by Fiona Walker
‘How did Hugo take the news of your engagement?’ Zoe asked lightly.
‘Fine.’ Tash shrugged. ‘He just said: “I always thought you were a star-fucker, Tash, but I never had you down as the marrying type. How extraordinary.” He’s got a bet on with Stefan that it’ll last less than six months. Stefan bet ten – but that’s allowing for divorce proceedings.’
Stefan Johanssen was Hugo’s unnaturally tall, hell-raising Swedish working pupil who was only marginally more morally principled than his boss.
Zoe started to laugh, but shut up as soon as she saw Tash’s face.
‘Do you think we’ll last?’ Tash asked worriedly.
Zoe stretched across to squeeze her hand, which was still icy cold from working outside. ‘Of course you will, if you work at it and want it enough.’
Tash looked reassured, and pulled a face at Enid, who was lurking under the table and eyeing her nervously.
Zoe wished she could feel as sure as her words. As Tash heaved herself back up to resume work, pulling on that awful, ancient Puffa which looked as though a dog had slept on it for years, she could feel herself gradually filling up to the scalp with the icy chill of apprehension. She knew in her heart that she should have told Tash the truth; told her that no, she didn’t think she and Niall had a cat in hell’s chance – even given all of its nine lives.
But as she watched Tash gather up a sleeping Beetroot from Enid’s bed and wander happily outside, she knew that as ever she had pandered to Tash’s fragile self-confidence and told her a comforting lie. She just hoped that she’d be proved wrong about this one.
Most of the yard’s horses were being clipped that day, a long, tedious job that required everyone to take a turn. It was the second major clip of the winter, which meant that the horses took to the unfamiliar buzzing of the electric blades more easily than they had in the autumn, and that the lines left from their previous clip still stood out on their coats as a guide. Tash, who was a notoriously asymmetric stylist, was grateful for them as she started on Gus’s lazy old bay gelding, Fashion Victim, a gangly thoroughbred with a drooping lower lip and eyes that never fully opened, like a dope-smoking hippie. With one hind hoof propped up on its rim, he stood stock still throughout, looking like a bored hooker waiting on a pavement when trade was slow.
Clipping Snob, however, was a different matter. A thin-coated Selle Français with twitching skin and a brutal temper, he required the lightest of clips, but this took all of an hour and a half with both India and Ted clinging on to him for dear life as Tash tried to get anywhere near with the humming blades. His dark eyes rolling, red nostrils fluted and hooves stamping like a flamenco dancer in a sulk, he wasn’t frightened so much as determined to have some fun and make them work hard.
‘Can’t we dope him?’ Ted groaned as he was bitten for the third time.
Poor, injured Hunk was missing out on the fun as – confined to his stable all winter beneath a swathe of rugs – he didn’t need another trim; his coat was still short enough to last through until spring. Pulling bored faces and whinnying for attention, he watched as his stable mate cavorted around causing bedlam.
Tash was puce in the face and utterly exhausted by the time she’d finished. Waiting for the clippers to cool, she heard a loud revving in the lane and, moments later, Kirsty was wandering up the pitted drive, an overnight bag slung over her shoulder and two tired bags slung under her baby blue eyes. Her red hair was looking uncharacteristically tousled and three of her shirt buttons were undone, displaying a lot of bouncy freckled cleavage and no bra. Her face was still flushed from the heating inside Hugo’s car.
‘You clipping?’ she called out as she wandered past. ‘Could you make a start on Betty for me, Tash? I’ll take over when I’ve had a shower. Thanks, hen.’ She tottered inside.
‘Lazy cow,’ Ted commiserated, heading towards Betty Blue’s box. Kirsty’s scatty, steel-grey mare was already looking goggle-eyed with trepidation as she backed away from the half-door over which she had recently been admiring Snob’s antics.
Unable to face another battle, Tash told Ted to take a break and they headed through to the tack room to brew up a pot of tea.
‘That woman has such a cheek.’ Ted whistled as Tash filled the kettle at the chipped enamel sink. ‘She’s hardly ever here before eleven these days. I’m amazed Gus doesn’t fire her.’
