by Fiona Walker
‘Can I at least give her a name?’ she asked the vet.
‘What?’ The vet was listening to Bay’s conversation now.
‘The dog. Can I name her?’
The vet’s eyes focused on Carly again. ‘Please do. Anything would be better than “stray bitch admitted at eight twenty-five”.’ She took a pen and clicked the nib to write on the back of her hand.
‘Pricey,’ she said decisively.
‘That’s so cool!’ Tilly sealed their unlikely friendship.
*
Lester had always appreciated the rituals surrounding death, not least tea-drinking. Pip was an enthusiastic tea-maker. The paramedics had had English Breakfast from Countryside Alliance mugs while they waited for the police; the police had waited for the funeral directors while drinking Assam from Bryn Parry mugs; the funeral directors had waited for the GP nursing Portmeirion mugs of Ceylon; the GP had been given Earl Grey in a bone china cup and saucer. The coroners’ office would have to be involved, they were told, a post-mortem held. The body would be kept in the hospital morgue until due process was done. The GP concurred with the medics that it was likely to have been a heart attack, the circumstances of death unusual and unfortunate but not suspicious.
Lester watched Pip closely, still keeping his emotions in check and carrying on with his yard duties when time allowed. She grew more agitated as the morning wore on, a far from silent witness clutching a tea tray. ‘Such a terrible scene to find! It’s just like a Sunday-night whodunit on TV. Do you need to take photographs? Are SOCO coming?’
The formal procedure for an unexplained death had been clarified to her – at length – but she refused to believe the excitement was evaporating so fast, that no grizzled, squabbling CID duo were going to arrive in a vintage car to examine the evidence.
‘He would never willingly die like this,’ she’d told the police emphatically. ‘He was far too proud. When Mrs Percy passed on with all that fuss, he was furious. She was in the bath, you know – huge aneurysm, instant, still had a ciggie on the go. Tufted mat went up like stubble. Could have burned the house down. The family Labradors were locked in there with her. Terrible scene. The Captain was beside himself. He never got another dog after that.’ She added breathlessly, ‘He drank a lot more after Mrs Percy died. Always sneaking down to the cellar for another bottle. But he knew those steps better than anyone.’
Once the Captain’s body had been removed to the mortuary and all the unfamiliar cars had gone from the drive, Pip went into uncharacteristic overdrive, waving a cloth around the house in a token gesture to its fur coats of dust – Lester had noticed that cleaning wasn’t Pip’s strong point. Now she was organising the post, going through the fridge and freezer to throw out perishables, then stripping the bed. He was proud of her, keeping busy. He did the same.
Stubbs at his heels, Lester checked on her again after he’d turned the stallion out and toured the field herds. She was no less frantic, dashing in and out of the loo after drinking too much tea, tidying as she went, any intention to help him on the yard thankfully forgotten. ‘Why not go home and have some rest?’ he suggested.
‘I have to go and prepare old Mrs Bentley’s lunch in a minute.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I’ll come straight back afterwards. I thought we’d watch the racing from Goodwood in the Captain’s honour. I’ll make your lunch too.’
‘Sussex Stakes today.’ And suddenly he could hardly stand up for sadness.
‘Egg salad. Mrs B can’t eat red meat.’
Crash. It hit him like a big wave against a seafront. Tears seemed to be coming from everywhere – his fingers, his jaw, his chest, his back, flooding in. He had to keep focused.
‘It’s a race.’ He watched her plucking rows of keys out of the press, although she was becoming too blurred to see. Focus, man! He heard the Captain’s voice in his head, barking at him as it had for sixty years, since his first day of national service with the Household Cavalry, the handsome young Captain Percy telling him there was no room for sentiment with horses, soldiers or women. The only living creature on God’s earth that should see a man’s fear, his suffering or his pain is his dog.
Stubbs was looking up at him worriedly. The tears were rising higher. Lester stood up tall, lifting his nose and chin, as though trapped in an upturned boat in an ever-shrinking air pocket, face twisted with the effort of not drowning.
