by Fiona Walker
The boy said nothing, staring fixedly at Luca’s hat.
She buckled up her seatbelt beside Luca, lowering her voice ‘Sorry you had to wait so long. Hide your face and drive.’
As they headed back to the stud, Pax got out her phone and fired off several messages, reading through her inbox, not noticing that the car’s intelligent dash screen was keeping tabs, eagerly offering to read aloud an incoming email from Helen Beadle, Solicitor. Another message – Mack Mob – made her grit her teeth, hand and phone banging back into her lap, face turned to the window as she took a couple of deep breaths.
After a pause, she addressed Kes brightly. ‘Daddy’s had a think and changed his mind about you trying the new school next week after all, which is good, isn’t it?’
‘He said it was a rubbish school.’
‘It’s small and fun.’
‘Oliver doesn’t want me to go to a rubbish school.’
‘Let’s not talk about Oliver.’
‘Oliver says—’
‘I said no talk of Oliver!’
Luca turned in surprise at her sudden sharpness. But she was already smooth-talking again, reassuring. ‘This isn’t about Oliver, darling, this is about Kes.’
‘I don’t want to go.’
‘You have to go to school, Kes.’
‘Don’t!’
‘We can walk there from Gronny’s house, with Knott.’
He clung to the puppy beside him. Big ploppy tears edged onto his lower lashes. ‘Daddy didn’t say goodbye.’
She reached round to grip his hand, her phone slipping from her knee into the brake well. ‘He sends lots of love and says he’s sorry he shouted and that he didn’t give you a big hug, but he’ll give you twice as many hugs when he sees you to make up for it.’
Catching sight of her glowing screen as he changed gear, Luca could see the incoming message just read: Solicitor says school try out OK. Fuck you.
*
Ronnie let her dogs run in the highest field, her phone coming back into signal with a flurry of texts – no more from Blair, she noticed sadly – and a voice mail from Petra, her dog-walking friend. ‘Ronnie, I can’t apologise enough for what happened in the woods earlier. My mare was totally out of order. Can you possibly call me back? I need to pick your brain.’
Petra answered her phone in one ring. ‘Thank God! What could a horny seventeenth-century cavalier get up to with Lord Goring’s wife in a stable that doesn’t involve doggy or knee tremblers? I had too many of those in the last book.’
‘You’re back at work already?’
‘I have a new Girl Friday who refuses to go home until I’ve written my synopsis. She’s going to revolutionise my life.’ Her merry voice deepened to a growl as she teased, ‘The same Girl Friday who’s your new weekend groom, I hear.’
‘Carly?’ Lester was as sharp as a tack, she realised.
‘Right clever, aren’t we?’ Petra played up her Yorkshire accent. ‘Now you have to help. I’ve a new anti-hero with an insatiable sex drive.’
Ronnie – who had been rather indiscreet about her wicked past over some of their dog walks – was Petra’s unofficial sex-scene consultant. ‘What happened to Father Willy, the lusty priest?’
‘I killed him off. He was far too corrupt. Seán O’Shaughnessy is a brilliant horseman and mercenary, fresh from the Catholic revolt, who travels to England at the height of the civil war, tasked by the Royalists to assassinate Black Tom, our heroic head of the New Model Army.’
‘Right.’
‘He lives for his cause, his horse and the lonely wives of his roguish commanders. You’re just the person I need to talk to for details of windswept couplings and haystack coitus.’
‘It’s been far too long to remember any al fresco risky business,’ she said vaguely, far preferring a bed these days.
‘Still, I bet you had a bonk more recently than me. Charlie does dry January, which means absolutely no sex. Even Gill gets an annual roll on Burns Night because it’s Paul’s birthday.’
Ronnie didn’t want to think about recent bonks, the memory of Blair’s touch fading far too fast.
‘I’m furious with Gill,’ she raged instead. ‘It was downright irresponsible coming through those woods.’
‘Bridge’s pony had bolted again.’
‘Is Bridge the one with pink hair who can’t ride for toffee?’
‘In fairness, I fall off my evil mare more often.’
‘Because your mare is evil. Luca thinks she and Beck are star-crossed.’
