by Fiona Walker
The children now found it hard to remember Mum without her ‘thinking gaps’, the tics, slurs and frustration that had held their vibrant, clever mother hostage until her death. Kit told them one of the anecdotes he’d scribbled down in his notepad, remembering a family camping weekend knee-deep in festival mud when they’d been babes in arms, their mother determined that they’d all see Bob Dylan, Tori Amos and ‘a panoply of nineties bands singing like Betjeman on Ecstasy’.
‘Is that why you hate their music, because not long afterwards Mum’s frontal lobe turned into Pulp and life became a Primal Scream Blur?’ His son turned, bearded chin pressed on his white T-shirted shoulder, hat tipped back like James Dean now. He was an artful poser of questions as well as stances.
Kit held his gaze, not trusting the beat in his carotid artery. They inevitably saw through his rose-tinted memories to the thorns. He wished he’d been a better husband when she was happy and healthy. He’d been furiously bad-tempered throughout that trip.
He was grateful that the waitress chose that moment to clear their plates. He watched her stack. A phone number was written in biro on the back of her hand beneath Lurcher Rescue. Hermia had been absurdly fond of lurchers, calling them the Iagos of the dog world, all eyes aside and guile.
‘I go to New York in a couple of weeks,’ he told them, as he reached across to fork up his daughter’s rejected starter before it was removed. ‘I’ve got the new lead actors over here right now to workshop the script with the London cast. They’re incredibly good.’ He didn’t mention Orla by name, uncomfortably aware that his son’s puberty had coincided with her starring role as a glossy television vampire. Posters of the woman he’d shared a bed with last night had featured on bedroom walls and almost certainly in fantasies. ‘You must come out and visit. Bring girlfriends, boyfriends, whatever.’ Like tattoos, it was safest not to ask.
His daughter was tipping down her brother’s pork-pie hat brim playfully as they launched into a spat about his Tinder-dependent love life and her ‘non-binary’ taste.
‘One, one, oh, one, oh, one, two,’ Kit muttered.
‘Is that the code to your safe?’ Two grey eyes turned to him. Hermia’s amused gaze.
‘No, Dad’s more left-field than that. Don’t tell me.’ The hat was lifted. Hermia’s smile. ‘To be or not to be reloaded?’
‘Binary for fifty-three.’ He picked up his glass, finding it empty.
‘Mum always said you were too clever by half.’ The blonde hair had escaped its pins, just like her mother’s used to, as she splashed out the last of the bottle of red. ‘What’s that in binary?’
‘Zero point one.’
His son raised his glass. ‘Lady and gentleman, I give you the only Cambridge mathematician to win two Oliviers and a Tony. Don’t tell us what that is in binary.’
His daughter clinked it. ‘Mum won an Olivier.’
‘Medea.’ Kit nodded, swallowing uncomfortably. ‘At the Royal Court.’
Afterwards she’d taken a break from acting, wanting to spend more time with the children as their bedtimes got later, and life with au pairs became too stressful to balance. She wanted them to base the family in Compton Magna year-round and aim for secondary education at the good Warwickshire grammars, not the hothouses of north London. She couldn’t wait to focus more on her pony breeding and to catch up with childhood friends, like the one in the Lake District with whom she exchanged ridiculously long, old-fashioned letters that she re-read endlessly (‘You’ll love her!’ she’d always promised, their plans to meet up ill-fated). Hermia’s family farmed just half a mile along the lane; parties and visits were planned, the future a limitless horizon.
They’d come here, to the Mill for her fortieth birthday that year. She was wearing a poppy-red dress and a necklace shaped from a row of snaffles, sent to her by the Lake District friend. ‘These will be my unbridled forties!’
After her death Kit had boxed up that necklace, along with every personal item he could find relating to horses, and sent it to storage. Old bits of tack, pictures, books, rosettes, trophies, riding gear. They were still there. He couldn’t dispose of them – they had been a part of her – but he couldn’t bear them in his sight. He felt much the same way about horses.
*
Careering into the stud’s arrivals yard at her usual breakneck speed, Pip was so overexcited at the sight of Ronnie Percy – perched on a horsebox ramp talking on the phone and looking thrillingly aristocratic – that she didn’t notice the two little black and tan dogs bounding forward until the last minute, one disappearing beneath her car.
