Riders

by Jilly Cooper

  “Poisonous,” he agreed. “He made Eichmann look like a fairy godmother.”

  “He’s so rich,” said Tory, “that lots of mothers are after him, but he’s only after one thing.”

  “What’s that?” said Jake, to embarrass her.

  Tory swallowed. “Well, bed and things. He’s awfully promiscuous.” She pronounced it promise-kew-us. “And he never answers invitations; just rolls up with his current girlfriend and leaves after half an hour if he’s bored. He let off thunderflashes at Queen Charlotte’s. Lady Surrey was livid.”

  “He obviously hasn’t changed,” said Jake. “I should have thought Harrow or the army might have knocked it out of him.”

  “I think it made him worse,” sighed Tory. “He gets a little gang of cronies round him and manages to be even nastier.”

  Nothing unites people like a good bitch. Jake let her rattle on as he put the bridle together again and hung it up. Then he went to reapply Africa’s poultice. Tory followed him, longingly watching the tender way his hands ran over the mare, caressing her polished shoulder and her sleek veined legs. Africa nuzzled him, breathing through her velvet nostrils with love and trust.

  “She’s so beautiful,” said Tory wistfully.

  The swelling had practically disappeared. Jake redid the bandages and readjusted her summer rug. He wished Tory would buzz off and leave him alone to nurse his misery. As he came out of the stable, shutting the door behind him, the rain stopped. He looked at her round, anxious face, her clean flopping hair and enormous bosom straining against the dark blue T-shirt. There was kindness in her eyes. He looked at his watch.

  “Let’s go and have a drink.”

  Tory looked at him stupidly.

  “A drink,” he repeated mockingly. “The pubs are open. You’re eighteen, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, of course I am. Gosh, thanks awfully.”

  As they walked to the pub, Jake noticed the hawthorns were rusting slightly but still smelt like fresh soap, and the wet, hot nettles gave off a heady blackcurrant scent. The cricketers were running out onto the pitch, anxious to get all the game they could into the last half hour.

  It was the first time Tory had been taken by a man into a pub; in fact, the first time a man had voluntarily asked her out at all. My first date, she thought excitedly. An old woman was buying Guinness and putting it in a black canvas bag. In the corner, two men with sun-reddened faces, their wives wearing white cardigans and lots of cheap jewelry, had decided to break their journey on the way back to London and were drinking Pimm’s. What on earth was she going to drink? She hated beer, her mother said gin and orange was common, and she knew Buck’s Fizz involved champagne, which was expensive. Her mind was a complete blank. She looked desperately around.

  “I’d like a Pimm’s,” she said.

  Jake sighed. He’d hoped she’d drink something cheap, like cider, or better still, orange juice. That meant he’d have to have beer instead of the double whisky he so badly needed.

  Tory sat down, the furry moquette of the bench seat scratching her thighs. The pub was cool and dark and restful inside; the side door had been fastened back, and outside was a little garden full of wallflowers and irises and pale pink clematis scrambling over some rustic poles.

  At first, the conversation was very stilted, but after a couple of Pimm’s, Tory’s tongue was loosened and suddenly, like a washing machine that’s been tugged open halfway through its cycle, everything came gushing out. What a disaster she was at dances, how she hated her finishing school, how ghastly Colonel Carter was, and how she couldn’t get on with her mother.

  “Mummy likes Fen, because she’s pretty and funny and because she’s so young, but I’m an embarrassment to her and living proof that she’s over forty-five.”

  “She made you go to all these dances because she’s looking for a husband,” said Jake. “D’you think she’s found one?”

  “Oh, I hope not,” said Tory. “He’s so phony. He was hanging a picture for Mummy the other day and hit his thumb with the hammer and,” she went even redder, “he said booger instead of bugger.”

  Jake hadn’t even brushed his hair before he came out, but it fell into place automatically. Tory ached to touch it. She felt as if someone had bewitched her, as if she was drowning and there was no coming up even for the third time. In a panic, she noticed he’d finished his drink. She’d been reading about Women’s Lib and someone called Germaine Greer. It was all right for women to buy drinks these days. She got a fiver out of her bag and handed it to Jake.

