Riders (21 page)

Outside she found Hans Schmidt swaying in front of her.

“Fraulein Helen,” he said triumphantly, “come and dance wiz me.” He was just about to drag her off in the direction of the music when Malise and Rupert came out of the library, both looking wintry. To make matters worse, Hans insisted on coming out to the car with them and roaring with laughter when he discovered what was going on.

“You are losing zee touch, Rupert,” he kept saying.

“Fuck off,” snarled Rupert. Then, as Helen got into the car, “Your things are still in the caravan.”

“Only my suede dress,” said Helen.

“I’ll get Marion to post it on to you,” said Rupert and, without even saying good-bye, turned on his heel and stalked back into the house.

“There’s absolutely no need to cry,” said Malise, as the headlights lit up the grass verge and the pale green undersides of the spring trees. “That’s definitely thirty-love to you.”

“D’you think he’ll ever call me again?” said Helen with a sniff.

“ ’Course he will. It’s a completely new experience to Rupert, not getting his own way. Very good for him.”

Malise slipped a Beethoven quintet into the stereo. Helen lay back, reveling in the music and thinking how much Rupert would hate it. Ahead along the winding road she watched the cats’ eyes light up as their car approached.

“All right?” said Malise.

“Sure. I was thinking the cats’ eyes were like girls, all lighting up as Rupert approached.”

“And Rupert never dims his headlights,” said Malise.

“Is it worth it? Me going on with him, that is if he does ring me?”

“Depends if you’ve reached the stage when you can’t not. In which case any advice I give you will be meaningless.”

“Explain him to me,” pleaded Helen. “All I hear is gossip from people who hardly know him.”

“I’ve known his family for years. Rupert’s mother was exquisitely beautiful but deeply silly. She couldn’t cope with Rupert at all and abandoned him to a series of nannies, who all spoilt him because they were frightened of him, or felt sorry for him. He learnt far too early in life that, by making himself unpleasant, he could get his own way. The only decent relationship he had was with old Nanny Heald, and she was his father’s old nanny, so she didn’t look after Rupert very long. Rupert’s mother, of course, was besotted with Adrian, Rupert’s younger brother, who was sweet, curly-haired, plump, easygoing, and who, of course, has turned into a roaring pansy.

“As a result I don’t think Rupert really likes women. He certainly doesn’t trust them. Subconsciously, I think he enjoys kicking them in the teeth, just to pay them back as a sex for letting him down when he was a child. He’s bright, though, and enormously talented. Funnily enough, the one thing that might save him could be a good marriage. But she’d have to be a very remarkable girl to take the flak.”

As they reached the motorway, he put his foot on the accelerator.

“Wouldn’t it be easier,” he said, “to find a respectably rising barrister or some bright young publisher?”

Helen shrugged. “I guess so, but he is kind of addictive. You take a lot of trouble with all these guys. Have you got kids of your own?”

“We’ve got a daughter. She events.”

“Oh,” said Helen, “that’s what Mark Phillips does, as opposed to Rupert.”

“That’s right.”

“Any sons?”

“No.” There was a pause. Then he said in a measured, deliberately matter-of-fact voice. “We had a boy. He was killed in Northern Ireland last year.”

“Oh,” said Helen, aghast, “I’m desperately sorry.”

“He drove into a booby trap, killed outright, which I suppose was a mercy.”

“But not for you,” said Helen. “You weren’t able to say good-bye.”

Oh hell, she said to herself, that’s why he was reading that Rupert Brooke poem. And I came barging in with all my problems.

“Were you very close?” she asked.

“Yes, I think so. The awful thing was that I’m not sure he really wanted to go into the Army at all. Just felt he ought to because my father had a dazzling war and…”

“And you got an MC, Billy told me.”

“But Timmy was really rather a rebel. We had an awful row. He’d got some waitress pregnant, felt he ought to marry her. He didn’t love her, he just had principles. We tried to dissuade him. His last leave was all rows, my wife in hysterics.”

