by Fiona Walker
‘No bad thing; silly woman was a menace around those horses,’ Gill said chippily. ‘Ronnie’s obviously cash-strapped. We all know old Lester’s superhuman at seventy-whatever, and Ronnie’s no shirker, but they’ve got far too many horses.’
They were passing the open gateway of the stud farm drive now, all the Bags glancing up the long, poplar-lined stretch of tarmac to its golden-faced house and two interconnected Cotswold stone stable yards, the weathervane glinting above one of the arches, pointing north as the wind stripped their faces.
‘Pax has been helping out a bit,’ said Petra.
‘That’s one of the daughters, right?’ Bridge, whose only knowledge of the Percy family came from the others gossiping, knew that Ronnie had been estranged from all three of her children for years. ‘Is she the redhead we keep seeing parked up in a Noddy car in village lay-bys, shouting into her Bluetooth?’
‘The same.’
Mo bustled alongside Petra again, loving village drama. ‘She and the Scottish husband do up big old Cotswold piles and sell them for a fortune, don’t they?’
‘Places like Petra’s, you mean,’ Bridge snorted.
‘Much smarter.’ Petra took it in good cheer.
‘Playpens for pop stars, footballers and city boys.’ Sounding highly disapproving, Gill signalled for single file as a car approached, the quartet moving up onto the verge and waving thanks to weekenders from one of the thatched cottages on The Green as they edged past in an immaculately clean Audi, eyeing the horses with trepidation. ‘Mack Forsyth’s a shark,’ she told the others over her shoulder. ‘He’s quite a bit older than Pax – closer to Ronnie’s age. Obvious father figure; never seen him out of a suit.’
The riders waited for a big pickup to come the other way.
‘His first wife took off with the kids to live in Australia, which is pretty ouch,’ Petra let slip.
‘He sounds a right one,’ Mo tutted.
‘Don’t you feel sorry for him?’ Bridge was surprised.
‘Mothers don’t put continents between kiddies and their dads without good reason.’
‘Mack looks like George Clooney, mind you.’ Gill raised her crop hand in thanks as the pickup passed.
‘Jimmy Nesbit,’ Petra downgraded.
‘Not more geriatric pin-ups!’ grumbled Bridge, noticing Petra sucking in her plump lips, clearly party to the inside story thanks to her dog-walking alliance with Ronnie.
As a third car appeared over the hill, trapping them all on the verge longer, Petra cracked, ‘He’s a terrible control freak and his parents are Presbyterian zealots; Ronnie thinks that when the in-laws moved down from Aviemore last summer to rule the roost from a neighbouring bungalow, Pax went from fed up to clinically depressed.’
Bridge let a sarcastic huff escape her lips, her eyes drifting back across to the beautiful golden stud, unable to imagine feeling miserable when you could escape there.
‘So she’s spending more time with Mummy and the horses?’ She feigned a cut-glass accent, sitting tight as Craic took objection to the approaching car’s roof box.
Mo chuckled. ‘You’ve got the right hump today, Mrs Mazur.’
‘I just don’t see what’s special about having a selfish husband and mad in-laws. Sure, we’ve all got those.’ The chip on her shoulder sizzled. ‘At least he’s a snappy dresser, this silver fox of hers. Aleš has been trending plaster-encrusted joggers and trainers for years, and his parents are certifiable – but you don’t catch me doing the shouty Bluetooth thing or running home to Mammy, do you? Sure, she’d just tell me to get down on my knees, and not to pray: every Walsh woman learns early on that to have a good marriage you need to give him lip and head in equal measure.’ Craic spun round as the offending roof box whooshed past, cannoning into Mo’s good-natured cob who flattened its ears, his rider’s face puce.
Chastened, Bridge apologised. ‘Sorry. Horse and mouth running away with me again.’ She had no bate with Ronnie’s daughter; she didn’t know the woman. Today’s bad temper was entirely directed at herself.
‘We can’t all have your exciting love life, Bridge duck,’ Mo sighed. ‘When Barry gets up my nose, I spend time with Mum and the horses. Bloody muddy and hard work it is too. You try mucking out ten when it’s so cold you can’t feel your fingers.’
