The Country Escape

by Fiona Walker

  ‘It might be a day or two,’ he told Mil vaguely. ‘Got a game of cricket to play.’

  ‘You always had your priorities right, Everett.’

  Chapter 50

  The first concrete memory Kat had after falling off was bouncing around on the back seat of Dair Armitage’s Range Rover with her head resting on a cartridge bag and the guns rattling on the rack above her. Later, at the County Hospital, there had been nurses and a nice female doctor who said she had a horse too and talked about dressage. Dair had appeared occasionally, asking how much longer it would take because he’d had a call to deal with some poachers.

  Then Mags had arrived to take her home to Lake Farm, pink hair on end, driving far too fast as usual, although Kat recalled that no pheasants had been mown down on the way. She asked about Dougie several times and got no reply, although that might have been another memory blank. There had been a lot of loud music.

  Officially declared mildly concussed, Kat went straight to bed while Mags raided the last of the Waitrose goodies in the fridge. Later, Cyn appeared for a night shift – an over-enthusiastic Florence Nightingale in winceyette pyjamas who woke Kat constantly with wet flannels and pulse-checks. It was only when tall, dour Pru took over in the morning that Kat learned the truth about her reputation.

  ‘I hear you’ve been spying on Dougie Everett for the antis and the Brom and Lem.’ Pru delivered a breakfast of doorstep toast and brick red tea on a tray at a quarter to six, turning on the radio for Farming Today. ‘Frightfully impressive subterfuge, my dear. To think we all just assumed you and Dougie Everett were shagging like stoats. You’re Eardisford’s own Mata Hari!’

  The sanctuary committee and volunteers all rallied to provide cover for Kat, insisting that she must rest for at least forty-eight hours after a head injury, but Kat wasn’t good at resting, especially with such a heavy heart. She seemed to have a constant stream of visitors and ‘carers’, plonking down a cup of tea, asking if she was suffering blurred vision or dizziness and then asking if it was true that Dougie Everett had been hired to marry her.

  ‘We’re treating it as strictly confidential information for committee and activists only, Kat love,’ Mags reported kindly. She and Russ seemed to have elected themselves primary carers, playing a lot of loud music and arguing. ‘Russ thinks the more cards we keep up our sleeves the better. For now, he says direct action is the way forward. And we all think you need protecting.’

  ‘I can look after myself,’ Kat insisted, wishing she could see Dougie. She still couldn’t remember anything of her fall or its immediate aftermath, although Russ had it all on camera and said it was damning stuff. He had also told Dougie she never wanted to see him again, which infuriated her.

  ‘You have no right to interfere with my life!’

  ‘Irritability is a classic post-concussion side-effect,’ Russ said calmly.

  ‘I’m not irritable. I’m fucking annoyed at being treated like a psychiatric patient. I want to make some phone calls. In private.’

  Waiting until Mags and Russ were out in the yard with the animals, Kat phoned Dawn.

  ‘Promise me you’re definitely coming next weekend? I need you to help me evict Russ.’

  ‘I thought he’d moved out months ago.’

  ‘He’s found a reason to move back in.’ She dropped her voice: ‘I’ll explain when I see you, but I’m practically being held prisoner here.’

  ‘I’ll bring the wire-cutters baked in a cake,’ Dawn reassured her cheerfully.

  Taking a deep breath, Kat phoned Dougie. He answered from one of the kennel pens, hounds baying all around him. She waited while he moved somewhere he could hear better, his voice husky and breathless: ‘How are you?’

  ‘Much better.’

  ‘Thank God.’

  ‘Can I see you?’

  He hesitated. ‘I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.’

  ‘Please, Dougie.’

  There was an even longer pause. ‘No, Kat. Trust me, it’s for the best.’

  ‘Trusting you is something I’m finding hard to do right now,’ she breathed, but he had already rung off. She still held the phone tightly to her ear, as though some part of him was still inside it and she could keep it close. ‘Loving is another matter.’

  Chapter 51

  Eardisford might have no mobile-phone signal or reliable internet coverage, but news that a pink car with eyelash decals stuck around its headlights was heading towards Lake Farm reached Kat almost half an hour before Dawn located the potholed track that was being patrolled by an aggressive peacock.

  Setting out to meet her on Sri had seemed like a great idea, but it was Kat’s first ride since the fall and she hadn’t realized how nervous she’d feel. The mare was popping from several days off and raring to go, trying to tow Kat to the hidden meadow while her rider tried to persuade her to head through the woods towards the village instead. Then Kat met Meat and Two Veg in high humour because they’d just redirected the pink convertible several times from private estate roads where its driver was lost, each time sending her an even more roundabout way.

  ‘Reckon she’ll be halfway to Abergavenny by now!’ Spud cackled.

  Sensing a heroic chase might be in order, Kat decided to canter home at a good pelt, but Sri thought otherwise, particularly when she spied a box of pheasant poults on the back of Turnip’s quad bike and went into sharp reverse before planting herself indignantly between two elder bushes, as though imagining she could no longer be seen.

