Kiss and Tell (58 page)

‘Maybe he’s taken it?’

‘To the pub? Hardly! Oh God, he’ll go mad.’

‘There’ll be a perfectly simple explanation,’ Sophia assured her.

‘Probably hunting some supper for us seeing as the Bitches of Eastwick have polished ours off,’ Sally giggled.

It was too late to dash to the supermarket, so Tash called Angelo in the Olive Branch kitchen and threw herself on his mercy.

Thus Hugo and the men arrived home half an hour later with a boot full of the finest frozen lobster tails and wild Alaskan salmon from the pub’s catering stores. Tash didn’t dare think about the cost.

‘Just like being with Alexandra and Pascal.’ Sally sighed delightedly as they all joined together in creating a feast in the huge kitchen, drinking their way through so much wine that by the time they sat down around the enormous table they were all in roaring spirits.

‘To Tash and Hugo, and this wonderful time together!’ Sally raised her glass enthusiastically.

As soon as Tash picked up her fork Amery let out a furious wail through the baby monitor and she rushed upstairs. He took an age to settle, not helped by Em’s two older children thundering around the landings as they dashed from window to window to look out for Santa Claus. When she finally got Amery off to sleep there was a wail from Cora’s room as the little girl woke from a bad dream and found her cuddly Elmer missing. A long hunt ensued and he was finally tracked down in the bathroom, tucked behind somebody’s toiletry bag.

By the time Tash got back downstairs the table had been cleared
and everybody was putting on coats and scarves to walk to midnight mass in the ancient Maccombe church.

‘We’ll babysit,’ Sally offered, taking the monitor from her. ‘You go with Hugo and the others. Matty is allergic to organised religion, as you know.’

‘Has anyone seen Beccy yet?’ Tash asked as she went in search of a coat.

‘Been and gone faster than Santa on his rounds,’ Sophia said, handing her a scarf. ‘She was wearing a very strange hat throughout supper.’

‘A hat?’ Tash was surprised.

‘A rainbow-coloured witchy thing.’ Her sister said, then dropped her voice. ‘Is she all right? She looked very spaced out. Nobody knew what to say to her.’

‘I’ll go and see her. Ask her along to midnight mass.’

But Sophia shook her head, buttoning up Tash’s coat for her. ‘She was adamant she didn’t want anything to do with it. Isn’t she some sort of Buddhist?’

Stomach rumbling, Tash followed the others into a cold, dense mist, groping into the darkness for Hugo’s gloved hand, which felt big and safe and firm. It wasn’t until they all stumbled past the lodge cottage and set off the motion-detector floodlight that she realised she was holding her father’s leather-gloved hand. To her surprise, he looked terribly pleased.

‘Merry Christmas, Tash. Thank you for taking us all on.’

‘It’s a real pleasure.’ Tash reached up to kiss his stubbly jowls and, for the first time that day, she really meant it.

Standing side by side in the Beauchamp family pew she and James belted out the carols and got terrible giggles when one of the old vergers, reading haltingly from Luke, quoted the Angel Gabriel as telling the shepherds that they would find an ‘infant sapped in waddling clothes’. On her other side, swigging discreetly from his hipflask, Hugo sang along flatly, yawning widely in between having a tight-lipped argument with his mother, who reeked of gin, was smoking a sly Rothmans and kept asking loudly whether the female vicar was ‘that old queer, Reverend Coles, in drag’.

That night Tash stayed up until past three wrapping gifts. It was only as she climbed, exhausted, to bed at last that she remembered
the missing gun. Hugo was too sound asleep to disturb, so she made a note to ask him about it first thing in the morning.

Then she remembered Beccy.

In the stables flat Beccy stared at her reflection, contemplating her new look.

The dreadlocks had gone. In their place was a highlighted crop.

Left longer on front, urchin short behind, streaked at the crown with silver blondes that almost made her look grey and near-black at the nape of her neck, Beccy knew it looked awful, but it was what she had asked for. It had looked sensational in the photograph that she’d ripped out of
Vogue
. She’d refused to listen to Traycee’s advice, determined to transform from hippy to vamp for Hugo. But it was still her round, babyish face staring out at her, now crowned with this monstrous creation that was part Phillip Schofield, part roadkill badger.

She hated it. Hated it, hated it, hated it. She wanted to die.

