by Fiona Walker
Anke leaned closer, dropping her voice. ‘Carly, I must ask you, do you think Faith is happy with life right now?’
‘How d’you mean?’ she asked blankly. ‘She’s friends with Dillon Rafferty. What girl wouldn’t be happy?’ There were chips of ice in her voice.
‘Sometimes she puts on a brave face, but a mother knows.’
‘She’s cool, Mrs B, honest.’ There was a noisy jangle of bracelets as she reached up to pat Anke’s arm. ‘She’ll have a ball in Essex. That brave face will come back quite different, just you wait and see. She’ll be all smiles.’
‘I hope so.’ Anke sighed, watching as Faith tuned the car radio to Classic FM and cranked some Wagner up to full blast. ‘I do hope so.’
Anke was left feeling ragged after the party and vowed that Chad would have all his landmark celebrations in purpose-built venues. The huge clearing-up operation took two days, unassisted by Faith who headed straight to Overlodes Equestrian Centre in her new car to welcome a victorious Rory home from his Scottish trip. She stayed there from dawn to dusk, making the most of what little time she had left before leaving for Essex.
‘Why is my daughter so ungrateful?’ Anke lamented to best friends Ophelia and Pixie. ‘She is just so obsessed with poor Rory.’
‘She’s in love,’ Pixie said simply.
‘Dilly was just the same at her age,’ Ophelia reminded her, ‘and look at her now – she and Magnus are like a pair of solid bookends.’
‘But Rory hasn’t got the backbone to be a bookend,’ Anke fretted. ‘I’m not sure he could take the weight of her clever mind, and anyway he doesn’t want to.’
‘He’s pretty special underneath that laid-back bluff,’ insisted Pixie, who had always had a soft spot for Rory. ‘Remember, his father died when he was terribly young. He’s really had to fend for himself.’
Anke felt a sharp pang of recognition. Now more convinced than ever that Faith’s problems lay with a lack of a paternal anchor, she redoubled her efforts to tell her more about her birth father, but Faith – eventually coming down from her Brain Candy high with tremors, a dry mouth and nausea – blocked her ears to any mention of flame-haired horse dealer Fearghal.
‘How many times? I don’t want to meet my father. Much as I know it’s a disappointment to you, I am not father-fixated or a lesbian or anything else remotely interesting. I am just an anti-social, flat-chested girl who wants to ride horses and who made a complete mess of her birthday party by locking herself in the loo when lots of strangers turned up.’
Which was, Anke supposed, an apology of sorts.
In her defensive but honest way, Faith in fact apologised to everybody who had put themselves out to make her party happen only to find her behaving like an imbecile, from Carly whose dreams of finding Grant’s successor had come to nothing, to her gayfathers, to Graham and Magnus. To Faith’s tremendous relief, they all forgave her good-spiritedly.
Finally she begged Dillon Rafferty’s number from Magnus and sent him a text asking him to ignore everything she had said or done that night. The Brain Candy had turned her into a monster, and she was mortified when she thought back to how she had harangued him about Rory.
To her amazement, he replied within minutes. I enjoyed it, brat. You are unique. Tell me more about this wonder horse. Is he really for sale?
Faith texted excitedly back, thumb on fast-forward. Definitely. Times are hard. Old money’s suffering more than ever, and event riders are always broke. Hugo Beauchamp would probably sell his own mother if the price was right.
Chapter 9
Alicia Beauchamp, despite her aura of fading, tissue-wrapped glamour, of Chanel, gin and pearls, was a dyed-in-the-wool thermals and thermos eventing mother.
For years she had stood in rain-lashed, muddy fields cheering on her charges, although Charles had long ago bowed out of competitive riding in favour of the odd day’s hunting or polo, leaving the path clear for Hugo. From those early years of rusty pony trailers and lowly rankings, through national championships, countless three day events, British teams and medal ceremonies, Alicia had been a stalwart supporter.
