by Fiona Walker
‘I must say, Tash, you’re doing exceptionally well – bloody well.’ Ben raised his glass approving. ‘I keep hearing your name being bandied around as a new hot shot – should be capped soon, huh?’
Hating to tempt fate, Tash shrugged.
‘Surely you wear a cap, darling?’ Alexandra asked in concern. ‘I thought they made you these days – for safety reasons?’
‘Are you going to take more of a back seat in the sport once you’re married?’ Sophia asked rather crushingly. She hated to hear about her sister doing well, especially from Ben.
‘Of course not,’ she muttered, not wanting to talk about it.
‘But you’ll want to start a family soon, surely?’
‘Nope.’ She noticed that Niall had already drained his drink and was still staring out at the valley, eyes performing their Clint Eastwood enigmatic trick.
‘Oh.’ Sophia looked across at Niall as well. ‘I must say you’ve both lost bags of weight recently – have you been dieting together?’
‘No, we’re just starved of conversation,’ said Tash sadly.
That night, Tash was hugely grateful to Niall for holding their shabby act together at dinner. He regaled them all with scandalous anecdotes about his recent films, didn’t drink so much that he lost his edge and only flirted a moderate amount with Sophia, who looked delighted by his sparkly-eyed flattery and obvious admiration for her beauty. Even Ben seemed delighted that his wife merited such attention. Tash privately thought him a terrible wimp, and found to her horror that she was comparing Ben’s reaction to that she imagined from his closest crony, Hugo. He would have made no secret of the fact that he was irritated by Niall’s behaviour and either bawled him out for it or employed the subtler tactic of flirting twice as brazenly with Tash in return. The thought made her feel rather heady.
‘What are you sinking about, Tash?’ Pascal asked, pouring her another glass of wine, his wise eyes watching her affectionately.
‘Oh – only Hugo,’ she said mindlessly. Unfortunately this came at a lull in the conversation at the table and the others turned to her in astonishment.
‘I was – er – just thinking how awful it would be to lose Snob as he did his horse Surfer,’ she went on, flustered into an obvious, ham-fisted lie.
‘Oh, I see.’ Pascal turned back to fill his wife’s glass, dropping his voice and whispering in her ear, ‘I was just going to say ’ow ’appy she was looking. I assumed she was sinking about the wedding.’
‘Right now,’ Alexandra regarded her daughter over her husband’s head, ‘I think that’s the last thing on Tash’s mind.’
In bed that night, Sophia removed the witch-hazel aromatherapy pads from her eyes, rubbed in the last of her lipo-reactive, sebocel-firming face cream and turned to her husband.
‘Am I right in thinking that you once – mistakenly – believed Hugo to be rather fond of Tash?’
Ben guffawed affectionately and put down the copy of the Telegraph, which he had bought at the Waterloo Eurostar terminal three days earlier and had been reading ever since; he had yet to reach the Court and Social pages.
‘Yes – barking up the wrong tree there, huh?’
‘I’m not so sure.’ Sophia slipped off her wrist watch and stretched across to the bedside table to put it down. ‘I rather think I underestimated your judgement, darling.’
‘Oh, do you?’ Ben – who was very seldom complimented on his acumen and perception – looked delighted. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘Whenever one talks to Tash about Niall, she adopts the look of a long-suffering sister excusing the antics of a ruffian brother. But when one mentions Hugo, she looks just as she did as a teenager – all flustered and guilty and rather on her nerves. She had a huge crush on him for years, you know.’
‘So she did – rather a hoot that.’ Ben folded the Telegraph into a very neat triangle and cast it to one side. ‘But what makes you think I was right about old Hugs’s feelings?’
‘Because, my darling,’ Sophia kissed him on the nose before turning to the bedside light, ‘he looks exactly the same way when one mentions her.’ She flicked the switch. ‘But without the flustered bit, natch.’
‘Natch.’ Ben head-butted his way into the bolster beside her before stretching a tentative hand across to her thigh.
‘Not now, darling.’ Sophia firmly steered it away. ‘I’ve got fat-reducing cream on my stomach. Tomorrow perhaps.’