*
‘Let’s put a bet on!’ Pip suggested brightly. She threw the last of the keys into her bag and turned to Lester, relieved to find he had a curious half-smile on his face, gazing mistily up at the ceiling. Pip liked Lester’s face, decades of Cotswold wind and rain hardening and wizening its skin against grief.
‘The Captain fancied the Coolmore colt,’ he told Pip, and she distinctly heard an amused catch in his throat, a curious sort of choking noise. ‘Sired by Sadlers Wells, Danehill damline.’ He was taking strangely deep breaths, she noticed, hoping he’d remembered to use his asthma inhaler today. The last thing she wanted on top of everything else was a trip to A and E. ‘We’ve got the two lines in broodmares here, but not together. Both in foal to Cruisoe this year.’ She’d noticed the Captain was never happier than listening to Lester’s quiet, crackly voice talking breeding. They’d chew the cud for hours, the stallion man still espousing the jumping, staying chaser thoroughbred bloodlines Ann had favoured for dual-purpose eventing and point-to-pointing stock, the Captain convinced it was better to mix pure speed with power: Take a lightning-fast mare off the flat and cross her with big-jumping Irish guts, and you’ve got a cross-country machine with enough spring for the pretty poles and the dancing! He would bark with laughter when Lester argued otherwise, but listened intently to what he had to say, especially if it involved a racing tip.
Pip pressed her eyes tight shut against a much-anticipated deluge of tears, but still they remained obstinately dry. ‘I’ll place an online bet from Mrs B’s.’ She dragged open a drawer and scooped some more keys into her bag. ‘Now I’m going to lock this place up in case the police need the scene preserved. They haven’t done the autopsy yet.’
His breathing really was very odd. ‘Any word from the children?’
Pip noticed he skipped a generation when he spoke of them, just as the Captain had: ‘the children’, not ‘grandchildren’. ‘I’ve tried them all again twice.’ The hiatus no longer felt reassuringly normal, but like a gathering storm, and they already had one of those, with distant thunder rumbling on the far horizon.
Pip felt indignant on the Captain’s behalf. She knew they all had busy lives – they’d visited less often lately, familial tolerance waning. He’d become so intractable, less interested in them than his television screen. Most recently, Alice had complained about the smell and the state of the house. Pip knew that wasn’t her fault: the Captain didn’t see dirt and he always insisted that watching her mop was torture. But to cover herself, she’d already texted Janine Turner, saying she needed her team for an urgent once-over. No harm getting the place deep-cleaned before the family were crawling all over it; the housekeeping float could easily cover it, and she’d get a receipt.
Outside the day was unfittingly perfect, the sky now Lego block blue. Pip triple-locked the back door, secure in the knowledge that the house was impenetrable. ‘I’ll be back before you know it,’ she promised Lester, heaving her clanking bag onto the passenger seat.
His head was bowed, but at least his breathing seemed normal again.
*
With dam-bursting relief, Lester waved her off, double-checking Stubbs was at his side as her clutch screamed and she reversed at breakneck speed, handbrake turning before hurtling out along the driveway, exhaust bobbing smokily.
From his high-hedged field, Cruisoe the stallion charged alongside, letting out angry bellows as he saw the car off.
‘Now that’s a lot of horse, Lester.’ Laugh as loud as a fevered sneeze. Gorsebridge Sales, 1993. A rare dun sports horse bred in the purple (‘Never breed for colour, Lest
er, but if you happen to throw a rainbow there’s a crock at the end’). The Captain nodding almost imperceptibly in time to the auctioneer’s rising price, fast climbing higher than Lester’s annual salary and higher again. ‘Tell me when to stop.’
Lester had said nothing.
Cruisoe had earned his hammer price back a hundred times over.
Lester turned back to the yard, remembering it full of visiting mares, the lorries and trailers coming and going every day, Ann’s fierce welcomes, the three-hour three-bottle lunches, the Captain’s loud laughter, the yard phone ringing non-stop.
The yard Tannoy was ringing, the phone-line wired to loudspeakers.
There was an extension in Stables Cottage. It was attached to the wall with a long, curled flex that had tangled itself so tightly over many years that it was now impossible to move more than a foot away from the base set. To Lester’s knowledge, it had been on that wall for forty years or more, although he was seldom called upon to answer it. He used it to ring through feed orders or summon the vet.
