Kiss and Tell

by Fiona Walker

  He thought about calling her now to cheer himself up, but settled for picture-texting instead.

  ‘Oi – you,’ he held his phone over the stable door.

  Lifting his tail slightly, The Fox let out a drum-rolling fart and carried on munching his hay.

  Dillon made kissing noises to attract his attention until, with a deep sigh, the horse consented to pose, turning around and thrusting his head obligingly from the door, dropping hay all over Dillon’s hair which was still sticky from the heavy wax coating it had received from the Paris stylist.

  Reaching up to remove a piece that had fallen on to his brow, he realised that he was still wearing the barbell Nell had given him before he set out for Paris, specially designed by Chopard at great expense to her specific instructions. He secretly hated it. ‘They make beautiful rings, too,’ Nell had said so leadingly that he couldn’t help but laugh.

  But that laughter, and his continued refusal to take her to Paris, had sparked the ongoing storm, the eye of which he was languishing in now. Poor, darling, beautiful Nell. She so wanted a whirlwind romance and a Vegas wedding, but he just wanted to go steady with the girl next door.

  Sending the picture of The Fox to Faith, his fingers hovered over the keys before he quickly typed a message to Nell. Life’s too short. No more arguing. Paris hell without you. I love you. Riding out the storm and counting the minutes until I see you. Will bring present. xxx

  After the message had winged itself away, he cursed himself for that final sentence. He was always promising the same to his daughters and Fawn constantly gave him a hard time for it, pointing out that they loved him without bribery and corruption. Now he’d need another unscheduled stop. He didn’t have a present – Nell was hardly likely to appreciate the white label first pressing of Lola Lèvres’s collaboration with legendary rap producer Marley X, or the clutch of studio freebies he’d grabbed for the girls in the farm office.

  He looked at The Fox and blew out through his lips, unscrewing the brow barbell. ‘Know where I can buy a bunch of flowers round here?’

  The horse turned away.

  His neighbour with the heart-shaped star was bobbing his handsome head up and down furiously behind the grille, mad eyes boggling. He was liked a caged tiger.

  ‘You and me both, mate,’ Dillon sighed, walking forwards to scratch the horse’s black muzzle through the bars. ‘You should like it here – this place is great. I love it. I could live here.’ The centre of attention at last, Cœur d’Or relaxed and looked almost mellow, lifting his big nose to sniff Dillon’s hair. ‘“Heart of Gold” was a great track.’ He started singing a few bars.

  The horse dropped his nose, eyes wide again.

  ‘Yeah, maybe I’ll transpose the key if I ever do a cover,’ Dillon agreed, turning to gaze enviously around him again. Haydown was a great find, a secret rapture. Dillon felt like a kid slotting a new platform game into a console, knowing that there could be hours of new excitements to explore here, wanting to see them all at once. He couldn’t remember feeling like this since first arriving at his Lower Oddford farm.

  Apart from the telephone bell ringing out unheeded and unanswered every few minutes, the only sound he’d heard since he’d arrived on the yard were horses snorting, insects buzzing and bird-song.

  He thought about Tash Beauchamp and her peculiarly gentle but abrupt manner, her strange eyes and her hidden tears. He felt bad that he’d snapped his fingers to make her show him two horses when really he was just idling away an afternoon, but she was infuriatingly odd, obviously in pain yet killingly secretive and upper class about it. It was red rag to a bull. Dillon was still in green-room mode, tired and tetchy from being sideswept by the Lèvres family in Paris. Buying power was an easy fix now that he had so few addictions left.

  On cue, Faith texted back. BUY HIM BUY HIM BUY HIM!!!!

  The message from Nell was queuing behind it: What present?

