Polo

by Jilly Cooper

  ‘Nothing wrong with your elbow if you can hit like that,’ she spat. ‘She’s poisoned you against me, I knew she would.’

  ‘I said go to bed,’ said Ricky harshly. ‘Go on, bugger off.’

  With a stifled sob Perdita stumbled upstairs, slamming the door so hard that every ornament in the house shook.

  There was a pause, then both Ricky and Daisy jumped at the sound of clapping. Slowly Violet walked into the room.

  ‘I always heard how marvellous you were,’ she said to Ricky, ‘but I’d no idea how marvellous. I’ve been waiting for years for someone to do that.’

  ‘Good,’ said Ricky, unmoved.

  Then, slowly, he looked round the kitchen and the sitting room at the flowers painted all over the pale green walls, like a meadow in summer, at the dark green ivy crawling up the stairs and the bears and tigers and dragons decorating every piece of furniture.

  ‘Christ,’ he said in amazement.

  ‘I can always paint over it,’ said Daisy hastily.

  ‘It’s stunning. You said you hadn’t been painting. Stop shaking. It’ll be all right.’

  ‘Should I go to her?’

  ‘Leave her to stew,’ said Violet and Ricky in unison.

  ‘Oh, and by the way, Mum,’ went on Violet, ‘Philippa rang and said could you man the bric-à-brac stall on Saturday.’

  ‘No, she can’t,’ snapped Ricky.

  ‘I said you couldn’t,’ said Violet gleefully. ‘I told her you’d gone out to dinner with Ricky. She sounded put out.’

  ‘Oh goodness,’ said Daisy.

  ‘I’ve been hearing how marvellous you are,’ said Ricky drily to Violet, ‘but I’d no idea how marvellous. Might put the bloody nympho off.’

  After he’d had another cup of coffee, he went up to see Perdita. She was crying great wracking despairing sobs into her pillow. Ricky sat down on her bed.

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘It’s me, Ricky.’

  ‘Fuck off even more. I hate you.’

  ‘You better stop sulking and apologize to your mother or I won’t take you to Argentina.’

  ‘I’ll never apologize to her,’ said Perdita tonelessly. ‘What did you say? How? When?’

  ‘Week after next, to stay with Alejandro. He’ll teach you a few manners and how to play polo properly.’

  ‘Oh, thank you!’ Perdita flung her arms round his neck.

  He could feel her hot soaked cheeks, her wet hair, her lips against his cheek, the bars of her ribs, the softness of her breasts, the contrasting bullet hardness of her nipples.

  ‘And then can I come back to Robinsgrove?’

  ‘If you behave yourself.’

  Still she clung. He could feel her heart pounding. She was so like Chessie. He’d never wanted to screw anyone more in his life, but gently he disengaged himself.

  ‘Go and apologize to your mother.’

  Next day the weather turned cold, bitter winds systematically stripping the trees. Walking through Ricky’s woods, Daisy noticed ruby-red sticky buds thrusting out on the chestnuts, although many of the trees still clung on to their shrivelled brown leaves. Like Ricky and me clinging on to the past, thought Daisy.

  Ten days later Ricky and Perdita left for Argentina.

  ‘I want to ask two f-f-favours,’ said Ricky as he put Perdita’s suitcases in a boot crammed with polo sticks. ‘Could you possibly put flowers on Will’s grave sometimes for me? And if Little Chef goes into a real decline will you promise to ring me?’

  Perdita hardly bothered to kiss her mother goodbye. She hadn’t forgiven her her night out with Ricky. The wireless blared ‘I just called to say I love you’ as Daisy went back into the house. She couldn’t help envying Perdita.

  It was a terribly long journey, even though they broke it in Florida. Ricky hardly took his nose out of a Frederick Forsyth novel. Perdita, bra-less, in a T-shirt and a skirt that buttoned up the front for easy access, writhed and burned beside him. She cleaned her teeth every three hours and had Juicyfruit continually at the ready in case he wanted to kiss her. She deliberately got a bit drunk at dinner and when the lights were switched out let her head fall on to his shoulder.

  ‘I’m cold,’ she murmured.

  ‘I’ll get you another blanket.’

  As he would for any of his ponies, thought Perdita bitterly.

  ‘I’m still cold,’ she whispered half an hour later.

