by Fiona Walker
When she looked back at Hugo, he was smiling his most mocking smile, a curious look of concentration on his face.
Clutching tightly on to the bottle for support, Tash realised to her horror that he was moving even closer to her. For a terrifying moment his breath traced her cheek and she thought that he was going to kiss her. But he merely stretched up a hand and removed something from her hair.
‘I shouldn’t think this’ll improve your chances, darling,’ he said, dropping a pearl into the champagne bottle before turning away. ‘Kirsty, darling! There you are! Now, I know you’re practically a married woman, but humour an envious bastard with a New Year’s kiss.’
In front of most of the eventing circle, none of whom could guess at their steamy affair, he drew Kirsty into his arms and planted a very respectable, if rather too long, closed-mouth kiss on her plump lips. Over his shoulder, Tash was appalled to see one of Kirsty’s glittering blueberry eyes winking at her.
‘Happy New Year, Tash!’ Rufus lurched up, absolutely bombed out of his mind on vodka, his yellow shirt covered with pieces of quiche and party streamers.
Before Tash could respond, he had landed a huge, wet kiss on her gaping mouth and, even worse, inserted a warm, fat tongue into her mouth.
‘You’re a fucking great shnogger, Tash,’ he hiccuped, backing away and reeling towards the downstairs lavatory from which, seconds later, came the unmistakable sound of retching.
Suddenly it was Auld Lang Syne time. Grabbed by Gus – with a far more warm and welcome New Year’s peck on the mouth – Tash was propelled into the throng in the sitting room to link arms and sing. But luck was still not on her side as she found herself crossing her arms and clutching on to the small, manicured paw of Kirsty on one side and the damp, sweaty pudginess of Ted’s fingerlock on the other. His gelled hair was all over the place now.
‘Been looking for you all night,’ he hissed into her ear as she tried to sing along with the out-of-time, out-of-tune rabble. ‘Hear Niall’s gone away again – give me a call if you need a plug re-wiring.’
Tash rolled her eyes and tipped her head as far away from his stale breath as she could manage. Unfortunately this necessitated practically necking with Kirsty.
‘No Niall tonight then?’ she asked rather regretfully.
Still wrestling with ‘sip a drink of kindness yet’, Tash shook her head with another of her stiff little smiles. They were coming in remarkably handy tonight.
At last no one could remember any more words and Tash, released from her double half-nelson, escaped back to the hall, which was practically deserted. She found Hugo’s bottle of champagne still sitting on the bookshelf where she had left it and, grabbing it by the neck, snuggled up by the familiar coats for a long, bolstering swig.
‘You all right, darling?’ Zoe asked as she swept from sitting room to kitchen, weighed down by trays. ‘Happy New Year.’
‘Blast!’ Penny was following her with fingers full of glasses to be refilled. ‘I forgot to post bloody Hugo outside to bring in the coal and the coins. I bet you the first stranger across the threshold will be that faggot Godfrey Pelham, and he’s blue-rinsed, not dark. Plus he’s so mean he never brings booze or grub with him.’
When the doorbell rang, everyone ignored it. No one who was welcome inside Lime Tree Farm would ever think to ring the doorbell. There was an unwritten rule at the farm that the doorbell was the domain of the VAT man and the bailiffs, giving Penny and Gus enough warning to hide. Everyone else just walked in.
‘Happy New Year, sweetheart.’ An eventing mate kissed Tash on the cheek. ‘Perhaps this is the year you’ll be capped, huh?’ He drifted away towards the sitting room.
Tash was halfway down the bottle and perking up. She was just contemplating nipping upstairs to borrow an outfit from Penny and steal a bit of Zoe’s make-up when Hugo the Cruel stalked malevolently up to reclaim his champagne.
Saying nothing to him, Tash thrust the bottle into his hand and moved away, but Hugo put up an arm to block her.
‘Listen, I’m sorry I was a bit heavy earlier,’ he said, not sounding particularly sorry at all. ‘Penny’s just told me about Niall’s abrupt departure. Had no idea that was why you didn’t want to come out. In fact, I’d not realised he’d been in England at all.’
