Polo

by Jilly Cooper

  ‘You could have denied what he wrote, instead of slagging Daisy off to the other papers. You never bothered to apologize afterwards. Daisy is one of the sweetest, kindest most gentle . . .’

  ‘Are you after her then?’

  ‘No, I am bloody not. I just know how different my life would have been if I’d had a mother like her.’ For a moment he bleakly remembered childhood at Robinsgrove, alone in a huge, cold house with Herbert, an inconsolable widower, either silent or shouting.

  ‘Have you ever thought what effect it had on Violet and Eddie? All their school chums nudging and giggling. No wonder Eddie ploughed Common Entrance.’

  ‘He’d have ploughed it anyway, he’s so thick,’ stammered Perdita, fight seeping out of her like air out of a punctured tyre.

  ‘Rubbish, and look how you fucked up Rupert and Taggie. It’s not surprising Rupert loathes you. Trying to frame him in bed after he’d only been married for a year to the one true thing in his life. If you hadn’t screwed up Venturer he’d have been in England and never have let Taggie slip on the ice and miscarry, and if you hadn’t dumped about the orgy the adoption societies would never have pulled the plug on them.’

  Perdita gasped. ‘I never knew about that. Taggie’s been lovely to me.’

  ‘That’s because she’s got a sweet, forgiving nature, unlike you, you vengeful bitch. Go away,’ he snapped, seeing Daisy’s worried, bright pink face appearing at the window.

  ‘Don’t kick her when she’s down,’ pleaded Daisy.

  ‘I haven’t finished,’ said Ricky, shutting the window on her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ whispered Perdita, who was now haggard and shaking. ‘I didn’t realize how awful I’d been.’

  ‘And walking out on Apocalypse just as we were getting the team together, and that’s nothing to what you did to Luke – short of making a wooden cross and banging the nails into his hands and feet.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about Luke.’ She was suddenly hysterical.

  ‘Well, I do. Did you realize that when Hal Peters went bankrupt, he left Luke with all his medical bills and the bills for the yard, so he had to sell all his horses.’

  ‘Even Fantasma?’ The tears held back since the night she came home spilled over. ‘Oh, no, he loved her as much as I loved Tero.’

  ‘Far more,’ said Ricky bleakly. ‘He’d never have buggered off to Singapore without seeing she was OK.’

  ‘Where’s she gone?’

  ‘Alejandro’s.’

  ‘Oh Christ, he’s such a bastard to horses. Why didn’t anyone tell me?’

  ‘They didn’t think you’d be interested.’

  Outside they could hear the protests of the mower as Daisy forced it through the hayfield, then the manic rattle as it tried to swallow one of Ethel’s shredded bones.

  ‘Did Red know about Luke?’

  ‘Course he did. You must know what a shit he is.’

  You’d think he was even more of one, thought Perdita dully, if you’d caught him in bed with Chessie.

  ‘I hate him so much for what he did to Tero,’ she whispered, ‘but I can’t help still wanting him. It’s horrible, like being in love with a husband who’s battered your child to death. How can I ever get over him?’

  ‘Work,’ said Ricky, going towards the door. ‘I want you up at the yard by seven o’clock tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m not up to it,’ said Perdita in panic.

  ‘Don’t be so bloody wet.’

  ‘D’you think Red’ll send Spotty back? I asked the twins to ask him. He must be so miserable missing Tero and me.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Ricky, privately thinking Red was unlikely to relinquish a pony as good as Spotty with the Westchester coming up.

  ‘Ring Chessie, will you?’ asked Perdita with a sudden explosion of hostility. ‘You expect me to get over Red. You didn’t get over her.’

  ‘We’re not talking about me,’ said Ricky.

  Outside, blinking in the low-angled sunshine, Daisy was washing her car. She was straddled, panting, over the bonnet trying to clean the far side of the front window. Her left breast had escaped from her bikini. Moving to the right so as not to embarrass her, Ricky took the cloth from her.

  ‘Shove over. I’ll do it.’

  The following week brought no news from either Red or Drew. Perdita was getting frantic about Spotty when, at twilight one warm evening, Angel suddenly rolled up in a new Aston Martin with a pig trailer rattling behind, out of which towered an outraged and decidedly car-sick Spotty.

  ‘I keednap heem,’ said Angel to an ecstatic Perdita, who instantly revived after a gruelling twelve-hour stint at Ricky’s. ‘Bart’s in New York, Red in Sotogrande. Spotty was being flown back to the States for the Westchester tomorrow, so I steal heem. He not very pleased.’

