Riders

by Jilly Cooper

  A second later, Helen had rammed the Porsche into the car in front with a sickening crunch. She banged her head hard, and the bonnet of the car just buckled up like the face of a bulldog in a cartoon film.

  “Why don’t you look where you’re going?” yelled the driver of the car in front. He found Helen crying hysterically, trying to collect together the scattered photographs before anyone else could see them.

  Rupert flew in from Rotterdam around six the following evening, tired but once again victorious. He’d left the grooms to bring back the horses. Phillips met him at the airport in Helen’s Mini and gleefully told him that Mrs. Campbell-Black had pranged the Porsche the previous afternoon. Serve the bastard right, he thought, as he saw Rupert’s look of fury. Shouldn’t go down in the woods with Podge.

  Helen walked up and down her bedroom, wondering how the hell to tackle Rupert. By some miracle, in four years of marriage, she’d never actually caught him being unfaithful. She’d suspected other women—Marion, Janey, Grania Pringle, several of Rupert’s exes, but never in a million years Podge, with her fat legs, her cockney accent, and her plain homely face. It had come as a terrible, terrible shock. Helen couldn’t stop shaking. It was so revolting, too, taking photographs of her in one of their own fields, where anyone might have walked past. She wished she had a girlfriend to pour her heart out to, but Janey was still on the way back from Rotterdam with Billy, and, anyway, Janey wasn’t safe. She thought of ringing Hilary, but Hilary would just say, “I told you so.” She still had a blinding headache from yesterday’s shunt in the Porsche, and a huge bruise on her forehead beneath her hair.

  The usual frantic barking told her Rupert was home. For once, instead of going to the stables, he came straight upstairs into the bedroom.

  “I hear you pranged my car. Are you all right?”

  “Perfectly, thank you.” Helen gazed out of the window, quivering with animosity, refusing to look around.

  “How the hell did it happen?”

  “I was in a jam, looking at some of your photographs just back from the drugstore.” She swung around, handing him the folders. “They’re kind of interesting. Have a look.”

  Casually Rupert picked them up. When he was feeling trapped, his eyes seemed to go a darker, more opaque, shade of blue and lose all their sparkle.

  “I thought I’d taken some nice ones of Marcus. That’s good, and so’s that, and there’s a gorgeous one of Badger, and Arcy. Christ, he’s a good-looking horse. Pity you shut your eyes in that one.” He gave a low whistle. “Who’s that?”

  “You know perfectly well,” screamed Helen. “It’s that slut, Podge.”

  “Phillips must have borrowed my camera. God, she’s got quite a shape on her.”

  “It was you who took them,” hissed Helen, “and your hand is remarkably steady, which is more than can be said for Podge’s when she took photos of you.”

  Rupert flipped through the photographs, playing for time.

  “Who’s that headless chap? Got a cock like the post office tower.”

  “It’s yours,” said Helen in a choked voice, “and I guess you can’t deny the fact that the next one is you.”

  “I’m afraid it is,” said Rupert. Then he committed the cardinal sin of starting to laugh.

  Helen lost her temper. “How dare you go to bed with her!”

  “Who says I’ve been to bed with her?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. And I suppose Janey and Billy know all about it. How could you, how could you?”

  Rupert scratched his ear, looking at her meditatively. “Do you really want to know?” he said softly.

  “Yes, I bloody well do.”

  “I fucked her because she was at home when I got back, and she wanted me.”

  Helen flinched.

  “And she’s a bloody miracle in bed.”

  “And I’m not, I suppose?”

  “No, you are not, my pet. If you want the truth, you’re like a frozen chicken. Fucking you is like stuffing sausage meat into a broiler. I’m always frightened I’ll discover the giblets.”

  Helen gasped, unable to speak.

  “You never react, never display any pleasure, never once in four years of marriage have you asked for it. If I want you, I have to sit on the street with a begging bowl, and I’m bloody fed up with it. Every time you part your legs a degree, you behave as if you’re bestowing a colossal favor. It’s not your fault. Your bloody mother instilled it into you: ‘Behave like a lady at all times.’ My God.”

