Country Lovers

by Fiona Walker

  Ronnie’s protests were cut off by a heavy knock at the front door, which nobody used except salesmen and tourists. At the same time, there was a sharp rap at the back door.

  ‘You take the Jehovah’s Witnesses.’ Ronnie headed through the back corridor to the vestibule, trailed by her dogs.

  Pax made her way to the enormous hallway, hauling aside locks and bolts and cranking the stiff key around.

  Carly and her buggy were waiting. ‘I’m sorry to bother you, only the new manager has fallen asleep in the tack room. Poor bugger’s fit to drop, says he’s not slept since Toronto.’

  ‘He’s lying,’ Pax muttered, remembering him asleep on the hotel chair, her hillbilly guard with no gun.

  ‘That little puppy’s with him.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll wake him in a bit.’

  ‘Am I needed tomorrow?’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘Yard work. Only I can change my cleaning shifts if I am.’

  ‘Someone will call you. Does Mummy have your number?’

  She nodded, shifting from foot to foot. ‘I need minimum wage if it’s regular work. Just saying.’

  Pax rubbed her forehead tiredly, irritated by her fresh-faced ballsiness. ‘I’ll pass that on. Anything else? Pension scheme? Private healthcare? Dress-down Fridays?’

  ‘That’s all.’ She forced a smile, but her jaw was set, the eyes unfriendly. ‘See you tomorrow, maybe.’

  ‘I won’t be here.’

  Pax trailed back through the hall and the breakfast room, dropping down the steps into the kitchen, then freezing on the spot as Penhaligon’s Quercus filled her nostrils.

  Bay Austen was standing by the Aga, resplendent in red coat, blue eyes dark with concern. ‘Darling Pax, I’m afraid there’s been an accident.’

  ‘It’s Lester…’ Ronnie was already pulling on her coat.

  7

  A pair of hunt supporters had brought Lester’s cob back in a muddy trailer being towed by an Isuzu Trooper with a boot full of spaniels. They’d given Bay a lift.

  ‘I didn’t see it happen,’ he explained to Pax, lounging against the wheel arch in offensively good humour whilst she lowered the ramp. His own horse was standing alongside in the second partition, both fully tacked, steam still rising from their backs.

  ‘We were having a terrific run,’ he went on. ‘Lester was at the back. All I heard was the cry go up to call an ambulance.’

  Pax clambered inside, the high-pitched growl of her mother’s sports car still just audible as Ronnie raced away through the village, heading north towards Coventry where Lester had been taken by air ambulance.

  ‘From what I can gather,’ Bay’s voice continued out of sight as she let down the breech bars, ‘a hunt monitor jumped out of a hedge with a camera as the field cantered past; Lester’s chap swerved to avoid trampling her and bashed against a tree. The old boy sat it out, but the bump must have cracked a hip. First anyone knew about it was after the hounds checked and we realised Lester had turned grey and was having an asthma attack. Stayed in the saddle throughout. Your grandfather would have been proud. You here alone?’ He watched her reverse the cob out.

  Guessing Luca must still be asleep in the tack room, Pax was reluctant to involve the puritanical Horsemaker in a crisis so soon after his arrival, still less to introduce him to inveterate gossip, Bay, toxically privileged and pro-bloodsports, who would doubtless spread news far and wide that Ronnie’s stud man looked like a long-lost Bee Gee.

  ‘I’ll stay until there’s news, if you like?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’ She led the cob past him. ‘Shouldn’t you be getting back?’

  ‘I’m not field master today, so I’m all yours.’

  Pax felt her indignation smoulder. ‘You push off. I’m fine.’

  She could hear the ramp going quickly back up behind them, grateful that the supporters would be too keen to get back to their sport to linger for tea and talk.

  But Bay was in no hurry, holding open the stable door and watching as she started untacking. ‘How’s the cold?’

  ‘Much better.’

  ‘You look deathly.’

  ‘Thanks.’ All the toxins in Pax’s body from months of deep-vein tears, booze and cortisol seemed to be pumping through her heart.

  ‘That husband of yours isn’t looking after you properly. You should be tucked up in bed with a hot toddy.’

  ‘Mack’s in Scotland.’ She heaved at the girth straps, keeping her face turned away, feelings veering wildly between murderous and martyred.