‘Oh – right-oh.’ He gave her hand a squeeze. ‘Night then.’
‘Night.’ Sophia strained her ears for sounds of activity in the next room, but there were none.
Tash lay awake for hours, trying to muster the nerve to elbow Niall awake and have everything out, but she couldn’t pluck up the courage and besides, she told herself, he badly needed his sleep at the moment. She waited and waited for her own dreams to arrive and deaden the panic in her head, but they would not come. Instead she once again watched the dawn lighten the room and listened to the morning chorus rise and work through its vocal exercises.
Sophia and Ben were already taking morning showers and chatting loudly over the gushing water in the next room when she fell into the bottomless pit of a dreamless sleep.
She woke at midday to find the shutters and windows open, and sun drenching her body. Beside her, Niall’s side of the bed was creased and vacant. Blinking and peering out of the window whilst wrapped in a sheet, Tash could just see the corner of the balcony which overlooked the pool. A cloud of cigarette smoke was drifting from it, signifying that Niall was there. He was the only guest other than herself who smoked.
Dressed in a borrowed bikini of her mother’s and Sophia’s apple green sarong, Tash took her very pale and rather stubbly body outside to be put on show beside the pool.
Sophia was already reclining on a sun lounger looking as though every ounce of her had recently been tightened and glossed at great expense. Beside her Ben was turning the subtle pink of uncooked turkey flesh, only his nose having burnt to a rare beefsteak red.
Reading a book on wedding etiquette, Alexandra was sensibly confined beneath a sun-shade, wearing a bright yellow bathing suit that showed off the mahogany glow of her skin.
‘Tash darling!’ she greeted her delightedly. ‘I so envy you your ability to sleep – do have a swim.’
Beside her, Pascal sipped pastis and read the papers, his own deep, burnt oak tan confined beneath cream chinos and a pale blue shirt.
‘Tash, chérie,’ he looked up from Le Monde, ‘you look sensational – the pale English skin is so délicat, like a rose petal, non?’
‘Er – non.’ Desperate to hide her midge-bitten paleness, she greeted Polly, who was splashing around in the pool wearing a super-trendy crocheted bikini. Badgered endlessly, Tash joined her in a raucous game of ‘dive for the brick’ followed by ‘singing underwater’ and then ‘race widths with arm-bands on ankles and floats stuffed down tops’. Tash longed for the confidence boost of winning something right now but she lost everything, her concentration in smithereens. All the time she was aware of an audience from high up on the balcony as Niall sat chain-smoking, drinking black coffee out of a bowl and watching them all like a psychologist regarding specimens of human behaviour through a two-way mirror.
This is where we fell in love! Tash wanted to scream up at him. What went wrong?
But she simply swam widths and lengths and dived and forward-rolled until her eyes were red and stinging from chlorine, and her fingers were as wrinkled as tinned chestnuts.
‘I love you, Tash!’ Polly screamed happily as she pinned her half-sister to a flapping pool filter with her water-gun. ‘Je t’aime!’
‘Will you marry me then?’ Tash asked bleakly.
After lunch, she and Niall found themselves side by side at the pool’s edge sunbathing. Unknown to Tash, Alexandra had spread the word amongst the rest of the family to leave them alone together for a couple of hours. She had spotted the heavy silence between them and wanted to give them a ch
ance to kiss and make up. Tash felt more like socking Niall’s kisser in a punch up, but knew that she was just channelling her frustration at her own dithering inertia into illogical hatred, like Hamlet screaming at Ophelia to get to a nunnery. She wondered vaguely whether she herself might take advantage of a few years in a novice’s wimple? Swapping wedding vows for those of chastity and silence seemed quite tempting right now.
Niall seemed oblivious of her mental churning as he dozed and reposed, buried behind a very intellectual biography of Goethe.
Tash, who was being bitten to itchy distraction by hungry May midges, scratched her stubbly legs and reached alternately for the sun-oil and the insect repellent. Niall only spoke to her when requesting one to be passed in his direction, as formal as a fellow client in a sun-bed salon.