Smarting quietly because Craic was one of those ten kept at the little livery yard Mo ran from her parents’ farm, Bridge remembered Aleš arguing against paying the extra for him to be stabled in winter (‘He should live in field. You treat that fucking animal like baby. You want another baby, let’s make another baby, baby.’ His Bond baddie way of talking, once so endearing, now got firmly on her nerves).
‘Yeah, well not all of us have a mammy we can run to.’ She shrugged, mustering the sardonic smile. ‘Some of us just take it on the chin. And I genuinely find spunk’s better than Protect & Perfect serum for fine lines and eye bags.’
‘That’s a Bridge too far.’ Gill looked shocked. ‘Put those heels down and sit up. Another quick pipe-opener, ladies?’
The riders cut through the Church Meadows, cantering up to the still-frosted standing stones before dropping back to walk along the narrow track between the old kennels and the tennis club, Craic on springs.
Belly still fluttering with the thrill of the quick-speed fix, Bridge cursed her forked tongue again. In truth, it was a tongue that had been nowhere near Aleš’s dick in weeks; a ban imposed after some petty row about him not pulling his weight around the house had turned nasty, a stubborn stand-off she regretted every time he stood up to magnificent attention. In retaliation, his beard was no longer tracing its way between her thighs either.
Although still far more active than the other Bags, their sex life was definitely on the wane, a bedtime routine made ever more time-saving and point-scoring, like hastily loading their dinner plates in the dishwasher when they’d once spent a giggly, messy, foamy hour washing up. Add on a passion-killing fortnight with his close-knit family in Poland, crammed on an inflatable mattress between a travel cot and a bunk, and her mojo was twitching for better times. Bridge sympathised with Petra’s desire for a healing touch, but not from a TDF, DDG fantasy figure. Hers was still six-feet-four Aleš with his gunmetal eyes and Atlas shoulders. But even if she’d die for him, a petit mort at a time, that wasn’t a reason not to start living again. They all deserved a life beyond marriage, even depressed redheads.
‘Whatshername – Pax,’ she said. ‘She needs a SMC.’
‘She’s not having the Horsemaker,’ growled Petra.
*
It was only when he was pulling his yard boots on after breakfast that Lester spotted Ronnie’s little black phone still on his hall table. Tutting, he put a flat cap over it and pulled on the fur trapper hat Pax had bought him for Christmas, a masterful invention for keeping his ears warm.
The landline was ringing again. Confounded thing! Knowing it might be Pax, he reluctantly plucked the receiver from the wall and lifted a furry ear flap.
‘Stud.’
‘Ronnie there?’ Man’s voice, sleepy and peaty, not British.
‘No.’
‘Luca O’Brien.’
‘He’s not here either,’ he growled.
There was a loudspeaker announcement in the background at the other end, a different foreign accent. ‘Listen, I’m about to board. My flight details have now changed, yeah?’
‘Yes,’ Lester corrected. The Captain had loathed ‘yeah’.
‘I transfer in Schiphol, not Dublin, so I’ll not be staying the night in Ireland now.’
This peaty voice was Irish, Lester realised, closing his eyes in disappointment. Deep and dulcet. He’d been expecting a reedy jockey’s whine, not a husky baritone. This was Luca.
‘I’ll be with yous all tonight.’
‘Be with you tonight,’ he corrected again, mind racing.
‘Good to hear it. Flight KL1435, Birmingham. I should be through customs twenty-two thirty. Will it be yourself or Ron
nie meeting me, Lester?’
Hearing his name, so affably spoken by this stranger to whom he had never been introduced, Lester stiffened further. He could no longer trust his eyes with night driving – a fact he had yet to acquaint Ronnie with – and he certainly had no intention of setting out in sub-zero temperatures to fetch the enemy home.
‘Not myself,’ he said, glancing at the flat cap. ‘We’ll see what we can do. Someone will be there.’ Perhaps Pip could be persuaded?
‘Great. Looking forward to meeting ya.’
‘Looking forward to meeting you.’ He rang off briskly.
When Lester called Pip, it went straight to voice mail. The same with Pax. He tried Alice next. Her reaction was predictable. ‘Absolutely not. We’ve a house full of teenagers, cows to milk first thing tomorrow, then hunting. Sod Mummy’s bad logistics. Come to supper.’
She sounded more like her grandmother Ann every year, he thought, politely declining the offer.
