The Country Lovers

by Walker, Fiona

  Lizzie was satisfyingly outraged. ‘That bastard! What did he want? Whatever it was, I hope you told him to get lost.’

  ‘I was very polite,’ she said, bursting into tears again.

  ‘Stay brave, kid,’ Lizzie soothed. ‘Remember, the best thing you ever did was breaking it off with Bay. You should have literally broken it off and pickled it. Saved a lot of women a lot of heartache.’

  Pax dug her fingernail into the flex. ‘I not sure I can stay here, Libs. I’ll go mad and commit matricide, then I’ll never get Kes.’ Why oh why wouldn’t the tears stop?

  ‘Come to us. We’ll downward dog together in front of Nicholas Sparks’ movies.’

  ‘I love your sweet heart, but I’m—’ She nearly leapt out of her skin as she spotted her mother’s blue eyes peering in through the window, and just for an unguarded moment she saw the exhaustion and despair in them. Spotting Pax, they crystallised into focus and sparkled. If Luca O’Brien used his smile as a weapon, it was a popgun compared to Ronnie’s façade. She’d spent half a decade turning and galloping the moment things got too emotional.

  ‘I’m going to unmask my mother,’ she finished.

  *

  Throughout her early life, and again in recent weeks, Ronnie had checked her reflection in Lester’s little kitchen window, conveniently located between rug and feed rooms, its glass kept immaculately clean despite the fact he hadn’t, to her knowledge, raised its dark brown blind in forty years, the glazed lean-to on the cottage’s garden side flooding in light enough. It made the perfect mirror for a quick check-over, and today she wanted to flick her hair, pinch her cheeks and roll her lips beneath her teeth to redden them.

  Instead, she was staring at her younger self, at all the tears soaked into pillows and stables, never once shed in front of her mother.

  What? Pax mouthed furiously, not waiting for an answer as she turned away to pace back and forth. Tethered to the wall by the phone cord, she resembled a chained dog.

  Watching her grab a tea towel to mop her tears, Stubbs trotting loyally after her, Ronnie felt her heart fold into itself, tighter and tighter, powerless to help.

  Pax was glaring at her again. Stop spying on me.

  I’m sorry, Ronnie mouthed back. I wasn’t spying I was—

  The blind came down abruptly and she found herself staring at her own fifty-something face, weather-beaten from hours in the saddle, starting to bag a little at the jowls and chin, her eyes strangely incandescent. To her shock, they bore great glistening tears. She swiped them, rolled her teeth over her lips, pinched her cheeks and strode back to Luca who was watching the grey stallion again, arms tightly crossed and broad shoulders hunched.

  There were lots of jobs still to do on the yard but they would have to wait. She wondered again how they would survive without Lester.

  ‘I must go back to the hospital and you must have a rest,’ she told Luca over-brightly, beckoning him to follow, aware that the poor man was on his knees with fatigue. ‘I’ll quickly show where you’re staying – it’s a bit of a labyrinth, but the outlook’s pretty. You’ll have the run of the house and use of the car,’ she briefed him as she marched off the yard. ‘I don’t eat supper as a rule, but I’m happy to count you into soup at lunchtime and breakfast after the yard’s done. Or you can self-cater. It’s up to you. Use the main kitchen whenever you like – yours is very basic – and you can have friends round any time as long as they don’t frighten the horses. Pip, the housekeeper, might reappear at some point and will probably try to mother you, shag you or both. Again, up to you. UK calls only from the phone, I’m afraid. There’s mobile reception up the lane. All your liabilities are your own. I can only afford you long enough to get the foals down and the mares covered again. And please don’t forget,’ she paused in the rear courtyard, glancing up at the top row of dormers, ‘to be nice to Pax. She’s going through a bloody tough time.’ She turned to him.

  He looked unimpressed behind the gentleman-explorer’s beard. ‘And you’re not?’

  ‘I’m just plain bloody tough.’ She indicated the long glass vestibule that formed the rear entrance of the house and doubled as a boot room. ‘Your flat is through there, the door straight ahead here. It’s all unlocked.’ Amid a sudden din of barking, the gate creaked behind them.

  Dressed in an ancient shredded Barbour, yard boots and an ugly woolly hat, Pax was holding out Lester’s overnight bag. Her swollen red eyes were as fierce as before, emotional Armageddon barely in check. At her feet, Stubbs was defending Knott from the heeler bitches.

