The Country Set

by Fiona Walker

  Just as quickly, at the sound of a long, plaintive horn call to stop hounds, the followers fell silent.

  ‘Why do we do all this if we can’t kill the foxes, Mr Lester?’ asked a bright voice at waist height, the accent pure Bardswold, and he turned to see the Stokeses’ granddaughter Grace Dawkins, looking up at him from a small hairy pony.

  ‘Ssh!’ He glared down at her. ‘Get back with the others.’

  Undeterred, she smiled at him expectantly, speaking in a whisper: ‘We can talk like this if you like.’

  ‘Ssh.’ He breathed it even more quietly, with an exaggerated finger-to-mouth gesture, then waved her away, ears cocked as he heard the hounds regrouping at the far side of the covert, the whippers-in cantering round to reposition there, another sharp sound of the huntsman’s horn preparing the pack to draw again.

  ‘My friend Tilly’s dad’s the field master,’ came the whisper. ‘He says you know more about horses and hunting than everyone else here put together, Mr Lester. You must know the answer.’

  Lester gritted his teeth. ‘If you say so.’ He glanced down again. She was a pretty thing with a ferrety snubbed nose and a decent little riding position. Her mother, Mo, had looked just the same at that age before she’d run to fat, as Stokes women inevitably did.

  ‘It’s obedience training,’ he muttered, under his breath. ‘We’re teaching the hounds not to chase Charlie Fox.’

  ‘Are the terriers learning that too?’ she asked, as hounds drew again, undergrowth crackling, and the terrier-men charged around on their quads to stay close, camouflaged and flat-capped, standing up on the pegs, the big boxes strapped fore and aft, whimpering and yapping, as little black noses tried to prise the lids off.

  The hounds started to sing almost straight away this time. Hearing the horn call doubling, Lester thumped his boot-tops with his crop’s bone handle, rolling his tongue again.

  Little Grace watched him impassively. ‘I like your horse.’

  Already packed with hard muscle beneath a coat gleaming like a newly minted copper coin, freshly hogged and standing as four square as a Horse of the Year Show champion under the judge’s eye, Lester’s little cob was by far the best produced conveyance of the day.

  ‘Seen this lad bred, born and broken,’ he couldn’t resist boasting, his focus still on the coppice where the song lifted his heart.

  ‘Did you mate his mum and dad?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  ‘My dad says one of the Dragons off the telly is going to turn the stud into a spa hotel,’ Grace’s chatty, sing-song voice cut through the cacophony, ‘but that’s not going to happen, is it, Mr Lester?’

  ‘We slay dragons round here,’ Lester said darkly. He spotted a streak of chestnut fur in the undergrowth and snapped, ‘Now buzz off back to your mother.’

  Waiting until she’d trotted off, he put his all into his saddle-thumping shouts and brrrs as the hounds sang their way closer, undergrowth snap, crackle and popping. ‘Ay, ay, Charlie!’

  A buzzing noise made him look up, and he spotted the drone just above the trees, his mind accelerating as though the horn was blowing away. The sabs all had drones these days. It was filming them all, capturing the riders grouped around the wood, looking to all as though they were holding up, a strict no-no under the Hunting Act.

  The chestnut shape snaked past again, a lead hound little more than a wicket’s length behind. Lester watched the fox falter at the wood’s edge, just a few feet away from him, startled by the riders and noise. It was young, barely more than a cub, separated from the rest of its family, its coat the deep rust colour of tamarind, white bib and tail tip still crisply laundered, its eyes stretched wide, every instinct focused on survival. He stopped thumping his boot-tops, transfixed.

  Pausing for a split second at the mesh stock fencing that marked the boundary between woodland and pasture, the little fox glanced back, then forward and straight up to meet Lester’s eyes, animal to animal. With a bound, he made a bid for freedom, to take his chance and run. But instead of streaking away, he twisted back with a frantic cry and flurry of scrabbling ginger fur, the wire snagging and trapping him.

  Hounds bayed. The drone hovered lower.

