by Fiona Walker
‘For goodness’ sake, not now!’ snapped a tearful voice, as a small, dark-haired woman muscled past them to lob in a few sods, like Carol Klein hastily backfilling a newly planted rose.
Still the two women clung to each other, taking no notice as more mourners edged around to add their handfuls of soil. Petra watched Ronnie reach up to wipe tears from the younger woman’s freckled face, their foreheads tipping together now.
The tiny, dark-haired woman – she had to be the other daughter, Petra realised – stood her ground, growling like a terrier. ‘This really isn’t the place for reconciliation.’
‘What could be more fitting?’ Ronnie reached out her arm to include her.
‘Absolutely not!’ She recoiled. ‘I’m not about to forgive you, and neither is Tim, are you, Tim?’ Her voice rose shrilly.
The small, rugged blond man she was addressing looked round from talking to fellow mourners. As soon as he did, Petra spotted Bay among them. With a startling sixth sense, he fixed his gaze straight back at her, smiling widely. Then, pulling his phone from his pocket, he turned away just as swiftly.
A chirrup sounded deep within Petra’s handbag.
It had to be a text from him.
Leave it there, she told herself, the voice in her head the same one she used when Wilf spotted one of the children’s snacks abandoned on the coffee-table. Leave it. Leave it!
He’d turned to smile at her again, eyebrows shooting up questioningly.
Her fingers twitched for her bag zip. Leave it! A man who sent drones bearing roses across fields in pursuit of fun was more than capable of sexting at a funeral, and she must not go there. This crush was staying safe. She glanced around the figures in black for Bay’s beautiful, ice-queen wife, but she didn’t appear to be with him. Why did seeing him always make her feel so wild and wilful?
A shout went out from the graveside that could have been aimed at her: ‘You’re an embarrassment, Mummy!’
The raised voices grew louder, accusations flying now.
Cutting through them all came a man’s voice, as gravelly and Aussie as the Hunter River. ‘Don’t any of you dare speak like that to her!’
Everyone started talking at once, his voice loudest and angriest of all.
A moment later, Ronnie charged across the lane, blue eyes livid as she jumped into the passenger seat of a Range Rover where she sat glaring out of the window, making a furious phone call. A craggily handsome, dark-haired man in a grey three-piece suit stalked in her wake now, eyes like burning peat as he climbed into the driver’s seat. Edging out of sight, Petra watched their jaws moving with wasp-chewing intensity. Moments later, Ronnie jumped out and slammed the door. Starting the engine with a deep diesel roar, he drove off.
‘Bugger!’ she hissed, turning to Petra as though it was the most natural thing in the world to find her brief farm-shop ice-cream acquaintance malingering behind an undercover royal vehicle. ‘Don’t you hate sensitive types?’
‘Depends if it’s my sensitivities at stake or theirs.’
‘He’ll come around.’ The blue eyes were over-bright. ‘Always was a frightful prima donna. I don’t suppose you have a taxi number?’ She felt her pockets. ‘And a phone I could borrow. Mine’s still in the car.’ She was pure Lady Penelope and totally irresistible.
Petra fished in her bag for her phone, swiping in the screen code, finding the number for S Express Cabs and handing it across.
‘Thanks. Hello? Can I book a – hello? Blast, cut off.’ She marched further along the lane to try again, oblivious of the other mourners milling about now, slowly getting into cars or walking towards the stud, almost all eyes on her.
Petra gave chase. ‘The reception’s lousy here. I’m on my way to the stud too, so perhaps you could call from there.’
‘The reception’s going to be lousy there too, trust me. I’m going to the family tree. Keep me company.’ She started striding away with the phone pressed to her ear again.
There was something so compelling about Ronnie Percy that Petra felt as though she’d just been invited on the most tremendous adventure.
‘Hello, is that the taxi firm?... What?... Sorry, bad line. I think I must have misdialled... No, Bay, this is not “the sexiest writer in the Bardswolds” and I don’t want to come to the pub...’
*
It didn’t matter that Petra’s to-do list was as long as the Mahabharata or that she was wearing a push-up bra, clingy dress and FitFlops, she was soon scaling the stile into the church meadows and battling to keep up as her small blonde companion, in pearls, loafers and shift dress, marched onwards, navigating her way around both the standing stones and Petra’s smartphone as she tried to relocate the taxi number. ‘Why do they make these things so fiddly? Don’t forget Pony Club Camp finishes at four not five today,’ she reminded Petra.
