Turn Right at the Spotted Dog

by Jilly Cooper

  All the same, I’ve got a horrible feeling I put her on to a train to Putney Bridge by mistake.

  Back home, I rang my husband.

  ‘Wasn’t it wonderful?’ he said. ‘I watched the whole thing at the Garrick with Kingsley Amis. We both cried non-stop, except when Kingsley got apopleptic about that left-footer taking one of the prayers.’

  And as the golden coaches roll home, and Fergie and Andrew set off in their red helicopter, and all the royalty experts go back into mothballs until the next wedding, one Scottish genealogist got it right:

  ‘It has been,’ he said, ‘a glorious glorious Sara-mony.’

  Great Slugs Of Cognac

  ‘NOW WE CAN all go and shoot red-legged partridge,’ as the future Duke of Wellington sardonically remarked, when the untimely arrival of a senior officer stopped him completing his victory at Vimeiro during the Peninsular War.

  Following the Duke’s example and that of Shirley Conran’s Countess Maxine we recently spent a day shooting red-legged partridge in Spain with the Duke of Fernan-Nunez. We stayed at the Ritz, Madrid, which is like a luxurious private house at the turn of the century: beautiful rooms, wonderful food, and a smiling maid hovering unobtrusively to pick up any clothes or names we cared to drop. There was even a ‘No Molestar’ sign to hang outside the door so we wouldn’t be disturbed.

  A pomegranate for breakfast, on the day of the shoot, with pink carnation petals floating in the finger bowls, seemed a pretty chic start, but did little to dispel my nerves. Friends who’d shot in Spain had all come back with dire stories of Spaniards being so competitive they all ended up shooting each other in the bottom.

  Normally the Ritz arranges for between eight and a dozen of their guests to make up a shooting party, but today, as it was the end of the season, we were joining a private party of the Duke’s friends. The only Ritz guest shooting was Richard Prior, a splendidly upright figure in lace-up dung-coloured gum boots and an inverted flower-pot hat like Pete’s in EastEnders, who told us he was a deer consultant. Cheering him on were me, my husband, the Mail on Sunday photographer, who spoke fluent Spanish, and a nice, blue-eyed Dutchman from the Ritz, called Tom.

  Dawn was fading flamingo pink in the east as we set off in a black Mercedes. After half an hour Tom suggested we stop for coffee. Mr Prior turned pale.

  ‘It’s very bad form to be late for a shooting party,’ he said.

  ‘In Spain,’ said Tom, ‘it’s very bad form to be early.’

  Thirty miles south of Madrid at the end of a long drive, we reached the Duke’s red and white house. The Duke himself had patent leather hair, protruding blue eyes, a sad face that never moved when he talked, and feet that turned out like Charlie Chaplin’s. He evidently belongs to one of the leading families in Spain, but was currently being led all over his rose beds by an enchanting yellow labrador puppy, with very black Spanish eyes.

  The shoot was being run by the Duke’s friend, a ravishing Spaniard called Javier Corsini, who had black curls flecked with grey, and a perfect olive tan, as though he’d been up at five and spent three hours in make-up.

  ‘I am a professional hunter,’ he purred.

  ‘Lucky quarry,’ I thought wistfully.

  Mr Prior was still trying to gauge the day’s form.

  ‘As red-legs have started to mate by the end of the season,’ he asked, ‘if a pair come over rather than a crowd, does one leave them?’

  Javier looked thunderstruck: ‘No ’ere, you shoot everything.’

  Nine o’clock – and the scheduled time for kick off. The next hour and a half, however, were punctuated by one Japanese car after another screeching up the drive, and another brace of gorgeous young blades, with diplomatic bags under their eyes, falling out and launching into a ten-minute orgy of handshaking and chat.

  Dress was varied – like a woman’s autumn fashion show at Bentalls of Kingston – and included flat caps, Tyrolean trilbys, flower pots, green knickerbockers, suede and leather trousers sawn off above the ankle, khaki cardigans and Puffas. No Barbours except ours – perhaps they only wear them in Seville.

  ‘Aren’t they faint-making?’ I muttered to my husband.

  ‘More like a lot of off-duty head-waiters,’ he said sourly.

  At long last we set off in Javier’s Land Rover, thundering over the roughest tracks, rocks hitting our undercarriage like pop corn. Javier said he was a leetle tired, because yesterday he’d been shooting big game: ‘Stag, wild boar, and follow deer’ in the south of Spain with the King.