  He took another photograph, this time of the horse with the heart-shaped star lifting his soft black lip in a distinctly Elvis fashion, and he almost sent it to her, but something made him stop and regroup. Gift horses weren’t great ideas, especially ones at this high a price. His father had once bought a mistress a rare black Falabella stallion the size of a Labrador, only to discover that the lease on her Chelsea garden flat didn’t allow her to keep it there and London livery was over a grand a month, regardless of the incumbent’s size. The poor mistress had died of an overdose just a few weeks after the Rockfather had dispensed with her services. The stallion had then been given to a very ungrateful ten-year-old Dillon, who’d fed it variety of his father’s drugs before losing interest when it failed to die, explode or do anything much, other than eat. Amazingly, Black Sabbath was still going strong at twenty-eight, in a small paddock in the grounds of his father’s castle in Ireland. The mistresses were still as plentiful as the houses his father owned, and all were lavished with regular presents. If Dillon wasn’t careful he would find himself going the same way and he knew it. In the modern world a rich man could buy favour far more quickly than he could earn it but, as he knew from his own childhood, buying a child’s love was less straightforward if one hadn’t the time to back up the extravagance. His father had sold out on that front years ago.

  Buying a horse was similarly fraught with difficulties because they had no notion of their own value and no gratitude for anything beyond food and shelter. To a horse, ownership was a non sequitur. They were obedient, brave and noble servants to their riders because their trust had been earned, slowly and patiently.

  Until recently, the only other horse Dillon had owned had lamed him for life. He wasn’t about to buy another gift horse without looking in its mouth very carefully indeed.

  And so, instead of sending Nell the photograph of Cœur d’Or he sent her a blurry shot of something pink, firm and slightly hairy with a distinctive pink pip at its centre.

  What in hell’s that? she texted back with obvious alarm.

  My heart he wrote simply, having held the phone up inside his T-shirt and snapped his chest where he imagined his heart to be. It’s yours.

  He looked at his phone for a long time waiting for her response.

  The silence spoke volumes.

  Chapter 11

  ‘Who’s that on Fox?’ Gus Moncrieff asked his wife as they rattled through the outer courtyard and under the clock tower on their ancient Land Rover. ‘Bloody awful leg position.’

  Penny automatically reached out to take the steering wheel from her husband as he lifted both hands to his face and struggled to light one of his endless successions of cigarettes. Pulling the wheel sharply left to avoid a free-range terrier, she didn’t take her eyes off the rider in the ménage to their right.

  ‘Tash’s sister, I think.’

  ‘Sophia doesn’t ride, does she?’

  ‘No, the younger one, the horsy stepsister. Rebecca, isn’t it?’

  ‘I thought she ran away to become a Tibetan monk?’

  ‘She came home via a rather hefty jail sentence for drug trafficking. But we don’t. Talk. About. It. Tash and Hugo have taken her on as a working pupil.’

  Gus whistled, succeeding in lighting the cigarette this time.

  ‘Put that out,’ Penny ordered, relinquishing the wheel. ‘We are here to visit a newborn child, remember?’

  ‘You can go into the house to reconnoitre. Tash is bound to have a boob out or something. And I want to check this out first.’ Gus parked the Land Rover beside the arena, where a solitary figure was leaning over the rails. He jumped out, proffering an arm. ‘Hello! Gus Moncrieff.’

  Sighing, Penny clambered out too, not catching the name of the man by the rails as he introduced himself to Gus.

  ‘And this is the wife,’ Gus waved his cigarette arm in her direction, still squinting critically at the horse and rider on show.

  Flashing a quick smile Penny also turned to regard Beccy on Fox.

  Gus was right, her lower leg was atrocious and judging
by the colour of her face and the heavy breathing, she was monumentally unfit. Her shoulders were tense and she had a rather hollow back. But there was a lot to like. Her hands were lovely and soft, her chin nice and high and her seat deep and well connected. She could go a long way with a seat like that. The Fox certainly seemed to appreciate her and was going very sweetly indeed.

  ‘Super horse.’ She sighed jealously. ‘Super, super horse.’

  Gus nodded. ‘D’you know some American offered Hugo a hundred grand to use the beast’s DNA to clone him?’

  Penny snorted at the thought. ‘He turned him down. Said they’d have to clone Tash too because this horse had the best possible start in life thanks to her and that’s why he’s so perfect.’ She sighed enviously again, shooting Gus a resentful look because he would never dream of acknowledging her help like that. ‘There’ll be no clones of this amazing creature.’

  They all watched in silence as The Fox cruised around the space in his energetic, springy trot, as smooth and powerful as a train on rails.