  ‘Apart for New Year?’

  ‘Couldn’t be helped.’

  ‘When’s he back?’

  She paused too long, wondering. Would she have to drive up there to confront him, to fetch Kes home? ‘Tomorrow, I think.’

  ‘You think?’ He toyed with the word, loading it with playful insinuation.

  She nodded, throwing the girth over the saddle, increasingly uncomfortable with the cross-examination, which Bay was predictably turning into adulterous speed dating.

  ‘So you’re on your own tonight?’

  She blanked this.

  ‘Why don’t we catch up later over a drink?’

  ‘Time to go, Bay.’ She gave him a weary smile, unbuckling the cob’s breastplate.

  The hunt supporters were back in their pickup, engine running, checking their phones while they waited for the Wolds’ master.

  He was scrutinising her face closely now. ‘You’re not sleeping well.’

  ‘I told you, it’s this flu thing.’

  ‘No it’s not.’ He smacked his lips in thought, making her jump. ‘I think you’ve left old Och Aye the Noo at last.’

  ‘Whoa! Where did that come from?’

  ‘Deny it.’

  ‘It’s none of your business.’ She pulled the saddle off the cob’s back, turning to glare at him and then regretting it. She tried not to blink. How could Bay know? It had to be her mother, spilling home truths after he’d interrupted their awkward confessional. ‘For God’s sake, don’t tell anyone.’

  Catching a flash of amused white smile in the stable’s darkness, Pax realised she’d just given herself away. Had it just been an educated guess? Bay had been there at her grandfather’s funeral, after all, when Pax could barely bring herself to be in the same room as Mack, shuddering with revulsion every time he introduced himself to an old family friend as ‘Patricia’s better half’, or picked fights with her because she refused to guestimate the value of her grandfather’s estate. She’d been quietly drunk that day too, their terse war of words in the car home starting the moment they’d reached for their seat belts.

  ‘You always were braver than me.’ Bay’s face was in shadow, framed in the open door, his hunt coat identical to the one of her father’s she’d found in the attic wardrobe the previous afternoon. ‘Good luck, beautiful girl.’

  For a moment, fourteen years of rattling through life in the wrong direction rolled back, the sadness overwhelming. Pax wanted to bury her face in those blue lapels and weep.

  She needed him gone.

  ‘I’ll see you off, shall I?’ She threw the saddle over the door and hurried past him, a lump in her throat as big as the cob’s salt lick.

  Back at the Trooper, Bay was all smiles and solicitude again, pausing with his gloved fingers on the door handle to loudly offer the Fosse and Wolds’ formal best wishes for Lester’s speedy recovery, glancing inside to check the others were still on their phones before adding a whispered postscript, ‘Let’s have lunch.’

  ‘Why?’ She couldn’t look higher than his nose. Not so brave now.

  ‘You look like you need a decent meal.’ His mouth – the first she had ever kissed – stopped smiling. ‘I’ll call later.’

  ‘You don’t have my number.’

  ‘Actually, I do.’ He turned and climbed inside. ‘I’ve made it into my screen saver, look.’ He held up a photograph of a familiar-looking kitchen wall. With a wave and a roar of diesel engine, he was gone,
trailer rattling.

  ‘Arrogant bastard,’ Pax muttered to make herself feel better. She’d forgotten her mobile number was still Sharpied in extra-large letters on the tiles close to the ancient landline phone, along with those of other family members, neighbouring landowners, the vet, plumber and Ladbrokes, all of whom her grandfather had called regularly to shout at. Let him call, she thought with satisfaction. It would ring in a bin somewhere between here and the M42.

  As she headed back to the cob’s stable to sponge him off and put on a rug, it occurred to Pax that she’d thrown away a lot of control and privacy with the gesture. A call so easily dismissed with a swipe on a mobile screen was public knowledge over an ancient wired line with two inconveniently placed handsets. In a motion sickness powershift, she had an immediate and overwhelming need to know Kes was all right, to explain to Mack as calmly as possible that she’d be staying at the stud for a few days, seek reassurance that he was bringing their son home tomorrow and that they would put his needs first, call a brief truce until they sought something more formal.

