The Country Set

by Fiona Walker

  ‘Tell me I’m a not stupid, stubborn woman?’ she asked her dogs, who cocked their heads, bat ears pricked.

  Having wished one another a merry Christmas with brisk formality at seven a.m., she and Lester mucked out stables as though it was any other day, working as far apart as possible, listening to carols on Classic FM, and ignoring the announcer’s constant references to opening presents and putting the turkey on. Yet there was a Scrooge-like companionability between them, which Ronnie found rather cheering.

  In the spirit of a brief seasonal armistice, Ronnie followed the family tradition of inviting him to share a Christmas drink with her at midday. She’d found a very fine amontillado in a cupboard that she hoped would win him round. Her father would undoubtedly have been appalled that she hadn’t gone through the hollow process of offering lunch too – an invitation that had been issued and declined every year in perpetuity – but Ronnie had seen no point: Lester had been too bad-tempered yesterday for her to flatter him with ritual. She was having soup, and Lester had his pie selection; he had a ferocious appetite for a septuagenarian built like a whippet.

  But when he took his coat off, she looked at the neat leather patches sewn onto his increasingly threadbare tweeds, and saw the rim of angry red skin around his crisp white collar – ‘Lester’s rain scald’, her father had called his eczema – and felt a rush of pity for this strange, insular, ageing man, who had once been such a hero. Was it possible that she had missed him more than she realised? There was an uncomfortable ache in her chest telling her so.

  ‘Stay and eat with me.’

  ‘No, thank you.’ He looked quietly pleased, the custom honoured.

  They raised a glass. ‘To old friends.’ It felt reassuringly secular.

  Ronnie tried not to think of the many friends she had abandoned over the years, habitually repeating that first unwitting purge, the ability to walk out of one life and into another her blessing and curse.

  Lester had downed his sherry in one. ‘We’ll toast your father.’

  She was too dutiful a daughter to decline. Glasses refilled, they raised a toast to the Captain.

  ‘And your mother.’ He scratched the eczema on the back of his hand.

  The glasses were charged and raised again.

  Ronnie had never been a big drinker. By the time they’d toasted her grandfather, the stud’s first foundation stallion and the Queen, she’d had enough to make the room spin. Even taking small sips, she could feel the fire spreading inside her. ‘Let’s leave it there, Lester.’

  With a determined look, he picked up the bottle, filled both glasses and lifted his. ‘To Johnny Ledwell.’

  Ronnie knew he was trying to get a reaction out of her. Some memories should be shared rarely, she’d always found; she and Lester had very different ones of Johnny.

  Lester was waiting, statue-still, small and stubborn. She suspected she could go and eat her soup, have an afternoon nap, listen to the Queen’s Speech and come back to find him still here, toasting the man who had taken away her faith in love.

  What was it she’d always said to gloss over her unhappy first marriage? ‘He’s the only husband I’ve ever had that I couldn’t hand back to his wife!’ Such a vaudeville line to wish away a tragedy.

  She lifted her glass to the ghost in the room. ‘To Johnny.’ She drained it.

  There was a long silence. Ronnie knew the fire was stealing through him too.

  ‘He’d have been sixty this year,’ he said quietly.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Never liked Christmas, did he? Said it was the dull day off between Christmas Eve and Boxing Day meets.’

  ‘He loved his hunting.’

  ‘He did that.’ The rheumy eyes were fixed on her face. ‘More than anything.’

  She met his gaze. ‘Not quite.’

  Lester’s empty glass broke the deadlock, thrust up like a magnifying lens. One grey eye bulged in its convex. ‘I never left him.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Now you’re up off again.’

  ‘I...’ She was feeling increasingly muddled, light-headed and angry. ‘I was never going to stay, Lester.’

  ‘Just like last time.’

  ‘That was different.’

  He had the bottle again, sherry spilling everywhere as he splashed more into the little crystal glasses.

