The Country Set

by Fiona Walker

  He’d been true to his word. Not once had their fellowship disbanded. Until now.

  The tears rose again, that merciless flash flood, but he was accustomed to beating them back now, eyelids faster than a row of sandbags.

  A neat, square tissue pulled from a travel pack was thrust at him before he could reach into his pocket for the spare handkerchief. ‘Bad day for hay-fever,’ muttered Gill.

  ‘Indeed. Thank you.’

  As they all stood to sing, he waited for the organ to strike up to blow his nose as quietly as he could, then hastily dab his eyes.

  He couldn’t see Ronnie through the coalfield of black shoulders and hats, but he knew exactly where she was in the church from following the gazes of those around him. All eyes were upon her, Gill’s and Paul’s included.

  Compton Magna’s collective memory was a long one, especially in this church. Many still vividly remembered how scandalised the village had been thirty years ago, when adorable Ronnie Percy had run away with a lover, leaving her six-year marriage and three young children behind, along with her heartbroken parents.

  ‘Now you mustn’t worry yourself about any of this, Lester,’ Jocelyn had growled. ‘She’ll come back.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘I say so, Lester.’ The crack in his voice had given away how upset he was. ‘And what I say goes. Until she does, best not mention her name, eh?’

  The two men hadn’t spoken about her again from that day until the Captain’s death.

  ‘Do you really think she’ll come back to run the stud?’ Gill whispered to Paul, between verses.

  ‘Definitely,’ the little Kiwi assured her. ‘Your old Brit families are bred to sacrifice personal ambitions for the sake of the family name, aren’t they?’

  Lester thought about the seven-magpie secret. He’d need a very steely nerve to see him through.

  *

  Her authority under threat, Pip bustled proprietorially around Percy Place plumping cushions, straightening pictures and monitoring the caterers with mutinous loathing. They were the enemy, an uppity gaggle of Sloaney women headed by waspish finger-clicker Leonie, who had moved Pip’s cakes to the back ranks of the sweet treats trestle. Her date and walnut slices, sombre as sarcophaguses, moist as freshly dug earth, were hidden behind high-rise displays of cupcakes topped with helter-skelter butter icing.

  ‘Mrs Petty paid for a very generous spread.’ Leonie threw a few paper napkins across Pip’s lovingly baked burial mounds for good measure. ‘There’s really no need for home-made.’

  ‘I bought all the ingredients with my own money. I’ve been up all night making them.’

  ‘Not meaning to be unkind, but it shows.’

  ‘I’m in charge here.’

  ‘Mrs Petty hired me. We have a professional reputation to protect.’ She whisked off, long fingers snapping at a hired waitress to lay out the cucumber finger sandwiches.

  Pip removed the napkins and rearranged her food, replacing the business cards the caterer had discreetly fanned around the table with her own. Determined as she was to stay on at the stud, it did no harm to spread the word, and she’d been encouraged by Kit Donne’s approach, planning to distribute more around the village noticeboards, farm shop, tennis club and pub. Now she’d cracked another Ronnie clue and put the wronged wife into the picture, she was tempted to print off some Proof ones offering her detection skills, too.

  She ate one of the caterer’s cupcakes, pleasantly surprised by its lightness, her imagination fired by her discovery of more pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that morning, although they had slotted stormy clouds into all her blue-sky thinking about Ronnie. Gazing up at the portraits of Percy horses, she struggled to see one as beautiful as Beck, the grey stallion in Verity Robertson’s Facebook avatar. Yet maybe there was something familiar about the unquenchable energy in the eyes, the arched bridge of neck...

  What was it Verity had written on her timeline when she’d first set her heart upon having him? In UK already. Unwanted gift!

  Pip slotted another piece of the puzzle into place. Of course! Ronnie had originally intended the stallion for her father’s stud. Who else would she bring a top breeding horse from Germany to Britain for? Who else needed to be thrown a lifeline and bloodline that good?

  ‘Magnificent beasts.’ Leonie the caterer stepped in beside her, also looking up at the portraits.

  ‘I’m more of a cat person,’ Pip said, feeling something being pressed into her hand and looking down to find a neat stack of her own business cards gathered up and returned.