  Instinctively, she pressed her face into the cob’s neck and breathed deeply. That familiar salty, biscotti scent filled her nostrils. Fourteen years rolled back again. Tears briefly wet and soft against a warm, clipped coat, a wall of comforting muscle, the steady crunch of jaw on hay.

  Turning quickly away, she picked up the saddle and headed to the tack room.

  Luca was indeed still asleep, deathly pale beneath his beard, his cheeks hollow, reminding her again of a prisoner of war, not the golden boy they’d been anticipating. He looked so peaceful, her mother’s fallen angel, a man who had seen her at her unforgiveable worst and was consequently hard to like or forgive. The room was refrigerator-cold. Ignoring the small voice telling her to wake him hospitably and show him to a real bed, Pax flicked on the oil heater and shushed the puppy to stay, edging an old wool horse rug over them both and hurrying back to the house.

  The landline started ringing as she let herself in and she hurtled down dim corridors to answer it in the kitchen, expecting Mack as she pressed the clunky old cordless house phone to her ear.

  But it was Alice, the Cotswold jungle drums working faster than Reuters. ‘Just heard what’s happened, Mother,’ came her sister’s customary snappy falsetto, always at its most arch when she thought she was speaking with Ronnie.

  ‘It’s me, Lisp – Pax.’ Growing up, the Ledwell siblings Alice, Timothy and Patricia had been a Blytonesque trio of Lisp, Moth and Pax, Alice earning Lisp because she couldn’t pronounce her ‘s’ words.

  ‘Thank God you’re there. Poor Lester. Is it serious? Shall I come round? We’ve got a shoot going on, but lunch is all made.’

  ‘There’s no point rushing here.’ She couldn’t face the prospect of Alice right now, with her short-fused black-and-white opinions. ‘Mummy’s ambulance chasing. He didn’t fall off, so I’m hoping it’s not too bad.’

  ‘Is it really true the antis were behind it? I heard they lay in wait and lynch-mobbed him.’

  ‘Hardly.’ She relayed what Bay had told her about the hedge-lurking monitor, then held the receiver away from her ear as Alice spouted furiously about ignorant townies interfering in country traditions.

  ‘Luca O’Brien has arrived,’ Pax said to shut her up.

  ‘God, already? What’s he like?’

  ‘Too early to tell.’

  ‘Which means he’s absolutely ghastly. You always like people; I’ll come round later. Meanwhile, call as soon as you know more about Lester. Why aren’t you in Scotland, by the way?’

  ‘Change of plan.’ She felt the approaching sting of exposure. Alice had no idea what was going on in Pax’s world. A one-way mirror lay between them through which Pax could see her sister clearly – Queen Victoria in a Joules gilet and layered bob, stalwart Cotswold wife eager to maintain her claim to the stud. Alice just saw herself reflected back. No rancid marriage rotted from the inside out, no tears and tantrums and delirium tremens, no humiliating, unstoppable breakdown with a stranger she now hated for it. Just fierce Percy fortitude.

  Alice was name-dropping a tweedy A-list of Bardswolders amongst today’s guns on her family farm. Perhaps she should tell all if Bay would be trumpeting her news? But Pax found herself staring at the chair her grandmother had always occupied, imagining Alice’s unalloyed horror at her recent behaviour, her insistence that Pax must stick with her marriage at whatever cost for their son’s sake, and she let Alice end the call with a cheery, ‘Must dash.’

  Oh, Kes. Her chest and arms ached with the need to hug him, to breathe in the silken top of his head. She needed to hear his voice.

  They’d all be out walking now, the traditional Forsyth yomp up to Arthur’s Seat before lunch, Kes on his father’s shoulders. She must try to smooth things over a bit, catch a word with her son to reassure him all was well in the world. She was still so jittery that she misdialled Mack’s mobile twice, then hung up on his voicemail, furious with herself for getting tearful again.

  She headed upstairs to switch on the heater in her father’s old bedroom, perching on the end of the bed, discomfort mounting at the prospect of Luca occupying it, the memories of Johnny Ledwell so little stirred in years, now freshly scented with nostalgia and need.

  The phone was ringing again. That, at least, was like the old days. It had rung endlessly then. She thundered down to answer it, certain it was Mack his time, the need for diplomacy pressing.