  ‘Young Ronnie Percy!’ Lester barked, back in a schooling ring in the sixties now, relentless in his determination to make her ride better than the best. ‘Let’s drink to her, shall we? The girl who never gave up, no matter how many times she fell. The girl who looked after her friends. The girl who loved the stud, the horses, this house. She would never walk away from this place a second time. Drink to her!’

  Knowing that taking on his fight would just bait it, Ronnie closed her eyes and drank. ‘Now, I think you should go, Lester, before we toast the devil too. This is for you.’ She picked up a small parcel and thrust it at him, eager to get it over with. ‘Merry Christmas.’

  It was a new recording of the Water Music by the London Philharmonic. Lester loved Handel with a passion bordering on obsession; Jocelyn had once enjoyed a long-running joke of giving his stallion man a door handle every Christmas and watching Lester’s poker face for reaction.

  He muttered his thanks, and turned away, one tweed forearm brushing swiftly across his eyes. ‘Yours is outside, Mrs Le– Ronnie. You can look at it later.’ Stubbs the fox terrier gave Ronnie a withering look and followed his master out of the room.

  In desperate need of food to mop up the sherry – a stack of Fray Bentos pies would have been ideal – Ronnie ate her soup, followed by the last of the biscuits Pip had left in the larder, now horribly stale, chased down with coffee. Two industrially strong black Javas later and she was feeling, if not entirely sober, awake at least.

  Her phone was crammed with Christmas messages. When she’d deleted her contacts, she hadn’t anticipated that they would all insist on staying in touch so vociferously. So few of them were signed with more than a row of Xs that she had no idea who they were from.

  She had been determined to leave them all: her darling foxy admirers, the alternative dinner-party guests, her event riders and grooms, fellow owners. Over the sea and far away, drifting back into view occasionally if they forayed to the Continent: ‘Ronnie’s always such fun, isn’t she?’ She was good at fast friends. But they took longer to let go every time.

  Was it possible that she was already missing them too?

  She replied to everyone with an even longer row of kisses, irritated that Christmas was such a minefield of sentimentality. There was a message from Angus, signing himself off with her old nickname for him, ‘Angst’. A five-month love affair that had led to a decade of mutual dependence. She sent him a row of kisses too, grateful that their drunken, angry Christmases were long gone, grateful also that he had stayed in touch all these years when she had tried so hard to keep rolling.

  Nothing from Blair. The familiar stab of pain.

  Had she barred his number? She tried to remember. She knew it by heart.

  She had been so good. She mustn’t crumble now.

  She pressed the phone to her forehead.

  It was Christmas. She’d had a drink. She must pull herself together.

  Sitting at the kitchen table, she looked at her sleeping dogs by the Aga, heard the clock creaking on the wall, felt the first involuntary jerk of her head growing sleepily heavy.

  It was Christmas Day. It had been her choice to spend it alone.

  She stood up, striding into the boot room for her coat. She had to ride.

  *

  Having arrived late the previous night and gregariously polished off six bottles of Malbec while talking into the early hours, Kit’s house guests had slept through the whole of Christmas morning, which he rather liked.

  Ferdie and Donald were big men – one as wide as the other was tall – so cat-napper Kit had put them in the master bedroom downstairs and used one of the children’s
old rooms upstairs for his four hours of restless sleep. He’d walked at dawn, glancing up at lights glowing in bedrooms, imagining stockings being unwrapped; he’d visited Hermia’s grave and spoken to her at length about their children and his Sassoon play, apologising for being tedious, knowing she would understand.

  He’d intended to go to the morning church service – a piece of theatre he rarely sought out and enjoyed when he did – but there was a hand-written sign on the door saying that St. Mary’s church was closed due to unforeseen circumstances, so he’d returned home, vexed that the Comptons had lost both its pulpit and its public bar this year. If there was nowhere to sin and nowhere to repent, what was left?