  The gamekeepers watched impassively as Kat flailed her legs in an attempt to get the mare moving again.

  ‘You not riding out with the new master today?’ asked Turnip, sounding like something out of Black Beauty.

  ‘If you mean Dougie Everett, then no,’ Kat mumbled, well aware that the entire village was gossiping about them now. Amazingly, the arranged-marriage story remained confined to a very few, sparing her at least some humiliation, although the rumour that somebody had put out as a smokescreen was not much better. The latest gossip – she strongly suspected Russ and Mags of spreading it – was that Kat had discovered Dougie in flagrante in the Eardisford tack room with a male groom.

  She kicked some more, but Sri thrust her nose in the air and refused to budge.

  Shrugging off his shooting waistcoat, Meathead strode forwards and waved it around his head like a football rattle. ‘Get going, you old bag!’

  At this Sri shot out from the bushes, dancing in the direction of home in a crab-like sideways trot, straight into the path of a bicycle freewheeling down the park drive, hounds teeming around its back wheel. As it slid to a halt at an angle in a shriek of brakes, she heard the familiar voice calling the hounds back urgently and turned to find Dougie looking up at her.

  It was the first time she’d seen him since the confrontation in the woods. To her shame, as soon as she caught the glint of tousled blond hair in the sun, she felt the breath snatched straight out of her lungs and her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth as though she’d just chewed on Pritt Stick. As Sri crabbed, she noticed that Dougie had fierce red streaks in his tanned cheeks, eyes intense as blue blowtorch flames.

  Just for a moment the mare stood still and Kat knew that her own face was colouring too as her eyes fixed on his and couldn’t look away.

  ‘How are you?’ he asked, in an undertone.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘I hear Russ has moved back in.’ There was an arrogant, urgent snap to his voice.

  ‘He doesn’t think I should be on my own so soon after a head injury, but I have a friend staying this weekend,’ she said, flustered and aware that the keepers were watching, the smiling, kind-eyed hounds bounding around, four-legged reminders of everything old-world-colonial and wrong about Eardisford.

  ‘It’s good to see you back in the saddle.’ He moved closer, dropping his voice so that only she could hear. ‘You still have to ride the Bolt, Kat. It’s so important to you.’

  It seemed feeble to explain that she co
uldn’t do it without him, but it was how she felt. His fierce positivity, encouragement and bravery had fuelled her in recent weeks. She’d felt true daring pumping back into her veins and it had been glorious, just as his loud, occasionally lusty affection had triggered a sea change within her. The cold glacier in which her libido had been trapped had melted, hot springs bubbling around her body, geysers of lust fountaining through her. They still did, just looking down at him now, holding his gaze, remembering the way he had pulled her right on to his saddle to kiss her.

  ‘You’ve got the guts and the ability,’ he urged, the husky voice so persuasively sexy that she knew she would be tempted to jump the moon if it asked her to.

  ‘Will you help me?’ she asked, lost in his eyes.

  He looked away, watching his hounds milling around him, hands raking through his hair. ‘I can’t.’

  Hurt, she glared at the wind socks that had appeared alongside the landing strip in front of the lake. ‘Of course, Seth’s arriving this afternoon, isn’t he? Don’t you all have to line up on the steps to doff caps?’

  Dougie looked furious. On cue, the mare started spinning and backing up again. ‘You need a stronger right leg and a better contact,’ he told her brusquely, then put a hunting horn to his lips and called the hounds back with a series of long, shrill blows, to which they came leaping up, tongues lolling and tails spinning.

  At this Sri pricked her curled ears and shot into the woods.

  Kat was still plunging around in the undergrowth when Dawn rolled gently along the Lake Farm track in her new pink car, satnav loudly insisting she must take the first available U-turn and proceed to the public highway. She was being pursued by a furious Trevor, pecking at the shiny rear bumper.

  ‘There you bloody are!’ Dawn yelled, with relief, through the window, sending Sri into another hissy fit as she practically sat down in shock at the sight of the pink convertible, then doubled back when Trevor fanned his tail for a celebratory strut.

  Dawn’s tan was from a bottle, her blond hair sporting new extensions and streaked with on-trend blue to match the colour the air turned once she finally spilled from the car into Lake Farm, proffering two bottles of sparkling wine and two fat steaks. Beneath the gloss, she was clearly frazzled, turquoise contact lenses positively spinning with stress.

  ‘You look amazing!’ She hugged Kat with the relief of one who felt she had just crossed time- and war-zones by camel caravan, tank and microlite to reach her destination. She held her at arm’s length to admire her. ‘You are ripped! There’s not an ounce on you. But, Kee-rist, do you need me to sort out that hair and the Scouse brows!’ She kissed her nose and thrust the wine at her.

  ‘You look fantastic too.’ Kat laughed. Dawn arriving was like a rainbow coming out in a force-ten gale.