He was buried deep within his book, reading as quickly and avidly as ever; Tash had always envied him his ability to get thoroughly absorbed. She found herself struggling with a magazine these days, which she believed to be a give-away sign of deadened braincells and lack of depth. She had once guzzled literary worthies, biographies, escapist trash and art books with a devotee’s relish – just as she had been able to reel off the Radio 4 schedule, the latest music sensations, best exhibitions and thought-provoking films. Nowadays she was stretched to remember the news headlines. However busy he was, Niall would never fail to keep up with the news, views and previews of the world’s opinion-pollsters. Tash, raced off her feet and confined within the insular world of eventing, knew more about the latest craze in tendon-protection than the latest Terry Johnston play. She sometimes wished she was like Zoe who, although living within that world too, kept her intellectual life intact; Tash had often found her at the kitchen table poring over the review section of the Sunday papers, or covertly watching an arty video which she had recorded whilst the others were glued to Soldier Soldier. Tash was acutely aware of her intellectual inadequacies, and of the way she had changed since meeting Niall. Their mutual interests were crumbling away, and it was almost entirely her fault. He remained within his ivory tower while she’d clambered down a rope-ladder and run away to the stable-yard.
He finally looked up from his biography after almost an hour to tell her off for leaving the sun-oil out of the shade so that it sizzled against his skin like hot cooking fat when he rubbed some on his belly – nowadays quite ample from so much drinking.
‘You had it last,’ she reminded him, flicking a fly from her face.
‘Well, in that case you should use it more often,’ he snapped. ‘Or you’ll burn.’
‘I tan more easily than you.’
‘But you have moles which are a danger sign,’ he said priggishly, picking up his book with a haughty sigh.
‘They’re not moles, they’re isolated freckles,’ she grumbled, but he was feigning fascination with a foot-note now. She stared at the pool, ultra-violet bright in the sun. ‘You once said you loved every one of my moles, Niall.’
‘All the more reason for not wanting them to develop into skin cancer now.’ He didn’t look up. ‘And I thought they were isolated freckles?’
She propped herself up on one elbow and shaded her eyes with one hand to look at him.
‘You still love them?’
‘Course I do.’ He turned a page with a carefully licked finger.
‘Is the biggest one to the left or the right of my belly button?’
But he considered this question too petty to answer.
Twenty minutes later she could bear it no longer.
‘Please stop stroking your sideburns like that,’ she pleaded. ‘It’s driving me to distraction.’
‘They itch in this heat.’
‘Well, shave them off.’
‘I like them.’
‘Fine – just don’t stroke them.’
He stopped, burying himself so moodily between the pages of his book that he was practically wearing it as a nose-shield.
Minutes later he had thrown it down.
‘Will you stop doing that!’ he snarled.
Just drifting off to sleep, Tash jumped so much that she pitched off her lilo, landing on the insect repellent which oozed out on to the paving stones.
‘Doing what?’ She blinked at him in bleary-eyed confusion. There was a foul smell of citrus and eucalyptus everywhere.
‘Those sort of shuddery sighs.’ He propped himself into a half sit-up and peered at her over his dark glasses, belly creasing like a German sausage.
‘Sorry.’ She clambered back on to the lilo. ‘I wasn’t aware that I had been. I was falling asleep.’
‘That stands to reason – you do it in bed too.’
‘Well, you should have mentioned it before.’
‘You were always asleep.’
Tash irritably wiped insect repellent from her knees.
‘Do you have to smear so much of that on?’ He rolled on to his side so that she was faced with his red, towel-pocked back, sweating at the neck where it had been in contact with the hot plastic of the lilo.
Ten minutes later they were both at boiling point, swatting flies and picking dust from their swimwear as they desperately sought excuses to pick on one another.
Ironically the final straw came from an entirely innocent source as one of Alexandra’s spaniels came trotting up, stumpy tail gyrating as it offered them a well-gnawed tennis ball to be thrown.
‘The dog wants a game.’ Niall didn’t look up from his book.
‘It’s asking you, not me,’ Tash pointed out as the dog dropped the ball eagerly on Niall’s sunburned bare foot.
‘I’m reading.’ He flipped a page with a morose snatch.