  Spotty, however, was so thrilled to see Perdita that he jumped out of the trailer while he was still tied up, nearly strangling himself. Having thanked Angel incoherently, Perdita leapt on Spotty’s red-and-white back and roared him off up the ride to show Ricky.

  ‘Ees better?’ Angel asked Daisy.

  ‘Better now she’s seen you. She’s been desperately down.’

  ‘She can only go up now. Red is a preek,’ said Angel.

  The only time Daisy had seen Angel he’d been trying to murder Drew in the Queen’s Cup, scowling under his bright blue hat, with expletives pouring from his pouting lips, and she had thought him the devil incarnate. But this soulful young man with the snake hips, the tumbled curls and the beautiful carved face, waving a bottle of Dom Perignon and a huge bunch of Régale lilies picked from Bart’s garden, utterly disarmed her.

  ‘For you,’ he said. ‘Perdita have enough presents.’

  ‘You really shouldn’t,’ mumbled Daisy.

  ‘I reech now,’ said Angel simply.

  As he opened the bottle, he explained that he was going to play for Victor Kaputnik for three times as much as Drew’d been getting and Victor, enraged at not winning any of the major cups in England, had asked Angel to find him twenty horses.

  ‘I shall make ten thousand dollars on each horse.’

  ‘Will you have to ride Sharon as well?’ asked Daisy, holding out a glass as the cork flew out.

  ‘No. She about to leave Veector for David Waterlane, so I have not to be service station.’

  Daisy giggled. ‘Is Veector furious?’

  ‘Not at all. ’E find new bumbo. Ees easy when you’re reech.’

  ‘And is Drew upset he’s been sacked?’ It was like putting a bare foot on broken glass. ‘Was he actually sacked?’

  ‘’E was,’ said Angel with satisfaction. ‘Slimy bastard.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Daisy, raising her glass. ‘Shall we go into the garden?’

  Outside it was all blue and misty, with the ravages of the last ten days’ heatwave softened by the half-light and the snow-white flowers of the bindweed hanging luminous.

  ‘They’re supposed to stay open all night if there’s a moon,’ said Daisy. ‘So life’s good?’

  ‘Life is so, so,’ said Angel, then, succumbing to Daisy’s sweet enquiring gaze, ‘No, it’s fucking ’orrible. Since Bibi walk out after ‘Urlingham Ball, I am totally meeserable. She work too ’ard, I was angry, I play the pitch, so many other women, but it deedn’t work and now she’s ‘aving an affair with Drew Benedict.’

  ‘Oooh,’ wailed Daisy. Then, at Angel’s look of surprise: ‘I’m just so sorry for you.’

  ‘First ’e torture me in the Falklands, then ’e torture me in Eengland, and now in America. Smarmy Eenglish deekhead!’ Angel filled up their glasses.

  ‘He is, isn’t he?’ agreed Daisy. ‘Why don’t you ring her?’

  ‘It would be weakness.’

  ‘On the contrary, it would be very brave,’ urged Daisy, thinking that if the smarmy English dickhead rang her now she would swim straight across the Atlantic to see him. ‘I bet she’s as miserable as you,’ she went on. It wasn’t because she
wanted to break up Bibi and Drew, but because she couldn’t imagine anyone loving Bibi more than this stormy, troubled boy.

  They finished the champagne and started on Daisy’s Muscadet. Angel, not a heavy drinker, couldn’t manage to dial Bibi’s number in Florida, so Daisy, who wasn’t much soberer, had to do it for him and finally handed him over to Bibi’s Filipino maid. Angel launched into a raging torrent of Spanish.

  He was sober when he came off the telephone. All the bounce and bubble had gone out of him.

  ‘Bibi ’as gone into the ’ospital for an operation, Carmen won’t say what for, so I sack her.’

  He tried Red in Sotogrande and Grace in Connecticut; they were both out. He was damned if he was going to ring Bart. The hospital would say nothing except that Mrs Solis de Gonzales had been admitted.

  ‘At least she keep my name. I know eet ees abortion.’ He had to count on his fingers three times to work it out. ‘Could be my child. Could be Drew’s.’ His face blackened.

  Thrusting a fistful of tenners into Daisy’s hands to pay for the telephone calls, he was out of the house in an instant, storming off to Heathrow to catch the next plane to Palm Beach.

