Kiss and Tell

by Fiona Walker

  Faith’s appearance was far from tomboyish, in a clingy top from which her unfeasible cleavage jutted accusingly, with the tightest of skinny jeans, ultra high heels and too much make-up. Rory couldn’t bring himself to look at her for long or scrutinise the changes close up. The thought of her cosmetic surgery shocked him. This all-new Faith was like a stranger, more assertive and bolshy than ever. When he asked her what had gone wrong in Essex she just snarled, ‘I got fired.’

  ‘Can’t be a top dressage rider with massive bazookas,’ cackled Lem, who had no idea they were detachable.

  Under a similar delusion Rory cleared his throat and stared at his glass.

  ‘Big boobs get you noticed,’ Faith retorted, determined to wear her chicken fillets for life if she had to.

  ‘Shame Kurt Willis is more of a bicep man,’ Lem cackled, turning to Rory. ‘So tell us about la belle France,’ he goaded, enjoying the atmosphere. ‘Is Marie-Clair Tucson as big a bitch as they all say she is?’

  Having slipped from the wagon in France, Rory raced through his drinks, hamming up his tall tales of his time in France because he was ill at ease.

  ‘MC is seriously cool,’ he enthused. ‘She has to be the sexiest woman in eventing.’

  ‘Oh come on!’ Faith was combative as ever. ‘Lucy Field is the pin-up now – or Zara. MC is ancient.’

  ‘She does it for me.’ He didn’t look at her.

  ‘Hugo was in a foul mood in France,’ he went on, addressing Beccy now. ‘Barely said a word the whole time we were staying with MC – just buggered off running for hours on end. Thank God for MC. She cheered me up enormously. Sensational woman. Looks like Lollobrigida and rides like Lester Piggot. Just my type.’

  ‘So you said,’ Beccy reminded him, glancing worriedly at Faith.

  ‘She has some amazing contacts in the States,’ he went on. ‘Hugo’s taking me out there after Christmas to train with Janet Madsen. We’re going to be based at MC’s Florida barn for a few weeks before flying to Virginia to stay with the Johanssens.’

  ‘Oh, Virginia’s beautiful,’ Beccy said. ‘I always wanted to go ranching there.’

  ‘Didn’t you fit that into your eight-year world tour?’ Faith asked bitchily, jealous that she was hogging Rory. She couldn’t bear the idea of him going away again so soon. ‘I’m sure you’ll love playing the cowboy, Rory. You can re-enact that scene with the man galloping down the cliff in that film you love. What’s it called? Ride on Snowy Mountain?’

  ‘The Man from Snowy River,’ he said hollowly, mortified by her scathing.

  ‘That pile of Aussie shit!’ Lemon shrieked with horror. ‘Give me Brokeback Mountain any time.’

  ‘Oh shut up!’ Rory snapped.

  Lemon gasped. ‘Homophobia alert! Homophobia alert!’

  ‘If you’d just make up your mind on that front, I’d have more respect for you.’ Rory stood up, raised a hand and walked out, leaving Faith’s heart blazing in his wake.

  ‘Tosser,’ Lem sniped at his retreating back. ‘He’s trying to be all macho like Hugo.’

  ‘Maybe that’s a good thing,’ Beccy said placatingly, thinking Rory had been rather better company than usual that night, especially as he’d singled her out for attention. ‘He obviously respects Hugo, and he can learn a lot from him.’

  ‘Yeah, like how to be an even bigger tosser!’ Lem sneered.

  ‘C’mon, Hugo’s the best rider in the world.’

  ‘He fucking isn’t!’ Lem’s anger flared so brightly, she cowered back. ‘He’s a typical stuck-up dickhead who’s bought his way into the sport. So is Rory. Lough has ten times their talent and is no piker. He’s tough. He’ll squash Hugo when he gets here. Just you wait.’

  Swallowing uncomfortably, Beccy was happy to wait indefinitely.

  Tash’s romantic dinner derailed when she found out that Hugo was taking lascivious livery Venetia Gundry to lunch the following day. Jealousy stubbed its toes on each one of her ribs as they ate, before running up and down them and giving her a stitch. Even the fact that Hugo’s jolly and bibulous trainer chum Kelvin would be at the lunch failed to comfort her as she imagined him getting too drunk to notice Hugo and Venetia playing footsy beneath a table in the Olive Branch.

