Well Groomed

by Fiona Walker

  Hugo turned to stare at her, his gaze devouring her face, sad eyes as dark and misty as bilberries. Behind them, Stefan was already wading through the puddles in the yard.

  ‘I’ve only ever been in love once,’ Hugo suddenly muttered, his voice almost inaudible under the din of the storm. ‘Bloody awful emotion – I couldn’t cope with it at all. I suppose it’s okay if you both do it – like eating garlic. I just couldn’t get rid of the taste.’

  ‘And now?’

  He shrugged bleakly. ‘Whoever said it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all was just a loser.’

  ‘Tennyson.’ Her voice wobbled.

  ‘You always were better read than me.’

  ‘There are lots of poems about unrequited love,’ she croaked. ‘And I’ve had a lot of years to read them.’

  He said nothing, bilberry eyes blinking away the rain which was beading his lashes.

  The next moment Stefan was towering over them, absolutely sodden, looking the picture of sympathy, his schoolboy face pinched with worry.

  ‘Shit, I’m cracking up for you, my friend.’ He loped over to Hugo on his long, thin legs, dripping water everywhere from his cycle leathers. ‘Jack phoned the farm to say what had happened.’ He wiped water from his face with the back of his glove. ‘God, you’re both drenched. Come inside.’

  ‘Ah – the next nursing shift, how timely.’ Hugo smiled at him before turning back to Tash. ‘You can piss off now, Sister French.’

  ‘Hugo—’

  ‘PISS OFF!’ His face was venomous.

  ‘Steady on, Hugs.’ Stefan held him back as he made a lunge for Tash who scuttled off the car bonnet, tripping in her haste.

  ‘You’ve had your fun and heard all you wanted to hear to make you feel good.’ Hugo spat out his words. ‘Go back to Niall and tell him what a sad bastard I am.’

  ‘Hugo, please listen to me—’

  ‘Fuck off, fuck off, FUCK OFF!’ he yelled, burying his face in his hands and starting to sob. ‘For Christ’s sake, get rid of her, Stef. Get her out of here.’

  As Hugo wandered unsteadily towards the house, Stefan hastily kissed Tash’s cheek and pushed her into the Land-Rover, ducking as the rain flattened his spiky hair and ran into his eyes.

  ‘I’d better follow him,’ he yelled over the machine-gun rattle of the downpour on the cab roof. ‘I’m sorry, darling. Take no notice of what he said – he’s feeling so hellish about Bod that he needs to savage something. I’ll look after him. For Christ’s sake, drive carefully.’

  Tash cried all the way back to Fosbourne, which barely mattered as she couldn’t have seen a thing through the windscreen even had she been dry-eyed. The wipers were next to useless in the downpour, and she relied upon knowing the lanes to get her back. Even though she took large chunks of several verges with her, she made it safely. There were floods in several spots, some already almost a foot deep. Had she been in the design classic, she would have been stranded miles from a phone.

  She knew she should deliver the car back to Gus and tell them what was going on, but she couldn’t bring herself to.

  The forge was in power-cut darkness and poor Beetroot, who was terrified by the storm, crawled out from her hiding place beneath the coffee table, positively trembling with fear.

  Tash collapsed on the sofa and cuddled her.

  ‘He thinks I’m so blissfully happy with Niall,’ she told Beetroot in disbelief. ‘How can I adore someone who can be that thick? And so downright, pigheadedly, bloody-mindedly proud?’

  Beetroot licked her tears, desperate to reassure her.

  Thirty-Four

  * * *

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, THE Lime Tree Farm mob were eating their usual noisy breakfast, agog to know what had happened at Haydown the night before. Only Zoe was away – out stocking up at Tesco’s according to the others.

  ‘Is it open at this time in the morning?’ Tash looked at her watch tiredly. It was still before seven.

  ‘Must be,’ Penny said brightly.

  Settling at the kitchen table, Tash wished that Zoe was around; she was desperate to talk to her about Hugo. His car was still parked in the lane outside the farm from the night before. She’d wanted to drive straight up there that morning to see how he was, but hadn’t had the nerve. She had a pretty shrewd idea that she was the last person he’d want to see.

