by Fiona Walker
He started compressing her chest again. ‘Thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight …’
When Beccy began to splutter and cough, clearly about to vomit, he pulled her torso upright and supported her, careful not to put any more stress on her broken pelvis than he had to. He rubbed her back, soft and pale between her shoulder blades where her little camisole revealed skin tens of shades lighter than the outdoor glow around her neckline and arms. As he stroked her, his fingers crisscrossed a small tattoo on one pearl-white shoulder. A mermaid smiled up at him.
He could hear the Melbourne Tannoy in his ears, announcing that Tash was at the lake. He saw the girl climb the barriers in front of him, so close her bag caught on his elbow, pulling it clean off her arm like a thief. She hadn’t even looked back. He remembered her fear, her eyes as wild as an animal’s, her body all bones and baggy clothes. She’d smelled of stale digs and the city, a world away from anything that comforted him or inspired him. She had smelled of his childhood.
Now her warm skin was sweet and moreish; she smelled of life as she hiccupped and gasped and groaned, fighting her way back.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘I didn’t mean to do it. I’m so sorry.’
‘Don’t you go away,’ he breathed in her ear, ‘I know who you are. I’ve taken long time to find you.’ And, holding her tight, he dropped his lips to kiss the mermaid, stunned by the electric shock that rocketed right through him.
Then Beccy vomited.
As moments go, it wasn’t the most romantic, but in that moment Lough changed indelibly. Even as she was wrenched away from him, spirited off in an ambulance by paramedics who insisted she must go to hospital, he knew he’d bet his heart on the wrong horse a long time ago.
Stomach pumped and pain relief strictly controlled, Beccy was monitored overnight before undergoing a psychiatric assessment in the morning.
It took Lough over an hour to pluck up the courage to call her mobile that afternoon, intending to leave a message. He didn’t imagine for a moment that she would answer it in person, but she did.
‘You saved my life,’ she breathed.
He couldn’t think what to say.
‘Again.’ She laughed tearfully.
‘How are you?’ he managed to ask eventually.
‘Under observation, apparently, although no longer a suicide risk, which is nice.’ Her nerves were making her babble. ‘They do at least see that I took too many painkillers to try to kill the pain, not myself, and now I’m on the most fantastic new stuff that means I’m not in constant agony. They’ve spent all day assessing me. It seems I’m not considered a threat to myself or others. They obviously haven’t seen me ride across country.’
He smiled, amazed at how upbeat she sounded. ‘So when do you get out?’
‘Any time now. I might even be going to France tonight, if the hospital will discharge me. Pascal thinks I should talk to Tash in person.’
‘Can’t you just phone?’
‘I need to tell her the truth face to face.’
‘And what is the truth?’ he asked carefully.
Beccy breathed in deeply, the truth of it still hurting a lot. ‘I was horribly drunk. I never saw him properly – just heard the voice and smelled the aftershave. And I so wanted it to be my Hugo – Tash’s Hugo – even though it was so awful. I’ve had this crazy hang-up about him for years, you see. I’ve been a bit obsessed really.’
‘“Every woman needs a little madness in her life.”’
She recognised the quote with a sharp intake of breath. Cyrano de Bergerac. ‘Oh, God, don’t! I’m so ashamed that I pretended to be Tash all those weeks just to talk to you.’
‘I’m glad you did.’ He let out that rare, hot-spring laugh. ‘Are you really going to France tonight?’
‘If the consultant agrees. James was absolutely livid when he got back from St Andrews. You should have heard him: “But she has a broken pelvis, for God’s sake!”’ she impersonated her stepfather’s bark. ‘And Pascal just stood his ground: “Tash, she has a broken heart. That is much more fragile to travel. I will hire a private ambulance and a nurse.”’ Her French accent was superb. Lough fought a crazy urge to ask her to keep talking in it, but she was speaking again:
‘I’m being wheeled over the Channel to say my piece. D’you want me to bring you back some Rosé d’Anjou? Send your love to Tash?’
There was an awkward pause.