“What happened to the baby?”

“It was a false alarm, which made the whole thing more ironic. Now I wish it hadn’t been. At least we’d have something of him left.”

They had reached London now. When they got to Regina House he got out as well. A few stars had managed to pierce the russet haze hanging over London. Lit from behind by the street-light, there were no lines on his face.

Helen swallowed, took a deep breath to conquer her shyness, and stammered, “I always dreamed English men would be just like you, and it’s taken me six months in this country to find one,” and, putting her hand on his shoulder, she kissed him quickly on the cheek. “Thank you so much for my lift. I do hope we meet again.”

“Absolutely no doubt about that,” said Malise. “Young Rupert’ll be on the warpath in no time. But listen to an old campaigner: play it cool, don’t let him have it all his own way.”

Malise let himself into his Lowndes Street flat and switched off the burglar alarm. It was a cheerless place. His wife had conventional tastes, tending to eau de nil wallpaper, overhead lights, and Sloane Square chintz. She was away in the country, eventing with their daughter. The marriage had not been a success. They had stayed together because of the children, but now there was only Henrietta left. In the drawing room, on an easel standing on a dust sheet, was an oil painting of a hunting scene Malise was restoring. He could finish it in two hours. He didn’t feel tired. Instead, he poured himself a glass of brandy and set to work, thinking about that exquisite redhead. She was wasted on Rupert. He was not entirely sure of his motives in whisking her back to London. Was it a desire to put Rupert down, or because he couldn’t bear the thought of Rupert sleeping with her tonight, forcing his drunken hamfisted attentions on her? For a minute he imagined painting her in his studio, not bothering to turn on the lights as dusk fell, then taking her across to the narrow bed in the corner and making love to her so slowly and gently she wouldn’t realize it had been miraculous until it was all over.

He cursed himself for being a fool. He was fifty-two, thirty years her senior, probably a disgusting old man in her eyes. Yet she had stirred him more than any woman he had met for years.

She’d have done for Timmy. He picked up the photograph on the piano. The features that smiled back at him were very like his own, but less grim and austere, more clear-eyed and trusting.

Were Rupert and Billy and Humpty merely Timmy substitutes? Was that why he’d taken the job of chef d’equipe? After six months he was surprised, almost indignant, at the pain. Putting the photograph down, he slumped on the sofa, his face in his hands.

As Helen let herself into Regina House the telephone was ringing. “Shush, shush,” she pleaded, and, rushing forward, reached the receiver just before the principal of the hostel, furious and bristling in her hairnet.

“It’s one o’clock in the morning,” she hissed, “I won’t have people ringing so late.”

But Helen ignored her, hunching herself over the telephone to ward off the outside world. Praying as she’d never prayed before, she put it to her ear.

“Hello,” said a slightly slurred voice, “can I speak to Helen Macaulay?”

“Oh yes, you can, this is she.”

“Bloody bitch,” said Rupert, “waltzing off with the one man in the room I can’t afford to punch on the nose.”

Helen leant joyously against the wall, oblivious of the gesticulating crone in the hairnet.

“Are you okay?” Rupert went on.

“Fine. Where are you?”

“Back in my horrible little caravan—alone. I’ve got your dress here, like a shed snakeskin. It reeks of your scent. I wish you were here to fill it.”

“Oh, so do I,” said Helen. Again at a distance, she felt free to come on more strongly.

“Look, I’m on the road this week and most of next. I haven’t really got myself together, but I’ll ring you towards the end of the week, and I’ll try and get up to London on Monday or Tuesday.”

“Rupert,” she pleaded, “I didn’t want to go off with Malise. It was just that you seemed so otherwise engaged all evening.”

“Trying to make you jealous didn’t work, did it? Won’t try that again in a hurry.”

