by Fiona Walker
After ringing off Sylva watched the ducklings swimming behind their mother, stripes rippling from their tiny slipstreams.
Her groin still hummed from its joyful union with Rory’s eager thrusts, fluttering twitches of pleasure lingering inside her like those ripples upon the water’s surface. She patted her rounded belly, which was spilling very slightly over her skinny jeans. It was time for self-denial again – sexual and nutritional. She must forfeit occasional sex for regular exercise with her personal trainer, fasting and dieting back down to her usual size. As she walked the last few hundred yards to her horrible faux château, she wondered whether it was finally time for a tummy tuck. Three pregnancies would eventually take their toll, even if one did a hundred abdominal crunches a day, as she did. She wasn’t eager to revisit the surgeon’s knife again – the last time she’d flown to LA for a few discreet adjustments, she’d had a reaction to the anaesthetic from which it had taken her weeks to fully recover. But plastic surgery was a necessary evil these days, she reminded herself. No pain no gain, as they said in this country. Like childbirth.
‘Two pregnancies,’ she reminded herself as she reached into her pocket and pressed the remote control for her electric gates.
Chapter 19
Lying awake the night before her marathon dentistry-then-surgery makeover, Faith rehearsed a call to Mr Ali Khan, explaining that she couldn’t possibly go through with it.
But the following morning, as she looked at her boyish chest in the mottled mirror of the mobile home’s badly lit bathroom, she was less certain. If she had breasts like Sylva Frost a whole new world would open up to her, along with Rory’s fickle heart.
Carly’s escape plan worked perfectly. Kurt and Graeme were away competing in Germany. At her friend’s insistence, Faith texted them to say that she had been kicked in the face by one of the young stallions and was going to have to get her nose re-set and her teeth fixed, but that they mustn’t worry because Carly’s family would look after her. As her father was a dentist, the gayfathers assumed she was in safe hands. They had no idea that Carly’s parents were in fact away in Spain. Now Faith could legitimately disappear for forty-eight hours.
Carly bustled her and her pre-packed hospital bag into the pink Mini Cooper and accelerated along the half mile of tree-lined drive like a getaway driver, long before the other seven staff members at Piaffe Court could notice a thing.
In less than an hour the girls were walking into the Harley Street dental clinic that was the first port of call in turning Faith into the woman of Rory’s dreams.
‘Can I get you anything?’ Carly asked caringly just before Faith temporarily lost the power of speech in order to gain the power of a whiter than white smile.
‘A new phone.’ Faith thrust her purse at her.
By teatime, now in Mr Ali Khan’s care a few hundred yards along the same illustrious street, dopy from a pre-med and her mouth still floppy from her veneer fitting, Faith was waiting in her private room. Carly had gone to have her hair extensions reglued, leaving her friend with a fluffy pink good-luck teddy bear and strict instructions not to play with her new mobile phone.
Faith pulled it from its box and groaned. It was baby pink. Groggily she slotted in her old sim card and switched it on in case there were any messages, but its sleek face reported nothing apart from a low battery.
Unable to stop herself, she texted Rory, whom she knew would be arriving in Blenheim that day. Good Luck.
It took all her will power not to add a line of xs. The pre-med was making her feel horribly maudlin. Tears filled her eyes and her vision was so blurry that she struggled to read the reply. The nurses had appeared to wheel her through to the operating theatre now.
‘You’ll have to leave that here, love,’ said one, trying to take the new phone away from her.
‘No!’ She snatched it back and blinked several times at the screen in front of her.
Miss you.
Suddenly overwhelmed with certainty and relief, she grabbed the nurse’s arm urgently. ‘Tell Mr Ali Khan I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want boobs like Sylva Frost after all. I want boobs like my mother. And a nose like my mother.’
The nurse looked agitated, knowing that perfectionist Farouk, now scrubbed and waiting, would go mad at any last-minute change. ‘What are those breasts like?’
‘Beautiful,’ Faith struggled upright. ‘I want to look just like my mother. She’s beautiful.’
‘Do you have a photograph, perhaps?’