  Was the King a good shot?

  ‘The King does not like too much to shoot, he prefer the stocking.’

  ‘Oh,’ I squeaked, madly excited at the possibility of regal sexual preference.

  ‘I too prefer the stocking,’ said Javier warmly.

  ‘Si si con suspender belts,’ I said encouragingly.

  ‘No deer stocking, you ’ave it in Scotland.’

  I realised he meant stalking.

  Round the corner, a crowd of beaters in sapphire blue, and a couple of policemen in black plastic hats were warming their hands on a bonfire. I didn’t know whether to feel safer that in Spain it is the law to have two policemen, or members of the Civil Guard, on every shoot. Off we tramped into Clint Eastwood country – stunted trees, dusty grey scrub, soft fawn fields like the speckled breast of a thrush. All down the valley, facing a steep slope, the guns took up their positions, each with a loader and a man to pick up. We stood behind a handsome middle-aged man, who looked like Fergie’s stepfather and who was wearing bizarre trousers made from green billiard-table baize – perhaps they had six pockets.

  It was very quiet; all we could here was the chuckling sound of the partridge. Tom from the Ritz, who had the soul of a poet, whispered that the ground might look parched now, but in the spring I would find thousands of leetle flowers, showing off their beauty. Could I not smell great wafts of thyme?

  Next minute all I could smell was gunpowder. A lone partridge flew overhead. Billiard Table Trousers potted it in one, and the poor thing cartwheeled frantically through the air, landing with a sickening thud behind us. Soon the air was full of feathers all down the line. A sparrow and a thrush were blown to smithereens. Whenever anything got through safely, I cheered and was shushed reprovingly.

  Finally, toot, toot, toot, came the beaters over the hill, blowing their trumpets and squeezing the last partridge out of the scrub like tomato puree out of a tube. A long note on a hunting horn told us the drive was over.

  Immediately, like greyhounds from the trap, yelling Es la mia, the guns tore down the hill to locate their partridge, and touchingly, I thought, to put them out of their misery.

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ said the Mail on Sunday photographer. ‘They’re just hell-bent on grabbing as many as possible before the other guns get them.’

  Next minute the chief beater, on a large roan horse called Robert, cantered by, with a fine hare hanging from his saddle.

  ‘Didn’t see that flap past,’ said my husband. ‘Perhaps the horse trod on it.’

  ‘A hare passed me,’ said Mr Prior. ‘But I didn’t feel I should shoot it.’

  Nevertheless he had shot very well. English honour was satisfied. He was also full of praise for the shoot. The birds had come out very high, and been magnificently and carefully driven.

  The partridge themselves were now laid out on the ground, chestnut and powder blue, with their speckled kerchiefs, red legs, and swollen eyes, as though they’d been crying all night at the prospect of death.

  Once when I went on a shoot in Northumberland and my host encased me in green rubber from top to toe, so I would blend into the countryside, I remember asking sweatily and sulkily why the young man in the next butt was allowed to shoot in a red jersey.

  ‘Because he’s a Duke’s son,’ said my host. ‘He can shoot anything he likes.’

  Similarly the Duke’s puppy was now having a field day tearing the laid-out partridges to pieces. The Duke, who wasn’t shoo
ting, watched it indulgently. The other guns less so – dying to give it a kick, but inhibited by the presence of its ducal master.

  The beaters set off for the next drive barracking cheerfully, and drinking wine out of leather bottles. The police were being well primed with Ritz Cognac. It was getting colder. Javier pulled on ginger suede gloves and stylishly lent out of his Land Rover as he drove along to check the undercarriage.

  The Duke, we learnt, had recently got married, at the age of fifty, and was expecting his first baby in June.

  Why hadn’t he married before?

  ‘Because he had enough pipple to look after him,’ said Javier, as though that explained it.

  For the next drive, the guns spread out across the curve of a valley, with the two middle guns flanking a sluggish stream, fringed with rusty tamarisk trees.

  ‘I hear a red-leg calling,’ said Mr Prior poetically.

  Soon, to left and right, the Spaniards were blasting away, blatantly poaching his partridge.