F
or the next few weeks Rupert laid siege to Helen, throwing her into total confusion. On the one hand he epitomized everything she disapproved of. He was flip—except about winning—spoilt, philistine, hedonistic, immoral, and very right-wing—eating South African oranges just to irritate her,
and
in the street, which her mother had drummed into her one must
never
do. The few dates they were able to snatch in between Rupert’s punishing show-jumping schedule and Helen’s job always ended in rows because she wouldn’t sleep with him.

On the other hand she had very much taken to heart Malise’s remarks about Rupert’s disturbed childhood and the possibility that he might be redeemed by a good marriage. Could she be the one to transform this wild boy into the greatest show jumper of his age? There was a strong element of reforming zeal in Helen’s character; she had a great urge to do good.

Princess Anne had also just announced her engagement to Mark Phillips and every girl in England was in love with the handsome captain, who looked so macho in his uniform and who, despite being pretty unforthcoming when interviewed on television, was obviously a genius with horses. Princess Anne looked blissfully happy. And when one considered Rupert was just as beautiful as Captain Phillips, and extremely articulate when interviewed about anything, did it matter, pondered Helen as she tossed and turned in her narrow bed in Regina House, reading A. E. Housman and Matthew Arnold, that she and Rupert couldn’t talk about Sartre and Henry James? He was young. He could learn. Malise said he was bright.

Anyway, all this fretting was academic because Rupert hadn’t mentioned marriage or said that he loved her. But he rang her from all over Europe and managed to snatch an evening, however embattled, with her about once a fortnight, and he had invited her to fly out to Lucerne for a big show at the beginning of June, so she had plenty of hope to sustain her.

Meanwhile the IRA were very active in London, exploding bombs; everyone was very jumpy, and her mother wrote her endless letters, saying that she need no longer stay in England a year, that things sounded very hazardous, and why didn’t she come home. Helen, who would have leapt at the chance all through the winter, wrote back saying she was fine and that she had a new beau.

Rupert sat with his feet up on the balcony of his hotel bedroom overlooking the Bois de Boulogne. After a class at the Paris show that ended at midnight the previous night, he was eating a late breakfast. Wearing nothing but a bath towel, his bare shoulders already turning dark brown, he was eating a croissant with apricot jam and trying to read
War and Peace.

“I can’t understand this bloody book,” he yelled back into the room. “All the characters have three names.”

“So do you,” said Billy, coming out onto the balcony, dripping from the bath and also wrapped in a towel. He looked at the spine of the book. “It might help if you started with Volume One, not Volume Two.”

“Fucking hell,” said Rupert, throwing the book into the bosky depths of the Bois and endangering the lives of two squirrels, “that’s what comes of asking Marion to get out books from the library.”

“Why are you reading that junk anyway?”

Rupert poured himself another cup of coffee. “Helen says I’m a philistine.”

“She thinks you’re Jewish?” said Billy. “You don’t look it.”

“I thought it meant something to do with Sodom and Gomorrah until I looked it up,” said Rupert, “but it just means you’re pig ignorant, deficient in culture, and don’t read enough.”

“You read
Horse and Hound,
” said Billy indignantly, “and your horoscope and the racing results, and Dick Francis.”

“Or go to the the-
at
er, as she calls it.”

“I should think not after that rubbish she dragged us to the other night. Anyway, you went to a strip club in Hamburg last week. I’ve heard people call you a lot of things, but not stupid.”

He bent down to pick up his hairbrush which had dropped on the floor, and winced. “I don’t know what they put in those drinks last night but I feel like hell.”

“I feel like Helen,” said Rupert. “I spent all last night trying to ring her up. I got hold of the London directory, but I couldn’t find Vagina House anywhere.”

“Probably looked it up under ‘cunt,’ ” said Billy.

Rupert laughed. Then a look of determination came over his face. “I’ll show her. I’ll write her a really intellectual letter.” He got Helen’s last letter, all ten pages of it, out of his wallet. “I can hardly understand hers—it’s so full of long words.” He smoothed out the first page. “She hopes we take in the Comédie Française and the Louvre, and then says that just looking at me elevates her temperature. Christ, what have I landed myself with?”

