The Country Set

by Fiona Walker

  ‘Excuse me one moment.’ Pip retreated to the observation tower to leave one-star reviews for Leonie’s catering company on every site she could find. The Captain, a big fan of revenge and hater of macaroons, would have surely been proud.

  ‘I won’t ever forget you,’ she promised, letting the tears come freely at last, a glorious Titanic-Bambi-Lion King purge, until she realised she didn’t have a tissue, at which point she stopped and settled down to watch the Austen family sizing the place up, sherry in hand, as she waited to calm down enough to go back.

  *

  Petra was so overawed walking up to Percy Place that, when she arrived, she quite forgot to swap her FitFlops for the heels in her handbag. Close up, the house was every inch the Birtwick Park beauty she’d dreamed it would be, its big double doors thrown open. The family were welcoming guests in the grand entrance hall, its black and white floor beckoning Petra in to navigate the tricky chessboard of commiserating with a line of close relatives to a man she had never met.

  ‘I’m terribly sorry for your loss.’ She started with the tall, elegant redhead granddaughter, whom Ronnie had hugged in the graveyard.

  ‘Thank you.’ She looked at Petra with sad, kind eyes as warm as harvest moons. ‘Forgive me, you are?’

  Here we go. ‘Villager. Petra. Have a horse. Upper Bagot Farmhouse.’ No right to be here.

  ‘Oh, gosh, of course, you’re the writer. I love your books! I had no idea you knew Grumps. How kind of you to come. I’m Pax.’ She whisked Petra down the line, like a VIP, introducing her to her siblings, small rugged Tim, who thanked her cleavage for the sympathetic words, and even smaller and more rugged Alice, nerves fraying in black Aquascutum, who told her to hurry into the main drawing room before the food ran out. ‘Didn’t expect this many to turn up, but the village always loved a freebie. Did you know Grumps well?’ She eyed Petra beadily.

  ‘We shared a great admiration for Kipling.’

  Alice smiled briefly, whispering, ‘Try some of Pip’s cakes. They really are jolly good. Such a shame we’ll have to let her go.’

  ‘No, we won’t,’ Pax corrected with a tight smile, adding a hissed aside, ‘Grumps would want her to stay on.’

  Her sister’s eyes flashed. ‘Pax, do your bloody...’ clearly aware of the bystanders, Alice’s narrow Cupid’s-bow mouth formed the word ‘...maths.’

  A rosebud mimed back: ‘I am.’

  Realising she was party to a private argument breaking through grief’s formal surface, Petra smiled politely and moved on.

  She was dying to have a quick look around before she tried to penetrate the chattering black throng, but Gill was already lying in wait by an enormous carved bear, her fascinator at forty-five degrees, like a party hat after one too many congas: ‘It’s wall-to-wall hunt buttons and blazers in there, and they’re serving oloroso by the barrel. Nobody knows what’s going to happen to the stud and we’re all pretending not to care, like cocktail hour while the Titanic listed. You must get the heads-up. Where have you been?’

  ‘Holiday stuff.’ Loyalty is a fickle thing, Petra reflected, finding herself holding onto her encounter with Ronnie Percy and the family tree like Mary Lennox to her secret garden, reluctant to break the spell just yet. She glanced at her watch and tried not to panic about her to-do list. ‘I can’t stay long.’

  ‘You must talk to Pip. When I tried, she just thrust a huge stack of flapjacks at me and told me to steer clear of the vol-au-vents. I think she’s a bit fed up, and one can hardly blame her. The atmosphere’s horrid. There was a frightful ding-dong in the graveyard earlier. Alice accused her mother of crocodile tears and Blair Robertson – you know, the Australian eventer? Daniel Craig in breeches – leaped to Ronnie’s defence. The next thing you know, he and Alice’s husband are like two bare-knuckle boxers rolling up their sleeves graveside and Ronnie has bolted as usual. That’s probably the last we’ll see of her.’

  Petra looked at her watch again, knowing her to be in the village for at least another half-hour waiting for her cab. It was hard to make a dramatic exit from the Cotswolds by private hire unless you booked well in advance.

  ‘Bay’s convinced the family are keeping just the stud business and some land and selling the rest, but my guess is nothing’s been decided.’

