by Fiona Walker
‘Are you two really getting married?’ she couldn’t resist asking.
‘So the papers say,’ he hedged.
‘She’s very beautiful,’ she said politely, more because she wanted to be positive than because she rated her higher than any other pretty celebrity, although Faith had no doubt of her charms, and she sometimes still wondered if life would be better had she allowed Farouk Ali Khan to give her replica Sylva Frost boobs after all. The public clearly worshipped her, as did at least two of the loveliest men Faith knew. ‘Congratulations. I’m sure you’ll have a really … amazing life together.’ Her natural honesty made the tribute tough going.
The long, rather mournful sigh at the other end of the phone surprised her. ‘Faith, is there anything else? Only I’m in the studio right now with a bunch of session musicians and engineers waiting on our every word.’
‘No. That’s it. Hopefully see you at Badminton,’ she squeaked, her own world suddenly feeling very muddy and insignificant.
Then she remembered that he had taken her call within three rings, despite all those engineers and musicians around him, and the thought made her feel somewhat better. She sent him a text. Best of luck with the new tracks.
He texted right back: You are beautiful. Thanks.
Faith stared at the words for a long time, wondering whether he’d got his recipients muddled up, then decided not. If Dillon saw the beauty within, who was she to argue? On a high, she texted Rory how’s it going? hoping his return to West Berkshire had been a bit more celebratory than hers, although she’d already overheard the Moncrieffs gossiping about the shaky state of the Beauchamps’ marriage.
Rory’s reply bore this out. Hugo demanding regular yard handkerchief checks, like Verdi’s Otello. Only wish the music was as good. New head groom has b awful taste in radio stations.
What’s she like? Faith demanded jealously, not interested in the main tragedy.
Amazing body. Into bondage. Great at plaiting.
Rory had a way to go before he saw the beauty within, she reflected sadly.
At Haydown, Tash and Lough may not have spoken since Belton, but the yard kept functioning regardless, and Badminton preparations were well underway by the time Hugo and Rory returned. The horses the two men had entered had been brought to peak fitness in their absence and were raring to go, along with two campaigners for Lough, one of them a scratch ride that had come through an old New Zealand teammate sidelined by injury.
The ride was Koura, a horse that, years ago, Hugo had produced from nothing, but he had lost the ride when a petty disagreement with the owners had escalated. This still rankled with Hugo, because he’d rated the horse as world-class. Along with Lough’s complete indifference to the yard’s Kentucky glory, this was guaranteed to wind up Hugo to snapping point within hours of arriving home.
His disappointment at missing out on victory by such a narrow margin was hidden from all but those closest to him, and that meant Tash bearing the brunt. A win in the States would have put him well in advance of Lough in the sponsorship race. Meanwhile, Lough had won both his sections at the trials in Lincolnshire, and Hugo couldn’t understand why Tash had withdrawn when she needed the completion to qualify Deep River for four-stars again.
‘You were winning everything in sight while I was in Florida. Why stop now?’
‘Those were mostly just pre-season warm ups. I’m not ready for the big tracks yet,’ she told him, earning an irritated look.
‘No point warming up if you’re going to go cold again,’ he pointed out, although he was secretly relieved that she’d not been sharing a horsebox with the Kiwis at Belton.
His suspicions would not go away, however cavernous the apparent chasm between her and Lough now. The way they edged around one another, always aware where the other was, one leaving a room as soon as the other entered, never on the yard at the same time, was incredibly telling. There was no customary welcome-home celebration with every chair filled around the kitchen table, no big Team Haydown pre-Badminton gathering on the Monday night as would usually happen, Hugo noticed.
When Gus made a flying visit to scrounge Haydown’s spare car passes, he was one of the few people brave enough to raise the subject of Lough. ‘He was in a stinking mood at Belton, with that black eye and the bloody great cut on his head. Did Tash beat him up while you were away?’
‘I hope so,’ Hugo said darkly.
Lough’s injuries were a cause of much speculation, but nobody seemed to know how it had happened. When Hugo interrogated Beccy on the subject, she went red, then explained, ‘Tash gave him a haircut.’
