Country Lovers

by Fiona Walker

  Looking up, eyes huge, Pax shoved the piece of paper in her back pocket and missed, sending it billowing across the cobbles. She and Luca went running after it, comical in their twists and turns as it changed direction, swept up, down and around in the wind.

  Shrieking with laughter and dashing to join in the game, Kes employed the Percy cricket catch to grab it from under their noses, looking at it and proudly reading, ‘A… A.’

  He turned back to thrust it at Ronnie. ‘What does the rest say, Gronny?’

  Glancing at it, Ronnie resisted an urge to kiss it. ‘Boring grown-up stuff,’ she said as Pax hurried up, and Ronnie told her, ‘I don’t think he read the rest.’

  ‘It’s okay, Kes can only read the alphabet and words of one syllable.’ She stooped to pick him up, quickly mouthing thank you.

  Ronnie brightened. ‘One syllable, hey, Kester the Genius? There are many Percys who never get beyond that at fifty, let alone five! I’m one of them without my specs.’

  Ronnie turned as Luca appeared beside her and handed the flyer to him. Dear, kind Luca, whose smile gave nothing away. ‘Get her on a horse again and I might just give you your weight in gold,’ she said quietly, then called across at her giggling grandson, ‘Kes is going to start riding, aren’t you, darling?’

  Pax’s protests that he was too young were drowned out by her son’s banshee cry of delight as he scrabbled down to charge around the yard pretending to gallop.

  ‘Born to ride!’ Ronnie realised that she sounded like her own mother.

  Pax’s voice was brittle. ‘I suppose it’ll really piss off Mack, at least there’s that.’

  Letting this pass, Ronnie watched as Kes charged up to Luca to butt him like a goat, which he took with an exaggerated ‘oof!’, pretending to reel backwards, then clicking him on as he cantered away again.

  Breaking the good news about the tough-thug Shetland who would soon be Beck’s sidekick, she sensed she didn’t have Pax and Luca’s entire attention. Both were looking at everything but one another.

  She changed tack. ‘I’m hiring a weekend girl on the yard so you can both have more time off.’ Vague nods greeted this.

  ‘Who?’ Pax asked eventually.

  ‘Carly Turner.’

  Pax and Luca both spoke at the same time again: ‘She’ll be—’

  ‘Expensive,’ finished Pax as Luca said, ‘Good.’

  They glanced at each other with an energy that made Ronnie step back.

  ‘You know we can’t afford it, Mummy,’ Pax insisted.

  ‘We can if we sell some horses.’ Watching Pax racing after Kes, she told Luca about his mysterious royal caller.

  That got him standing to attention, in as far as he ever did, languid leanness shifting from one foot to another, smile rearranging itself. ‘Yeah, he rang me after.’

  ‘Old friend?’

  ‘He’s a time-waster.’ He clicked his tongue in his cheek, watching Pax as she rejoined them with Kes, whose cuddly rabbit was covered in teasels, burrs and now hay.

  ‘Who’s a time-waster?’ Pax asked.

  ‘Luca’s Arab friend – sorry, Arab acquaintance.’

  ‘AA!’ Kes identified proudly, grabbing Ronny’s hand.

  ‘Well done, Kes.’ Pax gave her mother guilty eyes above a frozen smile, then glanced at Luca.

  That same electric look passed between them again, Ronnie noticed. A precarious intimacy, alien to them both.

  ‘So who is your Arab acquaintance?’ Pax asked him.

  ‘Just a guy I worked with once.’

  ‘A prince,’ Ronnie deadpanned.

  ‘Really?’ Pax looked bemused.

  ‘You know a real prince?’ Kes could do big-eyes just like his mum. ‘Like Eric or Naveen?’

  ‘Sure, it’s nothing,’ Luca smiled.

  ‘Does he have a magic sword? Or a magic carpet?’ Kes made hand swoops whilst doing imaginary flying.

  ‘No, just a magic da.’

  ‘Like my daddy?’

  Pax’s face developed its rigidly kind look. ‘Like Daddy, yes.’

  An ordinary prince. Ronnie thought back to Luca talking about the run-up to the London Olympics. ‘Does this mean you’re still in touch with the royal family who bought Beck, Luca?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  Ronnie’s business head now had stud fees on a loop, knowing there were huge performance horse programmes taking off over there, semen straws flying east first class at tens of thousands a pop. ‘Do they breed?’