  The third drive was distinctly hairy. We stood beside Jaime, a sweet boy, who, despite impossibly long eyelashes, was a very good shot. To our right, however, was a trigger-happy wanderer in a green Tyrolean hat called Alvaro. Accompanied by his seven-year-old son, who had the inevitable winter hacking cough, and two emaciated dogs, Alvaro was determined to shoot more than anyone else.

  Thank God we had fortified ourselves with great slugs of Cognac, for the next minute, all hell broke loose. As the partridges were driven towards us, Alvaro took a pot at everything, regardless of whose bird it was.

  Crash, he shattered one that came through at boot level, crash, he winged another behind him at mid-thigh.

  Next minute, his gun was swinging towards Jaime.

  ‘Duck,’ I screamed.

  ‘Where,’ screamed Jaime, gazing excitedly up at the sky and nearly getting his eyelashes blown off.

  I longed to hang a ‘No Molestar’ sign on the end of our butt. My husband and I and the Mail on Sunday photographer were so terrified, that, despite a ground littered with rabbit droppings and no sun anywhere, we flattened ourselves on our faces pretending to be sunbathing.

  ‘Come and sit by me,’ said Tom from the Ritz, kindly. ‘Pellets seldom go through two people.’

  ‘You’d be safer in front,’ said my husband, spitting out a mouthful of thyme.

  A second later we cringed as a sparrow whizzed by at bum level. Alvaro swung after it, missing it twice, then getting it with the third. Perhaps as an answer to French knickers, the Spaniards should patent Spanish knickers, khaki and bullet proof.

  I was never so relieved to hear anyone as I was to hear the approaching beaters. Lobbing rocks into the stream, blowing their trumpets, and laughing maniacally: ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ they sounded like a cross between Louis Armstrong, and Mr Rochester’s mad wife.

  At the end of the drive, Alvaro went bananas, scuttling round, gathering up every living thing he could find, urging on his rangy dogs. Having shot fourteen partridge, he was distraught only to trace thirteen. Unseen, his pointer, who had blond ears and a snub nose like Jill Bennett, was so hungry it had gobbled up a partridge whole.

  Once again the bag was laid out, and the Duke’s puppy, his mouth full of feathers, played Don’t Pass the Partridge.

  Back for lunch, past stunted vines, spreading for miles over the dull brown earth, like some German war cemetery. A partridge pecked at the side of the road.

  ‘Push off,’ we hissed, ‘Alvaro’s behind us.’

  Inside the Duke’s house, the walls were covered with tusks and antlers, and paintings of the Duke’s big-nosed ancestors putting ringed white hands on the heads of small proud dogs. Above the Duke’s coat of arms crouched a predatory looking bat. We all tried to translate the Latin motto. ‘Your blood is my tea,’ was the best suggestion.

  The Ritz had provided a sumptuous lunch of consommé, square inches of Spanish omelette, ham, smoked filet mignon and strawberry shortcake.

  Alvaro, with a glass of Rioca in his hand instead of a 12 bore, turned out to be gentle and charming. He worked in the Ministry of Commerce, he said. His dogs were called Sago and Cash Payment. Being one of seven brothers had made him very competitive. He had shot since he was seven. We were joined by Jaime of the long eyelashes, who said he worked for American Express. If my husband hadn’t been present, I might have been tempted to say, ‘You will do nicely, sir.’

  The Duke of the sorrowful contenance held out his glass for more red wine, and said about eight shooting parties a year were held at his house, but he seldom shot himself, being a very bad shot: ‘I couldn’t even ’it the sun.’

  The house had been requisitioned by the Russians during the Spanish Civil War, he went on. As an act of spite they had burnt it down when they left, so it had to be completely rebuilt. There was no sign of the Duke’s new wife, nor, although the guns nearly all wore wedding rings, of any other wives or girlfriends. Perhaps, as the Ritz had provided lunch, there was no need of them.

  After lunch the sun came out, like a make-up artist gilding the rushes, adding blusher to the tawny earth and painting deep blue shadows in the grooves of the hills. We could smell great wafts of thyme now. For the last drive, which is invariably the most do-or-die of the day, we stood at the bottom of another steep hill.

  ‘Good infantry country,’ said my husband approvingly. ‘The Duke of Wellington always preferred to accept the enemy whilst occupying the reverse slope.’

  All along the line with no thought that the din might put off the birds, the guns laughed and chatted. All except Alvaro, who was shifting tigrishly from foot to foot, hands clenched on his gun, like Virginia Wade about to take service.

