Riders (60 page)

“Poor lovie, you look shattered,” she told Fen. “Let’s have a drink before dinner.”

“Can we afford it?” said Fen, looking at the bills.

“I think so,” said Tory. “At the moment, anyway. It just infuriates me that, having paid for all that foreign stabling in advance, we won’t be able to use it.”

Having opened a bottle of red wine and filled two glasses, Fen slumped in the armchair by the Aga. Although it was the end of April it was still cold. Wolf, the lurcher, who was missing his master even more than Macaulay, leapt onto Fen’s lap for comfort.

“Poor old boy,” said Fen, cuddling his shivering, shaggy body.

“How’s Mac?” said Tory, draining the broccoli.

“Still off his feed. His whole routine’s been disrupted. Ouch,” she screeched, as Wolf, hearing the sound of a car on the gravel, leapt off her knees, scratching her thighs with his long claws. Next moment, he was through the back door and had rushed off, barking frantically, into the yard.

“Who the hell could that be?” said Fen.

“Wolf obviously knows him,” said Tory. “He’s stopped barking.”

“May I come in?” said Malise.

“Oh hell,” muttered Fen, “he’ll think we’ve eaten and stay gassing for hours.”

“Hello,” said Tory, blushing with her usual shyness. “You’ve come at the right time. We’ve just opened a bottle.” She filled up another glass.

Malise sat down at the long scrubbed table, enjoying the warmth, admiring the children’s paintings and the newspaper photographs of the horses on the corkboard, alongside this year’s already substantial number of rosettes for which there was no longer space in the tackroom. He looked at the pile of envelopes.

“You’ve been busy.”

“Canceling shows,” said Tory. “Hoping we might get some of our money back. Why don’t you stay for supper?” she stammered. “We’ve got masses.”

“I’m sure there isn’t enough,” said Malise.

“Tory always cooks for five thousand and it’s always marvelous,” said Fen.

Malise suddenly realized he hadn’t eaten all day.

“Well, it’d be awfully nice.”

“It’s only chicken,” said Tory apologetically.

“I’ll get it out,” said Fen. Typical Tory, she thought, as she got four huge baked potatoes and a large blue casserole out of the oven.

“Nice kitchen,” said Malise as he put butter in his baked potato. “How’s Macaulay?”

“Devastated,” sighed Fen. “He even misses shows. Every time the telephone goes in the tackroom, he starts cantering around the field.”

“This is excellent, Tory,” said Malise. “I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. By the way, I’ve just been to see Jake.”

“Oh, how kind. How was he?”

“Pretty miserable still; frustrated, bored.”

“And still in a lot of pain?” asked Tory.

“Yup, but at least I gave him something to take his mind off his leg. You’d better get the horses in tomorrow, Fen. He’s agreed you can jump them.”

“Poor Jake,” said Fen. “I drove over to see him this morning. He looked awful. What did you say?” She stopped with a piece of carrot on the way to her mouth.

“He’s going to let you ride the horses.”

“Where?” stammered Fen.

Malise laughed. “Rome, Paris, Windsor, Barcelona, Crittleden, Lucerne, just for starters.”

Fen opened her mouth and shut it again. Then she turned to Tory. “Is this true?”

Tory laughed and hugged her. “If Malise says so, it must be.”

“But we can’t afford it.”

“Of course you can. You’ll be jumping as a member of the British team, so those expenses’ll be paid, and if I’m anything to go by, you’ll be in the money very soon.”

Fen looked at him incredulously. “Thank you,” she said in a choked voice. Then, jumping to her feet and falling over Wolf, she ran out into the yard, muttering that she must go and tell Macaulay.

“Oh, please, God, forgive me,” she prayed as she buried her face in Macaulay’s neck, “I didn’t mean it when I said I wanted to give up show jumping.”

The following day, Fen loaded up Macaulay in the trailer and drove to Oxford. Without asking anyone’s permission she unboxed him in the Woodstock Road and rode him across the emerald green, billiard-table-smooth hospital lawn and, cavalierly trampling a bed of dark red wallflowers underfoot, banged on the window of Jake’s room.

Jake, sunk in the depths of gloom, thought he was hallucinating when the great white face with the white eye peered through the glass at him. Fortunately it was a slack period. Matron was at lunch, patients were resting, and comely Sister Wutherspoon, who was a show-jumping fan, pushed Jake’s bed so it was flush to the opened window. The reunion touched everyone. At first Macaulay couldn’t quite believe it, pressing his face against Jake’s shoulder, whickering in ecstasy, then licking his pajama jacket and his face with a great, pink, stropping tongue. For a minute Jake couldn’t speak, but at last his face took on some color as he fed Macaulay a whole pound of grapes and a bar of chocolate and an apple. Word soon spread round the hospital. A crowd of nurses had soon gathered in the room to pat and even take photographs of the World Champion, thrilled to see the delight on Jake’s face. They had all been worried about his slow recovery and his black depression. In the middle, the matron walked in and everyone melted away. Fortunately, she was also a show-jumping fan.

