Kiss and Tell (19 page)

Trailing behind them, infuriated by her friend’s ungrateful attention seeking, Carly came to a sulky halt between the gayfathers and Magnus, and watched as Graham unlatched the big doors.

‘We meant to show you this earlier,’ he pulled open one side, ‘but you’ve been otherwise engaged.’

The second door opened to reveal a small bright yellow Volkswagen hatchback parked inside the barn and covered with ribbons.

‘Happy birthday!’

Faith burst into noisy, happy tears.

‘Ohmygoditsacar!’ she said stupidly. ‘I really don’t deserve this.’

‘Telling me,’ Carly muttered in an undertone.

Faith was ecstatic. Kissing and hugging her parents, she danced inside to take a closer look. Having her own car meant only one thing to her right now: she could drive back from Essex to see Rory as often as she liked.

‘Don’t even think about driving it until you’re sober,’ Graham warned as she leaped into the driver’s seat to get a feel, reminding him of Susan Sarandon in
Thelma and Louise
as she prepares to drive over the edge of the canyon.

‘Do you think she likes it?’ Anke asked Carly anxiously, deeply concerned by her daughter’s behaviour that night.

‘It’s okay,’ Carly conceded resentfully, knowing that the oneupmanship of having a car had now been lost.

‘It’s a lovely colour, I think,’ Anke smiled. ‘Like your swimming costume. You do know that we haven’t got a pool?’

‘It’s a dress,’ Carly muttered, noting in alarm that Graham had
customised the sides of Faith’s new car with silhouetted dressage decals and hung furry horseshoes from the rear-view mirror. She made a mental note never, ever to ask for a lift in it.

Anke leaned closer, dropping her voice. ‘Carly, I must ask you, do you think Faith is happy with life right now?’

‘How d’you mean?’ she asked blankly. ‘She’s friends with Dillon Rafferty. What girl wouldn’t be happy?’ There were chips of ice in her voice.

‘Sometimes she puts on a brave face, but a mother knows.’

‘She’s cool, Mrs B, honest.’ There was a noisy jangle of bracelets as she reached up to pat Anke’s arm. ‘She’ll have a ball in Essex. That brave face will come back quite different, just you wait and see. She’ll be all smiles.’

‘I hope so.’ Anke sighed, watching as Faith tuned the car radio to Classic FM and cranked some Wagner up to full blast. ‘I do hope so.’

Anke was left feeling ragged after the party and vowed that Chad would have all his landmark celebrations in purpose-built venues. The huge clearing-up operation took two days, unassisted by Faith who headed straight to Overlodes Equestrian Centre in her new car to welcome a victorious Rory home from his Scottish trip. She stayed there from dawn to dusk, making the most of what little time she had left before leaving for Essex.

‘Why is my daughter so ungrateful?’ Anke lamented to best friends Ophelia and Pixie. ‘She is just so obsessed with poor Rory.’

‘She’s in love,’ Pixie said simply.

‘Dilly was just the same at her age,’ Ophelia reminded her, ‘and look at her now – she and Magnus are like a pair of solid bookends.’

‘But Rory hasn’t got the backbone to be a bookend,’ Anke fretted. ‘I’m not sure he could take the weight of her clever mind, and anyway he doesn’t want to.’

‘He’s pretty special underneath that laid-back bluff,’ insisted Pixie, who had always had a soft spot for Rory. ‘Remember, his father died when he was terribly young. He’s really had to fend for himself.’

Anke felt a sharp pang of recognition. Now more convinced than ever that Faith’s problems lay with a lack of a paternal anchor, she redoubled her efforts to tell her more about her birth father, but
Faith – eventually coming down from her Brain Candy high with tremors, a dry mouth and nausea – blocked her ears to any mention of flame-haired horse dealer Fearghal.

‘How many times? I
don’t
want to meet my father. Much as I know it’s a disappointment to you, I am not father-fixated or a lesbian or anything else remotely interesting. I am just an anti-social, flat-chested girl who wants to ride horses and who made a complete mess of her birthday party by locking herself in the loo when lots of strangers turned up.’

Which was, Anke supposed, an apology of sorts.

In her defensive but honest way, Faith in fact apologised to everybody who had put themselves out to make her party happen only to find her behaving like an imbecile, from Carly whose dreams of finding Grant’s successor had come to nothing, to her gayfathers, to Graham and Magnus. To Faith’s tremendous relief, they all forgave her good-spiritedly.