‘Really?’ She sounded terribly pleased. ‘Maybe Beck’s the Petruchio to her Katherine Minola? Shall we marry them off? Being a mum should calm her down, Gill says. Oh, I don’t think I’ve told you she’s in foal yet, have I?’
‘Good grief!’ Ronnie was thrilled, not least to have such undisputable proof of her stallion’s fertility after so many years off stud duties. She guessed Luca would be all for reading the banns, but she was in a position to overrule that. Watching The Taming of the Shrew, she’d always thought the bully Petruchio should have stayed shacked up with his manservant. ‘My grey chap needs a Grumio, not a wife.’
‘Isn’t Luca his groomio, ha ha?’
‘Your Shetland’s not doing a lot at the moment is he?’
When Petra heard what Ronnie was asking, she laughed. ‘He’s an absolute devil, you do know that? He’ll corrupt that stallion completely. He thinks he’s Goliath. And he is very special.’
‘We’ll take tremendous care of him.’
‘And he’ll get ridden, you say?’
‘Kes is super keen.’ He would be as soon as she told him.
‘He’d love that. He misses having a special person. I tell you what, he’s all yours if you give me some good sex.’
Ronnie racked her mind, thinking back to the heady days of the late seventies before marriage, Aids and a replacement hip. ‘Okay, this happened in a horsebox rather than a stable, but you could adapt it: wrists tied to the hay rack by leather reins, mouth silenced with bandage tape. The biggest cock I’d ever seen in my life.’
‘Hmm, I can’t see Sean O’Shaughnessy tying a woman up.’
‘I wasn’t the one tied up.’
‘I don’t want Sean gimped.’
‘This man won Badminton the next day. He’s a national treasure. Still commentates today.’
‘Just no.’
‘All right; how about your lovers climb up into the stable eaves. He lies along the big tie beam holding the ones to either side for balance while she straddles him, riding on top, stockinged legs dangling back down into the stall. It’s thrillingly mid-air – very Greatest Showman – and the horse can stay in the scene throughout.’
‘God, you’re a genius. You actually did that?’
‘A neighbour. When I lived in Cumbria, I was throwing a drinks party and popped out to check the horses. Went in to straighten a rug, looked up and saw her in her finest cocktail dress going at it with the local poultry farmer. A bronze turkey was left on my doorstep every Christmas after that.’
‘I love you!’ Petra rang off.
Spotting Pax’s silly Italian car come whining up the drive, Ronnie hurried back down to the yard. As her dogs rushed ahead, barking their heads off, she realised Luca was at the wheel in a fetching pink hat. That was a turn-up for the books.
But far better than that was the small, dark-haired person on the back seat clutching a tartan rabbit. ‘Keeeeeeeesteeeeer!’ she hurtled under the archway. He waved back furiously as the car came to a halt.
‘Where have you lot been?’ Ronnie demanded.
‘Sorry!’ Luca was already out of the driver’s door, whipping off the hat.
‘All my fault.’ Pax spilled out the other side and hurried back to open Kes’s door.
Ronnie’s mood brightened further, noting that both looked interestingly furtive, opening their mouths to explain at the same time:
‘I offered to—’
‘I asked Luca to—’
‘Want to see the horses!’ Kes shouted.
‘You are so right. Horses are much better boring old news.’
‘And dogs!’ Kes loved her two Lancashire Heelers, although the older bitch, who thought children unnecessarily bothersome, pulled nasty faces at him that made Pax overreact protectively. Lots of things made Pax overreact these days.
She was fussing now, saying that Kes should change, and that he needed food and orientation. ‘And there’s lots to do on the yard, Mummy.’
‘I want to see the horses with Gronny!’ Kes shouted again, beaming at Ronnie.
‘We’ll all go together!’ Ronnie offered.
‘Someone has to stay and help Luca.’ Pax was doing her martyred, jaw-set face, big eyes sorrowful with a touch of passive aggression. Ronnie knew that she was meant to offer to take that on. But if she did, Kes wouldn’t see the horses.
‘We’ll be back before you know it!’ She hurried him away before his mother could protest more.