She fought back the tears again, knowing that she couldn’t concentrate if they took hold.

In front of her was the gun. So dark and sleek and deadly.

She picked it up, slid her hands along the cool metal barrel, around the trigger mechanism and stock. It was beautiful.

Her romantic notion, spun at her lowest ebb, had been to go in to the woods with it. Blowing her brains out had never been on the agenda, but blasting a few trees would feel good. For that, however, she would need shotgun cartridges, and in her haste to grab the gun undetected she’d forgotten those. She’d tried to steal some during supper but there were too many people and she hadn’t wanted to hang around in case anyone spotted the disaster zone lurking beneath her hat. So now she was a useless waste of space with an unloaded gun and a hideous haircut.

At that moment, she heard light footsteps on the stairs up from the yard and gripped the gun tighter.

Karma let out a disloyal, welcoming bark from the end of her bed. Something landed with a thud just outside her door. Then a voice whispered, ‘Beccy, are you awake in there?’

Thrusting the gun under the duvet, Beccy stole to the door.

‘What do you want?’

‘Are you okay?’

She opened the door a fraction. There was a stocking outside –or,
more accurately a lumpy pair of old tights filled with wrapped presents shedding glitter everywhere. Above it Tash’s mismatched eyes, pinched with tiredness and hidden behind her out-of-hours specs, regarded her anxiously. ‘I saw your light on. Ohmygod! You cut off your dreadlocks. Wow. That’s so lovely.’

Beccy stared at the stocking again, tears gripping her. She hadn’t had a Christmas stocking in over a decade. She hadn’t had a proper Christmas in over a decade. She didn’t really know what to do about it or with it. She felt out of control.

‘I haven’t bought any presents,’ she blurted.

‘This is a beautiful present to all of us.’ Tash reached up to touch her short hair.

Beccy jerked her head away sharply. ‘It’s vile.’

Now that she could study it more closely, Tash clearly couldn’t disagree. ‘It’s very trendy,’ she said diplomatically.

‘It’s vile.’

‘And the colour’s a striking mix.’

‘It’s vile.’

‘Would you like me to have a go at calming it down for you?’

‘You’ll only make it look worse.’

‘I promise I won’t. I’ve cut hair for lots of riders on the circuit who never get time to go to a salon. I can even do colour if you want to have another go at dying it.’

Beccy thought about the gun in her bed and suddenly felt very silly and very tearful again. ‘Would you mind?’

It was the early hours of Christmas morning. Tash had a limited number of products at her disposal but a willing heart. ‘Of course not. Put the kettle on and I’ll be back in five minutes.’

Using and the yard’s best plaiting scissors and a colourant advertised by a Desperate Housewife that she’d bought at the supermarket to give her own hair some winter lustre and had never got around to trying, Tash trimmed the David Beckham nineties curtain fringe to a tufty Agyness Deyn/Erin O’Connor crop and toned down the unforgiving white blondes to flattering biscuit shades.

‘I wish I could cut hair,’ Beccy sighed as her stepsister worked, thinking it unfair that Tash could paint, cook and even dress hair well, whereas she had no great talent.

‘I’ll teach you,’ Tash promised. ‘It’s as easy clipping a horse or pulling a mane once you know how.’

Having blow-dried her handiwork until they were both pink in the face, she wrapped her arms around Beccy’s shoulders and smiled at their reflection.

Beccy let out a little gasp of delight. Her eyes shone out beneath the flattering urchin cut so that they now seemed huge, lending her face a Manga quality. She looked prettier than she had in years.

‘Happy Christmas.’ Tash kissed her on the top of her head.

Cautiously, Beccy covered Tash’s hands with her own. ‘Happy Christmas.’

A text message came through on her phone, making them both jump.

‘Must be one of your travelling friends from Australia or New Zealand,’ Tash yawned, gathering up her scissors and the little plastic bottles, gloves and pots. ‘They’re already washing up after Christmas lunch there.’

Beccy nodded, almost strangled with nerves.

‘I must go.’ Tash hurried for the door. ‘If he wakes up, Hugo will think I’m kissing Santa Claus under the mistletoe, and I’m in his bad books enough as it is.’

Beccy brightened, guessing there was tension between the Beauchampions.

Once Tash had gone, she leaped on the phone and read the message.
Merry Christmas from Hong Kong.