  Lester slithered stiffly off the cob and scooped up the little fox, arthritic fingers struggling to free its thrashing leg from the twist of loose wire before hurrying back to the cob to pull the sandwich tin from his leather saddle bag, toss it away into the undergrowth, thrust the stunned creature inside and buckle it closed. A split second later, three hounds broke cover.

  A small lynch mob of tricolour, lemon and brindle, they bounded around him, noses and tails thrashing this way and that. Then, to his blessed relief, they homed in on his tin, which had burst open spilling bloater-paste sandwiches everywhere. If there was one scent guaranteed to turn a hound it was fish paste.

  ‘Good man, Lester.’ Bay didn’t spot the marauding trio as he thundered past to join the huntsman, who was drawing ever faster on his horn, keeping the rest of his young pack’s attention on the job. Behind him, the whipper-in shouted at the unruly breakaway squad attacking Lester’s sandwiches, leather thong tapping backs to get their attention and call them with him. They teemed beneath the cob’s legs.

  Lester’s saddle bag went very, very still.

  Moments later, the horn let out a long call ending in a tremolo. Deep in the covert, the rest of the pack sang victoriously.

  Leading the cob to a sturdy fencing rail, Lester clambered onto it with effort to remount. He glanced down at his saddle bag uncertainly. He’d never done anything so reckless in the field. It was against everything he’d ever been taught. He’d have to hang back for a quiet moment when they moved on to the next covert and feed the fox back in. He lifted the flap a fraction.

  ‘Lester! Isn’t this exciting? Cake?’

  Lester almost fell off in shock, swinging round to find Pip in her bright pink fleece thrusting a spotty tin up at him.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he hissed. The master would be apoplectic. ‘You can’t hand those out now.’

  ‘I brought a hound back,’ she announced proudly, pointing at a liver and white dog gambolling happily into the woods.

  ‘That is no hound.’ He watched it disappear. ‘That’s an English pointer.’

  24

  Ronnie had been given twenty-seven mortice keys in unlabelled bunches for the stud farm. The twenty-seventh she tried opened the shiny new lock to the swollen, dog-scratched back door.

  Having dismissed Blair’s offer to come inside with her – ‘I’m hunting for horse passports, not ghosts’ – Ronnie found herself rooted to the step, head pressed against the door’s peeling paint, looking down at the rusted iron boot-scraper on which generations of Percys had loosened gritty red brash mud from their soles. Beyond the door was a void: no barking, no phone ringing, no television tuned loudly to a racing review in a distant room, no shout telling her to bloody well hurry up and come in. For a moment, she was leaden with loss, shot through with the inescapable loneliness of grief.

  She unfolded the list Alice had sent her. There was no point in being mawkish about it. Her meeting with the solicitor in Leamington later that morning had been put off long enough. She was obliged to attend in person to swear an oath and sign papers, which she found rather fitting, given paperwork inevitably made her swear rather a lot, something she’d inherited from her father.

  She wanted to hold Blair’s hand very badly now.

  ‘Bugger it.’ She shied away from the door and lit a cigarette, needing someone to chase her inside, like a horse up a ramp. Alice and Pax should have been there with a lunge whip and a bucket of carrots.

  Her daughters had embraced their roles as executors with extraordinary efficiency, Alice almost indecently quick off the blocks orchestrating probate valuations of the estate and its contents, while Pax spent long evenings assimilating lists of her grandfather’s cash assets and debts. They’d kept their mother updated with concise, bul
let-pointed emails, copied to Tim in South Africa and the expensive Leamington solicitor. The pedantry exasperated Ronnie, who had stopped opening emails about the market value of elderly tractors or three hundred round bales of oat straw. Yet the stud’s precarious finances made the need to get past the legal process a pressing one. The list of creditors who couldn’t be paid until probate was granted was very long.

  Her children were carefully avoiding another confrontation, the safe cordon marked out around Ronnie making her feel like an unexploded bomb. They’d been the same in childhood, her heartbreaking trinity raised by their grandparents and led by the fierce eldest sibling, charging out through the house or across the stable-yards whenever their mother arrived to visit, slamming on the brakes at a distance, heads down – dark, blonde and red – politely lining up to greet her, leaving only the family dogs to bound forward in unbridled welcome. The Percys had never been a family given to physical displays of affection: Ann would present a cheek to be kissed with a steely grimace, and a pat on the back was as touchy-feely as the Captain ever got. For years, Ronnie’s open arms had fallen to her sides in defeat until she’d finally given up trying.