Time with Kes would never make up for her absence from his mother’s life, but she saw some sort of redemption in him nonetheless. The fact they adored each other was a very good start.
Ronnie longed to make a better fist of being a grandparent than she had a parent. Having married Johnny at just nineteen and borne their children by twenty-five, glamorous grannydom was always on the cards. Her dismay at becoming a grandmother for the first time had been a result of her total exclusion from the process, not her young age. Alice was adamant she should play no role in her three children’s lives. Now lanky teenagers, they barely knew Ronnie. Equally, Tim’s ex-patriot life had made it difficult for her to see his two children more than a handful of times, and divorce had taken them even further out of reach, her sixth grandchild currently on the way from his second wife who she’d met just once, at her own father’s funeral.
With Kes came Ronnie’s first opportunity to be involved, and she was determined to embrace and enjoy it. He was about the same age Tim had been when her marriage had ended, but Kes was nothing like the boisterous blond dynamo she’d kissed goodnight that heart-breaking March night, her plan to leave his father and take the children with her about to backfire horribly.
While her own son had always been a typical Percy, even at five – witty, mischievous and sporty, his generation still one of Swallows and Amazons, Kes was a solitary, defiant little character, fiercely stubborn and clever enough to carve tantrums and demands into a fine art. His bull-necked father might claim the Forsyth genes dominant, but Ronnie suspected Kes owed his brooding good looks less to Mack’s black-browed Gaelic colouring and more to his grandfather, Johnny Ledwell; the affinity with horses surely stemmed from there.
‘Here he is.’ She led Kes into the barn where Spirit, the dun colt, strutted across to them eagerly, nipping rivals out of the way, eyes gleaming with mischief and self-belief. That was the look she wanted to see on her grandson’s face. Everyone loved Spirit, knowing he was going to be something special one day. He knew it himself.
‘Lift me up, Gronny!’
She heaved him onto the second rail so he and Spirit could cuff noses, his little fingers sinking into the colt’s mane, scratching and grooming while the young horse flexed his neck ecstatically.
‘When can I ride him?’ asked Kes.
‘Not for a few years. You’ll have to let Gronny’s friend win Badminton on him first. I’ve promised he can. Then he’s your ride, and you can both represent the country in… 2032,’ she calculated. ‘You’ll be eighteen and he’ll be fourteen. “The Olympic gold medal for the Individual Three Day Event goes to Kester Forsyth riding Compton Spirit for Great Britain!”
‘I’m Oliver Alexander Jocelyn Forsyth,’ he reminded her.
‘Isn’t it funny how we end up with different names? My Great-uncle Cedric was christened Cornelius Winchelsea Pitt-Dacre, imagine that? I far preferred Cedric, just as I love Kester.’ Ronnie hadn’t been invited to the christening and wasn’t quite sure the origin of the nickname, although she vaguely remembered her mother grumbling in a long-ago letter that Jocelyn had only been added at the last minute to stop the poor child bearing the initials OAF.
‘I’m named after my brother,’ he said now.
‘Your brother?’ She steadied him as he stretched to rub chubby fingers through the colt’s forehead whirl, his touch instinctive.
‘The one who was born dead. Nanaforce says he’s an angel in heaven, but it’s not true. He’s here,’ he whispered dramatically, putting a finger to his mouth.
‘Here?’
He nodded. ‘Only I can see him. Oliver does really naughty things, Gronny. He likes playing tricks on people.’
‘Does Mummy know this?’
‘She says I mustn’t talk about Oliver. You won’t tell her, will you?’
‘No, but it’s always best to be honest, Kes, not keep secrets. They can hurt terribly, secrets.’
Ronnie watched unseeing as Spirit nibbled at her cuff, remembering the letters hidden in Lester’s cottage with a pinch of conscience. Too many family secrets.
Pax had never told her she’d lost a baby before Kes – such a devastating event, and another reminder of Ronnie’s failure to be there at the moments in life when a mother was needed most of all.
‘Oliver gets me into trouble,’ Kes was saying. ‘Like hiding all of Granaidh’s reading glasses at Christmas so he couldn’t do his sodco.’
‘Sudoku,’ she corrected, holding him close.
