Kiss and Tell (63 page)
Faith didn’t drive to Lime Tree Farm. Instead, blind with tears and anger, she drove almost a third of the way back to the Cotswolds without thinking. It wasn’t until she was crawling along the A34 in nose-to-tail traffic, accidents in front and behind, severe weather warnings on the radio, that she wondered what in hell she was doing.
She couldn’t pull up or turn around – there was nowhere to go – but the longer she inched forwards at a snails’ pace, the sillier she felt for running home to Mummy and the angrier she felt with Lemon.
Yet she knew he was right. Dillon had said as much six months ago, at her birthday party, and how much had she learned since then?
Faith closed her eyes and groaned as she realised that she had missed seeing Dillon at Haydown – one of those rare moments when their paths crossed and she could remind herself she had friends with influence, and ones that she really liked. She had thought that
Lemon was her friend, had started to think of him as her very best friend, but now all that had been shattered.
Her mobile phone rang deep in her Puffa jacket. No doubt it would be Lemon with an apology. She scrabbled for the hands-free earpiece.
‘Faith?’ The voice was very muffled, the signal appalling.
Faith was edging towards the exit for West Ilsley, where she knew that she could cross back over the flyover and start the arduous task of crawling back to Maccombe.
‘’s me,’ the voice croaked. ‘Promised I’d call.’
‘Rory?’
‘Yup.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Not sure. Snowed onmycar.’ He sounded very drunk.
‘You’re not with your sister?’
‘Godno. SheshwithAmosshorrible family. Ishaw Aunt Bell and SpursandEllen andwhatever their babieshcalled butithinkthey wantedmetogo, so I drove here to pick up your present, but Jules wassnthere and then I drove into a tree.’
‘You did what?’
‘Droveintoatree.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Dunno.’
‘Stay right there,’ she ordered, cancelling her indicators in a cacophony of car horns as she swung back out from the slip road. ‘I’m coming to get you.’
When Faith got to the outskirts of Upper Springlode she tried Rory’s number again, but it was going straight to voicemail.
She pulled up in a gateway opposite the Prattle, away from the drifts, wondering what to do. It was pitch dark and, although it had stopped snowing, the wind was whipping the fallen snow around and the landscape was uniform white with just a few brave tyre tracks crimping the thick covering on the lanes. No snowploughs or gritters would pass through a backwater like Upper Springlode for hours, if at all. She had no idea where Rory was.
She had almost come off the road several times, and was tired and over-emotional. She thought about calling her mother to beg for help. Graham would launch a search party, and Magnus and Dilly
were still around, both of whom had an army of local friends to call upon.
Then she remembered Jules at the stables, and she set the car in first gear to make her way to Rory’s yard by the white lanes.
The driveway up to the yard was so deep in drift that she was forced to leave her car behind and wade through by torchlight, the snow biting far above her wellington boots as she stepped into it, her jeans soon soaked. Again she cursed her mother for not giving her the waterproof trousers she’d wanted for Christmas.
At last she reached the cottage, stooping beneath the fruit tree branches that were usually high overhead and now, weighed down with snow, created an alien landscape of white arms stretching out to bar her way.
The cottage was locked up and in darkness.
Fighting her way back through the garden, her legs now sodden, chilled and numb, she made it into the American barn where the warm air was infused with familiar scents that soothed Faith – hay, straw, shavings and warm horse.
There was no sign of human life.
Outside again, she suddenly noticed that the static caravan, unoccupied for several years, was glowing away cheerfully beyond the high stack of glossy black haylage bales.
Crunching forwards through another drift, she got within a few feet before stopping in her tracks and backing away. Two figures inside were doing nefarious things up against a mock-teak cabinet. Neither was Rory.
She stepped back further and jumped as an indignant yelp rang out.
Spinning around, Faith saw a small, dark shape in the snow by her feet.
‘Twitch!’
Rory’s nervy little Jack Russell terrier writhed with joy, wagging his stumpy tail so vigorously that his whole body waved from side to side in the deep snow and created a small clearing.
Faith stooped to pick him up. He was freezing cold, like a little hairy block of ice. She unzipped her coat and tucked him inside to warm him up.
