Kiss and Tell (86 page)

As her darling Jules had foretold, Pete was the real deal, with his manic laugh and globe-trotting life. He was edgy rather than twitchy, a truly dangerous man rather than a bad boy, and head-spinningly untrustworthy. While Dillon’s testosterone-packed smile was legend, his father didn’t need to smile to ooze sex appeal.

But Pete was not the member of the Rafferty family driving the groom’s side of the wedding train; that was his young wife Indigo, who played for the cameras quite brilliantly. She might guard the castle gates very closely when her husband was around, but he was most often in Ireland these days, and while he was away Indigo had made it her mission to cultivate her stepson’s fantasy fiancée, for whom she had played matchmaker in the first place. She was a faultless stage manager, granting the tabloids limited but enticing telephoto opportunities, along with Sylva’s film crew, who were
gracefully but firmly manipulated along with their subject.

It had started with an open invitation for Sylva and her family to use the Abbey’s new indoor pool and fitness rooms, and to ride the horses kept there. A series of shopping trips followed, along with pampering sessions at Eastlode Park, all accompanied by their many children, the nannies and the oleaginous child psychologist Dong. Most recently, Sylva had found herself joining Indigo on a succession of more intimate girls’ lunches. Mama insisted Sylva go along, maintaining that the friendship could prove as beneficial to her as Posh’s was to Mrs Cruise. The paparazzi certainly chased these photo opportunities eagerly, and Sylva was riding high IFOJ as a result of the alliance, but she was growing tired of the headlines that claimed she was best friends with her future mother-in-law when she barely knew her future husband.

Sylva found Dong’s strange, watchful presence an impediment to the natural flow of conversation, and she thought he was a toadying sham, but Indigo trusted him implicitly. Just five feet to her six, they were an incongruous pair, but they seemed devoted to one another. Both apparently loved the sound of his quasi-Californian drawl.

‘Dillon is your classic madonna–whore complex, just like his father,’ he told them over lunch of clear soup and noodle toast at Eastlode Park. ‘Distant mother, now deceased, making him put some women on a pedestal – the sort he perceives as a mother or a wife, almost desexualising them – while other women he sees as no more than depositories for his jizz.’

‘And which category are you suggesting I fall into?’ Sylva demanded.

‘Hard to tell.’ He eyed up her breasts. ‘Superficially whore, because that is your public image, but you are also a mother, of course.’

‘What exactly are your qualifications?’ Sylva fumed, but Dong was impervious to any attack.

Her friendship with Indigo was as brittle as her love affair with Dillon, and both women were well aware that theirs was a careful game of chess being played out in front of the full media glare, with the kings held back for now. Sylva appreciated the challenge of taking on a grand master, at least. By contrast, what she had with Dillon felt like an online chess quickie in which both players had walked away
from their keyboards. Their names remained up on screen, but they had no control over their pieces and no real care. Each just wanted to wait for the other to give up first and then log off.

For Mama’s sake, Sylva tried very hard to stay in play for the Beauchamps’ party. It was important that she and Dillon were seen out in public together soon. And she was surprised to find herself looking forward to seeing eventing’s premier couple again; they provided the rare combination of a husband she found attractive and a wife she genuinely liked. That Sylva had once tried to poach one from the other didn’t bother her now that she had Dillon caught in a snare. She could trust herself to behave impeccably. Surely taking him back to that beautiful house where they had first flirted over a champagne shooting lunch would give the lacklustre romance a little fizz at last?

She had her dark hair extensions re-applied, her natural blonde roots touched up to match and her lips plumped in anticipation, then enjoyed a lengthy Bond Street shopping trip with Indigo, who talked her into a very sexy Galliano smock matched with thigh-high suede boots instead of the more modest, retro Chloé cocktail dress she’d been favouring. ‘Dillon will love this.’

‘Are you sure?’ Sylva turned round and the smock’s diaphanous fabric swirled, revealing the first tawny curve of her Fake-Baked buttocks. ‘They’re quite a conservative crowd, darlink.’

‘Dillon will
love
it, won’t he Dong?’ Indigo consulted her oracle, who was sitting in a plush velvet chair in the corner of the dressing room, sipping green tea.

He peered over his thick-rimmed spectacles. ‘His father would love certainly it. Like son like father.’ He thickened his Sino-American accent to make the Spoonerism sound like a Confucian proverb.

‘There you go.’ Indigo rested her case.

Sylva opened her mouth, about to protest that Dillon wasn’t like Pete at all and hardly had the same taste, but then she looked at her reflection again and changed her mind. The dress did look sensational.

‘It would work better with blonde hair.’ Indigo was studying her critically.

Their eyes met in the mirror.

‘I’ll go blonde again for the wedding,’ Sylva said evenly.

They shared half-smiles, barely perceptible amid the Botox-frozen perfection of their faces.

Watching them, Dong steepled his manicured hands to his nose and whispered, ‘The dye is cast.’

Sylva wasn’t sure what he meant, especially when, two days later, Dillon phoned to say that Berry was no better and Fawn’s filming had been extended by a week so he couldn’t get back in time for the party. Trying to sound serene, Sylva insisted that was fine and she would go alone – or, better still, take her new best friend Indigo with her.

‘Good luck.’ Dillon’s laughter inflamed her bottled anger. ‘My stepmother is allergic to horses.’

‘But she has a dozen at the Abbey.’

‘One in every colour, yes. She collects them, like children. She gets somebody else to handle them, just as she does the children.’

Indigo’s reaction to Sylva’s request that she be her plus-one bore this out. ‘Who are these people?’ she demanded as they bobbed in the Abbey pool, surrounded by nannies and children as usual.

