Kiss and Tell (43 page)

She hurriedly phone Sophia to see what her sister knew about it all.

‘It comes as no surprise, frankly. You know what she’s like,’ Sophia assured her airily.

‘She hasn’t even
seen
Amery yet.’

‘Linus was practically out of nappies by the time he met his grandmother, remember?’

‘That’s because Mummy fell out with his father. We haven’t fallen out.’

‘And she’s always been
very
protective of Polly,’ Sophia gave a
jealous sniff, having long struggled with the youth, beauty and monopoly of their halfsister. She then changed direction sharply, on to the subject of Hugo’s surprise fortieth birthday party. ‘You still haven’t given me a
clue
about numbers and budget, Tash. I simply can’t organise it
all
myself!’

Tash pretended the baby was crying and rang off. She couldn’t think about that right now, particularly with Hugo standing close by, barking into his mobile.

She suddenly felt tearful. Her mother was rather wayward and fickle, avoided confrontation and could be very impulsive, but she was never usually this neglectful.

It was a few moments before she realised that Hugo was speaking in French. For a brief and thrilling moment she thought that he had somehow managed to summon Pascal to the phone in the Himalayas and was giving him a piece of his mind about this ‘year out’. But then she picked up enough to realise that he was trying to rescue their holiday plans. Her heart sank as she guessed exactly which hostess he would call for a last-minute invitation.

‘That’s settled!’ he announced triumphantly as he rang off. ‘MC would love to have us to stay after Pau.’ His old eventing friend Marie-Clair Tucson owned a stud farm near Angers. ‘We’ll meet up there after the trials.’

Tash secretly dreaded spending any time with MC, who had once been a lover of Hugo’s, swam naked, smoked cigars and regarded small children as vermin. Thinking that he was missing the point, and feeling even more tearful, she suggested they stay in a family-friendly gîte instead.

‘Don’t be silly, Tash. MC is a fabulous cook, and we can look at some of her young horses while we’re there.’

‘But this holiday is always totally
away
from horses,’ she reminded him, voice strangled with emotion. ‘We agreed we need one week a year without a horse in sight.’

‘That’s hardly going to happen on a stud farm, is it?’

‘Which is why I don’t want to go.’

‘It’s agreed now.’

‘Well dis-agree.’

He gave her a withering look. ‘I know you’re upset about your mother swanning off like this, but—’

‘You have no idea how I feel!’ she wailed, tears finally spouting.
‘I don’t want to go to France at all if Mummy’s not there. I want to stay here.’ Nowadays, her default position when upset was to cling to home and the familiar.

But Hugo, who had spent the autumn dashing to competitions all over Europe and Ireland, couldn’t understand Tash’s thinking at all. He knew that living out of a lorry was tough with such a young family, but surely all the luxuries of MC’s fabulous farm would appeal to her?

He tried hard to make conciliatory noises. ‘It’s been a tough season and God knows we all need a break. I can see how tense you’ve been since Blenheim.’

‘
I’ve
been?’ she laughed incredulously. Hugo was the one who had been impossibly short-tempered, snapping at Rory, berating Beccy and, most of all, ragging poor little Lemon, who seemed as stumped as the rest of them as to where Lough Strachan could be.

‘Let’s get to France and let our hair down, huh?’ He put his arm around her. ‘It’ll be like old times.’

For a moment, Tash longed for it to be true. But she already knew the reality. With no au pairs or grandmother to help with childcare she would be constantly guarding a small baby and rampaging toddler while Hugo demanded equal attention and stimulation. Yet the thought of being all together was a rare opportunity.

‘It’ll be hard work with the children,’ she started to weaken.

‘We can leave them here with the Czechs.’

Tash couldn’t believe her ears. ‘What?’

‘Just for a few days. My mother will oversee them.’

‘Amery is still breastfeeding!’

‘Can’t you express?’

Tash was too staggered to speak. Her jaw was still swinging when the phone rang.

‘I’ve solved your staffing shortage,’ Penny’s cheerful voice greeted her as soon as she picked up. ‘You can borrow our new working pupil, Anke Brakespear’s daughter. Howzat?’

Tash managed a grateful sob.

‘You okay?’

‘Having a domestic.’

‘Righti-ho. Hang on in there, and if he claims you’re driving him away hand him the car keys and tell him to do it himself. Always brings Gus to heel.’ She rang off, leaving Tash glaring at Hugo.