‘With what kind of blunt instrument?’
Constantly running around with armfuls of tack, or children, or both, Tash was determinedly avoiding confrontation. Hugo knew they needed time alone together, but there was no window of opportunity. It was all smoke and mirrors and the darkened glass of the horsebox as it was rapidly loaded with supplies for another four-star event.
The turnaround between the two international three day events held within a week of one another at opposite sides of the Atlantic was always frantic, and never more so than this year with Haydown fielding so many entries and yet being so chronically short-staffed.
The arrival of Hugo’s former head girl Franny should have been a cause for nostalgic celebration, but her long-held mistrust of Tash only added to the tension. Brought in to look after the yard while the team was away and await the return of Oil Tanker and Rio from America midweek, straight-talking Franny was very quick to pick up on the appalling atmosphere at the yard.
‘I won’t come back and work here if it stays like this,’ she told Jenny on Monday night as they shared a pizza in Jenny’s little estate cottage, which Franny was occupying for the duration of her stay.
‘It won’t,’ Jenny assured her. ‘Something’s got to give.’
‘Like what? Tash’s knicker elastic? She and that Lough are obviously shagging like stoats.’
‘They have been very close,’ Jenny admitted. ‘He helped her overcome her nerves and get back in the saddle.’
‘There you go. Leg up, leg over. Seen it a million times before. Look at me.’
Franny’s on-off boyfriend Ted, a former event rider turned dealer, had recently booted her out of the static caravan they’d shared on his yard near Bristol to move in a younger model, leaving Franny homeless and on the job and singles markets simultaneously.
‘Does Hugo know what his wife’s up to when his back’s turned?’ Franny asked slyly.
‘Don’t you dare say a thing!’ Jenny ordered. She’d known her since agricultural college, where the tiny, black-haired siren with the Betty Boop body had stirred up trouble.
But Franny didn’t need to say a thing. The atmosphere between Hugo and Lough was already so strained that it threatened to explode on the penultimate day before Badminton, especially when Hugo took a bad fall from a young horse on the road after a motorbike came flying past – and he was certain Lough was riding it.
‘Bloody idiot!’ he raged as Tash patched up bloody grazes on his face, hands and elbow.
‘He hasn’t left the yard all morning,’ she pointed out gently. ‘He’s been washing down his horsebox and loading it up ready to go.’
‘Very Maori warrior,’ he sneered and then winced as she daubed his bloodied chin with Dettol.
Watching with great interest from the floor near by, where she had gathered an emergency ward of fluffy toys, Cora giggled, ‘Daddy cry.’
‘Daddy is not crying,’ Hugo snapped. ‘He’s just fed up that Mummy keeps siding with the Kiwi.’
‘I am not siding with him. There are no sides.’
‘Could have fooled me,’ he grumbled. ‘Somebody is out to get us, and I’m sure he’s in on it. There’s more shit on the internet this week, saying we bribed the ground jury to spin Stella’s horse at Kentucky. And there’s a piece about the Mogo sponsorship race, suggesting that I’m so scared Lough will beat me I’ve offered him bribes.’<
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‘What bribes?’
‘Cash, sex, the usual.’
‘Not sure you’re really Lough’s type.’
‘The sex would be with you.’
‘Marry me, Franny, and I’ll give you beautiful babies!’
It wasn’t a line many women would want their boyfriend to shout to another woman within an hour of meeting them.
Lemon wasn’t a particularly great boyfriend, Beccy had decided. He still flirted with everybody and anybody, and risqué, rubber-wearing vamp Franny was his new target; they adored one another.
Beccy felt rejected. She longed for a romantic gesture, a sign that he cared for her more than just as a convenient way of getting regular sex and the housework done. The novelty was wearing off for both of them. He shared less of his body and his secrets each day, and his loyalty was extremely questionable. Being with him had smoothed none of the sharp edges of Beccy’s painful love-hate crush on Hugo, or her regret than she had muddled with Lough’s mind. Lemon was devoted to his boss, and Beccy was a poor runner-up, as she was about to find out.
