by Fiona Walker
The lorry in front of him now slowed to a crawl on the steep hill.
Kit glared at the ramp in front of him. ‘CAUTION HORSES’, said the letters across it. ‘Too bloody right.’ Swinging out, seeing clear carriageway, he floored it, flicking his own finger out of the sunroof in celebration, spotting the speed camera too late, the oncoming car later still. Cresting the hill, he swerved back into his own lane in the nick of time, then blasted past the Gatso, with the horsebox’s furious beep in his ears. He already had nine points on his licence. Had it flashed?
Taking a left turn, Kit cut across a cleft in the ridge towards the Cotswolds’ latest Michelin-starred hang-out, wishing he’d stuck to the village pub after all.
*
The dun colt had escaped from the foal barn, sailing over sheep hurdles, gates, posts and rails to rejoin his mother in the top field. Lester trudged after it, cursing under his breath, his hips and heart aching badly. There were always one or two that tried, but he’d never known one get this far. This one looked set to be a persistent offender, which was only to be expected. Lester had picked the foal out as special straight away. The Captain had known it too, his waning interest briefly revived at the sight of it at a day old, charging around the nursery paddock. ‘That’s our Olympic horse, Lester.’
The Captain had let Pip christen it, which meant the poor chap owed his registered name, Top Gun, to a movie she liked about fighter pilots – ‘He’s by Cruisoe and it stars Tom Cruise, get it?’ To Lester he was simply Tom, and he was breath-taking.
He watched him move now, that ground-covering, fetlock-flicking action eager to play catch, knowing he had Lester beat from the off, trotting away with hocks and head high.
‘I’m not even going to try,’ Lester told him, going up to his mother instead and buckling on a head-collar. ‘I know you’re still a mummy’s boy.’
The foal stood and watched as he led the mare down to the gate. He let out an indignant high-pitched whinny, but he didn’t follow.
Lester took the mare out of the field and waited. Leaning back against the gate patiently, he pulled an aniseed ball from his pocket to suck, looking down at the stable-yard. Although his eyes blurred things now, his mind and memory were crystal clear, filling in the soft spots.
From here, he could see across the stud’s rooftops to the stallion paddock where the foal’s father was scratching his golden, dorsal-striped rump on the metal tree guard around the oak trunk. Beyond that, the front paddocks flanked the drive to the lane, park rails meeting stone walls, hunt jump and hedge, Austen land to the left, the village to the right, and directly ahead the hayfield still waiting to be cut, silver as wolf fur.
Stubbs came and sat beside him now, leaning hard against his leg and looking up, old-man eyebrows serious.
‘It’s all right, I’m not going to cry,’ he told him. ‘We saw that one off.’
He could vividly remember standing up here with the Captain and Mrs Percy the year they’d planted all the whips for the new field hedging, watching Ronnie and her friend charging down the drive and across that lane, riding bareback, ponytails bobbing, jodhpured legs kicking, no heed to cars – less traffic in those days – then charging off across the fields to the church meadows, climbing the hill to slalom through the standing stones, then plunging down into the churchyard to scatter tables, chairs and nervous village ladies as they bought cakes from the stall to cram into saddle bags before setting off on some day-long adventure.
‘Those girls are terrors,’ Mrs Percy had lamented, in her dry-sherry voice.
The Captain had just roared with laughter, sending his wife to apologise to the vicar and bring back a Victoria sponge.
Church volunteers had run the cake stall every Saturday throughout the sixties and seventies, the village’s very own Lyons Corner House, serving cream teas all summer to a roaring trade. The church had been at the heart of village life then. The Percy family had their own pew and wall engraving, the Captain’s readings at services legendary for volume. Those two little girls had been christened and married there; one was now buried there. Soon the Captain would be lowered beneath its earth too, joining his wife and forefathers.
Lester could see the unicorn horn of the spire peeking above the yews, a glint from the tall glass dome on the vicarage roof in the foreground – some Middle Eastern family lived there now – and the barley-sugar twists of the Old Almshouses’ chimneys closer still, its garden backing onto the Green. To the right was the little school – the ‘terrors’ hadn’t attended that, one educated by nuns, the other by a boater-throwing local preparatory then boarding school, where she’d denied her bright mind by staring out of the window through lessons, dreaming of eventing glory.
