Kiss and Tell

by Fiona Walker

  Somehow Tash managed to get the mare around the rest of the course, but she had no memory of it. Amazingly she finished within the time and retained her top-ten position on the overnight leader board.

  Her head injury wasn’t spotted for almost twenty-four hours. She could walk, talk and function fairly normally, and insisted she was okay despite a screaming headache and increasing nausea, both of which she put down to the stress of their schedule and the early days of pregnancy. She didn’t complain because she didn’t want to let anybody down.

  The radio interviews had passed in a blur, the demo even more so, but Hugo naturally took control and helped her out when she was tongue-tied, which was often the case in public, despite her private gregariousness.

  He had also carried her through their after-dinner speech; he had always been the raconteur, his audience in stitches as he regaled them with scurrilous tales from ten years at the top of the sport. Nevertheless, immediately afterwards he took his wife to one side, blue eyes anxious, and said they must call a doctor. He’d never seen her so grey.

  ‘No!’ Tash was adamant, great yawns racking through her. ‘I just need to go to bed.’

  The next morning she felt as though she’d been drugged. Her contact lenses wobbled in her eyes and she couldn’t see straight. There was a foul taste in her mouth. Her swollen breasts ached in sympathy with her pounding, pounding skull.

  Schooling the little black mare before breakfast, she had to get off to throw up three times. She felt increasingly spaced out and couldn’t purely blame it on morning sickness and nerves. She disliked being the focus of so much attention, not all of it positive. Talk at Werribee Park was all of the ‘Melbourne Martyr’ and who she might be, a blurred photo of the man in the hoodie pulling the blonde from under the mare’s hooves was on the front of every newspaper sports section, his identity as mysterious as the girl whose life he had saved. The media were hasty to draw comparisons with suffragette Emily Wilding Davison, who had run out in front of a Derby field, yet nobody knew what, if anything, this girl had been protesting about. In the gossip-loving lorry park, malicious tongues had already started wagging, suggesting that the blonde might be a spurned mistress of Hugo’s.

  Any rumours certainly didn’t put off the crowds that flocked to the trade stands later that morning, eager to meet the sport’s golden couple, the legendary ‘Beauchampions’.

  ‘I’m such a dolt, I can’t even spell my own name right,’ Tash joked as she battled nausea throughout the book signing, painful cramps starting to claw at her belly.

  ‘Remember me?’ one buyer asked as he thrust his book towards her.

  His face swam in front of Tash’s eyes. Lovely face. Big, dark eyes – very honest and appealing, like a young Robert Downey Junior, she thought vaguely as she took the book and wielded her pen.

  ‘Who shall I sign this to?’ Her own voice was getting smaller and smaller in her head.

  She couldn’t hear his reply at all.

  ‘I’m sorry? Who did you say?’

  ‘Like the Scottish loch, only spelt the Irish way.’

  ‘The Scottish loch … how lovely …’ She smiled up at him, pen twirling and eyes crossing.

  Then she uncrossed her eyes with great effort. ‘I know you.’

  He nodded, the beautiful brown eyes so molten they could be fresh from a Lavazza machine.

  The espresso eyes and Scottish lochs started swirling again.

  She remembered nothing beyond that.

  A few hours later the medical team broke it to Hugo that, as well as mild concussion, his wife had suffered a miscarriage.

  Tash would dream of lochs quite a lot in coming weeks. In her childhood, when her parents had still been together, the French family had taken a house on the banks of Loch Fyne every August, where they had walked, talked, guzzled oysters and entertained vast groups of friends. Years later she and Niall – her ex – had once had a disastrous attempt at rapprochement on the edge of a loch. Most recently Hugo had taken her salmon fishing near Loch Lomond, and she had loved it with an unexpected passion – from the long walks along river banks, to delicious picnics, to the tweeds and kinky rubber waders, to the endless lovemaking during long evenings in the croft. Their baby had been conceived there.

  She coped with the loss with what others took to be characteristic common sense, but in fact hid great well of sadness and self-blame.