  Ricky put an arm round her shoulders, but made no pass and eventually she fell asleep. Ricky gazed out of the window at stars as sleepless as himself. If he slept he might have nightmares about Will and Chessie. He couldn’t bear to wake up screaming on the plane as he so often did alone at night at Robinsgrove.

  23

  Ricky got very uptight at Miami Airport when his polo sticks were nearly put on a plane to Hawaii by mistake.

  ‘Expect the poor things needed a holiday. You work them hard enough,’ said Perdita. But even Ricky telling her not to be bloody silly couldn’t douse her sudden euphoria at the sight of the BA stickers being stamped on their luggage. She was going to Argentina, home of the greatest polo players and ponies in the world.

  The Buenos Aires flight was delayed and the plane horribly hot, but this didn’t upset the passengers who seemed delighted to be going home. The men, very handsome and as many of them blond as dark, gathered at the back of the plane, embracing each other and eyeing Perdita with approval and chattering like a great drinks party. After a shamingly large second supper of chicken, sweetcorn and cake, a vast vodka and tonic and half a bottle of red wine, at one o’clock in the morning the chatter suddenly turned into the Frogsmore Stream running under Snow Cottage and she fell asleep until six to find the chatter going on as loud as ever.

  Women passengers who’d nodded off in full make-up emerged with faces crumpled and ankles swollen. For breakfast they were offered cake again, this time with salt and pepper.

  ‘Bearing in mind the vast divide between rich and poor in Argentina, they presumably let them eat cake all the time,’ said Perdita.

  Ricky didn’t smile. He’d had another sleepless night and ahead lay customs, who couldn’t be expected to be exactly pro-British, and because of post and telephone strikes in Argentina, he hadn’t been able to confirm the flight with Alejandro, so they’d have to go through the hassle of hiring a car to drive the 330 kilometres out to his estancia.

  Perdita, however, was excitedly looking down on vast faded pink rivers curling through spinach-green forest, and the blue shadow of their plane lying across Buenos Aires. Now she could see red houses, swimming-pools, race tracks, skyscrapers sticking up like teeth, and roads and railways so uniformly crisscross they seemed like tiles on a vast kitchen floor.

  Rupert had also pulled some powerful strings. After a lightning whip through immigration, an official located all their luggage and polo sticks and whizzed them through customs. As they came through the exit doors, Ricky looked wearily round for an Avis sign. Perdita, in a faded purple T-shirt and sawn-off pale pink jeans, was pleasantly aware of all the men staring unashamedly at her. Then a young man in a blue shirt rushed up to his arriving girlfriend with a huge bunch of hyacinths and daffodils. Abandoning the English winter, Perdita realized she and Ricky had gone slap into the Argentine spring.

  Next minute a tall, blond boy with a bull-dog jaw and massive shoulders walked up to them, looking slightly apprehensive.

  ‘Hi, Ricky,’ he said in a deep Florida drawl. ‘Don’t know if you remember me, Luke Alderton. If you want to hit me across the airport, I’ll understand, OK, but I’m staying with Alejandro. Thought you might like a ride out to the estancia.’

  For a second, Ricky glared at him, then he smiled. ‘I never had any fight with you, Luke. It’s incredibly kind of you to meet us on the offchance. This is Perdita.’

  Perdita found her hand being engulfed in an incredibly strong grip, and Luke looked down at her, grinning lazily and appreciatively.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ asked Rick
y.

  ‘Being used as cheap labour to break Alejandro’s ponies,’ said Luke, taking Perdita’s suitcases from her, ‘in return for picking up a few tips from the master.’ (He pronounced it masster.)

  ‘Thank Christ for that,’ said Ricky. ‘You can look after Perdita.’

  ‘Shouldn’t be too much of a hardship,’ said Luke, then eyeing Perdita’s slender arms, ‘but she better start pumping iron if she’s going to play high goal.’

  As he sorted out the porter with amazingly fluent Spanish, Perdita noticed he was wearing a bomber jacket with US Open printed on the back.

  ‘Who’s he?’ she whispered to Ricky.

  ‘Bart’s son by a previous marriage,’ said Ricky. ‘Potentially the best back in the world.’

  Within seconds they’d piled into a battered Mercedes and were fighting their way out on to the airport road. Luke pointed to a red spotted scarf gathering dust up on the dashboard.

  ‘You may want to put that over your eyes, the driving’s kinda crazy here,’ he said as ten cars hurtled forward with absolutely no lane discipline, and all went straight through a red light with furious honking. Next moment a huge bus with Jumbo El Rapido on the side tore past overtaking and cutting in front.