‘She’s the only one around here with any sponsorship,’ Tash sighed. ‘He can’t afford to.’
‘Can’t you get Niall to sponsor you?’ Ted gave her a cheeky look, his broken nose wrinkling thoughtfully. ‘He must be worth a packet.’
But Tash shook her head. ‘His divorce settlement was diabolical – his first wife was practically bankrupt when they settled, so she gets half of everything he earns.’
She winced at the memory. Although married formally in a Catholic church in England, Niall and Lisette O’Shaughnessy had in fact been married first at a drive-in chapel in America. Both had seen it as a private joke at the time. When Lisette chose to divorce him in the States instead of England, however, she was not just after the favourable exchange rate – she knew that she could claim for maintenance, which as a childless woman she would undoubtedly have been refused on the other side of the pond. With one of the best divorce lawyers on her side, she took Niall apart. Desperate to get things over with quickly, Niall had allowed Lisette to divorce him on the grounds of his adultery, even though she had left him for another man long before he met Tash. At the time he’d said he was happy for her to take every penny he earned so long as he was rid of her. She’d walked away with a Lottery winner’s smile on her face.
‘Did she marry him for his money?’ Ted was examining his curly black hair in the cracked wall mirror now, scraping it back to see what he’d look like with a crew cut.
‘Nope.’ Tash plugged the kettle in. ‘But she divorced him for the alimony. It’s why he has to work in the States so much – they pay far better than anyone else.’ She started examining the mugs to locate the two with the fewest tannin stains.
‘Surely he could fork out for a few feed bills?’ Ted pulled back his chin, not believing Niall could be that skint.
‘He already owns Snob,’ she confessed.
‘He what?’ He was so amazed he stopped examining his hair for a moment and gaped at her.
‘I couldn’t afford to import him,’ Tash explained. ‘Snob was given to me by my step-father in France, you see. There was tons of red tape and Niall sorted it all out for me, with Hugo’s help. Snob had to be put in his name. It worked out simpler that way. We’ve never bothered to change it. Niall lent me so much money at the time that I thought it was fairer to keep Snob as his.’
‘At least his ex-wife doesn’t demand half his winnings,’ Ted sniffed, returning his attention to the mirror.
‘I’m sure she would if she knew.’ Tash peered into a chipped mug. ‘But she’d also have to pay half of his costs in return, and I can’t see her being too keen. Anyway, I’m sure she has no claim on him.’ Tash shuddered as she quickly dismissed the thought.
‘What does she do?’ Ted tried out a side parting.
‘She’s a producer.’ Tash rinsed out the mug. ‘Gets the backing for films – most of which she puts up herself, according to Niall.’
‘So he pays for her to work and not you? That’s a bit ripe, innit?’ He pulled a curly tendril over one eye.
‘Perhaps,’ Tash hedged, watching him as he preened. ‘D’you want me to cut your hair for you?’
Ted grinned. ‘Yeah, why not? Fetch those clippers in here, would you?’
Kirsty almost fainted with shock when she re-emerged from the farm half an hour later to find Ted being clipped instead of her dizzy grey mare.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ she gasped.
‘Tash is clipping my wings,’ Ted laughed cheerfully, his black mop now shorn to a stubbly half-inch all over. ‘To stop my hair being flyaway.’
Six
* * *
SALLY COULD EASILY ANTICIPATE one of Matty’s black glooms. It would start with a general restlessness, a nit-picking inability to keep still as he wandered around the house finding fault with the smallest things – a pile of unpaired socks on the kitchen table, a packet of breakfast cereal put back into the larder empty, a final reminder that still hadn’t been paid. He would quickly progress from these to more serious issues – Sally’s over-zealous shopping, the children’s reactionary teachers, the whingeing neighbour. Soon he would move on to the personal – their flaccid sex life, financial troubles, Sally’s ghastly friends, his father’s bullying during his childhood, Sally’s spoiling of the children. Finally his black gloom would allow itself indulgently to encompass Big Issues – world poverty, the fall of socialism, the arming of volatile states, and Why Were We Put On This Earth In The First Place? More often than not, he blamed Sally specifically for all of these things.