Faith scrabbled woozily for her bag and brought out her little leather-bound wallet of snapshots, opening it up to reveal a photograph of a young Anke with her Olympic gold. She held it out triumphantly.
‘Dear child’ – the nurse’s eyebrows shot up – ‘this woman looks just like you.’
Chapter 20
Beccy had slept in the strangest of places all over the world with some unusual bedfellows, from cosying up with Mongolian hosts in yurts in the hinterlands to keeping close quarters with twelve Vietnamese siblings in boat houses in floating villages, from head-to-toeing with tropical insect life in hammocks in the rain-forest to watching nocturnal rats investigate shanty shacks in city slums. But sharing the sleeping quarters of a horsebox with Rory Midwinter in a bitterly cold corner of a windswept field in Oxfordshire looked set to be a night she would never forget.
Her first impression of Rory was of a pro skier’s physique, a big, mellow smile and gorgeous sleepy eyes, and the prospect of working with him at Haydown was initially a very uplifting one. All too briefly. Then Twitch the terrier attacked Karma the Labradoodle puppy and everything changed.
Rory was unrepentant and even had the nerve to laugh when poor, terrified Karma, trying to escape, became stuck fast behind the chemical loo in the horsebox shower room, her fluffy coat attaching her to the Velcro towel holder. He was, Beccy decided, arrogant and selfish, and took nothing seriously. He was supercilious, spoiled and very rude. He called Karma a ‘shagpile on legs’ a ‘posh mongrel’ and a ‘twit’. Beccy was so hurt that, to her shame, she burst into noisy tears, which at least silenced an astonished Rory.
Later, when he had found the manners to apologise, and tried to make amends by asking her about herself, he fell asleep while she was talking.
Beccy now thought that he was, quite simply, vile.
She knew it was unsportsmanlike, but she hoped he fell off. His lovely young coloured horse, Humpty, who had settled in his temporary stabling with much less fuss than his master, was far too good for him, as was his famous owner, along with his host and coach, Hugo.
She had also taken against Rory because he was unapologetically hijacking Hugo’s bunk in the horsebox. For a brief and very exciting moment before that, it had looked as though just Beccy and her brother-in-law were going to share the state-of-the-art Oakley with its slide-out pod that projected from the side of the lorry at the press of a button to double the luxury accommodation, wood panelling, power shower and flat-screen television. But then Rory had driven up beside them in his ancient, leaking bus of a horsebox belching diesel fumes and Hugo had insisted his new protégé stay in the Oakley while he headed off to the Woodstock bed and breakfast to brave the family room with Tash and the kids, hoping for at least a few hours’ sleep before each day of the competition. Jenny was sleeping in a nearby horsebox with her German-rider fiancé Dolf. That left Rory and Beccy sharing the state-of-the-art penthouse on wheels.
After fiddling with everything from the DVD player to the microwave – and breaking them, Beccy was certain – Rory wandered off with Twitch at his heels for the riders’ briefing and a first cross-country course walk, leaving her to wrestle with all his badly packed trunks of horse paraphernalia. To her horror, Hugo had told her that she was going to groom for Rory while Jenny did everything for him, assisted by Tash.
‘But Tash has two babies to look after!’ she had pleaded.
‘She has her au pairs, plus Sophia is around to help. Tash’s focus will be entirely on me.
’
Beccy wished her focus could be entirely on Hugo, as it longed to be, but she was stuck with the ever-yawning, big-headed Rory.
And her focus was about to shift dramatically to the North Island half way across the globe, from which she received her first text in almost a week.
Horses and Lem on way to airport. Going to sort things out and follow on. L
Beccy let out a whimper of fear. She hadn’t heard from him since the night he had phoned to talk about his father and she’d told him not to come.
She quickly checked through her saved messages and found the one sent three weeks earlier, listing his arrival dates and details. Reading it again she groaned and sat down heavily on a tack trunk.
She’d somehow thought that if she ignored the situation it would go away, but instead it was about to blow up in her face.
Her hands shook as she tried to fashion a reply that would put him off, but she knew it was far too late for that. In the end all she could think of was: Our conversations never took place. Hugo must never know. If you say anything I will deny it.
