by Fiona Walker
Tash kissed her head and stroked her arms. ‘I can’t believe you never told anybody this. That’s such a weight to bear.’
‘I’ve told you now.’ She carefully removed Tash’s hand from her arm and made to push it away, but then she felt the battered little hoop on her third finger and gripped on.
‘Why d’you wear your wedding ring to compete?’
Tash was so thrown by the sudden change of subject, it took a moment to realise what she was asking. ‘I always have done.’
‘Most riders take them off to stop them getting damaged, don’t they?’
‘Well I’ve never bothered. Beccy, about your father—’
‘I don’t want to talk about it any more.’
‘You should tell your mother.’
She gripped Tash’s hand like a vice. ‘You swore you wouldn’t say anything!’
‘And I won’t, Beccy, but you must please think about sharing this, maybe getting some professional help, there are bereavement counsellors or—’
‘No way!’
‘Okay,’ Tash sighed. ‘We’ll put it aside for now. But I cannot forget about it, Beccy. You’ve shared this with me, and that can’t be forgotten.’
‘I just figured I owed you an explanation. Why I fuck up. Maybe you’re right – I’m just like my dad. You have to be pretty fearless to jump off a bridge, after all.’ She let go of Tash’s hand and pushed it aside.
Rubbing her sore fingers to restore the circulation, Tash guessed how much talking about this must have taken out of Beccy.
‘I’ve always known that there had to be something you weren’t telling us. Something very big. Nobody disappears for almost a decade without a lot of demons at their heels.’
‘Oh, I’m not that unique. I met a lot of lost souls on my travels.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘I still do. Look at Lough. He’s run half way around the world and I don’t think he’ll be going back to New Zealand for a long time yet, do you?’
Tash looked up at her, surprised by Beccy’s insight.
‘Perhaps not,’ she said quietly, not wanting to think about Lough.
But Beccy wouldn’t let it go that easily. There was more she needed to confess that night. ‘I met him on my travels.’
‘Lough?’
She nodded. ‘Small world, huh? We met in Melbourne six years ago. In June.’
‘I was in Melbourne then,’ Tash realised in astonishment.
‘I know. You met Lough there too.’
Tash shook her head, bewildered.
‘When I left Britain to go travelling you’d just announced your engagement. I hoped I’d never see you again.’ Beccy’s voice shook as she stared down at Tash’s wedding ring, a simple gold band battered and misshaped from so much riding. It must still have been quite shiny in Melbourne, she guessed.
‘But then a couple of years later I ended up in Melbourne. I was in a really bad place then. I didn’t know what I’d hoped to change by travelling – to find something of Dad, I guess. I planned to visit the place he died in Singapore but I kept flunking it. I was so scared I’d find just bad spirits there to haunt me. Turns out I did, and got arrested for it, but that’s another story. In Melbourne, I was crazy miserable. I started to think I must be like him, you know, bipolar? I still wonder sometimes.’
Tash nodded, appalled that she might have been struggling with the disorder for years without treatment. ‘We can find you help, Beccy.’
Beccy didn’t appear to be listening. ‘I’ve never been as low as I was in Melbourne. I just wanted to die. When I picked up a newspaper in a coffee shop and read that you were there with Hugo, luxuriating in an all-expenses-paid hotel, something just clicked in my mind.’
‘It wasn’t that glamorous,’ Tash assured her. ‘We stayed in a motel near the racecourse and I was in hospital for the last few days.’
‘I know you lost a baby out there.’ Beccy stared at the window, dry-eyed now. The storm had passed and dawn was beginning to break. ‘It made me want to die too.’
‘Oh Beccy. I wish I’d known you were there, seen you.’
‘You did.’
Before Tash could react, Beccy swung back from the window to stare at her. ‘Were you terribly upset about the baby?’