  Throwing the barely smoked cigarette into a flowerpot, she hugged herself now. Too many bloody memories here. She checked them with every stride as she went through the back door at speed, her little dogs at her heels, claws skittering on the flagstones. All three of them marched through the vestibule where the family’s hunting boots had stood for six generations in military formation beneath thick layers of coats on pegs, like a rocky outcrop, then out along the back passageway hung with stable name-plates from favourite horses over a century of Percy breeding. For a moment Ronnie paused, eyes clamped shut, her nose filling with a smell that wiped out four decades in a breath. Horses and hunting days, their scents breathed at the run along echoing corridors, feet sliding on beeswaxed floorboards, dust dancing, pursued by a pack of hearth-warmed dogs.

  This was a house filled with equine, not human, memorabilia, she recalled with relief. The photographs and paintings that lined every wall were of four-legged subjects. The few with family members in the saddle largely pre-dated recent generations because there had been precious little space to hang anything since the early 1950s. Only the drawing room, where the Percys had entertained guests, had been redecorated in living memory, and that had been minimal: the oak-panelled walls and marquetry floors were sensible wash-down Victorian interior design for the professional horseman. Ronnie’s parents had been unsentimental and rarely replaced anything that had life left in it. As such, there was very little evidence that they had ever been there, beyond clothes in wardrobes, dog scuffs on doors and her mother’s carefully kept stud records.

  That was what she went to gather now: passports, covering certificates, studbooks and grading records. They were already laid out in archive boxes on her father’s desk where they’d recently been shown to the auctioneer who had valued the estate’s assets.

  Traditionally an explosion of brimming ashtrays and paper piles that nobody was allowed to touch, the room had been cleaned and sorted, and Ronnie experienced another rib pinch of anti-climax. She’d anticipated feeling as though the Captain had just walked out of each room into the next, but instead he’d been unceremoniously tidied away with a squirt of Pledge.

  She glanced out of the big sash window, which looked across to the stable-yards, heads over every door for once. Percy bloodstock was far more than paper trails. Jocelyn’s true legacy was not in three archive boxes but out in the yards, barns and fields, many in utero, their futures ahead of them. The trustees might have no faith in her, but she knew a good horse when she saw one, and she’d always had a knack for selling them.

  Carrying the paperwork outside took several trips. Blustering clouds were playing hide and seek with the sun. She could hear Blair calling his dog somewhere beyond the stallion paddock. At a greater distance, the hunt was moving between coverts in Austen land on the opposite side of Lord’s Brook. She’d jumped that brook countless times as a child, Hermia hot on her heels, both girls whooping and congratulating their ponies and one another.

  Could she live here again, she wondered, even for a short while? She had never intended her tenure in Wiltshire to be permanent, but taking this on was no task for a woman who could pack a suitcase faster than most took to find their car keys in their handbag.

  Going back into the house to fetch the final box, she cut through the kitchen to fetch a glass of water.

  The smell was wrong. Comforting, it was the burned-sugar warmth of home-baking, sweet enough to take the bitterness out of the many arguments with her mother she remembered being waged there. The heart of the house still beat inside Ronnie, a stampeding blood rush, as though competition schedules, entry forms and maps remained spread out on its long, scrubbed table, dog beds crowded in front of the Aga, babies and toddlers banging spoons against pans or squishing flour and water dough on high-chair trays. The Captain had rarely ventured in here. This had been his wife’s HQ.

  The scratched, heavy-based Ravenscroft glasses in the cupboards hadn’t changed, impervious to Ann slamming them down to emphasise a point, and the sink mixer tap was still loose. When she and Johnny had lived in the old servants’ quarters, this kitchen had been a daily meeting point for mother and daughter.

