by Jilly Cooper
‘Really?’ Chessie drew slightly faster on her cigarette.
‘He’s being such a wow with all the movie stars he’s coaching,’ went on Bibi, slowly pouring too much cream over her fruit salad. ‘Being Ricky, he hasn’t a clue who any of them are and keeps yelling “Come here, you” to Stacy Keach and Pamela Sue Martin and Stefanie Powers. They just adore him.’
Luke put a hand over Perdita’s.
‘Don’t rise,’ he murmured. ‘She’s only winding Chessie up.’
‘Of course the women are spectacular in LA,’ went on Bibi. ‘Everyone’s beautiful there.’
‘You must be the exception,’ said Chessie sweetly, but she was balling her napkin.
‘How’s Ricky’s elbow?’ asked Luke.
‘Holding up pretty good,’ said Bibi. ‘In fact he seems to be spending a lot of time on both elbows, screwing his brains out. There are women coming out of his ears.’
‘Oh, c’mon,’ said Luke sharply.
Chessie didn’t react. Perdita had less restraint.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she stormed. ‘Ricky’s not like that.’
‘How d’you know?’ said Chessie sharply.
‘I’m his protégée,’ said Perdita simply. ‘I’ve been working in his yard for the last two and a half years. He fixed up for me to stay with Alejandro, and I’m going back to England to play with him in Dancer Maitland’s team next year. We’ve already met,’ she added to Chessie. ‘You gave me a lift home from David Waterlane’s party the night you got off with Bart.’
There was a stunned pause. Both Bibi and Chessie were looking at her as though she were a maggot who’d strayed into their raddichio.
‘You’ll never guess,’ drawled Chessie as Bart came off the telephone. ‘Your son’s brought a little Trojan polo pony into the house. Perdita works for Ricky and she’s going to be playing for him when we’re in England next year. You could be marking each other.’
‘She’ll give you a hard time,’ said Luke evenly. ‘She’s pretty good. Come on, baby.’ Taking Perdita’s hand, he pulled her to his feet. ‘I’ve got work to do. Thanks for a great lunch.’ Briefly he kissed Chessie’s rigid cheek. ‘See you tomorrow, Dad.’
31
Bart Alderton was an indelibly competitive man, but not altogether a bad one. To spite Grace and Ricky, who had both patronized him, he had stolen Ricky’s wife. Will’s death, however, had shaken him to his working-class roots. Afterwards he had been magic to Chessie, displaying uncharacteristic gentleness and patience, not only wheeling in an army of bereavement counsellors, but also listening endlessly and comforting her himself. He had also been jolted by how much his defection had destroyed Grace and the animosity this had aroused in Bibi and particularly Red.
Until Bart met Chessie, driven on by Grace, he had been a total workaholic, who only played polo so hard because he liked the snob element and was addicted to winning. But in Chessie he had acquired the perfect accessory to flaunt on the sidelines. Having fallen in love with her as well, he was so frantic to stop her ever going back to Ricky that becoming a better polo player and annihilating Ricky on the field had become his ultimate fix.
He was faced, therefore, with the conflict of winning on all fronts. It was hard satisfying Chessie in bed if his elbow had been hit by a ball the day before, his right shin was black and blue from a pulverizing ride-off and he had to fly off to New York first thing in the morning. How, too, could he concentrate on a board meeting, if he felt as though he’d been hit by a truck, or when half his mind was on whether he could dump the sales seminar in Detroit and the speech to the LA Chamber of Commerce in order to make tomorrow’s final?
That afternoon when Luke and Perdita came to lunch in Palm Beach he was desperate to stick and ball, but he was supposed to fly to Washington immediately to meet the Saudi Minister of Defence to clinch an order for 100 helicopters. Picking up his briefcase, he went out to the pool to find Chessie doing backstroke with absolutely no clothes on at all, surreptitiously being watched through the wrought-iron gates by two security guards, whose crotches were bulging as much as their side pockets.
‘Chessie!’ he snarled.
Christ, she was beautiful, with her breasts so small and firm they hardly splayed to the sides at all and her curling waist, and the red jewels of her painted toenails. Smiling sleepily and lasciviously up at him, she deliberately opened her legs, so he could see the pink, shining coral of her labia.
‘Come out of that pool,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Fuck off, you two sons of bitches!’ he roared at the security men.