  “Go on,” she said with a giggle, “we’re all equal.”

  Jake shrugged and went to the bar. The cricketers had finished their game and flocked into the pub, and the barmaid was serving them with huge jugs of beer to pass around, so it was a few minutes before Jake got served. Tory sat in a haze of happiness; the longer he took, the longer they’d have. She looked at him slumped against the bar. He was so thin beside the beefy cricketers; she wished she could feed him up; she was sure he wouldn’t grumble about overdone beef and soggy potatoes. On the door near the Ladies’, a group of men were playing darts. Oh, dear, Cupid had scored a double top, straight into her heart.

  Jake returned with the drinks and a packet of crisps.

  “I don’t know why I’ve been telling you all these things,” said Tory. “You’re the one who needs cheering up. But you’re such a good listener.”

  “I get plenty of practice. When you’ve got to take stupid women on long rides you develop a listener’s face. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re listening.”

  Tory’s face fell. “I’m sorry,” she said humbly, starting to eat the crisps. “I didn’t mean to bore you.”

  “You haven’t,” he said irritably.

  “Who taught you to ride?” she asked.

  “My father. He put me on a pony almost before I could walk.”

  “How long ago did he die?” said Tory.

  “I don’t know that he’s dead.”

  Tory looked startled.

  “He was a gypsy. He met my mother when he was hop-picking on part-time work. Her father was the keeper at the big house. He tried to settle down with my mother and get a steady job, but it was like caging a lark. One day, the wanderlust became too strong, so he walked out when I was about eight years old.”

  “You must have missed him.”

  “I did.” The third pint of beer had loosened his tongue and the world seemed a more hospitable place.

  “So did my mother. She cried a lot, behind locked doors, and my grandfather went through all the photograph albums cutting my father’s picture out of the family groups.”

  “So you might suddenly bump into him one day?”

  “I doubt it,” said Jake, although he never passed a gypsy encampment or a fairground without having a look.

  “Was he very good-looking?”

  “My mother thought so. Two years after he left she waved me off to school and said she’d be in to cook the school dinner later. Then she put some cushions in front of the gas oven and that was that. All I remember is that all the masters and boys were particularly put out because we were supposed to be having treacle pudding that day.”

  He suddenly glared at Tory, whose eyes had filled with tears. What the hell was he telling the soppy cow all this for? He hadn’t talked about his mother for years.

  Tory couldn’t bear it. He’d lost his mother and his father and now he was going to lose Africa.

  “Do you think Bobby Cotterel will really sell her?” she asked.

  “ ’Course he will; doesn’t give a damn about her. He was grumbling the other day because Mrs. Wilton was threatening to put up the livery fees.”

  The pub was filling up now and becoming noisy and clamorous. Tory looked at an obscene, pink pile of sausages, greasily glinting under a cover on the bar. How lovely to see food and for once not feel hungry.

  “What will you do if Africa goes?”

  “Get another job.”

  “
Around here?”

  “No, up north probably. I doubt if Mrs. Wilton will give me a reference.”

  “Oh, you mustn’t,” said Tory, aghast. “I mean—it’s so cold up north. I must go to the loo.”

  She had difficulty negotiating the way to the Ladies’, cannoning off tables and cricketers like a baby elephant.

  Oh, hell, thought Jake, as she narrowly missed a flying dart, she’s pissed.

  Tory collapsed onto the loo and realized with the shock from the cold slab under her bottom that the seat cover was still down. She lifted it up. If I can manage to go on peeing for over twenty seconds, Jake will take me out again, she said to herself. By wriggling she made it last for twenty-two.

  When she found she had put her bag in the basin and washed her hands over it, she realized she was very tight. She couldn’t bear Jake to go away. She pressed her hot forehead against the mirror. “Gypsy Jake,” she murmured to herself.