Usually Matty could only contemplate such enormity for a few days before the black gloom played itself out and, after a brief spate of guilty penitence at his bloody-mindedness, he became his sweet, distracted self once more.
But this time the black gloom was taking a long, long time to lift, and Sally wished she was as good at anticipating its demise as its rise.
He had been sulky since Christmas, positively malcontent since Tash and Niall’s announcement on Boxing Day, and utterly insufferable since New Year’s Eve, which they had spent with Sally’s rather weird parents – a pair of ageing hippies who lived very comfortably in deepest Dorset, funding an affluent, if unconventional, lifestyle from their burgeoning shares. They represented everything Matty loathed. They were unpunctual slobs and he was a control freak; they adored junk television and the Daily Mail; Matty was an appalling intellectual snob and considered the Guardian grossly sensationalist these days. They loved the Mamas and the Papas, while Matty considered blues to be the only respectable strain of modern popular music. He had done little during the stay to conceal his contempt for their taste.
To make things worse, he had now decided to work from home for a week and was driving Sally up the wall. Or, to be more accurate, into the cellar.
She would have never volunteered to clear the dreaded thing out had it not been for Matty’s ever-prowling presence elsewhere in the house.
Since they had moved into the sprawling, tatty Richmond town-house four years earlier, Sally had ventured down to the cellar fewer than a dozen times. It was damp, dark, smelly and inhabited by an extraordinary army of spiders, wood lice, earwigs, silverfish and, occasionally, rodents. At this time of year it was also chillingly cold.
Most of the space – which stretched for the entire width and almost half the breadth of the house – was taken up with their old furniture, Matty’s old files and film stock, and a great deal of rubbish left behind by the previous owners. When, in a moment of misplaced generosity, Alexandra had arranged to have their house completely redecorated while they were on holiday a couple of years earlier, the impeccably tasteful interior designer had taken one look at Matty’s and Sally’s amassed collectibles and ordered them struck from her sight. Now the cellar was host to several enormous bean-bags, Habitat shelf units, a vast number of raffia plant-pot holders and an old dentist’s chair on which Matty had once brooded over the meaning of life.
Alone in the cellar, the sounds of John Lee Hooker and Matty’s muffled footsteps seeping from the rafters overhead, Sally sank down into the dentist’s chair and gazed up at the thin girder of light cutting its way through the dust on the high quarter-windows. Through them she could just make out the collection of weeds in the narrow wall beds outside and the shadow of the railings to the street.
‘D’you want a coffee?’ Matty yelled down from the top of the stairs to the kitchen lobby.
‘No, thanks.’ Sally knew for a fact that they had none in the house. She had pilfered the last spoonful for a hasty half-mug while Matty was in the shower that morning.
‘What on earth are you doing down there?’
‘Oh, just having a bit of a tidy up.’ She shivered, pulling her thick mohair cardigan around her.
‘Tidying up? Are you mad? The house is a tip – why don’t you tidy up here instead?’
‘I’m looking for something.’ Sally wished he’d go away and leave her in peace. Even here she couldn’t escape from his nagging.
‘Looking for what exactly?’ He was halfway down the stairs now. Sally could make out his shadow curling menacingly around the far wall in a very Hitchcockian fashion.
‘Oh – just things.’
‘Christ!’ He stomped back to the kitchen. ‘I bloody give up.’
Sally huddled tighter in the chair and wondered whether to cry.
She’d been crying a lot lately, often for no real reason. The tiniest thing would trigger it off – getting her finger caught in the door of the dish washer, accidentally killing a spider when she was trying to throw it out humanely, a sad song coming on the radio, Linus crying – and cry he often did now that his teeth were coming through. At the root of her tears, she knew, were the first barbed scratches of the horns of a dilemma, but she wasn’t sure that she was willing to face up to it right now.
