by Jilly Cooper
‘Bitch,’ said Luke, grinning and getting out a packet of Polos. ‘That’s because I didn’t take her with me on Concorde.’
He also found it faintly embarrassing, having insisted that all the Apocalypse team get up early and work all their ponies every day, that he waived the rules with Fantasma. Instead he hacked her gently round the Rutshire countryside.
‘She gets awful bored if I stick and ball her,’ he told Ricky apologetically, ‘and only just tolerates practice chukkas. I guess she saves herself for the real thing.’
‘If she takes out your bloody father, I’ll forgive her,’ said Ricky grimly.
47
If Ricky’s hatred for Bart grew deep inside him like a beast, then Bart was equally obsessed with Ricky. The prospect of coming to England with enough ponies for a cavalry regiment and publicly showing the world who was the better man gave him an unbelievable sexual frisson. He was therefore outraged by a piece in the April issue of Polo magazine questioning the future invincibility of the Flyers.
‘Hitherto Bart Alderton has been shored up by the mighty ten goalers, Juan and Miguel O’Brien, and wildly underhandicapped ringers. Allied to the volatile and extremely vocal Napier brothers and an unknown Mexican this summer in England, will Bart be able to retain the Flyers’ supremacy?’
Having fired off a solicitor’s letter to Polo magazine Bart went into an orgy of pony-buying. Nor could the pleadings of Bibi that Alderton Airlines had recorded their first loss in twenty years, that 500 blue-collar and 400 white-collar workers had to be laid off and Bart ought to be there to fire them personally, that the vice-presidents of the various sections of the Alderton empire were at each others’ throats, stop him spending May, June and July in England.
The lay-offs and losses were just symptoms of a world-wide malaise, Bart told Bibi airily. Business would pick up in the fall. Anyway he was always at the end of the telephone or a fax machine. He couldn’t understand either why Bibi, as his polo manager, couldn’t accompany him and Chessie to England. Things wouldn’t run nearly as smoothly without her. But Bibi insisted that one member of the Alderton family must stay home to mind the shop. Nor was she prepared to leave Angel, who was still banned from playing in England, loose on his own on the US circuit for two and a half months. The punishing hours she worked for Bart had already put a great strain on her marriage.
‘Surely Angel could spare you for the big matches? Marriages need ventilating,’ grumbled Bart, totally forgetting that he wasn’t prepared to leave Chessie on her own for a second in England. As it was, he already had security guards following her twenty-four hours a day and had bugged the telephones and rooms both at the huge house he had just bought near Cowdray and at the flat in Knightsbridge. Chessie got her revenge by spending a fortune on clothes and enlisting the help of the guards even to choosing the colour and shape of her lingerie. If the world’s press was clamouring to witness her first meeting with her ex-husband in four and half years, Chessie reasoned, she better look good.
To the press’s disappointment this meeting didn’t occur until the final of the Queen’s Cup. Apocalypse, who, under Luke’s crash course, had finally got their act together, stormed through their side of the draw, taking huge delight in thrashing the Kaputnik Tigers, consisting of Victor, the twins and the great American Number Three, Bobby Ferraro, in the semi-finals, before meeting Bart, the Napiers and an unknown Mexican in the final.
Luke’s greatest headache on the day was keeping Apocalypse calm. It was like ponying three wild mustangs along a freeway. Perdita, suffering from appalling stage fright, became more histrionic and picky than ever. Ricky, whose stomach had been churning all summer at the prospect of bumping into Chessie, had been throwing up all night. Dancer, the most frightened of the three, hid it the best and consequently became the recipient of a lot of flak from Perdita and Ricky, particularly during practice chukkas and while they were watching videos of earlier Alderton Flyer matches.
‘It’s only because you take criticism so well that we can tell you things,’ Luke kept comforting Dancer.
Most patrons worried more about the bank manager than playing badly. Dancer, acutely aware he was the weak link in the team, was terrified of letting Apocalypse down. He had to mark Ben Napier, who was twice his size and four times his strength. He hardly slept the night before and in his fitful dreams was ridden off by the whole world.
