by Fiona Walker
‘Rubbish!’ she railed. ‘Hugo can be bloody mean-spirited and self-indulgent, but he’s got some compassion.’
‘Admittedly he treats his dogs better than Huntingdon, but I ’clare, they have everything else in common.’
‘Well, Huntingdon would have been okay if he hadn’t had such depraved friends and such a pious, unloving wife,’ Tash bristled. ‘He adores her in the book, but she shrugs him off every time he wants to grope her.’
‘Which is more than can be said for you,’ growled Niall, pulling her into a clinch.
The one thing that had to be said for this Niall-as-Huntingdon character, Tash realised, was that he was irresistibly sexy, despite the rather off-putting sideburns that the director had insisted he grow. She loved the way he couldn’t keep his hands off her and made it so obvious what a turn-on he found her. Their sex life owed everything to Anne Brontë right now.
‘I’d have quite gone for Huntingdon,’ Tash admitted. ‘Gambling, womanising and all – he just needed the love of a good, racy woman up to his rakish Regency ways.’
‘At least he has a sense of fun.’ Niall started to undress her with his teeth amidst much shrieking. ‘I think I’m beginning to rather like the old sod.’
So much so, Tash noticed, that he was living life in his guise. Gradually, Niall became more and more demanding and dictatorial, less sympathetic. Increasingly, he was making no secret of the fact that he resented her time away competing. He helped less in the forge, drank even more than ever, and his sex drive shot through the roof. Not only was he dragging her off to bed earlier each night, but he was flirting more unashamedly than ever. No one was safe as he used his towering charms on everyone from Penny, Denise in the Olive Branch, his co-star Imogen Glenn, Godfrey in the local shop, Zoe, and even Kirsty, who was back from Scotland and throwing herself into her work to compensate for not throwing herself on to Hugo. Worse still, the dreaded Minty was playing the demonstrative, adulterous friend, Annabella Wilmot, with whom Huntingdon has a wild affair. Tash became accustomed to dropped calls and enigmatic faxes which she was certain were from the infatuated actress. Only Niall’s derisory indifference to them saved her from the jealous demons. He was living the part to the hilt.
‘What’s got into him lately?’ Zoe laughed one night when they had all been drinking in the Olive Branch. ‘He seems to have had a new lease of life.’
‘Character acting,’ sighed Tash.
‘Well, I’m not sure I’d give him a character reference. He’s jolly headstrong at the moment.’
‘D’you think so?’ Tash looked to the bar where he was flirting with one of Denise’s daughters. ‘I rather like it. He’s more fun.’
He was difficult, argumentative and selfish, but Tash found him far less withdrawn than he had been all year. Together, they started to laugh again, play silly games, dare to be sarcastic or confrontational, and she had to admit the sex was great. Even Beetroot called an uneasy truce, cowed by his new found domination. In a moment of excitable master-and-faithful-hound role-play Niall even spent a day off from filming teaching her to sit, stay, beg and shake hands.
He was so delighted with his conquests that he insisted on showing Tash as soon as she walked through the door, returning whacked from a competition the other side of Windsor. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that Beetroot knew every one of the tricks he had ‘taught’ her already.
‘I walked up to show Zoe earlier,’ he told her. ‘And she kept laughing at me. Can’t think why. I said I’d give Rufus a couple of driving lessons if I get the time.’
‘In what?’ Tash giggled. ‘The design classic?’
‘Of course. It’s the greatest car ever created, so it is.’
‘Its gear-stick is above the steering wheel,’ she pointed out. ‘And it has no clutch.’
‘So? If he can drive that, he can drive anything.’
Tash hugged him for being so hopelessly gorgeous.
Glowing with radiance, she found herself winning everything in sight. Hunk, who was growing stronger every day, couldn’t put an oiled hoof wrong and was looking increasingly likely to go to Badminton after all, for which he was still entered. Even Snob was starting to come into hand again, seemingly bowled along by her ebullient mood, although he was always ratty and difficult after a ‘driving lesson’ with Penny.