  Then it became plain that she must buy Africa. She had the money. Jake could pay her back, or she could be the owner and he the jockey. She had visions of herself in a big primrose yellow hat, leading Africa into the winner’s enclosure with two mounted policemen on either side. She was a bit hazy about what went on in show jumping. She looked in the telephone directory, but there was no Bobby Cotterel. He must be ex-directory; but the Mayhews had had the house before Bobby Cotterel. She spent ages finding the M’s. They did come after L, didn’t they? Oh God, the page was missing, No, it was the first number on the next page. Sir Edward Mayhew, Bandit’s Court. Her hand was shaking so much she could hardly dial the number.

  “Hello,” said a brusque voice.

  She was so surprised she couldn’t speak.

  “If that’s burglars,” said the voice, “I’m here plus fifteen guard dogs and you can fuck off.”

  Tory gasped. “No, it isn’t,” she said. “Is that Mr. Cotterel?” She must speak very slowly and try to sound businesslike.

  Jake, having finished his glass of beer and ordered a large whisky, gazed at his reflection, framed by mahogany and surrounded by upside-down bottles in the mirror behind the bar. Totally without vanity, he looked in mirrors only for identity. He had spent too many Sundays at the children’s home, with scrubbed face and hair plastered down with water in the hope of charming some visitor into fostering or adopting him, to have any illusions about his attractiveness.

  “Come here often?” said the barmaid, who worked in the pub on Sunday to boost her wages and in the hope of finding a new boyfriend.

  “No,” said Jake.

  He glanced at his watch. Tory had been away for nearly a quarter of an hour now. He hoped the stupid cow hadn’t passed out. He’d need a forklift truck to carry her home. He went out to look for her. She was standing by the telephone in the passage with her shoes off.

  “That’s fine,” she was saying in a careful voice.

  If Bobby Cotterel had not come back a week early from the South of France because it was so expensive, and been promptly faced with a large income-tax bill, he might not have been in such a receptive mood. Africa troubled his conscience, like his daughter’s guinea pig, whose cage, now she’d gone back to boarding school, needed cleaning out. He was not an unkind man. This girl sounded a “gent,” and was so anxious to buy Africa for four times the price he’d paid for her, and he wouldn’t have to pay any commission to Mrs. Wilton.

  “The livery fee’s paid up for another three weeks,” he said.

  “I’ll take that over,” said Tory.

  “No, I’ll be happy to stand it to you, darling.”

  “Can we come round and give you the check now?”

  “Of course. Come and have a drink, but for Christ’s sake don’t tell anyone I’m back.”

  Tory had had her first date, and been called darling and invited for a drink by Bobby Cotterel.

  She turned towards Jake with shining eyes.

  If she lost a couple of hundredweight, she’d be quite pretty, he thought sourly. What the hell had she got to look so cheerful about?

  “You okay?”

  “Wonderful. I’ve just bought Africa.”

  “Whatever for? You don’t like horses.”

  “For you, of course. You can pay me back slowly, a pound a week, or we can go into partnership. I’ll own her, you can ride her.”

  A dull red flush had spread across Jake’s face.

  “You’re crazy. How much did you pay?”

  “I offered eight hundred and he accepted. He’s just had a bill for his income tax. I said we’d take the check around now, before Mrs. Wilton starts blabbing about Sir William and Malise Gordon.”

  “Have you got that amount in the bank?”

  “Oh, yes, I got £5,000 on my birthday, and lots of shares.”

  “Your mother’ll bust a gut.”

  “Hooray,” said Tory.

  “She’ll say I got you plastered.”

  “No, you did not. I did it all off my own bat, like those cricketers in the bar.”

  She cannoned off a hatstand as she went out of the door.

  Jake was finding it impossible to clamber out of the pit of despair so quickly. He might at least say thank you, thought Tory.

  They walked to Bobby Cotterel’s house and handed over the check. Armed with a receipt, he walked her home, both of them following the white lines in the middle of the road. Half-shafts of moonlight found their way through the beech trees on either side of the road, shimmering on their dark gray-green trunks. Fortunately the house was still dark.

  “Oh good,” said Tory, “I can put back Mummy’s mac before she finds out it’s missing. I’m going to London tomorrow. I’ve got two awful drinks’ parties, then a dance on Wednesday, but I’ll be home on Thursday. Mummy and Colonel Carter are going out to dinner. I’ve got to babysit. Perhaps you could come around, after they’ve gone out, and we can decide what to do.”

