Wild Weekend

by Celia Brayfield

  Although there was the question of Miranda. He had a very clear memory of that hour or so they had spent together when things had gone right. In fact, when he thought about it, things had never gone so right with any woman anywhere at any time as they had with Miranda in that sweet-as-a-nut interlude at the Yattenham Arms. Maybe he was missing something good there. Something really good. On the other hand, maybe his memory was playing tricks. Nothing could be that good. Not in real life. Could it?

  When he arrived at Florian’s house, there was no sign of human life. The door to the farmhouse kitchen was open and a couple of chickens were wandering in and out. Inside, Florian’s dog paced disconsolately up and down the room, pausing every now and then to gaze soulfully at the door to the rest of the house. This door was shut and firmly latched. On the table, a puddle of milk and several abandoned cereal bowls suggested that children had recently breakfasted.

  ‘Anybody home?’ called Oliver. ‘Hello? Florian?’

  The dog suddenly lifted its muzzle and let out a howl. Not a loud sound, but desperately mournful.

  ‘Florian?’ Oliver called again, having a sense that the man wasn’t far away.

  A few minutes later, the sound of bare feet on oak staircase came from the far side of the door, the latch was raised and Florian appeared in the doorway. The lower half of his milk-white body was wrapped in an ancient bath towel. The dog immediately leaped up and tried to lick his master’s face.

  ‘Oh, Oliver. Hi,’ said Florian. He was looking vague. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘I said I’d be over for the pig,’ Oliver reminded him.

  ‘Of course you did. Sorry. Only just woken up. What time is it?’

  ‘Late. Ten. Eleven almost.’

  ‘Crikey.’ He looked around the deserted kitchen as if he hadn’t seen it for many years. ‘I suppose my sister’s taken her lot to church. Give me five minutes. I’ll be right with you.’

  This was not the normal Florian. He was showing no anxiety at all about what the pig might have done to the vines. He was moving like a sleepwalker. He was ignoring the dog. A soft confusion had replaced his keynote aristocratic poise. As he turned to slip out of the door again, Oliver noticed a couple of dead oak leaves caught in his hair and some pink weals on his back, just below waist level. Exactly as if somebody had taken a handful of him. It was all a bit odd.

  After much more than five minutes, Florian reappeared in clothes and led Oliver out to the area near the oak tree, where there were tracks in the soft ground but no sign of the animal itself. Florian remained distracted. He seemed to be almost smiling to himself.

  ‘There she is,’ said Oliver at last, spotting Miss Piggy lying flat out on the grass in a sunny spot. At the sound of her master’s voice, she flapped an ear. Since Florian continued to act as spaced as a visitor from a distant galaxy, it took a while to chivvy her onto her trotters, over to the car park and up a ramp into the back of Oliver’s pick-up.

  ‘At least she didn’t get near the vines,’ said Oliver.

  ‘Yes. No. No she didn’t, did she? Quite lucky, really.’ Florian was gazing into the middle distance.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Oliver asked him.

  ‘I’m brilliant,’ he said, sounding slightly surprised. ‘Why?’

  ‘You seem a bit – I don’t know – zoned, maybe?’

  ‘Sorry. Didn’t get much sleep. Time for a coffee before you go?’

  They returned to the farmhouse kitchen. Florian’s dog was standing in the middle of the floor, its head lowered and its eyes, which protruded like half-spheres of obsidian from the side of its head, fixed resentfully upon a person who was sitting at the end of the table. This person was holding a scrap of buttered toast towards the dog and saying, ‘It’s no good you looking at me like that.’

  A person with masses of hair, who smelled nice. A female person. She saw Florian and something that could only be described as a glow appeared on her face.

  Florian said, ‘Hello, darling.’

  ‘Hello, sweet thing,’ said the person, putting the toast back on her plate and wafting to her feet. She wore a sweatshirt of Florian’s, and probably some knickers.

  Florian and the person seemed to be drawn together by some atomic force. They collided affectionately in front of the Aga. Something that was somewhere between a kiss and a nestle took place. Then the pair withdrew a few inches, seeming embarrassed, and turned as one being towards Oliver.

  ‘This is Dido,’ said Florian graciously. ‘This is Oliver. His farm is the other side of the village. He came over to pick up the pig.’