Tash sighed, thinking back to those awful weeks that had followed the Australian tour. ‘For a while, yes. I blamed myself. I’d only just found out I was pregnant before the trip. Hugo wanted to cancel it but I insisted I’d be fine. There was no medical reason not to go, but perhaps I shouldn’t have carried working so hard. I didn’t feel pregnant, you see. I now know that I never do, apart from morning sickness, but back then it was my first experience so I had no idea what I should feel like, and any nausea I put down to jet lag and competition nerves. When I miscarried I thought it was my fault for not taking it a bit easier, but the doctors assured me that it could have happened at any time.’
‘But the accident caused it, surely?’
‘What accident?’
‘In the cross-country at the three day event, someone ran in front of you.’
‘God, that.’ It was a memory she had kept packed away for many years now, along with everything else about that terrible day. ‘I don’t think that made—’
‘I didn’t plan it!’ Beccy blurted.
Tash stared at her for a long time.
‘It was you?’
Beccy nodded. ‘It happened so quickly. One minute this image formed in my head of showing you how much you’d ruined my life. The next, there were hooves and metal shoes everywhere. Then somebody was dragging me away and you’d gone, galloping away without a backward glance.’
Tash looked at her, unable to speak. She’d received a lot of criticism for riding away from the incident that day, the sense knocked from her head. Now that she knew it had been Beccy, she couldn’t bear to think what might have happened.
‘You think I abandoned you too?’ she whispered eventually.
Beccy shook her head. ‘You’ve always ridden all over me Tash, but I am entirely responsible for ruining my own life, I know that.’
‘You’re only twenty-eight,’ Tash protested. ‘There’s a lot more life to lead out there.’
Beccy chewed at her lower lip, staring at the window again. A bright, low sun was fighting through early morning mist. Occasional figures were moving about outside as fellow competitors started to emerge from horseboxes.
‘What happened on the course had nothing to do with my losing the baby,’ Tash assured her quietly. ‘It was just a horrible coincidence. And I had no idea it was you. Like you say, it all happened so fast. A girl then a man – I didn’t see the faces at all, just—’
‘It was Lough.’
‘Lough?’
‘He was the one who grabbed me.’
Tash lapsed into silence again, staring at Beccy’s profile by the window, searching her face for signs of make-believe, but that innocent china doll expression gave nothing away. She looked almost serene.
‘Are you sure it was Lough?’
She nodded.
Tash rubbed her eyes tiredly, the lack of sleep and too much high emotion making her increasingly lightheaded. ‘Why has he never said anything about it?’
‘It’s the day he fell in love with you.’
‘That’s rubbish.’
‘I’ve been trying to figure it out,’ Beccy went on, almost cheerfully. ‘I guess it’s like the Florence Nightingale effect, only instead of a carer forming a slow, romantic attachment to his patient, this was a hero forming an instant fixation with his damsel in distress. What’s that, d’you suppose? Fireman complex?’
‘Stop this, Beccy,’ Tash pleaded, ‘it doesn’t help.’
‘He came to see you afterwards, to reveal himself as your valiant knight.’
‘He didn’t.’ She shook her head, again wondering how much of all this was some sort of fantasy Beccy had invented.
‘But you were really ill and he couldn’t save you a
second time. He’s never got over that. Lancelot trapped in a crowd at court, watching Guinevere suffer.’
‘That’s enough!’ Tash held up her hands, the pain all too tangible again.
Beccy slumped back in her bench bed and turned to the wall.
‘We have to set aside this conversation for now,’ Tash said, pulling herself together. ‘We must check on the horses.’
‘Forgotten but not forgiven,’ Beccy muttered.
‘Not forgotten.’ Tash reached out and touched her shoulder. ‘And there’s nothing to forgive.’
‘You can’t mean that?’
‘I will never abandon you again, Beccy, I promise.’
Slowly and tentatively, Beccy’s hand closed over hers.
They held hands for a long time, two women in a tatty horsebox in a field, sharing family secrets that had lain buried for years.