  Helen gazed at him, too stunned to say anything, just watching him strip off his clothes in front of her, down to the lean, beautiful suntanned body that was so terribly reminiscent of the photographs. For a horrifying moment she thought he was going to pounce on her, but he merely went off into the shower, to emerge five minutes later dripping and rubbing his hair dry with a big pink towel.

  “Have you got the message?” he said. “I don’t get my kicks at home so I get them elsewhere.”

  “You’ve got to fire her,” whispered Helen, through white lips. “I can’t go on meeting her, knowing this, having seen those disgusting pictures.”

  “What’s disgusting about those pictures? Kodak obviously enjoyed them. She’s got a nice body and, what’s more important, she’s not remotely ashamed of it. You could pick up a few tips from her.”

  He went into his dressing room and got out his dinner jacket and a white dress shirt.

  “Where are you going?” Helen asked numbly.

  “Out to dinner. It’s Hilary’s dinner party, remember? You insisted I should be back on time.”

  No one could dress more quickly than Rupert when he chose.

  “You can’t go out to dinner after this,” Helen whispered in bewilderment.

  “Why not? The drink’s free. It’s much better than staying here and listening to the hysterics that you’re about to give way to any minute. I don’t like having books thrown at me and that scent bottle’s dangerously large. Don’t you think you’d better get changed, too?” He was frowning in the mirror now, as he tied his tie.

  “Aren’t you even going to apologize for you and Podge?”

  Rupert flicked the bent tie expertly through the gap. “Why should I apologize for your inadequacies?”

  Now he was brushing his still damp hair with silver brushes, back over the temples, and in two wings over the ears. He picked up his jacket. “Don’t bother to wait up for me. I’ll tell Ortrud, or whatever her name is this week, you’ve got a migraine.”

  Helen simply couldn’t believe that he could treat an act of such magnitude so lightly. And the terrible things he had said. Was she really that awful in bed? Was it all her fault? The moment he’d gone, she threw herself down on the bed sobbing her heart out. Not for the first time she wished she hadn’t put Marcus’s nursery next to their bedroom. Within seconds there was thumping on the door and cries of “Mummy, Mummy.” Helen gritted her teeth. Where the hell was Ortrud? The thumpings grew more insistent. “Mummy, why are you crying?”

  Helen put on her dark glasses and opened the door. Marcus almost fell inside. He was wearing blue and white striped pajamas and clutching a stuffed purple skunk Rupert had brought him from Aachen.

  “Mummy crying,” he said doubtfully.

  Helen picked him up, reveling in his newly bathed softness.

  “Momma’s got a sore head.” She banged her hand against her temple, then the skunk’s head against the window. “Mummy go bang in car. That’s why she’s crying.”

  Marcus seemed to accept this. Helen looked nervously for the thin trickle of mucus from his nose that always heralded an asthma attack (usually triggered off by Rupert’s presence), but there was no sign.

  “Story,” said Marcus pointedly.

  I can’t face it, thought Helen. “Ortrud,” she screamed down the stairs. But Ortrud, on hearing that Helen would be staying in, had pushed off to the Jolly Goat in Stroud to meet her friends.

  Rupert, having vented his wrath on Helen bec
ause he felt so guilty, was not enjoying Hilary’s dinner party. Hilary, despite her arbitrary comments to Helen about even numbers, was delighted he had come alone.

  “What’s the matter with her?” she asked.

  “Migraine,” said Rupert tersely.

  “You mean a row,” said Hilary, out of the corner of her mouth. “Have some of Crispin’s elderflower wine to cheer you up.”

  Rupert looked round dismissively at the earnest women, their bulges concealed beneath ethnic smocks, and their bearded husbands looking self-conscious in dinner jackets. If it hadn’t been Hilary and Crispin’s wedding anniversary they would have refused to dress up. Everyone, except Rupert, brought presents.

  Hilary put him on her right at dinner. There wasn’t even a decent-looking woman for him to flirt with or make eyes at across the table. The dinner was disgusting—smoked trout, then jugged hare, of all unbelievable things in August. With Hilary’s slovenly cooking, it was probably jugged hairs as well.