  They said hello simultaneously. Then the person said, ‘Did you find it OK?’

  ‘Oh yes. No trouble at all.’ Then Oliver found himself saying, ‘Oh well. Must be getting back.’

  On the way out of the car park, he slowed down to pass Florian’s sister, who was driving her children back from the morning service at St Oswin’s. She wound down her window as she drew level with him.

  ‘Is she still there?’ she asked in a conspiratorial shout. ‘The girlfriend?’

  ‘There is some woman there,’ he confirmed.

  ‘Does it look OK?’ she called anxiously, while her children on the back seat giggled and kicked each other.

  ‘Well, the dog’s pretty upset.’

  ‘So far so good, then. He met her in London, you know. Well, he was never going to meet anyone suitable hanging around down the pub with you lot, was he? She must be dotty about him. But he’ll screw it up, he always does.’ And she let in the clutch and shot the car forward in a shower of gravel, before slamming on the brakes when the vehicle was at a crazy angle about six inches from the kitchen door.

  As he drove back through the village, a black cloud settled on Oliver’s morning. Damn Florian. Damn woman. And what was wrong with The Pigeon & Pipkin, anyway?

  The tone used by Florian’s sister offended him. Why, she’d talked about him and Colin and Jimmy, not to mention her own brother, as if they were all desperate Bridget-Jones-style spinsters whose gonads were shrivelling from lack of use. Quite unnecessary. Absolutely outrageous. A man had no need to ‘meet somebody suitable’. A man, in Oliver’s mind, was always knee-deep in suitable somebodies, and if the mood took him and he did want to get married, why, all that he had to do was to choose one of them.

  Even Colin had managed to find somebody. OK, Colin had found the last Mrs Burton on the Internet, and the one before her through some Russian marriage bureau. This was not the sort of arrangement Oliver had in mind for himself, of course. He intended to fall in love. One day.

  One day, as he had always planned should happen, he would meet this woman and he would know that she was the one. He would adore her utterly and she would worship him totally – but in a spirited sort of way. It would all be simple and inevitable and absolutely glorious. That was the plan. A perfectly normal plan and bound to work out. One day.

  He couldn’t help remembering that, in his City days, people who said that their plans were simple and inevitable and bound to work out one day were always complete time-wasters. In fact, most of them were certifiably insane. But that was finance. Falling in love was something completely different.

  Clare and Miranda, accompanied by Lucy, set off down the lane on their horses. The last wisps of mist had gone, leaving the new leaves glistening and dew drops sparkling on the budding twigs. Tulip, asked by Lucy to lead at a sedate walk, found this responsibility overpoweringly thrilling, and started to dance sideways and toss her head; she was at an age to be excited about everything and, if there was nothing to get excited about, to imagine a rattlesnake in every gateway just to make life a bit more interesting.

  Samson and Smithie clopped along peacefully side by side, requiring no input from their riders, who slowly remembered how it felt to balance on a bald, slippery saddle and bend their legs around their horses’ribs, while keeping their feet contorted correctly in their stirrups and the reins threaded through their fingers, and at the same time sitting up gracef
ully and looking cheerful. The sun was up now, warm on their backs and as yellow as the dandelions twinkling in the young grass.

  Just occasionally, when Samson’s ears picked up the far-off cry of the hounds, the sound reminded him of his hunting days and he too tossed his head but, as Clare told herself, taking a severe tone, it was nothing to worry about. How pleasant this was. That young woman in charge looked remarkably intelligent. And Miranda – how confident she was, all of a sudden, managing that huge animal. Already, she looked quite different from the scurrying, frowning young executive she appeared in London. There was a sort of bloom on her cheeks and a sparkle in her eye. But how in the world to get her and that young man together?

  It was, she admitted to herself, oddly satisfying to be conspiring to find her daughter a husband. Why, it was like … the time she baked a cake, or tied Miranda’s tie on the first day of school. She had forgotten how these arcane rituals of traditional parenting created an illusion of comfort. She almost felt that she was making up, somehow, for being a non-traditional mother. As if there was anything to make up. Miranda was born modern, she would never have wanted an old-style mum. All the same, there was a sense of rightness about the idea. All because of that woman – what was her name? Bel. Quite an operator, in her way. Something about her niggled at Clare’s memory. The way she flapped her hands, maybe.