“We really don’t allow visitors out of hours, Mr. Lovell, but I suppose we can make an exception in Macaulay’s case.”

After twenty minutes, Fen put Macaulay back in the trailer and came back to talk to Jake, thanking him over and over again for letting her go, promising to ring him every night.

“When are you off?”

“Friday morning. Grisel’s collecting me.”

She saw him again once before she left, on the way home from a day trip to London. He was so busy giving her last-minute instructions, he didn’t notice she never took the scarf from her head.

“Rome’s tricky,” he said. “You’ll find the fences coming off the corners very fast, and at dusk the trees around the arena throw shadows across the poles, which make it very easy to make mistakes. Macaulay’s eyesight’s not brilliant. If you’re in any doubt, don’t jump him. You won’t like Rome: lots of wops with machine guns pinching your bottom. Don’t carry money or your passport in your bag, the muggers are frightful, and put any winnings in the hotel safe at once.”

“If there are any,” said Fen in a hollow voice.

“I gather Billy Lloyd-Foxe is back in the team, too,” said Jake. “If you have any problems, go to him rather than Malise. He has to ride the horses. He knows what he’s talking about.”

“I’ve been very wicked,” said Fen, when she got back to the Mill House three hours later and found Tory in the kitchen darning Fen’s lucky socks. “I’ve bought three pairs of trousers, three shirts, two dresses, and a bikini. I promise I’ll win it all back. And I passed a poster of Janey Lloyd-Foxe in the tube, telling me to read her column every week, so I drew a mustache on her and wrote ‘bitch’ underneath.”

“I hope no one saw you,” said Tory in alarm. “Let’s see what you bought.”

“And I went to the hairdresser,” said Fen casually. “I covered it up with a scarf, because I thought Jake might freak out. It’s gone a bit flat.”

She removed the scarf. Tory just gaped at her. Fen had gone out that morning with dark mouse hair trailing almost to her waist. Now it was streaked white blond and no longer than two inches all over her head. Tendrils curled round her face and down to a point at the nape of her neck. She had been on a crash diet for the last ten days since she heard about the trip, and now weighed no more than eight stone. As a result of so many salads, the spots had gone for good, the new hairstyle emphasized the emerging cheekbones, the brilliant, slanting, aquamarine eyes, and the long slender neck.

“I’m sorry,” Fen hung her head, “but I thought it would be easier to keep like this.”

Certainly it won’t be easier to keep men at a distance, thought Tory. Malise was going to have his work cut out as a chaperone. Suddenly, with a flash of equal pain and pleasure, she realized that Fen was no longer a child, a little sister. Almost since this morning she’d grown up into a beauty.

“It’s gorgeous,” she said in awe. “The hair’s heaven.”

Fen grinned with relief. “Griselda won’t be able to keep her hands off me!”

F
en had seldom met anyone she disliked more than Griselda Hubbard. Having told Fen to be ready at five-thirty, she rolled up, while it was still dark, at four forty-five, just as Fen was feeding Desdemona and Macaulay. Refusing to come in for a cup of coffee, she sat drumming her fingers on the wheel of her vast eight-gear juggernaut, gazing at the immaculate yard as though it was a pigsty, forcing Fen into a complete panic and sabotaging all her down-to-
the-last-minute organization. Macaulay loathed getting up early, at the best of times. There was no way you could hurry him over his breakfast or Sarah over blow-drying her hair.

“It’ll dry all crinkly if I leave it,” was her only answer, in reply to Fen’s frantic pleas.

“What on earth’s that?” said Griselda, as Fen installed a huge sweetshop jar of lemon sherbets, taking up a large corner of the very limited cupboard space.

“Macaulay’s reward if he jumps well.”

“You’re optimistic,” said Griselda dismissively. She was bull-terrier solid rather than fat, with huge fleshy thighs stretching a maroon track suit, and a hard face with short permed dark hair, small beady eyes, and more than a suggestion of mustache on her upper lip. She might have been any age between thirty and forty-five but in fact was only twenty-eight.

“I am not sitting next to her,” muttered Sarah.

Georgie, Griselda’s girl groom, as thin and wiry as Griselda was solid, had a pointed nose, watery blue eyes, and a long beige plait down her back. There was a lot of fuss about loading. Griselda had four horses, with her star, Mr. Punch, on the outside.

“I’m not having that brute next to Punchie,” she said, as Fen started to lead Macaulay up the ramp.

“He wouldn’t hurt a fly,” protested Fen.

“Punchie is not a fly,” said Griselda, “and that’s not what Rupert Campbell-Black says. Put Desdemona next to Punchie.”

