Country Lovers

by Fiona Walker

  Lester would no more speak of it now than he would cut off an arm, but he trusted Ronnie to set aside personal feelings, find these letters and store them safely. She knew she must spare Pax the awfulness of discovering the truth about her father by accidentally stumbling upon them, but the fact that she was still covering up for Johnny years later infuriated Ronnie, to still be the one who had been judged, whose infidelity had broken a family apart. It maddened her yet more that Lester had painted a gothic tragedy when nobody really knew the truth of Johnny’s poor dead mother. It was criminally irresponsible to suggest to a young, grieving Pax that the grandmother she so closely resembled had topped herself after losing her own newborn.

  ‘Lester has his own theories on many things,’ was all she could say, her relentless need to jolly up and move on already at full gallop. ‘He finds it terribly hard to call me by my first name, have you noticed?’ She edged along the range rail as Pax returned to press her hands to its warmth. ‘He starts saying “Mrs Ledwell” then stops and changes it. I’ve been “Mrs Le—Ronnie” for months.’

  The haunted eyes flickered with amusement.

  Ronnie tried to hold her gaze. ‘You should visit him, Pax.’

  ‘I’ll wait till he’s stronger.’

  She’s worried that Lester will judge her because her marriage has failed like mine, thought Ronnie. ‘I know he seems old-fashioned, but he’s a lot more forgiving than you think, Pax. He’s seen a lot.’

  Pax leaned back against the rail beside her mother, tilting her head closer. ‘I remember when I was a little girl, one of the mares had a stillborn foal out in the top pasture. I’d tagged along with Daddy and Lester to check over the herd, and there she was, standing over this lifeless bundle she’d just licked clean, protecting him, nudging him. It was the first time I’d seen anything like that. I can’t have been much older than Kes, six or seven maybe. Daddy wanted to call the kennel man, but Lester insisted we should leave them together for a few hours, “field grief”, he called it. She stayed with her foal all morning, grazing alongside him – just long enough for a soul to leave, Lester said – then quietly moved on. I thought about that day a lot after we lost Oliver; I used to close my eyes and imagine I was a mare, galloping away from all that pain, all that feeling. I galloped for miles, for years; I still do. I close my eyes and I gallop.’

  Ronnie covered her hand on the rail. Pax let it rest there as, without speaking, both women closed their eyes. And as the grass, hedges and clouds flew past in Ronnie’s head, she sensed how terribly alike they were.

  ‘When things got really bad with Mack – not the recent stuff, but before, when we were trying for Kes and he got so high-handed, I found I couldn’t do it at all, couldn’t close my eyes and ride away from it in my imagination.’

  ‘How do you mean “high-handed”?’

  ‘He’s always been a bit of a control freak, but he took conception so seriously, reading my temperature every day, checking my weight, making me take all sorts of supplements, wear loose clothes, do certain exercises, eat only certain food. He knew more about my cycle than I did by the end. He wouldn’t let me discuss trying to get pregnant with my girlfriends, wanted baby-making to be this intimate, private thing, but I felt like a lab rat. And every month I was a failure because I bled.’

  Ronnie’s own blood boiled at this. ‘Was it Mack who stopped you making any contact with me?’

  ‘Alice was pretty set against it too,’ Pax hedged. Then she nodded, confessing, ‘Mack said you were a bad influence. I never told him about Bay,’ she added quickly, looking away. ‘I was in a bit of a bad place when we met.’

  ‘I heard your London friends were pretty wild.’

  The hand beneath hers slid away. ‘My bath will be cold.’ She headed towards the stairs.

  ‘Run another later.’

  ‘You should go.’ She said it so kindly, it was a can’t-turn-down invitation.

  ‘I’ll let myself out.’

  Pax kissed her mother goodnight at the bottom of the stairs. ‘Let’s not talk about this again.’

  ‘If that’s what you want.’

  ‘I’ve talked enough. Kes needs to believe there was love between his parents, just as I did.’

  ‘I loved your father very much once.’

  ‘And now you love Blair Robertson.’

  Ronnie step back in surprise. ‘Pax, I really don’t—’

  ‘I think you two need each other more than you realise. Please call him.’ With a bright, defensive smile she must have picked up from Luca, Pax headed upstairs.

