The Country Set

by Fiona Walker

  ‘Pays to keep your ear to the ground in this family.’ He wandered into the kitchen.

  She thought back to the night of the hurricane, the jumpy date night – he’d spent most of it on the phone in the pub entrance.

  Following him, she shouldered the door frame and watched him rooting in the fridge. ‘You knew the stud was going to be robbed, didn’t you?’

  ‘I heard rumours.’

  ‘And you did nothing about it?’

  ‘You can’t just bulldoze around laying down the law in this family, Carl!’ The fridge door swung shut and he glowered at her. ‘Turners might want a leader, yeah, but a lot of our lot’s lawless. It’s a long game bringing order round here. I’m a non-commissioned officer, babe. I work my way up through the ranks. You had me commanding them all that night like bloody Mountbatten driving in to do battle.’

  ‘I knew you hated it.’

  ‘It got the job done. But I won’t do any good in this family throwing my weight around.’ He was slamming his way around the cupboards now. ‘Where’s all the beer gone?’

  ‘In you, lover.’ She smiled apologetically, turning and heading back to the sofa, calling over her shoulder, ‘You drank it. There’s half a bottle of Tia Maria in the cupboard if you’re desperate. I’ll join you. It’s almost Christmas, after all.’ The carol-singing had made her feel like it was really about to happen.

  He carried the drinks through, stooping over the back of the sofa to deliver hers and clink it with his own glass.

  She reached back for his free hand.

  He took it, his broad palm and big knuckles enveloping hers. ‘The lads are all at Flynn’s. I said I’d go round there.’

  She stopped herself snapping that it was the third time that week. She couldn’t face a fight, knowing the slightest hint of a raised voice would wake Ellis. She was well practised in the art of hissing, but Ash always just shouted.

  Instead, she held on to his hand, stretching back to look up at him. ‘Or we could just go straight to bed?’

  Carly didn’t feel randy yet, but she knew she would. Their bodies had the conversation in bed that they couldn’t have anywhere else. Sex always brought them closer, and it had been over a week now. It couldn’t be right that his mates were taking priority over his mate.

  He was so tall, standing above her, that she couldn’t see his expression, just the tight set of his chin with its sexy cleft, and the curve of his nose, dark nostrils flaring.

  For a moment his fingers gripped hers, then slipped away. ‘Later, bae.’

  Carly threw back her sweet coffee liqueur and returned irritably to her albums, remembering how much easier it had been when he was in the army.

  She texted Janine: So who in the family has a Prince Albert and a gecko?

  The list that came back was extensive. It seemed the pierced-dick-lizard thing was something of a Turner brand. Of the half-dozen names on there, one stood out a mile: Jed.

  *

  ‘Are you sure we haven’t gone past your house?’ Bay stifled a yawn as he herded Pip along the Broadbourne road, the luxury new-builds of the ribbon development thinning out to countryside. ‘Do you recognise any landmarks?’

  Pip managed a valiant ‘onwards’ gesture with her hand. She wanted to ask whether he’d like to come in for a coffee, but she was having difficulty speaking, let alone remembering where she lived. The effect of Social Norm’s poitín – the sensory equivalent of dental anaesthetic combined with a blow to the head and an aerobics class after-burn – hadn’t fully kicked in until they were halfway home, and now she couldn’t entirely recall where home was.

  They made it to the bus stop, a splintering wooden hut beneath a weeping willow, so Pip knew they were close. She’d caught her bus to university from there for three years. Those were the days.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Bay asked in alarm.

  She was sitting inside the bus stop now, mentally travelling back in time. ‘Youcanleavemehere.’

  ‘Of course I can’t,’ he said. ‘What’s the name of your house?’

  ‘The Bulrushes.’

  ‘I’ll go and look for it. Don’t go away.’

  ‘Petrahasnthadsexforages.’

  Bay sat beside her. ‘I think she deserves a bit more discretion from her friends.’

  There was a long silence, broken only by Pip’s deep, sobering breaths. The bus stop smelt of stale cigarette smoke.

  ‘I’m only trying to help her.’ She picked the words out with effort, then corrected herself carefully. ‘Help you.’

  ‘I’m flattered, but please don’t.’

  ‘I want to. You’re both lovely. Shpeshly you.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He pulled out his hip flask. ‘Now tell me what Ronnie Percy is up to.’