The night before travelling to Badminton, she cooked his supper in their little kitchenette while he packed his bag next door in his room, which he refused to let Beccy turn into a living area even though he always slept in her bedroom. He was listening to loud techno music, its bass turned up to max making the floorboards vibrate.
Beccy had just endured a teeth-grinding drink in the Olive Branch, during which Lemon had flirted so outrageously with Franny that landlord Angelo had twice been forced to ask if they could tone it down. Now his music was going right through her, and she’d had as much as she could take. She was going to demand some changes.
She marched in, and he looked up furtively from his knapsack. ‘How many times?’ he shouted over the din. ‘Don’t walk in on me like that!’
But Beccy didn’t care what he was doing. She turned off the music. ‘You need to shape up your act.’
‘What?’
‘You need to take better care of me.’ She launched straight into her rant, voice climbing scales. ‘I cook for you, I clean this place, I do your washing and muck out your horses when you want a lie-in. I pay for everything. I give you a massage every night. And what do you do for me, Lem? What do you do for me?’
He looked astonished, and more than a bit pissed off. ‘Lay off, Beccy.’
‘Lay off?’
‘I don’t need this right now. Save it, okay?’
The red mist in front of her eyes thickened. She’d expected anger perhaps, self-justification and a bit of much-needed contrition, but not irritation. He was waving her away like a wasp that was trying to land on his lolly.
Beccy might be twenty-seven, but her experience with boyfriend-girlfriend relationships dated back to her teens and she had no reference points beyond that. Negotiation wasn’t in her repertoire.
‘In that case, it’s over!’ she wailed.
Lemon shrugged, buckling up his knapsack. ‘Fine by me.’
It was her turn to look astonished. ‘You don’t mean that?’
He nodded, glancing up at her coldly. ‘I need to stay focused for Lough, especially this week. Maybe it’s best we call it a day. Let’s quit while we’re ahead, yeah? Stay mates.’
Beccy opened and closed her mouth, the words forming yet unable to get past her tongue. She wanted to scream and shout. He had to care for her more than that, surely? She needed him, his security and support. Admittedly, they lacked romance, but he was her friend and confidante. Without him, she was lost. She couldn’t possibly ‘stay mates’ with someone who was willing to hurt her this much.
‘How long till we eat?’ he asked now, as though she had merely popped in to offer him a choice of vegetables.
Saying nothing, her throat full of razor blades, Beccy walked straight out of the flat, leaving supper to burn on the hob. She wandered through the yard, uncertain where to go. She wanted to call her mother, but Henrietta and James were away playing golf; Em was with her family in the Dorset cottage for the week. She briefly thought about running to Tash, but it would be too humiliating to bear her ruptured heart in front of the woman who had everything Beccy wanted, and the thought of Hugo being a party to any of it mortified her. She’d already tried to talk to Tash about Lemon, after all, and that had got her nowhere. She knew she could call Faith, who was so loyal and fair, but what did Faith know about relationships, when she had never had one? Beccy had nobody to turn to. Up until five minutes ago, Lemon had been her closest ally.
Tears streamed down her face. Was this how men worked, she wondered. They could just switch off and walk away without a backward glance. What little experience she had seemed to confirm it. She reached the two horseboxes parked side by side beyond the stables arch, ramps down, ready to be loaded with horses in the morning, Hugo’s huge Oakley HGV and Lough’s smaller Ketterer. She knew she couldn’t go back to the flat, but there were mattresses inside the lorries, if she could only get in. The outside doors of both were locked, but when she stepped up the ramp of the bigger box and through the horse area, she found the groom’s door unlocked and slipped inside, curling up in the dark in one corner of the seating to let the tears roll. She jumped with alarm when there was a great scraping and moaning at the door, but it was just Karma who had followed her mistress. She let her in and hugged her tight, weeping into the soft, curly fur.
Almost an hour later, tears running dry and self-pity dissipating, she realised she would have to go back to the flat. She hadn’t packed her own stuff, she was filthy and tired, and had a pounding headache. She wanted to crawl into bed and pull the duvet over her head.