‘Sorry. Unforgiveable.’ She said in a small voice. ‘One psychiatrist asked me today if I self harm, which I don’t, but I forgot to point out to her that I’ve been cutting off my nose to spite my face all my life.’
Hearing her speak with that rushed, nervous humour reminded Lough of the calls they’d shared before. He still struggled to separate Beccy from Tash during those early weeks, yet the more he thought about it, the more clearly he could hear the real Beccy speaking, with her playful, restless mind and her quick-wittedness.
‘I was thinking of coming to visit you,’ he admitted. In fact, he’d spent all morning grappling with his motorbike to get it roadworthy, running through what he was going to say in his head, while Gus loudly complained that his horses were going unridden.
‘You still can,’ Beccy said now.
‘But you’re going to France.’
‘I am – the Loire Valley. It’s not Bergerac, I know, but it’s less far for you to drive,’ she teased. Then, when there was a stunned silence at the other end of the line, she hastily added, ‘Forget it. Stupid idea. Total fantasy.’
Still Lough said nothing and Beccy winced at her end of the line, her face now so red it was threatening to melt the fascia of her iPhone.
‘Maybe we’re both fantasists,’ he said eventually.
Beccy caught her breath. ‘They should lock us up.’
‘They did once, remember? You in a Singapore jail, and me in a cell in Auckland.’
Suddenly they both burst into laughter, a magical release that rendered them both breathless. It was like a first kiss.
‘I’ll see you in France then, shall I?’ he asked, clearly still uncertain if she was joking.
Gripped by fright, Beccy found the fact Lough had called at all surreal, and a paranoid voice in her head still insisted that he was using her to get closer to Tash. Like a child with a box of matches, she couldn’t resist sending up sparks.
‘If Tash and Hugo really have separated, there’s nothing to stop you now. You’re bound to want to talk to her. Le Manoir’s really romantic, from what I’ve heard. Don’t worry, I won’t stand in your way. Can’t stand up right now anyway.’
There was another yawning silence and Beccy closed her eyes, knowing she’d just totally blown it, the matches catching the few fragile silk threads that tied her and Lough together and burning them clean away. Her thumb was already fingering the End Call button.
‘Must go – just cut myself badly with my tongue again. Need to call for a nurse. See you some time.’
In truth, Beccy felt she didn’t deserve Lough’s attention any more than she did Tash’s forgiveness. She’d never been as terrified as she was right now. The thought of travelling to France to face her stepsister felt more intimidating than stepping off the side of a cliff.
That evening, accompanied by her mother and Pascal, Beccy was taken by private ambulance to Biggin Hill where she was carefully loaded on to a chartered plane bound for France.
As a treat, her mother had bought her a great doorstep of newspapers and magazines. Beccy picked up a tabloid from the top of the pile. Suddenly she shrieked, causing Henrietta to almost knock herself out on an overhead shelf in her haste to check what was wrong.
‘That’s Faith!’ Beccy pointed to the strawberry blonde photographed on the front page, leaving a private Caribbean island by speed boat.
Very late that night, in his quiet corner of County Mayo, horse dealer Fearghal Moore answered the persistent knocking on the front door of his tatty farmhouse to find a stunning sun-tanned girl standing there, her hair the colour of
rose gold.
Blinking sleep from his eyes, he took in her tanned face, white smile and strangely familiar features in silent astonishment.
‘I’m Faith,’ she announced nervously. ‘Your daughter. Mum said it was okay to come. I might need somewhere to hide for a bit, if that’s all right …’
‘Sure, child. We’ve been expecting you.’ He held the door wide open. ‘By God, you look just like your mother.’
Chapter 83
En route to Le Manoir, Beccy entertained visions of speaking with Tash in a gentle, La Dame aux camélias fashion, in an antique bed, a slender hand to her furrowed brow, consumptive cough ever-ready and pity all around her. The little room she was put in when she arrived was perfect. It was called the Salle Bienvenue because it was in a circular turret right at the front of the magical old house, overlooking the formal carriage drive nobody ever used, with narrow, arched windows and its own small balcony. Beccy had been put in there because it was the only bedroom that had no steps to it, making it possible to wheel her chair in and out along the narrow passageway that ran from the rear courtyard. It was after midnight by the time she arrived, and Tash was already in bed by then so she had plenty of time to perfect her pose and work through the scene in her head.