  She said all the right things if asked. She knew that almost all miscarriages were nature’s way of preventing a wretched life. She knew that it was probably always going to happen with this particular pregnancy; it was nothing to do with carrying on competing and maintaining a hectic work schedule, it was just fate taking control. Yet still Tash secretly felt that it was her fault.

  She lost a great deal of weight, became listless and withdrawn, stopped phoning friends or painting, and her riding became so unfocused and slapdash that Hugo banned her from top competitions for the rest of the season after a succession of three crashing falls at advanced events.

  ‘We lost the first life we created.’ He took her in his arms six weeks after Melbourne, as he did night after night, and enfolded her beneath the angle of his jaw. ‘I loved that little shared bit of us, just as I love every bit of you. And I will fight for all of us more now, for you and for our children. We will have children, Tash.’

  Tash wanted to believe him so badly, and his words did help enormously, but some scales had fallen irretrievably from her eyes with that lost child and, with each barren month that passed after Melbourne, she mourned motherhood a little more.

  The stray girl from the crowd and that moment of chance, of near-fatality, haunted her for years to come. She played what very little of it she remembered over and over again in her head but she could never remember enough to paint a full picture. As pregnancy continued to elude her she felt she was being punished for not stopping that day. She threw herself back into her riding, reaching the top-ten in the FEI world rankings for the first time and joining Hugo on the national squad. Her top horse and prolific stallion, The Foxy Snob, became the highest point-scoring horse in history and, to Hugo’s mild pique, got more fan mail than any of them. Yet her lost chance at motherhood was never far from her mind, however momentous the highs, affectionate the support and prolific the accolades.

  Almost three years later she received an anonymous letter, postmarked the Solomon Islands. Written on woven, hand-made paper, in a beautiful indigo script, it simply read:

  A heart was lost in Melbourne; it will always be lost. So many locks and not enough keys; it’s easier to be lost than found. But I will make amends. Pax nobiscum.

  When he read it Hugo was all for calling in a private detective, believing his wife to be stalked. Tash told him not to be so silly and tucked the letter among her keepsakes in a shell-studded box she kept at the bottom of her wardrobe.

  Just days after receiving it she conceived Cora.

  Chapter 1

  When a small puddle suddenly appeared beneath her in the Waitrose queue, Tash Beauchamp thought that her waters had broken a fortnight before her due date.

  It was only after her checkout lane had been closed, the in-store janitor and duty manager called, and half the neighbouring staff and customers alerted to the prospect of a live birth in aisle five, that the true cause of the ever-expanding pool beneath Tash’s trolley was discovered.

  Her fresh deli pork and sage kebab sticks had broken through their wrapping and speared a carton of pineapple juice, which was splashing everywhere. The smell was unmistakeable.

  ‘Shame,’ the manager lamented as Tash, eighteen-month-old Cora and their shopping were relocated to another till. ‘We’ve never had a birth here – a couple of deaths, several proposals and a nasty case of ABH in the freezer section just last month, but no babies. You could have called it Rose if it was a girl. Imagine the ambulance arriving while you’re in the last stages of labour, desperate to get to hospital – “Not yet, baby Rose. Wait. Wait, Rose!”;
Waitrose. Getit?’

  Tash flashed a weak smile. ‘Actually, it’s a boy.’

  ‘Oh, lovely,’ the manager beamed at little Cora, who had a finger rammed in each nostril, her tongue poking out between pudgy thumbs. ‘One of each. When’s he due?’

  Tash started heaving her canvas shopping bags in to the trolley, longing to sit down. ‘First week of August.’

  ‘Here – let me,’ the manager took over. ‘So he’ll be an Olympic baby. You could name him after a gold medallist.’

  ‘His father would certainly like that.’

  ‘We’ve got a local hopeful here – lives up on the downs. Hugo something … Beaumont or Butcher? Comes in here quite a lot. Everyone says he’ll bring back gold this year. Rides horses, I gather – not really my thing. I’m allergic, and I always think the poor horse does most of the work, don’t you? They should get the medals! This bloke’s a right toff and a bit of an arrogant sod, to be honest, but you forget that when national pride’s at stake, don’t you?’

  ‘You certainly try.’

  ‘So do you have any names lined up?’

  ‘His father wants to call him Hugo.’