  ‘I could come too.’

  ‘It’s the Czechs’ day off. You have no childcare.’

  ‘The children can come too.’

  ‘That would be completely unprofessional. Venetia is one of our best clients and Kelvin’s a part of the support team we rely on. They don’t want you breastfeeding between courses.’

  Tash regarded him levelly. ‘Is that how you see me? As a milk cow?’

  ‘Of course not. It’s only when you’re with the children.’

  ‘We have children together, Hugo.’

  ‘Yes, darling, and we run a business together too. I have to keep going out trophy-hunting to make ends meet. Perhaps we should each concentrate on our areas of expertise, huh?’

  ‘I’m bringing in new owners,’ Tash pointed out.

  ‘Yes. You’re new “bisexual” best friend,’ he said caustically.

  So that was it, Tash registered with surprise. He felt threatened. Sylva had fulfilled her prescription in the most unexpected way, making him jealous already.

  To Hugo’s surprise she suddenly smiled wantonly across the table. ‘Let’s go to bed. I have something to show you.’

  Hugo might not approve of his wife’s new friendship, but he certainly approved of the Per Una underwear purchased at the same time as their M&S meal. What was underneath those frilly layers, however, came as a shock.

  ‘What is that?’ he gaped at his wife’s pubic hair, reduced from its normal lush, neat triangle to a racing stripe.

  ‘I went for a bikini wax and they got a bit carried away.’

  ‘It looks like you’ve had a hunter clip.’

  ‘It’s a Brazilian, apparently. Don’t you like it?’

  ‘It’s certainly different, but I’d rather you stuck to a full English in future.’

  Her face flamed, but then Hugo kissed each one of her polished new angles with interest and she lay back delightedly. A moment later, however, he had turned his head away and was rubbing his lips with the back of his hand. ‘What have you put on here?’

  ‘Just perfumed body lotion.’ It was from Sylva’s signature range. ‘Don’t you like it?’

  ‘I prefer your natural smell. It’s like going down on a jar of pear drops.’

  It was last orders at the Olive Branch and Faith was horribly downcast as she revealed to her friends the true scale of her feelings for Rory, mascara slipping and lip gloss chewed away: ‘I just get so mad that he doesn’t fancy me, I can’t help myself. I want to punish him. I am so crap with men.’

  ‘Me too,’ agreed Beccy sympathetically, patting her arm.

  ‘Me three,’ Lemon put his arms around them both, ‘and I am one.’

  ‘Only a token one,’ Faith muttered.

  ‘Less of that!’ he growled, forgiving her cattiness because she had shoulders like an oarsman that felt good to hang on to.

  They huddled together for a moment, staring at their glasses, sharing one silent thought.

  ‘A pact.’ Lem squeezed the shoulders to either side of him. ‘We will all get laid before the New Year.’

  He received a muted response. Faith stared at the floor. Beccy stared at the ceiling.

  ‘C’mon, what’s so bad about having a shag? It’ll cheer us all up.’

  Faith, bravest and most honest, laid her cards on the table first. ‘Thing is, Lem, I’ve never had – that is, I’m not very experienced. Fuck it, I’m a virgin. There. I said it.’

  ‘Cool,’ Lemon kissed her on the top of her head.

  ‘Me too,’ Beccy mumbled, knowing Faith was already in on the secret.

  ‘You?’ Lemon’s eyes were like saucers. ‘But you’re really old.’

  ‘Thanks for that. The opportunity just never arose.’

  ‘Ker-ist.’ He turned fro
m one woman to the other. ‘We really need to do something about this situation, yeah. You see,’ – he screwed up his peculiar, munchkin face in a grimace with the effort of ditching the wisecracking act and admitting his own home truth – ‘my opportunity has arisen many, many times but there have never been any takers.’

  ‘Are you saying you’re a virgin too?’ Beccy gulped, amazed.

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ he hushed, looking around. ‘I am just very choosy.’

  ‘You’re bisexual,’ Faith pointed out. ‘What’s choosy about that?’

  Lem shot her a sideways look. ‘I still say we make a pact.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Let’s lose our cherries. How about it, girls?’

  Faith and Beccy looked at one another uncertainly.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t planning to throw mine away just like that,’ Faith muttered.

