Country Lovers

by Fiona Walker

  Carly braced herself for Ash shutting the line of conversation down. But to her surprise, he laughed again, eyes laser hard in return. ‘Yeah, classy outfit.’

  Bridge grinned, turning to Carly. ‘Told you the magic was working.’

  *

  By the time Pax had pitched out of the lift doors onto her floor and navigated the maze of hotel corridors, she’d lost the power of speech and had just the tiniest aperture of tunnel vision left. Like Eurydice returning from the Underworld, she followed the figure that was leading the way. All she cared about was making it into her room to safety. Cannoning off walls, she tried to hold on to what scrap of dignity remained, repeatedly saying, ‘Thank you’ but it came out ‘Phoo’.

  A hand held up the key card to a door reader – was it her door? Her hand? She seemed to have lost sense of where any of her limbs were and what they were doing. Suddenly she was very close to the brightly patterned carpet.

  She realised she was lying down. She must have passed out. Wet tongue on her face. Seductive, soothing voice. Was he trying to seduce her?

  ‘Shh, little fella, you’re all right there. Calm down. You’re not alone any more.’

  The Viking was talking to the puppy, Pax realised, trying to lift her head. She was lying on the floor, halfway through the door, being greeted by the deerhound. The strange not-Swedish voice was addressing her far less sympathetically. ‘You okay down there?’

  As soon as she moved, the room upended, the contents of her head falling out like a dropped handbag as she crashed around in search of the bathroom. The fragmented montage threw images of a chewed wastepaper bin, chewed mini kettle, chewed shower cap and vanity products, chewed loo seat and then…

  The glasses of cheap fizz came out in a reverse countdown, New Year returning. Ten, nine, eight…

  She retched and retched.

  Seven… six… five… It was counting her down to unconsciousness, the tunnel vision narrowing blissfully.

  She felt the hair lifted from her face, that not-very-sympathetic, not-very-Scandinavian voice telling her not to pass out.

  ‘Christ, I’m sorry.’ Her sleepy voice echoed around the loo bowl.

  ‘Don’t blaspheme. And stay awake for pity’s sake.’

  ‘Oh no, I’m going to be sick again.’

  She thought her stomach would invert. All she wanted to do was sleep.

  ‘You must drink water.’ He ordered. Watter. Was he Icelandic?

  Ignoring him, she curled up beside the puppy on the bathroom floor which was rocking gently, like a ship. ‘Thank you. Now go away.’

  He took her firmly by both arms and pulled her upright, but she kept her eyes tight shut, terrified of blacking out. She felt a smooth edge on her lips as a plastic beaker was pressed against them, cold water splashing over her chin and onto her shirt.

  ‘Look at me,’ he demanded.

  She managed to open one eye. Two sharply focussed apple green ones stared back, pale lashed and critical, then four eyes, six, now eight like a spider. Oh God, she was going to pass out again.

  ‘Have you taken anything?’

  Was he accusing her of theft?

  ‘Sleeping pills? Drugs? Pills of any sort?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘When did you last eat?’

  She couldn’t remember, the water still running over her lips and tongue, dripping into her throat, for a moment blissfully refreshing and then splashing against reflux.

  Vesuvius erupted again, this time without a moment’s warning. Unable to turn back to the loo bowl in time, she was violently sick down her front, over the stranger’s legs and the puppy. Wine, espresso martini and acid bile dripped everywhere in a thin liquid cocktail, splattered on her chin, wet through her hair. It stank. She was rotten to the core. She started to sob and apologise, fumbling to get away, sliding around in the wet mess like a contestant on a humiliating Saturday night game show involving slime tanks, inflatables and water squirters. She had to find somewhere dry to lie down.

  Her good Samaritan was throwing towels over the vomit, talking to her, but she couldn’t follow what he was saying.

  ‘Shh!’ she interrupted, picking out her words ultra-carefully. ‘I… have… to… sleep.’

  ‘Drink. Water,’ he repeated, moronically slowly. ‘Is there anybody I can call?’

  Beyond care, desperate to shake him off and rinse away the reek, she clambered into the bath fully clothed and set the shower running, grateful for the sobering icy blast that came first, followed by the warmth, closing her eyes, hoping he’d go away if she ignored him.

