The Country Set

by Fiona Walker

  She turned the phone over in her hand, hot as a brick, its screen cracked. ‘Didn’t Dad give you a newer one than this?’

  Fitz snatched it. ‘I like this one.’

  ‘It could cause an injury. You need something better if you’re bussing it to school and back, not to mention your social life there.’

  ‘I won’t have a social life there.’

  ‘Of course you will.’ Fitz had always made friends easily. His old school pack was still in constant contact, another reason Petra felt reassured by his calm insistence that he wasn’t a closet drug addict being groomed online by a sex ring, just an over-thinker, who’d cracked under exam pressure and wasn’t in a hurry to repeat the process without proper preparation. ‘Fetch the phone your father gave you. I’ll help you set it up, if you like. Does it take the same SIM card?’

  ‘It’s already set up.’

  ‘Dad’ll be pleased. He was asking me about it last weekend.’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘Just if you were using it,’ she said vaguely. (The scintillating exchange – ‘He using that BlackBerry I gave him yet?’ ‘Mm, think so, why?’ ‘No reason’ – was memorable only because Charlie had been picking his nose at the time and she’d felt affronted.)

  ‘When do you start your new book?’

  ‘This week.’

  ‘Cool.’ He scowled at her and patted his hoodie pocket as he slouched out, grabbing his mallet. ‘I have a match to run.’

  Petra wished she found it easier to treat him as an equal instead of talking to him as she did to the girls. ‘Let’s switch that television off and get out in the fresh air!’ She bounded back into the kitchen like an overenthusiastic CBBC presenter. ‘Dewy croquet with your brother – then you can take the ponies out for a hack, once we know the hunt’s pushed off, and I’ll walk Wilf. How does that sound?’

  They kept staring at the screen, seemingly having lost their hearing.

  ‘Girls?’

  Nothing.

  ‘Answer me or that television will mysteriously cease to function.’

  ‘It’s like the best bit ever on The Next Step,’ Prudie explained.

  ‘How many times have you seen it?’

  ‘Only twice,’ Bella insisted eagerly. ‘It’s so cool. They’re showing the whole of the next series this afternoon.’

  ‘What about riding the ponies?’

  ‘They won’t mind.’

  She took command of the remote to wails of protest. ‘We have catch-up. Beat your brother and you can watch kids in leotards to your heart’s content.’ Unlike soft-touch Ed, who let his little sisters enjoy carefully stage-managed triumphs, Fitz was highly competitive, like his father who never flattered to deceive. They hadn’t a chance of winning.

  *

  Ronnie and Blair made light work of matching each horse to its stud record, assessing them as they went along, old pros at handling youngsters and putting them at ease. That they always found it so easy to team up together and get a job done was an irony not lost on them.

  ‘Bring them all back to Wiltshire,’ Blair suggested. ‘You can rent this place out. I’ll produce them and we’ll split the profit.’

  She threw him a blue-sky smile, knowing he was much better at high-flying optimism away from home. That was why he spent so much time on the road competing. They both hated standing still, thinking aloud or looking back. Sometimes Ronnie wished their love affair could remain as one endless road trip from event to event. They worked best together with places to go, things to do and see, theirs a love affair in perpetual motion.

  Having scanned half the horses, she made coffee in the tack room while Blair took a cigarette break and went in search of George again.

  She left the kettle creaking towards boil and went to Lester’s garden door. Listening carefully, she could hear a horse cropping grass and a soft, reassuring voice: ‘You’ll be all right, boy. Just you settle in there. You can smell the ferrets, eh, Charlie?’

  She chewed her lip, wondering if the customary bloody-minded eccentricity might be touched with a trace of senility, these days.

  ‘Everything’s fine, Mrs Ledwell!’ his voice called through the door. ‘You just get on.’

  Ronnie sprang back in guilty surprise. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Lester, we must get over this. We must talk.’

  Silence.

  ‘I have no idea how you’re coping here with nobody to help except Pip, but it’s Herculean. You can’t keep it up once the horses come off grass. When did you last have a day off?’

