The Country Set

by Fiona Walker

  ‘How awful.’ Petra couldn’t bear to think of her own family enduring that. ‘So hard on her children.’

  ‘And on poor Kit,’ Mo chipped in, nudging the cob to keep up. ‘Seven years, he cared for her. Totally ran out of money.’ She dropped her voice to a hushed whisper. ‘Those kids of theirs wore jumble-sale hand-me-downs, and Kit drove round in a twenty-year-old banger that was more rust than car. When Hermia died, her brother, Sandy, had to pay for her funeral.’

  ‘It’s no wonder the Old Almshouses has bad memories.’

  ‘That’s no excuse to have a messy garden,’ Gill muttered.

  ‘Gill!’ the other three Bags chided in unison, and she held up her crop in apology.

  They clattered on, the clang of hoofs on tarmac soon softening to hollow thuds on hard turf as the riders slotted their horses single file through the narrow opening by the gate to the church meadows.

  Trying to stop the Redhead racing, Petra was still thinking about Kit Donne, her Black Beauty storytelling reflex starting to twitch, pity heightened. The man who’d once owned her family’s home always cut such a lonely, romantic figure, perfect for a fictional reinvention as a widowed Squire Gordon, intensely intelligent and soulful.

  *

  ‘Fuuuuuuck oooooooooff, yoooooooou waaaanker!’ Kit shouted at the rear-view mirror, head bobbing to the CD Orla had bought him, a band called Chairlift, which he hoped wasn’t a subconscious dig at the decades he had on her.

  On the fast lane of the M40, he was being flashed repeatedly by a dusty green Range Rover as he stuck rigidly to the speed limit, slowly creeping past a long line of middle-lane hogs.

  ‘You might not have twelve points on your licence and a magistrates’ hearing next week to determine whether you’ll be banned or not,’ he told the rear-view mirror furiously, ‘but I do, so BACK OFF!’ The last time he’d driven into the Bardswolds, a Gatso camera had caught him overtaking a horsebox and maxed out his driving endorsements; he had no intention of upping the ante by doing a ton on the fast lane on the eve of his court date.

  Losing his licence, a lawyer could argue, would make Kit’s professional life untenable. Ferdie insisted that a good brief was bound to convince the magistrates that his client must be spared, that his was an exceptional case, an award-winning theatre director, who took on productions in all corners of the world, many poorly serviced by public transport, and that a car was essential for him to make a living. But Kit saw no point in fighting a ban, despite Ferdie offering his legal-eagle nephew at a discounted fee. At the precise moment his case was due up in court, he would be flying to America. He intended to stay in central Manhattan for several months, his need for his own car non-existent. A short driving ban was immaterial.

  Losing his licence, Kit would argue, was just the kick in the backside he needed to sharpen up. He hated driving. It brought out the passive-aggressive in him. As did synth-pop. He turned up Chairlift and thrust his middle finger up as the Range Rover filled his rear window with its snarling grille and dotty rows of cartoon-eye Xenon lights. ‘I said BACK OFF!’

  Today he was late lunching with old friends in Stratford ahead of seeing Donald in Uncle Vanya, detouring first through the Bardswolds to visit Hermia’s grave, as he’d promised their children he would, his Lughnasa quarter of the year. His heart plunged as he dropped through the Chiltern Gap, leading the tailgating Range Rover in a steady charge on the Middleshires. Kit’s two worlds had never been further apart. Early this morning, when he’d peeled himself away from Orla’s naked body to undertake this journey for the second time in as many weeks, torn between booty call and duty call, he realised he was already accustomed to waking up with her. The love affair, while still secretive and far from cerebral, was starting to bed in, her hotel room barely slept in, her stay in the UK extended so they would travel to New York together to start rehearsing. Kit was mainlining testosterone.

  ‘Taking the elixir of youth from a woman in search of a father figure is so Roman health spa!’ Ferdie had laughed, when Kit reported how high his energy levels were.