  ‘There’s more than one way to skin a cat,’ Leonie hissed. ‘If I find these on my tables again, fur will fly.’

  Glancing over her shoulder, Pip saw her cakes beneath white blankets once more.

  The sugar rush spiked again. Pip marched to the gun room and rattled through the drawers and cartridge bags until she found her ammunition. It was time to take the caterers down and show Alice she wasn’t to be messed with.

  *

  Being an object of fascination was nothing new to Ronnie: she’d adopted the chin-up approach often enough and had scrutinised many a ceiling – Compton Magna church’s was in much need of repair, she quickly deduced – but dealing with tears was a rare call. Brought up by parents who believed the only acceptable public displays of grief were those of swans and elephants, she was determined not to cry. The only time she’d ever cried in front of the Captain, when a pony she’d adored had died of colic, he’d patted her shoulder irritably and ordered her to stop in the same tone he would if he’d caught her picking her nose.

  It was looking in the direction of her children that threatened to crack her resolve, and she tried everything in her power to hold off, but some part of her brain she couldn’t control had her eyes hostage.

  In the front pew at the side of the church, where the Percys traditionally sat, Alice had slotted in her wide-shouldered offspring – all a head taller than her now – along with her lofty, wide-shouldered husband, all with their heads cocked the same way, as though listening for mice. Across the aisle Tim, a slick Italian greyhound of a man with a street-dog temperament, sat alongside his second wife, Giselle, young and elegant in a black cloche that had more than a hint of the suffragette about it. Ronnie had met her only once, her son’s love life already as chequered and colourful as her own. Sitting close beside Tim, her plain black dress at least a size too big, Pax was rigidly self-controlled and pale as bone beneath her freckles, her cheeks hollow and eyes red. Ronnie noted the space between her and her husband, Mack, a hand-span of clear air that spoke volumes.

  The congregation stood to belt out ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’.

  She gripped the seat ledge of the pew. Beside her, Blair’s little finger lay against hers, as comforting as an arm round her shoulders, every nerve ending radiating reassurance.

  Ronnie was grateful for his self-containment. The old friend having his knee operation today was a social butterfly who would have held her hand, sung the hymns too loudly and caught the eyes of his many friends, but she could feel Blair’s entire focus on her, which meant her entire focus was on not crying.

  ‘He loathed this hymn,’ she muttered, as the mourners shrilled about purple-headed mountains and rivers running by.

  The order of service for Captain Jocelyn Percy’s funeral, old-school high church, with prep-school songs and speeches, was nothing if not predictable: Bach had seen them in, ‘Abide with Me’ sung first, Corinthians fifteen after the Collect, and once they’d intoned the prayers of penitence, there would be tributes from an oleaginous young Fosse and Wolds MFH and a pithily witty showing judge, renowned for her after-dinner speeches and hatred of straight hocks. If that hadn’t sent the older mourners off to sleep, Psalm Twenty-three would, and finally ‘Praise My Soul the King of Heaven’ would prod them awake before Bach was played as they followed the coffin out for the Committal.

  Where was her father? Ronnie wondered. That angry, witty, irreverent martinet, w
ho valued good horsemanship above humanity. The gambler, the wine lover, the secret Casualty enthusiast and hater of John Humphrys. The Gershwin addict for whom ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ played three times in a row was not obsessive, purely beautiful. There was no sign of him. No sign either of the devoted if irascible husband, father and grandfather, who had learned compassion for one generation by scorning another.

  And there should be horses outside. Daddy always needed them close enough to hear whinnies and squeals.

  It was as though her children had picked a one-size-fits-all ready-made country-church funeral package, depersonalised to help them all cope. Jocelyn, who had enjoyed an ambivalent relationship with religion and would undoubtedly have preferred a Tennyson poem or Raleigh quote, had disliked the self-congratulatory showing judge intensely, found Bach dull, and the MFH was too young to have hunted alongside him.

  ‘Hold onto your hats, it’s another reading.’ Ronnie murmured, as they all sat down. ‘This one will test my mettle.’ Blair felt in his pockets for a handkerchief but she waved it away.