She screamed, swerved and closed her eyes, driving blindly into the hay barn and coming to a soft halt against a wall of bales. When she looked around, Ronnie had both waggy-tailed dogs at foot and was hurrying across to her.
‘My goodness, are you all right?’
Pip rolled down the window. ‘Yes! I often park here. Nice and shady.’ She gathered up the Tupperware container that had just fallen off the front seat, her egg salad now transformed into a beetroot massacre. ‘My deepest sympathies at your father’s passing.’ She leaped out breathlessly, not realising that Ronnie was still talking on the phone. ‘I was the one who found him. Such a sorry tragedy.’
Ronnie held up her hand apologetically as she said a hasty farewell to her caller: ‘I have to go. I don’t know when I’ll be back in Wiltshire, but not tonight. Really, don’t feel you have to... Okay, well, if you can, then let me know. I’d like that.’ She rang off, holding out her hand to squeeze Pip’s. ‘Horribly rude of me. You must be Pauline. I’m Veronica Percy. Are you really okay?’
Clutching her Tupperware box, which was leaking beetroot juice over her hands, Pip nodded eagerly and arranged her face into one of pity. ‘They’ve taken your dad to the morgue for the...’ she cleared her throat and mouthed ‘...autopsy. I’m keeping the house locked to preserve the scene, but I’ll put on the tack-room kettle so we can have a nice cup of tea. I’ve made an egg salad, and there’s fruit cake.’
‘How wonderfully organised you are.’ Close to, Ronnie’s face was quite lined, with black smudges under her eyes, and she looked as though she’d been crying, but she was exquisitely pretty, with those big blue upper-class British eyes, high cheekbones and a generous smile. ‘I need to unload my horses first.’ Her husky voice was forthright, like the Captain’s. ‘The poor things have been on the go since five this morning. Are there a couple of stables made up?’
‘I’ll go and see!’ she offered, thrilled at the chance to play head girl, putting the egg salad on the roof of her car and wondering where Lester was. ‘Any special requirements?’
Ronnie’s face froze as a big red off-roader turned into the yard, its driver’s face equally stricken. Alice was out in a flash, still wearing her Wolds Pony Club polo-shirt and baseball cap, arms sunburned, a lanyard around her neck from which a whistle and a roll of gold stickers dangled. ‘Mummy, how dare you?’
‘Darling, Grandpa has just died. Let’s not fight.’
‘So you thought you’d load up your horses and move straight back in?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. We were at a competition when I heard the news.’
‘Did you win anything?’ Pip asked brightly, eager to cover up who had been the one to break the news to Ronnie. She’d always been wary of the Captain’s eldest granddaughter, a florid-faced little powerhouse of mother-love and country lore, and not her biggest fan.
‘Couldn’t you have just stayed there?’ Alice was demanding of her mother now, obviously trying very hard not to cry. ‘Let us handle this, Mummy.’
‘I want to be here. Today is just awful. I know how important he was to you three.’
Mother and daughter didn’t look at all alike, Pip observed. Alice took after her late father, a handsomely broken-nosed Worcestershire huntsman, who appeared in photos all over the house, glowering with the low-browed, broad-shouldered misanthropy of a Brontë hero, in a beagler and scarlet jacket. Ronnie was all f
ine-boned femininity.
‘We don’t need you here!’ Alice fumed.
‘Daddy would have wanted it.’
‘He bloody didn’t!’
‘I disagree.’
‘He so didn’t.’
‘You’re wrong.’
The trouble with horse people, Pip mused, was that their arguments often descended to yes-no interludes very quickly. Repeating one feverish line had kept the Captain occupied for hours on the phone in his twilight months, his face reddening with every emphatic ‘It bloody well is!’
On they went, trading ‘did’ and ‘didn’t’ until both sounded meaningless.
Ronnie’s mobile, abandoned on a hay bale, was ringing, its tone a soothing classical air. Pip picked it up to offer it to her, but she waved it away. The picture flashing up on screen of a man in a bush hat – seriously sexy eyes, Pip noted – disappeared as the call timed out, along with the word Blair.