But her apology was never enacted in the Salle Bienvenue. Instead, she was pushed on to a sunny terrace in a very obstinate hired wheelchair the following morning and left there batting away wasps while Pascal whisked Henrietta off for a tour of the garden.
Tash eventually appeared, clearly prodded by some unseen hand – the same hand that was looking after the children in the house.
She looked terrible, Beccy realised. The pink-cheeked, baby-fattened stepsister she had moved in with a year earlier was now gaunt and wasted, the suntan a thin patina that barely distracted from the dark smudges beneath her eyes and the veins of tension running up and down her long neck.
‘It wasn’t Hugo!’ she blurted without preamble. ‘It was another Hugo, a teenage one. I had no idea, Tash, really no idea.’
Those big, mismatched eyes blinked, not quite daring to believe her.
Beccy looked away, too ashamed to face the very real emotional wreckage she had caused for a moment longer.
Ahead of her, the valley smouldered in a heat haze, the distant poplars like little flames licking up into a scorching blue sky.
‘I don’t suppose you’ll ever forgive me,’ she whispered.
‘Oh Beccy, of course I do.’ A warm hand enveloped hers as Tash crouched down beside her. ‘But will Hugo ever forgive me for not believing him?’
Beccy’s moods and their extremes might be up for professional consideration, but her sense of right and wrong was still fully functioning.
‘He didn’t believe you either!’ she wailed indignantly. ‘He still doesn’t.’
‘Maybe he’s right not to.’ Tash stared out at the valley.
Beccy turned pale. ‘So you did have an affair with Lough?’
‘No,’ she said, her voice barely more than a whisper. ‘We kissed once – that was it. But I fancied him.’ She pressed her hands to her hot cheeks. ‘I really fancied him.’
‘Oh, that’s just normal,’ Beccy assured her, sounding terribly relieved. ‘You’d have to be mad not to fancy Lough. He’s just so sexy. In fact,’ she smiled, ‘mad people probably fancy Lough, too. Everybody fancies him!’
Tash turned to look at her stepsister in surprise. Beccy’s face was lit up like the landscape around them. So that was where her affection now lay.
‘He’s a difficult character,’ she warned, suddenly anxious about Beccy’s fragility.
‘So am I,’ she pointed out. Then, turning pink, added, ‘So was he a good kisser?’
*
After an even longer lunch than usual, with Pascal, Alexandra and Henrietta in rip-roaring form, Tash could wait no longer to tackle another difficult character, the one she loved with all her bruised heart. Quickly plonking the children, wide awake, in their travel cots for an afternoon nap and thrusting the squawking monitor apologetically at Henrietta, who appeared to be the only other adult awake in the house, she hid herself in Pascal’s study and used the phone there, dialling Hugo’s mobile.
‘It’s me,’ she said breathlessly when he answered, blood rushing loudly in her ears.
‘Yes?’ He was typically curt.
She told him the truth as she had just heard it, simply and without embellishment; that Beccy had been mistaken, that it had been someone else.
‘Fine. So when are you coming home?’
There was the sound of a Tannoy in the background. He was at a competition, she realised.
‘Soon – tomorrow or Thursday.’
‘Fine.’
There was a long pause and the lump in Tash’s throat grew so big, she felt like a snake that had swallowed a whole egg.
‘Is that all?’ he asked.
She could barely breathe for unhappiness.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered hoarsely.
‘Thanks.’ He hung up.
He hadn’t even asked after the children. Tomorrow was Amery’s birthday.
Tash rubbed her face, anger flaring.
She pressed redial.
‘Okay – here’s how it is,’ she raged as soon as he picked up. ‘I fancied Lough. I was lonely and you were away and he made no secret of his attraction for me and I fancied him. That’s all! Nothing happened beyond flirtation and one kiss. There was no affair. I fancied him, but I have always fancied you more and loved only you. Is that such a CRIME?’
‘Tash, poppet, this is Rory. Hugo’s just ridden in for the prize-giving and I’m holding his phone.’