“Don’t forget to put ‘Ms.’ on the envelope,” said Billy.

“Marion even got me a book of quotations,” said Rupert, extracting a couple of sheets of hotel writing paper from the leather folder in the chest of drawers. “Now, ought I to address her as Dear or Dearest?”

“You ‘darling’ her all the time when you’re with her.”

“Don’t want to compromise myself on paper.” Rupert picked up the quote book. “I’ll bloody outquote her. Let’s look up Helen.” He ran his fingers down the Index. “Helen, here we are, ‘I wish I knew where Helen lies,’ not with me, unfortunately. ‘Sweet Helen make me immortal with a kiss.’ That’s not going nearly far enough.”

“Are you going to buy Con O’Hara’s chestnut?” asked Billy, who was trying to cut the nails on his right hand.

“Not for the price he’s asking. It’s got a terrible stop. ‘Helen thy beauty is to me.’ That sounds more promising.” He flipped over the pages to find the reference. “ ‘Helen thy beauty is to me…Hyacinth hair.’ Hyacinths are pink and blue, not hair-colored. Christ, these poets get away with murder.”

“Why don’t you just say you’re missing her?” asked Billy reasonably.

“That’s what she wants to hear. If I could only bed her, I could forget about her.”

“Sensible girl,” said Billy, “Knows if she gives in she’ll lose you. Hardly blame her. You haven’t exactly got a reputation for fidelity.”

“I have,” said Rupert, outraged. “I was faithful to Bianca for at least two months.”

“While having Marion on the side.”

“Grooms don’t count. They simply exist for the recreation of the rider. Helen’s not even my type if you analyze her feature by feature. Her clothes are terrible. Like all American women, she always wears trousers, or pants, as she so delightfully calls them, two sizes too big.”

“Methinks the laddy does protest too much. Why don’t you pack her in?”

“I’m buggered if I’ll give up so easily. I’ve never not got anyone I really wanted.”

“What about that nun in Rome?” said Billy, who was lighting a cigarette.

“Nuns don’t count.”

“Like grooms, I suppose.”

“ ‘Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss,’ ” read Rupert. “ ‘Her lips suck forth my soul. Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.’ ”

“That’s a bit strong,” said Billy. “Who wrote that?”

“Chap called Marlowe. Anyway it’s not my soul I want her to suck.”

Billy started to laugh and choked on his cigarette.

Rupert looked at him beadily. “Honestly, William, I don’t know why you don’t empty the entire packet of cigarettes onto a plate and eat them with a knife and fork. You ought to cut down.” He returned to the quote book. “This bit’s better: ‘Thou art fairer than the evening air, clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.’ That’s very pretty. Reminds me of Penscombe on a clear night.” He wrote it down in his flamboyant royal blue scrawl, practically taking up half the page.

“That’ll wow her. Anyway, I should be able to pull her in Lucerne. She’s coming out for a whole week.”

“D’you know what I think?” said Billy.

“Not until you tell me.”

“Unlike most of the girls you’ve run around with, Helen’s serious. She’s absolutely crazy about you, genuinely in love, and she won’t sleep with you not because she wants to trap you, but because she believes it’s wrong. She’s a middle-class American girl and they’re very, very respectable.”

“You reckon she’s crazy about me?”

“I reckon. Christ, Rupe, you’re actually blushing.”

Rupert soon recovered.

“What are we going to do this evening?” he asked.

“Go to bed early and no booze, according to Malise. We’ve got a Nations’ Cup tomorrow.”

“Sod that,” said Rupert, putting his letter into an envelope. “There’s a stunning girl who’s come out from
The Tatler
to cover the—er—social side of show jumping. I would
not
mind covering her. I thought we could show her Paris.”

“Sure,” sighed Billy, “and she’s brought a dog of a female photographer with her, and guess who’ll end up with her? I wish to Christ Malise would pick Lavinia for Lucerne.”

