by Fiona Walker
‘Forget it.’ Hugo flashed a tired on-off smile as he emerged from the boot room and crossed through the kitchen past her, heading for the rear lobby that led to the main house. ‘I’m whacked. I’m going to bed. Lock up once you’ve chucked the Roadies out, will you?’
‘But …’
He was already gone. Always the first to finish eating, Beetroot scuttled after him, claws slithering on the flagstones in her haste to join him in bed.
Tash remembered feeling much the same way when they were first married; she had suffered from almost continual indigestion.
Wearily she pressed the phone’s green button. Niall was still reminiscing, apparently unbothered by the artificial hold music that had briefly featured at the other end of the line:
‘… that day that you made me walk up onto the downs to make love behind the gorse bushes on Wayfarer’s Walk and some spotty teenager flying a kite literally stepped back on top of us. I’ve never laughed so much …’
Tash smiled into the phone as she, too, couldn’t help remembering that sunny day over a decade ago when she’d hardly had a care in the world compared to now. Laughter was a rare commodity now, as was fun, silly, adventurous sex.
‘It was a man with a hang-glider,’ she recalled.
‘It was?’
‘He was taking a run higher up the ridge and lost his footing – he passed over us so low that he kicked you on the bottom.’
‘So he did now,’ Niall chortled, sucking in a deep, contented breath that was no doubt accompanied by a puff on a rare Cuban cigar. ‘Did the spotty kid with the kite fall over us after that?’
‘He didn’t.’
‘He did so. I remember because he was wearing a T-shirt on promoting one of my films. Celt, wasn’t it?’
Tash suddenly found the conversation less entertaining. Face cold and heart pounding as she guessed what Hugo must be thinking of her right now. ‘The kite kid must have been with somebody else.’
‘Was it?’ Niall was unapologetic. ‘I admit I got rather fond of that spot hidden among the gorse bushes, so I did …’
With a rueful pang, Tash realised that not long after pleasuring her amid the gorse bushes Niall had been pleasuring another in the same spot. He had never been particularly faithful and was notorious for transferring his affections from one woman to another with shameful speed. In Tash’s case, the other woman had been Zoe.
As the baby let out a series of kicks Tash touched her bump for comfort and felt a shudder of fear course through her, her cold face even clammier and her clanking heart raking indigestion up from her belly now. Any thoughts of infidelity and affairs made her very jumpy and afraid indeed.
Niall had moved on from reminiscing about nefarious activities behind West Berkshire gorse bushes and was contemplating matters at hand: ‘Have you got a name for the little fellow yet?’
‘Waitrose,’ Tash muttered, still thinking uncomfortably about betrayal.
On cue Zoe’s soothing tones came back on the phone.
‘Sorry about that – Cian is out like a light again, bless him. I hope Niall’s been keeping you entertained.’
‘Highly.’
‘Good. Now what were you saying before I had to break off – something about Hugo buying you flowers? That’s so tender and thoughtful. He must have turned over a new leaf. Fatherhood has obviously reformed his rakish ways.’
Tash could hear Hugo upstairs, ordering Beetroot out of the bedroom so loudly that Cora was bound to wake up.
‘Yes, he’s quite the new man these days. He’s promised to bring me a lovely present back from the Olympics if he wins gold.’
‘Oh, what’s that?’
Tash thought about handsome Lough Strachan with his Maori tattoos and fiery reputation, and smiled as she anxiously stroked her belly, which unborn Amery was now using as a bouncy castle. Things would get better after the Games, she was certain of it. With new staff starting they’d have lots more help on the yard and in the house; having Beccy in situ would help reconcile the increasing rift between Tash and her father. And Hugo would stop sneaking into Waitrose to buy flowers for whatever – probably perfectly innocent – reason. Yes, it would all get better after the Games, especially if he won a medal.
‘Undivided attention,’ she sighed. ‘He’s bringing me back his undivided attention.’
Zoe laughed throatily. ‘In that case we’ll definitely be cheering him on this end.’