‘I am not going to France without the children.’

‘Fine,’ he shrugged, as though they were just talking about packing extra socks. ‘Bring them along.’ He picked up his phone and read a text that has just come in.

‘Only if we stay in a gîte.’ Tash craned her neck to see if the message was from V, but he’d pocketed the phone before she could read a word.

Suspicions flaring, Tash took an even more stubborn stance. They were still arguing when Beccy appeared, pink-faced, at the door to say that they were both needed on the yard because one of the part-timers hadn’t turned up, the muck heap was full, they needed haylage bales moved and the tractor wouldn’t start.

‘We’re hopelessly behind,’ she apologised breathlessly. ‘Nothing’s been groomed yet.’

‘It’s okay, we’ll finally have some more hands on the yard next week,’ Tash promised.

‘What?’ Hugo looked at her crossly.

‘Lough Strachan?’ Beccy asked, turning pinker.

‘No, someone from Lime Tree Farm,’ she pulled on her coat. ‘And me.’

‘You’ll be in France.’

‘No, I won’t.’

As Hugo opened his mouth to protest, his phone beeped with yet another text. Stalling by the door, Tash bristled while he read it, longing to grab the indestructible device and try out its manufacturer’s guarantee.

‘I shan’t tell MC you’re a “
non
” yet,’ he said as he read it. ‘After all, I’m sure someone else will take your place if I RSVP a royal
oui
now.’

‘Who?’ She felt faint, the V in RSVP raging in her head.

‘Rory,’ he suggested lightly, typing a response to the text as they headed outside. It was obvious he didn’t believe that she would stay behind, but Tash’s obstinate streak was firmly in play.

The following day, when she still refused to change her mind, Hugo appeared with a vast bunch of roses, star-gazer lilies and asters held out like a shield in front of him as he pleaded with her to reconsider. But her reaction alarmed him all the more as, spotting the label, her eyes narrowed. ‘They’re from Waitrose.’

‘So?’

Looking highly disapproving, Tash took them without another word. Later that day they appeared, neatly arranged in two pewter vases, on Snob and Bodybuilder’s graves in Flat Pad, and Hugo realised he had done nothing to further his cause, although he had no idea why.

‘Are Waitrose flowers politically incorrect?’ he asked Beccy, baffled.

‘They do it for me.’ She sighed, giving him a bashful sideways look that was wasted on Hugo as he stalked off, muttering about living orchids.

By the end of the week, Haydown was bursting with blooms, but Tash was no more willing to go to France. ‘Someone has to stay behind and water all these plants,’ she pointed out mulishly.

Chapter 27

When Faith arrived at Lime Tree Farm in Fosbourne Ducis, her chicken fillets and attitude were firmly in place. She immediately kicked up a dust cloud of controversy as an ageing and unfit grey Thoroughbred gelding that she had apparently kidnapped from Rory’s Cotswolds yard was dropped off by a passing local trainer on his way back from Cheltenham.

‘How did she get Charlie to agree to do that?’ Gus was staggered and secretly quite impressed that one of the meanest Lambourn stalwarts had taken a twenty-mile detour for an unprepossessing kid like Faith.

‘Flashed her fake tits at him probably,’ Penny muttered.

‘Has she got falsies?’ Fascinated, Gus couldn’t wait to take another look. He’d never seen fake breasts close up before and, being a leg man, would need them pointed out rather like Prince Philip touring a factory and told that he was looking at a bottling machine.

‘I definitely heard that Kurt fired her because she took time off to have a boob job,’ Penny nodded, having been to her dressage trainer for a lesson just that week and got all the gossip. ‘I hope Anke’s right that she’s a bloody hard worker and knows her stuff. When I told her she can’t have her own horse here d’you know what she said?’

‘He’s not my horse, I’ve just stolen him,’ Gus laughed, having overheard. He liked Faith’s style. Opinionated, domineering, defensive and obstreperous in equal measure, she was a tough cookie even in the notoriously hardened world of event riding.

‘She’s just like her bloody father,’ Penny was not looking forward to life as unwitting guardian to the irascible new cuckoo chick. ‘Thank God she’s going to start off at Haydown,’ she sighed with relief. ‘She can take that pensionable horse with her for a start. Tash has a knack with these stroppy girls, and Lord knows she needs the help with Hugo away so much. There’s no way she can cope alone, whatever he thinks.’