‘Do you have to teach him?’ Tash asked. ‘I’m quite happy with a hired Bentley and a few ribbons.’
‘Nonsense,’ she pooh-poohed. ‘He’s doing brilliantly. He’s quite used to shafts now.’
Tash, who had picked up a new line in double-entendres from Niall, stifled a giggle.
‘Gus long-reined him in full harness twice this week without a single wobbly,’ Penny went on regardless. ‘And I have to push on somewhat as we’ve only a couple of months to go.’
That scared Tash. Even more so when Henrietta drove to Fosbourne Ducis the following weekend with a stack of invitations, stamped envelopes and various proposed guest lists which she and Alexandra had concocted during their innumerable wedding-plan phone conversations. Although the original plan had been to hold the reception in the grounds of Fosbourne Holt House, where the wedding ceremony was being conducted, Gus was now rather magnanimously suggesting that it be held in the untended gardens at the farm.
‘Too mean to get a taxi home,’ Penny had moaned, dreading the litter on the lawn.
‘Rubbish!’ Gus had railed. ‘I’m too mean to buy them a decent present – this is it.’
Henrietta would rather have gone for the glamour of the stately home and its grand lawns, but at least this way saved James and Pascal a few hundred pounds and she expected the numbers would have to be kept quite low too.
‘Now there are bound to be bags of people you want to add from the eventing and acting worlds, plus friends and locals and what-not.’ She smiled at Tash and Niall when she finally cornered them together in the forge. She noticed fondly that they had that new-love inability to keep their hands off one another.
‘Sure,’ Tash giggled, not really listening because, unseen by Henrietta, Niall had his fingers between her legs underneath the stone-topped table and was doing quite miraculous things with them.
‘But your mother and I have tried to work out most of the family for you to save time.’ Henrietta cleared her throat and went on, ‘We really have left this terribly late, you know. Now, I was a bit woolly on your family, Niall, so you’ll need to help me out on the cousins etcetera. Plus telling me who you want to come along to the ceremony, or just reception.’
‘Fine.’ Niall went on to reel off a list of names so long that it sounded as though he was role-calling the entire cast of Ben Hur. All the time his fingers played delightfully with Tash. He even had the nerve at one point to fumble for a cigarette with his left hand and then ask her to light it for him.
Given the job of looking up the addresses in Niall’s falling-apart Filofax, Tash kept writing them down entirely wrong on the envelopes. At one point she realised that she’d written ‘Oh Christ yes’ instead of a London post code.
‘We’ll have to pare these down.’ Henrietta gaped at the list nervously afterwards.
‘Oh, sure – most of my family won’t be able to come over anyhow.’ Niall shrugged. ‘Now, I’d better give you the names of my friends too.’
Henrietta almost fainted, her pen seeming to smoke as she scribbled them down. Getting bored of writing envelopes, Tash lolled against Niall, indulging him in a long, slow finger massage to the back of the neck while she grinned rather inanely at Henrietta.
Her own list, although long by her standards, was pathetically scant compared with Niall’s.
‘Well, I think we need to lose at least two-thirds, don’t you?’ gulped Henrietta, looking down at her three-page list and imagining James’s reaction if she went home with the news that he was footing half the bill for a reception for four hundred actors, Irish Catholics, starving artists, rowdy eventers, and Tash’s old school friends as well as
his first wife’s awful family.
Deciding who should attend the civil ceremony was easy, as the long hall at Fosbourne Holt House would only fit in one hundred.
The big marquee reception in the Moncrieffs’ garden, however, was a nightmare to write a list for.
Tash ended up having a blazing row with Niall about it.
She was even more alarmed when he started mulling over who was to be his best man, tossing around the names of several wild men of films, including the self-proclaimed bastion of all ‘lads’, the comic Rory Franks, who had only recently been all over the papers for getting a fifteen-year-old girl pregnant. He was a well-publicised alcoholic and coke addict with whom Niall had once had a tumultuous friendship before backing off, announcing him too dangerous.
‘But I thought Matty was going to be your best man?’ Tash tackled him after Henrietta left.