  ‘I can’t. Client confidentiality.’

  ‘Percys are overconfident.’ He held the flask out of reach as she tried to take it. ‘Especially Ronnie.’

  ‘Lester says she’s beyond rodent – redunt – hope,’ she said dismissively. The stud’s stallion man hadn’t quite voiced that sentiment – he rarely spoke, apart from the odd barked order to sweep the yard or a polite thank-you for her baking – but she knew he thought it.

  ‘Old Lester thinks we’re all beyond redemption,’ Bay said, his phone screen glowing as he tiredly tried to identify her house on Google Maps.

  ‘Especially Ponnie Rercy.’ She closed her eyes to stop the stars swirling about. She could hear Bay’s flask top unscrewing again, the clink of its hinged top.

  ‘Ronnie was my first pin-up,’ he admitted. ‘Everyone in the Comptons was in love with her. She’d hack round the village, all blonde hair, cigarettes and laughter, stopping to talk to everyone. She owned these lanes. Then she was gone.’

  Listening, Pip imagined one of the soft-focus vintage clips played on BBC2 retrospectives, all headscarves, clipped English and village cricket. ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Eight.’

  She snorted with laughter.

  ‘I had an eye for women and horses from an early age.’ He yawned, stretching back. ‘C’mon, where do you live, Pip?’

  In Bay’s mind, the two sentences were entirely unconnected. Pip, floating somewhere between total incomprehension and second wind, added them together, drew a heart around them and added today’s date as surely as the graffiti celebrating teenage trysts on the bus-stop walls around them.

  It was another perfect moment. This was the sort of evening she’d dreamed of fifteen years ago, waiting here to catch the bus to lectures. Laughter, friendship, intelligent conversation, unbridled no-strings sex. In the absence of Shane Lynch, Bay was a very hot option. Petra wouldn’t mind, surely. Pip was younger and unattached; it would be a straightforward physical exchange, like a game of ping-pong.

  Pip preferred her men muscled, inked and wearing at least two items of leather that weren’t shoes and a belt, whereas Bay had that posh thing going on with the Dominic West voice, bright trousers and gold signet ring, but he was seriously good-looking and very gentlemanly. She admired his profile, illuminated by the dull gleam of his phone screen as he pinpointed her address. She had sobered up enough to know exactly where home was, but she liked sitting there with him.

  ‘Do you want to have sex with me?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s a generous offer, but I have to get back to my wife.’ The reply was so effortlessly polite, he might have been declining an extra-strong mint.

  The matter-of-factness somehow made the rejection okay. When Pip had been married – not a relationship she ever cared to dwell on much – her husband Ali had accused her of divorcing sex from emotion. Pip didn’t see that as a bad thing. She found emotions a lot harder to understand than sex.

  ‘Now, stand up. I know where you live.’ Switching on his phone again and holding it up, Bay showed her a red teardrop point on Google Maps. As he did so, a new message came through with a bright trill, its text running across the top of the screen.

  Hope Pip got home okay. Thanks
for proving me wrong. God rest ye. Px

  They could hear the carol singers further along the lane now, offering tidings of comfort and joy. Pip really didn’t want to be alone.

  ‘We can sign a disclaimer,’ she offered.

  *

  Petra bailed from carol-singing after they’d done ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ for the Stokeses at Lower Bagot Farm, which was always the jolliest of the calls, old Sid and Joan laying on hot toddies and piles of sausage rolls, their daughter Pam clapping and laughing in her wheelchair, her cerebral palsy never limiting her capacity for sociability.

  Petra walked part of the way home with Mo. Muffling yawns with gloved hands, they chatted about visiting in-laws, then Mo passed on hunt-supper gossip and the latest Archers plot. Inevitably, the conversation turned to Pip Edwards.

  ‘Do you really think she was targeted by a hustler?’ Mo was shocked.

  ‘In her dreams. She’s a fantasist. Bay’s probably strapped to the wall of her punishment dungeon in a gimp mask right now,’ Petra predicted bitchily.

  ‘That’s awful!’ Mo stifled a shocked laugh.

