by Fiona Walker
‘Not … olly. Th … sh … Jailbird … bloody inconvenient … lympic … bloody … uck off.’
‘What? I really can’t hear anything, Hugo.’
Realising Tash needed help with Cora, Alicia lunged forwards and started to try to distract her granddaughter by waving her cigarette around in pretty patterns and clinking the ice in her glass, blowing kisses and humming ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’. Cora, enchanted, fell silent and stared. Tash, appalled, couldn’t concentrate on what Hugo was saying at all.
‘Just get back here!’ he ordered and rang off.
It was a beautifully bright, blustery morning as Tash drove the short distance across Haydown land from Alicia’s cottage, which her mother-in-law grandly insisted upon calling The Dower House, but was in fact the old gamekeeper’s lodge. The avenue of beeches that led out of the woods was rustling feverishly overhead and casting dappled shadows through the open sunroof.
‘… and on that farm he had a cow, ee eye ee eye oh!’ Tash sang along to the nursery rhymes CD on the stereo. Behind her Cora was making ‘moo’ sounds from her car seat and pointing at a field of sheep through the window.
The land surrounding them was farmed by the same two tenant families that had maintained it when Henry Beauchamp had been alive. The fourth generations of the Bell and the Caroll families (the Ding Dongs and the Singalongs as they were affectionately known to the Beauchamps) were respectively custodians of a small mixed dairy, beef and sheep herd run on the sheltered and lush meadows of Lower Farm, and five hundred acres of arable on the fertile, open hills of Upper Farm. The rest of the estate was divided into huge tracts of dark, serried woodland and flinty, windswept downland that was variously leased out for shoots, timber production and grazing, plus the long tree-skirted valley of neglected parkland closer to the house, and the huge equestrian operation that Tash and Hugo ran from the main house and yard.
And Haydown House never failed to lift Tash’s heart when she saw it. A brick-and-flint William and Mary country house with the show-stoppingly perfect symmetrical face of a great classical beauty and the broad shoulders of a paternal hug, it was an amazing place to call home. Perched high on the Berkshire Downs, on the edge of the pretty village of Maccombe, surrounded by protective high pink-brick walls, beautiful gardens and its courtyards of old stables, coach house, cottages and barns, it was a daydream of a place to live.
Even though it was getting very ragged around the edges, cost a fortune to run and was impossible to keep remotely clean and ordered, Tash adored it with a passion second only to that for her family and animals.
As she drove along the farm track that led past the orchards and then beneath the clock-tower archway into the old coaching yard she could see Hugo’s pack of dogs sunning themselves on the flagstones outside his office, but the door was wide open and the place deserted. Glancing left towards the biggest and oldest of the three stable yards she spotted Jenny, sporting a Team GB baseball cap, hosing one of the youngsters’ legs. Waving, she drove on past the big open barn that housed straw and hay and along the back drive to the house itself, passing the overgrown grass tennis court and croquet lawn, and the lichen-flecked walls of the kitchen gardens. Behind the house, by the peeling black-gloss back door to the boot room that absolutely everybody used when calling at the house, apart from Jehovah’s witnesses and travelling salesmen, a smart navy blue Golf was parked beside Hugo’s dusty Discovery.
Tash let out a groan of recognition. It wasn’t her mother that had arrived unexpectedly to lunch. It was her stepmother, Henrietta.
On cue, she appeared at Tash’s own back door, the perfect hostess as opposed to a forgotten guest, all welcoming smiles and creamy blonde neatness in Berketex and pearls. Then a younger, pinker face topped with purple and green beaded dreadlocks appeared around the door behind her, and Tash realised that prodigal daughter and drug smuggler Beccy had come for lunch too.
‘Oh Christ,’ she covered her mouth in horrified recall.
She had issued the invitation weeks ago, without thinking how close to the Olympic and baby countdowns it would be. It hadn’t been long after Beccy had finally made it back to the UK amid a spattering of press coverage and a huge wave of family relief. Tash had been so excited and pleased that all her father’s hard work to exonerate Beccy and ensure her pardon from her fifteen-year sentence had paid off that she had picked a date at random. She must have forgotten to write it in the diary. Henrietta meanwhile – as organised a wife, mother and stepmother as she had been a PA to James all those years ago – had stuck faithfully to it, bringing Beccy, a basket of home-made jam and biscuits, a lift-the-flap book for Cora and a clutch of Babygros for the bump. She had even brought a lamb bone for Tash’s dog, Beetroot.