Grumbling under his breath to Stubbs that this was not his responsibility, Lester took the stud’s battered old hardback telephone book containing at least four generations of Percy handwriting listing contact details of all manner of professional equestrians. There was no record of a ‘Bunny’ in Wiltshire, which was the only name Lester had ever heard Ronnie use to refer to her former landlord, host of a large horse trials and a big eventing mover-shaker. There were, however, several entries for three-day-event rider Blair Robertson who had been buying and selling horses since he first got off the boat from Australia almost forty years earlier. Lester dialled the one number not crossed out, a mobile.
It was answered in two rings.
‘Ronnie.’ The low growl was pure sex-fuelled testosterone. If Luca was husky Gaelic gold, Aussie Blair was diamond-mine deep and rough-hewn.
‘It’s Compton Magna Stud. We need to get a message to Mrs Ledwell.’
‘Ooooookay.’
‘She will be with you later, I believe.’
‘Why’s she coming here?’ The voice rumbled like distant thunder. Was it anger?
Lester realised that perhaps he’d misread the situation, the love affair still in deep winter hibernation.
There was a click of tongue against palate, Blair’s hoarse voice cynical. ‘Don’t tell me, Bunny’s convinced her to join him for his end-of-year lunch?’
‘I believe so. Will you be attending?’
‘Not my bag, mate. I wondered why the old sod was being so coy. I bet he’s taking her to the Bretts’ bash too.’
‘Perhaps you have a telephone number on which I can contact Mr Bunny?’
He laughed again. ‘Tell me the message. I’ll make sure she gets it.’
‘Her friend arrives tonight. The Irish gentleman.’
The call was abruptly ended.
2
The Saddle Bags said farewell to Gill at her sprawling cottage in the wooded shadows behind St Mary’s church, her daughters’ ponies bellowing unseen for attention, the huge yews still spun with jewelled spiders’ webs. Soon afterwards, Petra headed through the electric gates to her handsome farmhouse. Cotswold vales laid out like giant, misty watercolour paintings to either side, it sat isolated on high ground midway between Compton Magna and Compton Bagot, on the orchard-skirted lane known as Plum Run, a runway from one village’s picture-postcard perfection to the other’s workmanlike hotchpotch of artisan and eyesore. With its Georgian face, Tudor flank and barn conversions sold off to rich Londoners, the farmhouse was a lifetime away from its agricultural roots, and hard to imagine it was anything like the ramshackle working farm belonging to Mo’s parents, where Bridge kept Craic on livery.
‘Byeeeee! Happy New Year!’ Petra waved over her shoulder, disappearing behind a high Cotswold wall, many-paned windows glinting beyond. She was always so upbeat, radiating naughty jollity and optimism, a state of mind Bridge envied far more than her big pretend farmhouse.
As the last two Bags headed home, the Jugged Hare’s hoarding ahead of them, she felt gloom descending.
Mo’s big, kind face turned to study her. ‘What is it, love? Not just the interview, I reckon.’
‘It’s nothing.’
‘Spit it out.’
‘It’s all good.’ Bridge was well-accustomed to glossing over her crabbier moments. ‘Only, don’t you sometimes just want the “old me” back, y’know?’
‘That never happens, love. We’re heading in opposite directions; the old me is always getting younger as we grow older. You’re closer to yours than the rest of us, mind you.’
Bridge thought of Bernie, whose old and new selves remained one and the same, and she felt another familiar, soul-deep pang of missing her twin. This Christmas, with one in the States and the other in Poland, the Walsh girls hadn’t got together in Belfast with their band of siblings. Both were comforted by the prospect of hosting a joint thirtieth birthday party here in the Cotswolds in March, but it still felt wrong.
‘You’re missing your Aleš and the kiddies, that’s what it is. No time to be alone, New Year.’
Bridge rolled her eyes at Craic’s ears. Whilst she did miss her babies terribly, they’d be asleep by six, after which the Mazur family traditionally endured indigestion from Bigos stew, wind from gassy beer, aching cheeks from showing good cheer, sore feet from dancing and ringing ears from enduring Aleš’s gregariously tuneless singing. Her eyelids prickled. Mo was right. She wished she was still there.
‘Come round to us if you like. Barry’s got a keg in and I’ve made cottage pie. We’ve always a fair few over, farming folk mostly.’