When Hugo married and settled down she was happy to take a back seat and pursue other interests, friendships and loves – at least one of them deliciously illicit and involving a very dashing, very married local magistrate Master of Foxhounds. But now that Tash was so busy with family youngstock, Alicia had dug her impenetrable wet weather gear out of retirement and – despite two hip replacements and a spot of rheumatism in one knee – was nobly checking score boards, rolling up bandages and brewing coffee in the horsebox between phases, keeping the dogs under control and barracking stewards and her son.
‘Hurry up, Hugo’ – ‘no, not those boots, these boots’ – ‘don’t leave that bloody thing there’ – ‘cigarette?’ – ‘hup!’ were her standard rallying cries.
This morning was no exception. ‘We should have left half an hour ago!’ she shouted from the horsebox cab, cigarette dangling between her lips and Beefy yapping excitedly on her knee.
‘Are you sure you’ll be all right?’ Hugo asked Tash for the tenth time, reluctant to leave.
‘Absolutely! We’re grand.’ She waved sleeping Amery’s little fist at him. ‘Now you heard your mother. Get going. Bring back pots. We’ll be waiting here for you.’
Blue eyes glittering, he kissed her on the mouth and belted off to take the wheel, leaving Tash to turn tiredly towards the house and carry Amery inside, wondering where Beccy had got to with Cora. There were still half a dozen horses left to muck out, but Beccy had spirited the toddler into the house ten minutes earlier, muttering something about fetching a drink.
They were in the snug, Cora emptying bookshelves unheeded while, swigging on a Diet Coke and lying back on the drop-arm tapestry sofa, Beccy used the Beauchamps’ phone. ‘You’re going to have to ask James to increase my allowance, Mummy,’ she was saying. ‘Tash and Hugo pay next to nothing and are really mean. They say I’m nowhere near ready to start competing yet, and they make me do all the most boring jobs.’
Still cradling Amery, Tash cleared her throat and Beccy leaped upright, inadvertently elbowing her new puppy, Karma. It let out an indignant shriek, scrabbled off the arm and landed on Cora’s pile of books, which slithered underfoot and made the puppy do the splits.
Eyeing her sister at the door, Beccy had the grace to blush. ‘I have to go Mummy – I’ll call you later okay? When you’ve spoken with James?’ She hung up, not looking Tash in the face. ‘My phone’s out of charge so I used your landline.’
‘Fine,’ Tash was hurt by the ‘mean’ comment and too wracked with physical discomfort to be forgiving. ‘But please don’t leave the yard unattended with jobs half done. It’s selfish and unprofessional. If you want to ride more and earn more, you have to start by improving your basic stable care.’
She personally thought Beccy had a better standard of living than her employers. Heavily subsidised by her trust fund in addition to her wages and rent-free life at Haydown, she shopped for groceries exclusively at M&S, ran a racy little Audi that was far better than Tash’s own ancient Shogun, had an iPhone constantly loaded with the latest tracks, a Mac laptop bursting with movies and pop videos, and Egyptian bedlinen and Molton Brown bath products in the stable flat. As soon as she’d arrived she’d bought herself the sooty grey Labradoodle puppy that now sported a diamante-encrusted collar and ate nothing but steamed chicken. For a self-styled global hippy who had purportedly survived on rice and lentils in India, Beccy liked life’s little luxuries.
‘Cora was thirsty.’ She glared down at her feet, encased in pink and orange Joules socks, this season’s must-have colours among image-conscious young event riders.
‘So I see.’ A beaker of sticky apple juice had been upended in a first edition of a Montgomery biography. Tash sighed, her anger evaporating. ‘You’d better get back out there now. Jenny’s taking the hunting box to deliver a horse to Leicestershire this morning so you’re in charge.
If you can come in and help me with Cora at lunchtime, I’ll make you something to eat.’
‘Sure.’
Tash suddenly felt incredibly sorry for her stepsister, who had been forced to start at the bottom like a teenager despite being in her late twenties. ‘It will get easier, Beccy. You’re already a million times faster and fitter than when you started.’