‘Dad, are you coming?’ Clutching a burgundy briefcase, Bibi appeared impatiently at the drawing-room window.
‘Jolly nearly,’ mocked Chessie, not closing her legs.
‘Christ, you slut,’ said Bibi in disgust.
‘You handle the Defence Minister,’ said Bart, not looking round. ‘Iranians like women.’
‘They don’t listen to them,’ raged Bibi. ‘You oughta be there, Dad.’
‘Give me twenty minutes,’ said Bart.
‘Five’s quite enough for your father,’ said Chessie.
‘You bitch,’ said Bart a minute later, as he slammed the bedroom door. ‘Why d’you keep winding Bibi up, for Chrissake?’
‘Why does your bloody son wind me up?’ screamed Chessie. ‘Why d’you have to play with him tomorrow?’
‘We’ve been through all that,’ said Bart roughly. Then drawing her to him, ‘You’ll have to pay for it, you know.’
He felt her breath quicken.
‘Punish me then,’ whispered Chessie.
He left her after half an hour, sated, sore but satisfied. She hated him, but he had totally cracked her sexually. She wouldn’t be swimming in the nude for a few days.
Perdita was in a far worse mood than Chessie.
‘I do not believe it,’ she stormed, too angry to cry as they drove back to Luke’s barn in Wellington. ‘Ricky is not promiscuous.’
‘Sure he isn’t,’ said Luke. ‘Bibi was just paying Chessie back for asking about her love life. Bibi’s boyfriend Skipper’s what we call a Trust Fund Baby. He lives off his father and does damn all, and now he’s playing her up. He’s an asshole. But it always hurts.’
‘I can’t see Ricky fancying her,’ said Perdita. ‘She’s not remotely glamorous.’
‘Can be,’ said Luke as they drove past scummy canals full of condoms and Coke tins. ‘When she’s dressed up for the evening with her hair loose and her jewels on and her contact lenses in, she looks fantastic. She’s tired too. Grace knew all the polo schedules well in advance so everything ran smoothly. Chessie’s not interested, so Bibi has to do all that as well as running the LA office. She’s got a terrific body.’
‘Pity about the face. And that Chessie’s a bitch,’ said Perdita, gazing moodily out at an airport, where hundreds of private planes – mostly Alderton Lightnings – flocked like seagulls. ‘And she’s so bloody beautiful. Mind you, it’s easy if you’re that rich. Christ, I’d like to spend a million pounds on clothes and a hundred years in a beauty parlour. If only I wasn’t so broke! How can I compete with that sort of thing?’
Luke touched her cheek with his hand.
‘You’re beautiful. No one holds a candle to you.’
He ought to go home and tune up the horses for tomorrow. He also had a mass of paperwork to go through, having been away so long, but to cheer Perdita up he took her to Palm Beach Polo Club, which was only a mile from his barn.
Entering the gates, they passed incredibly manicured land, flawless lawns, tennis courts and swimming-pools. On the left were khaki lakes and polo pitches, flanked by mushroom-coloured houses with wonderful gardens overflowing with hibiscus, oleander and bougainvillaea. Fountains and sprinklers sparkled in the brilliant sunlight. Only the palm trees, lurching lanky and gawky with their scruffy mopheads, seemed out of place.
‘Six years ago there was nothing here,’ said Luke. ‘Cattle grazed and most of it was swamp. That house belo
ngs to an oil heiress. She’s twenty-three. That house cost fifteen million. The husband bought it for his wife because she likes to watch polo. They spend two weeks a year here, and that’s Polo Island, and there’s the house Auriel’s rented.’
‘They look like upmarket mud huts,’ said Perdita sourly. ‘Fancy paying fifteen million for one of those.’
‘There’s the Players Club. I’ll take you there tomorrow after the match, and there’s Field One. Doesn’t that give you a frisson?’
Driving on, Luke pointed out the most amazing barns, each one painted in a different colour, pale pink, sky-blue, black and white, all open-plan and with the sort of gardens you could open to the public.
‘You’d expect the ponies to spend all day painting their toenails and reading Vanity Fair,’ said Luke. ‘Instead they come out on to the pitches and get bashed and yanked to pieces in the roughest polo in the world. It all looks so perfect, but up in those palm trees live rattlesnakes, and in those smooth brown pools lurk alligators. They symbolize the play. A handful of the richest men in the world converge on Palm Beach every January, merely for the buzz of taking each other out. My father rolls up like Genghis Khan with seventy horses. He’s run out of challenges in the boardroom. Screwing a billion out of the government, raking up another billion in the portfolio, stripping assets, stripping girls, is nothing to being within an inch of death while you kick the shit out of Victor Kaputnik, or Lando Medici, or even Hal Peters, on the field. Over in the UK you don’t get the thrust of the patron. They don’t play to win here, but to annihilate.’