  ‘Sally’s just called,’ Penny told her, towelling her wet blonde hair dry and eating toast at the same time. ‘Apparently she turned up on location first thing this morning to find Hugo shivering in the kitchen with his dogs, and Stefan fast asleep at the table. She thinks they’d stayed up talking all night, but Hugo is still pacing around like a mad thing. I could hear him yelling in the background while she was on the phone.’

  ‘His best horse was destroyed last night,’ Tash sighed, helping herself to a coffee. ‘I don’t think I’d sleep if it happened to me.’

  ‘So what exactly happened?’ Gus noticed her red eyes. ‘We thought you’d come back here afterwards.’

  ‘We waited up for hours.’ Penny was towelling her ears vigorously now.

  The mood was all light-hearted cheer and busy activity. Tash could hear India thudding around in her room overhead, and Rufus’s stereo already booming out its early-morning bass tattoo. Someone was whistling up on the landing, and out in the yard Ted and Franny were chattering loudly about some pub gossip from the night before.

  Settling beside Gus at the table, Tash gave them a brief, painful précis up until her exit from Haydown House the night before. She carefully omitted to mention their lop-sided conversation about love or the fact that Hugo had practically thrown her out of his yard afterwards. The whole thing seemed like a bad dream, she kept having to pinch herself to believe it had actually happened.

  ‘I had no idea Bod had Navicular,’ said Gus, absolutely appalled. ‘Shit, what a bloody awful thing to know! And Hugo didn’t breathe a word to anyone. It must have been eating him up, poor bastard.’

  ‘He was devastated.’ Tash took a slug of coffee and winced as it scalded a filling. ‘But there was nothing he could do. He knew Bod wouldn’t have been able to compete after this year. Badminton was going to be their last big event together. Now he won’t even be going.’

  At that moment, Kirsty wandered in, looking ratty. ‘That friend of you guys is still in the bath,’ she moaned, flopping down at the table and starting to leaf through the post. ‘Hi, Tash hen. Sorry to hear about last night. Is Hugo okay?’

  ‘Not particularly.’ Tash watched her, but she was calmly ripping open a letter from Australia and far more interested in moaning about the bathroom-hogger than asking after Hugo.

  ‘Half an hour he’s been in there. What’s he doing? Re-tiling the walls?’

  ‘It’s Matty,’ Penny explained to Tash in an undertone. ‘He got totally plastered last night and had to stay here. There was a bit of a confrontation after you’d gone, actually. Poor Sally went back to the hotel – I think she called just now to check he was okay as much as anything.’

  ‘Yes?’ Tash wasn’t particularly interested. Her brother’s problems seemed to pale into insignificance right now.

  ‘You’ll never believe this,’ Penny went pink, ‘but they started having this full dress row at the dining table while we were all tucking in – just after you and Hugo left – it was wildly embarrassing. Niall’s mother almost had a coronary.’

  ‘Your brother refused to eat the fish because he’s a veggie.’ Gus spooned sugar into his tea. ‘And Sally cracked some joke about him finding salmonogamy hard to swallow. Didn’t quite get it, to be frank. Odd woman, your sister-in-law.’

  ‘The next moment, they were accusing one another of adultery.’ Penny shook her head. ‘Or rather Matty was confessing to it. With my sister of all people.’

  Gus cleared his throat. ‘He told Sally in front of everyone that he’d had a fling with Zoe at one of our parties a couple of summers ago. India and Rufus were sitting at
the table listening to it all. Poor Zoe didn’t know where to look. He even asked her to back him up when he went into details.’

  ‘I thought that was just a bit of a drunken kiss.’ Tash rubbed her eyes tiredly. ‘Nothing very serious.’

  ‘You knew about it?’ Penny gaped at her.

  ‘Niall told me. Did he stay here last night, by the way? Talking to Matty or something?’ She hoped he hadn’t passed out blind drunk anywhere.

  Gus and Penny exchanged glances. ‘Yes, something like that. He persuaded his mother to stay at the cast’s hotel in Marlbury – she was all set to return to Haydown, which you can imagine would have been a bit sticky. Lisette and David took her in their cab, along with Sally, who was in a state.’