  ‘A woman’s guess is far more accurate than a man’s certainty. Is he here?’ Anticipation curled in her belly.

  ‘Somewhere, being indiscreet as ever. I think a bunch of them went to look at this year’s foals in the hope there’s a Badminton winner going cheap.’

  Nowhere near enough elasticity in the joints for top-end competition. Petra remembered those over-bright blue eyes, the tough kindness, the determined way she walked very fast, never looking back.

  They made their way into the drawing room, a huge, oak-panelled space littered with dog-eared antiques and hung with so many horse portraits it resembled an old-fashioned zoetrope: if you spun it, they would gallop round and round. Double length, it had a false-panelled wall that had been folded back to reveal its mirror sitting room, creating a ballroom-length space that had once hosted legendary parties.

  ‘You will never guess who was in the pub earlier.’ Gill had grabbed them some sherry.

  ‘Caitlyn Jenner, Mary Beard, Zoella and Bridge Mazur having a ladies’ lunch?’

  Gill tsked. ‘I do hate it when you’re silly. No, it was Kit Donne.’ She breathed it like a state secret.

  ‘Are you sure? He never comes here.’

  ‘Absolutely. And he was in a horrid mood. I’d forgotten what a miserable bugger he is.’ They’d made it to a table covered with Pip’s business cards and a well-plundered cake selection. There was no sign of Pip. ‘I told him he should smarten his house up.’

  ‘Gill, you didn’t!’

  ‘The village comes first, Petra.’ She helped herself to one of the last chocolate brownies. ‘Which is why you must talk to Pip. Where on earth is she?’

  ‘Fondant French fancy?’ A tall, thin blonde in expensive leather trousers thrust a plate of brightly coloured little cakes under their nose. ‘If you’re looking for Pip, she took herself off for a comfort break. Bit of a runny tummy. I’d leave that brownie if I was you. Said she’d be back soon.’

  ‘I don’t have soon, Gill,’ Petra apologised, looking at her watch yet again. ‘I have to go now.’

  ‘Nonsense. Have another sherry and let me give you a guided tour of the house and stables.’ Gill knew exactly how to play her, waving Leonie’s French fancies away. ‘Some of upstairs is still boarded up – there was a fire when Ann died, you may recall, all very unfortunate – but the old servants’ hall with all the bells still running along it and the observation tower with views to Eyngate are must-sees. I’ve been coming here so long, I know it better than my own place.’

  For a tour around Birtwick Park, Petra would fly to Italy with nothing but a bikini in hand luggage.

  ‘Who’s he?’ was the first thing she asked, as they admired the mosaic of framed hunks on horses, one man featuring more than most, long-thighed and furnace-eyed.

  ‘Johnny Ledwell.’ Gill tilted her head. ‘Handsome, isn’t he?’

  ‘And some.’ Petra admired the bone structure and perfect horseman’s seat. ‘I’d put him in a book.’

  ‘Not a man of many words.’

  ‘I can make up for that.’

  ‘I doubt it. If rumour’s to be believed, some things are best left unsaid.’

  *

  In St Mary’s pretty churchyard, Jonathan Selwyn Ledwell’s grave was as far away from the Percy plot as Croydon is to Chelsea on a London map. In life, the family Johnny had married into might have stayed fiercely loyal, but in front of God they’d turned him out to grass on high pasture, the rumours of suicide and other misdemeanours banishing him to an isolated plot close to the perimeter fence. Ronnie had always thought it served him far better than the Percys’ dingy yew-sentried corral. From here, the glorious view stretched straight down across the meadows to
Sixty Acres, where the herd of young horses he’d had direct influence in breeding took afternoon naps, tails flicking, heads occasionally curling back to nip at an itch. The little dun, far smaller and more golden than the others, was still chummed up with his bigger mate.

  ‘You’d like that colt,’ she told Johnny, taking the dead flowers from his grave and setting one of her father’s floral tributes there, a delightful ring of sweet-peas from the hunt that she was certain the Captain would have been happy to pass on to his son-in-law. For all their emotive words, her children hadn’t been to their father’s grave in a while, and neither had Lester, who weeded around it from time to time. It was so drought-parched that only a few thin stinging nettles drooped near Johnny’s narrow resting place, the ground hard as concrete, a fitting barrier between her winged feet and his clay ones.