‘Thanks, but I’ve got plans.’ She was looking forward to her Cowshed bath oil, bottle of wine and luxury ready meal for one.
‘When does Aleš get back?’ Mo always pronounced it ‘Alice’ no matter how often she heard the correct ‘Alesh’, making Bridge envisage her husband in shock-rock leather and eyeliner singing ‘School’s Out for Summer’.
‘Day after tomorrow.’ She was surprised again by how sharp the pinch from missing him felt.
Now in Compton Bagot village, the two riders spotted a small, comically curvy car parked outside the memorial hall ahead of them, a solitary figure inside waving her hands around, mouth moving.
Pax Forsyth, all copper curls, long limbs and fragile bone structure, like Satine in Moulin Rouge.
‘It’s a four-wheeled phone booth, that car.’ Bridge nodded in its direction.
‘Who d’you suppose she parks up to talk to?’
‘Her lover?’ Bridge suggested in a ‘duh?’ voice.
Mo’s kind, wide face unfolded into spherical shock. ‘Valerie Benson’s hubby used to stop his Jag here every night to call his bit on the side before old Mr Coles overheard him having phone sex on his air-traffic radio band. That was a way back, mind you.’
‘D’you think it’s anyone we know?’ Bridge whispered.
‘My bet’s on one of the Chipping Norton set.’ Mo embraced the idea with surprising enthusiasm. ‘Could never resist them fiery redheads. She mixes in high circles, I heard.’
Bridge gazed at the figure in the car, undeniably beautiful and foxily sylvan in an oversized tartan scarf, eyes huge, lips dewy buds, pale freckled neck swan-long, the sort of woman red-blooded country types inevitably wanted to devour. The chip on her shoulder sizzled hotly again.
‘Always was the prettiest of the Captain’s grandkids,’ Mo sighed.
At that moment, Pax put her head in her hands, shoulders shaking, grief-stricken. The two women looked hastily away, guilty eyes trained on the Old Post Office’s flashing icicles.
‘Make the most of tonight, duck.’ Kindly Mo groped for a distracting platitude. ‘Last night of the year is always special.’
‘Especially when your husband is nine hundred miles away and the farrier next door’s having open house.’
‘Are you sure going there is wise?’
‘Mo, I’ll be tucked up in bed in a onesie watching Jools from eleven. I rave vicariously through the party wall these
days.’
‘One more night to blow the diet before I actually start the diet,’ Mo said cheerfully as they rode on.
Glancing over her shoulder at Pax, Bridge saw the redhead was raking her hair back from her wide-eyed face, talking again.
Her own phone started ringing in her pocket, her husband’s handsome, bearded mug on its screen when she pulled it out.
‘We miss you, kochanie!’ Aleš boomed in her ear. ‘Tomorrow, I try to change flights, yes? Come home early?’
‘Absolutely not. It’ll cost too much.’
‘You are worth every euro, moja kochana. Marzę o twoim dotyku.’
‘I dream of your touch too, baby, but—’
‘Is that horse feet?’
‘What?’
‘I hear horse hoofs. Jazda konna? You are riding?’
‘Yes.’ She pulled up and Craic whinnied throatily as his cob friend carried on. ‘So?’
‘You do not want us home sooner because you want to be with horse, yes?’
‘Don’t be silly, Aleš. Last time we changed flights home, it cost five hundred euro.’
‘Your horse cost more than that every month!’
‘Sure, it’s way less than that.’ Ahead of her, Mo had pulled up too, looking round questioningly.
‘You rather play with horse than see your family?’ he accused. Although Aleš wasn’t Craic’s biggest fan – and he was always more hot-blooded at home in Poland – she had a shrewd suspicion he was also pretty keen to get away from his mother.
Smiling reassuringly at Mo, she muttered through gritted teeth, ‘I love you more than life, my darling. Now stop being such a fecking dick, enjoy Sylwester with your family and hurry home. I miss you all.’
There were kissing noises in her ear. ‘Okay. I am dick. Kocham cię. I love you.’
‘Love you too. We’ll talk later,’ she rang off.
You are going to earn your spurs and enjoy the Craic, Bridge reminded herself, kicking on to catch Mo up. Without thinking, she glanced over her shoulder again at the Noddy car. Two pale, wet amber eyes were watching her now, the mouth moving fast.