Finally she begged Dillon Rafferty’s number from Magnus and sent him a text asking him to ignore everything she had said or done that night. The Brain Candy had turned her into a monster, and she was mortified when she thought back to how she had harangued him about Rory.

To her amazement, he replied within minutes.
I enjoyed it, brat. You are unique. Tell me more about this wonder horse. Is he really for sale?

Faith texted excitedly back, thumb on fast-forward.
Definitely. Times are hard. Old money’s suffering more than ever, and event riders are always broke. Hugo Beauchamp would probably sell his own mother if the price was right
.

Chapter 9

Alicia Beauchamp, despite her aura of fading, tissue-wrapped glamour, of Chanel, gin and pearls, was a dyed-in-the-wool thermals and thermos eventing mother.

For years she had stood in rain-lashed, muddy fields cheering on her charges, although Charles had long ago bowed out of competitive
riding in favour of the odd day’s hunting or polo, leaving the path clear for Hugo. From those early years of rusty pony trailers and lowly rankings, through national championships, countless three day events, British teams and medal ceremonies, Alicia had been a stalwart supporter.

When Hugo married and settled down she was happy to take a back seat and pursue other interests, friendships and loves – at least one of them deliciously illicit and involving a very dashing, very married local magistrate Master of Foxhounds. But now that Tash was so busy with family youngstock, Alicia had dug her impenetrable wet weather gear out of retirement and – despite two hip replacements and a spot of rheumatism in one knee – was nobly checking score boards, rolling up bandages and brewing coffee in the horsebox between phases, keeping the dogs under control and barracking stewards and her son.

‘Hurry
up,
Hugo’ – ‘no, not those boots,
these
boots’ – ‘don’t leave that bloody thing there’ – ‘cigarette?’ – ‘hup!’ were her standard rallying cries.

This morning was no exception. ‘We should have left half an hour ago!’ she shouted from the horsebox cab, cigarette dangling between her lips and Beefy yapping excitedly on her knee.

‘Are you sure you’ll be all right?’ Hugo asked Tash for the tenth time, reluctant to leave.

‘Absolutely! We’re grand.’ She waved sleeping Amery’s little fist at him. ‘Now you heard your mother. Get going. Bring back pots. We’ll be waiting here for you.’

Blue eyes glittering, he kissed her on the mouth and belted off to take the wheel, leaving Tash to turn tiredly towards the house and carry Amery inside, wondering where Beccy had got to with Cora. There were still half a dozen horses left to muck out, but Beccy had spirited the toddler into the house ten minutes earlier, muttering something about fetching a drink.

They were in the snug, Cora emptying bookshelves unheeded while, swigging on a Diet Coke and lying back on the drop-arm tapestry sofa, Beccy used the Beauchamps’ phone. ‘You’re going to have to ask James to increase my allowance, Mummy,’ she was saying. ‘Tash and Hugo pay next to nothing and are
really
mean. They say I’m nowhere near ready to start competing yet, and they make me do all the most boring jobs.’

Still cradling Amery, Tash cleared her throat and Beccy leaped upright, inadvertently elbowing her new puppy, Karma. It let out an indignant shriek, scrabbled off the arm and landed on Cora’s pile of books, which slithered underfoot and made the puppy do the splits.

Eyeing her sister at the door, Beccy had the grace to blush. ‘I have to go Mummy – I’ll call you later okay? When you’ve spoken with James?’ She hung up, not looking Tash in the face. ‘My phone’s out of charge so I used your landline.’

‘Fine,’ Tash was hurt by the ‘mean’ comment and too wracked with physical discomfort to be forgiving. ‘But please don’t leave the yard unattended with jobs half done. It’s selfish and unprofessional. If you want to ride more and earn more, you have to start by improving your basic stable care.’

She personally thought Beccy had a better standard of living than her employers. Heavily subsidised by her trust fund in addition to her wages and rent-free life at Haydown, she shopped for groceries exclusively at M&S, ran a racy little Audi that was far better than Tash’s own ancient Shogun, had an iPhone constantly loaded with the latest tracks, a Mac laptop bursting with movies and pop videos, and Egyptian bedlinen and Molton Brown bath products in the stable flat. As soon as she’d arrived she’d bought herself the sooty grey Labradoodle puppy that now sported a diamante-encrusted collar and ate nothing but steamed chicken. For a self-styled global hippy who had purportedly survived on rice and lentils in India, Beccy liked life’s little luxuries.

