by Fiona Walker
She shook her head. ‘I’d remember. One of us would. ’Tis in my memory lock’d and you yourself shall keep the key of it. Poor Ophelia and Laertes never made it to senior moments.’ She headed back to the driver’s door, jumping into her wet-dog-and-coffee-smelling cab.
How did a horsebox-driving harridan know Hamlet?
But before he could work it out, she’d reversed neatly, liberating his key, still miraculously intact when he plucked it up from its gravel casing.
‘Thank you!’ he shouted up at the cab. ‘Sorry to have been so much trouble!’
Nodding, she drove forwards again, almost mowing him down.
He waited in the rain to apologise and bid her farewell, but she stayed in the cab, digging through the glovebox. More thunder rumbled. Holding up his hand in farewell, he got into his car, plugged his phone onto its charger, cranked up Ella Fitzgerald and drove away at speed.
*
In the cab of the lorry, Ronnie pulled out a heavy coin from her glovebox. She’d just realised who he was. She turned it round in her hand. It went everywhere with her to competitions and had done for half a century. A commemorative crown handed out to school children to celebrate the silver wedding anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip in 1972, later swapped between two small girls who’d painted them with nail varnish initials as friendship tokens. The varnish had long since chipped off, but Ronnie could still remember the V daubed with her mother’s conservative coral pink, while on the other side, in far bolder scarlet, a curly H.
‘Happy birthday, Hermia,’ she breathed, pressing it to her lips. ‘By God, he misses you, that difficult man of yours. That makes two of us.’
*
Ronnie’s dogs bounded up to greet her when she got back to the hotel room.
‘Has Key Man gone?’ Blair came out of the bathroom towelling his wet hair. He had a dark red bruise across his ribs.
‘Key Man has gone.’ She lifted his arm to examine it closer, but he waved the gesture away, kissing her wet hair. ‘Funny thing, he was married to a friend of mine.’
‘Small world. You get talking?’
‘Not really. He’s no idea who I am – we never met. They got together after I’d left Johnny. She and I wrote to each other on and off, but then we lost touch.’ Ronnie had a trick she’d adopted long ago to share facts about her past without their allied pain, a throwaway lightness of tone and amused crease of the eye.
Although Ronnie rarely spoke of her past to Blair, she knew he understood that she had led two lives: the one before she’d left Johnny of gilded-cage social standing, the mantelpiece thick with invitations. Afterwards, she’d counted the friends who remained in touch on one hand. For years, Hermia’s name would have been the first finger she’d have lifted when asked who had remained loyal, but that had changed abruptly.
She leaned against him, head under his chin, both too wet to care about the puddle forming around them.
‘Tough day.’ He wrapped his arms round her.
‘Tough day.’ She sighed, grateful for the tightness of the hug. ‘Thank you for driving over here.’
‘I’d only be sitting in the lorry park worrying about you if I hadn’t. My first ride tomorrow isn’t until late morning.’ While no longer arriving at events with the small cavalry of horses he’d once had – all for sale at the right price, his six-horse transporter known as the Dealing Ring – Blair was still competing in classes every day this week. He’d be out campaigning again at a different event on Sunday. His was the travelling circus life typical of eventers, one he found hard to give up. They both did.
‘How are the family bearing up?’
‘Still gathering. Daddy’s carer is running round like a Border collie. She found him this morning, so she’s riding a massive adrenalin high, but that won’t last. Alice is in bits, so organising everything will help her – she’s always thrived on order.’ She didn’t mention the animosity of their encounter. Blair would listen if she needed to get it all off her chest but he knew none of the characters involved. She had never asked him to invest in that part of her life, and she had no urge to start now. Having him here was enough. Ultra-competitive, diamond-tough and known for taking things that mattered very seriously, Blair was the yin to her yang.
Stealing his towel for her own hair, she sat down on the bed. Her dogs trotted back to the basket she’d set in one corner. She knew she should get back into the shower, but she was so washed down by rain and washed out by torridness, she couldn’t face it just yet.