  Pow, he brought down a partridge, then another, followed by a couple of lapwing, a seagull, two sparrows and a starling.

  Suddenly we were amazed to see fearless Tom, darting through the firing lines as though he was at Vietnam, with an outside mandarin in each hand like grenades, bearing sustenance to Jaime and Javier. Next minute he was scuttling back to take Cognac to the Civil Guard, who sat under an olive tree, getting more civil by the minute.

  To the extreme right of the line, the admirably ethical Mr Prior shot fewer than the others, because he still wouldn’t poach, or wing the beaters’ standard bearer, who, despite Javier’s howls to keep out of sight, insisted on standing on the brow of the hill waving a fertiliser bag on the end of a stick.

  ‘Under normal circumstances,’ said my husband disapprovingly, ‘he’d have been picked off by our side, since he’s giving away our position.’

  ‘You can waste a lot of cartridges on liver spots and bumble bees in the afternoon,’ quoted Mr Prior philosophically, as the last trumpet sounded.

  ‘Well shot, Richard,’ yelled Javier.

  ‘Well restrained, Richard,’ chorused his English fans.

  ‘The best shot of the day’, my husband could be heard telling the Mail on Sunday photographer, ‘was when Alan Lamb got that four off his leg which won us the game in Sydney.’

  Camouflaged against the green, the guns came up the valley. The 188 partridges and sundry other birds that had been shot, were laid out in pairs, like some ghastly danse macabre. They looked so pathetically small and few compared with the humans who proudly surrounded them.

  Then as a perfect coup de théâtre, a Ritz waiter solemnly approached with glasses of Cognac for everyone on a silver tray. As a royal guest told the manager of the Ritz, Madrid, recently: ‘There are only two hotels in the world: this and Claridges.

  Apart from the slaughter, it had been a splendid day out. But as we sped north in our black Mercedes, the Western sky was flecked with rose-pink bars. I hoped it was a sign that the 188 red legs were winging into heaven.

  Ping Pong In Wiltshire

  Part One

  IN THE BEGINNING was the talking snake, who was probably an opinion pollster in disguise. Everywhere Eve went, he slithered after her, clipboard tightly coiled in his tail, pestering her with questions about her lov
e life: ‘How many time-s-s-s do you have s-s-s-ex a week? Do you always achieve s-s-s-atisfaction?’

  Eventually, Eve got so fed up, she persuaded Adam, with some help from God, to move to a less salubrious area outside Eden.

  I’m not fond of opinion polls either. I find it hard to believe them (well would you tell the truth about your sex life to a total stranger?), they make me slightly uneasy about my life, and they are always contradicting each other. Just before Christmas, for example, I read that MORI had decided that the national average for having sex had risen to three times a week. It used to be 2.4 and one had been smugly aware of being well above the norm. Immediately I started worrying about how I was going to fit in an extra .6 during the Christmas rush, and with the exhausting palaver of getting the children back to school I might even slip – horrors – below the national average.

  Then earlier this month a survey in a popular Sunday informed me I was in the group least likely to have an affair, because, as the mother of teenagers, I’d want to set them a good example. Reading further down the page, I was surprised to find the contradictory information that, as a woman of forty-eight, I was in the age group most likely to have an affair, because it was my last chance of a fling.

  I was just contemplating jumping on the milkman when in The Times last week, a sex therapist called Dagmar O’Connor told us that the message from America is loud and clear. Affairs are passé. Monogamy is back in fashion. They’re all so panic-stricken about sexually transmitted diseases, you can’t pass a street corner in New York without some soothsayer warning you to beware the march of AIDS.

  According to an American friend, you have to produce a medical certificate before anyone will sleep with you. And as the easiest way not to catch AIDS is to stick to the same partner, getting it right sexually with them has become of vital importance.

  Dagmar O’Connor has therefore written a new book called How to Make Love to the Same Person for the Rest of Your Life and Still Love It. And Miss O’Connor, looking like a strict but kindly headmistress, certainly has some whacky ideas for gingering up our sex lives. She begins brightly with the belief that few of us are abnormal sexually, but that most couples suffer from unequal desires. She goes on to quote one husband and wife whose sex life had reached an impasse because the man wanted it every day and the wife was refusing to sleep with him.