  Sadly, tearfully, Daisy was finishing off the Muscadet and wishing someone had ever loved her as much as that when the telephone rang. Alas, it was not Drew but Sharon Kaputnik.

  ‘Ay’ve just seen a fraightfully good paintin’ of Chessie Alderton in the Noddy. Dave – we’re together now – wants a portrait of me to grace the Long Gallery. Ay wonder if you’d oblaige, Daisy?’

  Angel took a taxi from Miami Airport. His only luggage was his polo sticks, which he left as security for the driver, as he bounded out of the moving car and dived through a door marked Emergency into the hospital.

  The receptionist, who was used to the histrionics and antics of South American polo players, had never seen one so fired up as Angel.

  ‘There were flames coming out of his hair, the glass petition nearly melted,’ she told her friend that evening. ‘Then I had to explain to him that Mrs Gonzales had gone down to the theatre. Sister Passolini had just stopped by to say “Hi”, when this fruitcake falls on her, grabs her by the throat, threatening strangulation if she doesn’t take him to the theatre right away. I buzzed a guard, but this Argy KOed him and ran off before we could stop him.’

  Loose in the hospital, Angel had raced past rest rooms and elevators and started throwing open doors. In the first room, he found a lot of fat women gazing at a nurse who was drawing a large carrot on the blackboard.

  ‘You can’t go in there,’ screeched Sister Passolini who, rather taken by Angel, had caught up with him. ‘That’s Over-Eaters Anonymous. Or in there!’ she added in horror, as Angel discovered a lot of sheepish-looking men gazing at another blackboard on which a male nurse with a beard was drawing an even bigger carrot, ‘That’s the Impotency Support Group. You won’t find your wife in there, nor in Freedom from Smoking next door, and beyond that are all the Consultation Rooms. Try the next floor straight on to the end of the passage,’ she whispered. ‘You better beat it. The heavy brigade has just arrived.’

  Chased by two more security guards, Angel sprinted up the stairs past a sign saying, ‘Please be quiet, Theatre in Use’. To left and right he was faced with rows of pale grey doors. Seeing a blonde nurse passing by with a syringe in a kidney-shaped bowl, Angel grabbed her. ‘My wife, Bibi Gonzales,’ he panted. ‘Please, she is somewhere in here.’

  ‘Wasn’t she Bibi Alderton?’ asked the blonde nurse. ‘Right? She’s in there, first left after the swing doors, but they’re operating. You can’t go in.’

  When the two guards tried to restrain him, Angel fobbed them off with fifty dollars each and started breaking up equipment. A trolley loaded with instruments went flying, a kidney machine crashed to the floor, a cupboard full of medicines was wrenched off the wall and went flying through the window. Angel was just kicking over an X-ray machine when a man in a green overall wearing a mask and rubber gloves backed out through the swing doors, crunching on the glass.

  ‘What the hell’s going on? I’m about to operate.’

  Angel leapt on him, grabbing him by his gown, shoving him against the wall.

  ‘You not going to abort my child,’ he hissed.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ squawked the surgeon. ‘I don’t do terminations.’

  Angel’s mad eyes were suddenly vast with fear. ‘Ees more serious? She ’ave cancer? Oh, my poor Bibi.’

  ‘For goodness sake, cool it,’ said the blonde nurse in amusement. Then, ignoring the frantic signals of the surgeon: ‘Mrs Gonzales is only having a nose job.’

  If she’d hoped to placate Angel, she was quite wrong. Even more incensed, he stormed into the theatre, where Bibi, pale as her white nightgown, like a corpse in a morgue, lay on the operating table, surrounded by people in masks. Woosy from her pre-med, she was not too far gone to whip off the disfiguringly ugly bathcap.

  ‘What zee fuck?’ howled Angel. Then, stopped in his tracks: ‘What ’ave you done to your beautiful ’air?’

  For, spilling over the white pillow, instead of the thick, shaggy, dark red curls was a long, sleek, totally straight, blonde bob.

  ‘Ees thees what Drew Benedict like?’ said Angel furiously. ‘He may prefer blondes, but ’e is no gentleman.’

  Bibi burst into tears. ‘I love you so much. I figured if I had long blonde hair and a tiny nose like all the other polo wives, you might love me, too.’

  Angel gave a groan. ‘I loff you as you are!’ Then, running a finger down her nose: ‘She is the theeng I like most about you. You are most beautiful girl I haff known. You geeve me the duck bumps. I haff nevair been more meeserable in my life. When you ran away, I theenk I die.’