  ‘Does he? What a coincidence!’

  ‘I’ve steered him towards Amery.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Amery – it’s a Beauchamp family name.’

  ‘Beauchamp, you say?’ The manager started to grow pale.

  ‘Cora’s daddy is Hugo Beauchamp, isn’t he darling?’ Tash smiled at her little girl and then laughed as she excitedly lisped: ‘Daddy winth gold! Daddy winth gold!’ as Hugo had taught her, although she didn’t understand what it meant. Along with ‘star’, ‘pig’, ‘hug’ and ‘dog’, these were the only words she could say. To Tash’s continual concern she had yet to say anything close to ‘Mummy’.

  The store manager was still blustering with embarrassment as she lifted the last of the shopping into the trolley. ‘I’m sure he’s not at all arrogant at home – busy man like him hasn’t much time for pleasantries in a supermarket.’

  ‘He’s supremely arrogant at home.’ Tash sighed fondly, eyeing the green bag that was spilling with ingredients for the intimate Olympic send-off meal she was planning for that evening.

  ‘But romantic.’ The manager was eyeing the groceries too – the clichéd champagne, truffles, smoked salmon and strawberries. ‘You’re a lucky couple. Once we had kids, the husband and I were lucky if we managed half an hour together to sit down in front of EastEnders, let alone fresh flowers every week and romantic candle-lit meals.’

  Tash removed the candles from Cora’s sticky grip, as she was using them to smack the manager on the bottom. ‘What flowers?’

  ‘The ones your husband buys here every week,’ she beamed cheerfully.

  Tash swallowed, trying very hard to beam back.

  Hugo never bought her flowers.

  ‘His father was just the same,’ Alicia sniffed disparagingly when Tash called in to drop off her fags and gin. ‘He started taking mistresses as soon as I had the boys.’

  Tash gaped at her mother-in-law, who was already pouring two vast gin and Its, even though it was barely midday.

  ‘I’ll stick to tea, thanks.’ She headed for the kettle, waving away Alicia’s offer of a Rothmans.

  ‘You girls today!’ She sparked up, but in a conciliatory gesture reached behind her to open a window. ‘I smoked all the way through both my pregnancies and look at Hugo and Charles. Both marvellous specimens.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Tash topped up Cora’s beaker of juice with water from the tap and handed it down to her, where she was playing with Granny Lish’s elderly pug, Beefeater. Unlike his predecessor, Gordons – known universally as ‘Thug the pug’ – Beefy was as long-suffering and gentle as he was sad-eyed, creased and curly-tailed. He and Cora adored one another.

  ‘The secret to stopping him straying is to get your figure back as soon as you’ve had the baby,’ Alicia commanded grandly, draining the first gin and It and starting on the second.

  ‘Really?’ Tash looked over her shoulder worriedly as she put a teabag into a chipped bone-china cup.

  ‘Absolutely!’ Alicia avowed, Spode-blue eyes briefly appearing through their curtains of pale, crepey skin as they stretched wide in Tash’s direction and then cast their critical way down to her bottom. ‘Men can’t stand the great fat Hausfraus most women become after childbirth. I existed on gin, cigarettes and sultanas for six months after Charles.’

  ‘You still do,’ Tash muttered, having as usual filled her mother-inlaw’s fridge with ready meals that she knew would get thrown out by the char at the end of the week, when they had passed their sell-by dates. In the short time that she had been shopping for Alicia the week’s list never altered – a litre of Bombay Sapphire, a litre of Martini, two hundred Rothmans, two lemons, two packets of Ritz crackers, soft cheese and a biscuit assortment box.

  ‘Can’t manage sultanas nowadays – not with these teeth,’ Alicia veiled her clever blue eyes behind their creases once more and bared her teeth instead – very expensive but ill-fitting bridgework in pale cream marbled with old gold nicotine stains, like antique ivory.

  Tash made her tea and then settled at the kitchen table to watch Cora play, her back aching.