  “I think it may be a bit more problematical than that,” said Jake.

  He took the key, opened the door for her, and turned on the hall light. Oh God, thought Tory miserably, there was Fen’s whip lying on the hall table, beside a wilting bowl of pink peonies. Jake turned to her, a slight smile touching his lips. Was it contempt, or pity, or mockery?

  “Thank you very much,” he said, and was gone.

  Fighting back her disappointment that he hadn’t attempted to kiss her, Tory then reflected that she would probably have tasted of onion-flavored crisps.

  5

  The drinks’ parties on Monday and Tuesday were bad enough for Tory. But the dance on Wednesday was a nightmare. At the dinner party beforehand, some sadist had seated her next to Rupert Campbell-Black. On his right was a ravishing girl named Melanie Potter, whom all the girls were absolutely furious about. Melanie had upstaged everyone by turning up, several weeks after the season began, with a suntan acquired from a month in the Bahamas.

  Rupert had arrived late, parking his filthy Rolls-Royce, with the blacked-out windows, across the pavement. He then demanded tomato ketchup in the middle of dinner, and proceeded to drench his sea trout with it, which everyone except his hostess and Tory thought wildly funny. Naturally he’d ignored Tory all the way through dinner. But there was something menacing about that broad black back and beautifully shaped blond head, a totally deceptive languor concealing the rampant sexuality. She wondered what he would have done if she’d tapped him on the shoulder and told him she was the owner of an £800 horse.

  Then they went on to the dance and she somehow found herself piled into Rupert’s Rolls-Royce, driving through the laburnumand lilac-lined streets of Chelsea. She had to sit on some young boy’s knee, trying to put her feet on the ground and all her weight on them. But she still heard him complaining to Rupert afterwards that his legs were completely numb and about to drop off.

  The hostess was kind, but too distraught about gate-crashers to introduce Tory to more than two young men, who both, as usual, danced one dance, then led her back and propped her against a pillar l
ike an old umbrella, pretending they were just off to get her a drink or had to dance with their hostess. Thinking about Jake nonstop didn’t insulate her from the misery of it all. It made it almost worse. Obviously it was impossible that he should ever care for her. If no one else wanted her, why should he? Feeling about as desirable as a Christmas tree on Twelfth Night, she was sitting by herself at the edge of the ballroom when a handsome boy sauntered towards her. Reprieve at last.

  “Excuse me,” he said.

  “Oh, yes, please,” said Tory.

  “If no one’s using this,” he said, “could I possibly borrow it?” and, picking up the chair beside her, he carried it back across the room and sat down on the edge of the yelling group around Rupert Campbell-Black. As soon as they got to the dance, Rupert had abandoned his dinner party and, taking Melanie, had gone off to get drunk with his inseparable chum, Billy Lloyd-Foxe, who was in another party. Now he was sitting, cigar drooping out of his handsome, curling mouth, wearing Melanie’s feather boa, while she sat on his knee, shrieking with laughter, with the pink rose from his buttonhole behind her ear.

  Later Billy Lloyd-Foxe passed Tory on the way to the lavatory and on the way back, struck by conscience, asked her to dance. She liked Billy; everyone did; she liked his turned-down eyes and his broken nose and his air of life being a little bit too much for him. But everything was spoilt when Rupert and Melanie got onto the floor: Rupert, his blue eyes glittering, swinging Melanie’s boa round like the pantomime cat’s tail, had danced around behind Tory’s back, pulling faces and puffing out his cheeks to look fat like Tory and make Billy laugh.

  Tory escaped to the loo, shaking. She found her dinner party hostess’s daughter repairing her makeup and chuntering with a couple of friends over the effrontery of Melanie Potter.

  “Her mother did it on purpose. What chance have any of us got against a suntan like that? She turned up at the Patelys’ drinks’ party wearing jeans. Lady Surrey was absolutely livid.”

  At that moment Melanie Potter walked in and went over to the mirror, where she examined a huge love bite on her shoulder and tried to cover it with powder.