“Not while he’s imposing all this Kraut discipline and trying to keep his squad pure, he won’t,” said Rupert. He looked at his watch. “We’ve got three hours.”

“I’m going to give The Bull a workout.”

“Tracey can do that. Let’s go and spend an hour at the Louvre.”

After a couple of good classes in which they were both placed, Rupert and Billy felt like celebrating. Pretending to go to bed dutifully at eleven o’clock, they waited half an hour, then crept out down the back stairs, aided by a chambermaid. It was unfortunate that Malise, getting up very early to explore Paris, caught Rupert coming out of the
Tatler
girl’s bedroom.

In the Nations’ Cup later in the day Rupert jumped appallingly and had over twenty faults in each round. In the evening Malise called him to his room and gave him the worst dressing-down of his life. Rupert was irresponsible, insubordinate, undisciplined, a disruptive influence on the team, and a disgrace to his country.

“And what’s more,” thundered Malise, “I’m not having you back in the team until you’ve learnt to behave yourself.”

Helen sat in the London Library checking the quotations in a manuscript on Disraeli before sending it to press. Goodness, authors are inaccurate! This one got everything wrong: changing words, leaving out huge chunks, paraphrasing long paragraphs to suit his argument. All the same, she was glad to be out of the office. Nigel, having recently discovered she was going out with Rupert, made her life a misery, saying awful things about him all the time. In the middle of a heatwave, the London Library was one of the coolest places in the West End. Helen was always inspired, too, by the air of cloistered quiet and erudition. Those rows and rows of wonderful books, and the photographs of famous writers on the stairs: T. S. Eliot, Harold Nicolson, Rudyard Kipling. One day, if she persevered with her novel, she might join them.

Being a great writer, however, didn’t seem nearly as important at the moment as seeing Rupert again. She hadn’t heard from him for a fortnight, not a telephone call nor a letter. Next Monday she was supposed to be flying out to Lucerne to spend a week with him, and it was already Wednesday. She’d asked for the week off and she knew how Nigel would sneer if she suddenly announced she wouldn’t be going after all. And if he did ring, and she did go, wasn’t she compromising herself? Would she be able to hold him off in all that heady Swiss air? God, life was difficult. A bluebottle was bashing abortively against the windowpane. At a nearby desk a horrible old man, sweating in a check wool suit, with eyebrows as big as mustaches, was leering at her. Suddenly she hated academics, beastly goaty things with inflated ideas of their own sex appeal, like Nigel and Paul, and even Harold Mountjoy. She wanted to get out and live her life; she was trapped like that bluebottle.

“Have you any books on copulation?” said a voice.

“I’m afraid I don’t work here,” said Helen. Then she started violently, for there, tanned and gloriously unacademic, stood Rupert.

Her next thought was how unfair it was that he should have caught her with two-day-old hair, a shiny face, and no makeup. The next moment she was in his arms.

“Angel,” he said, kissing her, “did you get my letter?”

“No, I left before the post this morning.”

“Sssh,” said the man with mustache eyebrows disapprovingly. “People are trying to work.”

“Are you coming out for a drink?” said Rupert, only slightly lowering his voice.

“I’d just love it. I’ve got one more quote to check. I’ll be with you in ten minutes.”

“I’ll wander round,” said Rupert.

Helen found the quotation, and was surreptitiously combing her hair and powdering her nose behind a pillar when she heard a loud and unmistakable voice saying: “Hello, is that Ladbroke’s’? My account number’s 8KY85982. I want a tenner each way on Brass Monkey in the two o’clock at Kempton, and twenty each way on Bob Martin in the two-thirty. He’s been scratched, has he? Change it to Sam the Spy then, but only a tenner each way.”

Crimson with embarrassment, Helen longed to disappear into one of the card index drawers. How dare Rupert disturb such a hallowed seat of learning?

“Funny places you work in,” he said, as they went out into the sunshine. “I bet Nige feels at home in there. Come on, let’s go to the Ritz.”