‘Just go, Mummy! Throw up your ramp and go!’ Alice was barking, a mashup of ‘I Will Survive’ and evicting a recalcitrant pony clubber from camp. ‘Pax can’t take it.’
‘Pax is in Italy,’ Pip pointed out helpfully, admiring Ronnie’s phone, which was a version up from hers.
‘Let’s go into the house and talk, Alice.’ Ronnie’s voice was consoling, etched with a heavy hint of mounting irritation. ‘Pippa here’s offered to look after my horses, and I’m dying for a pee.’
‘Best use the yard loo.’ Pip stood to attention, determined the house would stay locked down to spare the grieving family its less savoury corners until Janine Turner’s cleaning team had been in. ‘I’ll make tea. Milk and sugar? It’s Pip, by the way.’
But Alice was already talking across her: ‘Mummy, I really think this is all best conducted through lawyers, don’t you? There’s the stud to consider.’
‘I don’t give a fig about that right now.’ The big blue eyes sought out Pip as she edged towards the tack room. ‘Was it quick, his death?’
‘I wasn’t there.’ She saw again the slipper soles at the bottom of the cellar steps, the lifeless veined ankles. ‘I found him this morning. He’d passed over some time before. Around midnight, they think.’
‘Oh, God, he was all alone.’
‘What do you care?’ Alice was raging now, a finger-pointing rapper in a Pony Club baseball cap. ‘You roll up here the moment he dies, like you have a right to be a part of this family, of this place. You’re a stranger here now. You’re not needed. You never saw him.’
Pip felt cross. She could hear a voice in her head respectfully pointing out that neither of them had seen much of the Captain towards the end. But she said nothing, lips pressed tightly together, heartbeat suddenly revving to max.
Pip had always struggled with her emotions, her parents responding to tears and tantrums with the same mistrust prompted by pop music, spicy food and television channels not prefixed by ‘BBC’. ‘Happy’ and ‘cross’ seemed to cover most bases, Pip had found. Lying awake in the dark brought out other feelings so she kept two bedside lights permanently switched on and an emergency torch in her bedside drawer. Being faced with other people’s emotions was as bad as a power cut.
‘Alice, he was my father!’ Ronnie raked back her hair, which sprang back to cloud glossily around her face, like an advert for conditioner.
‘Which is why we all loved and protected him from what you did to him!’ Alice squared up to her mother. ‘We all pulled together. He looked after us after you pissed off and then after Daddy died. Grumps brought us up. I have a right to be upset. You don’t!’ As she stepped back with a Donald Trump finger jab, she inadvertently trod hard on Pip’s foot.
‘Ow!’
‘Oh, dry up, Pip.’
Without warning, Pip wanted to shout, I was the one who saw him every day! I washed for him, cooked for him, cared for him! I saw his breath get shallower. I saw him struggle to walk. He was the toughest, nastiest man I cared for but I did care for him. Me! And I saw his dead body.
At last, this was feeling real. Yet still the tears didn’t come. She stared at them, too choked to speak.
‘Just leave!’ Alice was snarling at her mother.
Ronnie rolled her eyes in defiant exasperation. ‘Why don’t we let Pip make us that cup of tea?’
‘Pip should leave too!’ Alice growled. ‘You had no right to call Mummy.’
Pip’s anger was incendiary now. ‘None of the rest of you picked up.’
‘We do have lives!’
‘Unlike Grumps!’ Pip flashed. Oh. Shit.
Alice turned to her mother, saying in a throat-burning undertone: ‘I requiem meam doleat!’
Now they were talking in tongues! Pip’s chest was a fire-pit, her breath hard to catch, her grief a forest blaze roaring through her.
‘Oh, God.’ Ronnie was doing the hair thing with her hands again, husky laughter trapped in a sob. ‘Daddy insisted every Percy should be able to ride well enough to race under rules, add up well enough to wager, write well enough to apologise, and speak Latin well enough to—’
‘Garden!’ Alice interrupted, leaving Pip with the distinct impression that the Captain had used a less wholesome example.
‘Omnia mors aequat. I must pee.’ Ronnie hurried to the yard loo.
Alice marched after her. ‘Death does not make all things bloody equal...’