What she needed was a real, close friend to discuss it with, but she was starting to realise just how shallow her friendships had become. During the years of her marriage her circle of friends had shifted and changed almost imperceptibly. The small, merry band of intimate confidantes she had once so relied upon – some old school and college cronies, a few close associates from her teaching days – had steadily drifted away as their lives no longer paralleled hers. They were either unmarried or, if they were in stable relationships, they had no children. And, while she was surrounded by nappies and lunch-boxes, washing and discarded toys, they had neat, minimalist houses with the latest high-tech stereo equipment to play all those CDs that their highly paid jobs allowed them to splash out on. They were free to meet up when she wasn’t, they had great jobs, good clothes, more money, fewer sleepless nights – more fun, it seemed. Sally guessed she bored them with her out-of-date clothes, lack of street-wise nous, endless talk of children, nursery schools and baby-sitters. She was paranoid that they all talked about how dull she was behind her back.
Increasingly, she had peopled her world with other young mothers who, although scared of Matty and rather intimidated by Sally herself, were easier to feel comfortable with than her childless friends. They sometimes bored her with their bovine joy in motherhood, but she rather relished the fact that she often led in conversations, keeping them in stitches with her worldly gossip about Matty’s hectic life producing documentaries and her other racy friends whom she still occasionally saw, especially Niall. Yet when it came to a crisis, she would lose far too much face by admitting it to them, and if she did, she suspected that their response would amount to nothing but embarrassed platitudes.
She needed someone who both respected and understood her. And she felt that she’d hidden so much of herself away of late that there were very few left who would recognise her voice of fear if it spoke out.
The person she missed most in the world right now was Niall’s ex-wife, Lisette. When Sally had met Matty, he, Niall and Lisette had been the holy trinity of cosmopolitan style, wit and hell-raising charm as far as she was concerned. With Sally on board, they had made an invincible foursome: Niall, the dashing, romantic, daring leader; Matty, the clever, sensitive, idealistic foil; Lisette, the sexy, dangerous, funny siren; and Sally, the laughing, easy-going, caring diplomat. Together they had held endless raucous dinner parties, holidayed on the cheap all over the globe, attended every film, play and party they could get into without paying and talked out their wild dreams and ideals late into the night. Sally had adored Lisette for all her abrasive, aggressive ambition. She could cut steel on her acid humour, but she was astute, practical and incredibly incisive. And for someone often obsessed with blazing through life with blinkered disregard, she was a remarkably good
listener. Sally and Lisette had become firm friends, talking for hours on the phone every day, meeting for gossipy lunches and sharing the most gruesome of secrets. It was from Lisette that Sally had developed her taste for shopping.
When Lisette had walked out on Niall to further her career with a dilettante Hollywood brat who had almost ruined it instead, the solid, four-square union had quickly become a three-legged horse. Niall had fallen apart, and as a consequence Matty and Sally’s marriage had undergone tremendous strain. They had both tried valiantly to help him keep life and soul together, but the split between their greatest friends had merely served to highlight the widening fault-line in their own relationship. It had taken a lot of effort and talking to keep their marriage alive and kicking amidst the fall out. Niall was now back on an even keel and, to Sally’s mind, utterly suited to Tash. But Matty had severe doubts about the union, and Niall and he no longer had the same close friendship they’d once shared.
Until recently, Sally had assumed that Lisette was still trying to get her off-on career as a producer re-started in the States.
Then, a few weeks ago, a promotional postcard had arrived on Sally’s doorstep, hyping a low-budget British film starring some very classy young English actors along with a couple of fading American names. On the reverse side was a neat little logo featuring two director’s chairs tipped together at angles with the words SLEEPING PARTNERS FILMS encircling them. A very brief, almost illegible note had been scribbled beneath: ‘Back in London. This is my work number. Let’s do a two-bottle lunch very soon. Merry Christmas.’ There had been no signature. Flipping the card over, Sally had scanned the list of credits underneath the promotional still. Alongside the name of the director and the leading stars was ‘Producer – Lisette Norton’. It was her working name – her maiden one.