‘I never know what to do with them now that we don’t have the Labs any more,’ Henrietta apologised as she proffered the leg-bone wrapped in a Marks and Spencer bag, like a blood-encrusted caveman’s club. ‘It seems such a waste to throw them out.’
‘I’ve told her she should get another dog’ – Beccy resumed her position sitting at the kitchen table, poring over Horse & Hound – ‘but she says James won’t let her.’
‘Your father says dogs tie us to the house,’ Henrietta explained to Tash. ‘He no longer shoots, after all – it plays havoc with his tinnitus. Now that he’s retired and the girls have left home we do love to get away.’ James had taken to whisking Henrietta away for lengthy golfing holidays in South Africa in the years since the last of their long line of Labradors had passed away.
‘I’m back to house-sit now,’ Beccy pointed out idly as she flipped to the classified section to look at Dogs for Sale. ‘How about a Labradoodle?’
‘You know it’s not up for discussion, darling,’ Henrietta smiled stiffly as she continued waving the lamb bone around, suddenly looking sad. Tash knew that her stepmother desperately missed having dogs, her many generations of yellow Labrador ‘golden girls’. They had been her children, and even having her youngest daughter back was no match for the unconditional love of her Labs.
‘I’ll give this to Beetroot when the rest of the pack’s backs are turned,’ Tash promised, taking the bone before handing Cora to ‘Granny Hen’ for a cuddle. She then mixed them all Buck’s Fizzes from the champagne and freshly squeezed orange juice she’d just bought for her romantic evening with Hugo, before setting about transforming the rest of the ingredients lined up for that good-luck supper into a girls’ lunch instead.
Watching her, Beccy vowed that she would never, ever get pregnant. Tash had once been really quite stunning – Beccy had certainly envied her height and athleticism over the years. With a fine-boned, striking face set on a long, elegant neck, she had always possessed head-turning looks, made all the more stunning by her mismatched eyes, one amber and one green. Admittedly, she’d never learned to tame that mop of rather bushy, wavy brown hair which every riding hat moulded into a different, rebellious shape, and her dress sense had always been very hit and miss, but Beccy – who had struggled to do anything with her limp blonde tresses and extensive range of pastel fleeces and pale jeans before discovering dreadlocks, hats and Indian silk kaftans – was not particularly critical on that front. What appalled her was the bulge.
It stuck out like the huge bonnet of an ugly American car, a great snarling radiator grille of checked maternity top leering over Tash’s wrinkly navy leggings, emphasising her long, bandy legs and – horrors – a bottom that had spread far and wide since forfeiting the saddle for the birthing ball.
Rendered red in the face from just the simplest of exertions, like chopping salad or loading plates on a tray, Tash panted her way around the kitchen on swollen ankles. Beccy was too busy observing in appalled wonder to offer to help and Henrietta, chattering nonsensically with a giggling Cora, didn’t seem to notice.
Tash’s skin looked dry. She had bags under her eyes and her usually high, hollow cheeks were puffy and blotchy. She even has a bit of a double chin, Beccy realised. And aren’t those
upper arms just beginning to get a hint of dinner-lady bingo wing? Oh. My. God. I am never having a baby.
Oblivious to the scrutiny, Tash had loaded two trays and was rubbing her wrists which were numb in parts and stinging with pain in others.
‘We’ll eat outside on the terrace,’ she announced, unable to face clearing the huge scrubbed-pine table in the kitchen that was so overloaded with detritus these days that it had taken on the shape of a rhino. Nor could she face the dusty formality of the dining room proper. The house had really begun to go to pot since Radka’s departure. She felt ashamed, doubly so because Henrietta always kept Benedict House so immaculate.
But Henrietta was far more concerned about safeguarding her expensively styled hair than encountering a little house dust. She had promised to look in on an old school-friend near Marlborough for tea and didn’t want to arrive looking like Boris Johnson after a boozy lunch.
