Country Lovers

by Fiona Walker

  Pax gritted her teeth. ‘I’ll pick him up at four thirty on the dot.’

  Despite a rare, uninterrupted blue sky and bright winter sun, her spirits were lowering by the minute. Last night’s high felt as though it had happened in a parallel life.

  She found herself wanting to tell Luca what he’d done, to share the thrill of it, the resurrection, but she held it back, already feeling too guilty, the squirm of self-loathing eating through her. Secret drinker. Secret rider. Secrets keeper.

  She retreated to the main house to work through calls that needed returning and cheques that needed writing, praying they wouldn’t bounce. At least the antiquated way the stud paid for everything bought them enough time for the deposits from new bookings for Cruisoe coverings to clear. There were precious few of those.

  The booking diary was an old-fashioned leather-bound tome and not a diary as such, its entries dating back many years, Lester’s neat handwriting cataloguing generations of visiting mares. That same handwriting in the letters which had been interleaved with her father’s.

  She slammed the book shut and watched through the big, twelve-paned window as Luca rode past on the old point-to-pointer they couldn’t sell because it hadn’t raced in years, leading an unbroken three-year-old out to nanny around the village for experience. She’d done it herself a hundred times a lifetime ago, that parallel life she’d all too briefly ridden through last night.

  Back out on the yard, safe in the knowledge he’d be gone a while, she made a beeline for Lester’s cob, burying her face in his solid neck and focussing on breathing. In out, in out. Deep lungfuls of that sweet, addictive comfort.

  ‘Shall we tack him up for you?’

  She swung round in alarm to see her mother beaming over the door at her, fresh from a night of sin. She looked radiant.

  Did she know about Pax riding? But the smile was unwitting.

  ‘No thanks.’ She gave the cob a perfunctory pat, hoping Ronnie would think she was just checking him over. ‘Good night?’

  ‘Better than yours by the look of it. Come and see Lester. I’m driving over there now.’

  ‘I can’t. I have lots to do.’

  ‘Nonsense. We’ll take Stubbs. I’ve found a trolley suitcase he fits in perfectly. Is he in the cottage?’ She was across the yard to the wall door before Pax could stop her, calling over her shoulder, ‘Luca’s riding out, I take it?’

  Pax followed slowly, pulling off her boots at the back door, knowing exactly what her mother would have just stumbled across. Why hadn’t she put them away? Half-sellotaped letters were spread out on the table in Lester’s cottage.

  Ronnie pressed her hands to her cheeks. ‘You found them then?’

  Pax stood in the doorway uncertainly.

  ‘He wanted me to hide them.’

  She crossed the room, fighting an urge to do as Lester wanted and stuff them all back in the box. ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘Longer than I realised. Self-denial is an incredibly powerful thing. Lester was worried you’d come across them. He wanted me to put them in safekeeping, but I couldn’t find the ruddy box, and now—’

  ‘I’m glad I know.’

  ‘Is it terribly selfish to say I am too? It’s not an easy thing to carry alone.’

  As they stood close together, looking down at the jigsaw of crumpled paper and heartfelt words, Pax felt an extraordinary flood of relief. Something deeper surfaced alongside it, a belief she’d stayed true to through all their years of estrangement, however bad things got: they shared the same capacity to forgive. Her mother – tough and kind and courageous, never giving up on her children – had kept Johnny Ledwell’s secret unswervingly.

  ‘I can’t imagine how hard it must have been, living that lie.’

  ‘For all of us. There were happy times, and many of them, but I do so wish they could start afresh today when so much has changed.’ Ronnie turned to smile up at her sadly. ‘The curse of being my age is to want to go back and live one’s life again with the benefit of hindsight. Appreciating how good something is in the moment is so much harder than looking back at it afterwards.’

  Pax looked at her tough, upbeat mother whose life had been so filled with regret and rejection, and felt a fierce pride at her endurance, and at her homecoming.

  ‘Does Lester talk about Daddy?’

  ‘God, no. Our elephant must stay in the room like a taxidermist’s chef d’oeuvre.’

  They leaned closer for a moment, an embrace within reach that neither knew quite how to make.

  ‘I can’t face him, Mummy.’