  And, seizing her hands, he covered them with kisses, and then he kissed her lips. There wasn’t a dry eye above the masks except for those of the plastic surgeon who was incensed at losing such a rich customer, and who had been intending to remodel Bibi’s entire body over the next few years.

  ‘I weel keel Drew Benedict,’ said Angel as he paused for breath.

  ‘Oh, please don’t,’ protested Bibi. ‘It was hopeless with him. I thought about you the whole time and how much I loved you.’

  ‘I ’urt you so bad,’ moaned Angel. ‘I was jealous of your work, I ’ate being a kept boy.’

  ‘You won’t be much longer,’ said Bibi. ‘If Dad goes belly-up, I won’t be an heiress any more.’

  ‘You won’t be anyway, after paying for all the equipment Rudolph Valentino’s just smashed up,’ said the plastic surgeon nastily, and he was even crosser when Angel just swept Bibi up and carried her out to the still-waiting taxi, banging on the door of the Impotency Support Group, yelling, ‘Keep eet up, two three four,’ as he went by.

  70

  Heeding Ricky’s advice, Perdita buried herself in work, standing in for his grooms when they took holidays before the Westchester, playing in low- and medium-goal matches. But she was still desperately pale, thin and unnaturally subdued.

  Nor did the situation improve when Violet and Eddie returned from staying with schoolfriends not prepared to be as forgiving as Daisy and stepping warily round their perfidious sister. Soon they were at each other’s throats, all three thinking they had exclusive rights to the television, the bathroom and Violet and Perdita the use of Daisy’s rickety Volkswagen. Matters grew worse when Violet got straight As in her four A levels, was rewarded with money to buy a car by a delighted Biddy Macleod, and Violet’s schoolfriends rang the whole time comparing results and having endless discussions as to what they were going to do in their year out.

  Eddie, blissfully unaware that Ricky had pulled strings with the muscular energy of a bell ringer to get him into Bagley Hall, a nearby co-ed, was half-terrified, half-excited at the prospect of boarding with girls in September. He had now reached adolescence, loving and co-operative one moment, moody, withdrawn and resentful the next.

  There were compensations. Suddenly the
small boy, who Daisy’d had to threaten within an inch of his life to pick up a toothbrush, was cleaning his teeth three times a day and bathing and washing his hair more often than Violet and Perdita. When he wasn’t counting his spots and perfecting a sexy pout in the mirror, he poured over Penthouse and The F-Plan Diet. Soon envelopes addressed to body-building firms were lying around in the hall.

  To add to Daisy’s problems, the puppies were crapping everywhere and chewing up everything and Sharon Kaputnik had to be painted. Not wanting to trouble Ricky or subject him to constant sexual harassment by painting Sharon in his attic, Daisy used the sitting room at Snow Cottage. This meant that every afternoon Sharon rose like Page Three incarnate from a sofa lined with Jaffacake crumbs, chewed crayon and puppy fur, surrounded by a sea of Coke tins, beer cans, mugs, kicked-off shoes and overflowing ashtrays, while being eyed by Eddie as he pretended to watch programmes on re-upholstering and re-runs of Falcon Crest.

  Nor was Daisy any longer buoyed up by the prospect of seeing Drew again when the holidays were over. She found her thoughts turning more and more to Ricky, and how awful it would be when he finally went back to Chessie. He’d taken to dropping in late in the evening, often bringing a take-away, and was so wonderful at separating and shutting up the children.

  ‘If you’d ever umpired the Napiers, Bart Alderton and the O’Briens in the same match, you wouldn’t have any problems.’

  ‘Unfortunately, one can’t send one’s children off for arguing,’ sighed Daisy.

  By the middle of August everyone was revving up for the Westchester, or West-Chessie-ter, as Daisy called it to herself. The English team had been confirmed: Ricky as captain, Drew and the Napiers; the same as the International, with the twins as reserve. Not an exciting team, but a solid one. Ricky detested the Napiers, but they were both nines and, under pressure from the BPA, he couldn’t see any way not to select them. He found the prospect deeply depressing, particularly as the very few practice matches they were able to organize were incredibly acrimonious. Rupert, who had high-handedly appointed himself unofficial team manager, because Venturer’s stake was so vast and because ‘although I don’t know that much about polo, I know all about winning’, was all too ready to put his show-jumping boot in and tell the players exactly where they were going wrong.