Their room was in a modern extension to the hotel overlooking the millpond, the décor bland and boutiquey, pillows and cushions layered up like millefeuille, and a trio of abstract canvases above the bed. There was a small balcony on which they could smoke, and a discreet picture-framed television on the wall – it was showing Goodwood with the sound down.
‘How long will you need to stay on to sort things out?’ Blair asked.
‘Not long,’ she said, lying back on the bed, the crook of one elbow over her eyes, the flight urge lighting up her nerve endings. ‘Alice needs to be in complete control of this. Tim’s the entertainer so he’ll make the funeral a big production. Pax will ensure nobody feels left out and everything is fair. I just stir things up.’
‘Maybe they need stirring.’ She felt his weight shift onto the mattress beside her.
‘The silver spoon in this mouth got melted down a long time ago to keep horses in shoes.’ She rolled over and kissed his chest, propping her chin on it to look at him.
‘Doesn’t stop it speaking its mind.’
‘A family trait all Percys inherit, although if I said that to Alice she’d accuse me of trying to make off with the tarnished silver salvers.’ She smiled. ‘Pip’s the stirrer, I suspect. I bet she’s counted the spoons.’
‘Who’s Pip?’
‘The adrenalin collie. Strange woman. Clever, though. I quite like her.’
‘Not as clever as you. You’re fierce.’ Blair reached up a hand to cup her face and she pressed her cheek tightly to it. He had wonderful hands, broad and square-tipped, sensitive to a horse’s mouth and a woman’s body.
‘Rub my back.’ She wriggled down to lie alongside him on her front, then propped herself up again to drag off her T-shirt and flopped back down.
His thumbs hard in the knots of tension bunched there brought out a sigh so deep she felt her soul might sneak out with it. The tears rolled for a while, a huge relief to be able to let them out, and to be with a man who understood not to try to hug and baby-talk her into feeling better. They weren’t straightforward feelings: raw grief for the father she had lost today, frustration at being rejected again as a mother, the yearning for a long-lost friend, but there was no need to separate them out. Like tangled laundry, they all got washed together.
At last the sad blindness passed, the seizures shuddering away. Blair’s thumbs worked deeply and swiftly on her lower back, every little bunch of sorrow forced into supple surrender. She rolled over and smiled up at him, a moment of supreme calm. ‘Shall we have sex?’
‘Isn’t that kind of disrespectful?’
‘Only if the coffin’s in the room.’
Graveside humour made them crease together with laughter, Blair’s hand clamped on his bruised chest.
She reached up to move it aside and touch the red skin. He winced as her fingertips tested it. ‘You fell off?’
‘Three from bloody home. Rider error. Going too fast.’
His mind had been off the game because he was thinking about getting here for me, she realised. That was never part of the deal either. The flight nerves hummed.
Pulling her T-shirt back on, she went outside for a cigarette and watched the Sussex Stakes from the balcony door, the sound still mute, a Galileo colt romping home. He was sensational.
‘Oh, to have bred that.’ She flipped the end of her tab out after just three or four puffs – her way of cutting down – and came back in, taking a bottle of water from the minibar fr
idge. ‘Compton Magna Stud is still like something out of the Ark.’
‘The animals come in two by two.’ Blair patted the bed beside him. ‘That’s all you need to procreate.’
‘Mercifully it’s not something I have to worry about.’ She slid off her jeans and climbed on top of him.
Blair and Ronnie enjoyed having sex together immensely. They often laughed, chatted and took cigarette, loo and coffee breaks, the way they now understood and needed one another’s bodies making it worth pacing. Such were the stop-start timetable and prying eyes of competition lorry-park life that they’d been known to start making love before breakfast, take it a stage further mid-morning, pick up where they’d left off at teatime and finish the job at bedtime. Conversely, Blair sometimes came to her cottage with just minutes to spare. They’d barely have closed the door before they were joined at the hip, no words exchanged between entry, finale and the door slamming again. Although she’d never admit it to anybody but herself, Ronnie occasionally struggled to keep up with the super-fit Australian – he could be very controlling as well as athletic, flipping between passion and detachment with bewildering unpredictability – but he also accused her of tuning out, so they were perfectly matched to give pleasure while not always paying it their full attention.