  ‘I’ll do the yard while you’re visiting Lester,’ she said, not looking at them. ‘Bring everything in and tidy up.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I told you, I need to keep busy.’

  ‘I’ll help,’ offered Luca.

  ‘I don’t need your help.’

  Oh dear, she really was spoiling for a fight, thought Ronnie, taking Lester’s bag and, as an afterthought, gathering up Stubbs. ‘I’ll try to be back as quickly as I can.’

  ‘Take as long as you need.’ Pax pocketed her glasses and rubbed her face, raking her fingers up through her hair and retying her bun so tightly her red eyes tilted up at the edges.

  Ronnie’s heart turned again. Oh, the pure, unrelenting hell of a marriage ending. ‘The broodmares need bringing in first.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘I’m really very grateful, Pax, and I—’

  ‘I want to do it.’ Her big hare eyes warned her off sentimentality like all good Percys. ‘It helps to help. Send Lester my love.’

  ‘I will,’ Ronnie said and smiled, turning away. ‘I’m just showing Luca up to his – oh.’ He’d swung out of the gate and was loping across the arrivals yard. Under the first archway, he paused and waited.

  ‘Tell him I don’t need him,’ muttered Pax. ‘He’s shattered.’

  ‘So are you.’ Ronnie wondered at the endurance marathon going on between them. ‘I don’t think you have a choice.’

  As she drove away, glancing in her rear-view mirror, Ronnie saw them trudging up towards the turnouts together with head collars, and sent up a little prayer that her daughter made peace as usual, quashing the worry that Pax was in the sort of frenetic, angry mindset that made her more likely to start a stampede or push a new manager in a water trough.

  At the bottom of the driveway, a mud-caked Land Rover was turning in, its lights flashing hello. Gritting her teeth, Ronnie barred its way with her car.

  The window buzzed down, a plume of aftershave rushing out. Bay had changed into casual clothes, hair wet from the shower. He glowed with good health, winter suntan – and bad intentions. ‘Thought I’d check how it’s all going, lend a hand if you need one.’

  ‘It’s fine. Now be a good boy and bugger off.’

  ‘Come on, Ron. I’m being neighbourly. Is Pax still here? She’s not answering her phone.’ When Ronnie gave no more than a withering look, he leaned out of his car window further, voice conspiratorial. ‘Is it true she’s given Och Aye the Noo his marching orders?’

  ‘None of your bloody business.’ Surely Lester hadn’t said anything? Even delirious with pain, he was usually the soul of discretion.

  ‘I’ll come back tomorrow, shall I?’

  ‘Go home, Bay.’

  He gave her a mock hangdog look, but he did as she asked, reversing around and shooting off again with a wave from the open window.

  *

  ‘Kochanie, I am not sure I can hold this position.’

  ‘Just – oooh, grrrgh – try a bit – ahhh – longer.’

  ‘I have a little back pain and cramp.’

  ‘Nothing to what – eaughh – I’m feeling, Aleš. Oh, Jaysus, that’s good! How about if I do…’

  ‘Zajebisty!’

  ‘… this?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Zajebisty! Oh yes. Oh yes.’

  They were up against the front door, rattling it on its hinges, the ultimate knee-trembler. Bridge’s ankles were on Aleš’s huge s
houlders, his shins wedged against the old wood-planking, forehead against the lintel, one big hand supporting her buttocks while the other was splayed across the little peep-window, knuckles in her shoulder blade. Both were secretly getting off like wildfire on the fact dog walkers, motorists and cyclists were passing just a foot or two away from their pounding, sweaty coupling. That and the fact it was the coolest spot in the room with the log burner at full blast, and they appreciated the draught they’d complained about all winter, no longer muffled with upholstered sausages and thick drapes, but whistling around two finely balanced, semi-naked bodies.

  ‘Oh, oh, oh!’ Bridge wailed joyfully as Aleš turned her round so that his back was to the door now, blotting out the little glass pane, head crammed at an angle, shoulders as wide as the entrance porch. This way, she could hold onto the rail for the door curtain, lean right back and…

  ‘Ooooooooooooooh.’

  It was sensational.

  ‘I am coming!’ Aleš warned.