‘How do you know?’
‘There’s a text here from “Tilly’s Dad open brackets, might be Guy close brackets”. I’m glad someone else can’t remember names.’
‘I keep meaning to change that,’ she said breathlessly, trying to keep balance as they dropped down the steep slope behind the stones.
Ronnie, lightning-thumbed, was back through to S Express Cabs. ‘The Comptons, that’s right... Can’t you come any sooner than that?... No, no, it’s fine. Outside the Jugged Hare, in that case.’ Her forefinger covered the microphone, blue eyes meeting Petra’s, the soul of old friendship, ‘I bet bloody Blair’s drowning his sorrows in there. What?’ She lifted her finger. ‘I’m going to the station, yes. Veronica Percy.’ Ending the call, she held out the phone to Petra, now several lengths behind. ‘Thank you. I knew we’d be allies. I’m just sorry we won’t be acquainted long enough to be chums.’
Petra was uncertain how to interpret this, but it smacked of all too short a lease. ‘You never know when you need an ally. Text yourself from my number anyway.’
‘That’s sweet.’ She smiled, doing it. ‘And don’t trust Might Be Guy. If a man who’s not your husband puts kisses in a text, he’s either batting for the other team or he wants to sleep with you. My friend in the Range Rover is a man of few words but a two-kiss texter, which speaks volumes.’
‘Have you been together long?’
‘We’re friends,’ she said over-quickly, then smiled slowly.
‘I hope you patch things up soon.’
‘We always do, although he’s not exactly helped my cause here. Men are so ridiculous, aren’t they, the way they leap to our defence?’
Petra couldn’t remember Charlie ever leaping to her defence, and he was a practising barrister. She nodded vaguely, increasingly out of breath as she raced alongside.
‘My elder daughter, Alice, is terrified I’m going to barge my way into the stud to start throwing wild parties full of kinky country types doing obscene things on the George the Third button-backs, but I’m not intending to.’
‘What a shame. It would make a change from cheese and wine at the Hickses’ or pheasant casserole at the Austens’.’
‘Do they still do that?’ She flashed her charming smile again from beneath the swinging blonde bell of hair. ‘Isn’t it awful? Daddy used to say it was full of game-droppers and name-droppers.’
‘Charlie, my husband, gets furious when I call it the Well-hung Party,’ Petra confided, although she kept quiet about the fact they’d never been invited. ‘Where do you live now?’
‘Wiltshire. My landlord’s family have some land where we run a horse trials. It’s a terrific day out. You should come. The Pony Clubber will love it. Do you ride?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good for you. Four things greater than all things are, Women and horses and power and war.’
‘Rudyard Kipling.’
‘Clever you for knowing that. The first two putting as much distance as they can between themselves and the others if they have any sense, I’ve always thought.’
Cleverer you for making Wilde with Kipling, Petra thought. Ronnie Percy was no standard-issue kick-on countr
ywoman despite trying to sell Petra a horse in the next breath: ‘I know of a super little three-quarter bred, eventing lines, suit you down to the ground.’ She now started firing out questions with relentless, husky cheer: ‘Have you lived in the village long?’
‘Seven years.’
‘An old-timer! Do you like it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Come on – truth. It’s horribly insular, isn’t it?”
‘It’s a beautiful spot.’
‘That accent’s not local. Yorkshire?’
‘Most people don’t notice it these days.’
‘I have an ear for accents and a nose for a trouble.’ She chuckled again. ‘I love the north. Yorkshire Dales, yes?’
‘Hawes.’ Crikey, she was like the speed-walking Gestapo. Petra would need to put her hands on her knees and pant in a minute.
‘Oh, lovely, I’ve always thought Hawes very underrated.’ She gave a ghost of a wink as they swung through the kissing gate onto the stud’s unimaginatively named Sixty Acres.
The bachelor pack of yearling and two-year-old colts and geldings were still playing sundial with the cedar’s big shadow, charging off in all directions with tails fanned as the women approached.
