by Jilly Cooper
“Hear you’re in the doghouse,” said Alison, the Irish girl who helped out at weekends. “Old Ma Wilton’s hopping. I knew she’d catch you out sooner or later.”
Jake didn’t answer; he was putting a poultice on Africa. He’d already rubbed one of his gypsy medicines (ointment made from marshmallow flowers) gently into her leg. He was finally sweeping up at about nine-thirty, when Mrs. Wilton turned up. Her faced looked unappetizingly magenta in the naked lightbulb of the tackroom and he could smell whisky on her breath.
“I want to talk to you, Jake,” she said, speaking slowly to show she was quite sober. “Do you realize you’ve ruined the reputation of Brook Farm Riding School?”
“What reputation?” said Jake. “You can’t descend from the basement.”
“Don’t be cheeky. No need to answer back.”
Jake swept up the straw on the floor. Phrases like “absolute shambles,” “endangering best horse in the yard,” and “duty to our young pupils” flowed over his head. His face had taken on an almost Asiatic aloofness.
Why can’t he ever show any contrition? thought Mrs. Wilton. If he apologized just once it would make a difference.
The diatribe continued: “Taking advantage,” “wonder who’s employing whom,” “use my house as an hotel,” “after all I’ve done for you.” Jake mimicked her under his breath.
Oh, God, she was getting very close now; he hoped she wasn’t going to start anything.
“I’m very disappointed in you, Jake,” she went on. “I really trusted you, gave you some responsibility and you just kick me in the teeth. Yet I still feel deep down that you really like me.” For a second her voice was almost obscenely conciliatory.
“No, I don’t,” Jake said flatly. “Deep down it’s much worse.”
Mrs. Wilton caught her breath. Next minute, vindictiveness was warming her blood. She played her trump card. “You’d better get Africa’s leg better; she won’t be with us much longer.”
Jake looked up, eyes narrowed.
That jolted him, she thought.
“Sir William’s just rung. I thought he was going to raise hell about Lady Dorothy’s garden, but he only wanted to know how Africa was and if we’d be interested in selling. He wants her for his youngest son to hunt next season. She might do very well with a decent rider on her back.”
Turning, she walked unsteadily out of the tackroom. Jake felt suddenly exhausted, near to tears, overwhelmed with black despair.
Going out of the tackroom, he walked down past the loose boxes until he came to Africa. Even though she was feeding, she left her manger and hobbled over to him, whickering with joy, nuzzling at his pockets. He put his arms round her neck and she laid her head against his cheek. Soppy old thing; she’d stay like that for hours, breathing softly while he scratched her behind the ears.
In his mind, he jumped that beautiful first round again, reliving that wonderful, amazing last jump. What a star she was; he couldn’t give her up, and he knew more than ever that the only thing he could ever be in this world was a show jumper. Working for Mrs. Wilton for over a year, he was constantly aware of time running past, time wasted. He had left the orphanage at eighteen and spent two years in a racing stable. It was there he made the discovery that difficult horses became easy when he rode them, and that he could communicate with them as he never could with people. Even having his first girl, and subsequently others, wasn’t nearly as exciting as that sudden breakthrough when a horse that had been written off as hopeless became responsive under his touch. Finally there was the joy, over the past months, of discovering Africa and slowly realizing how good she was. It was worth putting up with the horrible little girls and their frightful mothers. No mother had ever protected and fussed over him like they did, he thought bitterly.
And now he’d blown it; it was only a matter of time before Mrs. Wilton sacked him. He supposed he could get another job as a groom, but not as a rider. Africa nuzzled him gently.
I’m still here, she seemed to say.
“But not for much longer,” sighed Jake, “although I’ll fight like a bugger to keep you.”
Tory Maxwell lay on her bed, bitterly ashamed of herself for eating three helpings of strawberries and cream. She looked around her extremely tidy bedroom and wished she had a photograph of Jake. The scent of lilac and lilies of the valley kept drifting in from outside, as insistently he kept drifting into her thoughts. Not that he had noticed her. His eyes had flickered over her as a man flips past the woman’s fashion page in his daily paper, knowing it has nothing to interest him.