He disliked it so intensely that sometimes he chose to ignore it, as he did now, marching into the cottage to feed Stubbs, then selecting a Fray Bentos pie to heat up for his lunch. Lester was not a greedy man, but nothing ever dented his appetite. No grief, illness or tragedy had altered his routine three meals a day, stop points he saw as simple necessities, along with sleep, exercise and tea. He had eaten meat pies on rotation for longer than there had been a telephone in Stables Cottage. His horses always ate the same food and Lester saw no reason to do otherwise. Sweet treats were a different matter.
The small fruit cake Pip had left him smelt like a Turkish spice market, jewelled with dates, cherries and sultanas. The Captain had been particularly fond of rich fruit cake with a glass of port.
His eyes watered again.
The infernal phone was still ringing.
When answering a call, which he was increasingly reluctant to do, Lester addressed the mouthpiece with the same gruff greeting: ‘Stud.’ This had caused such amusement to some local teenage girls in the seventies that they’d rung repeatedly from the red box on the Green, so that they could shriek, ‘Your place or mine?’
He was reminded of those girls now as he marched across to answer it.
‘Stud.’
Within a breath of the reply, he knew whom he was speaking to.
‘Lester, I need you to make up two stables. Shavings, not straw.’
No preamble. So like the Captain.
He turned automatically to look up at the faded festoons of rosettes along the beams, heart hammering, appetite vanished. ‘Right you are, Mrs Ledwell.’
Then she ruined it with a warm laugh. ‘For God’s sake, don’t do the Parker thing on me, Lester, today of all days. Call me Ronnie.’
*
Kit Donne was stuck behind a horsebox on the twisting climb between Chipping Hampton and the Fosse ridge, his attempt to overtake foiled by the driver swinging out to block him.
Trying to ring his son to apologise that he would be late for lunch, he repeatedly redialled his last outgoing call by mistake, theatrical agent and old friend Ferdie.
‘How hung-over are you, dear boy?’
‘Mildly,’ he said, through gritted teeth, as he tried for another overtake on a straight stretch and found his path filled with red tail-lights, a single-finger salute coming from the horsebox cab.
‘Fuck you too!’
‘No need to be so Boys from the Blackstuff. Stay on the line and I’ll patch a call through on my other line, if you hold on a tick. Are you meeting up at the house?’
‘No, the Mill – Le Mill, now it’s been shleb-cheffed and Michelin-starred.’
‘Quelle surprise,’ came the sing-song sarcasm. ‘Even our beloved Bardswolds is under siege by men bearing rapini spears. No corner of the Cotswolds is spared a little jus, these days, which is why this little Jew prefers life up here in the Brum-burbs of Stratford or down in the ghetto of London. I’m dialling your firstborn from the other line now.’
The Fosse Hills was the current Cotswold-property hotspot for celebrities in the know stepping away from London.
Cooler and more cultural than the Castle Combe chocolate boxes in the south, less media-tarnished than the east’s seedy Chipping Norton set, not as snobbishly inbred as the Badminton and Highgrove west wing, it had become almost impossible to open a property section without finding the Bardswolds namechecked. This high spur of Jurassic limestone escarpment, which scythed its way around the lush folds of the Fosse Valley, with the vales of Avon and Evesham stretching away either side, was no longer the Cotswolds’ best-kept secret.
Those who had discovered it years ago remained tight-lipped, fearful that it would soon become another franchise outlet for Soho House and Daylesford Organics, narrow lanes overrun with Range Rover Evoques. Others, like Kit, who had known it and loved it in another lifetime, now avoided it as much as possible. He based himself in London all year and soon in New York.
‘Tell me, dear boy, have you cast your Broadway lead?’ Ferdie was asking.
‘I have,’ Kit said carefully, head throbbing. His Broadway lead could drink a lot of vodka.
‘Have you couched your Broadway lead?’
‘I resent that.’
Kit’s recent National Theatre production, based on a little-known Jacobean comedy, had been a huge commercial success, going on to sell out the regional tour circuit, then three months in the West End. Transferring it to Broadway was always going to be challenging, an American audience unlikely to catch the zeitgeist of a modern-day reworking of a Thomas Middleton satire set among high-end London property developers playing off oligarchs against Chinese investors. They’d needed a big name attached.