  ‘You’ll have to some time.’

  ‘I need to ride the Wolf Moon Lap first.’

  Ronnie looked astonished. ‘Why?’

  ‘I have to be able to look him the eye.’ It was hard to explain to a pragmatist like Ronnie why gut instinct told her Lester expected no less, that this would heal her as surely as hospital was healing him. Grapes and magazines were all very well, but family honour needed a greater power to restore it. He’d made it clear what he expected her to do.

  Of all the people in Pax’s life, Lester had always seen deepest inside her and pushed her into making the right decisions, her mentalist. She’d craved his approval since early childhood, a surrogate father to her drunken one, a step-parent in heart and soul as it turned out. It was Lester who had travelled with her to competitions, coached her, bolstered her, torn strips off her for getting it wrong and praised her for getting it right; he’d comforted her when her father died even though his own hidden grief must have been soul-destroying. She’d broken his heart when she’d turned her back on it all, but he had never censured her, had remained a constant in her life to whom she’d returned whenever she needed grounding and no-nonsense sympathy. Throughout, he had waited for her to ride again, patient as can be, certain in his belief that she would.

  Ronnie was right that self-denial was a powerful force. Pax had always known it wasn’t her marriage ending that would disappoint Lester if she visited – it was that she had come back to live at the stud and not got on a horse.

  ‘We’ll start now! Get you in training.’ So easy for Ronnie to say, the get-going toughie who picked herself up and dusted herself down after every big fall, getting straight back on again.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said stubbornly.

  ‘You’ve lost your nerve, haven’t you?’ Her mother’s blue eyes creased with sympathy.

  Pax couldn’t look at her, the memory of last night’s ride still vivid in every muscle. My secret. My secret. Mine.

  She must not let it out yet, however dishonourable it made her feel to keep it to herself. If she shared it, she’d never let herself go there again.

  ‘Oh poor Pax,’ Ronnie sighed.

  She shook her head, her need to be truthful overwhelming. ‘It’s not that. After what happened with Bay, I suppose I denied myself the thing I loved most. I had to punish myself.’

  ‘But why? I was the one who deserved punishment.’

  ‘I wasn’t good enough. I was always in your shadow. The pictures all over the tack room: Badminton at eighteen, Olympic selection at nineteen.’

  ‘I never went.’

  ‘I know, but to Grumps, you were his superstar. Every class I won, you’d won it first. Every horse I broke would have been just your type. I was poor compensation.’

  ‘And then I came back and unwittingly stole the first boy you fell in love with.’ Ronnie’s eyes had lost their sparkle, her face etched with remorse.

  ‘I never wanted to get on a horse again.’

  ‘Even now?’

  Pax thought about the restless, belly-deep need she always felt around horses. The galloping she’d done in her imagination, the hooves in her ears through her listless marriage; horses galloped alongside every car she drove, every train she took, every nightmare from which she ran away to wakefulness. They were the percussion to her life, the stampede that told her there was something better over the horizon. They’d stayed with her no
matter how far removed she’d become from the little red-haired girl in the photographs on Lester’s walls, no matter how hard she’d tried to disassociate herself from her, to punish her for never being good enough.

  Bulimia had come first, long before leaving the stud: public self-denial, private gorging, that oh-so-secret solace, then the purge of forcing the comfort straight back out, acid and loathsome. For a brief while, drugs fast-tracked her to a secret headspace, offered a release. Later alcohol, her hand over the glass at dinner parties before excusing herself to her host’s downstairs loo to neck vodka straight from the bottle hidden in her handbag. Now moonlit riding, trying to get a reckless kick replicating the heroines of the pony books she’d read as a child: By day, Patricia was a frilly Pollyanna cossetted amongst nannies and governesses, by night Pax and her pony owned the moors. Who was she kidding?

  Ronnie stepped closer, a hand on her arm. ‘What’s stopping you doing it now, Pax?’

  ‘I’m frightened it might feel like coming home.’

  At that moment, she realised she was already there.