  Having a much younger lover was good for the blood-sugar balance if not for the soul. His diet of coffee-shop paninis had gone overnight, his after-theatre life of early hours salons in boozy private members’ clubs had been traded in for unprecedented amounts of sex, his need for small blue pills rescheduled to a point in the future when her lips no longer kissed their way across the long barren landscape of his body, redirecting all his blood to his crotch, her sense of humour siphoning helium bubbles to his head. They laughed a ridiculous amount.

  The moment they parted company, that balloon popped. Driving on his old home run now, listening to music he couldn’t connect with, the placebo of physical infatuation melted on his tongue leaving a bitter taste. No matter how he sugared it, she was closer in age to his children, their life stages decades apart.

  He switched the car stereo gratefully to Radio Four.

  The crowd he was meeting at the RSC today were all his generation, old friends who had known Hermia well, and for whom a new relationship so clearly led by the groin might seem like a betrayal, if not to the wife he’d mourned for half a decade, then to the peer group he now looked beyond to find sex and companionship. To his relief, Orla had shown no interest in coming with him, claiming Chekhov’s sentimentality left her cold. Instead, she planned to be an old-fashioned tourist in London for a day, combining that modern celebrity contradiction of hiding behind dark glasses while over-sharing on social media. Kit was grateful she matched his desire to keep their relationship under wraps, its novelty best eaten from one bowl with two spoons.

  Theirs was a love affair tailor-made for New York, where he could bury himself in work and young company, his focus on inspiring her to pull out the performance of a lifetime. Threading his way through motorway traffic to the Bardswolds and his long-since empty nest for a Celtic anniversary had started to feel more staged than his work. His need for patterns and ritual was perhaps unnecessary, an addictive prop like the cigarettes he’d recently quit. Samhain, his autumn’s end ritual, would come bang in the middle of his New York run. He was already wondering whether to fly back for it.

  Lights flashed behind him, the Range Rover harrying him on. Still steadily overtaking a long line of middle-lane traffic, Kit glanced in his mirrors, fantasising that the Saab had James Bond rear-mounted guns. Behind its wheel, he could just make out the driver’s crisp white shirt collar and a glint of dark aviator glasses, the passenger’s blonde hair alongside.

  He stamped repeatedly on his brake to make the bastard back off. It inched aggressively closer.

  Kit raised a hand in despair at the stupidity of it all. He wasn’t about to get hurt at high speed for the sake of principle. Flicking on his indicator, then sliding across into a small gap between cars in the middle lane, he glared out of his side window as big green off-roader drew alongside. The blonde in the passenger seat glared back. Kit did a double-take and her blue eyes widened in recognition.

  It was the one-finger-salute harridan, whose horsebox had probably cost him his licence. Not content with parking on his keys afterwards, here she was again, hollow-cheeked, cigarette in hand, black pearls at her ears and throat, travelling in a car that was trying to drive him off the M40.

  A horn sounding in warning snapped Kit’s eyes back to the road in front and he realised he was drifting, almost side-ramming a caravan in the slow lane. By the time he’d swerved back and straightened up, the Range Rover had swept past. Countryside Alliance, horse trials and Game Fair window stickers taunted him from the tailgate.

  ’Tis in my memory lock’d and you yourself shall keep the key of it. It could stay locked there.

  *

  Kicking down the brake on the double buggy, Carly looked at her split old Dunlops, which she’d bought with Ash to go to Glastonbury the first year they’d been together, now as worn down as bald tyres. They’d seen more action in the last year than they had in the decade before it.


  Whenever she thought back to her sixteen-year-old self, striding through the mud to see the Manic Street Preachers, Carly marvelled that she’d let nothing stand between her and what she wanted, handsome Fusilier Ash Turner, the moment she’d clocked the Daniel Craig body, the mile-wide smile and the eyes fixed only on her. A decade on, Carly still let very little faze her, but having kids meant her thumb was always on the safety catch, and Ash kept the fireworks deep inside, his body thrown over the grenade to protect his family. He was sleeping less and less. Having gone to bed alone the previous night, Carly had awoken before five to find herself a hot sandwich filling between husband and elder son, both of whom had crept silently in to join her in the early hours, one small, naked and smelling of baby-wipes after a bad dream had made him wet the bed, the other in the same joggers he’d worn all week, having sat up half the night with his console, focus as unswerving as it had been when crossing Helmand Province at night in an armoured personnel carrier.