He replied in an instant, even though it was the early hours in New Zealand: Don’t be frightened, Tash, I know you are unhappy. Want to change that.
She tried to picture him sitting surrounded by the detritus of packing. She somehow imagined a little weatherboarded farmhouse in the middle of wooded, windswept hills. His horses had been loaded up in the middle of the night and taken away for their long journey across the world, leaving him all alone, packing up his few possessions and saying farewell to his family and friends, to his long-suffering mother and freeloading father.
Beccy already had a clear picture of him in her mind, a vignette of the sexy Devil on Horseback from the wrong side of the tracks, the loner, the self-starter who had succeeded against all the odds in his professional and sporting careers – driven, ruthless, touched with genius. It was a very sexy daydream. But now she had been caught napping and the daydream looked set to become a living nightmare, she was terrified.
She was about to switch off her phone when another message came through.
I won’t give you away. I promise. Saved you once before, remember? Can do it again. Counting the days. L
Beccy held down the power button to make it all go away. If he worked out exactly whose life he had saved, she really was in deep trouble.
Not long after unpacking her case at the Woodstock bed and breakfast and noticing that, while she had brought endless changes of clothes, comforters, nappies and even DVDs for the children, she had failed to pack so much as a change of knickers for herself, Tash concluded that she probably wasn’t quite ready for such a marathon undertaking as supporting Hugo at a three day event with the children in tow.
Worse still, she had left her purse on the kitchen table at Haydown and only had Hugo’s spare cash to keep her going. Forty pounds and a lot of loose change that he had been only too grateful to relinquish didn’t get you far in the Blenheim food stands when catering for the faddy tastes of two mute Czechs and a toddler, let alone fund a capsule wardrobe suitable for a supportive eventing wife and groom.
She would have asked Veruschka if she could borrow some clothes were it not for the fact that the twenty-something from Bohemia only seemed to possess size eight lemon yellow tracksuits and bootlace-strap vests with Hot Lips spelled out on the front in pink sequins. Vasilly, at six feet tall with a Budvar beer belly and shoulders like a shot-putter, was more Tash’s size, but lived in very tight stonewashed jeans and a donkey jacket the likes of which hadn’t been seen in the UK since Boys from the Blackstuff was on television.
The Jelineks were clearly finding it hard to settle in at Haydown. Homesick, insular and disapproving, they combined extreme politeness with a deep suspicion of all they found. While they worked like Trojans, their very fixed ideas and the language barrier meant that they rarely did what she asked of them. Veruschka was singularly determined to disinfect everything in the house using the strongest chemicals at her disposal, regardless of whether she was wiping down a highchair or an oil painting of one of Hugo’s ancestors; Vasilly seemed set on an equally ambitious mission to run the petrol strimmer over every inch of Haydown’s many hundreds of acres, strapping himself into his goggles and ear-protectors at dawn and marching off like a man possessed. Hugo thought they were hopeless and called them the ‘Blank Czechs’, but Tash appreciated their efforts and obvious love of children, and was trying her best to include them in every aspect of family life. Away from home, however, it was a much greater strain to look out for them, or ‘keep them in Czech’ as Hugo put it. They clearly had no idea what to make of a large scale horse trials in operation, and Blenheim Palace itself left them open-mouthed.
‘Queen liff here!’ Veruschka told Cora excitedly when they first set eyes on Blenheim Palace, and no amount of painstaking explanations from Tash would convince the au pair that the historic home of the Spencer-Churchill family was not Buckingham Palace.
Having arrived at the Oxfordshire venue on a September morning as cold as any January night, Tash had since endured a non-stop pandemonium of crying children and lost Czechs. Now Hugo insisted that she walk the course with him, promising to take it slowly to allow for her gradual return to fitness. With a double buggy and a brace of confused Eastern Europeans in tow, photographing everything with their mobile phones to text back to their relatives, Tash hardly helped Hugo’s concentration and her own was far too shot to think straight.
‘I’d aim to go the direct route on both horses here,’ she told him at a particularly technical-looking run of three huge logs shaped like the Greek letter Xi.
‘Are you sure?’ Hugo blew a plume of condensed air through his teeth as he closed one eye and cocked his head at the double bounce. ‘That’s a big ask for Vix.’