  Tim, as small, blond and handsome as his Percy forefathers, stood at the altar and drawled out a few verses of Ecclesiastes three. He looked bored, which his mother knew was his coping mechanism in stressful situations, another thing common to Percy men. Jocelyn had looked half asleep when they’d buried Ann, and she’d strongly suspected he’d been at the Scotch all morning. This gathering was no smaller than that had been, harvest and holidays notwithstanding, half the horse world crammed into the pews, gossiping in reverent undertones. It was a matching bookend to his wife’s send-off, a well-rounded conclusion to a doughty dotage.

  ‘A time to keep silence and a time to speak...’ Tim droned.

  Ronnie’s eyes refused to look up at the ceiling. Instead, they were drawn again to Pax, the quarter-profile she could see dominated by a curve of freckled cheek, high and round as her own from the smiling grimace of holding back tears, her fingers pressed tight to her mouth. It always cut deepest to lose life’s champions, and Jocelyn had adored his calm, fearless younger granddaughter.

  ‘A time to love and a time to hate...’

  As Pax’s shoulders started to shake, husband Mack swung his big arm around them as perfunctorily as a fairground ride’s safety bar. Shrugging it off, she slid into the space recently vacated by her brother so fast she shunted sister-in-law Giselle.

  She despises him, Ronnie realised in dismay, unable to look away.

  And now, as though afflicted by the same optical trick, Pax turned, catching her mother’s eye, her startled hare’s gaze luminous with unhappiness.

  ‘...a time of war and a time of peace.’

  Pax was Ronnie’s peace-maker in name and nature. How hard they’d both tried to rebuild the broken family bond. How spectacularly they’d failed.

  Tears brimmed. They looked hurriedly away. Beside Ronnie, Blair’s finger slid over hers, one knuckle tight to another, as profoundly comforting as a hug. She could see Mack mouthing, ‘You okay?’ at Pax, who nodded curtly and slid yet further away from him, budging Giselle along. When Tim resumed his seat, he was crammed in like an economy traveller on a bucket flight.

  As the bishop launched into the prayers of penitence, Pax’s gaze drifted over her shoulder again and found her mother’s, the hare’s eyes caught in headlights, tears welling once more. Mack glanced back too, his expression dispassionate.

  With heart-bursting certainty, Ronnie recognised a marriage frayed at the seams, the love having fallen out of it, like keys from a pocket. She saw her own past in her daughter’s present and wanted to clamber over the seat-back to that cold, lonely space between them, reassuring Pax that she was there for her, that she understood exactly how it felt.

  Sensing her distress, Blair moved his hand over hers, fingers interlaced, his wedding ring pressing hard into her knuckle.

  She slid her hand away, her eyes still on Pax. They had both married in this church, although she hadn’t been invited to her daughter’s ceremony, her exile at its peak.

  ‘O keep my life, and deliver me,’ intoned the bishop, ‘put me not to shame, for I have put my trust in you.’

  ‘Lord, have mercy,’ Ronnie murmured, her gaze sliding to the coffin.

  Her father had set no great store by religious supplication. His legacy had delivered a lifetime trust to her, not God. And it was very much there to put her to shame.

  *

  Racing back into the farmhouse after a grocery dash, Petra was on fire with multi-tasking, pre-holiday energy. Dumping her canvas shopping bag on the island, she added a few instructions to the house-sitters’ list that had occurred to her while she was out, sniffed her secret admirer’s rose drooping in its little vase, grabbed a basket of the girls’ clean washing and hurried towards the stairs.

  Janine was rushing the other way, carrying a mop and bucket, eyes wide. ‘I can explain about the larder!’

  ‘Say again?’ Petra edged past her, spilling days-of-the-week knickers from the high-rise laundry.

  Stooping to retrieve Wednesday and Thursday, the pale Turner eyes blinked. ‘You haven’t put your shopping away yet, then?’

  ‘No. Sorry, Janine. I’d make you and Carly a cup of tea but I’m in a mad dash to change for this wake at the stud, then I must come back and pack. And the house-sitters are turning up to be briefed at some point.’

  ‘Relax. I’ll put your groceries away, Petra. You go on up.’

  ‘You are a star. Have you seen Fitz?’