  Suddenly all she could think about was Kes. Her son, so small and trusting, his parents locked in battle, his mother trying to drown her sorrow one last time and scuppering everything. Mack was right; she’d slid straight back down to ground zero from where he had first picked her up.

  Desperate to wash her putrid self-pity, she put her head under the full blast of the shower, reaching blindly for soap, grabbing a damp trouser leg.

  A small bottle was pressed in her hand. ‘Shower gel.’

  She emptied it over her head, her arms leaden, then slipped and slopped around like a dying salmon in the foamy stream.

  ‘Rub it in. Like this.’ Her scalp was momentarily raked by the stranger’s fingers that foamed it to soft peaks. Then he abandoned her, taking two handfuls of lather to wash the puppy in the sink. ‘It’s cruel to leave a dog this young alone; no wonder he’s chewed everything.’

  She wanted to argue her case, but she had no defence, at least none she could say without slurring, and her heart went out to the puppy whose fate she’d made as uncertain as her own. He deserved better. She was mortified, pressing her face in her hands, eyelids burning, the slicing deluge forcing her away from the sleep she craved.

  ‘I gave him to my husband,’ she explained, her muffled words drowned by drunkenness and pelting water. ‘Then I realised I prefer the dog.’ It came out as total gobbledygook, but it hardly mattered.

  Rubbing her soapy eyes with the balls of her palms, she realised he was no longer in the bathroom, blearily spotting his shape through the door, puppy wrapped in a white towel now.

  The warmth of the water soothed her. It felt safe here in her white enamel boat. Hair rinsed after a fashion, she pushed in the plug to let the bath fill, lying beneath the waterfall, transported back to her tropical honeymoon, floating in the turquoise pool while the monsoon passed overhead and Mack slept in their room, knowing there was no going back.

  The taps were abruptly turned off

  ‘Time to get dry, Ophelia,’ barked the Viking.

  Pax tried to say, ‘I’m very grateful, but I wish you’d just go away,’ but even to her ears it was more, ‘Imgateful wushoo goway.’

  He pulled the plug. ‘You need to get out of those wet clothes.’

  She opened her eyes, squinting hazily up at a lot of facial hair and saying very carefully, ‘Haffnothinelstoware.’

  ‘Look in my bag. Leave those jeans in here and I’ll wring them out.’

  ‘Why youbeing so kind?’

  ‘I have no choice.’

  ‘Are you the Second Coming?’

  ‘Not quite.’ He smiled. It was an amazing smile, bursting from the golden beard like a crop circle in a cornfield, the eyes momentarily bright as sycamore buds. Then it was gone. He unbuckled his vomit-covered trousers, peeling them off to reveal thin, muscular legs and surprisingly garish orange boxers. ‘Hurry up; I need to get in that shower.’

  The bath had sides slippy as oiled steel and the room kept moving around. No sooner had she wobbled upright than she fell back. He reached down to help her, but she slipped again, almost taking him with her.

  ‘Look away,’ she said, scrabbling to pull her own jeans off, which meant she could use them for grip to stand on. As she finally stepped out onto the crumpled towel on the floor, she swayed light-headedly, closing her eyes, fighting back another wave of nausea.

  Two hands steadied her before a
folded towel was pressed into her arms. ‘Well done. Now find dry clothes.’

  Pax wasn’t sure how she made it into the bedroom, or how she discarded her top, but she realised she was just in her bra and pants by the wardrobe and the Viking was under the shower. She hoped he wasn’t a mad rapist, or a third member of Binkers’ gang carrying on the bet. She hardly cared. She’d been in much closer scrapes than this and survived. All she needed was sleep.

  Making her way across the room to crash straight into bed, she fell over his bag, a stack of clean white T-shirts spilling out. It was a relief to unspring the wet bra and pull one on. What the hell. She wriggled out of her sodden briefs and dragged on what she took to be a pair of joggers. Familiar stitched suede patches settled against her knees, Velcro grazing her ankles. They were breeches.

  At the bottom of the bag was a pair of shiny German riding boots.