  She handed her smartphone to Ellis. ‘Stay here with the pushchair and play Crossy Roads for five minutes. I want you where I can see you.’ Not that spotting him was hard these days. He’d become so attached to his ’Splorer Stick that it went with him everywhere. A small boy carrying an extendable multi-coloured fluffy duster was easy enough to track.

  Carly squeezed through the gap in the hedge and sidestepped her way along the narrow divide between it and the paddock fencing until she reached the place where the lower rail was broken and she could slip beneath it, staying crouched low to avoid the electric wire that ran around it to keep the horses’ noses off.

  He was at the far end of the field, huddled up with his older brothers and cousins beneath the shadow of the big cedar tree there, all eyes watching a quartet of distant horses being ridden through the wildflower meadow where the stone circle was.

  If any of the army wives had suggested to Carly when she’d moved here that she’d get a crush on a horse, she’d have told them Jake Gyllenhaal would need to grow two extra legs and a tail. Now she counted down the hours to her breathless secret mint liaisons.

  When she’d discovered the dun colt wasn’t turned out with the other foals in the little railed paddock beside the main drive, she thought he’d been sold. Days later, walking out of the village to start work at the Manor Farm shop, she’d seen him out with an older group on the opposite side of the lane to the stud. She now visited him almost every day, a clandestine meeting with the one living being that quickened her heartbeat more than any other.

  Carly hurried towards the tree, grateful not to be encumbered with the buggy, which was too difficult and dangerous to push this far now Spirit had moved. ‘Hello, beautiful,’ she breathed.

  Recognising her, the colt threw up his golden head with a shrill whinny, tangled, pale-tipped forelock sliding across his blue eye. He flicked it away, like a boy-band member irritated by his on-trend hair, sauntering over to thrust his nose at her pockets. His siblings no longer crowded in, accustomed to being chased away by their dominant thug of a baby brother.

  ‘Hello, Spirit.’

  The colt dropped his head blissfully as she scratched around his ears, pushing his poll against her hands, demanding more.

  ‘YOU!’ a voice shouted behind her, making the colt shy away. ‘This is private land!’

  She turned slowly, feeling the colour drain from all but two hot spots in her face. It was the tweedy little man she’d seen buzzing around the stud’s fields on a quad-bike or riding past the Orchard Estate in a flat cap. He had been herding horses the day she’d stopped cleaning to watch Flynn the farrier work. Striding towards her on foot, he was barely five feet with a pronounced limp, but no less ferocious. A little dog raced ahead and stopped to bark at her. Behind her, the colts all moved forwards, snorting with interest.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he shouted, his eyes tiny dots in raisiny creases beneath the brim of his cap.

  ‘There’s no harm,’ she said, boldly enough to let him know she wasn’t a lowly serf about to throw herself at his shiny boots – and they were very shiny. ‘I like seeing the horses.’ She reached back, feeling Spirit’s nose butt straight into her open palm, a warm breath blasting across it.

  ‘You’re trespassing.’ The man didn’t sound as grand as she’d first imagined. Under his flat cap, he had the deepest dimple grooves and wrinkles she’d ever seen, a very white moustache, and those dark, crease-framed eyes had a milky cataract gleam. He obviously couldn’t make her out clearly, limping a lot closer before the wrinkles tightened into a squinting frown. ‘I might have guessed. I recognise you from the estate. You hang around the field gates here. Are you a Turner?’

  ‘I’m Carly.’

  ‘Carly, you’re trespassing.’ With his flat, gravelly voice, he sounded like Alan Sugar’s country cousin.

  ‘I just came to see Spirit. What’s the harm?’

  ‘If you’re referring to that little wall-eyed dun, the harm is that Compton Magna Top Gun is a very valuable young horse.’

  ‘Is that his name, then? Bit of a mouthful.’

  ‘Tom for short.’ He bristled, clearly not wanting to engage, but too polite not to answer a direct question.

  ‘I get it! Like the old movie? Top Gun, Tom Cruise.’