  ‘Not before me,’ she panted as the electric shocks tickled and that whoosh of well-being flooded up inside her. Happy, happy homecoming. So rarely had they come together, at exactly the same time, it was like getting married again. Take that, Fantasy Ash. I love my husband!

  ‘Something strange is between my legs!’ Aleš wailed in a strangled voice.

  ‘Telling me!’ she groaned and shuddered appreciatively. ‘Ten inches of it’s inside me.’

  ‘Aghhhhhh!’

  With fairground-ride giddiness, Bridge felt herself free-falling several inches through the air as Aleš almost dropped her.

  ‘Kurwa! Arghhh!’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ She clung on, still half-coming, heart hammering as her body went into meltdown.

  ‘Something against my balls. Feel it, quick. Like it bugger me! Kurwa!’ He shrugged her legs urgently off his shoulders and pulled them round his waist. In moments of high excitement, Aleš’s kinkier demands were often lost in translation – and he could be quite kinky – so Bridge tried to ride this, body still crackling and fizzing like popping candy, doing what he wanted and reaching around to finger his balls and anus.

  They closed around a tightly rolled pamphlet. ‘What the…?’

  Aleš groaned as she swiftly removed it before taking a look.

  The Compton Villages Parish Magazine, January Edition ran with the headline Church Tower Under Risk of Collapse After Lead Theft Reveals Deathwatch Beetle. Brian Hicks and his wife Chris distributed the little booklet around all the local houses on the first of each month without fail, rolling it up neatly to post it through the Mazurs’ letterbox.

  ‘I think you’ve just been buggered by the Chairman of the Parish Council, my darling,’ Bridge told him, feeling his tower subside in sympathy with the beetle-infested church. ‘Would you like a cup of tea and an almond biscuit to get over the shock?’

  *

  Thinks happy thoughts, think happy thoughts! Pax could feel it, the tumour of rage multiplying ferociously, dividing and multiplying again like cells. She was holding a hose to wash mud off hooves as the herd came in from the fields, but longed to drench Luca in its icy water instead.

  ‘You’ve missed that near hind,’ he told her, passing behind with Margaret, the sourest-faced of the broodmares who looked almost as pissed off as Pax felt.

  ‘The girls never usually get their legs hosed,’ she said.

  ‘They do now.’

  Think happy thoughts! She pressed the hose trigger hard, the water pressure so high it snaked out of her frozen fingers, drenching her own leg, not doe-eyed Barbara’s.

  ‘Best check her frogs when you pick her feet out, yes?’ Luca passed behind her again, heading off to grab Shirley from the tie-ring.

  ‘Do you speak to my mother like she’s some half-witted pony-clubber?’

  He looked back at her in surprise. ‘I speak to her like she knows what she’s doing.’

  ‘I know what I’m doing.’

  ‘So you’ll have seen that mare looks a bit footsore.’

  ‘Of course I saw.’ She hadn’t noticed. Think happy thoughts. Think happy thoughts. At least you’re not in Scotland with Mack.

  ‘Must have been tough going back home, so it must,’ he said out of nowhere.

  Pax hesitated, furious that he was being so personal. Watching somebody throw up, slither around a bath in their underwear and sleep in your clothes might give you a right to ask after their mental health, but not now and not here.

  ‘Yes, mustn’t it,’ she replied eventually. He didn’t interrogate her further, which was good because she’d have waterboarded him with the hose.

  *

  At the end of a mixed ward full of oxygen-masked geriatrics, Lester was pale and composed, horrified that Ronnie hadn’t thought to bring him a supply of Fray Bentos pies or this week’s Horse & Hound, and the pyjama tops were striped, the bottoms checked. ‘I always fold them in matched pairs in the drawer. It’s a system. It makes no sense to muddle them.’

  ‘I’ll bring the right ones tomorrow,’ she promised, deciding not to remind him that he’d in all likelihood remain bottomless in a hospital gown until his op. At least the sight of Stubbs smuggled in a Bag for Life soothed him – although he was snobbishly irked it was an Aldi one.

  ‘Operation’s on Thursday. I’ll be up again in no time,’ he assured her, white with fear. ‘Didn’t even fall off.’

  ‘I know, Lester. You owe nothing to the Tumblers Club.’

  He looked relieved to be believed, giving her a wily look. ‘The Australian gone home, has he?’