  Eyes drooping, but determined to stay conscious long enough to find his ID, she dug clumsily in the side pockets, locating only a battered paperback and a tube of sugar-free gum. In lieu of toothpaste, she crunched through one and then regretted it, stomach balling up in protest.

  A black Puffa was thrown over the back of the chair. She weaved over to it, cannoning off the desk. In a pocket, she found a credit card and cash. She read her own name, Mrs Patricia Forsyth, and started in woozy surprise, forgetting that he’d picked it up when it had fallen from her jeans pocket in the bar. Well, he was welcome to steal her identity; she wasn’t going to have it much longer. And he’d be lucky to get anything out of the overdrawn joint account. He’d chosen the wrong victim to target tonight. And while he was washing off her DNA, she had him bang to rights. Not that she felt like calling the police.

  No longer able to remember why she was looking through his coat, she put it on, zipped it up like a hooded sleeping bag and climbed into bed, crashing straight out.

  PART TWO

  5

  Pax had been drinking long enough and hard enough to have a striking capacity for recovery. Her body clock jolted her wide awake just after six, albeit totally disoriented, temples crashing and with a mouth like cinder.

  Darkness. Small green light glowing on the ceiling. Large building. Distant noises. Closer to, somebody else’s breathing. Hotel room. She was wearing riding clothes and a coat that smelled of horse. Her marriage was finally falling apart. Mack wanted Kes to live with him in Scotland. The worst New Year ever.

  She groped around for a light switch, knocking over a chewed phone, a dog-eared notepad and a glass of water before locating a row of small metal rectangles and clicking one at random. A dim picture light came on across the room.

  Her Good Samaritan – or was he a hustler? – was asleep in the chair with a faded baseball cap tipped down over his eyes and the puppy on his lap. Dressed in frayed jeans, T-shirt and a checked shirt, he resembled a redneck hillbilly dozing on a veranda. All he needed was a guitar across his knee. Or a shotgun. Was he friend or foe?

  Most of the previous night remained blacked out, but she could remember a tough, beleaguered kindness. ‘I have no choice,’ he’d said.

  She groped in the pockets of the coat she was wearing, pulling out gum wrappers, flyers, tickets and a passport.

  Gianluca Declan Matthew O’Brien, she read. Born in County Kildare thirty-six years ago. The clean-shaven photograph could have been of somebody else.

  Groaning, Pax closed her eyes again, more fragments of the night flashing back in a horror strobe. Those awful calls from Mack. Drinking to forget. Abandoning the puppy. Flirting with a stranger in a bar. Kissing a stranger. All her money, her cards on the floor.

  Was he the stranger she’d kissed? That detail was still in darkness. But one thing made sense: he’d known the moment he saw her dropped credit card who she was; his lift, his boss’s daughter, a drunk. Shame curled her toes into the bed sheets.

  ‘Are you awake?’ he asked, his voice soft and strangely placeless, a generic Celtic burr, Irish accent polluted from too much travelling.

  ‘Only if you tell me it’s all been a bad dream.’ She sat up, then realised that was way too ambitious.

  ‘It’s not,’ he said bluntly, lifting the cap. The smile was unexpected, wide and welcoming, over-bright even. Another flashback. That smile, water, taking her jeans off. Had she got in the bath with him?

  ‘Then I’m not awake.’ She lay back down, clamping her eyes tight and trying, trying to remember more.

  *

  Like many season-hardened old countrymen, Lester had an encyclopaedic knowledge of rural folklore, cynical when omens boded well and pessimistic when they didn’t. That morning, as he dressed, a barn owl screeched piteously from the roof of the main house. Even in pitch darkness, Lester knew precisely where it had landed, on the overflow pipe that protruded from the dormer ridge of one of the little attic windows. It had perched there just before dawn, day after day, the winter that Ann Percy died. Old-timers said an owl on one’s roof foretold a tragedy.

  This was its third morning. He hadn’t liked hearing its screech when Ronnie was in the house; he liked it even less with young Pax and the Irish stranger there.

  Or were they there? Lester, a light sleeper, hadn’t heard a motor outside last night. It was still too dark outside to see whether Pax’s little car was parked there. He resented the preoccupation.