  Their hour passed in a dream of perfection, woman and horse in harmony, a few fluffy clouds scudding across the broad blue sky. They walked, they trotted. Samson stood obediently still beside the restless Tulip while Miranda persuaded Smithie into a sedate canter. For most of its length the bridle path was a broad grassy track running between high hedges, not an environment which offered a horse much scope for ambition.

  Coming back, they cut across one side of Oliver’s land and came out in Saxwold Farm Lane, just after Oliver himself had turned into it from the village road in his rattling pickup. He stopped to let the riders pass, but, being distracted by his thoughts, he forgot Lucy’s warning about pigs. Lucy, congratulating herself on bringing off the morning without any mishaps, also forgot that a pig had a role in Oliver’s morning mission.

  The sight of Miss Piggy in the back of the truck was exactly the outrage that Tulip had been looking for all morning. The moment she saw the pig, she shied like a scalded cat and threw Lucy into the hedge. Then she bolted down the lane.

  Samson, who seemed to have been nursing a sense of grievance over the canter he had been denied, tried to jump in the air with all four feet at once, causing Clare to shriek, which alarmed Smithie, and, in a chaos of hoofbeats and a flurry of mud, the two senior horses heaved into action and followed their companion. All three shot through the first open gateway, which led into one of Jimmy’s fields.

  ‘Pull them up!’ shouted Lucy, struggling back on her feet in time to see thousands of pounds’worth of horse heading for the horizon at a wild canter. ‘Pull them up! Pull on your reins!’

  ‘What’s she saying?’ cried Clare to Miranda.

  ‘Dunno!’ shouted Miranda. Once he got into his stride, Smithie had a fine, smooth action that was really not difficult to get into. Stuff was coming back to her, the long-forgotten exhortations of her childhood riding instructors. She was coping. She could do this. Actually, it was fun.

  ‘I can’t stop him!’ Clare had dragged on her reins with all her strength, but better women than she had tried and failed to stop Samson when his mind was made up for a gallop. He had long ago learned to tuck in his nose and drop his head, causing a novice rider, such as Clare, to find an alarming nothingness in front of her, shriek again, drop all pretences and grab his mane for dear life.

  Smithie, meanwhile, had decided that if this was a race, he was damn well not going to let that stupid mare win it. And Tulip had an instinct that there were other horses about, the rest of her herd just over there in the distance somewhere. So all three horses swept up the field and over the brow of the hill together. Smithie won by a nose when Tulip suddenly lost her confidence and slowed down at the summit.

  ‘Damn!’ said Lucy. ‘Now how are we going to catch them?’

  ‘We’ll drive after them in this,’ Oliver proposed. ‘Just let me get rid of the pig.’

  ‘You and your stupid pig.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I forgot.’

  ‘No, my fault. I should have remembered.’

  Off-centre to the top of the hill was a small copse of hazel trees, where Carole, Video Guy and some of the less fit among the saboteurs had found a sheltered place for a smoke and a moan. When three bolting horses passed near them, Carole’s contact among the sabs leapt to her feet.

  ‘There!’ she shouted. ‘There they are! Told you. It is an illegal hunt. The scum are trying to con us all! There’s the rest of them. The bastards! Look, there’s a loose horse with them – they’ve been riding all over the county while we’ve been sitting here. Come on.’ She grabbed Video Guy by the arm and pulled him up beside her. ‘Come on, you’ve got to get this. This’ll be evidence. Come on. For God’s sake, run!’

  A few hundred yards further on, to the immense relief of Clare and Miranda, the horses suddenly slowed to a walk. With awkward fingers, the two women gathered up their reins and created an illusion of being in control again. The ground was grassy here, and sloped down again to a small stream, hardly more than a cleft in the meadow. On the far side of it the land rose steeply, overgrown with bushes and gorse breaking into crests of golden blossom. While they watched, a couple of hounds ran into view.

  ‘That’s why they’ve stopped,’ said Miranda, getting back her breath. ‘They don’t want to go through the gorse.’