  Guiltily and furtively, Ronnie hurried to the dresser and opened the bottom left-hand cupboard. A Horace Batten boot-box tied up with old horse-rug fillet strings, he’d said. You couldn’t miss it.

  But the box wasn’t there.

  Ronnie felt a sudden angry ache for Lester. He was needed here, guarding the secrets, demanding protocol. This was all wrong.

  She could hear the tap running in the bathroom, the radio on, volume low. The Archers’ theme tune was playing through, an anthem that took her straight back to childhood, her mother cooking at the Aga, stepping over the dogs, sherry schooner and cigarette on the go, recounting every visitor to the stud that day. Pax’s childhood too. Mirror images.

  Maybe nothing much had changed.

  Heading through the courtyard to the back door of the main house, Ronnie could smell onions frying and saw Luca moving about in the main kitchen, drinking his funny green tea, freshly showered, all golden hair and big shoulders. Soon enough Pax would realise that he came straight out of the jar ready-mixed with concentrated goodness. Perhaps she had already.

  Zipping her duvet coat tighter, she took her mobile up to the tower above the far arch. The wind had dropped, stars thrown out in a wintry canopy, Orion overseeing them all, reminding her of Johnny again, her original huntsman.

  ‘I’m so mad at you for not calling first,’ she told Blair.

  ‘I called on you.’ He was on hands-free; she could hear the sat nav telling him to turn right. ‘We hate phones, you and me.’

  ‘Rubbish. You were texting mistresses when mobiles were the size of shoeboxes. You just feel guilty because you pin-hooked my mare. Please tell me Bay paid far too much for her.’

  ‘A fortune; I owe you commission.’

  ‘Good. I’m broke. How soon can I have it?’

  ‘Give me two hours.’

  It was that simple.

  15

  Exhausted from his first day back at school, Ellis fell asleep midway through the storybook Carly was reading to him, his ’Splorer Stick under one arm, Pricey the lurcher stretched out beside him. Next door, she could hear Ash still telling one of the three little pigs that he would huff and puff and blow their house down, his voice animated, the good mood sticking. Yawning, she stretched the cricks out of her shoulders as she padded though to join him, remembering Flynn telling her that all farriers had bad backs. Cleaners suffered the same fate.

  Ash’s back was a wide triangle of well-honed, massaged perfection, its landmines of tension and jumping nerves down to poor sleep rather than occupational hazards nowadays. He could still fight a war, but he lost the battle with insomnia night after night.

  She ran her hands along its familiar rock face, warm as granite baked by the sun, moving on to kiss Jackson, standing up in his cot with his hands braced on the rail like a tourist on a hotel balcony, laying him back down. Sienna was sleepy-eyed in her toddler bed, snuffly with a cold that moistened her top lip. Carly carefully kissed around it.

  She tried not to think back on that wet, snotty slick when Ash cornered her on the landing straight afterwards with a demanding kiss of his own, already primed for action. ‘You owe me one, bae.’

  Since when was sex a debt, she wondered, her stomach rumbling. ‘Let’s wait for the kids to settle. We need to eat.’

  Some nights, seduction came easily, a passive sacrifice to her body loving his, but tonight Carly felt uneasy. Her brain was too busy
downloading the day to feel horny just yet. Two new jobs. She wanted to share her good news on social media, to take a boost from the likes, to know Ash was really okay about it all.

  ‘It’s exciting, Ash,’ she told him over tea, his food disappearing a fast as hers went cold. ‘They give me choices.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he fed her a chip, ‘like whether to tidy up after someone else’s kids or shovel shit. How mad was Janine when you told her?’

  ‘Not done it yet.’

  ‘Good luck with that.’

  ‘I know this might not seem much, but it’s all about potential. Like Bridge says about that little job at the school.’

  ‘She’ll eat that place and spit it out, I reckon.’

  ‘She’s not that bad.’

  ‘For a ball-breaker.’ He was already wiping the gravy from his plate with a slice of bread. ‘It’s okay, I like her.’

  ‘She makes me laugh.’

  ‘Bit over the top, but yeah, she’s pretty lit.’

  ‘Pretty, too.’