Then they got dressed, mucked out four horses in temporary wooden stables and rode so incredibly badly they both retired after the show-jumping and went back to the horsebox to get some sleep before the long drive home.
‘It was you who wrote to me from the Solomon Islands after I lost the baby, wasn’t it?’ Tash asked Beccy as they settled back on their benches, trying to blot out the sound of voices, horses and commentary outside. ‘The letter meant a lot. I’ve kept it.’
‘Not me,’ Beccy said sleepily. ‘I’ve never been to the Solomon Islands.’
‘Then who wrote it?’
‘It must have been Lough.’ She yawned and fell asleep.
Tash felt beaten up with tiredness, yet couldn’t switch off enough to rest, her head whirring through her adolescence, her stepsister arriving in her life, that shy blonde shadow who blushed so easily and found making friends hard, storing up that terrible secret for so many years.
And then she was back in Melbourne, reliving the near miss and the terrible day that followed. She couldn’t picture Lough there at all, but knowing that he had been there knitted him even more tightly into the fabric of her life, cloaking all her restless thoughts in confusion as she lay staring at the horsebox ceiling.
On the opposite side of the cramped living space, Beccy slept like a baby, so many of her secrets released that now she felt as light as a feather, her dreams sweet.
As soon as they got back to Haydown Tash shut herself quietly in the study and phoned Hugo. He was driving through France, speaking on the hands-free and having to shout over the engine rumble.
The final line-up for the European Championships had just been announced, he reported cheerfully, and he was once again on the British team. It made what she was about to say even more difficult.
‘I can’t come to Germany after all,’ she told him. ‘I have to stay with Beccy.’
‘She’s had a fall?’
‘No, nothing like that. But I can’t leave her.’
‘Why not?’
Tash knew she couldn’t betray that confidence right now, their fragile bond after all these years of family angst, not even to Hugo. Beccy’s wellbeing was too important. This could make or break her future happiness.
‘I can’t explain just now – but I will soon, I promise.’
‘You have to come.’ His tone was icily uncompromising. ‘Bring Beccy with you if necessary.’
‘No. She couldn’t cope with that.’ Her stubbornness fuelled Hugo’s anger.
‘You expect me to believe this is about Beccy when we both know who’s five minutes’ drive away?’ he stormed eventually.
Tash tried to stay calm. ‘This has nothing to do with him.’
‘Like hell it doesn’t. I bet he’s constantly scratching at the back door. Well, you have to choose between us.’
‘This is about Beccy, not Lough!’ she howled.
‘No, Tash. This is about us. Stay away and this marriage might as well be over.’
‘You’re not seriously suggesting we separate?’
‘If you don’t come to Germany, I want you out of the house by the time I get back.’
She was too shocked to speak, listening to the rumbling engine his end, the horn-beeps and traffic, imagining Hugo driving furiously along the autoroute, his ultimatum hanging in the air on both sides of the Channel. However recklessly spoken, it was too late to take it back now.
As her mind raced she suddenly realised she could hear a woman’s voice purring directions to Hugo, deep and seductive, nothing like that of his official travelling companion India. Jealousy ran its knife through Tash’s already hammered heart. It had to be V.
‘You hypocrite!’ she screamed. ‘You bloody, bloody hypocrite!’
It was only after she had hung up and finally calmed down a little that she realised the voice had been one she’d heard a thousand times before. It was the horsebox’s sat nav.
Still reeling, too frightened of Hugo’s anger to risk another call, she went in search of her much-neglected BlackBerry and hurriedly composed a badly typed text. Pls lets forget that conbersation eve hapened. i love you zzz.
He called her half an hour later, his voice intimate and apologetic as hands-free was abandoned in favour of a quiet corner of a roadside café. ‘It’s forgotten.’
She laughed with tearful relief. ‘We so need this holiday. Just us.
Time to relax.’
‘No more texts?’ he said quietly.
‘No more texts,’ she agreed, not quite understanding. ‘Better to say things out loud.’