  ‘I don’t care why they’ve stopped, I just don’t want them to take off again. What’s going on over there?’ said Clare, daring to sit upright and fish for a lost stirrup with her toes. An incautious touch of her foot, however, sent Samson forward another few steps. Then he decided that the grass in front of him looked too good to pass on and dropped his nose for a snack, almost pulling the reins out of Clare’s inexpert hands.

  ‘It looks like people hunting,’ said Miranda, daring to stand in her stirrups for a better view. ‘I can see a couple of other horses. And there are hounds, look.’

  All six hounds were working the bank side now, running in and out of the cover, piling on top of each other and yelping with excitement, watched by one of the huntsmen and a girl on a pony.

  ‘What are they doing?’ asked Clare. ‘Why are they just standing and watching?’

  ‘I don’t know what they’re doing,’ said Miranda. Together, they took in the intent attitudes of the riders and sensed the accord between the people and their animals, built up over the winter of working together.

  Clare felt an unexpected flutter of respect and was about to try putting this unusual feeling into words when the huntsman’s horn caught the sun and a few notes rang out over the field. This was enough to remind Samson of his glory days. He took his nose out of the grass and lurched downhill.

  ‘Oh God!’ cried Clare, now finding that she had useless yards of rein in her hands. ‘I can’t stop him.’

  The next happenings were only established afterwards. The hounds at first obeyed the master’s call and gathered around him. The rest of the hunt, trailed by the main body of the saboteurs, appeared above them on the far side of the stream. Seeing what she took to be the rest of her herd, Tulip let out a passionate neigh and flew down to join them, followed instantly by Smithie. The two younger horses hardly broke stride as they nipped smoothly over the stream at its narrowest point, but Samson hesitated on the bank, then heaved himself over in a clumsy cat jump that left Clare once more clinging on to his neck.

  ‘Who is that woman?’ panted Video Guy as he scrambled in pursuit. ‘I know I know her.’

  There was shouting, and confusion, and questions, and brandished placards, and sheer terror on Clare’s part, and considerable fear from Miranda, and much milling and stamping from the horses. All accelerated to pandemonium
when a fox streaked from under a gorse bush and ran in the direction of the lane. This was too much for the hounds, who gave chase, and for the saboteurs, who let out howls of fury and ran forward in an attempt to head off the riders.

  ‘I know I know her face,’ said Video Guy, staggering out of the melee with his camera held above his head. ‘I know she’s … fuck me, she’s the Minister. Did we know this about her?’

  ‘All we knew was she’s supposed to be the Treasury’s choice for helping them meet their housing targets and bury the countryside in concrete,’ gasped Carole, who was not accustomed to physical activity, nor to paying attention to rural politics.

  ‘Fucking brilliant then, isn’t it?’ Video Guy checked to be sure he had plenty of tape left and leaped back into the melee.

  As the whole posse of horses and people set off after the hounds, Clare’s luck ran out. Samson dithered again on the stream bank, giving one of the saboteurs the opportunity to wave a placard under his nose. It was a great shot for the camera. The venerable animal reared up on his hind legs for the first time in at least twelve years, and pitched Clare squarely into two feet of muddy water.

  ‘Hang about. I’ve got to get this!’ shouted Video Guy, bounding forward in delight. The Minister! Hunting! And falling off her horse! Unbeatable!

  A blinding pain shot up Clare’s left arm, which was much later discovered to be attached to a broken collarbone. While she floundered to her feet, slipping in the mud, Video Guy staggered around her, trying to get close-ups of her anguished face and her mud-spattered body. Soon one of the huntsmen saw her plight and dismounted to help her to her feet. Video Guy got a solid thirty-second shot of his red coat before the huntsman’s elbow caught him in the face. In the general confusion, he scrambled away and rushed back to the safety of the copse. There he lost no time in connecting his technology to that of his favourite news agency.

  The fox, meanwhile, fled down the lane and into the pub car park. There he saw something familiar. And safe. And a way into it.

  At the end of the morning, when Carole returned to the van, she found the fox jammed under the driving seat. She got a warm, furry feeling and decided the whole weekend had been well spent. ‘Look at you! Is that my little Sweeney? Who’s a clever boy then? You coming back to London with us then? You don’t want to live in the nasty countryside at all, do you?’