Angel felt quite choked himself. ‘You’re so sweet. You won’t boss me around? I can wear the trousers?’

  ‘Sure you can.’

  Angel looked at her watch. ‘We have time.’

  ‘All the time in the world,’ whispered Bibi, unhooking her pearl earrings and putting them on the mantelpiece.

  ‘I am playing in the Mundialito this afternoon,’ said Angel, hooking them on again. ‘There’s a horse in Pilar Chico I very much want to try before. If we ’urry we ’ave time.’

  Then, seeing the outrage on Bibi’s face, ‘On zee way we look for a ring, I buy it,’ he added hastily.
‘I sell my watch this morning, and tonight after zee match, I make love to you so you won’t get up for three days.’

  Despite such promises, Bibi managed to gird her ransacked loins and meet Angel’s grandmother at the Plaza the next day.

  ‘But who is she?’ Angel’s grandmother kept saying to Betty beforehand.

  ‘She’s very rich, Mama. You know Angel hasn’t got any money.’

  ‘But who are they?’

  ‘Aeroplanes,’ explained Betty.

  ‘Better than cars, not as good as railroads. Not a great beauty, is she?’ added Angel’s grandmother loudly as Bibi approached. ‘She’ll never hold him.’

  ‘My dear,’ she advised Bibi later, ‘you must remember that in Argentina flattering the husband’s ego is of supreme importance. You must constantly demonstrate how much you love him.’

  ‘Oh, I do,’ sighed Bibi.

  ‘But I ’ave to warn you, Jean-Baptiste, my ‘usband, was constantly unfaithful to me, my son Pierre was constantly unfaithful to his wife. That’s why she run away with this Italian. Rafael will be unfaithful to you. American women who marry Argentines are always shocked by their promiscuity, but you mustn’t take it personally. They just have to demonstrate their virility.’

  41

  Despite being the long-distance target of Angel’s obsessive loathing, Drew Benedict had an excellent season in England. Not only were he and Bas on the Rutshire committee, where they made themselves very unpopular with Fatty Harris by putting the club on a sounder commercial footing, but Drew had also been elected to the handicap committee of the British Polo Association, polo’s governing body. This meant players and patrons alike courted him for inside information, the latter even offering him large backhanders to keep the handicaps of their team members down. Drew never accepted cash, but several extremely nice ponies found their way into his yard which Sukey, who handled Drew’s tax returns, was amazed he had acquired so cheaply.

  One of Drew’s first tasks was to handicap Ricky and Dancer. Turning up at the Rutshire at the beginning of the season, Drew noticed with a stab of envy that Ricky was back to his old form; hitting the ball with relentless accuracy, getting the last panting ounce out of his ponies, but still hogging the play, too often roaring at Perdita, Dancer, and even Bas, to leave the ball. On Drew’s recommendation, Ricky was rated at seven, two places lower than his handicap before he smashed his elbow. He could always be put up in July. Perdita, riding Spotty and Tero, was so improved that, to Ricky’s intense irritation, Drew put her up to two. He was even crosser when Dancer, whom Ricky wanted rated as minus one to keep the team’s collective handicap down, was, after a freak forty-yard forehand slap between the goal posts, rated by Drew at nought.

  ‘The bugger barely watched two chukkas,’ exploded Ricky in the bar afterwards. ‘How can he assess anyone on that?’

  ‘Drew,’ said Bas philosophically, removing a sprig of mint from his Pimm’s, ‘has other fish to fry. He only spent ten minutes at a Rutshire committee meeting the other night before beetling off. Must be establishing alibis. Any idea who she might be?’

  ‘Haven’t a clue,’ snapped Ricky, who didn’t want to hear about other people’s extramarital rompings.

  With Bas on six, the collective handicap of the team was fifteen, which meant they could play together in medium-goal tournaments. Thus Apocalypse was born. Looking it up, they found that the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, Famine, Justice, Pestilence and Death, had stalked through the land on white, black, red and pale horses so the beautiful jet-black shirts designed by Dancer’s marketing department each had a different coloured horse on the front and a number in the same colour on the back. The helmets were also black, giving the entire team a sinister air. Bas was Justice, Perdita Pestilence, the lean, emaciated Dancer appropriately Famine and Ricky the pale rider on the pale horse – the custard-yellow Wayne filled the bill perfectly – was Death. As a team their first problem was that they were all attacking players and Bas, as the second-best player in the team, was reduced to playing back which didn’t suit him at all.

  The second problem was organizing their schedules. Dancer had endless concert, recording and television commitments. Bas, as well as running the Bar Sinister in Cotchester High Street and pulling off numerous property deals, was always sloping off to Paris or the South of France or even the Seychelles to appease one of his demanding mistresses.

  Even worse, in May, just before the season proper began, Bas joined forces with Rupert, Declan O’Hara and various businessmen and local worthies and set up a consortium called Venturer. Venturer’s aim was to oust the local ITV station, Corinium, which was run by Bas’s corrupt and machiavellian brother, Anthony, second Baron Baddingham. This meant that Bas had to spend much of the summer in secret meetings or canvassing round the area which drove Ricky mad because Bas kept missing matches or having to switch dates.