  His eyes levelled with hers, amused. ‘Fancy her, do you?’

  ‘You do, you mean,’ she teased, knowing he did.

  ‘Not my type.’

  She gave him a mock-disbelieving look. ‘Go on, admit it, you’d love a threesome.’

  He laughed. ‘I’m digging my own grave whatever I say.’ He ripped off another hunk of bread, then looked at her from an angle as he chewed it, eyes sparkling. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Gotcha!’ She knew she’d been right. ‘You fancy the arse off her.’

  ‘Not half as much as I fancy my wife. And I’m not sharing you with anyone, bae.’

  As they ate, Carly could feel the old chemistry kicking in, his gaze on her body. He could always do this to her, muting conversations before they were started, feeding her lines from his lips and food from his fork, making her laugh with no more than a lift of his eyebrow. Strong and silent even when he was joking around, Ash really was in an exceptionally good mood.

  In bed, long before their bedtime, he was more attentive than he’d been in months, taking charge, not with the usual nod to foreplay but a full-scale heads-down focus on her pleasure, all the more squirmily delicious as he told her to stay still and enjoy, his fingers and tongue finding every one of her hot spots.

  Downstairs, Pricey was barking to be let out. ‘I’d better go.’ Carly slid off the bed and reached for Ash’s T-shirt to cover up and go down.

  A frost was hardening. Pricey took a long time to find the right spot in the garden to do her business, tiptoeing around out of sight. Shivering with cold as she waited by the back door, Carly heard a yell above and turned, listening for sounds of one of Ash’s nightmares, instead making out tinny movie music and tyre-squeal soundtrack.

  By the time she started back upstairs, Jackson was kicking off with telltale snivels as the head cold woke him, hot and tearful, his nose streaming. His nappy needed changing. Sienna woke too, red-faced and snuffly. Calpol administered, lullabies sung, she rejoined Ash.

  He was awake and watching a movie on the iPad, some smash-’em-up action franchise with four battered beefcakes and a token babe. Face blue-lit, he looked up with a slow smile as she crossed the room. ‘You’re beautiful, you know that?’

  She struck a Tank Girl pose. ‘Even though I’m not wearing leather biker gear with a Kalashnikov in each hand?’ She nodded at the little screen, in which the babe was dispensing with baddies, cleavage pert throughout.

  ‘Come here.’ He threw it aside and pulled back the covers.

  As soon as she climbed on, he was straight to action with barely a spit on his thumb to prepare her, fast and silent, the abandoned tablet lighting the room with unwatched, flickering action bouncing off the walls as though they were underwater. Rounds of gunshots rang out. Pump, pump, pump. A helicopter took off. He turned her over to get deeper. Carly held her breath to stop herself drowning, arm across her face, torn between animal delight and guilt at enjoying it so much, fingertips on fire.

  Shouts on the little screen, calling for backup, another screech of wheels, a rumble of caterpillar tracks and boom of incendiary fire.

  She could feel Ash starting to go soft.

  Grabbing the iPad, he fumbled turning it off, a music app starting instead; Drake, all grinding, beating hip hop heart. It should have helped, but it didn’t.

  Carly did all she could, angling her hips, moaning encouragement, reaching down to coax his ever-flagging cock back to life. Nothing made a difference.

  It wasn’t the first time. Sometimes Ash was apologetic, sometimes angry, or sometimes silent as now, rolling away uncommunicatively, cursing under his breath then muttering a terse, ‘Let’s forget it’ as he picked the tablet back up.

  Carly knew from experience that he loathed being consoled with platitudes or being told it didn’t matter, that to reassure him was worsening the blow.

  Instead, she lay awake, knowing she could no more say anything than she could sleep. Eventually, she opened her book to read, one Bridge had lent her which she hadn’t had time to start until now. An hour later, she was still reading, wondering at how women like Bridge and this author with her white-streaked hair and street cred could be so confident in their own minds, so upbeat and flippant about the things that had shaped them from schooldays to bullies to family to menstruation. All Carly remembered was following friends into womanhood in a rush, like cramming through a door, only to find Ash holding it open on the other side.