  ‘Poor Zoe.’ Tash smiled sadly. ‘Her dinner party was a wash-out, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, I think it had its compensations.’ Gus cleared his throat uncomfortably.

  Tash knew she should dedicate a morning to pepping up Hunk’s lack-lustre dressage, but she had to get away from the chat and babble of the yard where talk was of nothing but the disastrous dinner party and Hugo’s awful loss.

  She took Mickey Rourke through the Fosbourne villages and out on to the matrix of old, formal rides that criss-crossed the grounds of a local estate, which the landowner allowed them to use. As the lush green canopy enveloped her like a verdant tunnel, she tried to clear her head as she listened to Mickey’s huge, soup-plate feet thud out a muffled, squeaky rhythm in the thick, emerald green grass below. The trees, still wet from the storm, dropped great splashing beads of water on to her shoulders and legs, and Mickey continually tripped over newly exposed tree roots and slithered around on the glassy grass like an oversized grey duckling on a frozen pond. What had Hugo called him: ‘the clumsiest horse I’ve ever encountered’? Tash bit her lip.

  He had lost his two best horses in less than a year, and it was probable that he would also lose his sponsorship and backing as a result. He no longer had a ride at Badminton, a chance for international teams, a career he could reliably live off. He had several brilliant youngsters, but they were still years away from earning their keep in top-grade competitions unless he sold them all to buy a good international horse, and Hugo was unlikely to do that – he liked to make his horses from nothing, not buy them ready-prepared like cakes. His best mid-grade horse that year had been Mickey Rourke, and he had given him back to Tash. Before that it had been Drunken Hunk, and again Tash had benefited from Hugo’s belief that a horse should be with a jockey he clicks with.

  Tash knew exactly what horse Hugo had always clicked with and longed to have the chance to ride again. He was a horse so similar to Bodybuilder that it was uncanny. She had battled and battled to find the same chemistry with him that Hugo had discovered on the very few occasions he had ridden him, the same chemistry that she had seen him demonstrate with Bod only the previous day.

  Tash gazed at Mickey’s lop ears and watched them multiply like grey rabbits as tears started to sprout from her eyes. When she’d realised last night that she would lose Snob after Badminton, she’d been almost ripped apart with unhappiness. Now it seemed insignificant. At least Snob would carry on rampaging and causing merry havoc in someone else’s yard. Bodybuilder, the greatest Badminton hopeful of all, would never trot out of the Maccombe yard again, never shiver with excitement when he was led into the horse-box at the crack of dawn, realising that he was off to vie for glory. There had been one final victory which Hugo had longed to give him, a ghost of a dream that he had been denied the chance to fulfil.

  Tash had the same dream, the same foolish, romantic notion. But her circumstances were far less noble and her nerve far less steady. By giving up her last chance to prove herself, she knew that she could give Hugo a second one. She just wasn’t certain she was brave enough to do it.

  That evening, Niall returned to the forge after a very boring day’s shooting, most of which had been spent waiting for the ground to dry out enough to enact a picnic scene on the downs. He was in a strange, excitable mood that Tash couldn’t read, talking incredibly fast and moving around the room like a zephyr as he hastily went through his post, collected his messages and started to change his trousers for a clean pair that were hanging on the rail of the range. He didn’t bother to explain why he hadn’t returned the night before, nor did he ask her what had happened with Hugo at Haydown, although he had plenty to say on the subject of Bod’s inconvenient death.

  ‘Hugo was like a bloody lunatic today,’ he told her, wandering around in his underpants. ‘He hired this bloody great JCB which rolled up at lunchtime and started heaving chunks of earth out of the bottom of that steep field of his, what’s he call it?’

  ‘Twenty Acres?’

  ‘’S the one. Lisette is going nuts – I mean, we’re shooting the quad bike scene down there on Monday, and here he is digging it up. The next thing a fucking crane turns up and before you know it there’s a bloody dead horse swinging around on the end of it, headed for the hole like an oversized fair-ground game!’

  It was a typical Niall story told in his hyperbolic style. Tash wanted to deck him for insensitivity. He must be wildly distracted, or drunk, or both.

  ‘He was burying Bod.’