As none of the three could keep anything down, there was no question of a team lunch to create solidarity before the match. Dancer, because he liked to get up slowly, cope with his nerves on his own and arrive as late as possible to avoid being mobbed, flew to the Guards Club by helicopter. The others went by car. Ricky drove with Perdita in front because she felt sick and Luke and Little Chef, dancing across Luke’s knees to bark at every dog they passed, in the back. As he was the team mascot, Dancer had given him a collar of jet from which dangled a tiny ivory horse.
‘That dog is so spoilt,’ grumbled Perdita, ‘he even gets the gardeners to bury his bones for him.’
Luke had done his homework on the Alderton Flyers. He had watched every match they played in England and, by judicious chatting up of grooms and other players, had familiarized himself with every pony they’d be riding and had briefed Apocalypse accordingly.
‘Team’s top-heavy, with my father and the Napiers yelling their heads off and all wanting their own way. The only person they’ve got to boss around is this Mexican guy called José, who can’t understand a word of English, which may enhance his peace of mind, but doesn’t make for cohesion. We’ll flatten them.’
On paper the Flyers were much stronger. The game plan was to harass the hell out of them until they fouled out of exasperation. Then, against long, accurate penalties from Luke, there would be no defence. If the match went Apocalypse’s way, the others would leave Luke as a rock-solid wall of defence and concentrate on attack.
Luke wished he felt more cheerful. As Ricky overtook everyone on the M4, the damp patches under his arms joined across his back until his whole shirt was soaked in sweat and Luke could see his shoulder muscles as rigid as petrified snakes.
It was a close, punishingly hot day. Thunder grumbled on the horizon. The heatwave was in its third week. Wild roses and the creamy discs of elderflowers draped over the hedgerows shrivelled in a day. A heat haze undulated on the tarmac ahead. It was a relief to come off the motorway into the dark green oak and chestnut tunnels on the road to Windsor. Behind fern-filled verges and ramparts of purple rhododendrons, Luke caught glimpses of large pink-and-white houses which reminded him of Palm Beach, lawns yellow from the hosepipe ban and paddocks full of jumps and ponies whisking unpulled tails across glossy rumps. Men in shirtsleeves and girls in sundresses were drinking outside pubs.
‘Christ, I’d like to spend the afternoon knocking back Pimm’s and watching someone else make a fool of themselves,’ said Perdita in a hollow voice. Luke felt as if an ice-cube had been slipped into his hand. Glancing down he saw it was Perdita’s hand reaching back to him. Although the nails were bitten and dirty and the palm calloused, he had to resist lifting it to his lips. Instead he squeezed it gently.
‘Give us a poem, Luke,’ she asked.
‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,’ began Luke, his deep voice slightly croaky from dust.
They were passing Windsor Castle now and Luke thought ruefully of the sightseeing he had hoped to do. He hadn’t been to London yet, let alone Stratford.
‘Or close the wall up with our English dead!’ he went on.
‘In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger.’
‘Not the Kaputnik Tigers I hope,’ said Perdita. ‘I’m so scared I’ll probably play like Victor. Christ – look at those crowds and those tents.’
From the car-park came a humming like a vast swarm of bees, as chauffeurs
, not wanting to melt away, kept on the air-conditioning of their limos. No wind displaced the wilting flags along the pitch, but inside the hospitality tents electric fans could be seen ruffling vast clumps of pink peonies and pale blue delphiniums as men, wishing they’d worn striped shirts which didn’t show the sweat, and beautiful women refusing red wine because it would make their faces even pinker, toyed with lobster, cold beef and strawberries and cream.
Ricky, aware that the Alderton Flyers and their wives were lunching in the tent of Alfred Dunhill, the sponsors, suddenly thought he saw Chessie and nearly ran over a programme seller.
‘Oh, look,’ said a fat waitress, chucking leftovers into a grey, plastic dustbin, ‘there’s that Perdita, the one that said “eff off” to Prince Charles.’
‘Ow, yes,’ said her friend excitedly. ‘Hello, Perdy, can we have your autograph? Thought you was in the Tower. Stuck up little madam,’ she added, as Perdita gazed stonily ahead.
Down by the pony lines crowds surged forward to admire Apocalypse’s equine stars. Wayne appeared to be sleeping peacefully but was actually wondering how to bite his way through his new reinforced lead rope. They did awfully good teas at the Guards Club. Spotty, the show-off, was thrilled to see so many people. Fantasma, as usual, was standing on her front legs lashing out simultaneously with both back barrels.