‘Quite,’ he coughed tersely. ‘One doesn’t text a bolting horse to ask him to slow down.’
Bolting horses were something Tash didn’t want to picture right now. Having put Luhmühlen to the back of her mind, she felt sick as she contemplated riding the strongest horse on the yard around one of the toughest tracks in continental Europe in just a few days’ time.
‘Cub will look after you,’ Hugo assured her. ‘So will I. Just be there.’
Chapter 69
Tash didn’t want to leave Beccy behind on her own. She was terrified she’d run away, or worse. She knew it was illogical to suddenly start panicking, having trusted Beccy to her own devices for so long now, but her instability made so much sense in the light of recent revelations and it frightened her that she’d done nothing to help.
Beccy was adamant that she was fine: ‘I really feel so much better for talking. I just want to ride. I’ve got Franny to look out for me, and the Moncrieffs. You must go. Hugo would never forgive me for wrecking his plans.’
She did seem remarkably controlled and sensible about it, and Tash knew she couldn’t let Hugo down. Their marriage was on a far too wobbly tightrope to change direction, and she’d been plagued with terrible nightmares since Beccy’s confession, involving Hugo and the children falling from bridges and under horses. The more her stepsister had offloaded her angst, the more Tash seemed to acquire her own. She was so jittery and forgetful she put Beetroot and the Rat Pack in the back of the car to drive to the airport, only realising her mistake once she was on the M4, and necessitating a hasty turnaround. She missed her flight and had to wait several hours for the next available seat.
When she called Hugo to explain he was unsympathetic, ‘You were already cutting it fine. Now you’ll barely have a chance to sit on this horse before the competition. He’s way too fresh.’
She’d barely give her first four-star ride in years a thought. She knew she should try to blank her mind of everything going on at home and focus on the competition, but instead she waded through a very heavy volume about depression on the flight to Hamburg. By the time she arrived at the venue for the Luhmühlen three day event her head was throbbing with details of hypomania, cyclothymia, melatonin activity and cognitive functioning.
Concerned that she was so late, Hugo barely pecked her on the cheek before legging her up into the saddle.
Her first ride on The Cub showed up her distraction as he took off with her across a schooling ring, dumping her unceremoniously at the foot of the arena rails. Later, after the competitors’ briefing
, the first official course walk came as a shock. Luhmühlen was traditionally less challenging than its British four-star counterparts, but this year the cross-country course left many of the competitors scratching their heads over its technical complexity. It wouldn’t suit a big galloping horse, they all agreed. Cub was a very strong, galloping horse.
‘I think you should have the ride back,’ Tash told Hugo. He ignored her.
After the course walk, she rode again. Hand-galloping Cub along one of the tracks at the outskirts of the equestrian centre, she decided to test his brakes so kicked him on for a short pipe-opener then tried to pull up and failed. Instead, they careered back to the stables at breakneck speed, much to the delight of her fellow countrymen.
The large British contingent was in party spirits, seeing the event as a prolonged hen and stag party for Dolf and Jenny. A fancy-dress barbecue in the lorry park was planned for that evening, after the first horse inspection, and some of the jokers among the Brits even trotted up their horses wearing their costumes, much to the disapproval of the more humourless members of the ground jury. Rory, dressed as a guardsman complete with bearskin, cut a very dashing figure as he clanked alongside Humpty.
‘He looks like the Hamley’s logo,’ Tash laughed.
‘Entirely appropriate, given that he’s been like a kid let loose in a toyshop since he’s been based with MC,’ Hugo reflected as the toy soldier quick-marched past.
‘More like a knight on a crusade from what I hear,’ said Tash.
Rory had taken the European circuit by storm since teaming up with MC and Kevin. He had posted wins in France, Belgium and Germany in the past month. His place in the British team at the European Championships was now assured. In contrast, Tash could barely remember what it was like to earn her first cap; it seemed a lifetime ago.