  ‘Christ,’ muttered Perdita.

  ‘Good training for the polo here,’ said Luke. ‘The Carlisle twins and my brother Red were down here last week with Victor Kaputnik. They came out of a restaurant and had a race with Juan O’Brien and two of his cousins. Victor nearly had a triple by-pass. He jumped out of Red’s car yelling, “Taxi, taxi”. He was so frightened he wouldn’t let the driver go across a green light in case he hit Red and the twins coming the other way.’ Luke shook with laughter.

  ‘Who’s staying with Alejandro?’ asked Ricky.

  ‘Well, one guy couldn’t stand the pace and Ray Walter broke his wrist and went home, and there’s an Argie, Angel Solis de Gonzales, ex-Mirage pilot, trying to make it as a pro. Not wildly pro-Brit understandably.’

  ‘Any good?’ asked Ricky.

  ‘Awesome. He’s only been playing seriously for a couple of years,’ said Luke, hardly flinching as a car cut right in front of him, missing them by millimetres. Leaning out of the window, he let loose a stream of abuse.

  ‘How come you speak such good Spanish?’ asked Perdita.

  ‘Last time I was here it rained for forty days. The only answer was to learn Spanish. They say my accent is ’orrible, but at least I can understand what they’re saying on the pitch and suss out their Machiavellian little games.’

  They were into flat, open country now. Perdita looked at the huge puddles reflecting a vast expanse of sky.

  ‘I’m really, really here.’

  Luke smiled. ‘You will fall madly in love with Argentina,’ he said in his deep husky voice, which had a slight break in it, ‘with the wild life, the birds, the open spaces. But you will find it unconquerable, the extremes, the ferocity, the apparent heartlessness, the hailstorms that can wipe out a crop in half an hour. People own masses of land, not developing it or working it. It’s just there.’

  ‘How very un-American,’ said Perdita.

  Looking sideways at Luke, she decided that he wasn’t at all good-looking but definitely attractive. A tawny giant with shoulders and arms like a blacksmith’s, he had lean hips, more freckles than a gull’s egg, a snub nose, sleepy honey-coloured eyes, Bart’s pugnacious jaw and red-gold hair sticking up like a Dandy brush. He was also attractive because he was so reassuring.

  On top of the dashboard was a poem called Martin Fierro and a Spanish dictionary lying with its spine up, to which he must have been referring as he waited.

  ‘It’s the great Gaucho poem,’ he told her. ‘Martin Fierro’s aim in life was to sleep on a bed of clover, look up at the stars, and live as free as a bird in the sky. He put his horse and his dog a long way before his wife.’

  ‘You don’t look as though you read poetry,’ said Perdita in amazement, ‘and Martin’s a very naff name for a Gaucho.’

  Ricky, sharing the back with two polo helmets, a new saddle and numerous carrier bags of shopping, was beginning to relax.

  ‘How’s Alejandro?’

  ‘Probably had ten more kids since you were last here. Argentines adore their kids,’ Luke told Perdita. ‘Their big interest is the family. They won’t pay taxes, and they never stop at red lights.’ He put out a huge hand to shield Perdita as a car shot out.

  ‘Who are you playing for next year?’ asked Ricky.

  ‘Hal Peters – the automobile king – nice guy,’ said Luke. ‘Thought about nothing but cars for the first twenty-five years of his life, now he thinks about nothing but polo. He’s given me a free hand to buy horses. But every time I show any interest Alejandro quadruples the price. I guess I’m lucky to be working. Young American players are really feeling the cold at the moment. They can’t get sponsorship, because all the patrons think it’s chic to have an Argie on their side.’

  ‘Your father has three,’ said Ricky bleakly. ‘What’s Red’s handicap now?’

  ‘Six, should be higher. He hates to stick and ball. His mother allowed him to sit out college for a year and he never went back. He won MVP awards – Most Valuable Player,’ he explained to Perdita, ‘all summer, then blows it by testing positive for drugs the day before the US Open. Gets suspended and fined $5,000.’

  ‘Is he coming down here?’

  ‘Well, he’s always expected, like the Messiah,’ Luke grinned at Perdita. ‘My kid brother’s kind of wild. Like Richard Cory he glitters and flutters pulses as he walks. Look, heron on the edge of that alfalfa field.’