  She waited for an answer. Peering through the slot of the Suffolk latch, she couldn’t see him. She knew better than to try the door. As a child, she’d loved sneaking through it to the fairy-tale garden, but as adulthood had layered sensibility over curiosity, she’d learned to appreciate Lester’s privacy, the stallion man as intensely territorial as his charges, his world moving further out of reach, his secrets still haunting her today.

  The old broodmares watched her over their doors with limpid eyes as she turned away. No ghosts here, they said. Drawn by their reassurance, she crossed the yard.

  By the time her marriage was at its ragged end, Ronnie had stolen in and out of this yard like a thief. It had been Johnny’s domain, her competition horses confined to a run of old timber boxes around the back of the straw barn, battle lines drawn. His alliance with her father and Lester had been absolute, her adultery an unspoken secret.

  Breaking point had come during Cheltenham week. Confiding in her mother was, Ronnie later realised, totally foolhardy. Despite years of tolerating Jocelyn’s ill-tempered condescension and occasional cruelty, Ann had refused to empathise with her daughter’s despair. There were no maternal tears or tantrums, just a stiff-jawed, Noël Coward repartee over six o’clock sherry.

  ‘Don’t be so wet,’ Ann had snapped impatiently, when Ronnie told her how unhappy her marriage was. ‘Johnny doesn’t hit you or the children. He simply avoids you. And he’s jolly good with horses. Many women I know would love a husband like that.’

  Then, almost luminescent with excitement, Ronnie told her about Angus. She couldn’t have got it more wrong, too close to personal happiness to step back and see the picture as others did, especially a matriarchal traditionalist like Ann Percy. She’d broken the spell that had kept her daughter happy for months. ‘Your father must be told.’

  Jocelyn’s reaction was swift and uncompromising. Ill-tempered from a bad day at the races, he’d barely looked up from emptying his tweed pockets of betting slips in search of a cigarette. ‘How long’s it been going on?’ he’d demanded, his voice full of approaching thunder.

  ‘Almost a year.’

  ‘Cancel the anniversary.’

  Ronnie would stop seeing Angus Bowman immediately, he insisted. Johnny would be protected from the truth and the stud’s reputation safeguarded. Then, almost as an afterthought, he said, ‘You must put your children first.’

  ‘I am. I have. They’ll come with me.’

  ‘Come with you where?’

  ‘I’m leaving Johnny.’

  ‘You are going nowhere!’

  It was then the lightning bolts were loosed, Zeus putting his foot down on Mount Olympus, straight through the floor. Ronnie had never heard her father rant so angrily. He refused to allow her selfish, grubby love affair to compromise the long-term future of the family and stud, he stormed. The Percys would stand by Johnny. If Ronnie did not do as she was told, she would lose her inheritance as well as her marriage. If she took the children, Jocelyn raged on, he would cut them all out of his will, too, and Ronnie would deny her own blood as well as herself the birthright that six generations of Percys had enjoyed. Seeing him lost to the red mist, Ronnie had half expected him to threaten to shoot the horses, but he had a bronchial coughing fit instead, lit another cigarette and announced he was going up to change for supper. ‘We will say no more about the matter.’

  ‘Discretion
is the better part of valour, Ronnie,’ her mother hissed, after he’d gone. ‘By all means have an affair but, for God’s sake, don’t bloody blab or blub. You should take a leaf out of Johnny’s book.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she’d gasped, his emotional sclerosis cast in a sudden new light.

  But Ann waved her away, pouring herself a rare second sherry. ‘Go up and say goodnight to the children.’

  Ronnie’s get-out plan had gathered speed. Upstairs, the children were already asleep. Kissing their peaceful faces, she’d made a silent promise that she would do everything in her power to keep them safe. She had no choice but to confide in the jolly nanny – a close ally, quietly aware of how bad her employers’ marriage was – who promised to help if things blew up. They hurriedly packed three little getaway bags to stash in the wardrobe just in case, then shared a tearful hug.

  When Johnny had come in from the yard that evening, already half a bottle of Scotch up, Ann and Jocelyn had acted as though nothing whatsoever had happened. The decanter circulated, the new foals were discussed, that day’s Cheltenham winners derided as flukes. For a while, Ronnie’s one hysterical thought was that she should call Hermia after all and tell her that her parents had turned out to be the Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright of Compton Magna.

