Riders (48 page)

“Wish I was a stallion like you,” he said.

Arcy rolled his eyes and took a nip at Rupert, who cuffed him on the nose.

“One day, when you’re famous,” he told the horse, “you’ll be encouraged to fuck any mare you like. Why can’t I?”

Rupert knew Podge would be waiting up for him, but he went straight back to the house. He didn’t fancy sleeping in the spare room. It was supposed to be haunted and he wasn’t tight enough not to mind.

After finally settling Marcus, Helen had had a bath, bathed her eyes, washed her hair, and put on the plunging, black silk, Janet Reger nightgown Rupert had given her for Christmas, but which she had never worn because she had no cleavage. Now she lay in the big bed without the light on, with the moonlight pouring in through the windows. As Rupert tiptoed past the door she called out to him. He entered cautiously, waiting for abuse, his hair gleaming as silvery as one of his hairbrushes.

“I’m sorry,” she said in a choked voice. “It’s all my fault.”

Rupert, completely wrong-footed, was unbelievably touched.

“I understand exactly why you went for Podge,” she went on. “I’m hopeless in bed. It’s just my upbringing that makes me so dreadfully inhibited, but I love you so so much. I can’t bear the thought of losing you. I’ll try and make as many overtures as Rossini.” She was trying to make a joke, but her voice cracked. Rupert sat down, pulling her against him.

“No, it’s my fault,” he said, stroking her bare arms. “I’ll get rid of Podge tomorrow. I’ll pay her off, so you never have to see her again. I suppose it’s my upbringing, too. Fidelity wasn’t the family’s strong point, but I love you.”

“I’ll go and buy black sexy underwear, like Janey’s, and read sex books and learn how to drive a man to the ultimate of desire.”

“You do already. Have I ever not wanted you? I just got tired of trying to fuck someone who didn’t want me.”

That night Tabitha was conceived.

G
radually Billy’s and Janey’s cottage got into shape. And although Billy drew the line for a time at a swimming pool or a tennis court, the place seemed to have every other luxury.

“If I have a fantastic season and you write your arse off, we should be straight by the end of next year, give or take a few bottles of Bell’s,” Billy told Janey when they moved in in October. But he never expected the bills to be quite so astronomical. Having no wedding presents, he and Janey had to buy everything from a garlic crusher to a dishwasher. Billy’s mother was very rich and could have helped out. But she didn’t like Janey, who described her as an old boot with a tweed bum, or, in kinder moments, as “the Emperor Vespasian in drag.” Mrs. Lloyd-Foxe had the big nose and thick gray curls that look better on a man. She thought Janey was tarty and agreed with Helen that Janey wrote very over-the-
top articles in the paper. Last week Janey had written about her marriage, giving rather too many intimate details. Most people, including Billy, thought it was very funny. Mrs. Lloyd-Foxe did not.

“How’s dear Helen and darling little Marcus?” she asked, every time she rang Janey, knowing it would irritate her.

Mrs. Lloyd-Foxe had daughters, who seemed to lay babies with the ease that chickens produce eggs. It was up to Janey, her mother-in-law implied frequently, to produce a son as soon as possible. “Then there’ll be a little Lloyd-Foxe to carry on the line.”

Helen, feeling slightly sick, but much happier after her rapprochement with Rupert, was thrilled she was having another baby. Janey wanted to be pregnant, too and hadn’t taken the Pill since she’d been married to Billy. But each month it was just the same. She went to see her doctor, who said it was very early days and suggested she had her tubes blown.

“You’ve also been racketing round the world a lot,” he told her. “Why don’t you stop work for a bit, play house, look after Billy and get in a nesting mood? Try to confine intercourse to the middle of the month, between your periods.”

Janey, in fact, was bored with racketing around. She was fed up with living out of suitcases, interviewing pop stars and heads of state. She wanted to stay at home and watch the lime trees round the cottage turn yellow, and go out mushrooming in the early morning.

There was also the matter of her expenses, which were colossal, and which had very few bills to back them up, because Janey had lost them. There had been too many dinners for ten at Tiberio’s or Maxim’s, with Janey and Billy treating the rest of the team. The show-jumping correspondent, jealous of her pitch being queered by Janey, had sneaked to the sports editor about unnecessary extravagance. The editor, Mike Pardoe, nearly had a coronary when he saw the total and summoned Janey from Gloucestershire.

Pardoe had once been Janey’s lover. As she looked at his handsome watchful, wolfish face, Janey thought how much much nicer Billy was.

“These expenses are a joke,” said Pardoe. “How the hell did you spend so much money in Athens? Did you buy one of the Greek islands?”