Her mother had gone out with that monstrous murderer, Colonel Carter. After what he’d done to Jake, Tory couldn’t bring herself even to talk to him. How could her mother sleep with him? She imagined him climbing on top of her like an ancient dinosaur.
Looking in the mirror, she tried on a different colored lipstick and put her hands over the sides of her round face. If she were thinner, she might just be pretty. Out of the window, against a brilliant, drained sapphire sky, she could see the sliver of a pale new moon, followed by a little star. Just like me following Jake, she thought.
“Oh, please,” she prayed, “give me Jake Lovell, and then I could buy him all the horses he wants.”
Colonel Carter and Mrs. Maxwell were on their third gin and tonic in the bar of the Grand Hotel, Guildford. They had pulled Malise and Jake to shreds, had a good bitch about Sir William and Lady Dorothy, and were in a mood of great mutual self-congratulation about having found each other.
“You’re looking particularly lovely tonight,” said Colonel Carter.
He always says that, thought Molly, but then perhaps it’s true. She caught sight of her glossy reflection in the rose-tinted bar mirror. What should she wear to get married in? Perhaps oyster silk with a matching hat; it couldn’t be the same thing she wore to Tory’s party.
In future the colonel could cope with all her bills.
In the corner, the pianist, who had unnaturally vermilion hair, was playing “Someone to Watch Over Me.”
“Just a little lamb that’s lost in the wood,” sang the colonel.
It was nice to take an attractive woman out again. He had always been unfaithful to Jennifer, his wife, but it had been a shock when she died. She’d done everything for him.
“I was very lonely when Jennifer died,” he said.
“I was very lonely when Alastair died,” said Molly. No reason to add that she and Alastair had been divorced for six years before he was killed in that car crash. It was so much more romantic to be a widow than a divorcée.
The waiter presented them with a huge menu, which they studied with too much attention (Colonel Carter in particular noting the prices) for people in love.
“I’m glad I stood up to that bastard, Gordon,” he said.
“I wish I knew where I’d gone wrong with Tory,” said Molly Maxwell.
In the bedroom down the passage from Tory’s lay Fen. She’d been sent to bed in disgrace for cheeking Colonel Carter about frightening Africa with his twenty-five pounders. Her bed was full of biscuit crumbs and she was reading The Maltese Cat for the hundredth time with a flashlight. She turned the flashlight on her rosettes, white and blue, then looking out of the window, caught sight of the new moon.
“Make me the greatest show jumper in the world,” she wished.
4
Sunday started badly for Tory Maxwell. Unable to sleep, she had heard the floorboards outside her room creaking as the colonel crept out at dawn. But he was back by twelve-thirty, spruced up in clean clothes, mustache brushed, and bearing a bottle of gin, and he and Molly Maxwell sat out on the terrace drinking dry martinis while Tory cooked the lunch.
“As I have to fork out so much for this cookery and typing course,” said Molly, “I might as well make use of her.”
“What a charming garden,” said the colonel.
“The lawn needs mowing,” hinted Molly Maxwell. “But I seem to have so little time this summer.”
/> The white sauce for the cauliflower went lumpy because Tory was trying, at the same time, to read a piece in one of the color supplements on deb’s delights. The piece included a profile of Rupert Campbell-Black. After three years in the Blues, he was now too busy making a name for himself as a show jumper to go to many deb parties, but whenever he did he caused a rumpus.
“You can say that again,” sighed Tory, adding more milk to the sauce. She had been a victim of Rupert’s bitchy asides on numerous occasions. He had got that blank stare of complete indifference to perfection. The sight of his cold, arrogant face looking out at her made her feel quite sick. Particularly as her mother thought he was absolutely charming and kept nagging Tory to ring him up and make sure he’d got the invitation and was coming to Tory’s drinks’ party.
Tory was dreading the party. She didn’t think anyone would come and she was sensitive enough to realize that, although some of the fathers and the young men flirted with her mother, the mothers thought her pushy and jumped up.