They were heating up an M and S ready-meal in the little kitchen and had been arguing so animatedly that both had failed to notice that the microwave wasn’t plugged in.
He looked at her thoughtfully. ‘I’ve asked him, yes. But he wasn’t very keen.’
‘What do you mean, not keen?’ Tash laughed, turning her back on him to get the meal out of the microwave. ‘He’s my brother.’
Niall cleared his throat uncomfortably, suddenly putting his arms around her and resting his chin on her shoulder so that she seemed to have four hands grappling at the rock-hard meal.
‘Not keen means he refused point blank.’ Niall nuzzled her neck, eager for the row to be curtailed. ‘He says he won’t be seen to condone a marriage which he doesn’t believe will work.’
‘He what?’ Tash put the plastic tray of food on to a work surface and, with Niall still draped over her shoulders like a shawl, started to try to hack the still-frozen contents apart, too abstracted to notice.
‘It’s what he said.’ Niall’s lips were eating up her neck now. ‘I’m going to stay up there a couple of days next week. I’ll try to bring him round, huh?’
Tash chiselled a piece of frozen courgette out of the tray with a knife.
‘In order to do that,’ she said hollowly, ‘you’ll have to knock him out first.’
‘I’m not hungry.’ Niall slid his hands over hers and pulled them away from her frosty forage. ‘Let’s go to bed. I’m determined that today, at least, you are going to ride me more often than your damned horses.’
As the pressure of the early starts got to him, he spent several nights a week staying with Matty and Sally in Richmond, which meant the driver could collect him an hour later each day. Whenever he returned home to the forge afterwards, Tash found him distanced and tetchy. It took several hours before he was back to normal. She blamed it on the pressure of work, and having to adjust from the pampering on set to the do-it-yourself relaxation of the village. It never occurred to her that the reason he seemed detached was as a result of talking to her own brother.
Twenty-Three
* * *
SALLY WAS NOT GETTING on at all well with Matty. She had tried to ease his load by enrolling Tor in a local nursery for three afternoons a week and arranging for a neighbour to look after Linus most mornings, but Matty remained sullen and uncommunicative.
He thoroughly disapproved of her renewed friendship with Lisette and made no secret of the fact. As she devoted more and more time to mugging up on the film industry and helping Lisette set up the first May shoot for Four Poster Bed, he had become increasingly detached and sulky, burying himself in work. That was not in itself a bad thing as he’d done precious little of it in previous months, coasting along on the odd bit of project consultation without getting a good new film of his own underway.
But with work came the age-old, brooding resentment that he was still trapped producing low-budget commissions from satellite channels and, if he was lucky, Network television, whereas Lisette was now whooping it up within the luxurious echelons of the film industry.
‘The British film industry is a charity, Matty,’ Sally protested, stealing a line that Lisette was always using.
‘Not if it’s co-produced with Americans, it isn’t,’ he sneered, ‘which is where Lisette’s little piece of porno trash is coming from.’ He liked to refer to the film as some sort of blue movie because, stealing a look at the script when he thought Sally wasn’t looking, the only bit he had managed to read was a rampant sex scene between Niall and an as yet uncast actress whom Lisette wanted to be American but the casting director and director, David Wheaton, wanted to be a Brit.
‘And what exactly is your job on this film?’ he wanted to know.
‘I’m assisting Lisette.’
‘So you’re the production assistant? That’s quite a responsible role.’
‘No, not that. I’m just sort of helping out.’ She wished she knew herself, Lisette was being infuriatingly vague about it, just promising lots of fun and a fat salary. So far all Sally had done was sit around Sleeping Partners’ plush Marylebone office, gossiping and getting in the way.
‘You spend more time lunching with her than working with her.’ Matty was deliberately scathing.
‘I came up with that publicity idea,’ she pointed out hotly.
‘Which Lisette hasn’t taken up, thank God.’
‘She’s working on it!’ Sally protested furiously. ‘We’re drawing up a proposal.’ She thought that sounded sufficiently grand. Emboldened, she added, ‘And I’m doing a lot of PR liaising for her.’