“Well, the copy was good. You said so.”

“It’s gone off recently. Most of it seems to have been written with your pen dipped in Mouton Cadet and from a hotel bedroom. I want you to come back to Fleet Street where I can keep an eye on you and put you on features I need. You’re a good writer, Janey, but you’ve lost your edge.”

“I want to write a diary from the country, rather like
The Diary of a Provincial Lady,
” protested Janey.

“Who the hell’s interested in that?”

Janey was livid. She looked at Pardoe’s fridge, laden with drink, and the leather sofa, on which he’d laid her many years before, and which had just been upholstered in shiny black. She didn’t want to go back to that wild, uncertain pre-Billy existence, where you shivered on the tube platform on the way to work, in the dress you’d worn the night before and everyone knew you hadn’t been home.

She went off and lunched with a publishing friend and told him she wanted to write a book on men and where they stood at this moment in the sexual war. “I’m going to call it
Dispatches from the Y-Front.
”

“Good idea,” said the publishing friend. “Make a nice change from all this feminist rubbish pouring off the presses. Take in the lot: divorcées, adulterers, house husbands. Is the post-permissive male better in bed? Make it as bitchy, funny, and as contentious as possible. I’ll give you a £21,000 advance.”

Tight after lunch, Janey went back to Pardoe and handed in her notice.

“You’ll be back,” he said. “If you ever finish that book, which I very much doubt, I might serialize it.”

“I doubt it,” said Janey, “because you’ll certainly be in it, and you’ll be too vain to sue.”

Janey was not that worried about how long she’d take over the book. Her father had supported her mother. Why shouldn’t Billy support her? Billy came back from Hamburg to be told Janey had resigned, but was being paid a big advance to write a book.

“I’m going to be a proper wife, like Helen,” she went on.

Billy said he preferred improper wives and, although he liked the idea of her living in the woodcutter’s cottage, like Little Red Riding Hood, he did hope too many wolves wouldn’t turn up dressed as grandmothers. He was also slightly alarmed that, along with the £50,000 bill from the builders, there was a tax bill for £10,000 and Janey’s VAT for £3,000. Suddenly there didn’t seem to be anything to pay them with.

“Give the bills to Kev,” said Janey, airily. “That’s what he’s there for.”

But all worries about money were set aside with the excitement of moving in and the furniture looking so nice on the stone floors and lighting huge log fires in the drawing room and cutting back the roses and honeysuckle which were still in flower and darkening the windows. Then there was the bliss of waking up in their
own
bed in their
own
room, looking through the lime trees at the valley. How could they not be happy and prosper in an enchanted bower like this?

Janey missed Billy when he started going off to shows without her, but she was enjoying getting things straight, and it was heaven not having to get up at five o’clock in the morning to drive off over mountain passes or break down on icy roads. The winter that followed was very cold, and the wind whistled past their door straight off the Bristol Channel, but Janey merely turned the central heating up to tropical and thought idly about her book. The muse must not be raped; she must be given time to yield her secrets.

Rupert missed them both terribly when they moved out. All the fun seemed to have gone out of the house. He was making heroic attempts to be a good husband and Helen was trying equally hard to be more sexy. But when you were feeling sick and heavy with pregnancy, it wasn’t easy. Badger missed Mavis most of all, and spent days down at the cottage whenever Rupert was away. When Rupert arrived to fetch him, he would lie in front of the fire in embarrassment with his eyes shut, pretending that, because he couldn’t see Rupert, he wasn’t there.

As an ingratiating gesture, Janey invited Kev and Enid Coley to her first dinner party. The huge china poodle was unearthed from its home in the cellar, dusted down, and put in its place of honor in the drawing room. Unfortunately, Janey had sprayed oven cleaner all over the inside of the cooker the day before and had forgotten to wash it off, so when she removed the duck from the oven, the kitchen was flooded with toxic fumes and the duck was a charred wreck, the size of a wren. So everyone screamed with laughter and Billy was sent off to Stroud to get a Chinese takeout. Just as well, perhaps. When Billy checked the mustard Janey’d put on the table, he discovered it was the horses’ saffron anti-fly ointment.

“Janey’s very attractive,” commented Enid Coley on the way home, “but I’m not sure she’s a homemaker.”

By the time Christmas came, things were very tight. The Bull bruised a sole before the Olympia show and Billy didn’t have a single win with the other horses. He sent a Christmas card to his bank manager and decided he’d have to tap his parents, who’d invited them down for Christmas.

“Only for a couple of days,” Janey told Mrs. Lloyd-Foxe, firmly. “We can’t really leave the horses.”