While Petra watched in awe, Ronnie’s gaze was more critical. ‘Nice-looking bunch, but nowhere near enough elasticity in the joints for top-end competition.’ She tilted her head to watch a trio of bays charge by. ‘I know just the stallion to add it. My goodness, he’d put Compton Magna back on the map. Owner would never sell him, so all pie in the sky, of course.’ Her big smile flashed winningly before Petra could ask if that meant she was coming back. ‘This lot will make jolly decent hunters.’ She eyed a golden-coated, long-legged foal trotting in their wake. ‘Now he’s quite different.’
The foal, not remotely bothered by the two women, made his way across to one of the older colts, a fellow yellow dun, still snorting with red-nostrilled suspicion at the trespassers. Trying to interest him in a game, the foal bounced around him in a spring-loaded trot, nipping and teasing.
‘He’s much younger than the rest, isn’t he?’
‘One of this year’s, so seven months at most.’ Ronnie nodded, starting to walk slowly towards them. ‘Daddy always gets Lester to send the hotheads straight to prep school. If they think they’re big boys, they come across here to live like one and get taken down a peg or two. It’s not how I’d do it. I like a sharp, brave horse, and wouldn’t want to blunt that for a moment.’ Unable to get his startled brother’s attention, the foal marched up to her, pushing and nipping at her pockets. She laughed, tapping his nose away firmly. ‘He’s already got fans, I see. He knows all about titbits, and that certainly won’t have come from Lester.’ She clapped her hands over her head to send him on his way and he showed her a clean pair of heels. The little foal returned to his bigger doppelgänger, who had retreated even further and resumed his white-faced, blue-eyed efforts to engage him.
‘Terrible racists, horses.’ Ronnie watched their black manes and honeyed bodies snake and twist. ‘Take any big mixed herd, and they’ll inevitably divide up and hang out with the same colour. Duns are the absolute worst for it. Prejudices aside, that little man’s my guess at a future superstar.’
‘A woman’s guess is far more accurate than a man’s certainty,’ said Petra, and they watched the colt get his playfellow at last, the two racing off across the field together, squealing and bucking, little and large.
‘Oh, I like that.’ Ronnie marched onwards. ‘Is it Shakespeare?’
‘Kipling again. Sorry for sounding a swot. I studied him at university.’
‘Never apologise for knowing things. It’s heaven. A childhood friend of mine was just like you, always quoting something fascinating, then making a joke of it. She was adamant Kipling couldn’t write women.’
‘He’s also accused of being a terrible racist, like your duns, although plenty of scholars disagree these days.’
‘Daddy was a great admirer of The Jungle Book. He read it aloud to me when I was little, doing all the voices: Now don’t be angry after you’ve been afraid. That’s the worst kind of cowardice.’
They’d reached the Percy family tree where the Captain’s horseshoe had been painted black to match his wife’s. Queer Uncle Brooke was upside down again.
‘Now I am going to cry.’ Ronnie smiled tightly. ‘It won’t last long, but it’s probably best you go on.’
Petra hesitated, reluctant to say farewell, feeling that rare heart-swell of finding someone she longed to know better. ‘I know you want to be just good allies, but I can’t turn my back while you weep. I’ll stay if you’ll let me.’
‘Oh, you are golden.’ Blonde head ducking, Ronnie’s arm nudged gratefully against Petra’s side, the blue gaze brimmed up into hers for a moment. ‘I can’t tell you how much that means. But, really, best you bugger off.’ The eyes were blinking furiously, determined not to have a witness to sorrow.
‘You have my number.’
Turning to walk back to the church meadows, she saw the herd of youngsters had regrouped in the shadow of the tree as silently as Grandmother’s Footsteps, the dun colt and his sidekick in the front rank, nose to fly-swatting tail. This time, they didn’t skitter away when she FitFlopped past them, immobile as the standing stones, all eyes on Ronnie. It seemed she had the same effect on horses as she did on humans.
18
‘I almost broke a bally tooth on this!’ barked a furious old crony of Jocelyn’s, holding up a half-eaten smoked-salmon tartlet full of lead shot.