  ‘Lester’s fractured his hip.’ Ronnie was at her most no-nonsense, calling from a payphone in the hospital. ‘He’s absolutely livid about it and keeps telling everyone who’ll listen that he didn’t fall off.’

  Pax could imagine his indignity. She moved closer to the window to watch rain fleck the sash’s panes.

  ‘At least he gets that hip replaced straightaway, and for free,’ Ronnie went on, ‘but it’s rather more serious than it would have been had he seen a bone man months ago. The fracture goes right down into his femur, poor chap. He’ll be in here at least a fortnight, then it’s very slow recuperation. The other one needs replacing before it goes the same way too, so he’ll not be back in his yard boots for months, and whether he’ll ride again is in doubt. Not a word of that to him or anyone else yet, of course. Has Bay gone?’ There was an edge to her voice.

  ‘Ages ago.’ There was an even sharper edge to Pax’s, the mention of his name guaranteeing a frost between them, a quick subject switch essential. ‘Lester will need pyjamas and wash things, I take it?’

  ‘Oh, could you put it all together? That would be marvellous. I’ll come home as soon as he’s moved into a ward, then I can bring it all back here in visiting hours. How’s our new arrival?’

  ‘Still catnapping in the tack room.’ She had no desire to hurry back.

  ‘That won’t do at all. Why not put him in Lester’s cottage for now?’

  ‘I’ve got the attic flat ready.’

  ‘Nonsense. We agreed you and Kes are going to be living in that.’

  ‘We didn’t agree anything.’ She had a sudden image of herself sprawled on her father’s bed, whisky bottle and cigarette in hand, fulfilling the prophecy. ‘You can’t just give Lester’s cottage away, Mummy.’

  ‘He’s not going to need it for a bit, though, is he?’ It seldom occurred to pragmatic, ever-transient Ronnie that others were more sentimental about their private sanctums. ‘Stubbs and that fox need looking after. It’s jolly cosy in there, and far easier for keeping an eye on the yard.’

  ‘That’s not the point. It’s Lester’s home.’

  ‘I’m perfectly aware of that, but the stairs are totally impractical. He’ll need single-storey living for the foreseeable future. Maybe we can turn the old Stables Flat into a convalescence wing?’

  ‘That has an external staircase and no heating!’ The long dormitory beneath the clock tower hadn’t been used since before the war.

  ‘You’re good at sorting out this sort of thing, Pax. We can offer Stables Flat to Luca
instead of the cottage if you like? Although somebody has to look after the bloody fox.’

  ‘I’ll look after Lester’s cottage,’ she said in exasperation.

  ‘Good. That’s settled.’ A purr of laughter. ‘You can move your things across today.’

  Pax set her jaw, realising her mother had plotted this from the conversation’s start. She longed to argue, but for all the Mack Shack boasted high-speed Internet and dry cupboards, she loathed the metal box in which her unhappy marriage had been hermetically sealed for so long. She knew Lester would trust her to look after his cottage more than a stranger. And she could be useful here. With the old stallion man out of action, the stud badly needed her help. For months she’d been filing for the sake of it in the office she and Mack shared, the company overwintering until they sold the barn conversions. Here there were paper piles as high as termite mounds.

  Pax thrived on being needed. Her mother was right that the stud was somewhere secure and steeped in Kes’s family history, and she had very few alternatives. Her own childhood was close to the surface here, the village familiar and safe, her sister and Lester cornerstones.

  The truth that Pax would admit to nobody, not even herself, was how frightened she was that she’d start drinking again if she went back to the Mack Shack. She glanced at cupboards in the kitchen dresser now, knowing Scotch was in there, longing to taste just a mouthful for its burn of confidence. But she wouldn’t give Luca O’Brien the satisfaction of seeing her fail. That was another reason to be here, however uncomfortable the company. She pinched her nails into her palms and headed out to Lester’s cottage.

  In her hungover greed, Bridge had eaten most of the raw mix for her little rogaliki almond biscuits straight from the bowl. This, she realised later, was a blessing. Left in the oven too long, they had cooled to tooth-breaking bullets. Mercifully, her threat to village dentistry barely covered one brightly flowered vintage side plate.

  ‘Hard-core baking, baby!’ Ash Turner, all ink and muscle, pumped iron on her kitchen floor.