  ‘Hours ago,’ she sighed. Blair was another wrinkle that needed smoothing.

  ‘That’s a shame. Useful to have someone around the place who knows what they’re doing while I’m laid up.’

  ‘We have Luca now.’

  ‘Never hurts to have experience on side. Not a lot that Robertson fellow doesn’t know about horses.’

  ‘Lester, are you encouraging me to see more of Blair?’

  He stared her out beadily.

  ‘I’ll give him a call, shall I?’

  ‘If you say so.’

  Ronnie wondered if they’d overdone the opiates. She tested the theory. ‘Lester, I hope it’s all right, but while you’re in here I’ve found you a house-sitter.’

  ‘Very good.’ He sagged back against the pillows, frail and pale.

  ‘It’s easier to look after Stubbs and Laurence that way.’

  He had his eyes closed now. ‘I won’t tolerate curried food, pipe smoke or lavender bags. Your mother was a devil for slipping a pomander on a doorknob when I wasn’t looking.’

  ‘I think you’re safe with Pax.’

  His eyes snapped open. ‘Please don’t tell me you put her in my cottage?’

  ‘I thought you’d be pleased. She’s coming back to live at the stud.’

  A hand gripped hers tightly. ‘Get rid of the letters.’

  *

  Rather than hurl the parish magazine into the wood burner as revenge for being rimmed by it in a kinky threesome, Aleš had been – rather disturbingly, Bridge thought – engrossed in it for the ensuing half hour while she guzzled rogaliki biscuits and enjoyed the afterglow. Both freshly showered and jogger-clad, they sprawled on a sofa each, Bridge scrolling her phone while Aleš read twenty curled A5 pages of prayers, psalms and church services.

  ‘There are many poems from the little church school here.’ He smiled indulgently. ‘It is very sweet to see.’

  Bridge was touched that he took an interest. Their kids were still a way off school, and they’d already agreed they favoured the bigger, better-funded school in Broadbourne where their Polish cousins went.

  ‘Good place to work, yes? Safe place? Little part-time job is nice idea.’

  She eyed him warily.

  ‘I read list earlier when you lie there.’ He nodded towards the table where her notes about job applications had been crumpled under their lovemaking. ‘It says something about job at school?�
��

  ‘It’s just one left-field idea I’m toying with,’ she muttered. ‘I’m not taking it too seriously if—’ She stopped herself. ‘Are you saying that you were studying my job ideas list while we were having sex?’

  ‘It was in my eyeline.’

  ‘Remind me to leave How To Be a Woman out next time.’

  ‘That would be strange.’ He looked at her levelly, sarcasm lost on him as usual.

  ‘I’m looking for something a bit more challenging, work-wise, Aleš.’

  ‘You have a home to look after.’

  Bridge gritted her teeth. They mustn’t argue after this much sex. Not on their only night alone together. Her body was still rippling with the pleasure of it all.

  Closing her eyes to count to ten, she was alarmed to find Fantasy Ash waiting there in the darkness, emerging through the gloom of a deserted schoolyard, asking if he was too late for parents’ evening. Oh, those hard, tortured silver eyes.

  ‘D’you think you might be ready to go again later?’ she said, turning turning to Aleš, but he’d fallen asleep with his mouth open.

  *

  Hazy grey twilight had thickened into darkness around the stud’s stable yards, their cobbled quadrangles golden islands in the tungstens, the surrounding fields black seas through which Pax and Luca navigated, torches bobbing.

  By the time they’d brought in half a dozen big-bellied broodmares and herded youngstock back into barns, Luca was dead on his feet. Pax hadn’t uttered anything beyond snipes and monosyllables, crosser than ever because she kept disappearing to try calling her husband from the landline, only to storm back out less than a minute later. Luca waited each time, increasingly impatient. It seemed hubby was now playing the silent stand-off. It was all tactics and gameplay, ending relationships, he reflected sorely on his own rifts. Horses were far easier.

  He checked on the bellyaching stallions – the new neighbours engaged in straightforward out-shouting each other, interspersed with deep, appreciative inhaling and lip-curling – then tracked down Pax in the feed room, pouring hot water over quick-soak sugar beet and sobbing silently into the steam, trying to hide it as soon as she realised he was there, pulling on brittle British politeness like a uniform. ‘Almost done!’