At one-thirty, although Fen still wasn’t back from the stables, they started lunch. Colonel Carter carved. Conditioned by wartime austerity, he cut very thin slices. Tory noticed he touched her mother’s hand when he passed her a plate. She knew they found her presence a strain. Her mother found fault with everything. The white sauce was too lumpy and thin, the meat overdone, and the roast potatoes soggy. Molly, who wanted the colonel to think she had an appetite like a sparrow, pushed hers to the side of her plate.
“I don’t mean to nag,” she said to Tory, “but one day you’ll get married and have to cook for some chap, and he’ll expect decent grub.”
Some hope, thought Tory. As she cleared away in an excess of misery, she ate the two roast potatoes her mother had rejected and two more left in the dish. When her mother came in, weighed down by the gravy boat, as an excuse to powder her nose in the kitchen mirror, Tory had to swallow frantically.
Halfway through the pudding, when Molly was grumbling that the meringue was just like toffee, Fen walked in with a filthy face and hands and the same shirt she’d been wearing the day before, so triggering off a storm of reproof which Fen accepted with equanimity. The colonel droned on about bridge.
“Jolly good roast potatoes,” said Fen. “Are there any more?”
“There were two in the dish,” said Molly.
Tory blushed. “I threw them away.”
“I bet you ate them,” snapped Molly. “Really, Tory. D’you want to look like a house for your drinks party?”
“Did you have a good ride, Fenella?” asked Colonel Carter.
“Not very,” said Fen. “Jake was in a foul temper.”
“Nothing new,” said Molly. “Would you like some Stilton, Bernard?”
“Hardly surprising,” said Fen, glaring at Colonel Carter. “Africa might have been ruined for life.”
“Shut up,” snapped her mother.
“Malise Gordon dropped in to see if Africa was all right, but Jake says both he and Sir William are after her. It’s a rotten shame. Jake’s worked so hard on her; no one gets her going better than he does. And he’s got the most awful lot to take out this afternoon—fat grown-ups who can’t ride, and in this heat, they’ve booked for a whole two hours. I’m going back to help him after lunch.”
“You are not,” said Molly Maxwell firmly. “You spend too much time hanging round that place. You’re coming out to eat with the Braithwaites.”
“Whatever for?” wailed Fen.
“Because they asked us.”
“Tory as well?”
“No. Tory’s got to do her homework and write her thank-you letters.”
“It’s not fair. I loathe Melanie Braithwaite. She’s a drip and she’s not my age.”
Molly Maxwell insisted on taking Fen with them, as otherwise she would have had to go back to the colonel’s house on the way home and spend an hour in bed with him. That was the tiresome thing about men, she thought. They always wanted bed all the time and she so much preferred the flirting and the wining and dining.
Tory watched Fen, scrubbed and mutinous in a new dress, being dragged off to the Braithwaites. She then wrote five thank-you letters in her round, careful hand, and then accepted four more invitations. Being fat and plain and no threat to prettier girls, and because many of the debs’ mothers had known and liked her father, she was asked to quite a lot of parties. Each one spelled disaster.
I’m like a terrible first night, but first nights are lucky enough to fold, while I have to flop on forever, she said to herself.
Letters finished, she started on her homework, gazing at a page of shorthand until the heavy and light lines swam before her eyes.
“We are in receipt of your favor, yours faithfully, yours truly,” she wrote.
Oh, she’d be faithful and true to Jake. Then she wrote “Jake” in shorthand, the dark backward sloping J and light horizontal K on the line, with two little commas underneath to show it was a proper name. Then she wrote “Lovell”; it was the same sign as Lovely. He was lovely, too. She tried to visualize his face, but she could only picture his body and a blur. She felt impossibly restless. The telephone interrupted her daydreams; perhaps by a miracle it might be him, but it was only her mother saying that the Braithwaites wanted to play bridge and had pressed them to stay on for an early supper, so they’d be home at about ten, and could Tory do Fen’s packed lunch and see that she had a clean tunic and leotard for tomorrow? Poor trapped Fen, thought Tory.
The evening stretched ahead of her. Jake would be back from his ride now and settling the horses. The longing became too much for her. She’d nip down to the stables on the excuse that Fen might have left her whip behind.