‘Wow,’ said Perdita, startled out of her sulks. ‘You do sound disapproving – talk about the Sermon on the Mounted.’
Luke grinned. ‘Sorry, I was getting heavy. It’s taken the fun out of polo, but I guess I’ll exploit it until I make enough dough not to have to sell on ponies I like. Come and see the best-run barn in Palm Beach.’
As he swung the truck to the right Leroy jumped across Perdita’s legs, scrabbling at her leather trousers – not that it mattered, beastly hot things – and started barking provocatively out of the window at a couple of Rottweilers who nearly broke their chains barking back.
Bart’s barn, El Paradiso, was built in the middle of an orange grove. A colonnade of white pillars, smothered in white roses and jasmine led up to where loose boxes, painted duck-egg blue, the Alderton Flyers’ colours, contained the sleekest, fittest thoroughbred ponies Perdita had ever seen. An amazing tack room housed a computer giving print-outs of every chukka every pony had ever played. On the end was built an apartment with a bar, a kitchen, a shower room, a massive jacuzzi to soothe aching polo bones, and a living room with a vast portrait of Bart on a pony, as well as a Stubbs, a Herring, and two Munnings on the walls. How extraordinary, thought Perdita, to have two such lavish establishments within half an hour of each other and no wonder they needed all those security guards and Rottweilers on the gates.
Outside, white geraniums and impatiens grew in blue tubs and hanging baskets, and a fountain fell as regularly as a transparent comb into a pond edged with white irises. Everywhere the orange blossom wafted suffocatingly sweet.
Luke whistled at Leroy who, at a safe distance, was still winding up the Rottweilers.
‘Come and meet Red,’ he said.
Overwhelmed by such blatant perfection, Perdita snapped back sulkily that she absolutely loathed men with red hair.
‘Oh well, perhaps I don’t,’ she admitted in a small voice a second later. For there, cantering round a jade-green paddock with a cordless telephone in one hand and a polo stick in the other, his reddy-brown boots the same colour as his sleek sorrel pony and his gleaming chestnut hair, was Red Alderton. But there was no red in his deep, smooth mahogany suntan, which was enhanced by onyx-brown eyes with thick very dark lashes, a short straight nose and a wonderfully passionate, smiling mouth.
For three and a half years Perdita hadn’t been remotely sexually attracted to anyone but Ricky, but Red jolted her. Not only was he the best-looking man she had ever seen, but from the way he had knotted the reins on his pony’s neck, and was guiding her round the paddock with his thighs and his lean, supple, whipcord body, he was also the most effortlessly gifted polo player.
‘Hi, you guys,’ he said, waving his stick at them, and still giving himself time to execute another perfect shot, ‘be with you in a second. Lucy, baby, I gotta go. He’ll be home tomorrow, won’t he, so I’d better not call. Who did you say Chuck had run off with?’
A typical Gemini, Red lived on the telephone, adored gossip and had an increasingly low threshold of boredom. People were invariably pleased to see him because he made them laugh and had so much charm. Despite his languid insouciance, however, he had Bart’s killer instinct and, although he adored Luke, had to beat him at everything. Normally he never bothered to stick and ball. He was only doing so today because Luke, by sheer grind, had gone above him in the November handicap ratings.
He was now winding up his conversation.
‘Look, meet me at Cobblestones at six tomorrow. Love you too, baby.’
‘Cobblestones is the bar where all the players and grooms hang out,’ explained Luke.
And that’s not Auriel Kingham he’s talking to, thought Perdita.
As Red switched off the telephone, Luke introduced Perdita. ‘She’s from England. She’s going to play with Ricky and Dancer Maitland next year.’
‘I met Dancer at a Band-Aid concert in New York last week,’ said Red. ‘Christ, I wish I didn’t know it was Christmas. Nice guy, though, kinda fun to play with. I figured my stepmother had put me off English women for good, but,’ he smiled at Perdita, who blushed to the roots of her hair, ‘I guess you could convert me. How are you enjoying this hot, swampy, mosquito-infested paradise?’