A full sister to The Fox, Vixen was as beautiful as she was changeable; spooky, weather-dependent, capricious and flighty, she nevertheless had speed and heart on her side and was quite brilliant on her day, but she could need nursing round on a bad day and her cross-country routes always needed meticulous planning. As her biggest test to date, the Blenheim course had to be carefully masterminded.
‘The alternative route is ridiculously long.’
‘I guess you’re right.’ He gave it another sceptical look, but Tash was already kicking off the brake of the empty baby buggy and chasing after Veruschka, who had just gathered a mewling Amery in her arms and was jogging towards the next fence with him pressed to her sequinned chest while, alongside her, Vasilly bounced a rather alarmed and unstable Cora on his shoulders. They saw course walking as accelerated sight-seeing and were keen to press on, whereas Hugo needed time at each fence to look at the options, plan sight-lines and talk tactics.
Hugo caught them all up at a big new drop fence with a second, skinny element almost immediately upon landing.
‘Need to put the brakes on here.’ He studied it thoughtfully, knowing that his second ride – Sophia and Ben’s half-share horse Sir Galahad, an ex point-to-pointer with a fearsome hold – would be a nightmare to slow down enough to take the fence safely, particularly if he had taken the direct route at the Xi.
‘Good point,’ Tash agreed breathlessly, applying the buggy brake while she harnessed the reclaimed Amery back into the safety of his padded seat, ignoring Veruschka’s protestations that ‘he cold’. With a fluffy buggy sleeve and two blankets, she thought he was far more snug and secure in her personal care.
‘We hungry.’ Vasilly appeared at her side to hand over Cora.
Tash offered him a tenner, imagining they could navigate their way to a food outlet.
He looked as though he was going to cry.
‘Okay – I’ll get you food.’ Smiling reassuringly despite her reluctance to leave Hugo’s side, Tash resigned herself to queuing for the food before Vasilly’s sugar low made him even more of a burden.
‘Can you get some more cash out for me later?’ she asked Hugo as she prepared to desert him just ha
lf way around the course.
‘I said I would,’ he hissed, dumping all the dog leads on her so that she was forced to take charge of the Bitches of Eastwick and the Rat Pack as well as the buggy, suddenly finding herself feeling like a arctic sled driver pulled in all directions by a team of mismatched huskies – particularly given the chillingly cold look Hugo cast her over his shoulder as they went their separate ways.
She hastily bought fish and chips for her au pairs and then breast-fed Amery in the back of the car while Cora wolfed down a packet of crisps and sang the first line of ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ repeatedly until Tash could hear nothing else in her head for the rest of the day.
That night was even worse.
Amery, just six weeks old and feeding every three hours, already had lungs like a town crier and could wake the dead at three in the morning, let alone light-sleeping Hugo and daughter. With one muttering cursed oaths and the other chirping ‘Daddy!’ and ‘Baby’ while she struggled to stand up in her Grobag in the travel cot, they kept Tash awake between feeds, guiltly wondering why she had agreed to come. Lying awake late at night like this was when her mind played tricks, obsessing about the flowers Hugo bought that weren’t for her, and the texts he received from the mysterious V, whom she was no closer to identifying. Yet, as she well knew, the dead of night during a three day event wasn’t the moment to tackle such things. She was here to support her husband and rediscover the golden era of the Beauchampions.
At four in the morning, Hugo – also wide awake and re-walking the course in his mind for the fifth time – muttered, ‘Sod this. Let’s have sex.’
They had only made love once since Amery’s birth and, to Tash’s shame, she’d lost enthusiasm half way through. The mind had been willing – Hugo always got her heart and groin revving excitedly, and after a glass of wine and a very passionate kiss on the sofa she’d been practically dragging his clothes off – but the body hadn’t been quite ready. She’d soon become acutely aware of her wobbly stomach, new stretch marks and big, ugly pants and nursing bra. Hugo, as enthusiastic and bold as always, had taken a while to register her change of heart, by which time she had unequivocally wanted it all to stop, stupid hormonal tears bubbling up as quickly as her libido died down.