Quickly, she washed her hair. Her mother liked it drawn back from her forehead, but today she was jolly well going to let it flop loose. If only she had a slimming black dress, but her mother said she was too young and anyway she couldn’t go down to the stables dressed as though for a funeral. Ponchos were fashionable; as if they covered all the spare tires; but when they slid down on the shoulders they showed her bra straps, and if she didn’t wear a bra she flopped all over the place. If only she had a waist, she could wear a long skirt to cover her fat legs, but it made her look like a barrel. In the end she gave up and wore a navy blue T-shirt outside her jeans. Her hand was shaking so much she couldn’t do up the clasp of her pearls, so she left them off. In a fit of loathing, she drenched herself in her mother’s scent and, as it was drizzling slightly, borrowed her mother’s white trench coat, with the belt trendily done up at the back. It didn’t matter if it didn’t meet over her bust.
As she passed the church, people were coming out of Evensong, putting up umbrellas. On the village green, cricketers huddled disconsolately into the pavilion, hoping the apricot glow on the horizon meant that the rain was about to stop and they could finish their game.
The Brook Farm Riding School tackroom was overcrowded but very tidy—saddles and bridles occupying one wall, food bins another, and medicines, principally Jake’s gypsy remedies, yet another. Room had also been found for a few faded rosettes and old calendars. The order book was open. Sunday, full of bookings, had been crossed off. Monday was comparatively empty, except for a group of children who wanted to ride after school. Jake sat on a rickety chair, cleaning a bridle and reading the color supplement piece on Rupert Campbell-Black. The bastard was obviously going to make it in show jumping, just when Jake’s world seemed to be falling apart, throwing him straight down to the bottom of the ladder, without even being within clutching distance of the first rung. The two-hour ride had really taken it out of him; his head was pounding and every muscle in his body felt bruised by the fall yesterday.
After a night’s rest and Jake’s marshmallow ointment, Africa’s lameness had nearly gone. Mrs. Wilton had gloatingly told him of Malise’s interest that morning and Sir William had just rung again. No one could do anything about it, as Bobby Cotterel was in France till the end of the week, but it was only a ma
tter of time.
He heard a step and, looking up through the dusty cobwebbed window, saw Fen’s fat sister approaching. That was all he needed. Now she was stopping to comb her hair. Then her great blushing face, like a dutch cheese, appeared round the door.
“Yes?” he said bleakly.
“Did, I mean, I was wondering,” she stammered, “if Fen left her whip here?” The feebleness of the excuse made her blush even more. “It was—er—one our grandmother—gave her for Christmas, so she was worried.”
“I haven’t seen it. She’s so scatty, she probably dropped it on the way home.”
How pinched and dark under the eyes he looked, thought Tory, the red check shirt and the black hair only emphasizing his pallor. Sympathy overcame her shyness. “I’m so sorry about people wanting to buy Africa. Fen told me.”
Jake nodded. She shifted from one foot to another and Jake was enveloped in a waft of Molly’s scent, which did not evoke happy memories.
“Is her leg better?”
“She’s all right.”
Why was she hanging round like a great blancmange? Getting up, he ran the sponge under the tap and plunged it into the saddle soap, adding: “The whip—it isn’t here.”
Tory gazed at her feet, twisting a button on Mrs. Maxwell’s mac. Then she noticed what he was reading.
“Oh, there’s Rupert Campbell-Black. Horrible man.”
Jake looked up, slightly more accommodating. Tory blushed again.
“I’m sorry. Is he a friend of yours?”
There was a pause.
“I hate his guts,” said Jake.
“Oh, so do I,” said Tory. “He’s so vicious and contemptuous and, well, bloody-minded. How did you come across him?”
“We were at school together.”
Tory looked amazed.
“Prep school,” added Jake. “I was a day boy. Mum was the cook, so the headmaster let me in free.”
“Oh, goodness, he must have been an absolutely poisonous small boy.”
Taking a nail, Jake pushed out the saddle soap that had got stuck in the cheek-strap holes.