An unfamiliar horsebox was turning into the arrivals yard. Lester’s heart jumped from trot to gallop. A hiss of air brakes, the thump of impatient hoofs kicking partitions, the whinnies from stables as they registered newcomers. Then the engine rattled to a stop and he could hear the skylarks again, their shrill, lyrical trills rising and falling.
Behind him, the colt let out another indignant whinny.
Ignoring him, Lester watched the cab door open, then two small dogs spilling out followed by a diminutive figure.
His eyesight might not be so good these days, but he knew without question it was Ronnie, still slim as a teenager and athletic enough to jump down in one. She raked back the blonde bob and looked around. Lester shushed Stubbs, who was growling furiously as he heard the strange dogs barking. Ronnie marched to the back of the horsebox and pulled down the ramp to check her horses. Then she emerged and stood looking up at the house, its golden face and hers basking in lunchtime sun, Percy family tragedy stealing none of their beauty.
He could feel his arthritic fingers aching worse than ever. Looking down he realised his hands had formed into swollen-knuckled fists.
For all the prolonged schism, she was an only daughter who had just lost her father, Lester reminded himself. Let her have a moment. She wouldn’t thank him for interfering – they’d hardly parted on good terms.
‘Mnee-he-he-he-he.’ Behind him, the colt came a few steps closer.
Not looking round, Lester slotted the aniseed ball from one cheek to the other and let the mare keep slowly edging out of sight of her foal behind the hedge as she grazed the track.
Ronnie was on her mobile now. Lester, who disliked speaking on the phone at the best of times, was baffled by the modern plague of impatience that turned people into walking telephone booths.
The day she’d left Johnny, she’d spent half the morning in the old red phone box by the Green.
The foal nickered, closer still now.
Beyond the stable-yard, there was a screech of brake and the roar of burned clutch that told Lester Pip was returning. A moment later he spotted the little blue car racing along the drive between the poplars. She can deal with Ronnie, he decided with relief. Women were better at tea and sympathy. Or, in Pip’s case, tea.
Then he spotted a glint of red at the stud gates. A hundred yards behind Pip, turning off the village lane, came the battered Shogun of the Captain’s eldest grandchild, Alice. It pulled up at the bottom of the drive and she got out, also on the phone, gesticulating furiously. For a moment, he wondered if she could be speaking with Ronnie, then dismissed the notion. To Lester’s knowledge, mother and daughter hadn’t spoken since Ann Percy’s funeral, when Alice had wished Ronnie in Hell in front of three hundred witnesses, including the editor of Horse & Hound and the Duchess of Cornwall.
‘Oh, bloody hell!’ he cursed under his breath.
With a squeal, the colt reeled away.
Inserting another aniseed ball, Lester let the mare graze on.
5
The vast lavender-fringed and much-raked gravel rectangle beside the old watermill was playing host to more glossy marques than a Knightsbridge underground car park.
Kit posted his filthy ten-year-old Saab between two Aston Martins, wishing he’d booked somewhere le
ss pretentious. Hermia would have loved it, but their children were hardly going to be impressed. Their twenty-three-year-old son had donated his last acting fee to Médicins Sans Frontières and their daughter, a recent graduate from a red-brick where she’d read drama and Socialist Worker, was a Marxist vegan. The dishes here cost more than their local food bank’s annual budget.
His phone had buzzed with messages throughout his drive from London. Pulling his reading glasses from brow to nose to find Orla (10) banded across his screen, he scrolled through them, jpeg attachments loading with the laboured pace of a reluctant roller blind coming down. Orla belonged to the generation for whom the selfie had replaced a thousand words, all of them tightening his groin without challenging his mind.
Kit sent a smiley emoticon, ironically minimalist. His children were waiting, his own smiley face irrepressible at the prospect. He switched the phone off, a parallel life that was no longer an active window.