  It was only after their marriage had ended that Ronnie had realised Johnny Ledwell’s cold, polite retreat from her, one child at a time, was a way of dealing with his overwhelming guilt and depression. Living in the eye of a storm, with a man who wouldn’t look her in the eye, had felt utterly hollowing and bewildering, single parenthood within a supposed marriage of equals. With each pregnancy – none conceived soberly or lovingly – he’d become more detached, and Ronnie had felt shut out from the stud, annexed with her mother in domestic crèche HQ, planning her solitary competition career around childcare while her husband and father played God with bloodlines. She was just the baby-incubator and travelling sales rep, whose best horses were always sold out from under her.

  Johnny, who had started sleeping in the dressing room while Ronnie was nursing Alice so he could be up early for autumn hunting, had never entirely moved back, drunken conjugal visits made through the adjoining door. After Pax was born, even those had stopped.

  They would go for days without speaking. He’d enter a room she was in, pat the dogs, pour a drink and leave without acknowledging her. If she called him out about it, he’d apologise irritably, much as he would if the sofa had chased him down to demand an apology for not saying hello. It wasn’t that he hadn’t noticed her, but he’d blotted her out as inconsequential. Like the Captain, Johnny rarely looked to female company for conversation, intelligence, knowledge or even laughter, but for more practical and prosaic pleasures. And he had looked to Scotch long before that. By the end, he was drinking so heavily that a bottle of Johnnie Walker was just the daily starting point, like Ronnie’s first strong mug of tea.

  ‘Our elder daughter has serious control issues,’ she told his headstone, ‘our son remains a flake on the make, and our baby girl is about to call time on her marriage. It goes without saying that none of them wants my help.’ She winced away the urge to cry. ‘But they need someone. You bloody died, and now all their grandparents are gone, so there’s no top shelf to hide the bad stuff from them. If you can break out of here and rattle some chains, it would be appreciated.’

  ‘Or you can ask God,’ intoned a deep voice behind her.

  ‘Christ!’ Ronnie whipped round.

  ‘Him too. We can ask them together, if you like. I’m the Reverend Hilary Jolley.’ A large hand was thrust out of a cassock to shake. Piqued to have taken a background role in the biggest village ceremony of the year, the local vicar had stayed on after the bishop’s grand exit to sign off the paperwork, now delighted to gather in stray flock. ‘Shall we pray together, Mrs Ledwell?’

  Ronnie smiled warily, reluctant to offend God, yet always astonished that his representatives on earth were so universally odd. The Reverend Hilary Jolley was very hard to sex, a tun barrel of waistless godliness, mid-length hair, broad shoulders, a short neck and the sort of soft features that smacked of two genders divided by a common duty; there was an argument for both sides. The eyes, however, were as kind and lively as the name.

  Ronnie, who had fallen in and out of love with the Church a few times in her life, and broken plentiful Commandments on the way, had never needed Him onside more.

  ‘I’d love to.’ She smiled gratefully. ‘I just need to have a quick chat with an old friend first, if that’s okay?’

  *

  Lester dealt with the Captain’s wake as he did any large gathering – he retreated into a corner, like a guardsman into his sentry box, and stood dutifully still, eyes front. Condolences and reminiscences came and went in a polite rhythm as he paced his way steadily through each glass of sherry. His small principality of grief was perfectly confined, a corner of the old empire few ventured into, and those who did received little more than a polite nod.

  He’d found the funeral service surprisingly comforting. The Captain would have criticised it like mad for dullness, no doubt, and most likely fallen asleep, but Lester preferred his operas uncut and his tests of endurance long format. The piece of graveside theatre at the burial, while regrettable, had at least seen Ronnie away as sharply as a fox from a gunshot. Now the crows had all descended on the stud to pick over the cheeseboard, showing no sign of lifting off again soon. Tell them all to go to Hell, Lester.

  The Captain would have been a terrible warmonger had he served through conflict. Lester, always far more phlegmatic, stood guard, daring the battle to come to him.