  ‘I was going to set her up,’ Petra added, ‘but she’s certifiable. And she’s far too old for Tinder which is how they hooked up I hear. Nobody gets swiped right over thirty. She needs one of those agencies with a real person behind a desk who can see how vulnerable she is. And if she takes them cakes, they’re bound to give her the best dates.’

  ‘Barry has a very peculiar cousin down Andoversford way who makes the prettiest little ornaments carving eggshells. Pip must use a lot of eggs.’

  ‘It’s a match. Tell him to line up the dick shots.’ She sighed. ‘I’m going to have to find a new SMC.’

  ‘You can’t have Jed.’ Mo was very protective of her own crush on the village’s darkest Lord of Misrule. ‘Kit Donne’s back. He’s a good-looking man.’

  ‘Gill’s already staked her claim, although she doesn’t know it yet.’ Petra remembered the semi-naked figure on the doorstep in the sleeping bag. ‘I think I’ll focus on Charlie. If you can’t appreciate your husband at Christmas, when can you?”

  Mo’s jolly, smiling face – which always made Petra think of a golden retriever – pulled back, chin disappearing into her neck, soft eyes full of cheer. ‘You’re not feeling yourself.’

  ‘I’m married to Charlie, Mo. If I don’t feel myself, nobody will.’

  ‘So he really doesn’t exist, your hubby?’

  Petra was getting slightly fed up of the Bags’ running joke. ‘You saw him last weekend at Sanson Holdings charity shoot.’

  ‘A hologram.’ Mo winked. ‘Handsome one, I’ll grant you.’

  They hugged goodbye beside the memorial hall at the turn to the estate and Petra headed home to her unusually quiet house. A pile of lightly crusted dog sick greeted her in the middle of the kitchen floor. She tracked down her teenage son in his darkened room, screens glowing, toast plates and mugs littered around him, grumbling that she was getting between him and the television when she stooped to pick them up. Downstairs, she unloaded the dishwasher, made up a bed for Gunny in the annex, folded armfuls of the children’s laundry and then, collapsing gratefully onto the kitchen sofa with Wilf, called Gill to make sure all was well with the children.

  ‘Any gossip?’

  ‘Edited highlights include spiked punch, Kit Donne in his underpants, Bay on the sleaze, and Pip’s been scammed by someone with tattoos and a pierced penis.’

  ‘Usual village jollop then. Let’s debrief out hacking tomorrow. Early one okay?’

  ‘I’ll pass. Got mother-in-law arriving at eleven and the mare’s stroppily hormonal.’

  ‘All the more reason to come out and blow off the cobwebs before the widow spider trains her eight eyes for dust and dirt.’

  ‘Thanks for that, but no.’

  ‘Suit yourself. We’ll call past at eight anyway, just in case. The kids can all stay here until we’re back.’

  Petra loved it that her children got on so well with Gill’s, but she did sometimes worry that they were too thoroughly integrated into the Walcote pack, osmosing with the baskets of dogs and cats on every chair.

  Little Drummer Boy’s majorette is home, she texted Charlie. What train are you getting back tomorrow? Xxx He got extra kisses because it was Christmas.

  Wilf rolled over with a squeaky yawn, presenting his freckled belly for rubbing, head cocked to one side, eyes ringed with playful white, tail thumping. Petra obliged him distractedly. She and Charlie stroked the dog more than they did each other, vying to be the one he loved most. He was loyal to Petra because she fed him and took him for walks – the marriage; he was loyal to Charlie because he took him shooting – the love affair.

  She tried to picture Charlie asleep on the sofa now, television glowing, snoring with his mouth open, shirt gaping at the buttons, like fledgling beaks, rucked up over his slight hairy paunch. An unwanted image superimposed itself, like a strobe show, of Charlie in a bar, tie and tongue loosened, smile widening, telling an attractive woman that his wife didn’t understand him. Now he was in the familiar massage parlour bondage room.

  ‘Stop it,’ she told herself firmly. Sitting down with nothing to do was always fatal.

  She went out to check the horses, throwing each another slice of hay. The Redhead was still flirting with her small out-of-sight neighbour, tail fanned to one side as she presented an open invitation to the grilled glory hole.

  ‘He’s a gelding and he can’t reach,’ Petra pointed out gently, as the mare squealed to the frustrated tussock.

  Clouds were shuffling in overhead now, heavy and menacing.