The maître d’, who was an RSC member and had discreetly prepared his staff for a big-talent VIP lunching with them today, was profoundly disappointed to find that Christopher ‘Kit’ Donne looked more like a country auctioneer than a theatre director, a newsboy flat cap shielding his mane of oaky hair and clever grey eyes. Anybody expecting luvvie flamboyance didn’t know the highly organised mind and sharp intellect behind Kit’s award-winning productions, or appreciate that his children remained quite his favourite power couple to lunch with, no matter how hard a time they always gave him.
They were sitting at an outside table along the small balcony overlooking the millwheel: an angry idealist in a tweed waistcoat and pork-pie hat, with a countrified hippie chick in a flowered dress and gumboots, blonde hair piled up with pins that couldn’t hope to take its weight for long. They were sharing a bottle of red wine and the sort of ribald sibling laughter that’s as comfortable as old shoes. He felt his chest hollow with love and pride.
‘Sorry! Sorry so late. Have you ordered?’
‘We’re disordered.’ His daughter rose for a kiss, blonde hair escaping.
‘You’re fucking late.’ His son tipped his chair back and his hat brim down. ‘I take it you’re in a hurry as usual. Shall we skip lunch and go straight to Mum’s grave?’
‘We’re here to celebrate her birthday.’ Kit dragged up a chair. ‘We don’t need to stand on top of her. Let’s eat.’ His hangover needed ballast. ‘God, but it’s good to see you both!’
The food, when it arrived, lacked the carbohydrates he craved, sculptured little taste-bud-teasing cameos on huge white plates that the waitress turned to ensure the Le Mill logo was at twelve o’clock.
‘When did “The” become “Le”?’ Kit asked her, with jaded irony, but she didn’t know the answer, muttering apologies and offering to find out. ‘Really, don’t bother.’
‘Enjoy your meal.’ She smiled and backed away, tugging her white cuffs down over tattooed wrists. Lots of tiny Cs interlinked, he noticed. Orla had a tattoo of a bird of paradise on her hip. Hermia had hated tattoos. It was one of the few things she’d been as snobbish about as her family. As far as he was aware, their children still had none – at least none visible. He didn’t want to know beyond that.
He regarded them both now, his lifeblood with some of his DNA and none of the letters he’d fought to put after his name at their age, self-belief stamped through them as it had been in their mother. He relaxed into listening mode as his daughter launched into a convoluted story about losing her bag at a party in Oxford and calling her brother in the early hours to rescue her.
People often mistook Kit’s quietness for disapproval, but he rarely ever settled on one side of a fence. Thought was a constant and ongoing process, a conversation in his head too fast to voice out loud. When he’d been young, he’d been plagued by a bad stutter. It was why he’d always kept notes, his pockets bulging with hardback pads crammed with tight lines of largely illegible text. When he spoke with his cast and crew, he referred to the books constantly, slowing himself down with pre-written lines, slower still because it took him so long to read his own tiny writing, his many pairs of reading glasses never to hand, all too often forgotten on his head. On occasions, he still got so carried away pitching ideas, blocking scenes or giving notes off script that he couldn’t shut up; he repeated himself, contradicted himself and reinvented ideas. He no longer stuttered, but his mind in freeform worked so quickly and constantly it was beyond language. As he matured, he said less. He tried to write things down in big enough handwriting to be able to read them without glasses. The little leather pad and pen sat on the table beside him as habitually as a mobile phone.
His son was now describing researching the role he was about to play, glaring at the leather pad as he spoke, as though daring Kit to take notes.
They all picked unenthusiastically at desiccated edamame and beetroot soil on chia and pea-shoot salad, see-through slivers of three varieties of organic radish fanned artfully around it, a cuckoo spit of fennel foam on top, and he remembered bringing Hermia here years earlier. They had served T-bones on cast-iron griddles that took half an hour to cool down enough to eat, mountains of garlic bread weeping butter, and the side salads were sliced iceberg lettuce in a vinaigrette soup. His stomach rumbled at the memory.
‘So the heart attack is scheduled when?’ His son set down his fork. ‘I’ll diarise it.’
‘“Diarise” is not a word.’
‘Unlike “mid-life crisis”.’
‘That’s technically a hypothesis legitimised as a turn of phrase.’
The fork lifted accusingly. ‘That’s technically bullshit.’
‘That’s technically CH4,’ he snapped, then forced a smile, hangover pounding afresh. ‘Although, like any good farmer’s daughter, your mother would have been quick to point out that’s just methane.’