  Instead she said, very loudly and clearly, ‘I want a divorce.’

  They all ignored her.

  She said it again.

  Shooting her a withering look, her mother went to check on the cottage pie while Johnny poured himself another Scotch and her father muttered, in a stern undertone, ‘For God’s sake, Ronnie, go up to your room and lie down.’

  If she hadn’t heard Pax crying upstairs, Ronnie suspected she might have walked straight out of the house there and then, too blind with anger to care about anything but escape. Instead she went and rocked her youngest child, her own tears sliding silently into that beautiful curly red hair.

  Much later that night, Johnny came to her room, crashing round drunkenly offering her sex, kissing her with such aggression he cut her lip, so incapable of giving affection or wanting it that he passed out at the end of the bed, the first time he’d slept in it for four years.

  ‘Whose affair started first?’ she asked, but he was out cold. She could guess the answer. It hardly mattered. The marriage was irreparable. She covered him with the duvet and crept through to sleep on the floor in Pax and Alice’s room.

  At dawn, while her children still slept, she crept to the phone in the kitchen and rang Angus. He was riding in the Foxhunter at Cheltenham that day, already up and expecting her call. She’d wished him good luck in the race brightly.

  He heard it in her voice straight away, the conversation becoming one of those shorthand, heartfelt haiku exchanges that only lovers at the peak of intimacy can have.

  ‘Forget that. What’s the hell’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s all blowing up with Johnny.’

  ‘I’ll come straight over to get you out of there.’

  ‘Please don’t. I’ll deal with it. Win that race for me.’

  Ronnie had lain in a hot bath while the house still slept, teeth chattering, thoughts flying too fast to catch them before they spiked another emotion, from tears to anger to despair to cold determination to panic. She had to speak to Angus again. He needed to know her crisis wasn’t his crisis: he had to focus on the race; she couldn’t leave her children, even for a night.

  But when she’d hurried downstairs in a towelling robe, every phone in the house was being marked by breakfasting or newspaper reading or ironing, so she stepped into wellies and raced to the village phone box. His line rang unanswered. Eventually she was forced to give up because somebody was tapping impatiently on the other side of the steamed-up glass.

  It was Angus. He was smiling widely, blood on his chipped teeth. ‘I’ve just told Johnny I love his wife.’

  ‘Oh, Christ, what has he done to you?’ She’d rushed out, arms around him. His nose was broken.

  ‘Actually, he was very decent about it.’ He’d laughed. ‘It was your father who did this when I told him I’m taking you away.’

  ‘What about the children?’

  ‘They bit my ankles and set the dogs on me, but we’ll win them round.’ He started kissing her, his salty sweet blood against her lips. ‘A friend’s offered me his holiday house for the month. He’s also offered his divorce lawyer. You won’t lose the children, I promise. Now, for God’s sake, run away with me, Mrs Ledwell. We’ll sort all this out tomorrow.’ Their mutual laughter was as infectious as being tickled, unstoppable, almost painful.

  At that moment, she’d loved him like no other. Looking back half a lifetime later, Ronnie knew it to be the nursery slopes of emotion compared to the black runs ahead, yet it had been overwhelming. Being offered such a simple solution to such a horrid mess was deliverance. She was twenty-five and felt as if her life had restarted; she’d grown wings. She would be back to claim her home and her children the instant the dust settled, but right now she was flying all the way to the Lakes, the wind in her hair.

  Just days later, on a foggy afternoon at Whittington Races, a crashing fall changed everything completely.

  Ronnie pressed her nose against that of one of the stud’s oldest mothers, a dulcet-eyed former hurdler, with a dappled brown coat the colour of coffee beans.

  It was a safe bet that her love affair with fast-riding, loose-living Angus would have passed the finish post far sooner, had it not been for his accident. That day, in a blistering, rotational fall, beneath half a ton of fast-moving horse, his spine had crushed like thyme beneath a pestle.