  ‘And I’ve hung on to mine long enough to want something a bit special,’ said Beccy.

  ‘I’m not suggesting we cruise down to the docks and pick up lowlife.’

  ‘Only docks round here grow in hedgerows,’ joked Faith

  ‘Exactly. This is the Royal County of Berkshire, the heart of the jolly old home counties.’ Lemon camped up his bad British accent. ‘The talent round here is fabulous! Jockeys, artists, writers, models, actors, City boys … all bursting with sexual energy.’

  ‘Put like that, it does sound rather tempting.’ Beccy flushed delightedly.

  ‘Maybe we should do this,’ Faith agreed, certain that Rory would fancy her if she was sexually experienced like Sylva. ‘It could liberate us.’

  ‘Liberation,’ Beccy echoed, having long suspected that losing her virginity would be to cast the albatross from her neck.

  ‘Libido liberation!’ Lemon raised his glass hopefully.

  The girls joined in the toast with gusto.

  ‘Libido-ration!’

  Late that night, Hugo’s eyelids were pinned back despite the exhaustion clawing at his bones. Tash had been behaving very oddly all evening, and now lovemaking had yet again been interrupted by Amery bawling for a night feed.

  He felt a stranger in his own home. His children barely recognised him; his wife was wary and hostile and his yard staff were near-strangers. He wished to God he wasn’t going away again so soon. Coming home suddenly felt more akin to staying in a Travelodge with a bunch of unknown commuters.

  Tash had taken Amery down to feed him in the kitchen by the Aga because the house was so cold and Hugo disapproved of the baby coming into bed with them. She flipped open the laptop and looked at Twitter and Banter, her new addictions. Sylva had left her several private tweets reminding her to make Hugo jealous.

  He is already, she tweeted back, excited by progress. But resisting.

  He’s such a dinosaur! Sylva tweeted immediately from her jewelled Nokia.

  Says bikini wax is ‘suburban’.

  A cave man! Me hunter, you gatherer. Make him sweat more! Cau xx

  On Banter, there was lots if eventing gossip among the rants, but one post made her feel freezing cold again despite Amery’s warm skin against her chest and the nearby Aga.

  You Beauchampions are so up yourselves. Pride comes before a fall.

  Tash hastily flipped the lid down on the computer.

  Risking Hugo’s wrath, she carried Amery upstairs and into their bed, where she cuddled him tightly.

  His back turned to her, Hugo didn’t stir.

  Chapter 31

  Hugo missed out on a win in Cardiff by just a fraction of a penalty, but at least he regained some much-needed pride and garnered good press.

  Upon his return, Tash laid on a belated anniversary supper of their favourite Thai treats – deep-fried breaded oysters zinging with lime, lemongrass chicken sweetened with coconut and pandan leaves, and slivers of rare beef in her own home-made red curry – all washed down with lots of vintage cava.

  Hugo did sweat, as Sylva had prescribed. In fact, he sweated rather a lot, both from Tash’s rather over-enthusiastic use of red-eye chillies in her curry sauce and the rather thrilling lovemaking across the kitchen table and then, after a break to settle Amery, in the bath, and later in bed.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re going away again,’ she said soulfully as she pressed her cheek to his hot chest, feeling its rise and fall. He barely puffed after riding a horse at full pelt across country, but riding his wife lately had been such a rarity, his adrenalin peaked sooner and he worked up a muck sweat.

  ‘I’ll be back for Christmas,’ he promised.

  Tash found herself thinking of Lough Strachan saying almost the same words.

  ‘I might be riding by then.’

  ‘You must,’ he said. ‘Our business will suffer if you leave it any longer.’ It was the first time he’d admitted it openly, and they both knew he was right.

  While she’d been pregnant with Amery they had sat down with a year planner and committed to all the lucrative foreign trips for Hugo in the belief that Tash would soon be back in the saddle. Instead, she had been hijacked by nerves. The thought of getting on a horse made her feed giddy with fear.

  She counted to ten, letting the panic that was buzzing in her ears gradually fade away. ‘I will be riding by Christmas,’ she promised.

  He shifted across the bed to kiss her hard on the mouth, fingers running through her hair to the hollow behind her ear, where his thumb rested idly on her jumping pulse. Then he kissed on so tenderly she felt lightheaded. When they finally broke apart his cool blue eyes were gleaming with happiness. ‘God I’ve missed you!’