  He’d looked forward to sharing this notion with his guests, but they were still in bed. As the clock crept on towards lunchtime, Kit’s relief at venturesome, ever-partying Ferdie and Donald not demanding authentic village revelry started to wane, but he was still enjoying the tranquillity enough not to demand company. He was simply grateful to have it close by. There’d been no sign of a breakfast raid or hung-over tea-making in his absence, let alone the five-bird roast. Instead, Ferdie’s snores resonated through the door, Radio 3 still playing as it had all night.

  Incredibly hungry, Kit investigated the freezer, indebted to Pip at Home from Home Comforts for stocking it with seasonal food. There was every imaginable variety of canapé in there, along with multifarious themes on cooked goose, which might come in handy. When he went to put the oven on for the Danish pastries he’d found, he discovered the five-bird roast inside, already sizzling happily. A Post-it note had unpeeled itself and fallen on the floor.

  Baste. Turn up at 1.00 and put potatoes in. Peel things, chop things, drink things. Do not disturb the head chefs. We may be attempting sex. If we are not with you in an hour, call it a vintage shag. If you don’t see us by the time it gets dark, call an ambulance.

  Laughing, he pinged the pastries into the microwave and enjoyed their stolid sweetness.

  Pressing himself to the round window to get a phone signal, he wished his children a merry Christmas while drinking a large Scotch, feeling strangely content. It was, he realised, the first year he didn’t feel angry with Hermia for dying. He’d never particularly enjoyed his own company – a running joke for an ambitious theatre director who wanted his own company very much – and yet he was the perfect sort of alone this Christmas, one shared with friends who had witnessed what he had gone through and understood that he needed to unfold very slowly from loneliness on a day like this.

  He took his drink outside into the garden, completely neglected and overgrown in recent years, the huge old greenhouse that Hermia had loved to potter in now full of brown, frost-scorched weeds, its wood split and windows mouldering.

  Setting his drink down, he started pulling up the weeds by the roots.

  *

  Out in the stable-yard, dogs at her heels, Ronnie passed a large pot containing what at first she took to be a Christmas tree, a single tag shaped like a bauble attached to one of its branches, which she doubled back to read: Time to put down roots. Merry Christmas. Lester.

  It wasn’t a fir at all, but a young Cedar of Lebanon. A new family tree. Ronnie bit her lip hard, chest tight with emotion. She needed to ride off all this sherry-soaked sentimentality.

  Crossing the yard, she felt light-headed again. She had to hang onto two saddle racks in the tack room and breathe deeply to recover.

  Photographs of young Ronnie Percy surrounded her, many of them taken after she’d picked herself up after a fall but refused to give up. What was it Lester had said again?

  She shook her head. The words were gone, just his anger and disappointment in her remaining.

  There was no sign of Lester.

  ‘You two have to stay here,’ she told her dogs, cupping Enid’s grey muzzle in her hands. ‘You’re too much of a stopper... and you’re too much of a goer.’ She kissed Olive.

  She tacked up Dickon, who was delighted at the prospect of an outing, his big blazed head almost legging her up into the saddle on its own.

  ‘You’re in charge,’ she told him, as they clattered out along the driveway and turned right into a village currently muted by collective turkey-carving. He took immediate exception to a small hatchback with a roof box, almost dropping her in an undignified heap at her own gates. ‘Okay, I’m in charge. Just let’s not move too fast.’

  The village was bathed in milky sunshine, its ironstone cottages the colour of the roast potatoes being pulled from the Agas inside them. However hard Ronnie tried to tell herself that she didn’t belong here any more, that it had reinvented itself in her absence, she felt a deep, loyal sense of kinship.

  Was it possible she had missed this place?

  She stood in her stirrups as Dickon took a long, contented pee on the wide verge by the post-box. She envied him the freedom, her bladder already uncomfortably full from drinking so much coffee. She waved at a family in paper hats who were watching her through the window of one of the thatched cottages on the Green, mouths open.

  Would they bring it up every year between crackers and seconds? she wondered – ‘Do you remember the Christmas that woman stopped outside the window while her horse relieved itself?’ It hardly mattered. She’d be long gone.