‘Thank God you’ve arrived,’ said Luke’s groom, Lizzie, despairingly. ‘I’ve got one more stud to screw into her hoof and I can’t get near her in this mood.’
Next door to Fantasma, Perdita was trying to calm down a frantically trembling, sweating Tero.
‘God, the Flyers’ horses look well,’ she said gloomily. ‘There’s Glitz, and that chestnut Andromeda’s even faster than Fantasma.’
‘That’s because the Napiers cut their horses up before a match,’ said Luke, taking the spanner from Lizzie and picking up a now comparatively docile Fantasma’s nearside hoof. ‘One touch of their spurs and they fly.’
‘Bastards, I hate them,’ stormed Perdita.
‘That’s the right attitude,’ said Luke. ‘Napiers keep their horses in all the time. They’re not so relaxed as ours.’
‘Could have fooled me,’ said Lizzie, rubbing a large purpling bruise on her arm.
‘I’m sorry, honey.’ Luke patted her cheek as he handed her back the spanner. ‘Thirty minutes to the parade. We’d better get changed,’ he added, propelling Ricky, who, despite the heat, was shivering even worse than Tero, towards the players’ changing room.
‘And where am I supposed to change?’ demanded Perdita.
‘In the Ladies,’ said Ricky curtly.
‘And get gawped at? I’d rather use the lorry, but you can all flaming well stand guard, or Guards, while I have a shower later.’
Ricky sat in a dark corner of the changing room taking ages to zip up his boots, buckle his knee pads and his lucky belt, and button up his lucky gloves which had almost fallen to pieces. He must get a grip on himself. He’d only get Chessie back by hammering Bart. At the moment he wouldn’t know where to stand to hit a sixty-yard penalty.
Suddenly he froze as Bart came in and dived for the nearest loo. Prolonged peeing followed by a volley of farts and a vile smell told him Bart was as nervous as he was. Ricky felt slightly better, and better still when Bart came out and spent several minutes combing his wolf’s pelt forward to cover a receding hairline and re-smoothing his shirt into his belt and his breeches into his knee pads and boots. He then dived into his locker and produced some bronzing gel called ‘Indela’, newly launched by Victor’s pharmaceutical empire, which didn’t run when you sweated.
Outside, a band, redder than their tunics, were playing the British Grenadiers as clouds, blacker than their bearskins, marshalled on the horizon. A curious light had turned the field viridian as military men with lean figures strode around barking instructions into walkie-talkies.
Ricky, who was madly superstitious, was slightly cheered as the band, bored with military marches, launched, to the ecstasy of the crowd, into ‘Four Horsemen’.
‘Four Hor-ses, white horse, black horse, red horse, pale horse, plague, famine, justice, death, riding, riding, riding,’ roared the crowd stamping their feet in time on the wooden boards, as the menacing music swept through the ground.
‘Isn’t that marvellous!’ cried Perdita.
‘Unfair bloody advantage, hyping up Apocalypse,’ snarled Bart to the Napiers and the uncomprehending Mexican.
‘Let’s object,’ said Ben Napier, two spots of colour staining his cadaverous cheeks as, exactly on cue, a vast, black helicopter cast its shadow over the pitch.
With great difficulty and the help of a dozen security guards Dancer fought his way through to the pony lines.
‘Fuckin’ ’ell, don’t it sound grite?’ he grinned at his team-mates. ‘I might go out and give them an encore. I love the Guards Club,’ he went on, lowering his voice. ‘They can’t believe anyfink as cockney as me can play polo. Colonels keep comin’ up and saying “’Ullo, Dancer, you over from New Zealand again?”’
Perdita giggled; even Ricky smiled slightly. But he was watching Bart who’d cut all the Apocalypse team, even Luke, stone dead and was now shouting at the Napiers and into a telephone at the same time. How could Chessie be married to that, he thought with a shudder. Luke edged closer to his father.
‘I don’t give a shit if it has crashed,’ Bart was saying. ‘I can’t bring them back to life. Put Winston Chalmers on to it at once. I’ll call you later.’
‘What’s happened?’ Luke asked one of Bart’s grooms whom he knew from Palm Beach. The groom pulled a long face.
‘Alderton Pegasus totalled in the desert with no survivors.’