“Desdemona gets scared. It’s easier if she’s between Mac and Hardy, and Mac goes in first.”

“Look, if you hitch a lift with me,” said Griselda, “you abide by my rules.”

Handling the monster lorry like a man, Griselda calmly knocked down two of Tory’s carefully nurtured lilac trees on the grass verge by the gate. Fen shivered for Desdemona and Macaulay’s safety, as Grisel overtook juggernaut after juggernaut on the motorway. She got to the ferry two hours early, which meant lots of hanging around. Fen insisted on feeding her horses at the docks, which, to Griselda’s intense irritation, had Mr. Punch and the rest of her horses clamoring for their lunch too. To upset Fen, there was the inevitable lorry-load of bewildered, thirstily bleating little calves. The driver said they were destined for the pot.

“Why can’t they bloody kill them in England?” said Fen.

“EEC Regulations,” said the driver.

“Don’t be so sentimental,” said Griselda. “You eat meat, don’t you?”

When they were at sea they had lunch in the restaurant. Grisel ordered a huge steak. “I need my fuel. I’m the only one doing any work.”

Fen, who was starving, ordered a grilled sole, which seemed less bloodthirsty. The moment it arrived, Grisel made a point of asking her to go down to the hold and check the horses.

Throughout the three-day journey, she treated Fen with even more contempt than the grooms, insisting she map-read, then hitting the roof when Fen gazed out of the windows at the pink and white apple blossoms and, wondering how she would put Desdemona at all the fences that flashed past, twice navigated Grisel on to the wrong motorway.

Every sixty miles or so, Griselda ordered Sarah or Fen to make her yet another cup of strong black coffee with three spoonfuls of sugar.

Jake always stopped to water and graze his horses on the way. Griselda believed in pushing on. “We’ll never make Fontainebleau by nightfall if we bugger around blowing them out with grass. Who’d like a lemon sherbet?”

“They’re Macaulay’s,” snapped Fen.

“He’ll hardly get through that lot. No wonder he’s so podgy.”

“Certainly likes her pound of flesh,” muttered Sarah to Fen, “although why she should want any more flesh defeats me, the ugly cow.”

“She’s supposed to have a boyfriend,” said Fen.

“Must have picked him up at St. Dunstan’s.”

Finally, two days later, with the Ave Maria ringing out all over the city, they drove into Rome. Fen was knocked sideways by the beauty of the churches, the statues, the lakes reflecting the yellow and turquoise sky, and the great humpbacked dome of St. Peter’s. The streets swarmed with people parading up and down, gossiping and showing off their new clothes. The traffic was terrifying. Griselda, however, drove the lorry on undaunted, on the principle that if she crashed into a Ferrari it would come off worst. Sarah, sitting by the window, was the object of repeated wolf whistles.

“I always felt I’d like to end my days in Rome,” she said smugly.

“You probably will if Griselda doesn’t drive more slowly,” said Fen. “Oh, look at that beautiful park over there.” Through the gap in the houses she could see a rustic amphitheater circled with umbrella palms.

“That’s the showground,” said Sarah. “It’s supposed to be the most beautiful in the world.”

The stables, part of a military barracks, were splendid, with big roomy boxes, enabling the horses to look out into the yard.

“There’s Snakepit and The Bull,” said Sarah. “So Rupert and Billy are already here.”

Fen suddenly felt nervous and wondered what they’d think of her new hair.

“Hello,” said Dizzy, coming out of Snakepit’s box. “We flew out. We were lucky. Have you had a frightful journey?”

“Marvelous,” lied Fen, because Griselda was in earshot.

“Where are the team staying?” Griselda asked Dizzy.

“The Apollo, just round the corner.”

“Well, I’m off,” said Griselda. “I expect you’ll want to settle your horses, Fen. Can you carry my cases to the taxi rank, Georgie? And mind you brush out the horse area, and clean up the living area.”

“Bitch,” said Fen, glaring at Griselda’s solid, departing back, with Georgie running after her, buckling under the cases. “We’re getting home some other way,” she added to Sarah, “even if we have to carry the horses.”

Having examined the loose boxes for sticking-out nails and jagged edges of wood, they put down wood shavings and fed and watered the horses. Macaulay, however, had a more pressing need. Dropping down, folding like a camel, he rolled and rolled.

“God, I’m so tired. I could sleep on a clothesline,” said Fen.

“Where shall we have supper?” said Sarah.

“There’s a nice trattoria round the corner,” said Dizzy.

“Can I come with you?” asked Fen.

“No, you can’t,” said Driffield, who’d been checking his horses. “You’re staying at the Apollo with the team and you’ll be expected to dine with them, too. Come on, we’ll share a taxi.”

“Pay for it, you mean,” said Fen under her breath, knowing Driffield’s meanness. “You can sleep in the hotel room alternate nights, and I’ll sleep in the lorry,” she said apologetically to Sarah.