‘Cora was thirsty.’ She glared down at her feet, encased in pink and orange Joules socks, this season’s must-have colours among image-conscious young event riders.

‘So I see.’ A beaker of sticky apple juice had been upended in a first edition of a Montgomery biography. Tash sighed, her anger evaporating. ‘You’d better get back out there now. Jenny’s taking the hunting box to deliver a horse to Leicestershire this morning so you’re in charge. If you can come in and help me with Cora at lunchtime, I’ll make you something to eat.’

‘Sure.’

Tash suddenly felt incredibly sorry for her stepsister, who had been forced to start at the bottom like a teenager despite being in her late twenties. ‘It will get easier, Beccy. You’re already a million times faster and fitter than when you started.’

This wasn’t strictly true. Despite a natural affinity with horses, Beccy was not a particularly hard worker, she was vague and a poor timekeeper, she overslept, got the feeds muddled up and she had a memory like a sieve, but simply having another body around the place was a godsend. She could generally be relied upon to wait on the yard for the farrier or the vet or the feed merchant, or could sit with Cora while Tash dealt with something in Hugo’s absence. And when Tash had gone into labour she had been the only person on site. Without her, Tash had no idea how she would have coped. Beccy had been marvellous. For that Tash was eternally grateful, and even Hugo – who had not been best pleased to find his sister-in-law in situ when he returned from the Olympics – had tacitly accepted the situation. In fact he’d been strangely muted about it, as he had about everything since the Games. Tash put it down to the inevitable post-competition anti-climax, to worrying about money and most of all to adjusting to a new baby.

Amery was a bald, wrinkled wonder with his father’s blue eyes, his mother’s cleft chin and a very odd-shaped head from battering away at her pelvis for hours trying to get out. Far more passive than Cora had been, at less than a week old he was already proving happy to be hawked about in a Moses basket or car seat and plonked anywhere to gaze short-sightedly at the new world around him, occasionally thrusting a little starfish hand out to test the air. Mostly he slept with snuffly, trusting contentment, as he was now.

Beccy reached out to cup his sleeping cheek as she passed by, her face softening with indulgence, and at that moment Tash could forgive her any number of mistakes.

‘Thank you for being here,’ she blurted suddenly.

‘I’ll get better, I promise,’ Beccy mumbled as she disappeared along the back lobby.

Tash sat down. The truth was that they did need Beccy at Haydown very badly indeed, even if they couldn’t afford to pay her well and she was pretty unreliable. They were so desperately short-staffed that she often doubled the workforce when not AWOL, which was admittedly rather a lot.

Half an hour later, when one of the local part-timers came to the back door and asked Tash what she was supposed to be doing because there was nobody on the yard, no feeds had been mixed up
or haynets filled and the tack-room door was wide open, she realised Beccy must have gone missing again.

‘You
rally
must make an effort to control the estate better,’ Alicia barked through stiffly smiling lips as she and her son waited between summer downpours in the collecting ring at Ampney Franchart, a small one day event near Cirencester.

Hugo found her presence at horse trials something of a hindrance these days. On a practical level, he was already perfectly well supported at events by head girl Jenny or his team of volunteer grooms, hands-on owners and friends, but he was far too well-mannered a son to tell Alicia to bugger off.

‘The Haydown tenants are having a terrible time,’ Alicia carried on, tucking Beefy the pug into her coat’s poacher’s pocket as the heavens opened again. ‘I think you might have to waive the rent for the rest of the year.’

‘Can’t afford to,’ Hugo replied, pulling up his collar against the lashing rain, a thunderclap giving a timely roll overhead that made his young horse dance, back bunched nervously.

‘Your father always waived the rent when the harvest was this bad, or livestock prices this low.’ Despite the hot late summer, a record-breakingly cold spring had blighted crop and fodder production, resulting in low yields and poor quality.

‘Father had a private income running at about three times the estate overheads. I currently have an income of approximately half those overheads.’

‘So earn more.’

If only it was that simple, Hugo thought bitterly as he was beckoned into the muddy, hoof-poached ring to coax his mount through the showjumping phase of the battle for a cash prize of less than the cost of his diesel and entry fees that day.