‘Isn’t it a bit breezy?’ she worried.
‘Nonsense. It’s bracing!’
They ate lunch with their windswept hair and flapping clothing sticking to their food, forced to shout to make conversation above the sound of the groaning trees, flapping parasol and madly rustling leaves.
Only Cora was spared the elements. Hastily stuffed with an organic pouch meal and a satsuma, she now napped peacefully upstairs with the black-out blind lowered, a lullaby CD on auto-repeat.
Tash battled to keep her rocket and watercress salad on her plate as she alternately made small talk and apologised for Hugo’s absence.
‘The build up to the Olympics is always absolutely frantic,’ she explained. ‘He’s hardly here, and when he is there’s a mountain to do. Normally I can take the slack, but with this so huge’ – she patted her unborn boy – ‘I’m next to useless around the yard – I can’t ride, I can hardly muck out and groom, he won’t let me turn out or lunge.’
‘Well that’s one of the reasons we’re here—’ Henrietta started, but her daughter interrupted.
‘It must be crap being sidelined after all the excitement of both going last time.’
Four years earlier, Tash was one of the Olympic team that had flown their horses half way around the world, hotly tipped for gold. It had been a thrilling time. The media had gone into overdrive following the glamorous husband and wife duo on the road to what was seen as almost guaranteed glory. They had been invincible for the two years beforehand, winning every principal event, rivalling one another for top slot and taking the sport into a new realm of popularity. Together they had endorsed endless products with lucrative sponsorship deals, written two best-selling training books and a double-headed autobiography, held sell-out lecture-demonstration tours on both sides of the Atlantic, featured in their own TV series on a specialist countryside channel, sold countless DVDs on the back of it and become universally known as the Beauchampions.
Then, amid all this furore, they had gone to the Olympics and returned empty-handed. It was a crashing blow to mutual and national pride. Tash’s superstar stallion The Foxy Snob, veteran of World and European Championship teams, had boiled over in the dressage, unable to handle the atmosphere and floodlights, which meant that she was too far from the top ten to make her score competitive, despite the double clear that followed. And Hugo, far more humiliatingly, had fallen off at one of the smallest fences on the course on cross-country day, live on worldwide satellite television streaming, catapulted from the saddle when his horse left a knee and pitched over, a fluke accident that could have happened to anyone. The resulting elimination – and the fact that his horse had then buggered off at speed back to the stables to leave him with a very long walk home to his team-mates – obsessed him to this day. Selected to represent Great Britain again at the upcoming Games, he was determined to defend the family’s honour as well as that of his country.
‘It’s a nice sort of sideline, being pregnant,’ Tash told her step-sister carefully. ‘I only wish I could be there to support the Brits and Hugo this time, but he insists I am far too close to giving birth and I’d only make him nervous.’
‘Too right.’ Beccy gave the monster bump another horror-filled glance across the table, noticing that Tash had to sit with her knees apart like an old man, vast belly thrust out between her and the table.
‘Besides, I’m needed here.’ Tash sighed, distractedly watching a piece of French bread fly off her plate in a gust of wind and land in Beccy’s hair. Given all the other beads, ribbons and clips adorning the colourful dreads, it blended in quite nicely.
‘I thought you just said you couldn’t do anything around the yard?’ Henrietta helped herself to more smoked salmon, which whipped around on the end of her fork like a jaunty orange flag.
‘I can’t physically do much, but I can oversee things. Jenny is going to be with Hugo and we’re really short-staffed right now so we’ve got a couple of agency people along with the part-timers from the local villages and I’ll have to muddle along as best I can.’
‘That’s exactly what we wanted to talk to you about—’ Henrietta tried again, but again Beccy interrupted her.
‘I’m glad your baby’s going to be a Leo,’ she told Tash, fingering the talismans around her neck. ‘They’re so positive and determined. Cora’s an Aquarian like me, isn’t she? We have a terrible time deciding what we want from life. I wanted to be a dog groomer for years, didn’t I, Mum? James could never understand it.’