The guests at the wake were suffering Pip’s revenge on Leonie with satisfying pique. Emptying the contents of two twelve-bore cartridges into the waspish caterer’s little vol-au-vents and mini pastries had, briefly, made Pip feel glorious. Her pot-shots hadn’t been blasted from the barrel of a Holland & Holland in the grip of passion, however. They had been as meticulously inserted as microchips.
Prising her way into a brace of Eley Hi-Flyers from the crimp ends with a boning knife from the kitchen had been a challenging undertaking for one whose hands were still shaking from insomnia, cake and energy drink overload. Pip had had no idea gun cartridges were so impenetrably well engineered, the lead beads finally dropping all over the place when she’d dug her knife tip through the plastic shell. Then she’d discovered Leonie’s food was equally hard-cased, the toppings on the finger-food buffet egg-glazed in a way that made it impossible to hide a piece of shot inside without it looking obvious. But she’d managed to pre-load a few, her stealth tactics paying off, and it gave her a terrific frisson when the complaints started coming in.
‘Since when did we shoot salmon?’ the man with the tartlet demanded.
Unfortunately most of the grievances were directed straight at Pip. Leonie, an eager hunt foot-follower who knew half the mourners, was behaving more like a guest now that the wake was under way, platters of food her passport to drift between friends for long chinwags, currently nose-to-nose with the whipper-in. Meanwhile her two willowy teenage waitresses, ninjas in black and white, sprang up with plates of salted toffee mousse cups and frangipani tuiles, if Pip left the sweets table unmarked. Staying close to the food, keeping guard on her own cakes, she was in the front line.
The mourners were all treating Pip as though she was in charge, which under normal circumstances she’d take pride in, but having been excluded from the funeral service, she refused to preside over prissy food she had sabotaged. She was exhausted; nobody had offered her a drink; her feet ached in the expensive court shoes she’d bought especially and her scalp itched from doing her roots. When she discovered that Ronnie Percy wasn’t even coming to the reception, it was the final rosemary and fennel cheese straw.
‘I’m afraid I can’t take responsibility for any of the bought-in food the family has organised,’ she told tartlet man, in a high, tight voice. ‘As the Captain’s personal cook and companion, I baked some of his favourite cakes in his honour. But, please, do have an almond slice and a s
ponge finger to make up for your distress.’ She pressed them on him like daggers. ‘I’m Pip, by the way. I rarely left his side in his final months. He was devoted to me. Did you know the Captain long?’
‘Fifty years.’
‘It’s such a shame we saw so few of his old friends here in his last years, but I’m sure you’ve been terribly busy. He was so lonely by the end. Broken with unhappiness.’
‘I... um... Yes.’ Discomfited, the man bit into the almond slice. ‘Most tasty, Pippa.’
‘The secret’s in the jam. And it’s Pip. My dad used to call me Pipsqueak, you see. This is me.’ She pressed her Home Comforts card on him. ‘I also run a detective agency called Proof. Complimentary artisan baking with every client meeting.’
After he’d beaten a retreat to the safety of fellow black ties braying about hunting high days and British sports-horse breeding, Pip patrolled her table, refusing to leave her comfort food, murderous thoughts raging. Cramming the caterer’s delicate little fancies into her mouth when nobody was looking – what better way to get rid of enemy supplies than eat them? – she loaded plates with a selection of her finest baking and thrust her Home Comforts business card at anyone passing close by. If this was how the Percys rewarded loyalty, they would have to fight to keep her.
Leonie stalked up just as Pip had stuffed three iced macaroons into her mouth. ‘Have you heard? Lead shot has been found in the food.’
Unable to speak, Pip shrugged.
Noticing her cheeks bulging, Leonie’s eyes narrowed. ‘We must be vigilant. And I’d be grateful if you let guests choose their own cakes. People are saying it’s like an episode of The Apprentice over here.’
You’re fired, Pip thought murderously, eyes streaming, a macaroon crumb caught in her throat.
Leonie’s long, thin face softened. ‘You miss him, don’t you?’
She nodded, furious that the tears were streaming for all the wrong reasons – the macaroon mix was so dry and almondy, Mary Berry would be appalled – but she couldn’t hope to speak.
The next moment she was clasped in a lobster-claw embrace, the hiss harsh in her ear, ‘I’ve warned you once. Don’t cross me. I own the Comptons’ social catering.’