‘Today he put stones in Daddy’s motorbike.’
‘Good for him,’ she said before she could stop herself, forced to add a ‘that was very, very naughty, though.’
‘Why did Oliver die inside Mummy’s tummy, Gronny?’
‘Sometimes these things just happen.’ She tightened her arms round him, that awkward but heartfelt Percy hug, heart thudding with pity. ‘Nature can be very cruel. But it’s also very kind. It gave us you, and who couldn’t love it for that? And for Spirit?’
She took him on a hunt for wild teasels, but he soon got distracted, charging into the woodland on the stud’s top boundary to pretend to shoot invisible enemies while Ronnie tried not to imagine how different things would be had his older brother survived for him to play with.
Absorbing the shock, she was again reminded that so much of Pax’s life was totally lost to her. After the terrible, regrettable mess she’d left behind between Pax and Bay, mother and daughter had barely spoken for years, so many olive branches rejected that she had her own grove.
Piecing together a partial picture of her children’s progress from rare, formal correspondence with her mother Ann, Ronnie had worked out that running away to London had propelled her youngest daughter into a druggy trust-fund set who partied through winter and rattled between festivals in summer. Pax’s grandparents – along with Tim, whose London flat often doubled as her refuge – had spent years bailing her out of trouble and calling in favours to set her up with jobs and internships through friends of friends, none of which she held down for more than a week, rejecting stuffy art galleries, estate agencies, banking, insurance, until eventually she’d temped in a big heritage architect’s office and met Mack Forsyth.
A father of two, almost twenty years Pax’s senior, Mack had still been living with his first wife at the time as far as she could work out, which should by rights have horrified Pax’s stuffily strait-laced, forsaking-all-others grandparents. Nevertheless, when Pax’s age-gap relationship very quickly became serious enough for divorce papers to be served and a sapphire ring shown off, the Percys hailed Mack as a Very Good Thing. He’d totally transformed his new fiancée, Ann had reported in a letter to Ronnie, breaking the news before the formal announcement appeared in the Telegraph. The dreadlocks and friendship bracelets had gone, chignons and pearls in their place, and an engagement party was hosted at the stud, a small cer
emony in Ayrshire following just weeks later, the first Percy daughter not to marry in St Mary’s church for three centuries. Her rebel daughter.
Had there been a bump? Ronnie wondered now.
Not invited to either celebration, she’d sent good wishes and an over-expensive gift, receiving a polite thank-you letter from Pax in return. That had been their last contact for years. Pax the peacekeeper, who had once forgiven her so much, had become a total stranger after marrying. She hadn’t even had an address for her.
The thought that she might have struggled through the loss of a baby made her ache with remorse for not trying harder. Instead, Ronnie had decamped to Holland, determined to pull herself together after a run of bad, black-dog years. Living in exile with wild and wonderful Henk, her ageing parents increasingly insular and anti-social, she’d become detached, keeping the tiny, outdated photographs of her children folded in the back of her diary because they hurt too much to look at.
Their rapprochement had only started when Ann died, and even then it had been a tiptoe dance of grandmother’s footsteps until this crisis had thrown them all together: emails, stilted calls, a few meetings with Kes, awkward lunches when Tim was in the country. There were still so many secrets between them, and so much hurt and distrust from Pax. A family tree through which secrets grew like ivy.
The letters, she remembered again with a cold spasm of fear. She had to get rid of the letters.
She and Kes started back down towards the yard. It was getting dark, the lights glowing from the bays and half-doors. She could see Luca hard at it again, Pax helping him, the one wearing the pink hat now. Ronnie had noticed how well they worked well together from day one, both fast and efficient. They barely communicated – were positively frosty to each other if she was honest – and yet everything got done without fuss. If it was a stand-off, it was a productive one, both equally eager to be finished and part ways.
Coming back onto the yard now, she sensed a shift in atmosphere. They were talking together, both stooped over a piece of paper. Ronnie hoped it wasn’t another bill.
‘We’ve been collecting teasels!’ she shouted from the opposite end of the stable yard. ‘And Kes has found an owl pellet with a shrew’s skull in it!’