‘Lovely sporting heroes.’

‘I am not interested in them,’ Indigo coolly dismissed. ‘And I am busy. Pete will be here next weekend.’

Sylva found herself perking up. Maybe she would give the party a miss too. She wanted to try a few more of the Abbey’s horses for size for a start.

But Indigo was moving her chess pieces with consummate skill. ‘You must go to America to see Dillon,’ she insisted, swimming around Sylva like a crocodile. ‘He needs to know you care. His father will approve.’

‘Don’t be silly, darlink.’ Sylva made it to the steps and clambered out to consult her jewelled phone. ‘I am working all this week and next promoting my new book. If I fly out on Friday night, I would only have time to meet him for a few hours before flying home.’

‘So romantic.’ Climbing out of the pool, Indigo wrapped herself in a fluffy robe and glanced at Dong, still in his suit on a sunlounger, smiling his enigmatic guru smile. ‘Book a great restaurant. Wear your new dress. The press will go wild. Pete can read all about it in the Sunday papers here; he loves to catch up with his son that way.’

As soon as Sylva got back to Le Petit Château, Mama backed up Indigo’s entreaty with the heavy artillery. ‘I’ll get Pauline to book your
flights. You will take the pretty rings as a peace offering,
ma
i
ka
. This is a much better surprise for a man than a boring party.’

Sulkily, Sylva acquiesced.

Chapter 57

Five days before the best-planned party in eventing history, Sophia phoned Tash in an apoplectic fit. ‘
Why
have you cancelled the caterers?’

‘I haven’t,’ she said in surprise.

‘Marysia took the call over a fortnight ago, she tells me –
and
got confirmation from you in writing. Now they’ve got another booking. We’ll never get another lot at this short notice, not for this number.’

‘We can try,’ Tash urged, wondering who on earth could have forged the letter, and why.

The next day, while Sophia was ringing desperately around her contacts to secure a new caterer, calls and messages started to come through on Tash’s BlackBerry, commiserating for the family loss.

It didn’t take a great deal of detective work to discover that almost half the guest list had been emailed from her phone to say that the party had been cancelled.

‘I didn’t send it!’ Tash promised her sister, knowing that she left the thing all over the place at the yard and competitions, along with a piece of paper tucked into the case with the password and instructions because she kept forgetting how to work it. Anybody could have used it.

‘Now we have no choice but to pull the plug,’ Sophia told her in another phone call, which Tash had to take in the downstairs loo to avoid being overheard by an increasingly suspicious Hugo. ‘It’s in disarray and I will
not
have my reputation tarnished. I’ll discreetly let all the guests know and ask them to all keep schtum so we can rearrange something for a later date. At least Hugo has no idea what’s gone wrong. Just do something low-key instead.’

Working in the outside arena in brilliant spring sunshine later that afternoon, Tash spotted Lough riding across the road towards the
downs track and decided to cool off River by joining him as far as the start of the first steep climb. This was one guest not on Sophia’s list who Tash wanted to tell personally, although she had always suspected he wouldn’t come.

Crows were rasping overhead, wood pigeons cooing and amorous hedge birds tweeting at one another closer by as River’s mile-eating walk meant she quickly caught up with her stablemate, hooves quiet on the ridge of green that ran between the still-muddy wheel ruts. To either side of those, the first shoots of nettles and hogweed were starting to uncurl in the verges.

Lough didn’t look round, but he knew she was there because he held up a hand to keep her from talking and then pointed across the pasture field to their left. There, a family of fallow deer were watching them, much closer than they would have ever dared stray had the riders been on foot. Tash could clearly see the pregnant bellies of the does, their limpid eyes watchful.

‘Hugo’s father kept a herd on the parkland – it was all the rage in his day,’ she whispered once they had passed by. ‘But lots escaped in the late seventies and now there are breeding herds all over the downs.’

‘Good for them,’ he murmured. ‘Wild animals should run free, not be a rich man’s pretty playthings.’

‘The local poachers certainly like it,’ she sighed, glancing over her shoulder. ‘They eat a lot of prime venison round here. Lough, there’s been a horrible mix-up.’ She told him about the sabotaged party.

He gave no reaction to the news.

‘It has to be deliberate, don’t you think?’ Tash asked.

‘Why are you telling me about it?’

‘I thought you might know something.’

At last he looked across at her and gave a surprised laugh. ‘You mean, you think I might be behind it?’

‘No!’ she gulped. ‘I just …’ She looked away, embarrassed.

‘I’m not your husband’s greatest fan, but I wouldn’t do something like that, Tash. What would be the point? I was going to come.’

‘You were?’

‘Sure.’

They’d pulled up by the downs gate. Ahead, the track sloped sharply upwards and the horses traditionally cantered or galloped it.
River was already jogging, despite the hour’s work she’d already had. She was almost competition fit now and raring to go.

Reaching for the huntsman’s latch and swinging the gate open for her, Lough made way for her to pass.

‘I should go back,’ she said, reluctantly looking at her watch.

‘You won’t get that horse fit enough for a four-star in the school,’ he shrugged.

Knowing he was right, Tash guessed she could spare another half hour. Hugo was away coaching clients until four. Taking the challenge, she went through the gate and just about held on to River until Lough had shut it, then they were off, pounding along the parallel soft ruts up the steep flank of the downs, wind chilling their faces and ears, rhythmic hoof-falls, snorts and clanking bridlework creating a percussive beat. Tash felt no fear, just pure exhilaration. In a moment of showmanship she crouched higher over River’s neck and pushed for a fast finish, the mare easily out-racing Lough’s little horse.