  ‘Not sure.’

  ‘I can get Blair to check if you like. He has a lot of contacts. He coached in the UEA and Saudi and knows—’

  ‘Excuse me!’ A rabbit was thrust up between them all. ‘Rab and Oliver say grown-ups are reeeeaaaally boring.’ Kes made a fart noise. ‘Can we play with the hosepipe, Gronny?’

  ‘What a good idea,’ Ronnie took his hand, quashing the need for Blair’s grown-upness more than ever.

  *

  Pax tried not to let a sense of Schadenfreude take over when her son doused her mother from head to foot in cold water. It wasn’t that she didn’t want them to get on, but she found Ronnie’s all-consuming desire to be super-granny overwhelming sometimes. All that love-at-first-sight mutual adoration still felt too new to trust, like everything in the last few weeks.

  When Ronnie disappeared into the main house to change and dry off, she tried to persuade Kes in to the warmth of the cottage, but he clung to the yard, thin moon sliding up the night sky overhead now, horse silhouettes moving in a magic pool of golden light.

  Waiting for him to finish loudly counting the saddles for Luca in the tack room before he locked it, she read a few of the messages that had come through while her phone had a signal: her solicitor Helen confirming their next meeting; one of the pre-prep mums who didn’t realise Kes wouldn’t be returning this term; Lunch tomorrow? Bx from an unfamiliar mobile number that she swiped past with a brief heartbeat rush to find a more welcome one from livewire Bridge Mazur. I got this number from your parental data sheet. Hope okay? (Probably get fired before I officially start.) Grand to meet you earlier. Let me know when best to bring my friend and her boy over. Looking forward. :-]

  She smiled, messaging straight back with a couple of dates, going outside to wave her phone around to try to send it on its way, then proudly listening to Kes counting past thirty inside, his voice schoolroom sing-song, Luca’s bouncy encouragement possessing the same effortless spontaneity she’d noticed in others from big Irish families.

  Was she mad to want to move him to such a little school? she wondered. Mack was right that a school like his pre-prep had huge resources to give its pupils educational advantage. Self-doubt gripped her, the all too familiar comedown, a headache already knocking.

  ‘Me and Luca are best friends!’ Kes appeared beside her, hot breath pluming.

  ‘That’s nice.’ She watched the Irishman pull the door closed to lock it. In her hand, her phone let out an irritated buzz to tell her it had no signal and could not send.

  It was only when she looked down to tick the Send Later? box that she realised she’d replied in error to Bay’s message, not Bridge’s. How awful if he’d received That would be lovely! Let’s make it soon! Tues/Weds? xx The unsent message was easy enough to delete. Harder was the pounding in her chest and the recklessness with which her mind imagined what might happen if she left it there. Catching Luca looking at her curiously, she pocketed the phone. ‘Thank you for everything today.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’ They watched Kes charging off to say goodnight to Beck and Cruisoe.

  ‘I think you got out of teaching pony lessons.’

  He said nothing, his eyes shifting away, a rare streak of colour in each cheek, the smile firmly in place.

  Realising that was a mean, headachy dig, she reached out to pat his arm and wish him goodnight. His hand covered hers.

  It’s funny how the most everyday moments sometimes had such significance, she thought a moment later, the unexpected hea
t of his hand catching her by surprise again. And she knew in that moment, with a capsizing heart-lurch, that their friendship mattered now. It was something she needed.

  ‘Goodnight.’ He set off unsmiling, and she knew he felt the same way.

  Kes, stomping on cobbles as though they would pop like bubble wrap, big-stepped towards her. ‘Can Luca and Gronny eat supper with us?’

  ‘Not tonight.’

  He tilted his head. ‘Why not?’

  ‘I want you all to myself.’ She glanced at Luca’s retreating silhouette

  ‘Oliver says you are a boring smelly-pants!’

  She thought Oliver had a point, but she knew better than to acknowledge her son’s imaginary friend. ‘Let’s get you something to eat.’

  *

  ‘I’ve come to read Kes a bedtime story and give you a present!’ Ronnie told Pax brightly from the doorstep of Lester’s cottage, feeling as welcome as a Jehovah’s Witness, and uncomfortably duplicitous.