  Ronnie had read enough classics to acknowledge the pathos. Angus had no close family, no insurance and nobody to fall back on. He was in bits. He’d abandoned a vocation and fiancée for her, forsaking his closest allies. All he had was Ronnie, their runaway infatuation caught up in the wheels of deep shock. As honourable as she was compassionate, she was grateful for Percy pragmatism, staying in a bed-and-breakfast close to the hospital, then renting a cottage nearby and, as the weeks stretched to months, taking secretarial work to make ends meet, applying to the Injured Jockeys Fund for help as she oversaw his agonisingly slow recuperation. Before they knew it, they had a new life tethered in a tightly knit tangle in Cumbria, and Ronnie’s punishingly long drives to Gloucestershire to see her children tore her apart, her bouncy, happy-mummy show protecting them from the darkness of true mother love, a torrent of lava in her veins that missed them every minute of every day.

  The Percy family closed ranks, not budging an inch, and Ronnie didn’t ask them to. She had made her own bed. By the time she and Angus were settled enough for her to seek a formal shared-custody arrangement, her parents’ forceful arguments against it had gained considerable purchase: the stud provided the idyllic childhood she had enjoyed; Jocelyn could fund educations for his grandchildren, which she could never hope to afford, and Johnny was laying the foundations for breeding lines that would see them take over from six generations of Percys at Compton Magna. It was the only home her children had ever known, surrounded by family and animals they loved, with a jolly nanny they adored, and they didn’t want to leave. Most damningly, Ann had pointed out with vitriol that Ronnie already had one dependant to care for. Despite his breath-taking determination to regain as much movement as he could, it had been made clear early on that a wheelchair would always be part of Angus’s life. Her children didn’t deserve an accidental stepfather coasting bitterly through life. Their futures were all ahead of them here. Do the right thing by them, they’d urged. Leave them at home where they belong.

  Ronnie turned away from the mare, whose breath stayed warm against her shoulder. In almost thirty years of absence, she hadn’t lost her sense of belonging here. And yet her lesson in love had come at such a price, she wasn’t sure she could ever earn it back.

  *

  Mitch, the chatty postie, was at the gate of Upper Bagot Farmhouse with a signed-for parcel and obligatory w
eather talk: ‘Bit blustery today. Autumn blowing in,’ he called, as Petra crossed the gravel to him, then turned to salute a convoy of cars making their way along Plum Run, with small, anxious-looking children on booster seats peering out. ‘Reception kiddies starting a day early. Seems like only yesterday ours were that age, eh?’ He grinned, handing across a parcel and a pile of envelopes before tapping his tablet with the stylus. ‘All grown-up now.’

  Putting the post under her arm while she signed the screen, Petra was about to point out that her youngest daughter had only started school four years ago, but her phone was ringing in her pocket. She swiped it without looking, waving a thank-you to Mitch.

  ‘Hello?’ Propping the phone to her ear with her shoulder, she flipped through the letters, hearing a deep chuckle and a hunting horn.

  ‘What are you up to?’ Bay’s voice was laced with sloe gin and cheer. ‘Fancy breakfast?’

  Stay calm, Petra. You’re parking him. ‘You’re three hours too late.’

  ‘Call it lunch, then. Bring the girls. There’s always tons to eat and Tilly’s desperate to see Bella before school starts.’

  ‘We’ve got plans.’ Hacking, shoe-shopping, binge-watching The Next Step. Anything but seeing you and feeling sixteen again.

  ‘I’ve been bloody texting you all week. Why didn’t you come out with us today?’

  Beneath the parcel – which was for Ed from China and undoubtedly full of geekery – were the usual window-faced reminders and a stiff cream envelope addressed to Mr and Mrs Charles Gunn, which she guessed was a wedding invitation. ‘I’ve decided I’m not a hunting fan.’ Turning over the cream envelope, she wondered who was getting hitched. Judging from the expensive stationery it had to be one of Charlie’s mob.

  ‘Nonsense. Those thighs were made for tight breeches,’ he coaxed, voice going croakily sexy. The horn was sounding at his end again.

  ‘I have a book to write, Bay.’

  ‘And I can’t wait to read it. But before you get started, I do think you need some help with your descriptive accuracy. You’ve been getting quite a lot wrong.’

  She bristled. ‘Oh, yes?’