‘Shit,’ said Luke. ‘Dad should fly home.’
‘And miss a final? Pigs would fly,’ said the groom.
The Queen had arrived. State trumpeters and drum horses from the Household Cavalry in their gold uniforms, followed by the band, were lining up between the goal posts to lead the two teams, with the two umpires as a bolster between them, ten abreast on to the field. Players tend to ride their oldest, quietest horses in the parade in case the bands and the crowd overexcite them. Apocalypse, however, stuck to their theme. Ricky rode the pale yellow Wayne, Perdita was on Hermia, her red-chestnut friend from Pony Club days who leapt all over the place snatching excitedly at her bit. Dancer had a safer passage on black Geoffrey, the hangover horse. Luke had reluctantly agreed to ride Fantasma, the only white horse in the yard, and had great difficulty controlling her. A natural loner, she longed to be out in front leading the parade. When she wasn’t humping her back in temper, she was taking bites out of poor, kind Geoffrey on her right, and, less advisedly, out of umpire Shark Nelligan’s horse on her left. Despite this, Apocalypse, in their black shirts with their black hats over their noses, looked both sinister and threatening.
Ricky had just galloped Wayne back after the parade and was mounting a hopelessly over-excited Sinatra when he heard a frantic clicking of cameras as journalists and photographers broke through the ropes. Then he heard a soft voice saying, ‘Hello, Luke darling.’
Catching a great waft of Diorissimo, Ricky swung round as though a rattlesnake had bitten him, colour draining from his face. The heat had made everyone appear as though they’d been boiled alive. Chessie, by comparison, looked like a lily of the valley just picked from some cool, shady dell. She wore a pale green linen suit, exquisitely cut to show off the fragility of her body, and flat green pumps on her feet. Her face, faintly flushed from champagne in the Dunhill tent, was tanned to a smooth café au lait, the eyes were turned to aquamarine by the green suit and her full, pouting lips were as palely pink as the wild roses dying in the hedgerows.
Hugging Luke, but gazing over his shoulder at Ricky, she murmured, ‘How exciting you’re in the final and how ironic you’re playing against your father. What embarras de Aldertons. The commentator’s going to get so muddled.’
Then, wriggling out of Luke’
s grasp, like a sleepwalker she moved over to Ricky. Gazing up, she took in the hollowed cheeks with their suspicion of black stubble and the grim intransigent mouth which was belied by the fierce, yet desperately wounded, dark eyes beneath the black polo hat.
‘Hello, Ricky,’ she said mockingly. ‘How’s our bet going? Still a long way to go. No Gold Cup yet, no ten goal, no Westchester. You’ll have to do better than that.’
Oblivious of the photographers going crazy all round them, Ricky stared down at her. He simply couldn’t get a word out as she gently caressed Sinatra’s silky shoulder. Sinatra had been known to take people’s hands off, but now relaxed almost ecstatically under Chessie’s touch.
‘Four and a half years is a long time,’ she whispered. ‘Haven’t you missed me?’
Seeing her wanton, taunting little face, flawless except for the velvet smudges under the eyes, and her caressing suntanned hand inching towards his thigh, Ricky wanted to gather her up on Sinatra, gallop all the way back to Robinsgrove, ram every bolt and never let her go again.
They were interrupted by Luke, now mounted on Ophelia and looking more thunderous than the cloud now hanging above the pitch.
‘Back off, Chessie,’ he said roughly. ‘I don’t know if Dad put you up to this, but it is definitely out of order.’
Perdita was less reticent. ‘Fuck off, you bitch,’ she screamed. ‘What a bloody awful time to stage a comeback.’
The reporters scribbled avidly.
‘Any chance of a reconciliation, Mrs Alderton?’ asked The Scorpion, wrestling with one of Dancer’s security men.
Chessie gave a sob. ‘You’ll have to ask my ex-husband,’ she said.
‘For God’s sake get on, Ricky,’ snapped Major Ferguson, who masterminded every move at the Guards Club.
The Flyers were already on the field.
‘Here come the undertakers,’ sneered Charles Napier, deliberately barging his big brown mare into Spotty whom Perdita had just changed on to. ‘Black’s the right colour for you lot. You’ll certainly be flying that fag,’ he nodded at Dancer, ‘at half-mast by the end of this match.’