  ‘He’s had a story.’ Dressed in just a towelling gown, Pax had coated her hair in some sort of conditioner that made her look like a bird in an oil slick.

  ‘An embarrassment of riches, then.’ Ronnie wasn’t giving up easily, holding up a foxed copy of Beatrix Potter. ‘He told me earlier he’d never heard The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle.’

  There was a gurgling of pipes from above. ‘I’m just topping up the bath. Hang on.’ Pax dashed upstairs to stop the tap. Nipping inside and closing the door to shut out the cold, Ronnie found herself standing right next to the big dresser in which Lester had told her he kept private correspondence.

  She glared at it reluctantly. The letters.

  Pax was back down before she’d even located the right cupboard. ‘Another night, maybe? He’s almost asleep.’ They could both hear Kes playing loudly with his toy car, making vrooming noises overhead. ‘All this is still so new. Best not overstimulate him.’

  ‘Of course. These are for you.’ She handed across a large plastic bag from the Bardswolds’ one remaining old-fashioned saddlery shop and knew, the moment Pax registered the horse head logo emblazoned on it with a frozen smile, that she had judged it wrong. ‘Just a few practical things to wear around the yard.’

  Pax pulled out a pair of charcoal designer breeches, riding socks, thermal layers and gloves, then a padded gilet and short coat. ‘These are riding clothes, Mummy.’

  ‘Work clothes. They’re dual purpose.’

  ‘You can’t afford all this.’

  ‘You’d be amazed what Nectar points can buy these days.’

  ‘It’s terribly kind of you. At least you stopped short of the hat and boots.’

  ‘They’re still in the car. Call it an early birthday present.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Pax said, rigidly courteous.

  ‘While I’m here,’ Ronnie tried to sound airily casual, ‘Lester asked me to pick up a few things.’

  ‘Be my guest.’ Pax sat down on the bottom stair to make a fuss of Ronnie’s little heelers who had muscled inside too.

  ‘Don’t let your bath get cold.’

  ‘It’s fine.’ She looked up. ‘What things, exactly?’

  ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea while you’re in the bath, shall I?’

  ‘I don’t want a cup of tea.’ Pax cocked her head. ‘Is something bothering you, Mummy? Is this about what Kes told you?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘His brother.’

  Wrong-footed, Ronnie hesitated, unaccustomed to such directness. She’d forgotten how swiftly truth came out of the mouths of infants.

  ‘He says he told you about Oliver?’

  She perched beside Pax on the step, voice low so that Kes couldn’t possibly hear. ‘He told me he died.’

  ‘That’s right: Oliver, the baby we lost.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Ronnie reached out for her hand, but it was snatched away.

  ‘It was a long time ago.’ Pax chewed at her thumbnail, staring hard at the wood of the newel. ‘Now Kes has decided Oliver’s his imaginary friend, it’s hard to avoid the subject.’ She stood up, moving away from the stairs to the gloom of the passageway. ‘He’d be nearly ten now.’

  ‘Oliver was stillborn?’

  The pause stretched, vrooming noises above, the tick of Lester’s old wall clock marking the silence. Wait, Ronnie told herself. Wait. She’ll say it. Pain comes out.

  ‘The cord had got stuck around his neck, they said. I had no idea until it was too late.’ A light switch by the kitchen door was under close scrutiny, her hypnotic voice covering emotion. ‘I was three days overdue and when my midwife came to talk about inducing labour, she couldn’t find a heartbeat. They rushed me in for a caesarean, but he was already dead. He was the perfect little person when I held him: his fingers, his ears, hair like mine.’

  They both stared at the light switch. Wait, Ronnie, wait.

  ‘They let you have a funeral when a baby’s stillborn, but not a christening. We’d chosen his names way back when the scan showed he was a boy – Oliver because we both liked it; Alexander from the Forsyth side, Jocelyn from ours.’

  ‘I can’t imagine how devastating it must have been.’

  ‘We were offered grief counselling, but Mack said it would only keep dredging pain up. He wanted to try for another baby straight away, blot out what had happened, but it didn’t work like that. I blamed myself, still do. How could I have not known my baby was being strangled inside me? When I told Mack that’s how I felt, he didn’t deny it. He thought it was my fault too.’

  ‘That’s so wrong!’