  She sent Charlie another text: It’s going to snow. You might want to think about catching an earlier train. The strobe image was playing again. Charlie. Bar. Loose tie. Sympathetic woman.

  Did he have the same suspicious mind, she wondered, waking groggily on the sofa, lonely and shattered, reading his wife’s messages, his own strobe playing? Petra. Carol-singing. Pissed. Flirting. Entire village witnessing.

  Petra felt an involuntary smile steal across her lips. She’d seen Bay off. The Obelisk of Luxor was something she would never again dwell on. Apart from now, obvs.

  Restlessly on the move again, she made a posy of pine and holly to put in the annex for Gunny.

  As she did so, Charlie replied: No way case will fish tomz. Back Fri. Pols to Mum forme. Cx

  He only texted that badly when he was drunk. The strobe played ever faster, the gimp mask tightening. Petra didn’t want to entertain Gunny alone again. It was like competing in Masterchef every night with only the mean judge from the restaurant critics.

  She took her best reed diffuser and fluffy towels to the annex. He’d be out with chambers, she reassured herself, drowning his sorrows as the case from Hell dragged on. Poor Charlie. It was mean of her to imagine him partying every night.

  Poor you. Love you. Xx

  Love you too. You aremy beatiful clever wife and im soluckyto have youi and ouir beautifukl childrenm xxxxxxxxxxxx

  Well that was a turn-up for the books. She hadn’t had one of those since England retained the Ashes.

  Aw! Smiley face and love heart.

  The phone vibrated again: God rest ye too. Bx

  Bay. Her pulses rocketed. Her noble intention to devote her undiluted wifely love to Charlie this Christmas wasn’t starting well.

  ‘You all right, Mum?’ Fitz sloped in, whippet thin in baggy ripped leggings and a faded tour T-shirt, his dark hair all pointing left as though he’d been standing sideways in a wind tunnel.

  Was that fashionable or had he been asleep? Petra wondered. ‘Yes! Fine! You?’

  ‘Yeah, hangin’, y’know.’ He eyed her phone. ‘Can I – um – borrow that a sec?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Ponkers says the iPhone has an Easter egg I have to look at.’

  ‘Fitz, it’s Christmas not Easter.’

  ‘It’s a nickname for a hidden app.’ His hand was out expectantly.<
br />
  Quickly deleting the Bay texts, she handed it across.

  He played with a few settings, curled his mouth down, unimpressed, then handed it back. ‘It’s pretty lame.’ A moment later, he’d disappeared behind the fridge door.

  ‘Your father won’t be back tomorrow. He’s stuck with this case until the weekend.’

  ‘No shit.’

  ‘Gunny will be here, though.’

  ‘Shit.’ The door swung closed. He was clutching most of her Waitrose deli counter purchases to his chest, using his chin to steady them as he turned to retrieve a spoon from the cutlery drawer. ‘You’re not feeling paranoid, though, yeah?’

  ‘Paranoid about what?’

  ‘I dunno. You’re always paranoid.’

  ‘I am not!’

  ‘Cool.’ The dark eyes smiled into hers, as rare as a double rainbow.

  ‘Fitz, everything’s all right, isn’t it? With your love life and stuff?’

  ‘My love life’s good, Mum,’ he said without hesitation, turned towards the door to the hall, dropping a tub of taramasalata.

  Petra closed her eyes with relief.

  ‘It’s everyone else’s that’s fucked up,’ he added, as he exited, dropping a packet of sausage rolls.

  Petra put it back into the fridge and took herself upstairs for a long, candlelit bath.

  *

  @GunnPoint Friendship is OFF. Repeat, friendship is off.

  @Fitzroving Good news. Have you taken the measures?

  @GunnPoint All calls forwarded from landline and Mum’s phone has unknown number bar. Electric gates closed.

  @Fitzroving Good boy. Be vigilant. See you tomorrow.

  52

  Lester was no longer on such high alert when he took the grey stallion his hay net first thing in the morning, familiar with the way the horse flew to the back of the stable to wait, eyeing him resentfully as he fumbled to take down last night’s string and loop up the full one.

  As soon as he was back out of the stable, however, before the bolt was even slid fully across, the stallion would resume his circular march, head snaking, teeth bared, as he slammed the bars, attacked his mirror and snatched at his hay.