  The Moncrieffs had just been for a surprisingly jolly meal at The Terrier in Maccombe to celebrate their wedding anniversary. It was practically unheard of for either of the couple to go out to lunch, even rarer to do so together, so the uncommon treat had loosened them both up. Penny was feeling especially emotional.

  ‘Lovely, lovely horse.’ She sighed again – she had a tendency to repeat herself after more than a thimble of wine. ‘Best in the world right now.’

  ‘He’s already a freak of nature,’ Gus tutted. ‘No horse should be that talented and that nicely put together and that well-mannered. There’s got to be a catch.’

  Dillon laughed, looking from one Moncrieff to the other. ‘Has Hugo sent you along here to influence me?’

  Now they both looked from him to the horse and back in equal bemusement.

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re here to try to buy Fox?’ asked Penny, making it sound as though he might intend to enact nefarious Wicca rituals on the horse and should be arrested.

  ‘Hugo wouldn’t part with that animal for under a million,’ Gus spluttered in disbelief.

  ‘Of course he wouldn’t,’ Dillon agreed.

  ‘Exactly,’ Penny smiled, turning to look at Fox again as Gus clambered through the rails into the arena to give poor Beccy some unwanted instruction.

  ‘You’re lower leg is bloody awful – needs to go back at least six inches to stop you hollowing your back and collapsing forward like that …’

  Beccy’s face tightened miserably. Since arriving at Haydown, she’d barely ridden at all. Her one and only lesson with Hugo, staged yesterday on an old schoolmaster that she couldn’t get on the bit, or even to go forwards, had been a disaster. He had walked off in a huff, saying she was unteachable. It was many years since she’d ridden at all, apart from the odd camel and mule trek, and it certainly wasn’t like riding a bike. Just hacking out left her massively saddle sore. Being asked to ride the yard’s top horse was like being asked to take a Formula One car for a spin around Brands Hatch after a decade spent on car-free Sark and just a few refresher lessons in a Nissan Micra. Yet she’d thought she was doing a pretty good job up until now.

  ‘Boy, do you need my help!’ Gus marched towards her to grab her knee and reposition it.

  Eyeing him warily Beccy quashed the urge to throw herself off the horse and run back to the house. Sitting on The Fox was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and she couldn’t bring herself to pop the bubble just yet, especially if she was going to get some much-needed tips that might mean Hugo could see past her rustiness.

  Turning away, Penny picked up Gus’s smouldering cigarette butt, which he had abandoned in the dirt underfoot, and carefully extinguished it before putting it in her pocket. He was always blunt to the point of rudeness, although he meant well enough. It was just his way. A decade earlier he had shouted at Tash in a similar fashion every day – when she wasn’t hacking up to Haydown to let Hugo shout at her – and she had gone on to the country’s senior elite squad before giving it all up to have babies.

  Glancing across at the house, its windows glowing in the sunshine, Penny braced herself to meet the second of those babies. It was a tough call.

  After seven years of expensive private fertility treatments that had put their marriage and finances under almost impossible strain, Penny and Gus had recently admitted defeat on their own hopes of children.

  If only conceiving babies was as easy as foals, she reflected. Boozy Floozy, Penny’s own favourite mare, was still competing with Gus while breeding like wildfire through embryo transfer.

  And then there was dear Tash, as fecund as a rabbit. Penny, meanwhile, appeared to be as barren as the Gobi.

  A voice broke into her consciousness, the accent reminding her rather thrillingly of Pierce Brosnan. ‘You ride much?’

  She turned to see the man with the very white teeth and very blue eyes regarding her thoughtfully.

  With his silly, scruffy clothes, which were probably the height of fashion, he looked faintly ludicrous, but experience had taught her that, generally, the more messily a man dressed the more money and class he had.

  ‘I ride a bit,’ she said stiffly. ‘You?’

  He shook his head, creasing his eyes and glancing thoughtfully into the distance. ‘I was never much good – had a crashing fall a couple of years ago and decided I was safer on the ground. I own a couple of event horses now.’

  ‘Good for you,’ she said in the clipped, chipper voice she used when talking to the wilder boys in the Pony Club. She turned to look at Fox, who was standing patiently with Tash’s stepsister on board while Gus stalked around her like Basil Fawlty, waving his arms around and telling her how to completely redress her position. ‘Who do you keep your horses with?’