‘What about Lough Strachan?’ Gus asked. ‘Won’t he be there?’

‘Not arrived yet.’

‘
Still
? Jesus. Has he been abducted by aliens?’

‘Don’t joke.’ Penny dropped her voice, having enjoyed a long gossip about it with Jenny when out cubbing that week. ‘That little punk groom of his is behaving as though this is all perfectly normal, but of course nothing is being paid for. Hugo’s threatening to sell one of Lough’s horses.’

‘Shouldn’t they at least check he’s still alive?’

‘Lemon seems to have heard from him, but he’s a shifty little character. I wouldn’t trust him.’

‘You don’t trust anyone,’ Gus said with feeling.

‘Hardly surprising, being married to you,’ she muttered, stalking off check Faith hadn’t taken delivery of any more stolen horses.

Walking away after a barbed comment was becoming Penny’s stock in trade. It was as far as she ever pushed the panic button on their marriage, fearing that if she pressed any harder it would trigger the eject seat and she’d find herself bereft, with no Gus and no Lime Tree Farm. Their marriage had been heading towards a tail-spin after Burghley, but was spluttering along just above the tree line now that the UK horse trials season was almost over and Gus had fewer opportunities for stolen moments in moonlit lorry parks. Penny was certain that whoever it was he was having an affair with either rode, groomed or owned an event horse. While the woman’s exact identity remained a mystery, she was convinced it was an open secret on the circuit.

Worse than the disloyalty and betrayal, she found, was the humiliation: the thought that people in the sport knew, that riders and
organisers she had competed alongside for so many years were laughing at her.

Yet she had spoken to almost nobody about her fears, not even her sister Zoe or Tash. The only person that she had breathed a word to,
in vino
and in a stupidly overwrought state, was the handsome young man she had met at Haydown after the tipsy wedding-anniversary lunch. He turned out to be just about the most famous pop star in England, which was typical of her luck.

Perched on the top of the hay bales stacked in the Dutch barn, which seemed to be the only place with any decent reception on her mobile network, Faith sent out a blanket text to let her friends know about her new job. Then she began composing a separate message to Rory, agonising over how to phrase it and explain to him about bringing Whitey with her. But she had to abandon it when Penny started shouting for her. Phone already beeping with replies, she clambered down to be told that she would be working most days at Haydown.

‘I’ve just spoken with Tash and your horse can be stabled up there in the short term, but you’ll live here at Lime Tree Farm. We’ve promised your mother we’ll keep an eye on you.’

Faith wanted to hug her. It was better than she could have dreamed: she would be working right alongside Rory again. With Penny still banging on about the arrangements, she surreptitiously checked the texts that had come through. Amazingly, Dillon Rafferty was one of the first to reply and wish her luck. She’d only ever added his number to wind up Carly when they’d been playing with the settings of her new phone.

Realising that Penny had fallen silent, she looked up to find her glowering. ‘You’re going to have to sharpen up your ideas, Faith. If Hugo catches you texting during work hours he’ll send you straight back here. And if
I
catch you texting in work hours, I’ll send you straight back home.’

‘Yeah, sure.’ Faith’s new attitude was holding out despite the knots of fear and homesickness in her belly. As always when she was nervous, she was overly assertive. ‘It’s just Dillon Rafferty wishing me luck. He came to my eighteenth. We’re mates. I was the one who told him to buy The Fox.’

Penny looked shocked. ‘You know him?’

‘We’re like this.’ Faith pinched her thumb and forefinger together.

‘I’ve told Tash you’ll go straight up to Haydown to introduce yourself. Why not stay all day?’ Penny turned and stalked away.

Faith’s heart sank. She was dying to impress Penny Moncrieff, who was a doyenne of the sport. Instead, she’d just made herself look like a name-dropping idiot.

When Faith first set eyes on Haydown’s blushing brickwork, Flambards atmosphere, family heartbeat and quality horseflesh, she thought she was in heaven. But then she found that her
raison d’être
was missing.

‘Rory left for Pau with Hugo yesterday,’ Tash explained when showing her around. ‘They’ll be in France a couple of weeks – Hugo’s arranged a stay with MC, that’s Marie-Clair Tucson. They’ll be back for the Express Eventing Challenge.’

‘But that’s not until the end of November!’