‘And then a vet,’ Henrietta concurred, ‘then a riding instructor and an event rider, which is what we were going to—’
‘I remember that!’ Tash laughed. ‘You did a stint with the Stantons as a working pupil, didn’t you?’
Beccy nodded, eyes flashing.
‘They’re a lovely family.’ Tash was hugely fond of the big local clan that had competed for several generations and were as synonymous with dressage and event riding as the Whitakers were with show-jumping.
‘I didn’t stay long enough to find out,’ Beccy said quietly.
‘Why ever not?’ Tash had forgotten most of the details of her stepsister’s attempt at a competitive career, which had been going on at about the time she and Hugo had first got together, almost ten years earlier, although she did recall her father buying Beccy a very expensive horse. And Beccy had definitely possessed a lot of talent as a jockey, she recalled, but as with most things she’d quickly lost interest once the going got tough.
‘James and I had a falling out,’ Beccy muttered now.
‘Yes, well, he’s always felt rather guilty about that.’ Henrietta cleared her throat, hair whipping up from her face to reveal deep worry lines embossed on her brow.
‘He sold my horse,’ she gulped.
‘That sounds familiar.’ Tash sympathised, having fallen foul of her father’s rather brutal brand of paternal vengeance several times in her early years.
‘To Hugo,’ Beccy was close to tears now.
‘Which one was it?’
‘Butternut Squash.’
‘But he—’
‘Was sold straight on to America for twice the money,’ Beccy nodded forlornly. ‘Hugo promised James that we would always have first refusal if he sold him.’
‘Oh dear.’ Tash watched as another piece of bread flew off her plate, this time wedging itself in the foliage of the golden hop climbing an upright of the pergola behind Beccy. ‘It was a long time ago. Hugo has mellowed a lot since then. And the horse did really well, didn’t he? Kirsty Johanssen bought him when she and Stefan moved out to Virginia, I remember. He was placed at Kentucky one year.’
‘I could have gone four-star with him,’ Beccy lamented, conveniently forgetting that the chances of herself at seventeen producing the horse to international level had been nil, whereas Hugo had spotted his potential and moved him on to a top-flight career path.
‘Instead you went backpacking for a year and ended up staying away for almost a decade,’ Henrietta muttered under her breath, ‘half of it incarcerated in a potty bloody cult and then in prison.’
‘Do not pass go, do not collect five hundred pounds,’ Beccy sniffed, shooting her mother a dirty look.
‘It cost your stepfather considerably more than that to secure your liberty,’ her mother whispered, now holding her hair down with one hand and eating with the other.
Tash swallowed awkwardly. She was never sure whether the subject of her stepsister’s jail sentence was off limits or not. It seemed impolite to casually drop it in to conversation – ‘Now you’re back from Changi Women’s Prison, you must relish these cool summer days?’ – yet to ignore it was ridiculous. Similarly, for several years before fatefully moving on to South-East Asia as a part of her travels, Beccy had sequestered herself in an ashram with a mystical guru who took all her money, but that long episode was also never mentioned, despite the many trips Henrietta had made at the time to try to talk her daughter into coming home. Back then Beccy had taken the clothes, the money and the Marmite on offer and stubbornly stayed put, claiming that she had seen the light. Thus her ‘year out’ had slowly become almost a decade’s sabbatical of expensive self-denial, self-discovery, self-satisfaction and self, self, self. She hadn’t won many allies among the Frenches.
It was common knowledge in the family that, at Henrietta’s behest, James had continually fed funds into his stepdaughter’s account to safeguard her travels and enable her quick passage home whenever the need arose. Unfortunately that need had only presented itself when Beccy – finally leaving the safety of the ashram because the mystic suddenly closed it down to relocate to Epping Forest and buy himself a premier-league football team – travelled on to Singapore and found herself behind bars, her charmed travels coming to an abrupt end. As a result, that passage home had been very hard won and very, very expensive. Ten months in a Singapore women’s prison had finally knocked the glitter off Beccy’s globe-trotting life. Now home amid mother comforts, she had re-dyed her dreadlocks, been to a few summer music festivals and tied fresh dream catchers up above her bed in the family home on the Surrey borders, as though she hadn’t been away and the gap between seventeen and twenty-seven was non-existent.