American A-lister Orla Gomez’s reputation was notorious. She’d been in rehab more than she’d been on a set in recent years, and was considered washed up by most Hollywood producers. The only needles she put in her arm now were insulin pens for her diabetes, but her sugar-rush mind, sharp tongue and bitter regrets made her volatile. To risk that on stage six nights a week seemed madness, in a comedy it was certifiable, yet when she’d read for the part in New York, she’d outclassed all the other actresses by a league. Kit’s mind was made up from his first gale of laughter. He’d had to fight hard for her. She’d flown into London this week to watch the original cast, telling Kit she’d wanted to work with him since seeing his production of Medea as an exchange student: ‘Five goddam pissing times! The lead actress blew my mind away. You changed my life, Kit Donne.’
Kit glared at the horsebox tail-lights, wondering why he didn’t feel better. Orla was beautiful, unbelievably talented and probably still in bed in his London flat, sleeping off a moonlit performance of Medea’s speech to Jason on his rooftop garden, decrying women’s subjugation to their husbands, followed by a demonstration of what turned her on in his wet room and an all-out seduction in his kitchen. He’d cleared an empty bottle of Chase vodka and a lot of watermarks from his work surface that morning while dunking out his teabag, his head feeling remarkably clear and insanely cheerful, possibly because he was still drunk. Then he’d looked up at the calendar and noticed the date, and it was as though someone had picked up that vodka bottle and hit him over the skull with it.
‘Your son, my godson and theatre’s future is finally on line one.’ Ferdie had adopted an Essex dental receptionist’s lilt.
‘It’s Mum’s birthday.’ The familiar voice was as clear as a radio play through his car speakers. ‘You’d forgotten, hadn’t you? We’ve been waiting over an hour. We’re leaving now.’
‘Hello? Sorry! Stuck in traffic!’ Kit shouted. ‘Going to be late! Order for me!’
In twenty-seven years, Kit had never once forgotten his wife’s birthday until today. It was like forgetting Christmas.
Ferdie reappeared on the line, his voice wrapped in a self-satisfied smile. ‘You are beneath contempt, dear boy. I am beyond agent. And given you’re practically next door to o
ur mutually beloved Stratford, you can bloody well come here to talk to Donald about playing Lear. He’s got frightful collywobbles. We’re here until the weekend.’
Ferdie’s husband Donald was one of the country’s best-loved actors and a notorious drama queen. Having gladly accepted the invitation to direct his long-anticipated Lear at the RSC the following summer, Kit might have guessed his leading man would be gripped by stage fright with a year to curtain up.
‘Sorry, Ferd.’ He tried to swing past the horsebox again, almost going head-on into a white van. The finger from the cab turned into a small shaking fist. ‘It’s a flying visit.’
‘The sort that involves the seat of your pants, I don’t doubt. I’m not sure I like you very much right now, and that is spoken as your oldest friend.’
Kit had studiously avoided kindness for a long time, seeing few old acquaintances outside the safe professional confines of rehearsal room or theatre bar. Work was a way of channelling his grief, but he was drinking too much and a series of well-publicised affairs with his leading ladies – his ‘caught in the actress’, as Ferdie called it – had left him hollow with loneliness. He was a distinctly shabby friend.
‘I will make this up to you, Ferdie, I promise.’
‘Make it up to yourself first. The rest of us have lower expectations. I know it’s in the theatre-director job description to seduce actresses, but must they always be so much younger than you? If acting your age is too much to ask, dear boy, at least cast it.’
Kit laughed. ‘It’s on the bucket list.’
‘Trouble with bloody bucket lists is that one generally kicks it before one ticks it.’
‘I’m coming up for Donald’s Uncle Vanya preview in a couple of weeks, bringing some of the old Royal Court crowd. I’ll take you all out to lunch beforehand.’
‘He’ll appreciate that.’ Mollified, Ferdie’s voice lost a little of its scalpel edge. There was a long pause. ‘Put a pebble on her grave from me.’ He rang off.