The visit was not a success. Janey, who always left shopping until the last moment, was forced to spend an absolute fortune on Christmas presents, which shocked Billy’s frugal parents, who gave them a hideously ugly piece of family silver, instead of the check they had anticipated.

The Lloyd-Foxes lived in a house called The Maltings, which was so cold that Janey couldn’t bring herself to get up until lunchtime, and then only to hog the fire. Billy’s mother was not tactful. She came back incessantly to the subject of babies. It was so sad at bridge parties not to be able to boast of a little Lloyd-Foxe baby in the offing. She was so pleased dear Helen was being sensible and having a second child.

“I’ll iron Billy’s shirts for him,” she said, coming into the bedroom and picking them off the floor. “I know how he likes them, and I’ll make you an apple pie to take back to Gloucestershire. He so loves puddings.”

“She’ll get it in her kisser if she doesn’t shut up,” muttered Janey.

Out of sheer irritation, Janey left her room like a tip, with the fire on, and didn’t bother to make the one bed they’d slept in, out of the two single beds. Billy was the only form of central heating in the house. And as, at noon and six o’clock, Janey moved towards the vodka, Billy’s mother’s jaw quilted with muscles. She was very tired with cooking and she could have done with a little help and praise from Janey. Finally, on Boxing night, Billy asked his father for a loan.

Mr. Lloyd-Foxe hummed and hawed and said it had been a bad year with the squeeze and, although he had twenty thousand to spare, he had divided it between Billy’s sisters, Arabella and Lucinda.

“I feel they need it more than you and Janey do, as you’re both working.”

Janey didn’t even bother to kiss her mother-in-law good-bye, and it was only after they’d left that Mrs. Lloyd-Foxe discovered Janey had painted the letter “L” out of the The Maltings sign on the gate.

After Christmas the bills came flooding in. Billy, who’d never paid a gas or telephone or electricity bill in his life, had no idea they’d be so high. He also read his bank statement, which was infinitely more scarlet after Janey’s Christmas shopping spree.

“Did you honestly spend £60 on that cushion for my mother?”

“Pity I didn’t hold it over the old monster’s face,” said Janey.

The tax man and the builders were also hustling for payment. Another shock was that the £21,000 advance on the manuscript was divided into three: £7,000 on signature, £7,000 on delivery, and £7,000 on publication.

“How soon do you think you’ll deliver?” asked Billy.

The original date had been March, but Janey, who’d made only a few random notes, said there wouldn’t be a hope before the summer, which meant that autumn publication was very unlikely.

Janey had no idea, either, of the astronomical cost of running and traveling a string of horses, nor was she any good as a backup team. She kept forgetting to post entry forms, which meant Billy drove two hundred miles to a show to find he wasn’t eligible to compete. Often, fast-talking got him in, sometimes, it didn’t. Billy was one of the best riders in England, but he was not a natural jockey, like Rupert. He had to work at it and keep schooling his horses to get really good results. Nor did Janey understand Billy’s temperament: that he lacked self-confidence, and needed to be kept very calm before a big class. Rows and requests for money sapped his concentration. He needed to distance himself and, with a lovely wife in a warm bed at home, he tended to spend less time in the indoor school at night and to get up later in the morning.

In March, he came home from a three-week trip abroad. He’d missed Janey desperately and deliberately rang her at Southampton to say he’d be home in time for dinner, adding, rather plaintively, that he hadn’t eaten all day. As he settled the horses at Rupert’s, a marvelous smell of
boeuf bourgignon
drifted out of the kitchen, and he wondered if Janey would be cooking something nice for him. As he came up to the front door he tripped over a pile of milk bottles. The place stank of cat, not rabbit stew, and as he took the last finger of whisky to the sink to fill the glass up with water, he found it full of dirty dishes. The dishwasher had broken, explained Janey; the man hadn’t come to mend it yet. As he went back into the drawing room, he noticed the drink rings on the Georgian table Helen had given them as a wedding present. The place looked rather as Penscombe used to before Helen came and tidied it up. Somehow, these days, mess got on his nerves. He had had a bad week, hardly in the money at all. He tried to ignore the pile of brown envelopes unopened on the hall table. There was no more whisky; only vodka, but no tonic.

“Drink it with orange squash.”

“I’m starving.”

“I’m sorry, darling. I forgot to get anything in, and it was too late by the time you rang. Let’s go out.”

“Too bloody expensive. I’ll have some cornflakes.”

Billy’s stomach was churning painfully. He wondered if he were getting an ulcer. He had an early start in the morning. He went upstairs; the hot cupboard was bare, and there was nothing in his drawers.

“Have I got any clean shirts or breeches?”