  “What’s the matter? You’re not your usual dazzling self,” said Hilary in a low voice, letting her hand brush against his as she passed the red currant jelly. Rupert didn’t return the pressure.

  “What’s really the matter with Helen?” she asked. “She was all right yesterday.”

  “She’s all wrong now,” said Rupert. He turned to the German woman with plaits round her head on his right.

  “It must be a lonely life working with horses,” she said to him.

  “No,” said Rupert. “It’s very overcrowded.”

  What an idiot he’d been to shit on his own doorstep. He’d have to sack Podge now, and Arcy and the other horses who were absolutely devoted to her would be upset at the height of the season. Grooms weren’t hard to find, but ones as good as Podge virtually impossible. Why the hell, too, had he ever embarked on an affair with Hilary? She revolted him now. She insisted on lingering for hours over coffee. “I hate breaking up the ambience.”

  Rupert grew increasingly restless as the dwindling candlelight flickered on the shiny unpainted faces. The woman on Rupert’s right went off to the loo. Crispin was out of the room making more coffee, no doubt caffeine-free. Hilary’s lugubrious paintings glared down from the walls. Hilary could bear it no longer.

  “Helen’s found out about us, hasn’t she?”

  Rupert’s eyes narrowed. “Who?”

  “Us, you and me of course.”

  Rupert laughed. “No, about someone else, actually.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Helen found out I was knocking off someone else.”

  “A long time ago?”

  “No, ten days ago.”

  Hilary gasped. “You bastard. You rotten bastard,” she hissed. “You’re deliberately winding me up. I don’t believe you.”

  “What are you two looking so secretive about?” Crispin appeared at their side. “Sorry I was so long, dear, I was changing Kate. More coffee, Rupert?”

  Rupert looked at Crispin’s hands. He bet he hadn’t washed them. “No thanks.” He got to his feet. “I must go. Been a lovely evening, but I got up at four o’clock this morning and I don’t like to leave Helen too long.”

  He never minded in the past, said Hilary to herself furiously.

  “Why don’t you ring up? She’s probably fast asleep. Pity to break up the party.”

  “What party?” said Rupert, so only she could hear him. “Our particular party is over, my darling.”

  “What happened to your Porsche?” asked Crispin, watching Rupert curl his long legs into Helen’s Mini.

  “Helen had a prang yesterday.” Then he was gone.

  He was home by a quarter to twelve. Ortrud’s light was on, so was Podge’s, over the stables. Probably the whole household knew he’d gone out after a screaming match with Helen. He wandered down to the stables. It was still impossibly hot. A full moon upstaged the crowded stars. The horses were moving restlessly. Arcturus came to the half-door. Rupert gave him a carrot he’d pinched from Hilary’s crudités dish on the way out.

  “Wish I was a stallion like you,” he said.

  Arcy rolled his eyes and took a nip at Rupert, who cuffed him on the nose.

  “One day, when you’re famous,” he told the horse, “you’ll be encouraged to fuck any mare you like. Why can’t I?”

  Rupert knew Podge would be waiting up for him, but he went straight back to the house. He didn’t fancy sleeping in the spare room. It was supposed to be haunted and he wasn’t tight enough not to mind.

  After finally settling Marcus, Helen had had a bath, bathed her eyes, washed her hair, and put on the plunging, black silk, Janet Reger nightgown Rupert had given her for Christmas, but which she had never worn because she had no cleavage. Now she lay in the big bed without the light on, with the moonlight pouring in through the windows. As Rupert tiptoed past the door she called out to him. He entered cautiously, waiting for abuse, his hair gleaming as silvery as one of his hairbrushes.

  “I’m sorry,” she said in a choked voice. “It’s all my fault.”

  Rupert, completely wrong-footed, was unbelievably touched.

  “I understand exactly why you went for Podge,” she went on. “I’m hopeless in bed. It’s just my upbringing that makes me so dreadfully inhibited, but I love you so so much. I can’t bear the thought of losing you. I’ll try and make as many overtures as Rossini.” She was trying to make a joke, but her voice cracked. Rupert sat down, pulling her against him.

  “No, it’s my fault,” he said, stroking her bare arms. “I’ll get rid of Podge tomorrow. I’ll pay her off, so you never have to see her again. I suppose it’s my upbringing, too. Fidelity wasn’t the family’s strong point, but I love you.”