This wasn’t strictly true. Despite a natural affinity with horses, Beccy was not a particularly hard worker, she was vague and a poor timekeeper, she overslept, got the feeds muddled up and she had a memory like a sieve, but simply having another body around the place was a godsend. She could generally be relied upon to wait on the yard for the farrier or the vet or the feed merchant, or could sit with Cora while Tash dealt with something in Hugo’s absence. And when Tash had gone into labour she had been the only person on site. Without her, Tash had no idea how she would have coped. Beccy had been marvellous. For that Tash was eternally grateful, and even Hugo – who had not been best pleased to find his sister-in-law in situ when he returned from the Olympics – had tacitly accepted the situation. In fact he’d been strangely muted about it, as he had about everything since the Games. Tash put it down to the inevitable post-competition anti-climax, to worrying about money and most of all to adjusting to a new baby.
Amery was a bald, wrinkled wonder with his father’s blue eyes, his mother’s cleft chin and a very odd-shaped head from battering away at her pelvis for hours trying to get out. Far more passive than Cora had been, at less than a week old he was already proving happy to be hawked about in a Moses basket or car seat and plonked anywhere to gaze short-sightedly at the new world around him, occasionally thrusting a little starfish hand out to test the air. Mostly he slept with snuffly, trusting contentment, as he was now.
Beccy reached out to cup his sleeping cheek as she passed by, her face softening with indulgence, and at that moment Tash could forgive her any number of mistakes.
‘Thank you for being here,’ she blurted suddenly.
‘I’ll get better, I promise,’ Beccy mumbled as she disappeared along the back lobby.
Tash sat down. The truth was that they did need Beccy at Haydown very badly indeed, even if they couldn’t afford to pay her well and she was pretty unreliable. They were so desperately short-staffed that she often doubled the workforce when not AWOL, which was admittedly rather a lot.
Half an hour later, when one of the local part-timers came to the back door and asked Tash what she was supposed to be doing because there was nobody on the yard, no feeds had been mixed up or haynets filled and the tack-room door was wide open, she realised Beccy must have gone missing again.
‘You rally must make an effort to control the estate better,’ Alicia barked through stiffly smiling lips as she and her son waited between summer downpours in the collecting ring at Ampney Franchart, a small one day event near Cirencester.
Hugo found her presence at horse trials something of a hindrance these days. On a practical level, he was already perfectly well supported at events by head girl Jenny or his team of volunteer grooms, hands-on owners and friends, but he was far too well-mannered a son to tell Alicia to bugger off.
‘The Haydown tenants are having a terrible time,’ Alicia carried on, tucking Beefy the pug into her coat’s poacher’s pocket as the heavens opened again. ‘I think you might have to waive the rent for the rest of the year.’
‘Can’t afford to,’ Hugo replied, pulling up his collar against the lashing rain, a thunderclap giving a timely roll overhead that made his young horse dance, back bunched nervously.
‘Your father always waived the rent when the harvest was this bad, or livestock prices this low.’ Despite the hot late summer, a record-breakingly cold spring had blighted crop and fodder production, resulting in low yields and poor quality.
‘Father had a private income running at about three times the estate overheads. I currently have an income of approximately half those overheads.’
‘So earn more.’
If only it was that simple, Hugo thought bitterly as he was beckoned into the muddy, hoof-poached ring to coax his mount through the showjumping phase of the battle for a cash prize of less than the cost of his diesel and entry fees that day.
There was to be no glamorous Olympic medal-winners’ parade along the Mall in an open-topped bus for Hugo. Just a week after standing on the podium in front of a global television audience of millions, lowering his head for a brace of golds, he was competing between thunderstorms in a humble little Cotswolds event with dressage and fence judges lurking behind their swishing windscreen wipers in ageing hatch-backs, muddy-breeched amateurs falling off under-schooled horses in the minor sections, a windswept blue plastic loo cabin and a rain-lashed burger van totalling the ‘facilities’. It’s what earned him his real money. All three youngsters were leading their sections. Two were up for sale. If they went well across country today’s successes might just secure buyers in an increasingly sticky market.
The team gold and his individual glory was no doubt set to give the sport a great boost as such successes inevitably did, particularly at the lower levels with novice riders inspired to start taking part, but that couldn’t detract from the fact that event horses were proving very tough to sell right now, and when they did they commanded far lower prices than a year ago.