‘We did spend Christmas together.’ Tash sighed. Sometimes Hugo could be ruthlessly self-centred; it was possible he’d even forgotten that she and Niall were still an item.
‘Did you?’ Hugo looked bored.
Realising that this was as much of an apology as she was likely to receive, and bearing in mind the ticking off Zoe had given her, Tash mustered yet another stiff smile. Any minute now and the wind would change, leaving her looking like Virginia Bottomley on Question Time for the rest of her life.
The doorbell was ringing again, and once again it was ignored.
‘Have a good Christmas?’ Tash humoured him, taking in the deepness of the tan again and deciding it looked a bit patchy and flaking. He was so vain, she was surprised he didn’t use moisturiser.
‘Pretty horrific.’ Hugo’s blue eyes narrowed tiredly at the memory. ‘I stayed with Jim and Gail Reebok in their yard in New South Wales. Their little brats run around the stables like rats. No bloody discipline.’
‘See much of Kirsty?’ Tash asked casually, trying not to smile.
The blue eyes – even more searing when framed by golden-brown skin – crinkled at the corners for a moment before going dead-pan.
‘A bit,’ he answered, just as casually, then took a long swig of champagne.
The doorbell was ringing non-stop now.
‘All right, all right! We surrender! I’m coming!’ Penny yelled wandering into the hall still clutching a bottle of cheap plonk.
‘Well, I’d better mingle.’ Tash, feeling she had done her duty for Zoe’s sake, looked around for a handy group to chat to.
‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’ Hugo was still barring her way with a long arm, his green sweater pushed up to the elbow to show a lot of muscular, conker-brown arm.
‘Forgotten wha—?’ Before she could finish, his mouth closed on hers.
It was a brief, not entirely friendly kiss, but its effect still took both of them by surprise.
And Niall caught every second.
Framed in the doorway wearing a vast quilted coat, his nose puce from the cold, shoulders and hair dusted with snow, he looked both dishevelled and unspeakably handsome. His hands were full of Toblerone bars, claret bottles, loose change and lumps of coal stolen from one of the outhouses.
‘Flights from Heathrow have all been cancelled because of the snow,’ he announced with a big, unsteady grin. ‘They kept us waiting hours at check-in then told us to go home. Happy New Year!’
‘Niall!’ Tash bounded across the hall, long legs flying as she leaped ecstatically into his arms.
Niall found he couldn’t bring himself to look at Hugo.
It wasn’t the kiss he minded. Everyone kissed everyone else on New Year’s Eve. No, it was the guilty way Tash had snatched herself away when she’d caught sight of him, the gleaming blaze of something midway between fear and lust in her eyes.
Even as she surged forward, almost weeping with delighted excitement at his unexpected return, Niall’s heart barely lifted. She was wearing unspeakable clothes, her hair was all over the place, her tights laddered and full of road grit. But her cheeks glowed, her eyes shone and she looked utterly beautiful. And, deep within his heart, he suspected that her radiance was not the result of his return.
Five
* * *
HENRIETTA, CONTRARY TO ALEXANDRA’S hype, was not wildly keen on the idea of orchestrating Tash’s wedding from her side of the Channel. She had enough of a task keeping her own two daughters’ lives within her grasp, without the added pressure of dabbling in the rather unconventional one of her step-daughter’s. It wasn’t as if Tash was a daughter that James had any particular time for. Tash was ludicrously close to her m
other, and Henrietta sensed that James was somewhat intimidated by the link. In truth, she herself was too. Both she and James found it far easier to accommodate Sophia, who was glamorous, great to show off at parties and led a far more conventional life. Sophia, it had to be noted, also had far less time for her mother’s bohemian antics than Tash.
Six years earlier, newly married to her former boss, Henrietta had willingly involved herself in the marriage of James’s elder daughter to the rather raffish and supremely eligible Ben Meredith, now Viscount Guarlford. It had been one of those stressful but rewarding labours of love that the second wife feels obliged and gratified to take on. In those days Henrietta had a lot to prove to the back-biting gossips who hinted that James had only married his secretary in order to offset her against tax. The prospect of arranging Sophia’s jet-set society wedding had terrified her, but thanks to weeks of sleepless nights and triple-checking, the whole thing had come off marvellously, ensuring her Sophia’s devotion ever since. The fact that Alexandra – herself just remarried and wrapped up in her young toddler – had been involved to only the scantiest degree smoothed Henrietta’s passage immeasurably. But Tash’s marriage was a different matter.