‘Hot air.’ His daughter gave him a wise look. ‘From a windbag having a mid-life crisis.’
‘Bullshit.’ His son grinned. ‘From a slimy moldwarp.’
‘Puttock.’
‘Loon.’
‘Ratsbane.’ Kit laughed, leaning back as the waitress brought more wine and poured it.
Years ago, somebody had given the family fridge magnets of Shakespearian insults, which Hermia had adored. Even when her speech had been so slurred and laboured that it was almost impossible to understand her, they could all identify her glorying in ‘cream-faced loon’ and ‘bunch-back’d toad’.
‘Your mother would have been fifty-three today.’ He raised his refilled glass. ‘To Hermia!’
His children followed suit. ‘To Mum!’
For a moment, the lump in Kit’s throat was too cumbersome to work round, but he held the smile. A natural pessimist, he had none-the-less always striven to ensure his children saw their mother’s life in a positive light to counter the tragedy of her early death.
Three glasses stayed raised. His son stretched back, six foot four of lean, bearded muscle and lack of drive. His daughter’s big French grey eyes looked straight across at him, both barrels, dark-rimmed and tangle-lashed; her mother’s eyes, demanding and compelling. It seemed only a few sleeps ago that they’d been in cartooned pyjamas, fringes tickling eyelashes, Kit and Hermia tucking cuddly-toy-laden duvets over them.
Both children had followed their parents into the theatre. Both had talent – his son emotional and explosive on stage, his daughter a cool-headed pedant of prop table and lighting cue. Neither had the fanatical drive he’d possessed at their age, a chippy small-town northern lad sharing a cramped Vauxhall basement with a bunch of impoverished fellow Cambridge graduates, insomniac actors and writers whose lives all revolved around the stage. His kids, brought up confident and metropolitan, drifted between loftier landscapes as jobs and lovers changed; they used the family cottage in Compton Magna as a party pad; they treated their father’s London flat as an administrative address and dumping ground; they were bright and breezy and savvy enough not to live to work, and on days like this, Kit had to remind hi
mself repeatedly that he loved them precisely because they weren’t like him. When they had been tiny, Hermia had spent bedtime hours with her lips pressed to their little pink ears, telling them to aim high and fear nothing. Kit had ribbed her fondly for giving them unrealistic expectations. To be proven right twice over remained devastating.
He tried to picture her at fifty-three, his mind playing out parallel lives: Hermia to whom the accident had never happened, alongside her alter ego whose life had become so limited in scope and time.
Kit Donne and Hermia Austen had met through mutual friends in London in the late eighties, ambitious young director and bright, brave actress, one as antagonistically academic and working class as the other was broad-mindedly liberal and well-born, an alchemy of opposites that had forged a golden young Theatreland couple. When Hermia had been expecting their first child, they’d bought a rundown Cotswolds farm as an escape from London and to be closer to her family. Between directing and acting commitments, Kit had set about restoring the house and raising rare-breed sheep as a hobby, while country-girl Hermia bred and competed her beloved Welsh cobs. In the decade that had followed they’d spent as many weekends and long holidays there as possible. They were the village golden couple by then too, generous and sociable, with their outgoing children and an infectious passion for theatre, particularly the Royal Shakespeare Company with whom Kit worked as often as he could. With a stint as artistic director of the Royal Court and a string of award-winning productions under his belt, he had been hotly tipped as a future artistic director there.
Then, just days after her fortieth birthday, Hermia had suffered a serious head injury falling from a young horse onto the road. She’d been in hospital for months afterwards, multiple operations bringing no hope of her returning to the life she’d once led. Despite years of trading that hope for denial, of chasing medical science, she never recovered her co-ordination enough to walk unaided or her speech enough to be clearly understood, her mental health blighted by long-term cognitive problems and bouts of deep depression. At times, her desire to end her half-life had been overwhelming. Seven years after the accident, a huge stroke granted that wish, its underlying cause almost certainly the original head injury, and Kit had finally lost his greatest love and companion, relief and grief too tightly twisted together to reconcile, his mourning raw and conflicted. Six summers on, it could still consume him on days like this.