‘Where’s your master?’
He inserted a very cold, wet nose beneath her jumper neck.
She checked underfoot with her torch beam.
Apart from her own footprints, the only obvious tracks in the drifting snow were those of Twitch.
She started to retrace them.
They ran almost parallel to hers, leading her back along the drive and straight past her car.
He must have trotted along just minutes after she had parked, bound on an arrow-like path back to the home he had known best. Wherever he had come from, Rory, she was certain, was waiting.
Knowing that she was far safer staying with her car, she got in and followed the pawprints along the lane with her headlights, Twitch sitting importantly beside her on the passenger seat. No other cars, humans or animals were out in this godforsaken weather. She had the village to herself, the place that had once been her second home now rendered her silent, empty kingdom.
When the tracks disappeared a part of the way along the snow-covered lane that ran alongside Broken Back Woods, she parked and climbed out, eyes immediately watering in the bitter wind. There were no signs of a car passing here apart from her own – the drifting snow had long since covered any tracks.
She called out, the words snatched back into her mouth. Great wads of snow landed on her head as they were dragged by the wind from the tree branches overhead; elsewhere snow dusted down like icing sugar. She shouted and hollered. Nothing.
Then she reached for her phone and called his number.
Somewhere, just audible above the howling wind and creaking, freezing snow, she heard ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ ring out to answer her.
Faith fought tears of relief. He hadn’t changed his ringtone in two years – not since she had shown him how to download tones, using Wagner as an example, a lesson he had immediately forgotten. He hated that ringtone, but it was now his life-saving siren. As she neared her target, she used her mobile phone to call Rory’s again and again so that she could close in on the muffled melody coming from one of the piles of snow ahead of her.
At last she found his car, a fattened cartoon shape, totally covered in white and wedged into a tree. Beneath its thick snowy jacket it was twisted and bent, the damage revealed as she brushed its white-iced perfection away.
And there was Rory. He was unconscious.
The driver’s door was jammed closed by the snow and stoved in by the impact. On the opposite side, the passenger’s window was partly wound down and Twitch had obviously burrowed out from it, but Faith couldn’t hope to get close to it through the undergrowth and snow.
Pulling her frozen hand into her sleeve, she hurled her elbow at the window in front of her and yelped as pain razed through her, but at least it cracked and she could smash out the glass, trying not to let too much shower over Rory inside. He stayed totally still and corpse-like.
Heart hammering like a machine gun, Faith felt for a pulse and listened for breath.
Both were strong and even.
The smell of whisky was overpowering. There was a litre bottle of expensive-looking malt on the passenger seat, which was almost empty. Beside it lay the little bronze dog she had given him, and a broken porcelain horse.
For all her love, she spared him little sympathy now, so angry and terrified that she might not have ever found him and that he might have died there. She trudged back to her car and grabbed her Christmas shovel to begin to dig him out, hurling great showers of white over her shoulder until she could wrench the door open at last.
Then she fetched the shiny barrow and hauled Rory into it to push him back to her car.
Only then did he briefly regain consciousness. ‘Where am I? Haydown?’
‘Yes, Rory,’ she replied through gritted teeth. ‘I’m shovelling shit as usual.’
He started to sing:
‘In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan
…
’
He lapsed back into unconsciousness for the journey to Berkshire and Faith debated taking him to A & E, but she was terrified that he had done something illegal, and she knew his drinking habits well enough to gauge this stupor as one he could sleep off, albeit with pretty major tremors. If Hugo found out – as he inevitably would, should Rory get arrested – then Rory would probably be out on his ear. Better to risk it, she decided, stopping off at an all-night garage to stock up on dextrose tablets, bottled water and caffeine drinks.
‘Bad night to be travelling,’ the cashier sympathised.
‘They say travelling hopefully is sometimes better than arriving,’ Faith replied bleakly, carrying her goodies back to her unconscious passenger, who had Twitch under one arm and the broken horse figurine under the other.
By the time they arrived at Haydown Rory was starting to come to, with nauseous, delirious confusion. It was not a good moment to meet his new housemate. But Lough was just emerging from the steamy bathroom, a towel wrapped around his waist and a toothbrush poking from his mouth, when Faith hauled Rory upstairs.