But as she was about to creep out of the lorry, the yard work lights flashed on outside. Perhaps Lemon had come to find her after all?
She heard footsteps coming up the ramp and through the box towards her, and clutched Karma’s collar, her heart crashing in anticipation.
But it wasn’t Lemon that stepped inside. It was his boss.
Lough started back to find her there in the dark. He clicked on the light and saw her puffy eyes and red nose, but said nothing.
‘Just checking we packed enough bedding,’ she sniffed, wondering why he was coming into Hugo’s box when his own was next door. She guessed he must have heard her moving about.
‘Easier with the light on,’ he pointed out.
‘I’d just finished.’ She pushed past him.
‘You okay Beccy?’ He looked over his shoulder.
She paused at the top of the ramp, not looking back. The temptation to tell someone, anyone, what had just happened and how unhappy she was threatened to overwhelm her, but she managed to grip on to it. Telling Lough would be ten times more humiliating than telling even Tash.
‘I’m fine, thanks,’ she managed to croak past welling tears.
She heard him step behind her, his voice low and kind, that lovely sound she so seldom heard because he spoke so rarely. ‘You’re not fine. I can tell.’
‘It’s nothing!’
He laid a hand on shoulder, but she didn’t dare look up. ‘Is it Lem?’
‘Lem?’ she repeated in confusion, trying to join the dots through the misery of losing her first and only boyfriend by her own stupidity. But she had never really loved Lemon. And all you need is love, after all.
Eyes shining with tears, she suddenly jerked back her chin and stared at Lough through the darkness. ‘Why are you trying to wreck Tash’s marriage?’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘Yes. I d-don’t understand why you would want to stay on here and do this, when it wasn’t her you came to … it wasn’t why you …’ She still couldn’t bring herself to admit to their text life out loud. ‘We both know what happened before you came.’
‘That wasn’t why I stayed,’ he said quietly.
Beccy knew she’d asked for that. Winded with pain, she wanted to run and flee, but he still had hold of her shoulder. ‘I could ask you the same question. Why do you stay?’
She hung her head. ‘I feel safe here. It’s the first time I’ve felt safe in so long. I thought that was down to Lem, but I was wrong. It’s the whole yard family, with Tash as mummy and Hugo as daddy. I love it here.’
‘Strikes me as a pretty abusive family.’
‘Then you know nothing.’
‘I have first-hand experience,’ he corrected.
‘Tash is lovely.’ She admitted it for the first time, and it made her cry even harder as she remembered how jealous she’d always been, how she’d dismissed her stepsister as just plain lucky and undeserving of Hugo. ‘She was the only one of the Frenches who wrote to me in jail,’ she sobbed. ‘She sent me drawings of Cora and the horses. But I was so ungrateful because I just wanted a picture of Hugo. I swapped them for tobacco. I’ve never felt lonelier in my life than I did there.’
‘I have first-hand experience of that too.’ Lough looked up at the navy blue sky, where a few dim stars were blinking between the high shadows of clouds.
‘How did you cope?’
‘I thought about …’ He stopped, clearly about to say ‘her’. But he knew that wasn’t really right. Instead he said ‘coming here.’
‘I wish I’d known I was coming here,’ she sighed. ‘I just thought about growing old in there. I read books – that’s all visitors are allowed to bring prisoners. For twenty hours a day, I shared a cell with twelve women, with just straw mats to sleep on. I didn’t think I’d get out until I was almost pensionable.’
‘How come you ended up there in the first place?’
‘I have bad taste in men.’
He waited for more, knowing it would come.
‘I’d been living in an ashram in Tamil Nadu for a few years, but it was closed down and I went back to Thailand to look up some of the people I’d met there, the ones who worked stalls and bars on the islands, taught diving or yoga. Most had moved on, of course, but there was a Dutch guy who ran a surf hire shop in Phuket who remembered me and introduced me to some new friends. One of them was called Angel.’ She pronounced it ‘ann-hel’.