  ‘Rory Midwinter. He just won the Scottish Open at Baloney Palace.’ The man was staring at her face closely for reaction.

  ‘Bloneigh Castle,’ she corrected kindly. ‘I heard Rory did a super job there. That augurs well. This chestnut chap of Hugo’s won there a couple of years ago, and look at him now – although quite frankly I think a gold-medal horse doesn’t deserve to find himself being treated like a riding-school plod. What was Hugo thinking, putting Beccy up? She’s pretty basic, which means Gus can’t resist interfering.’ She squinted through the sunlight to Fox, who was nodding off, while Gus slapped his own thighs and buttocks and gave his terminally dull spiel on seatbones. He looked rather like an excitable Bavarian dancer without the music or Lederhosen.

  Dillon followed her gaze. ‘He’s just fabulous.’

  ‘He’s pretty special,’ she agreed.

  ‘Have you been married long?’

  Realising that he was talking about Gus not the horse, she laughed. ‘Twenty years to the day. I was barely out of my teens; the first of my friends to marry and now one of the few not divorced.’

  ‘It’s your anniversary?’

  ‘Yah.’

  ‘Congratulations. Wow. Twenty years.’

  ‘A score, as they say.’

  ‘Wow.’ He whistled, as though it was some sort of record. Perhaps it was in his line of business; Penny assumed he had to be in show-biz or the Euro jetset.

  ‘Is Rory your boyfriend?’ she inquired politely.

  It was his turn to laugh. ‘You obviously don’t know him that well.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve taught plenty of dishy young eventing chaps like him that squire every female on the yard before coming out of the closet as spectacularly as a stallion charging down a lorry ramp. Most end up turning to dressage.’ She shuddered. ‘Such a loss to the sport, not to mention the gals.’

  ‘Lucky you bagged yourself a straight one.’

  ‘You think so?’ She creased her crow’s feet into the sun in a cross between a smile and a grimace, not looking at him. ‘Yah.’

  Dillon cocked a brow, amazed to find somebody in this day and age who still spoke like one of the Mitford sisters.

  Not taking her eyes from
the horse that was framed in front of them in sunlight so bright and luminous that his coat looked like molten caramel, she added, ‘He’s having an affair, of course.’

  A tiny smile flicked on and off her lips, like a punctuation mark.

  Dillon had no idea how to react. The country set baffled him. They were acutely, pathologically secretive about the oddest things, like whether they had a paid job, and yet they thought nothing of discussing adultery with absolute strangers.

  ‘Bad luck,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Yes, isn’t it? I bet he dresses better for her; he didn’t even change for lunch. Said his one suit smells so badly of mothballs it would have put us both off our grub.’

  They watched Gus for a few moments as he continued stalking around Fox on long, skinny legs, sending up puffs of arena sand and barking about ‘stickability’. He was wearing faded grey breeches, blue and green striped knee-high socks, battered paddock boots and an England rugby shirt with a large mud stain on the front. His creased, weathered face with its sharp, broken nose and hooded, faded green eyes was handsome in a craggy way, and he had wonderfully wild, leonine head of hair that was a bit thin on top. He was more Richard Harris in A Man Called Horse than Robert Redford in The Horse Whisperer, but nonetheless dashing.

  ‘Anyone you know?’ Dillon enquired politely.

  ‘Not yet.’

  Her acceptance baffled him, making him think of a mother standing on a touchline during a school rugby match and saying of her son, ‘Of course, he has attention deficit disorder, you know. Ransacks the house on a regular basis and shot the family cat last week. But we love him.’ These people were extraordinary. When Fawn had discovered that he’d slept with their nanny while she was away filming – a deeply regrettable one-off, and a clichéd cry for help brought about by booze, cocaine, loneliness and sheer lazy stupidity on his part – she had taken the kids straight to the States to live with her parents, not telling a soul what had happened. The press still hadn’t found out to this day. Only Dillon, Fawn and the nanny knew, the latter having been paid for her silence with a very big cheque from Fawn’s personal fortune. The girl had walked away from the marriage with almost as much as Dillon.