  Only a handful of those now living in Compton Magna were familiar to her, mostly old farming families and a few elderly retainers. There was a new breed in situ – career-couple families, often incomers from London, a clever and sociable bunch with self-confident children and badly behaved dogs. Moving into the area in their thirties, they juggled a work–life balance, their oldest friendships too far away to reach, new ones slotting into categories that seldom saw a whole picture – neighbours, school parents, fellow commuters, dog-walkers – while second cars and spare beds suddenly took on prodigious significance, drawing in distant friends and granting freedom to travel to them. Petra Gunn was one of the new breed.

  She’d had such fun talking to Petra in their short but sweet acquaintance. Was it possible that she would miss such an instinctive friend, with her soulful eyes and wise wit?

  Life went in circles, they said. Circle of life, circle of friends. Running in circles only to end up in the same place. That straight line right the way around the world that took you back home. Oh, bother. She was still drunk.

  ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,’ she said out loud. How many of her seven ages had she had? Hermia would know the whole speech.

  Ronnie had always made friends easily, but none had held a candle to Hermia. That she had extinguished the friendship so unequivocally made its end all the harsher.

  Since then all friendships had felt transient. Experience had taught her that it was easiest if you treated them like much-loved animal companions. While they were around they made the world feel better, but their lives would always be shorter than yours. Villages could be very lonely, paranoid places without friendship. Kith and kin were lifeblood in a quiet spot like Compton Magna. One had only to look at Lester.

  Poor Lester didn’t make friends easily, yet he’d once had the greatest of allies in Johnny, the friendship born in the hunting field where one had been huntsman and the other amateur whip over four seasons of the best runs the Fosse and Wolds had ever known. Lester had offered Johnny his undying loyalty and still lived by that promise.

  Ronnie legged Dickon into a trot to leave the thought behind. Whizzing through the village now, she peered over hedges and garden walls, feeling far better, enjoying the snap of frost in the air and the pricked ears in front of her as Dickon bowled along on auto-pilot.

  She’d been planning just to loop around the manor fields and the orchards – a route she and Hermia had regularly thundered along at full tilt, talking breathlessly all the while – but now that she was out, the cobwebs blowing off, Ronnie felt she could last all day. Far better out here than cooped up watching family viewing with no family.

  ‘How fit are you feeling,
Dick?’

  He loped along, brown ears pricked like beetle claws, a horse for whom stamina came as naturally as speed to a greyhound.

  ‘We’ll take it steady,’ she promised. ‘Lots of middle-aged breathers.’

  She was going to try out Bay Austen’s three-mile point.

  *

  When Kit went back into the house, there was still no sign of Ferdie and Donald. Radio 3 had been turned up a few notches; Bach’s Oratorio was playing.

  Hermia, who had adored the couple, would have been delighted by the deliberate love-in. ‘Leave them there and see how long they can last without food,’ whispered her playful voice in his ear.

  Wanting to be alone with her longer, Kit took the bird out to rest and turned the potatoes, knowing the cooking smells would flush Ferdie out eventually.

  He listened to Van Morrison while he prepped veg, the familiar songs they’d fallen in love to. It hurt less than he’d feared. The second large whisky steeled his nerve enough to put on a much-scuffed, sacred family CD while he peeled carrots. His children played it at Christmas every year. Usually he couldn’t stay in the room.

  Hermia Austen’s radio recording of The Happy Prince accompanied Kit’s vegetable prep. And although he laid down his peeler to cry more than once and shout several times – the director who had overlaid his wife’s beautiful voice with strings had been an idiot – it made him proud and humble to listen to her voice again. She wasn’t talking to him, she was performing, which brought her to life in perfect abstraction, a Princess Leia hologram projected a safe distance away. The story was exquisitely sad, its pompous over-sentimentality largely lost on him because Hermia was in the room.

  ‘My goodness, she was good!’ Ferdie appeared in flamboyantly striped pyjamas, his eyes baggier than hammocks. ‘Didn’t you direct this?’

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘It was recorded live at Chichester Festival.’