Chapter 3
As a special reward for completing her A levels so diligently, Faith Brakespear was treated to a home-cooked spread of all her favourite things – her mother’s leverpostej pâté on rye bread, then roast lamb with all the minted and caramelised trimmings, and finished with treacle tart with toffee ice cream, all washed down with lashings of kir royale – during which she was toasted with an announcement that threw all her life plans into disarray.
‘I have arranged the best job for your gap year, kæreste,’ her mother Anke revealed with the delight of a magician pulling a solid gold rabbit from a satin topper. ‘You will be the working pupil at Kurt’s dressage yard in Essex.’
‘Essex?’ Faith croaked stupidly, thinking how far away it was from Oddlode and her beloved riding coach, Rory Midwinter.
‘Big county near London,’ her stepfather Graham mocked kindly. ‘Unusually high consumption of hair bleach and Turtle Wax. We used to live there, love.’
‘You will have to start at the bottom, of course,’ Anke was saying pragmatically, although her eyes sparkled with pride at achieving such a coup, ‘but Kurt knows how talented you are and how much you want to be a professional dressage rider, and you are his daughter, so he will make it happen for you, and Rio of course. Imagine what this will do for your chances, being his protégée?’
Long heralded as Britain’s best-ever dressage rider, Kurt Willis was a dashing blond cavalier who looked like a Ralph Lauren model and oozed pure, natural riding talent from every pore. Married to Anke for almost twenty years, much of it platonically, he had acknowledged and raised Faith and her older brother Magnus as his own children until the marriage finally foundered when, unable to live the lie any longer, he came out of the closet in public as well as private. Now known affectionately to his children as the Gayfather, he still lived in Essex with his long-term partner Graeme Fredericks, a fellow dressage rider – both men enjoying a famously open relationship involving a luxury gin palace, several million-pound horses, two poodles and a lot of strapping young grooms brought over from the continent each year. Anke, meanwhile, had gone on to marry a golden Graham herself, Lancashire-born haulier turned Essex freight millionaire Graham Brakespear. And after almost a decade as companionable near-neighbours to Kurt in Essex, the couple had moved to the Cotswolds with Magnus, Faith and their own son Chad two years earlier. All four collective parents and step-parents, Gayfathers and Graham/Graeme fathers remained gratifyingly close and friendly, and had recently been joined in this curious family tree by Magnus’s biological father, Stig Jorgen, a Swedish dressage trainer with whom he had recently become acquainted. Only Faith’s own birth father, an Irish horse trader whom she refused to acknowledge despite her mother’s various attempts to forge a relationship between them, remained out of the loop. She had spent her childhood craving a conventional family; in her early teens she’d taken Graham’s surname and was happy to let new acquaintances believe that she’d inherited her stubborn loyalty and broad shoulders from him.
Faith had no interest in acquiring more fathers. She simply wanted competitive glory and Rory. Now she was torn in two by her mother’s proposal.
‘You will go to Essex after your birthday party. You might as well start work straight away because, of course, Kurt and Graeme are not at the Olympics this year.’ The duo had controversially been left off the British dressage team for the first time in twenty years in favour of an all-female squad, all of whom were under twenty-five. ‘Kurt thinks the future is in a protégée, darling, and he wants that protégée to be you!’
Anke finished rapturously.
Faith’s mouth opened and closed, hot words burning themselves out on her tongue as she thought of every argument to refuse to go. She couldn’t leave Rory behind at such a critical time, nor deprive him of the chance to compete her horse Baron Areion, who had now changed disciplines from dressage to eventing and was flying through the ranks. In the end all she could splutter was: ‘Rio is staying here!’ and run to her room to ring her best friend, Carly. When there was no answer, she texted: PICK UP – URGENT!!!
She rang the number again on redial, but again the call went straight through to voicemail.
Had it been anybody else, Faith would charitably assume that their phone was out of charge, or that they were out of range, in a tunnel, in the theatre or in hospital – possibly dead. But Carly never, ever allowed her precious pink Motorola to be out of connection.
Carly had been avoiding Faith all week. The on-off best friend status, having been firmly on in recent weeks, now appeared to be off just when Faith badly needed advice.