The argument raged on.
Leaving them to it, Pip went to the tack room to put the kettle on, only realising she was still carrying Ronnie’s phone when it vibrated in her hand and started playing its classical riff again. The photo of handsome Blair was back on screen.
‘Phone call!’ She hurried out.
Alice was now addressing the closed door of the yard’s ancient privy, listing her mother’s many failings.
Pip stood on the tack-room step, a threshold that had felt like a portal to the Holy Grail two years ago. In his high-hedged field, Cruisoe charged up and down and roared with unaccustomed vigour. Further away, a mare shrilled and her foal echoed. The horses in the lorry whinnied and kicked. In her hand, the classical ringtone played a long, melancholy bass string.
The man’s face on the screen was looking straight at her, his dark eyes ninety per cent cocoa. Guessing it had to be important for him to call twice, she swiped the green Accept.
‘You okay?’ His voice was pure gravel. ‘Don’t even bother answering that. Brian Sedgewick’s lending me his car. I’ll drive down as soon as I’ve ridden my last round. I booked somewhere called Le Mill. Usual name. See you there. Be strong, kid.’ He rang off before Pip could explain.
There was something heroic in that voice: Crocodile Dundee was on his way, Indiana Jones was galloping in, Mad Max had Compton Magna covered. Wolverine had transport!
Be strong, kid. Pip felt better just for hearing it. Ronnie was strong, standing up for herself against Alice’s barrage.
‘For goodness’ sake, let’s pull together!’ The loo door slammed now as she emerged, ancient cistern refilling loudly, setting the old pipes rattling through the feed and tack rooms, like plate-banging prisoners. ‘Daddy would expect us all to jump to it, not mud-sling. There’s a lot to get on with.’ That husky voice was splitting. ‘Alice, we’re all in shock.’
The yard pipes, rattling and humming their final refrain, shuddered to silence. As they did so, Pip sensed the anger between the two women finally ebb.
Alice’s face contorted with the effort of not crying. She turned away, hand pressed to her mouth, the other held out to stop her mother touching her arm in comfort.
Ronnie and Alice stood together for a long time, not reconciled and yet too closely bonded by grief to move apart.
Pip hovered on the step, wondering whether it would be a good moment to mention the recent mobile call.
Alice was the first to pull herself together with a determined sniff. ‘Where the bloody hell’s Lester?’
‘Up in the top fields, I should think,’ Pip volunteered, grateful to be back in the conversat
ion. ‘It’s where he always goes when he needs to mull things over.’ Or hide. The stallion man was as brave as a lion with Percy horses, less so with Percy women. Give Lester a rearing, teeth-baring two-year-old, fresh from high pasture, and he’d have it following him round like a duckling in half an hour. But any mention of Ronnie brought on his eye twitch, and Ann Percy’s arrival on the yard had triggered a visible sweat.
‘Poor old Lester.’ Ronnie sighed. ‘This will be incredibly hard on him.’
‘Grumps will have seen he’s looked after,’ Alice said chippily.
‘He always said he poached his regiment’s best-ever tack-cleaner.’ Ronnie gazed across at the house. ‘Lester was Plymouth Brethren. They knew each other more than sixty years.’
Hovering in the tack-room doorway, Pip watched her make her way back to her lorry ramp, slight and determined. But instead of walking up it to fetch out a horse, she started heaving it closed. ‘I’ll take these two straight home and leave you in charge, Alice,’ she called. ‘Let’s please speak tomorrow.’
‘No!’ Pip leaped towards her. ‘You have to stay!’ Pip had personally brought Ronnie Percy back to Compton Magna. She was vibrant and she belonged here. It was the Elgin Marbles coming home to Greece, the Rosetta Stone to Egypt, Michelle Fowler to Albert Square. She couldn’t let the moment slip away. ‘I need you to stay!’
‘This isn’t about you, Pip!’ Alice snapped.
‘Blair’s on his way!’
The ramp hovered, the big blue eyes startled. ‘What?’
‘I took the call,’ Pip told Ronnie breathlessly, holding up the phone. ‘He says he’s booked a room at Le Mill in the usual name.’ As she spoke the words, she realised that perhaps she should have kept that bit quiet.