Hugo needed to sell several big-money horses to bring in much-needed revenue and save on hiring more staff. But the negative publicity surrounding silly, streaking Debbie Double-G still lingered like a bad smell as she did the celebrity circuit, determined to make a career from her endeavours, and certainly didn’t help Hugo as he tried to get back to the day job. Far from giving him the Midas touch, his gold medals appeared to come with an Inca curse.
Blinded by sideways rain, Hugo’s horse crashed through the first fence, which hardly improved their chances.
Watching from the sidelines, Alicia was joined by her crony Gin Seaton, a grey-haired battleaxe who had been following the sport for as long as anyone could remember and had owned several horses with Hugo over the years. ‘I gather congratulations are in order, Alicia.’
‘Hardly,’ she winced at the clattering of poles. ‘He’ll never win from this score.’
‘I was referring to your new grandson.’
Before she could reply, Alicia let out a wail of alarm as something started buzzing and chiming in her pocket, making Beefy growl.
‘That’s your mobile phone,’ Gin pointed out kindly.
When Hugo trotted out with a disappointing twenty penalties, glaring at a big bald event photographer who clearly fancied himself as a paparazzo and had been following him around all day, his mother thrust his mobile up at him.
‘Someone on the phone about buying a horse,’ she barked, taking his reins.
‘Yup?’ he muttered into the handset, jumping off and starting to walk to his horsebox to fetch out his next ride. ‘Yup … yup …’
Not noticing that the headstrong ex-hurdler he’d handed to Alicia was tanking past him to the lorry park, trailing his mother like string, Hugo turned his back to the wind and rain and listened very carefully indeed.
‘I’m all ears,’ he suddenly smiled, flicking two fingers at the snap-happy photographer who was now loitering behind the blue loo, his huge lens poking around it like a marksman’s rifle.
At Haydown, far from the early autumn storms that were rattling around the Cotswolds, Tash tried both Beccy’s mobile number and the yard line, wondering where on earth her stepsister was. She’d promised to be around to help with Cora’s lunch, and it was now after one-thirty.
Physically very limited after her surgery, and trapped in the office by endless phone-calls and paperwork, Tash resorted to feeding the little girl a carpet picnic of finger food on plastic plates. She hoped that Beccy was back on the yard and that nothing was wrong. She gazed through the open window to the bright sunlit stables in the distance, but all was still, a heat haze dancing above the long stretch of lawn
that needed mowing. She’d take the children out to see what was going on after the next feed, she decided.
Checking that Amery was still asleep in his Moses basket and Cora happily banging plastic blocks together on the hearthrug, Tash waded through a few more bills, plucking out the truly urgent and the final reminders.
Beside her was a list of her own clients to ring – portrait commissions that she had taken on shortly after finding out that she was pregnant, believing that she could complete them all before the birth and put some much-needed cash in the family coffers. Painting and sketching horses, dogs and quite often people had been a very profitable sideline for Tash over the years, particularly during the winter ‘closed season’ months, and her lively, accurate depictions were always in demand. But she’d developed severe carpal tunnel syndrome, an uncomfortable side-effect of pregnancy, and all painting and sketching had ground to a halt as her fingers rapidly became numb and her wrists shot through with pain. Holding a paintbrush had been impossible for months now. She had a long waiting list and her subjects were all still patiently waiting to be captured in oil or watercolour, but although the feeling in her hands and wrists was returning to normal her timetable – especially now with two children in tow – was set to be more chaotic and stretched than ever.
Tash was home alone four days after a caesarean with a toddler and a newborn to look after, and a stepsister who had vanished yet again.
‘Beccy?’ she called out now. But there was no answer, and Tash suddenly worried her short temper earlier had made her pack it in for good. She could be notoriously hair-triggered.
Feeling suddenly overwhelmed, she covered the seemingly impenetrable pile of bills with the latest issue of Horse & Hound and, admiring Hugo’s standing-in-stirrups Olympic victory salute captured on the front cover, answered the ever-ringing phone.