‘What the fuck is going on?’ he bellowed.
For a moment Faith was dumbstruck. She was staring at his tattoos – although that was far too prosaic a word for the amazing body art that adorned at least half of his muscular biceps and torso from the collarbones down, intricate Maori patterns and symbols, arm bands and moko designs, almost all on just one side of his body. It was breathtaking.
But just at that moment Rory opened an eye, groaned and threw up on his feet, which wasn’t the greatest first impression.
‘Food poisoning!’ Faith apologised, dragging Rory into his room while Lough retreated back to the bathroom.
He could tell – and smell – that it wasn’t food poisoning. He hadn’t heard a lot about Rory Midwinter: in fact his very presence at Haydown had not even been brokered when Lough and Hugo first agreed any tenancy deal, but that was a long time ago now, of course. Lem was clearly not a fan, and during his brief catch up with his boss earlier had already let slip that Rory was on his last chance and had to stay on the wagon to remain at Haydown. From what Lough had just seen, Rory Midwinter was about to go as cold turkey as the Christmas leftovers in the Beauchamps’ fridge or he’d be out on his ear.
When Lough re-emerged from the bathroom, the girl was scrubbing the sick from the landing carpet.
‘I’m Faith.’ She pulled off a yellow rubber glove and held out her hand.
‘Lough.’ He took it in a vice-like grip that made her wince before stepping past her with a swish of towel and a waft of hot, showered male skin that even Faith noticed was scented with such uncompromising testosterone that he would make the
Top Gear
team look like the cast of
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
.
She checked on Rory, washed his face and lips as best she could, lined up his dextrose tablets and water, and kissed him on the freshly wiped cheek before backing quietly to the door. He still had the broken china horse under one arm, she noticed, hoping that he wouldn’t cut himself.
Just as she turned to reach for the door handle he called out her name.
‘Yes?’ She looked over her shoulder, but his eyes were still closed and seemed to be asleep. She turned wearily away again.
‘Thank you. I love you.’
Faith froze, knowing that drunks said that to everybody. Yet her heart sucked it in, pounding it joyfully through her ears.
‘I love you too. Now sober up and see if you remember that.’
Trailed by a hopeful, tuck-tummied Twitch, she slipped out and fed him a packet of stewing lamb from the fridge (no doubt put there by Tash who was under the illusion that Rory could cook like Jamie Oliver) and then headed outside, determinedly not screaming when she got tangled up with two feathery, freshly shot pheasant hanging from the porch – also, no doubt, a gift from Tash.
After checking on Whitey and the rest of Rory’s horses, she mixed their morning feeds and then drove back to Fosbourne Ducis through the drifts, hardly noticing as her car jack-knifed this way and that on the now icy roads.
She had never been more grateful to see Lime Tree Farm glowing a welcome, the Moncrieffs and their houseguests all curled up on threadbare sofas and sag-bags amid the piles of old horse magazines and schedules in the farm’s sitting room, warming their toes by the huge open log fire, swigging mulled wine and taking it in turns to have baths when the immersion had heated enough water. All had been hunting earlier in the day, forced to return when the weather changed. They were very pink-cheeked and jolly.
‘Get what you wanted for Christmas?’ Penny stretched out an arm in welcome, her bright berry eyes mischievous.
Faith paused in the doorway as she passed, suddenly finding a tired smile on her face. ‘I got something I’ve been dreaming of for years.’
‘Good for you.’ Penny waved her away cheerfully, already reaching for the phone to call Anke and report that her daughter was back safe.
In her chilly little attic room Faith changed out of her still-damp clothes into two pairs of pyjamas, two sweaters, several pairs of socks and a woolly hat before crawling into bed, her teeth chattering and her body starting to shake uncontrollably. Guessing Rory was shaking too, she sent him a message to remind him to drink water, before conking out to have a disturbing dream that Lemon was holding Rory down in a tattoo parlour, insisting that he have ‘I Love Sylva Frost’ inked across his forehead. The tattoo artist was Lough Strachan.