“Malise won’t put up with that,” said Driffield. “You’ve made the grade now, dear, and you’ll have to behave like one of us.”

The Hotel Apollo was a sprawling yellow villa, its stuccoed walls peeling. The walls of the lobby were decorated with friezes of Apollo in various guises, cavorting with bathing nymphs, bemused maidens, and hairy-legged flute players. There was a rackety lift, but Fen preferred to climb a huge baroque staircase to her room on the second floor, which turned out to be the height of luxury.

Meanwhile, downstairs in the bar, Malise, hiding his disappointment that Helen hadn’t made the trip to Rome this year, was giving Billy and Rupert a pep talk. “I need your help, chaps,” he said, with unusual heartiness. “Fenella Maxwell’s not eighteen yet. Tory and Jake are in a panic she’s going to get seduced by some wop. I promised them we’d keep a close eye on her.”

“Tory’s overreacting,” said Rupert. “I can’t actually envisage Fen having to fight them off.”

“Poor old Jake,” said Billy, looking down at his glass of Coke. “Bloody bad luck when he’d just battled his way to the top.”

“I must send him a please-don’t-get-well card,” drawled Rupert. “He tried to kill me last year, remember?”

“Pity he didn’t succeed,” said Driffield nastily.

Billy thought wistfully of the old days, when predinner drinks were the nicest part of the day, to celebrate or cheer you up after a lousy round. You’d start with a pint of beer because you were thirsty, and after that you had several large whiskys, with increasing merriment in anticipation of some exotic food, heightened by plenty of wine and several brandies afterwards. Life had seemed framed in a halo, studded with buttercups. Now all meals had a terrible sameness, with people getting sillier or more aggressive. The first wild agony of losing Janey had given way to a dull numbing loneliness. He had become aware of the appalling sameness of the show-jumping circuit, the faceless bedrooms, the endless traveling. Before, it had been redeemed by hell-raising with Rupert, or living it up with Janey. Everywhere he went, he was reminded of her and the good time they had had, and every night he watched the other riders ring home to check up on their families and report the latest success. He had no one to ring now, no one who gave a stuff if he won or lost, except his creditors, whom he was gradually paying back. The money from each small win was sent to Mr. Block, who kept what was necessary for Billy’s livelihood, took his cut, and passed the rest on to the tax man. In fact, if he could get back on form and notch up about five really good wins, he could discharge the whole debt. Once Janey had filed for divorce, Billy’s mother, making no secret of her relief, had come to his aid, not giving him a huge sum, but enough to settle the most pressing bills. Rupert had been wonderful. Looking across at him, a fond father showing photographs of the twelve-month-old Tabitha to Malise, Billy felt a wave of passionate gratitude for his support and kindness. Never once had Rupert tried to persuade him to have a drink, as other people constantly did.

Malise’s voice broke into his thoughts.

“Hope you don’t mind coming here again too much,” he said in an undertone. “I’m fond of this place, even if it is a bit quaint.”

Billy smiled. “Of course not.” That was all part of the act, to be cheerful, never to show the cracks in his heart.

He pointed to one of the more grotesque figures portrayed in the frieze round the walls of the bar.

“What did that poor chap do?”

“Raped Apollo’s mother. He was pegged down so that birds could peck continually at his liver.”

“Sounds like mine in the old days,” said Billy.

“Another Coke?” asked Malise.

“No, I’m fine.” Billy looked across at Griselda Hubbard, massive in a red track suit. What a disgustingly ugly pig she was, and already bad-mouthing poor little Fen.

“She’s a hopeless map-reader and kept making the most ridiculous fuss about stopping to graze and water the horses. If I’d listened to her we’d still be in France. Jake’s mad to let her ride the horses when she’s so soft. They’ll be walking all over her in a week or two, and she’s no sense of hierarchy, treats her groom like an equal, even a superior. She’ll have both her and the two horses tucked up in her hotel bedroom watching the telly at any minute.”

“I hope we can get English food here,” grumbled Driffield, brandishing an empty glass and looking around, hoping someone would buy him a drink.

Rupert was discussing declining television viewing figures with Malise. “They ought to sack Dudley; he’s such a pratt. What we need on the circuit is crumpet.”

“Who’s talking?” sneered Driffield.

“Not groupie crumpet, competing crumpet, some good-looking riders,”

“Like Lavinia,” said Malise.

“She was never good enough, or pretty enough,” said Rupert.

“Ahem,” said Billy.

“Anyway, she married a frog. I am talking about someone like Ann Moore or Marion Coakes; someone every little pony-mad girl can identify with. It’s the pony-mad girls that make up the audiences and bring in their parents.”

“What about Fenella Maxwell?” said Malise.

“Well, if she shed about a stone and a half, most of which is spots.”