What was he doing in Hong Kong? she wondered as she wearily crawled beneath her covers and then screamed in shock at finding herself sharing her bed with a shotgun.

Chapter 39

The Beauchamps enjoyed a joyful Christmas Day despite the stress drone humming in the background. The family rallied together, cooking and laughing, helping out on the yard, walking through the park, drinking copiously and sharing gifts. The goose was cooked to perfection, the pudding set alight and sung around, the crackers pulled and the jokes read aloud.

And the most dazzling sugar plum fairy was definitely Beccy, told
so many times that she looked better without her dreadlocks that she was left in no doubt it had been the right move to have them cut off, even if she had needed a little help to perfect the look – not that she or Tash admitted that to anybody else, although they exchanged smiles that meant as much as the many gifts exchanged that day. Beccy felt strangely naked without her dreads, but she was starting to appreciate the light-headedness and freedom. And she must look good because James used the digital camera he had been given as a Christmas present to take shots of Henrietta and her daughters for the first time in years, and Beccy posed beside her mother and Em positively beaming. Only Sophia, tipsy on champagne, managed the odd bitchy backhander, comparing her stepsister to Kelly Osbourne ‘in her
Dancing with the Stars
stage’, and then later saying she looked like Aled Jones ‘now, of course, not when he was a choirboy’.

Beccy, who had always hated Sophia, wanted to push over the huge lopsided tree on top of her, but settled instead for tuning her out and concentrating on Hugo, who provided by far her most thrilling moment of the day and best Christmas present ever when he bestowed a festive kiss on her lips and told her she looked ‘quite ravishing’. She played with the words all day, repeating them whenever she was alone, in her flat, on the yard or even in the loo. ‘Quite ravishing, Quite, quite ravishing. Ravishing. Ravish, ravish, ravish.’

She hadn’t needed a gun to kill Beccy the ashram hippy, just scissors. Long live the new Beccy.

Now, as yet another blanket of cold mist swooped down to tuck the evening in, and Tash was again trying to get through to her mother on the telephone to wish her, Pascal and Polly a Happy Christmas, Beccy slipped outside and danced toward the yards, still whispering ‘ravishing’ to herself.

At the kitchen table, Sally and Sophia were sharing the last of a bottle of Cointreau and agreeing that Alexandra had never been a great one for Christmas.

‘She and Pascal are bound to be in Mauritius or Dominica or somewhere.’

‘Always forgets to send cards.’

‘Much better at birthdays.’

‘Just not Jesus’!’

They both fell about.

Fed up with their unhelpful background talk, Tash stalked
through to the dining room, where the table was still littered with the meal’s fall-out and Henrietta, sitting at the top end of the long stretch of antique linen tablecloth, had nodded off with her cheek pressed to the pile of napkins she had been gathering.

Quietly backing out of the room and making a mental note to wake her in half an hour, Tash checked on the rest of her house guests. Aside from the babies and toddlers, Matty had been the only adult sensible enough to go to bed for forty winks after the marathon meal. James and Ben were snoring loudly on adjacent sofas in the drawing room and the older kids were sleepily watching
Madagascar 3
in the snug along with Em and her husband Tim, who were already writing thank-you cards on behalf of their children. Alicia was stretched out on the Chesterfield in the old snooker room beneath the portrait of her late husband, Beefeater the pug tucked under one arm and a bottle of his namesake under the other.

Ignoring the heaps of washing up as she headed back through the kitchen, Tash went outside to help Hugo bed down the last few horses for the night. He had already been out there for over an hour.

It was like walking through dry ice, the mist was so thick. She could barely find her way to the arch, but she could tell from the blackened windows overhead that the Czechs were also sleeping off the excesses of their first British Christmas lunch, which they had eaten with the suspicion of food testers at the court of a particularly unpopular king, just as they had opened their glittery packages of winter clothes and hats with polite smiles that barely concealed the fact they would much rather stick to pastel jogging suits and marbled denim.

Hugo was in with Dove, who was expecting Snob’s last foal.

‘Is she okay?’ Tash checked, still unaware that the mare had been ill.

‘Fine – all quiet.’ He came out and closed the bolts, looking strangely shifty.

There was a step beside her and Tash realised that Beccy was there, her unfamiliar hair gleaming gold in the overhead work lights.