  ‘When do your new couple arrive?’ Alicia had noticed how much Tash was struggling in late pregnancy, although she hadn’t offered to help at all. Since writing off her car when flying rather high on gin and winnings on the way back from a bridge night at Busty de Meeth’s Wiltshire pile, Alicia had been in no hurry to replace it. Having relied upon a personal driver up until the age of fifty-three, she had loathed taking the wheel in recent years and was enjoying the return to delivered groceries, chauffeured transport and more visitors, even if that did put rather a lot of pressure on her already over-stretched and heavily pregnant daughter-in-law. Nor was Alicia keen to help out with childcare; having relied entirely upon nurses, nannies, housekeepers and cooks when bringing up her own sons, she had no real working knowledge of babies whatsoever, although she was pretty useful with foundling lambs, whelping dogs and foaling mares.

  ‘The Czechs can’t start until the end of August,’ Tash sighed. ‘The agency couldn’t come up with anybody sooner. Radka and Todor really left us in the lurch.’ The Bulgarian couple that had been working for Tash as au pairs for almost a year had done a moonlight flit a fortnight earlier, to go vegetable packing in Lincolnshire for three times the money.

  ‘I thought they were called Ratty and Toad?’ Alicia flicked her fag ash into the sink.

  ‘That’s what Hugo called them. No wonder they left. They came here to improve their English, poor things, and as soon as they learned enough to find out what we were calling them they buggered off.’

  Tash felt absurdly hurt by the defection, having thought herself very close to Radka, who adored Cora and who shared a very giggly sense of humour with Tash. She and the easy-going but money-obsessed Todor had become like family, and now Tash felt as though a younger sister had run away from home. Added to which, she was really struggling to manage the house and riotous garden at Haydown with just the family’s pensionable retainers Gwenda and Ron for help.

  Totally wrapped up in the Olympic build-up, Hugo barely registered the Bulgarians’ absence, whereas Tash mourned them like missing limbs.

  ‘Isn’t your mother supposed to be staying with you for the Olympics?’

  ‘She cried off. Something came up and she can’t get away – to do with Polly, I think.’

  Tash’s mother Alexandra lived in France with her second husband, Pascal, and their eighteen-year-old daughter Polly, who had deferred her place to study fashion at a Parisian college and was currently causing her parents a great many sleepless nights as she spent the year backpacking with a group of friends.

  ‘Beautiful child.’ Alicia was a great admirer of aesthetics and Polly was very aesthetic indeed, if completely untamed. ‘Bound to be kidnapped by slave traders or suchlike.’

  �
��God, don’t say that!’ Tash gulped, stooping awkwardly to gather Cora protectively to her bump. ‘After what Daddy and Henrietta went through over Beccy, Mummy is fretting all the time.’

  ‘Your stepsister? Wasn’t she banged up for drug smuggling?’

  ‘It was awful. Daddy had to fly out to Singapore four or five times. Poor Henrietta had sworn she’d never go there again – her first husband died out there, you see. She must think the place is cursed.’

  ‘Rubbish. I adored Singapore. Henry and I were regulars. So much more evolved than Hong Kong, I found. The Martini bar at Raffles mixes a very game gin sling.’ She reached for her drink with a nostalgic sigh.

  The conversation had triggered a vague memory that Tash was grasping to retrieve. On cue her mobile phone rang in her bag. It was Hugo, the personalised ringtone set to galloping hooves, which he found hugely embarrassing.

  Cora immediately started screeching excitedly, a trick she had recently developed to distract her mother during calls and draw attention back to herself.

  ‘Hello … Hi … What? Sorry – I can’t hear a thing; Cora’s shouting and it sounds as though you’re sitting on a tractor.’

  ‘I am sit … on a tract … or!’ he bellowed, though to Tash his voice was barely audible. ‘The bloo … muck … eap needed emptying and … know what Jenny’s … ike about revers … this … ing.’ Their head girl was terrified of the old yard tractor. ‘Your … mother’s here.’

  ‘My mother?’ She gasped in delight. Perhaps Alexandra had changed her mind about coming after all.

  Hugo sounded far from delighted. ‘And your sister. They … to lunch, appar … tly.’

  ‘But Polly’s in Vietnam— shh, Cora.’ Tash lifted her chin up as the little girl tried to grab at the phone. Denied her target, she shrieked at the top of her voice.