Realizing Perdita was too jolted to speak, Luke said: ‘We only arrived yesterday.’
‘Bring any good ponies?’
‘One genius,’ said Luke, ‘and I’m not selling her on. Where did you get that one?’
‘Miguel bought her,’ said Red. ‘Got the speed, but still a bit green. Thank Christ you’ve come back to help us clinch the match tomorrow. Before the semi-finals Auriel and I had our own private party and I went on to the pitch absolutely looped. All I could see was two balls, two mallets, eight goal posts, four pony’s ears in front of me, sixteen players, four screaming umpires and after the match my father twice over chasing me round two polo fields, out to bury me. Jesus!’
Throughout this languid patter, dispatched with the broadest of grins, Red’s eyes roved over Perdita in a way that made her feel edgy and hopelessly excited at the same time.
The telephone rang, making the sorrel mare jump.
‘Hi, Lorna, sweetheart, how ya been? Sorry I didn’t call, I’ve been up to here.’ Then, suddenly flaring up, ‘Oh, for Chrissake, get off my case.’ Red switched off the telephone so she couldn’t ring back.
Then, as Leroy bounced up and nipped the sorrel on her pink nose, making her jump more than ever, he added, ‘And keep that brute away from me. He was so pissed off waiting for you to come home, he bit me last week. He’ll bite a patron one of these days.’
‘How’s Auriel?’ said Luke, calling an unrepentant Leroy to heel.
‘Pretty good,’ said Red blandly. ‘I’m teaching her to play polo. She’s teaching me other things. She’s in LA making a movie about the corrupting effect of money. As she’s making five million bucks out of it, I guess she’s being corrupted all the way to the bank.’
‘D’you want to play in a charity match next Sunday?’ asked Luke.
Red looked wary. ‘Not a lot.’
‘It’s for Ethiopia. Bob Geldof’s flying down.’
‘Auriel better throw-in,’ said Red. ‘She adores publicity. Who else is playing?’
‘Victor, Shark Nelligan, Bobby Ferraro and Alejandro, against Hal, me, Jesus and, hopefully, you.’
‘How much?’
‘We’re playing for free.’
&n
bsp; ‘Bullshit. Shark and Alejandro won’t even tack up for free. Nor am I going to be bashed around by all those thugs for nothing.’
‘Three thousand,’ said Luke.
‘I’ll think about it,’ said Red. ‘What colour’s Hal Peters on?’
‘Purple.’
‘Doesn’t suit me,’ grumbled Red. ‘Drains all my colour. Make it four. I’ve got to buy Auriel a Christmas present. I’ve had three offers for the World Cup and two for the Open, by the way.’
At that moment a car drew up in front of the barn and a man in a crumpled dark blue suit got out.
‘Mr Alderton? I’m from the Daily News.’
‘How the hell did you get in here?’ snapped Red. ‘Those Rottweilers oughta be fired.’
‘We had an appointment.’
‘Well, we don’t any more, right?’
‘Could you just tell me about your relationship with Miss Kingham?’
‘I could,’ said Red amiably, watching the reporter brighten at the possibility of a scoop, ‘but I’m not going to.’
He glanced at his watch.
‘I must fly – literally. I’ve gotta party in LA this evening. Christ, I better call the airport.’
The minute he switched on the telephone it rang. Red listened for five seconds, and then said, ‘Aw, fuck off, Lorna.’
As he held the telephone at arm’s length, Perdita could hear the stream of abuse. Cantering back to the stable, he calmly lobbed the telephone into the pond.
‘My brother’s allergic to commitment,’ sighed Luke. ‘He suffers from the seven-minute itch.’
‘That’s why he took up polo,’ said Perdita. ‘At least his attention span lasts a chukka. He’s not a bit like you,’ she went on as they drove back to Luke’s barn, ‘not a millionth as nice.’
‘He’s OK,’ said Luke. ‘He just can’t handle people getting heavy.’
‘But screwing $4,000 out of you.’
‘He’s always broke,’ countered Luke, ‘because he’s so generous, not just with himself, but to everyone else. He could make a fortune playing polo. Patrons adore having him on their teams because he’s so glamorous, but they’re cautious. Players these days tend not to party till three o’clock in the morning before a final. There’s too much at stake. Red’s a party animal. He’s likely to turn up looped or not at all.’