Whereas Sophia had been James’s favourite, Tash was something of an embarrassment to him. She in turn had always been perfectly warm and polite to Henrietta, but there was a rather unflattering lack of interest emanating from West Berkshire towards Tash’s childhood home east of Bracknell. Unlike Sophia, Tash never telephoned for a chat or invited her father’s new family over for a day in Fosbourne Ducis. Nor did she ever let them know where she would be eventing so that they could troop out to support her (not that James would really entertain the idea), or let slip any pieces of film gossip she had picked up through Niall. Henrietta, who was somewhat star-struck by Niall (at thirty-six he was closer to her forty years, after all, than Tash’s twenty-seven), found this last negligence particularly galling.
When Henrietta’s younger daughter, Beccy, had announced her intention to enter eventing professionally, Henrietta had braced herself nervously and telephoned Tash to ask her for lunch, adding that she’d really appreciate it if Tash could give some advice to Beccy. Tash had apologised profusely, but explained that it was the middle of the season and she simply hadn’t the time.
Henrietta had felt absurdly snubbed.
The resentment had, to Henrietta’s shame, been allowed to brood and bubble over the past six months, to the point where she now positively disliked Tash.
To add further to Henrietta’s discomfort, the first two weeks of the new year brought a little flurry of postcards from Alexandra. It seemed to be one of James’s first wife’s favoured means of communication; a three-line scribble jotted on the back of a picture of the Loire Valley would arrive just a day after a single line jotted on a Mondrian print; the next day a reproduced watercolour of a wine bottle would be hiding in the Frenches’ post box along with the usual credit card bills and circulars.
After a very bad financial slump in the mid nineties, James’s finance company was at last out of the red and starting to fight its way back into competition with its larger rivals. But they were still extremely cautious with money. Many of the luxuries that Henrietta had delighted in when first married had now gone – the flashy cars, first-class flights, three-week holidays, designer clothes and weekends away. Henrietta’s girls still went to fee-paying schools, but this was more to do with an investment fund which Henrietta’s late father had set up than any contribution from James. He begrudgingly helped finance Beccy’s eventing hopes, but had it been Emily who wanted to pursue the sport, Henrietta suspected it would have been different. However hard she tried to balance things out, it was clear to all that the relationship between James and his younger step-daughter was far healthier than that with Henrietta’s troublesome elder.
Even today, Henrietta had spent most of the morning trying to locate Emily and her boyfriend, Six Pack, who had still not re-emerged from a raucous New Year party in Devon. That morning, three of their mutual friends had poled up the drive clutching ruck-sacks, claiming that they had been invited to stay for the weekend, a plan of which Henrietta had not even been warned let alone asked for permission. Lumping around the house in their slightly embarrassed, messy student way, they got under her feet and kept feeding crisps to the dogs. Henrietta found them very polite but extremely difficult to accommodate.
Consequently when the phone rang, she snatched it off the hook and reeled out the number with unaccustomed abruptness.
There was a short, confused pause at the other end before a soft, tentative voice spoke.
‘Henrietta?’
‘Yes,’ she snapped, watching as one of the lolling students ambled over to the fridge and brazenly removed three cans of beer, nodding at her amiably.
‘It’s Niall here – Tash’s Niall.’
Despite the miles of telephone cable separating them, Henrietta blushed as though given an unexpected peck on the cheek by Imran Khan.
‘Niall!’ She inched her way out of sight of the students. ‘How lovely to hear from you. How are you?’
‘Fine – a bit stressed,’ he apologised. ‘I’m just about to set out to the airport.’
‘Are you heading to Scotland already?’ Henrietta knew that he was due to start shooting some epic ‘Celtic history’ movie in the Highlands soon, a fact she had gleaned from Sophia, not Tash.
‘America,’ Niall explained. ‘Just for two days. Listen, Tash asked me to call.’