  It was a Monday Country day, and he refused to countenance negative thoughts when the hunt was meeting in the stud’s home vale, with Eynhope Park providing a particularly fine backdrop. The frost and fog would pass and the Fosse and Wolds hounds would sing. Even after so many years, the prospect made him high with anticipation.

  The owl shrieked again.

  ‘You go hunting too, my feathered friend,’ he said, pulling his checked shirt collar over his jumper neck. ‘Best sport for you.’

  His own hunting attire was already laid out on the stand: immaculately ironed shirt and stock, cavalry twill breeches, buff waistcoat now on its third lining, and his elderly but serviceable wool coat, well-brushed, replete with a full set of hunt buttons and blue Wolds lapels in honour of his long years’ service supporting and following their hounds, one-time amateur whip to the Captain as master and Johnny Ledwell as huntsman. Those were Lester’s salad days. The Percy family had led the field, none more fearless and stylish than Ronnie. Then she’d run off, her mother left raising her children, the master, huntsman and whip never really finding their true line again.

  Much to the Captain’s disappointment, none of his grandchildren had followed their parents’ hoof trails across Wolds country with great enthusiasm. Some of the hunt’s most legendary Monday runs had once crossed the stud’s land, and Lester had a shrewd suspicion that when the Captain had sold much of that old pasture to a big agricultural holding more than a decade back, the ancient coverts and hedgerows flattened and turned to crop, he’d done so partly from broken-hearted fury. What was the point in maintaining perfect hunt jumps and hedges when Percys no longer led the field? At the time, he’d insisted it was for the good of the stud. After paying off creditors, what was left had bought Cruisoe, the most prolific stallion Compton Magna had ever stood, his great athleticism and distinctive yellow dun colouring passed down to his progeny, winning plaudits across many disciplines, although the Captain was proudest of those who went on to carry the horn. He and Ann had both hunted into their seventies, but as they’d fallen further back in the field, queuing at gateways to avoid jumping the hedges, nobody took their place in the vanguard, just the fading memory of golden-haired Ronnie, whip arm up as she sailed over five feet of birch a length behind the master.

  Only Lester still hunted regularly, taking out Ann’s hardy, ageing cob, the last in his line from those bred by the Captain’s grandmother before the war.

  Lester was aware of being the last in his line too, not so much that he was a childless bachelor whose family had long ago been lost to him, but also that he was the last of the Captain’s generation at the stud. His lifetime had se
en such change, and yet a horse’s loyalty was timeless.

  Out on the yard just after six, peering through a fog of precipitation and misted cataracts, he realised that Pax’s car was still missing. Whilst telling himself it was no great surprise – he had listened to the weather forecasts and reports of travel chaos – it worried him, the owl shriek still echoing in his ears. This Luca character was unknown to all but Ronnie.

  He checked round each yard and barn first, as he always did, carrying a flashlight because most of the working lights needed new bulbs, frustrated by his own slowness and the caution with which he had to cross the frosted ground to keep balanced. In the furthest barn, his torch beam caught the little colt they all thought so highly of and he let the light linger to admire him, liking the bold toss of his head as he bustled up in greeting. Super sort. He could hear the Captain’s voice in his head. Suit Pax, that one. Jocelyn had never given up hope of seeing his granddaughter back on a horse. She has her parents’ talent and her grandparents’ good sense, he’d been fond of saying, although they both knew it was her mother, Ronnie, that Pax most took after in the saddle, with that instinctive Percy gift for getting the most out of every horse she rode.

  Lester, who had taught Ronnie to ride, had also taught all three of her offspring. None inherited their mother’s firecracker nerve. Alice, the oldest, had only ever been a moderate rider, overly impatient and aggressive, her short, top-heavy body not lending itself to elegance and balance. An enthusiastic Pony Club mum these days, she still stewarded at rallies and camp, rode her children’s ponies around her husband’s family farm during term time to keep them fit, and supported her older son’s point-to-point ambitions with fierce determination; but she preferred shooting for sport. Tim was even less interested, a glitz-loving fair-weather dilettante whose natural talent had gone to waste early on, seducing Pax’s pony-mad friends and dabbling briefly in polo before devoting himself to the grape as a wine merchant.