When the Brakespear family had moved from Essex to the Cotswolds, separating the two teenage friends by almost two hundred miles, Faith’s tenacity and loyalty, matched with Carly’s need for a sounding board outside her immediate social group, had kept the friendship alive. For over two years they had emailed, texted and often spoken daily.
At first glance unlikely allies, the girls had become friends at school when bonding through their mutual passion for horses. Then, as now, Faith was gangly, gingery, frizzy-haired, flat-chested and socially inept, but she had one great asset that made pony-mad Carly court her adoringly. She was a naturally gifted rider, her wealth of horsemanship gleaned from growing up with two dressage Olympians as parents. The girls became great foils, and the tradeoff was simple. Streetwise Carly had the glamour, feminine wiles and know-how with boys, and Faith had the riding expertise.
As well as adapting to long-distance separation, their friendship had this year even survived the ultimate betrayal when Carly had got a boyfriend. Hugely sensible, bright and straight-talking, Faith made a perfect sounding board through the ups and downs of first love.
Recently, in the wake of the monumental split between these two lovebirds – at least as traumatic and calamitous as Brad and Jen, according to Carly – the friendship had been experiencing a purple patch. Through the weeks of A level exams and then celebratory holidays combined with anxious waits for results, Faith had drawn surprising satisfaction from helping her friend through the break-up. In exchange, Carly had galvanised Faith’s determination to change her own life for ever.
Faith’s mother Anke might have been concerned that all the late-night chats and emails were distracting her from her revision, but in fact they’d had the opposite effect, focusing her on the importance of academic credentials when faced with the sketchiness of Carly in a crisis and the fact that her friend was blowing all her chances of scraping the two Cs and a D required to get into the University of Essex.
‘How can I concentrate on media studies when my heart is broken?’ she had lamented to Faith.
Faith, whose own heart had long been hammered hard by its fruitless love for charming, womanising Rory, sympathised, although Carly failed to see the parallels at first.
‘Your crush on that posh bungalow is nothing to my love for Grant!’ she had raged.
Faith agreed wholeheartedly. ‘That’s why I need your help getting the posh bungalow to raise his shutters and see me blossom as soon as exams are over.’
With A levels behind them, it was time for Carly to assist Faith’s plans to make Rory see her as more than just a tomboy cross-patch.
Carly was six months older than Faith, an age advantage she liked to point out with the sort of pride that insinuated the age gap was the equivalent of light years socially – and in many ways it was. Pretty, busty, petite and as blonde one month as she was raven-haired the next, Carly kept up with the latest trends in fashion, music, TV and language with an insatiable appetite for weekly gossip magazines. Her heroines were Posh Spice, Paris Hilton and Sylva Frost. She had even gained that ultimate credential – cosmetic surgery (admittedly it was just having her ears pinned back on the NHS, but it still counted). She had always led the way with the opposite sex while Faith trotted around in circles, but now it was time for Faith to gallop alongside her.
In recent weeks the friends had a worked out a seduction strategy to make Rory fall in love with Faith at long last; she would acquire a whiter than white smile, buoyant 32EE Hollywood ice cream scoop boobs, a pert bottom and a tiny button nose to wow him and become his inseparable other half, living, riding and competing side by side like Tash and Hugo Beauchamp or her mother’s friends the Moncrieffs.
Having won a small cash fortune in a local competition the previous year – wisely gathering interest in a savings account thus far – Faith was, on Carly’s advice, now planning to blow the lot on a makeover of industrial proportions. She had already made contact with a top London dentist and a cosmetic surgeon, although couldn’t actually book the veneers, boob job, nose job, lipo and chin implant until after her eighteenth birthday because she would need her mother’s permission before then.
But now that she had almost come of age and could at last green-light the offensive, she’d suddenly come up against a serious obstacle and urgently needed Carly’s help.
Again she texted PICK UP!!!. Again her subsequent call was redirected to voicemail.
Faith howled with frustration.