  ‘So he was,’ Niall nodded in agreement, pulling on the clean trousers, which were still damp. ‘And Lisette is screaming at him the whole time that the horse would have to be moved before the quad bike scene, or she’d have to re-insure the actors for injury by equine grave. I ’clare, it was madness. Finally Hugo stormed off to the house and left them all to it. Jesus, but that man frightens me sometimes. I’m going out tonight, all right?’ He started to look shifty, as though he was about to confess to something, but Tash was already halfway to the door.

  ‘Fine,’ she said, reaching for her coat. ‘So am I.’

  She drove the design classic to Maccombe in a daze, half an eye noticing the thick, heavily muddied tracks running all over the flat verges where the Land-Rover had wandered on to them during her return journey the previous night.

  It was a mild, bosky evening, so different from the cloying closeness of the night before. The sun, almost resting on the distant ridgeway like a ball on a seal’s nose, was drenching the valley in a last pink blush, an hour away from dropping out of view.

  Haydown was still buzzing with film types wrapping up for the night as they coiled cables, moved furniture and double-checked everything against the inevitable clip-boarded list.

  Hopping with nerves and trepidation, Tash encountered Stefan in the yard watching a young mare being lunged over a grid in the menage.

  ‘I thought they weren’t shooting here tonight?’ She nodded towards the house.

  ‘They weren’t.’ He turned to her, squinting through the lowering sunlight. ‘But there’s been a lot of fuss about the smashed conservatory and Hugo’s big dig. They’re going to have to go into extra time or something. I heard one of the crew saying they’re so behind schedule that they’re re-negotiating dates already. Looks like this wrap party will be an unwrapped party.’

  Tash closed her eyes. It would make things ten times worse, she realised, if they announced their split at the party. No wonder Niall had looked so evasive earlier.

  ‘I heard about the JCB drama,’ she sighed, looking down the sweeping drop of Twenty Acres. Apart from some heavy tyre marks leading to and from the bottom gate and a flat, muddy rectangle beside the large chestnut tree, there was little sign of disturbance, and all the heavy mechanical equipment had long since departed. She felt a great, leaden drag of sadness weighing down her shoulders as she thought of poor, talented Bod lying there.

  ‘It was a bloody fiasco,’ Stefan sighed. ‘That Lisette is such a bitch – no wonder Niall chose you.’

  Tash grimaced, turning her face to the sun to avoid looking at him. ‘It wasn’t quite like that. Is Hugo around?’ She quickly changed the subject.

  ‘Dunno – hang on.’ He leaned over the fence and yelled at the girl in the me
nage: ‘Hugo back with The Broker yet?’

  ‘Hours ago.’ She jerked her head towards the house. ‘He went in there. Follow the sound of pouring scotch.’

  When Tash finally tracked him down he wasn’t drunk at all. He was swigging tea in the old nursery upstairs wearing a personal stereo and reading Eventing. It was obviously one of the few spots in the house he could get some peace – the whole place was crawling with filmies checking off clip-boards and dismantling equipment. He looked dusty and dishevelled, still dressed in his riding gear, straw clinging to his t-shirt. To Tash he’d never looked more forlorn or more desirable, his beautiful face pinched with unhappiness. Once again she fought down the run-to-him-and-leap urge, hovering nearby until he noticed her and pulled off his headphones.

  ‘What d’you want?’ he asked guardedly. His blue eyes were squinting from lack of sleep and rimmed with red.

  She stood with half the room still dividing them, desperate to remain calm and practical, not smother him with soppy tears and pity.

  ‘I want you to help me out,’ she said firmly, launching straight in. ‘I need you to ride Snob for me at Badminton.’

  ‘What?’ He stared at her levelly, his face guarded.

  ‘I need you – want you – to ride Snob. I can’t do it,’ she explained hurriedly, moving towards him. ‘We’ve started to fight one another and it’s not safe – everyone’s been telling me that for weeks, but I couldn’t pull him out because he stands such a good chance of winning. Just not with me. You could ride him; you’ve always handled him better than me.’

  Hugo continued staring at her in silence. Close to, Tash could see how exhausted he looked with black smudges beneath his eyes and a little tic rattling in one cheek.

  ‘I phoned the head of the entry committee today, and she told me it would still be allowed if we declare a change of rider on Monday morning. Please, Hugo.’