  He was shooing back the other yearlings and two-year-olds, all crowding closer now. ‘It’s a modern film about pilots, I believe.’

  ‘I wasn’t even born when that came out.’ Like Social Norm, the old boy thought all movies after Where Eagles Dare were modern. ‘It’s proper vintage, trust me.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Watch my lips.’ Grinning, she mouthed So.

  Not reacting, the man glared at her impatiently. ‘Watch for an apology, I hope.’

  He really couldn’t see a lot through those cataracts. Nanna Purvis’s were so bad she hadn’t been able to see Carly poking her tongue out when the old witch said nasty things about her being just like her dad. This man made her feel like she had with her termagant grandmother, scolded and silly.

  ‘Now these colts aren’t handled, so for your own safety,’ he was saying, swinging his arms around to shoo them back again, ‘I suggest you walk very slowly towards the gate while I keep them here.’

  Carly stood her ground. Behind her, Spirit – a.k.a. Tom – rested his whiskery black chin on her shoulder and let out a long sigh, regarding the tweedy man with his wall eye. ‘I usually talk to him for a bit. Tell him stuff.’

  She could hear a drone flying somewhere nearby, although she couldn’t see it.

  The rest of the colts edged towards her for safety. The old man looked at her for a long time, the milky gaze moving from head to head in the little herd, finally settling on Tom again, his white face watching him from under Carly’s arm now as she scratched along his scraggy mane.

  ‘How often do you come here?’

  ‘Once or twice a week, maybe.’ She played it down.

  He nodded tersely, reaching up to stroke the colt and getting nipped at. ‘Stop feeding them and I’ll turn a blind eye.’ He trudged off to check the water trough, terrier at his heels.

  ‘Not much choice there,’ Carly muttered, feeding Tom a mint.

  ‘I saw that!’ the man shouted, not turning around.

  She grinned.

  ‘Tom.’ It didn’t really suit him, this leggy golden athlete with his odd eyes and shock of highlighted black hair. Carly thought he was more of a Ronaldo or a Nadal... or Spirit.

  She pocketed the rest of the Polos as she crossed back over the field with him marching alongside, chatting to him about her day, unafraid of him dancing around her, like Billy Elliot, all heels and spins, head-bobbing, nipping at her sleeve and demanding more mints. Carly knew he was just as much a kid as Ellis. He tried to block her way as she reached the broken rail, like a bouncer.

  She laughed, shooing him aside and climbing under. ‘I’ve gotta get my wages. Buy you more mints. Take these kids to see a very special dog.’

  She g
athered them now, pushing the buggy back onto the lane and on towards Manor Farm, riding out a tantrum from Ellis, who was furious to be separated from her phone, a bad night’s sleep making him hugely crabby. The ’Splorer Stick was thwacked angrily against verges and hedges.

  She could still hear the drone flying about nearby, its motor making the same noise as Ash’s console game did, except the virtual one that he flew around his gaming landscape was armed with explosives capable of tearing half a street down. If he kept on playing it night after night, Carly feared he might do just that to their little house in Quince Close. She’d left him sleeping it off while she took the kids to the farm, today a special one for which she needed the cash in hand the Austens paid.

  ‘We’re going to see Pricey this morning,’ she reminded Ellis, to cheer him up.

  The ’Splorer Stick was waved triumphantly in the air, his foot-stamping, air-punching dance of pure joy making her laugh afresh. Life always seemed so much better after seeing Spirit. Or Compton Top Gun, a.k.a. Tom.

  *

  A drone buzzed around overhead as the Saddle Bags crossed the last flat stretch of the church meadows at a brisk trot, sending up butterflies.

  ‘I bet that’s Bay Austen’s.’ Gill looked up at it disapprovingly. ‘He’s been like a kid with a new toy since he got the thing. It’s supposed to be helping him catch poachers.’

  ‘He’ll tire of it quickly enough,’ Bridge assured her. ‘The one Aleš bought off eBay to check out gutters and chimneys went back a month later. Let’s face it, ladies, all men are the same with flying robots, toy cars or beautiful women – if they can’t get inside it, they soon get bored.’ She waved up at the drone. ‘Bay’s probably spying on Petra.’