But now, when she was kneeling on those steel-hard riding thighs, with his even harder shaft revving deliciously inside her, his thumb soft drumming just the right spot to give her a body-melt climax, she found herself so stuffed with sadness she could barely breathe. The hot fix melted shamefully away.
‘Let’s stop.’ Blair drew her close, pulses slamming against hers. ‘Poor baby. Ssh. It’s okay.’
They lay together for a long time, heartbeats slowing in tandem, empathy coupling them tightly together, intimacy knotted from forehead to toes. Eventually, Ronnie got up to make a cup of tea. If sex and death were the forces by which humans erred, boiling the kettle was the first line of British defence.
Australian Blair’s respite was raiding the minibar for a beer, pressing its cool glass against her buttock as he passed behind her, making her jump, tea slopping, laughter a welcome balsam.
On screen, a field of two-year-olds were charging along in a five-furlong dash.
‘What will happen to your father’s stud?’ he asked.
‘Not my decision ultimately. The sooner I can sign away any interest the better.’
‘That’s what he wanted?’
She thought back to the awful lunches in recent memory at which her father had shouted a lot, knowing his health was failing, a j’accuse swansong telling her that the only way she could make things up to the Percy family was to do as he wished. ‘He wanted the last thirty-five years back.’
‘And you?’
‘I want today back.’ She closed her eyes. But instead of reliving the news of her father’s death, the homecoming or the awful encounter with Alice, she saw Hermia’s widower cowering against the storm, his eyes as lost as hers. Everyone can master a grief but he that has it.
*
Small, felt-like ears flicking back and forth at the sound of thunder, Stubbs looked up from his bed in the corner of the tack room at an unlikely human pack drawn together in adversity: Alice and Lester were sheltering from the storm with the last of the cake and yet more tea brewed by Pip, whose ears, like the fox terrier’s, were once again on elastic.
Retreating behind the rug racks, Alice made a series of urgent phone calls, not as hush-hush as she’d clearly have liked because she had to shout to be heard over the storm, was continually cut off, then had to repeat herself loudly.
‘...solicitors are emailing me the will now... The WILL, yes. We’re executors, as are they. It’s vitally important we—What? I told you, he fell down the stairs. Heart attack, they think. Let’s not worry about that now, Pax. We have to be straight onto this... What? Buckle and Webb, the lot who did Mummy... No, at the hospital morgue. Listen, we can talk about this when you’re—Pax? Pax? Bugger!’
‘You get the best mobile reception up in the observation tower,’ Pip said helpfully, as lightning discharged through a distant telegraph pole with a loud bang.
Red-eyed and determined, Alice peered out at the wild weather, a loose feedbag being swept along the cobbles. ‘I’ll use the phone in the house. I need to call my brother’s family again. Can I have the keys, Pip?’
‘Very crackly line in bad weather,’ Pip said quickly, thinking of the toffee-apple handset. ‘There’s an extension in Lester’s cottage.’
To her relief, a power cut put paid to Alice’s notion and they were plunged into gloomy monochrome.
Lester clambered onto a stool to check the fuse cupboard. ‘Must be a line down.’
‘Happens a lot,’ Pip told Alice.
‘I did grow up here,’ she snapped. ‘Now, it’s essential the stud functions as normally as possible.’ She took command, a small, busty silhouette marching between saddle racks, whistle swinging on its lanyard as though she was about to run a keep-fit class. ‘I need you both up to speed with what’s going on.’
Pip stood to attention, perked up to be counted still as part of the team given Alice’s customary disregard for her position. She owed it to Ronnie to report all this verbatim to her later. She reminded herself to visualise Alice as a small boat drifting on a sea of grief, the string that could pull her back in her own hand.
‘I’ve just spoken to Pax,’ Alice told them, helping herself to cake. ‘She’s going to try to get a flight back from Italy tonight and should be here by lunchtime tomorrow at the latest. Tim’s ex-wife knows where he is – halfway up some mountain apparently – and is driving out there now from Cape Town to... break... the... news.’ She was suddenly too choked to speak, and Pip rushed to comfort her, only to find herself batted away. ‘Too many raisins in this fruitcake.’