  Pip had been too busy waging her own cake wars with the caterers to bother him, for which he was grateful. At first he’d kept half a misted eye on her to make sure she was bearing up, admiring her tenacity as she set her own offerings so far to the front of the cake table they teetered on its edge, like coins in an arcade game. But his attention had long since turned inwards and backwards.

  Pax checked on him more than once, kind-eyed as always, her voice as soothing as those of his favourite contraltos. ‘Lester, such a hard day for you. Can I get you anything?’

  He shook his head each time. He’d urged her to sing when she was younger, told Johnny and the Captain she must join a choir, could still never listen to Handel’s Rinaldo without imagining her in the title role. But then he’d always had ambition for them all.

  Tim offered him cigarettes, even though Lester had quit when the boy was a teenager. ‘How d’you do it? Giselle keeps encouraging me to vape, which sounds ghastly.’

  ‘You stub one out and you don’t light another.’ After Johnny’s death, Lester’s sudden sense of his own mortality had brought many changes. Johnny’s son had needed to feel as invincible then as he clearly did now. Tim had his father’s predisposition to addiction and his mother’s wanderlust, which in combination made it all too easy for him to run away from responsibility, already checking his watch to countdown to departure.

  Alice, by contrast, was a stayer, like Ann Percy, immensely resilient, with a streak of terrier obsession from Johnny’s side, which meant she wouldn’t stop worrying away at a situation until she was satisfied with the result. He could see her charging from group to group now, making sure every guest had been spoken to, every polite commiseration acknowledged and recollection shared, although she wasn’t really listening to any of them, merely ticking off a list in her head, like Johnny counting hounds. It was why he had made a far better huntsman than master, his people skills awkward. The better master by far would have been the mistress.

  ‘More of the rocket fuel, sir.’ Alice’s florid-cheeked husband topped up Lester’s sherry glass with the same jovial nod as when he was handing out port at the meet he hosted annually at the Petty family farm. He was a pleasant man, but his lack of ambition had led Alice to grow peevish. ‘All set for the coming season?’

  ‘Getting there, Mr Petty.’ Lester welcomed the normality of getting horses fit again, his spirits lifted by the prospect of hound exercise starting the following week.

  The familiar faces of the Fosse and Wolds Hunt, out in force here, all knew Lester of old and understood that the man who had followed their hounds three days a week for decades rode his own line and never talked at point. Today they were united in support, a big field of associates that would be the first to step in with help if he needed it, but had the sense to leave him alo
ne when he did not.

  It was only the Austens who inevitably ventured too close to his sentry position, trying to flush him out with a lot of back-slapping and offers of a rare malt they’d brought along from the pub, but Lester had already anticipated the Percy family rivals baiting him, and he held hard. One of the best lessons Johnny had taught him was that wilful hounds and horses learned better from a good example than bad discipline. They only wanted reassurance after all, just as the family did.

  ‘Lester, you’ll have a jolly good hunch what Ronnie intends to do with this place.’ Sandy Austen fixed him with the hypnotising look all Austen men shared. ‘You two were always thick as thieves.’

  ‘Long time ago.’ There was honour among thieves. Seven for a secret never to be told.

  ‘Educated guess?’

  ‘I didn’t have much of a formal education, Mr Austen.’ They’d lost one for sorrow today. That left six. Ronnie had always possessed a Midas touch with horses. ‘But I’ve learned that it never pays to underestimate Mrs Ledwell.’

  19

  Kit let himself into the churchyard through the kissing gate set in its Cotswold stone wall opposite the Old Almshouses, appalled at how thin-skinned being in the village made him feel. Not content with indulging in too much whisky, nostalgia and name-calling in the pub, he’d just offered a woman a job purely on the basis that she’d burst into tears. He’d probably come back from New York to find Pip Edwards had stripped the place. Then again, wasn’t that what he wanted her to do?

  Being back in the house had made him uncomfortable, and his heartbeat was still elevated, as though he had just been onstage reading in for an absent actor. Not much had changed since he’d last been there, just a few props from his children’s occasional occupation and another layer of dust from neglect, yet each time there was less of her, the stranger she had become after the accident. An agonisingly slow exorcism.