  Ash’s breathing deepened to sleep. She flicked more pages, feeling both stupidly naïve and a part of wider new friendship, a tribe of Bridges, women who said it like it was and thought differently to her mother and schoolfriends, to the army wives she’d known, to her.

  Ash’s nightmares started kicking in early that night, barely an hour after he’d fallen asleep. It wasn’t yet ten.

  She laid a hand on his arm, but he was already deep down in his subconscious, mumbling ‘Do not move!’ It wasn’t directed at her. It was his soldiering voice. Then, ‘You are safe. La ta khaf. La ta khaf!’

  His nightmares, which often started with a moan then a shout, were quick to escalate, an arm flying out so fast Carly had to duck, his stop-start breath-quickening, then a silent terror that was a precursor to the screaming which always made her blood run cold, frightened the kids and forced her to wonder at what it was he’d seen that he could never unsee.

  Scrabbling round onto her knees, she tried to shake him awake to try to stop it, breathing in his ear. ‘There’s no war, Ash. You’re home.’

  ‘Home!’ He thrashed the other way, still asleep. ‘Can’t lose this fight.’

  ‘There is no fight here.’

  ‘Honour fight,’ he murmured, coming up through layers of memories and distortion. ‘Jihadi.’

  ‘You’re out of the army, Ash,’ Carly reassured him. Then he said it again and she realised her mistake.

  ‘Jed and me. Burns Night. Big fight on Burns Night.’ He sat up, rubbing his face groggily. ‘Gotta beat the bastard.’

  ‘What fight?’

  Removing the heels of his palms from sleepy, reddened eyes, he looked surprised to find her sitting beside him, her bedside lamp still on, the feminist book raised in one hand like a court witness with a Bible.

  ‘What fight?’ she repeated quietly.

  ‘King of the gypsies.’

  She closed her eyes and groaned. A big fight between traveller men, bare-fisted and brutal, the Turners traditionally used it to settle a family dispute (and make a lot of money on the side).

  ‘I have to do it. It’s family honour, Carl.’

  ‘What about this family, our family?’ She slammed the book down to emphasise the point.

  He picked it up, eager for distraction, looking at the cover. ‘What’s with Lily Munster?’

  She snatched it back. ‘It’s frank, funny feminism.’ That’s how Bridge had described it to her, with an added ‘fecking’ before feminism.

  ‘Is it now?’ He lo
oked amused, which she guessed was the point. His nightmare was abating, the veins on his neck already coming down, the sweat drying.

  ‘I don’t want you to fight, Ash,’ she said plainly.

  ‘We’re grown-ups, bae. I don’t much like you reading frank funny feminists, but I’m not going to stop you.’

  ‘It’s hardly the same thing!’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’ve changed my mind about Bridge.’ He rolled away again, presenting a big, tattooed shoulder. ‘You can tell her to steer the fuck clear of me. And my wife.’

  *

  ‘She may be the face której nie mogę zapomnieć…’ Charles Aznavour had nothing on Aleš, who had gone to the Polish supermarket in Broadbourne after work – via the pub with his brother – and returned in full voice, singing his way through the soundtracks from Richard Curtis movies while he prepared a congratulatory meal to celebrate Bridge’s new job.

  Aleš was a famously slow, messy, entertaining cook. To Bridge, who was only staying awake thanks to a handful of caffeine pills washed down with a bottle of Bull’s Blood, it seemed hours after starting with ‘Gimme Some Loving’, an onion and a chopping knife in the kitchen – toasting her throughout with refilled glasses of Źubrówka: ‘My clever career wife!’ – that he finally danced to the table with a pot of bigos, singing ‘Love Is All Around’. There, lifting pot lid and vodka glass simultaneously, he announced through the rising steam, ‘My gift to you, kochanie!’

  Grateful for his signature dish of porky sauerkraut, she quashed the suspicion that he’d be far less effusive if she’d just landed Head of Human Resources at Jaguar Land Rover. He didn’t even mind when she broke it to him that she’d been asked to go in tomorrow. ‘It’s their Ofsted inspection.’

  ‘Of course you must go; moja bratowa will look after the children. Eat!’

  To her shame, Bridge then found two mouthfuls of Poland’s favourite pork stew totally filled her up, indigestion threatening. Her body clock was long past its optimum supper time.