‘Just how your grandfather liked it.’ Pip stood up even taller, now finding it much easier to cope with Alice. Think boat.
‘Shilling a slice.’ Lester struck a match to light a hurricane lamp, his leathery face as sunken as Pip had ever seen it. It looked like a skull in the chiaroscuro shadow. ‘They sold it at the church for a shilling a slice.’
‘I think Pip should stay here with you tonight, Lester,’ Alice said firmly.
Pip and the old stallion man looked at each other in horror, knowing that would never happen. Mute in complicity, they listened as Alice forged on with her staff briefing, a tiny Queen Victoria addressing her trusty retainers: ‘Now that all the immediate family know – we’ll take Tim as read – the news can be broken more widely. Friends, locals, professional associates. Of course, there’s this delay waiting for the coroner, but as soon as that’s sorted, the death can be registered and a certificate issued so we can inform the official channels and deal with practical and financial matters, his bank accounts and bills and so on. I’ve already called the lawyer and have a meeting with him first thing tomorrow. There’s the funeral to arrange. That’s Tim’s mandate when he flies in but we need a date in the diary as soon as, especially with harvest getting under way. I want you both to start thinking of any names his family might not be aware of, especially you, Lester, mare owners, suppliers, trades and so forth. Grumps knew an awful lot of people. It’s a huge task.’ She rubbed her forehead fretfully with her fingers. ‘He was admired by so many.’
‘Most of them are dead now,’ Pip pointed out helpfully, ‘and he refused to talk to quite a lot of the rest, didn’t he, Lester?’
‘He was a one for picking fights and holding grudges.’ Lester nodded fondly.
‘He was certainly a strong-minded man.’ Alice cleared her throat. ‘I’ll need his diary and address book, Pip. And it goes without saying we’ll want you to make lots of your delicious cakes for the wake.’ She managed a stiff, condescending smile through the gloom. ‘Using fewer raisins.’
Pip made a mental note to tell Ronnie about the meeting with the solicitor, which seemed indecently hasty.
‘We�
��ll obviously try to keep funeral costs down,’ Alice was saying. ‘Family and close friends only. There’s no need for his estate to pay for a lot of old enemies to see him off in a gold-handled coffin covered with cheap flowers. He’d hate that. Any questions so far?’
‘Farrier’s coming,’ Lester said.
‘What?’
‘The farrier’s coming to trim them all tomorrow. Do I put him off?’
‘No. Horses’ hoofs don’t stop growing out of respect, Lester. This is why we need to pull together and get ourselves organised. The sooner I can go through Grumps’s paperwork the better. Is it all kept together, Pip?’
‘Your grandfather had an eccentric filing system – “Just shove it in a bloody drawer or bin it, Pip!” – but as soon as the lawyers tell you what you need, I can find it for you in a trice. No point looking now.’ The lights flickered. She willed the power to stay off.
‘Agreed. I’m better off at home where I can make calls and muck in.’ Alice opened the door to look out, a blast of wind making the rosettes on the wall flutter like bunting. ‘Hopefully Mummy will push off pretty pronto tomorrow so we don’t have her under our feet. I’m still furious with you for calling her, Pip,’ she snarled over her shoulder. ‘This is a family matter.’ The door was caught in a gust, banging against the outside wall, rosettes dropping like shot birds. ‘The rain’s almost stopped. I might make a dash for it.’
Thinking she’d gone, Pip harrumphed under her breath and turned back to Lester. ‘Can you believe that? Ronnie is family.’ She picked up a huge, faded rosette with gold lettering on its tail ribbons. ‘I’m calling her later. She knows who to trust.’
He made a growling sound in the base of his throat as the lights flickered back on, revealing Alice still framed in the door.
‘I will call Mummy, Pip.’ She marched back in. ‘She’s staying at the Mill, I believe.’
‘Le Mill, yes, but I don’t know what name it’s booked under. I’ve got her mobile number, if you need it?’
Alice lifted her square little chin, reluctant to admit that she didn’t have her own mother’s number. The lights were flickering on and off like a disco now. ‘Best jot it down to save me time.’