  ‘Outside with Carly, talking to the ponies.’

  ‘Sweet. I’ll be back in an hour.’

  ‘Take all the time you need, love! We’re here all day.’

  Reassured, Petra left the basket on the landing ready to raid later. Her own capsule holiday wardrobe was already laid out on the end of her bed, much depleted after her village-fête purge. This year’s philosophy was to pack no unflattering fashion disasters that looked much better in her mind’s eye than in that of the beholder, and nothing picture-pretty that hurt like hell out sight-seeing. She spotted the strappy espadrilles from last year’s French glamping holiday that had made her walk like she needed a wee and cast them aside.

  She stripped off her Capris and vest-top and went in search of something suitably funereal. Excuses not to go to Percy Place kept bubbling up – her to-do list was on its third page and she felt Gill was asking a lot – but her shallow excuse to be there wouldn’t stop buzzing around in her head. That morning’s Milk Tray moment still filled her with wilful recklessness.

  A text from Charlie came through as she rattled through the black end of her wardrobe: Tied up here, so usual train after all. 7.18 pick-up. C c. No apology. A mis-hit kiss. ‘Tied up’ again. The familiar Chelsea-basement bondage image flashed up.

  Her finger hovered over her phone screen’s reply button as she thought through her response: I’m packing for everyone, I have three lots of washing still to do, half a dozen emails to fire off, bills to pay and flights to check-in online. The cleaners are working round the piles of mess I haven’t got round to tidying up. The house-sitters will get here to be briefed soon. I’m collecting Bella from camp at four, Prudie from dance club at six, Ed from his train half an hour later and you from yours later still. They all need to tidy their rooms and have showers. The fridge needs clearing, the pets worming and the field poo-picking. And I’ve just agreed to attend a complete stranger’s wake in order to chat up his mildly stalkerish housekeeper. Now you tell me you’re going to roll up at gin o’clock to find it all done.

  Without warning, Petra found herself smiling.

  And so it would be: the Gunn family would be in holiday mood even if she had to sing ‘Quando, Quando, Quando’ with a gelato in one hand and a bottle of Chianti in the other. Her irritation vanished, the moral upper ground hers in the rolling Cotswold hills twenty-four hours before they arrived in cypress-striped Tuscany. No worries, she typed, see you at 8 x.

  Sensing her hall pass had been stamped, Petra wrig
gled into a subtly figure-hugging black dress, curled her hair up into a clip, then applied a dab of blusher and dash of mascara that she’d no doubt sweat straight off.

  It was now positively Mediterranean outside, Petra’s holiday mood irrepressible as she struck a pose. The dress wasn’t quite so subtly clingy across her tummy roll, and exposed far too much bare upper arm with its horse-rider’s T-shirt tan, but it was nothing a pair of Spanx and a silk shrug couldn’t transform to pure unadulterated J.Lo sultriness.

  Having pulled on her best shapewear and added a wisp of vintage Jigsaw, she dashed downstairs to transfer damp washing to the tumble-dryer – sod pegging it out: her carbon footprint was kicking up its heels now she was practically on holiday – and put a fresh wash on, then stuffed low heels into her handbag and stepped into her FitFlops to hurry to the stud. She planned to stay just long enough to toast the legendary Captain, have a quick, supportively nosy conversation with Pip, clock Bay, and then she’d come straight back. She would not drink too much or flirt.

  But when she walked from Plum Run along Church Lane and passed a small crowd in the graveyard, she realised that the funeral was still going on. They were only just lowering the Captain’s coffin into the ground.

  Petra checked her watch, wishing she’d stayed at home to count knickers into cases. She sent up a silent apology for feeling impatient that an overrunning burial was buggering up her busy day, and sloped across the road to linger respectfully behind a large black car – could it perhaps be a royal one? – watching as a clergyman in a snazzy mitre and purple cloak threw earth into the grave and invited mourners to follow.

  She recognised Ronnie Percy straight away, the blonde hair and upright stance unmistakable. At the same moment as she stepped forwards to take a handful of earth, a statuesque redhead did so too. They performed a strange, courtly after-you dance, soil in hand, before throwing it in together and embracing tightly.