  ‘Why can’t you live somewhere normal?’ Dawn marched into the house. ‘Tonight, we’re eating meat and decrying men, girl. Please tell me the vegan nursemaid’s sleeping in his tepee in the woods this week.’ She spotted Russ, sitting at his computer in a gloomy corner trying to upload video files. He didn’t take this in good spirits.

  ‘I’m here to look after Kat now,’ Dawn said brightly, ‘so you can push off and free-range, -lance or -load or whatever it is you do.’

  Standing up, he adopted a heroic Heathcliff stance, somewhat marred by the fact his earphones were still plugged into the computer. The two squared up to one another, enmity exactly where they’d left it in February.

  ‘Kat needs protecting right now,’ he said darkly.

  ‘Especially on the days you run out of clean pants,’ Dawn muttered, under her breath, as Russ pulled out the earplugs and stalked towards the door, muttering about cricket practice and whistling for Ché, who was drooling beneath the table where Dawn had dumped the steaks.

  Seeing Kat’s open-mouthed shock at her rudeness, Dawn winked unapologetically. ‘You did ask me to get rid of him, and for a man who doesn’t live here any more, he still looks very much at home.’

  ‘I think he’s worried Seth’s team will try to abduct me and force me into an arranged marriage,’ she admitted. Russ had become very controlling in the days since the showdown in the woods, populating the few remaining spare runs, hutches and cages at the sanctuary with dull-eyed Death Row wildlife ‘for their own protection’, disappearing for hours on end with his video camera to ‘monitor’ Dougie exercising hounds and horses, and holding forth in the pub, where the talk was all of Bollywood balls, cricket balls and Dougie’s tack-room lover, commonly believed to possess balls.

  ‘We are going to discuss this at length later.’ Dawn already had a bottle of wine open and her own emotional baggage to unload. ‘Man, is it good to see you! What a month. I could kill Dave…’

  Kat, who hadn’t touched alcohol since her concussion, hoped it was safe to start again. She’d never been very good at daytime drinking, but it would be rude not to join Dawn, who was already pouring her heart out.

  Selling the house had opened a lot of old wounds, and the exes’ amicable parting of ways had broken down into vicious spats more than once over possession of the Dualit toaster or plasma TV as the tension of dividing their belongings coincided with pedantic solicitors, a bad survey, delayed completion, rented accommodation falling through and Dave’s new girlfriend interfering.

  ‘Dave has a girlfriend?’ said Kat, watching Dawn’s face pinch with pique.

  ‘Brace yourself – they’ve been seen out double-dating with Nick and the sports masseuse.’ In turn, Dawn watched Kat for a reaction, but there was no flinch of pain at the mention of Nick’s name. ‘The new squeezes are best friends. Just like old times.’

  Kat’s green eyes filled with compassion. ‘How do you feel about that?’

  ‘A lot more miserable than I should,’ she muttered, pouring more wine and unloading her anger as one only can with the closest friends. ‘I know we all move on – and I never want to be with Dave again – but nobody told me it would hurt this much. Getting divorced was like breaking out of Colditz for both of us, so why do I feel jealous every time I hear his new girlfriend’s name?’

  ‘Maybe you’re not ready for him to be happy just yet.’

  ‘I’m certainly pissed off he’s got a sex life while I’m at home in a onesie with a Downton box set.’

  ‘What happened to internet dating?’

  ‘It’s exhausting, Kat. I needed a break. It’s like interviewing for a job every day of the week. All those questionnaires and top fives, then the emails and phone calls – not to mention Google detective work – and that’s before you even meet. Then you do and it takes all of ten seconds to realize there’s no chemistry at all.’

  Kat gave her a sympathetic smile. ‘I suppose there’s also no friendship group to fall back on to give you time to let that chemistry develop naturally.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Dawn murmured doubtfully. ‘I just hate it when they say “successful businessman” and it turns out they sell stuff on eBay. There are so many losers out there. And there’s you living next door to a bona fide Hollywood heartthrob.’

  ‘He hated Hollywood.’ Kat drank more wine. ‘His reviews always contained more about his love life, his background and his crooked teeth than his acting.’

  Dawn watched her face closely again, noticing how luminous her eyes grew, a smile crossing her mouth like the sun bursting out briefly between clouds before she bit it away.

  ‘So, tell me, if this crooked-toothed Hollywood failure living next door floats your boat, what went wrong?’

  ‘The boat sank. He’s employed by the estate to resurrect cruel, antediluvian pastimes for a few rich men’s pleasure.’

  ‘Stop talking like Russ and tell me how you really feel.’

  ‘I happen to agree with Russ on this one. Private landowners have no right to think that, just because they have thousands of acres, they can put up No Trespassers signs and slaughter anything that crosses their land. This isn’t medieval England, no matter how good Dougie looks in tights.
He’s totally out of date. He should have been born a Regency rake.’

  ‘Reminds me of all the erotica books we swapped around on the cruises. I loved the historical ones. Rakes were always fantastic in bed, keeping their mistresses’ quivering quims in a constant state of readiness.’