  She felt tears of relief pricking. ‘I miss you so much when you’re away, too.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m talking about.’

  Tash settled her cheek back in its nook and stared at his chest, eyeing the little hairs scattered there, the familiar moles, the areolae and nipples and the jut of his collarbone.

  ‘I haven’t been anywhere,’ she reminded him.

  But he was already asleep, dreaming no doubt of those distant horizons he had to cross in pursuit of glory while she was still struggling to gather her thoughts and cross the divide that kept opening up between them.

  A week later, left alone at Haydown again, Tash cheered herself up by indulging in a shopping spree. Spending several late nights on the laptop monitoring Hugo’s progress in the Southern Hemisphere’s only four-star three day event, she honed her online retail skills buying uplift and control undies from online stores in between checking the Adelaide scoreboard. How anybody could spend so much on kinky, corrective and seductive underwear in one week appalled her afterwards, but Tash was soon all too familiar with the hazards of the click-and-buy culture. By the time she knew the final score in Oz, she had plundered La Senza, Agent Provocateur and Victoria’s Secret.

  But her late-night vigils weren’t in vain. Hugo rewarded her nocturnal support with his best four-star result of the year, winning the Adelaide trials on Oil Tanker, a wiry little young thoroughbred borrowed from Australian rider Sandy Hunter.

  In another time zone, Hugo was also discovering the delight of impulse purchases. He liked the little bay horse he had ridden to victory so much that he’d struck a deal with Sandy then and there, certain he could secure an owner back in the UK.

  Tash phoned him on his mobile shortly after the awards ceremony.

  ‘You stayed up!’ he laughed.

  ‘I have a great surprise for you when you get home,’ she promised him after demanding a blow-by-blow account of the competition, fighting not to let her yawns be heard.

  ‘I’m bringing a surprise back with me too.’

  ‘I just want you back.’

  ‘When you ride, think of me,’ he spoke into the phone in a hair-tingling whisper.

  While Hugo was away, Tash tried and failed to summon the nerve to get on a horse again, using the excuse that most of the horses were having their annual holiday and she still had commissions to finish – besides which, Rory was more than capable of taking up the slack now so many
horses were turned away on their winter breaks. Back on the wagon and getting early nights, he was riding the newly backed babies brilliantly.

  When she was working on the yard, Tash was too preoccupied by her own worries to pick up much on the atmosphere there, not noticing the unholy trinity of Beccy, Lemon and Faith sniping in one corner while Rory and Jenny were trying to ignore them in another. As Rory’s dislike of Lemon intensified, so the little Kiwi increasingly froze him out and sought to get Faith on side with nights out at the Olive Branch or the Marlbury metroplex.

  Still struggling daily with the tractor, Tash found herself relying on Rory.

  He drove the ancient, cantankerous Massey Ferguson with indecent speed and unfair skill, whipping huge haylage bales, straw bales and pallets of feed in and out of the courtyards with balletic grace. Tash and Vasilly couldn’t even get it started.

  ‘Tractors, horses, women – I ride them all brilliantly,’ Rory boasted.

  Tash appreciated his company in the evenings, which stemmed her loneliness and somewhat limited her increasing addiction to Banter and internet shopping. Rory was great company and, underneath the bravura, far less big-headed than at first impression.

  ‘Hugo says that if I don’t stay sober he won’t take me to the States in the New Year.’

  ‘The States?’

  ‘For winter training with MC and the Swede … Jensen Stefansen?’

  ‘Stefan Johanssen. He’s won Kentucky three times. Married to Kirsty.’

  ‘Yeah. Them. They’re coached by Janet Madsen. She’s a legend – you know how hard it is to get a session with her?’

  ‘I’ve trained with her out there.’

  ‘Of course. But Hugo says you won’t be going this year, so I get to play in MC’s barn instead.’

  ‘Good for you.’ Tash nodded encouragingly, although her heart was hollow at the thought of Hugo being away for most of January and all of February. ‘I have the kids to think about, and this end to run.’

  ‘Exactly.’ Rory hugged her gratefully. ‘You have no idea how much this means to me. I just pray that I don’t goof up.’