  With the amazing eyesight that had helped him become a great player, Luke pointed out egrets, storks and even a snake that whisked into its hole before Perdita could see it.

  Passing through a town, Perdita noticed someone had painted a blue-and-white flag and a ‘Malvinas belong to Argentina’ slogan on the plinth of a statue of a general.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, keep your trap shut about the Falklands when we get there,’ said Ricky.

  ‘Alejandro’s not anti-Brit,’ said Luke. ‘He likes anyone he can sell horses to. He still talks mistily about Cowdray, and Guards and the parties, and the hospitality, and the women you didn’t have to date twenty-two times before laying them.’

  They were deep in the country now, driving through absolutely flat land like a table top. Slowly Perdita was trying to absorb the immensity of the pampas. The vast unclouded duck-egg-blue semi-circle of sky, like a protractor on the horizon, was only broken by the occasional windmill or fringe of acid-yellow poplars or milk-green gum trees. The grass seemed to flow on for ever like a millpond sea. Occasionally, like a liner, they passed an estancia with stables and a drive flanked by poplars and sailed on. At last Luke swung on to a dirt road potted with huge holes. His left elbow, sticking out of the window, was soon spattered with mud as they shattered vast puddles reflecting the blue of the sky.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said as Perdita nearly hit the ceiling. ‘You should have taken a sleeping pill.’

  On the right was a sunlit village with square white houses like a Western shanty town.

  ‘This place is called General Piran after some top brass who defended his country against the marauding British. It’s the nearest civilization to Alejandro’s place,’ explained Luke. ‘That’s the phone exchange which never works. That’s the fire station. They’ve got two fire stations, but all the houses are so far away they never get there in time. The teachers are all on strike, hardly surprising when they’re only paid a hundred dollars a month, so all Alejandro’s kids are at home getting under their mother’s feet.’

  He is nice, thought Perdita. How did anyone as vile as Bart produce a son like that?

  ‘Alejandro’s land begins here at the water.’ He pronounced it ‘wott-urr’. ‘He owns everything in front of us as far as the eye can see.’

  They had swung into an avenue lined with gums, their stark, white trunks rising like pill
ars. At the end on the left was a stick-and-ball field, a polo field covered with gulls, paddocks full of polished horses, then a group of red modern buildings. ‘Barns to the right, grooms’ quarters to the left, Alejandro’s straight ahead,’ said Luke as he drove up to a large ugly mulberry-red house with flowerbeds full of clashing red tulips, primulas and wallflowers, and a water tower completely submerged in variegated ivy.

  Instantly out of the front door charged a man a foot smaller than Luke, but with a barrel-chest as big. He had a huge Beethoven head of black curls, a brown face scorched with wrinkles by an unrelenting sun, small dark eyes and a smile like a slice of water melon, which showed a lot of gold fillings. He wore old jeans, espadrilles and a torn blue T-shirt through which spilled a lot of black chest-hair. Throwing open his arms, he gave a great roar of laughter.

  ‘El Orgulloso,’ he shouted, ‘El Orgulloso. Mountain Everest, he come to Mahomet at last,’ and he folded Ricky in a vast hot embrace. ‘Welcome, we are so please to see you.’

  Then, peering round the side of Ricky’s arm, he caught sight of Perdita and his little black eyes brightened even more.

  ‘And this is Perdita. She is certainly very OK.’ Seizing her hand, he looked her up and down. ‘Why you waste your life on polo? Find a nice billionaire instead.’

  ‘I want both,’ said Perdita.

  Alejandro gave another bellow of laughter.

  ‘Good girl, good girl. I speak very well English, don’t you theenk? Come and see my ponies.’ About to lead them back towards the stables, he lowered his voice and said to Luke, ‘Did you get it?’

  Luke nodded and, getting a red jewel box out of his jeans’ pocket, handed it to Alejandro just before a beautiful woman came out of the house. She had heavy lids above huge, dark, mournful eyes, a wonderful sculptured, aquiline nose, a big, sad, red mouth and long, shiny, blond hair with dark roots showing down the middle parting. She also had a wonderful bosom, a thickening waist and very slim brown legs in leather sandals.

  ‘Reeky,’ she hugged him. ‘It has been so long, and this must be Perdita.’ A shadow of apprehension crossed her face, immediately replaced by a warm and welcoming smile. ‘What a beauty,’ she said, kissing Perdita on both cheeks. ‘I am Claudia, Alejandro’s wife. Let me show you your room. You must be tired.’