‘But why does she need you on location?’ he persisted, still sceptical. ‘She won’t need to be there much.’
‘She’s the producer, of course she will – she’ll need to see the, er, rushes and dailies and things,’ Sally blustered, trying to remember the lingo. ‘And talk to all the, um, different directors and stuff.’
‘Rubbish. That’s the production manager’s job – Flavia Watson. Lisette’s role is much more hands-off than that.’ Matty’s eyes sparked suspiciously. ‘If she wants to be hanging around the location shoot so much, she’s up to something.’
Finally Sally caved in. ‘She’s after Hugo Beauchamp.’
‘Ah,’ he laughed delightedly. ‘Now that does make sense. Didn’t I tell you that Lisette had a nose-job for trouble? And Hugo’s definitely trouble. It couldn’t happen to a nastier chap.’
Sally avoided arguing with him about Lisette wherever possible.
She made valiant attempts to keep the friendship distanced from the marriage but this just infuriated Matty even more, as he convinced himself that she was being deliberately elusive to hide her secret life from him.
He still had odd bouts of explosive fury. When he found out that she was planning to stay in the crew hotel for the duration of the Berkshire location shoot, he went so far through the roof that he could have fixed the guttering on his way up.
‘We need the money, Matty – you can’t deny it,’ she pleaded. ‘And it means I’ll be near Niall and Tash. I can even keep an eye on things in case Lisette winds them up.’
‘And what are you planning to do with the kids while you’re earning all this cash and acting as guardian angel?’ he hissed. ‘Shall we have them put into care?’
‘Don’t be facetious,’ she snapped. ‘My parents have said they’ll have Linus and Tor to stay with them. And you can look after Tom until half-term when he’ll go down and join them. The shoot is only a couple of weeks long. We’ll just have to coast the last few days. I can look for a temporary child-minder if you want.’
‘Some stranger looking after our kids? I’d rather take time off and do it myself,’ he said to make himself look martyred.
‘Oh, would you?’ she beamed. ‘Well, that’s settled then.’
Which it wasn’t. Life became even more unsettled after these brief confrontations, especially when Niall started to use their house as a hotel. He had a flat of his own in London, but it currently had sitting tenants whom he was too kind to boot out, and he found the hotel that the BBC put him up in too professional and
soulless to suit him – it was full of salesmen on conferences and American tourists who recognised him at breakfast and came rushing over to ask him to autograph napkins. As most of the other actors in the project lived in London and went straight to work from home, he lacked company. The only actors who stayed at the hotel were those in minor roles who were only called for a couple of days’ work before leaving, thus giving them the transitory feel of the businessmen whose faces changed as often as the restaurant menus.
Sally was only too happy to have Niall to stay at first, hoping that he would cheer up Matty and ease some of the pressure off their marriage. But she was anxious how Lisette would react to news of their temporary lodger. When she broke it to her, Lisette was delighted, her rasping voice dropping excitedly over the phone line.
‘Oh, would you have a talk with him about your fucking brilliant event horse idea, Sally hon? I’ve tried to set up a meeting through Bob, but Niall’s been away on location most of this month. Don’t push him hard – if he thinks it’s a bad idea we’ll forget all about it. Is Matty out at the moment?’
‘Yes. He’s sloped off to Manchester for an overnight recce researching some project.’
‘Then I’ll fax you the proposal.’
Sally was over the moon that her idea was being taken seriously. With Matty away, she couldn’t wait to put it to Niall. Having plied him with wine later that evening, she discovered that he had forgotten he even owned Snob.
‘He’s Tash’s horse, so he is,’ he shrugged, not understanding what Sally was suggesting. ‘She’d never sell him.’
Sally bit her lip. ‘She already has. You bought him, remember? To get him imported?’
‘So I did!’ Niall’s face lit up and he cackled, rubbing his Huntingdon sideburns theatrically. ‘Christ, my money troubles are over. I’ll sell him straight away and pay the tax man. He’s worth at least half a million. I can buy Tash and myself a house with what’s left over.’