  “I’ll go and buy black sexy underwear, like Janey’s, and read sex books and learn how to drive a man to the ultimate of desire.”

  “You do already. Have I ever not wanted you? I just got tired of trying to fuck someone who didn’t want me.”

  That night Tabitha was conceived.

  29

  Gradually Billy’s and Janey’s cottage got into shape. And although Billy drew the line for a time at a swimming pool or a tennis court, the place seemed to have every other luxury.

  “If I have a fantastic season and you write your arse off, we should be straight by the end of next year, give or take a few bottles of Bell’s,” Billy told Janey when they moved in in October. But he never expected the bills to be quite so astronomical. Having no wedding presents, he and Janey had to buy everything from a garlic crusher to a dishwasher. Billy’s mother was very rich and could have helped out. But she didn’t like Janey, who described her as an old boot with a tweed bum, or, in kinder moments, as “the Emperor Vespasian in drag.” Mrs. Lloyd-Foxe had the big nose and thick gray curls that look better on a man. She thought Janey was tarty and agreed with Helen that Janey wrote very over-the-

  top articles in the paper. Last week Janey had written about her marriage, giving rather too many intimate details. Most people, including Billy, thought it was very funny. Mrs. Lloyd-Foxe did not.

  “How’s dear Helen and darling little Marcus?” she asked, every time she rang Janey, knowing it would irritate her.

  Mrs. Lloyd-Foxe had daughters, who seemed to lay babies with the ease that chickens produce eggs. It was up to Janey, her mother-in-law implied frequently, to produce a son as soon as possible. “Then there’ll be a little Lloyd-Foxe to carry on the line.”

  Helen, feeling slightly sick, but much happier after her rapprochement with Rupert, was thrilled she was having another baby. Janey wanted to be pregnant, too and hadn’t taken the Pill since she’d been married to Billy. But each month it was just the same. She went to see her doctor, who said it was very early days and suggested she had her tubes blown.

  “You’ve also been racketing round the world a lot,” he told her. “Why don’t you stop work for a bit, play house, look after Billy and get in a nesting mood? Try to confine intercourse to the middle of the month, between y
our periods.”

  Janey, in fact, was bored with racketing around. She was fed up with living out of suitcases, interviewing pop stars and heads of state. She wanted to stay at home and watch the lime trees round the cottage turn yellow, and go out mushrooming in the early morning.

  There was also the matter of her expenses, which were colossal, and which had very few bills to back them up, because Janey had lost them. There had been too many dinners for ten at Tiberio’s or Maxim’s, with Janey and Billy treating the rest of the team. The show-jumping correspondent, jealous of her pitch being queered by Janey, had sneaked to the sports editor about unnecessary extravagance. The editor, Mike Pardoe, nearly had a coronary when he saw the total and summoned Janey from Gloucestershire.

  Pardoe had once been Janey’s lover. As she looked at his handsome watchful, wolfish face, Janey thought how much much nicer Billy was.

  “These expenses are a joke,” said Pardoe. “How the hell did you spend so much money in Athens? Did you buy one of the Greek islands?”

  “Well, the copy was good. You said so.”

  “It’s gone off recently. Most of it seems to have been written with your pen dipped in Mouton Cadet and from a hotel bedroom. I want you to come back to Fleet Street where I can keep an eye on you and put you on features I need. You’re a good writer, Janey, but you’ve lost your edge.”

  “I want to write a diary from the country, rather like The Diary of a Provincial Lady,” protested Janey.

  “Who the hell’s interested in that?”

  Janey was livid. She looked at Pardoe’s fridge, laden with drink, and the leather sofa, on which he’d laid her many years before, and which had just been upholstered in shiny black. She didn’t want to go back to that wild, uncertain pre-Billy existence, where you shivered on the tube platform on the way to work, in the dress you’d worn the night before and everyone knew you hadn’t been home.

  She went off and lunched with a publishing friend and told him she wanted to write a book on men and where they stood at this moment in the sexual war. “I’m going to call it Dispatches from the Y-Front.”