  Pax headed into the dark kitchen, crossing to the little Rayburn, leaning against the range for warmth, prayer hands to her nose. ‘It took five years to conceive Kes, eight rounds of IVF.’ Her fingers thrummed together. ‘It almost finished us; perhaps it should have. It has now.’ She walked to the fridge, reached out for the handle, then changed her mind and walked back again.

  She wants a drink, Ronnie realised, almost offering to find her one before remembering.

  ‘Kes was our Band Aid, five years too late.’ Pax was back at the Rayburn. ‘Mack was adamant about christening him Oliver, our second son given the same names as that little headstone, like a replicant. It’s not uncommon apparently, but I hated the idea. I should have fought it more. I was just too grateful that he was healthy, and too ashamed that it was taking me so long to love him when I’d held his lifeless namesake in my arms and just loved, you know, just loved. For a child so wanted, it took me forever to bond. I love him more than life now.’ She glanced up at the ceiling. ‘Even if I feel like I don’t deserve him a lot of the time.’

  ‘Oh, Pax, I wish I’d known all this.’

  ‘Why? We never spoke; we were living in the Borders, you were in Germany. Alice knew, and she was kind, but there’s not much one can say, is there?’

  There was a great deal, Ronnie thought, she and Pax needed to say, but not right now. She could see how much the effort of talking about it had already cost her. ‘I like the name Kester; it’s Lester one removed.’

  Pax slowly clapped. ‘You’re the first to get that.’ She smiled briefly, glancing round the little hallway then back to her mother, both acknowledging the man who had been so important in their parallel childhoods. ‘I’ve never once called him Oliver. Mack and his parents tried Olly for a bit, but it never stuck. He’s Kes.’

  ‘But he thinks of his brother Oliver as his alter ego?’

  She nodded. ‘Mack hates it, and I try to discourage it, but the truth is I don’t mind that much.’

  ‘Because it brings Oliver to life,’ Ronnie guessed.

  Pax’s eyes brightened, surprised at being understood.

  Ronnie couldn’t resist reaching out a hand. This time, Pax let it rest on her arm.

  ‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ Ronnie said with feeling, alarmed to find a lump in her throat as big as a tennis ball.

  ‘Talking is good,’ Pax acknowledged with a half laugh, withdrawing. ‘Much as it pains
me to admit, Luca was right about that.’

  ‘I’m glad you two are making friends.’

  ‘You ordered him to be nice to me which is quite a different thing. Now he’s glued to me like a buddy programme. But he is right about talking. There are donkeys with no hind legs everywhere that man’s been.’ Pax did her walk to the fridge door handle and back again, pausing to straighten a picture of a bowler-hatted rider on a shiny show cob and say, ‘Sorry, Lester.’ They could both quietly imagine his horror at such intimate conversations taking place on his quarry tiles.

  ‘He’d be jolly chuffed to know Kes was named in his honour.’ Ronnie watched Pax opening and closing the glass cupboard now, without taking one out. ‘Les and Kes has a wonderful music hall ring about it, don’t you think?’

  ‘It was Lester’s shoulder I cried on after losing Oliver.’

  Ronnie masked her surprise. Lester was many things, but a good listener?

  ‘I came here for a few days not long after it happened. Mack didn’t know what to do with me because I couldn’t stop crying. Neither did Granny or Grumps, but Lester was very kind.’

  ‘Oh, he is kind.’ She could imagine him polite, poker-backed and dutiful while the older Percys hid away.

  ‘He told me something about Daddy, something he said nobody else knew.’

  Ronnie stiffened.

  ‘He said my grandmother, Johanna, had a baby after Daddy who died at just a few days old; apparently she never got over it. Maybe that’s why she drowned herself.’

  Ronnie had to forcibly stop herself snapping that Lester hadn’t known Johanna, they none of them had, and that Johnny had never breathed a word of it to her. Lester had always been a terrible myth-monger. And yet he’d also had Johnny’s confidence, letters passing between the two men for years despite barely a word spoken.

  She’d never seen the letters, but she could guess at their contents. Her late husband and Lester had been more than close, although any physical relationship was short-lived. Rigidly self-disciplined, they had behaved with total propriety to ensure nobody knew of the alliance, her own suspicions unspoken until long after Johnny’s death. Raised in an era when homosexuality was illegal and belonging to a society from which its discovery would have ostracised them as surely as her open adultery did her, the two men had coexisted in deep denial for years.