‘Well, I’m going to have a swim.’ Tash started to get up.
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, play with the wee dog for a few minutes first, huh?’ He glared at her angrily.
‘I’ll play with it afterwards.’ She pulled down her swimsuit where it was rucked up her bottom and searched for her scrunchy.
Niall was determined to win this bout. ‘Meanwhile it’s going to bug me, so I can’t concentrate on my book,’ he complained.
‘Well, you play with it then.’ Tash found her scrunchy half-hidden beneath Niall’s lilo and scrabbled to extract it.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ He shifted away.
‘Getting my hair-band.’ Tash noticed that the spaniel, thinking this was all part of the game, had started to join in, barking excitedly, snatching for the scrunchy and finally sinking its teeth into the lilo, which gave an ominous hiss so that the dog leaped away in alarm and almost fell in the pool.
‘Now look what you’ve done!’ Niall grumbled, shifting around as the lilo started to lose air like a hovercraft clocking off its shift.
‘I didn’t bite the bloody thing.’ She began to tie back her hair so furiously that her wrists became entrapped in the velvet band along with great hunks of hair until she had effectively tethered her hands to the back of her head.
‘Bugger – my – ouch – hands are – shit!’ Struggling to free herself, she tripped over Niall’s legs, now flailing around beneath her as he fought to stay comfortable on the sagging lilo. As she pitched forward, hopelessly off-balance, she was faced with the split-second choice of falling on to hard tiles or soft Niall. The latter seemed the more attractive option in the moment that she had to contemplate it and she landed quite hard on top of him.
‘Fucking ouch!’ he howled, trapped underneath her. ‘I think you’ve just smashed my ribs – get off.’
‘I’m trying!’
Still unwillingly adopting the armpit-flashing position of the hands-on-head scrunchy prisoner, Tash tried and failed to roll away. Their skin, oiled and re-oiled in the past hour, formed a messy suction which let out scatological noises every time she moved, but stubbornly glued them together.
‘Just came out to see if you wanted a drink!’ cried a cheerful voice from the balcony. ‘Oh – on second thoughts.’ Alexandra slipped tactfully away, calling back the excited spaniel w
hich was now trying to devour the belt string on Niall’s trunks, pulling them almost over his hips as part of the fun.
Finally freeing her wrists, Tash heaved herself off him and straightened up sheepishly, surveying the damage. He was looking exceedingly pissed off and his book was very flat and oily, but his body seemed relatively uncrushed.
‘What the hell did you do that for?’ he complained, dusting himself down and peeling the book from his chest, eyes blazing furiously over his sun-specs.
‘You tripped me up,’ she muttered, backing away and turning to dive into the pool before he could push her in.
Unfortunately she belly-flopped in her haste, stinging her chest and legs as though diving on to burning sand, and sending up a great splash of water which doused Niall and his precious book.
When she resurfaced, he was waiting on her lilo for the attack, his own having deflated fully now.
‘Okay, what is it?’ he growled as she clambered out of the pool via the slippery ladder and headed for her towel, inadvertently dripping all over his melting packet of M and Ms.
‘What is what?’ She wrapped herself in the fluffy rectangle and searched for somewhere to settle. Niall’s slippery, deflated lilo didn’t tempt her, so she perched on a grubby sun-lounger instead.
‘You obviously want to have a go at me.’ He brushed his hair out of his eyes and glared at her. ‘So now’s your chance.’
Tash felt her heart lurch, aware that he had stopped peering at her frustrated moodiness through the letter-box and had now opened the door to beckon her in. This was her chance. She just wished she didn’t feel quite so sun-boiled, tetchy and baited. She longed to be serene, sympathetic and sophisticated, and approach him as Zoe would – all gentle probing and quiet persistence. Instead she felt like listing every single complaint she had about him, down to leaving the loo seat up.
‘I don’t want to have a go at you, Niall,’ she started cautiously, anxious not get this wrong. ‘It’s just that you’ve been so uncommunicative and grumpy lately, I feel very uncomfortable with it, that’s all.’
‘I’ve been fine,’ he protested sourly. ‘It’s you who’s been snappy and sulky.’