  *

  On a narrow, sunken section of lane, Luca was being heeled by the rattling diesel of a Land Rover, the barking dogs inside causing the skittish youngster he was leading to jump up the bank while his mount stayed determinedly on the tarmac. Disconcerted, he found himself leading a horse with its hooves at head height. Even more alarmingly, the Land Rover was now trying to squeeze past before they reached a passing place.

  Battling to keep the younger horse calm and close without it breaking loose or jumping back down on top of him, Luca raised an arm in warning, calling, ‘Wait!’

  Still the Land Rover edged onwards, drawing level, passenger window lowering. In the seat, a rumpled brunette with smudged red lipstick. Stretching across her, Bay Austen was in cashmere and Schoffel, a trace of the same lipstick on his lower lip.

  ‘Luke, isn’t it? Keep meaning to pop in and see how you’re doing?’

  ‘Just grand.’ He hung onto the plunging youngster.

  ‘Give my regards to the girls! Tell Pax we’ll do that lunch soon.’ As he rumbled off, the youngster sprang off the bank like a deer, clean over Luca’s head, landing remarkably sure-footedly on the lane to trot amiably alongside again.

  Encounter with Bay cast aside, he grinned widely. ‘Now you’re going to be right up my street.’

  Trotting up the stud’s driveway, he moved the horses aside as Ronnie rattled towards him in her sports car, buzzing down the window. ‘I’m off to see Lester. What do you think of that young one? Make a nice sort for Pax, I thought?’

  He smiled, saying nothing, heart twisting. He’d train any horse on the yard to be well-mannered for Pax if asked, even Coll the Shetland.

  Ronnie put the car in gear. ‘Back after lunch!’

  Nodding, he set off again, the youngster pogoing alongside him once more as the sports car snarled away.

  Pax was back in the main house, seated at her grandfather’s desk which looked out over the driveway and front paddocks. He saw her framed in the big-paned window as he passed, pretending not to notice him, the awkwardness of the day not yet waning. They had to shake it off before tonight, which was going to be tough enough for Pax without this overhanging it. He raised his arm and waved, smiling when she looked up. The same moment, his phone buzzed in his pocket before ringing its way noisily into action, making him jump, now dreading each Unknown call. Sensing his disquiet, both horses spooked in opposite directions, leaving Luca somewhere in between, balancing on one stirrup like a Cossack, somehow grappling them back, but not before a considerable loss of dignity.

  When he turned to smile it off, Pax was at the window, muffled call asking if he was all right, Knott appearing beside her, paws up on the sill. The movement just made the horses shy again, banging together now and kicking out, the old point-to-pointer spinning away beneath him. Not concentrating, eyes still on Pax, Luca fell right off this time, landing on his feet, somehow holding onto both.

  He quickly turned to the window to bow with exaggerated chivalry.

  Eyes brimming with amusement, Pax returned to her paperwork.

  It was a start.

  *

  When Ronnie came back in a blaze of headlights, supermarket pizzas and biscuit treats for Kes sliding off the back seat, it was far later than she’d intended, a long call to Blair having diverted her in Aldi’s car park, then again halfway home. The affair was at fever pitch again. Although she’d always suspected that time apart might create extra frisson between them when they reunited, she’d underestimated how much. She was missing him a ridiculous amount when they were apart.

  Pax was about to set off to fetch Kes, that deep soothing voice surprising Ronnie with, ‘If they aren’t back, I am going to eviscerate Muir with his skean dhu.’

  She drove off looking murderous.

  ‘Oh dear.’

  Ronnie collared Luca. ‘Please make sure Pax has some fun tonight.’

  ‘It’s not really that sort of gig, y’know?’

  She gave him a wise look. ‘May I suggest something very straightforward which I think will cheer her up enormously?’

  When Luca heard what she had in mind, his face lit up with that amazing smile. ‘I’ve been meaning to do that since I got here.’

  *

  ‘And there were HUGE turtles that went RIGHT over my head and Grandforce said that they have existed for two hundred million YEARS which is even longer than him…’

  Steering the Noddy car back up the stud’s long driveway, Pax checked the dash clock, grateful to see she’d have time to settle Kes before she had to go out again. Mercifully her evisceration threats had been entirely unnecessary, the Forsyths ready and waiting with their grandson clutching a plush stingray while their son clutched a solicitor’s email.