‘Oh, yes?’ Henrietta would have felt it rather rude that Tash couldn’t bring herself to call personally were it not for the fact that she was talking to a far preferable deputy.
‘She’s had to dash to meet the vet – one of her horses has a bad tendon that’s gone puffy or something. Listen, are you free on the third Saturday in February? I forget the exact date.’
‘Think so.’ Henrietta was blushing more and more deeply. The sound of his voice was infuriatingly unsettling – deep, mellifluous and lilting; it should really only be allowed loose on the phone network after the nine o’clock watershed.
‘Well, it’s my one free weekend in England, so it is. Can you come over here for lunch? We’ve a great local restaurant I can book us into.’
Henrietta thought briefly and guiltily about a charity committee meeting she had arranged for that day, and then, mentally concocting a whopping lie about one of the girl’s having ’flu as an excuse, said that of course she’d be delighted to go.
After she had arranged the time and directions, Henrietta rang off and danced around the flagstone lobby. Then, to the astonishment of the students, she offered them all enormous gin and tonics.
‘Everyone’s so madly in love with Niall,’ Tash grumbled to Zoe the next day. ‘It’s not fair. Either they envy me like mad, or they simply don’t think I’m good enough for him, or they smile that secret smile that says they’re certain it won’t last. Hardly anyone’s congratulated me yet.’
‘I have.’
‘Only after questioning whether I was doing the right thing. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much how everyone has reacted.’
Zoe placed their requisite strong black coffees on the table and settled in front of her before speaking, kind blue eyes drinking her in. ‘It’s only because we love you both and care about you both and know how hopelessly harebrained you both are. We just want to know that you’re not both doing it because you’re being pressurised into it.’
‘Of course we’re being pressurised into it,’ Tash sighed. ‘But the whole point is that neither of us mind – we’re used to being bullied into things, it’s the only way either of us knows how to live.’
She glanced at her watch. It was still before seven and hollow with icy darkness outside. She’d spent most of the night awake as she always did when Niall had just gone away, plus she had been worrying about Hunk who was still not trotting out levelly and looked likely to be out of action for the first few weeks of the year.
‘Kirsty not up yet?’ she yawned.
‘Not back actually.’ Zoe raised a blonde eyebrow. ‘Sneaked off for a session at stud last night and clearly can’t walk straight enough to get back here.’
Tash winced. ‘Hugo’s such a sod.’ She shook her head. ‘I thought Richie was coming out here in a couple of weeks?’
Richie was Kirsty’s boyfriend from Australia. None of the occupants of Lime Tree Farm had met him yet, but photos of his butch, bull-necked person littered every surface and pin-board, more often than not featuring a girder-thick hairy arm draped around Kirsty’s slender shoulders. When she had first arrived back in England, Kirsty’s every sentence had been prefixed with ‘Richie thinks’ or ‘Richie says’. Nowadays it was more often ‘Hugo thinks’.
‘My guess is there’ll be fireworks when he does stagger off the red eye, poor chap.’ Zoe scratched her chin unhappily at the prospect. Outside they could hear Penny telling Ted off for smoking a fag in the hay-barn. He complained loudly that it was the only way to keep warm.
‘Do you think Hugo’ll kick up a stink then?’
She shook her head. ‘More likely Kirsty will. She’s far more in love with Hugo than she wants to admit. Hugo being Hugo, he’ll just get a kick out of the whole secrecy thing. It’s Kirsty who’ll crack under the strain.’
‘Poor Richie.’
‘Sounds like a prize idiot to me.’ Zoe stood up to fetch her toast which had just popped out of the rusty toaster and on to the plate drainer. ‘If he hasn’t guessed what’s going on then he must be pretty thick. Rumour has it Kirsty hardly saw him over Christmas. Too busy sloping off to meet up with Hugo in the bush or something.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Penny heard it from Ted who heard it from Franny.’
‘The bird in the bush telegraph then.’
Outside, Gus was leading out one of the horses to turn it out into the floodlit menage for a roll. They could hear its hooves sliding over the frozen cobbles, and Penny warning him that the sand in the menage was as hard as rock.