‘Oh, right,’ she gulped, mortified.
‘He won his intermediate section,’ he informed her jollily.
‘Great.’ She could hear clapping in the background.
‘Have you seen the papers today?’ Rory asked, sounding less bright.
‘I’m in France.’
‘Of course. Faith’s in all the tabloids. She’s been named as Dillon’s Caribbean Queen.’
‘His what?’ Tash was nonplussed.
‘Hang on – Hugo’s coming out. Oh, he’s ridden straight past.’ He dropped his voice, ‘He’s unspeakable right now, Tash. He obviously mishes you like hell. You must come back.’
‘I will,’ she promised.
‘It wasn’t him with Beccy at all, you know – it was Gus’s nephew.’
‘Mmm, yes.’ Tash cleared her throat awkwardly, wondering how on earth Rory knew. Was the hayloft doppelgänger an open secret on the eventing circuit now, too?
But before she could ask, he blurted: ‘D’you think Faith and Dillon will lasht?’ His voice was slurring again because he was upset.
‘I – I have no idea.’ She found it very hard to get her head around the idea, or really focus on it, and so said, without thinking, ‘I was always under the impression that Faith was far too madly in love with you to look at anyone else.’
‘Really?’ he gulped.
‘Really.’
‘Thanks, Tash! God, I’ve bloody got to win the Grand Slam. You’d better not beat me at Burghley. Your horse is looking far too fit and well for my liking.’
‘She is?’ Tash hadn’t sat on River in over a week.
‘Hugo rides her first every day, before everything else. Shall I go and see if I can find him for you?’
‘No, don’t worry.’ Her anger had totally vanished now, and she just felt weary and sad. She had to check the children were asleep, not terrorising Henrietta who had enough on her plate looking after Beccy. Pascal would be up and cooking again soon. The rhythm of life at Le Manoir never altered, whereas at home it was a constant game of pinball.
‘Any message?’ Rory asked awkwardly, clearly hoping that he didn’t have to relay the bit about her fancying Lough.
‘No,’ she sighed. ‘No message.’
*
Faith found meeting and spending time with her birth father a revel
ation, making sense of so much in her life.
Unlike her cool, self-controlled, magnanimous mother, Faith has always had a wild temper and a passionately fierce partisan streak. Fearghal was just the same, with his shock of frizzy red hair, his furious temper, glorious sense of humour and single-minded passion for horses.
Anke had always told Faith that she would like Fearghal, and reluctant as she always was to concur with her mother, she now knew that she had been absolutely right.
He was outspoken, bloody minded, zealous and dedicated. He was also wholly eccentric and suffered no fools gladly, but forgave friends and family willingly. To Faith’s delighted relief his fierce loyalty extended to all his children, legitimate or not.
Married and widowed once, divorced twice (‘Never unfaithful, though – you came between marriages, darling girl’), Fearghal was as lapsed as a Catholic can get and wholly unrepentant. His current wife, Roisin, was half his age and twice his girth and had borne him four more children to make his brood up to twelve, including Faith. All of them rode. All of them had reddish-blonde hair. And all welcomed her with open arms.
‘I wasn’t sure you’d want to know me.’ She was astonished by such overwhelming warmth.
‘I’ve always wanted to know you. We all have,’ Fearghal told her. ‘But you needed to find your way here in your own time.’
‘My friend Dillon talked me into it, really,’ she admitted, having been more-or-less nannied on to the Dublin flight by the Golden Hind staff as directed by her pop-star lover who had then stealthily hopped a private flight to LA to vanish behind his ex-wife’s entourage. Since the press had discovered Faith’s identity the story had been splashed over every paper and magazine and the race was on to pinpoint her whereabouts and secure an interview. But they had no idea to look for her in Ireland.
Dillon had been right, Faith realised; she needed the space to recover from her crash-course in lust and lovemaking while the media furore died down. Their brief seduction had been among the most fun she could remember; her ribs still ached from laughing so much and her throat from talking too much on that stolen day in the Caribbean. But as they’d both agreed when their lost week of sun and sin came to an end, staying friends was far more important than making love.