  ‘It just takes a lot of spade work,’ explained Bas soothingly. ‘Impressing the right people that we’re the right people to run a television station.’

  ‘I can’t see you are at all,’ snapped Ricky. ‘You can’t even organize yourself to play in a polo team.’

  ‘When Venturer get the franchise, Rupert and I are determined to get polo, particularly the Rutshire, regularly on television. It’s the ideal television sport – brave and incredibly charismatic men.’

  ‘Speak for yourself.’

  ‘And ravishing women. It just needs promoting. You’ll be grateful next year.’

  ‘I am not interested in next year, we’ve got a Merrill Lynch match tomorrow and we’ve already changed the date three times to fit in with you. Anyway, what makes you so sure you’ll get the franchise?’

  ‘Because my brother is such a shit,’ said Bas. ‘And Corinium’s programmes are so frightful and all the staff are in such a state of anarchy since Declan left, we can’t not.’

  Despite Bas’s frequent absences, Apocalypse had a wonderful first season, with Ricky’s handicap going up to eight, Perdita’s to three and Dancer’s to one in the July ratings. Venturer’s publicity, on the other hand, got worse and worse and, as autumn gave way to winter, it looked less and less likely that they would wrest the franchise from Corinium.

  For a start the press got wind of the story that Rupert was running after Declan’s teenage daughter Taggie, then that he had seduced Cameron Cook, Anthony Baddingham’s mistress and Corinium’s star producer, into his bed and on to Venturer’s side. This was followed by endless leaks about other staff Venturer had poached. It was also rumoured that Bas was having an affair with Declan’s wife, Maud, and was also keen on Taggie.

  With Rupert and Bas behaving so irresponsibly, Drew didn’t see why he should behave any better. Having played one season with the repulsive and demanding Kevin Coley and his dreadful wife, Enid, whom he frequently wished Perdita had drowned in the swimming-pool, Drew was looking for another patron. He found being dependent on Sukey more and more irksome, but if he left her he would be solely dependent on patrons like Kevin. He had also become accustomed to having money, which enabled him to spend a lot of time with Daisy Macleod. His endless committee meetings in fact gave him the perfect alibi. He also established a commendable reputation for uxoriousness. Leaving long before the end of the meeting, never staying for drinks afterwards, he pretended he must rush home to Sukey, then beetled off to bed with Daisy.

  As a loving wife, Sukey accompanied him to most matches, so Daisy avoided these except when Perdita was playing. On these occasions Drew would invariably manage to touch Daisy’s hand in the pony lines or murmur some endearment as he passed her at treading-in time.

  Sometimes when he rode out Daisy would meet him in her car and when autumn came it was extraordinary how frequently the East Cotchester foxes ran in the direction of Snow Cottage. Often they met in London in the Great Western Hotel or at Sukey’s house off Kensington Church Street. At first Daisy was appalled that Drew could make love in his and Sukey’s ancient four-poster, but as he was fon
d of pointing out, ‘A standing prick has no conscience’. Love, too, made Daisy worry less and less about morality. Her gratitude to Drew was unbounded because he had completely transformed her life. He had given her comfort and endless advice on bringing up her children and animals. Even Ethel didn’t take flying troilistic leaps into Daisy’s bed at the wrong moment any more.

  Drew had also persuaded her to give up her job and trebled her income by finding her commissions. She was now not only painting people’s dogs and horses, but also their wives, children and houses, and everyone seemed delighted. He had even asked an utterly unsuspecting Sukey to show Daisy how to do invoices and tax returns and introduced her to several galleries who showed interest in putting on exhibitions. But as she tended to sell whatever she did, it was difficult to get enough paintings together.

  Termtime gave Daisy a great deal of freedom. Eddie and Violet were still at boarding school. Perdita spent every day until long after dusk up at Ricky’s. Whenever Drew was able to see her, therefore, Daisy downed brushes and instead painted all night and most of the weekend.

  The holidays, however, were a nightmare, because Violet and Eddie, having taken against Hamish and Wendy, refused to go to LA any more, insisting on staying at home and hogging the telephone. Drew was used to ringing Daisy three times a day: in the morning when Sukey walked the dogs, from his car telephone and then, just to say he missed her, last thing at night while Sukey was having her bath. All this was pegged when the children came home. And now Christmas was approaching and Daisy was ashamed that she was dreading it more than ever.

  Towards the end of November, on the eve of Venturer’s crucial interview with the Independent Broadcasting Authority in London, all the papers were seething with speculation as to whether they’d win the franchise. Daisy, however, was only concerned that Drew, after a week playing polo in Dubai with Prince Charles, was flying home a day early, unknown to Sukey, in order to spend a whole night with her. This was a rare treat they had only managed twice since the affair had started.

  Daisy had done no painting for twenty-four hours, she was so frantic polishing the house, putting flowers in every alcove, making the most succulent scallop, prawn and lobster pie, and lighting a fire of apple logs in the sitting room.