The following Saturday was her eighteenth birthday. Having anticipated it eagerly for weeks, she now doubted that her best friend was even planning to come to the party her family were foisting upon her. It was vital that Carly was there to help her get ready and to discuss the way forward.
But Anke had just scuppered all her daughter’s well-laid plans to lay Rory and share his life. Ironically, she had done this by using links with her own horsy ex-husband, the other half of the legendary über-pairing, the most talked about equestrian duo for over a decade, who had simply been known as ‘Anke and Kurt’.
At last her phone burst into life with the ringtone that she had assigned only to her most intimate loved ones. ‘Two Souls’ by Dillon Rafferty rang out to pull at her heartstrings and lift her spirits.
But it wasn’t Carly, or Rory; it was her brother Magnus, calling to congratulate her on finishing her A levels and ask if he could bring a couple of extra guests to her party.
‘Depends who,’ she hedged.
‘Nell …’
Faith groaned. Magnus’s ex Nell, with whom he had a one-year-old daughter Giselle, was always horribly conceited and pointedly ignored her whenever they met.
‘… and her new boyfriend, now that it’s official.’ The crowd noise in the background was almost drowning him out. ‘I’ve just spoken to them in New York. He sends his love, by the way.’
‘His what?’
‘His love!’ Magnus repeated loudly. ‘The guy adores you. He’s never got over the day you legged up his lead guitarist on to one of Rory’s horses so powerfully that he flew clean over it. I think he wants to offer you a job as his personal bodyguard.’
‘Might be better than a year in Essex.’ Faith sighed, wondering how much her brother knew about the Kurt offer.
But someone was calling Magnus off the phone now. ‘So I can bring them, yeah?’
‘Okay.’ She agreed as casually as she could, heart skipping.
Tellingly, when Faith texted Carly yet again, this time to let her know of the VIP additions to the guest list, she got a call straight back from her friend, ‘Two Souls’ trilling out from the little Samsung on her bedside table. She listened to the whole of the refrain before answering.
‘You are joking me, right?’ Carly demanded breathlessly. ‘Dillon Rafferty is so not coming to your party.’
‘He is. I told you. He’s a mate of Magnus’s, after all.’
‘Ohmygod, I can’t believe Magnus is your brother. He’s so cool.
’
‘He’s okay.’ Faith found it impossible to see her brother as anything other than a trendy dork who played guitar with admirable talent – and who wrote very catchy songs with lyrics she didn’t quite understand.
With his girlfriend Dilly, he had now recorded an album that was enjoying modest success on the back of the music festivals they’d been playing. The duo had developed a local fan base and increasing word-of-mouth popularity. It barely registered on the celeb scale compared to Dillon Rafferty’s stratospheric fame, but Faith was still growing increasingly proud of her lofty, blond brother and his undoubted talent.
‘I can’t believe I let Magnus slip through my fingers.’ Carly sighed, having once snogged Faith’s brother at a barbecue when he was a spotty teenager. ‘He’s really made the big time if he mixes with Dillon Rafferty.’
‘I know Dillon personally,’ Faith reminded her hotly. ‘He owns some event horses at Rory’s yard, remember. We go way back. That’s why he wants to come to my party.’
‘T’yeah!’ Carly scoffed disbelievingly. ‘And I have a hot date with R-Pattz next weekend, so I’m going to have to blow you out.’
‘You are coming, aren’t you?’ Faith checked in a panic. She hated parties and was only really going along with this one to keep her mother happy, and because it enabled her to have an essential confab with Carly about her makeover, or Double-D Day as Carly had dubbed it.
‘Course.’
‘So why haven’t you been answering my calls?’
‘Dad’s confiscated my mobile because the last bill he got for it was over three hundred. He is so mean. I’m only allowed one call and two texts a day.’
‘I am privileged.’
‘Too right you are. I got a text from Grant today asking me to call him. He wants us to get back together.’
‘And you called me instead?’ Faith was wildly gratified.
‘Yeah. Well, I think I’ll make Grant stew until after your party. Who knows – I might get lucky. Not that Cotswolds guys are a patch on Essex lads.’