  ‘My chap suggests we draw up a calendar.’ Mack had tried to maintain a pompous higher ground. ‘Save any more,’ he’d cleared his throat, ‘mistakes.’

  Helen Beadle’s unequivocal and cross reaction to the wassail seizure seemed to have finally brought some semblance of cooperation. Walking them to the car, Mack had also admitted with tight-jawed reluctance that the ‘Scotland Plan’ was going to be delayed on his part by some interest in the barn conversions, the business being less dead in the water than he’d imagined.

  ‘So I’ll be here for mediation,’ he assured her with an attempt at a conciliatory smile.

  She turned into the arrivals yard, parking alongside the rusted Subaru that had once belonged to her grandfather.

  A chisel-jawed man was talking to her mother in the glow of the first archway, good-looking enough to make her double take.

  She peered at him, vaguely recognising the beanie and Puffa jacket. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Silly Mummy!’ Kes was already unbuckling his seat belt. ‘It’s Luca. I’m going to show him my turtle.’

  Pax stared, astonished, pulses fizzing like Sodastreams.

  The beard had gone.

  *

  Returning from a two-hour marathon in Evesham’s Tesco superstore, Bridge gritted her teeth in the passenger seat beside her husband, listening to The Wheels On The Bus playlist as their children gradually re-entered Earth’s atmosphere from cosmic tantrum to sleepy trance in the booster seats behind them.

  Aleš always insisted on shopping with them, despite never grasping that there was a time limit attached to taking small children into supermarkets which didn’t allow for him to choose individual onions with slow perfectionism, haggle with the man at the fresh fish counter, or linger lovingly by the Polish food section remembering a recipe his grandmother used to cook. By the time they’d reached the tills with a double-toddler-seat trolley stacked to chin height, everyone within a fifty-metre radius longed for ear defenders. She was only prepared to forgive him because he’d put in chocolates, pink champagne and fillet steak, still on his absolute best behaviour after last night.

  ‘And if we buy a plot to build a house it wi
ll definitely be big enough to keep Craic there?’ she confirmed for the umpteenth time, holding her phone out to record it for posterity this time.

  ‘I guarantee it, kochanie.’

  She smiled, kissing her fingers and reaching across to place them lovingly on his bristly head. Much as Bridge despised male violence, her husband’s aborted fight with Ash Turner had provided fantastic domestic leverage, as well as being strangely stimulating. Two men sparring over her honour had given her a secret frisson. The sex had been spectacular afterwards, the Mazurs back in full cry.

  As they drove up the sunken lane towards the Comptons, another car came towards them.

  ‘He is closer to passing space.’ Aleš drove on bullishly, forcing the other car to swiftly reverse, even though Bridge knew it would have been much easier for them to go back to a nearby gateway. Aleš always followed too closely, radiator to radiator, intimidating drivers into zig-zagging into the verges.

  This one was far better than most, and as they stalked it at close range, Bridge recognised Pax’s little Noddy car. She’d turned away to look out of the rear window, but there was no mistaking that mane of red hair. There was a passenger sitting beside her, his face dipping in and out of shadow as they bounced over the potholes. Hugely handsome, all high cheeks and square chin. Some women had all the luck.

  Bridge leant forwards, peering closer.

  ‘Oh my fecking life!’ she breathed, reaching straight for her phone as the Noddy car swung into the recess in the bank and they flashed past, already WhatsApping the Saddle Bags.

  *

  The Chipping Hampton Friends Meeting House was tricky to find, impossible to park near and challenging to access. Keen to protect its inscrutability, a Bardswolds Alcoholics Anonymous meeting was harder to track down than the VIP rooms of a London private members’ club. And like a private members club, many of the participants knew each other on the outside. When Pax and Luca finally located the room, ten minutes late, Pax peered through its small glass panel. Her eyes widened, already recognising a startling number: an architect she’d worked with, a friend’s nanny, a banker with a lisp she’d met at a dinner party recently, someone she’d been at prep school with and a comedian turned children’s author who had bought one of the farmhouses that she and Mack had renovated. Which in a group of fewer than twenty made it less of an anonymous gathering, more of a reunion.