  Ann had been a splendid cook, despairing of teaching newly married Ronnie to cater for her husband or host big country dinner parties: ‘When I married your father, we had six staff, but a young wife must learn to run her own house these days.’

  The kitchen, too, was uncharacteristically tidy. A state-of-the-art food processor looked out of place on the worn wooden worktop, and Ronnie wondered what had become of the peculiar, pug-eyed housekeeper.

  In the breakfast room, the mantelpiece was laden with her mother’s loathsome Staffordshire china dogs. One rainy summer’s day, aged about nine, Ronnie and Hermia had finger-knitted little scarves for them all and staged The Sound of Music in canine pottery, reimagining mountains of lonely goats and edelweiss among the invitations, carriage clock and candlesticks. Twenty years later, picking up one of the dogs to hurl at a drunken Johnny, she’d found one of the little scarves trapped dustily behind it and stopped herself, pressing its cool head to her hot cheeks instead. Ronnie had been brought up to possess steely self-control. Instead of making a scene, she’d swung round to face her husband with an upper lip so stiff she might have been a bisque doll. ‘Tell me, Johnny, what have I done to offend you so much?’

  He’d once told her Ledwells never argued. Percys loved a scrap: Ronnie battled with her mother daily, occasionally and explosively with her father, regularly with stewards and dressage judges. But with her husband the silences stretched on for weeks.

  ‘We’re fine as we are,’ he’d insisted, half draining his Scotch glass in one, a man far happier dealing with overwrought mares than with his unhappy wife.

  ‘You haven’t touched me in months, Johnny. You always behave like I repulse you, like you’re forcing yourself to touch worms.’

  ‘I’ve been busy. I get tired.’ The whisky had anaesthetised all warmth from his voice, the Worcestershire burr a low monotone. At the time, it had come across as cold arrogance.

  Looking now at the row of dogs with their wide painted eyes, witnesses to her affectionless marriage, Ronnie wished she could have seen the truth of it back then. Reliving the conversation, she remembered only her mounting sense of frustration and isolation as they embarked on another round of not arguing.

  ‘Johnny, talk to me,’ her twenty-five-year-old self had entreated.

  ‘I don’t do all that fancy, sweet-talking charm, Ron, you know that.’

  ‘Straight talking is fine. You can’t tell me you’re happy with our marriage.’

  ‘You’re a good wife.’

  ‘So why do you look at me like I’m not here? Why walk out of a room when I walk in? We have no joy in each other, no conversation, no physical relationship.’

&
nbsp; ‘Plenty of that in the lorry park.’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  ‘It’s no secret what goes on.’

  ‘Is that what you really think?’ She’d laughed in amazement. ‘That my knickers drop faster than the ramp when I’m away competing?’

  Johnny had always used silence to underline a point, sometimes for days, although Ronnie was usually too hot-headed to hold her tongue longer than it took to snatch an angry breath.

  ‘It’s you I share my bed with, Johnny, you I want. I never take any notice of anyone else.’

  ‘They notice you.’

  ‘That’s their problem. If it bothers you, I’ll hang up my boots.’

  ‘Absolutely not.’ It was the first time he’d looked animated, eyes sparking like coals.

  ‘I could work more with you on the breeding side. That way I don’t have to leave the children so much while they’re little.’

  ‘The stud is their future. Its reputation rides on you.’

  ‘What about my reputation? There’s no truth in any rumours. You can’t suffocate our marriage because of them. That’s not a reason, Johnny. That’s looking for an excuse.’

  She had been within reach of the truth in that moment, had she known it, but again her anger had flared too brightly. ‘Do you really hate me that much?’

  ‘I don’t hate you.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I just don’t...’ He’d hesitated, the sentence committed, suspended in animation, as though he’d taken off at speed over a blackthorn hedge on a horse he realised couldn’t land the leap, the barbed spikes coming up in slow motion.

  ‘...love me?’ she’d suggested hollowly. ‘You just don’t love me.’

  Their eyes met in the mirror, all too briefly and honestly. His were dark, bloodshot caverns in that hopelessly romantic face.

  ‘I just don’t like this conversation,’ he’d said eventually. ‘We won’t have it again. I need another drink.’