The Country Escape (32 page)

‘You poor, dear girl. Always feels like a gunshot down the windpipe when they go.’

But even Miriam had an ulterior motive, it seemed.
No sooner had she mopped Kat’s tears and poured her a huge glass of white than she was quizzing her about Dougie. ‘I hear you two are hacking buddies!’

‘He’s teaching me how to gallop.’ Kat was too wrung out for more than bare truths.

‘How exciting! You must find out as much as you can about his plans for the pack and let us know – the Brom and Lems are all dying to know what’ll
happen to our old Wednesday country and whether we can win it back.’

‘I really don’t think I’m the best person to find that out.’

Miriam gave her a steely look. ‘The sanctuary relies upon the goodwill of the Brom and Lem to survive, Kat. You know that. You owe it to us – and them.’

It seemed Kat was now a double agent.

Dougie couldn’t stop yawning. Having stayed up very late the previous night with the copy of
Pears Cyclopaedia
that he’d found on the mill house’s bookshelf, then exercised horses and hounds from dawn, and spent the afternoon forging
relations with several tenant farmers over buckets of tea and long reminiscences, he was struggling to remember his own name as he hurried to the Eardisford Arms quiz, let alone the capital of Venezuela.

‘Douglas, young man!’ Ageing glamour-puss Miriam hailed him to her table on the Constance Mytton-Gough Animal Sanctuary team, where Pru and Cyn were flanking Frank Bingham-Ince, a square-jawed
fount of cricketing knowledge and political facts. ‘You must join in, we’re a head short, and we need a young un to help with popular music and television. I’ve called the troops for support – my son Johnny was on
University Challenge
, unbeatable on politics and pop – but he can’t get here till eight. Get him a drink, Frank.’

‘A Coke would be great.’ Joining them, Dougie scoured the room,
delighted that he’d secured his wildcard slot on the sanctuary team. He only hoped his cribbing didn’t let him down. ‘Where’s Kat?’

‘I told her not to come, poor thing.’ Miriam sighed, beautifully plucked eyebrows straining together across the artificially smooth forehead. ‘She had a horse drop dead last night and was terribly upset.’

Dougie swung back to look at her. ‘Not the coloured
mare?’

‘No, the blind bay. He was positively ancient, but we all know what it’s like. She’s terrified she’ll lose another.’ Miriam’s voice dropped to a whisper as Russ stepped up to the mic to issue a long list of rules. ‘I hope you know your onions. Russ takes no prisoners, but Frank’s hidden a cricketing miscellany in the gents, so we’re playing sport as our joker.’

Dougie managed
to stick out three rounds featuring incomprehensible questions about left-wing politics, cult movies and indie music from the eighties and nineties, none of which he got right, before Miriam’s son joined the team to fire out answers about the miners’ strike and Joy Division B sides. Resigning his slot with relief and apologizing that he must check his horses, Dougie drove home in the setting evening
sun via Lake Farm, where neither Kat nor Sri was in evidence.

When he got to Lush Bottom, the sun was still blazing low along the meadow from the nursery-pond end, like a flame-thrower, and he could clearly make out the silhouette of a horse and rider in it, apparently spinning around furiously then stopping, head-shaking and reversing. As he approached, he admired Kat Mason’s fabulous
backside again, the buttocks tight with tension as they bounced on and off the saddle.

‘You’re positively callipygian!’ he called. It was one of the few things he remembered mugging up for the quiz with the
Pears Cyclopaedia
. Unfortunately, his voice made the mare jump and Kat fell off.

‘Is that Latin for a crap rider?’ she muttered.

‘Are you okay?’

‘No I’m not okay!’
she snapped. ‘I told you I’m hopeless and she knows it.’

‘She knows you’re upset.’

Kat glowered at him from under her helmet peak.

‘I heard you lost a horse yesterday.’ He helped her up. ‘I’m sorry. It always hurts like hell.’ He kept hold of her hand, squeezing it reassuringly.

She nodded, clearly trying not to cry.

Stepping closer to offer a comforting shoulder,
practised husky platitudes and a hint of expensive aftershave, Dougie found himself hugging thin air as she slipped her hand hurriedly from his and went to catch Sri, grazing nearby.

‘He was over thirty,’ she said, in a no-nonsense nurse’s tone. ‘He had a great innings and a dignified end. It’s his field-mate I feel sorry for, the old hunter. He’s so lost and just keeps calling.’ There
was a catch in her voice, but she controlled it, throwing Sri’s reins over her head. ‘The ponies are all right, they have each other – and Sri doesn’t need anyone.’

‘That’s where you’re wrong. She needs you.’

‘I can’t ride her for toffee.’ She straightened the stirrup and stared at it, girding herself to step back up to the altar on which she continually sacrificed her pride.

‘Let me have a sit on her,’ Dougie offered, before thinking it through.

‘Would you?’ She looked at him over her shoulder. ‘That might really help. Tina’s too scared of her to do it now.’

Having gone to considerable lengths to scrub up to dashing country casual in thigh-hugging burnt-orange trousers and Timothy Foxx polo shirt with the collar up, Dougie wasn’t dressed for riding,
and balked at Kat’s insistence that he must borrow her hard hat, a modern plastic one that looked part bicycle helmet, part Alessi fruit bowl. ‘It won’t fit.’

‘I have a surprisingly big head.’ She thrust it at him.

‘And I have an
un
surprisingly big one.’ He gave her a playful look, trying it on to prove his point, only to find it fitted perfectly. The pink headgear was deeply undignified,
as was the fact that his trousers were so tight he couldn’t get his foot in the stirrup and needed a leg up, but he gamely jumped on the mare, eager to wow Kat with a few moves. Instead, he immediately found himself spinning and reversing with no perceptible control.

‘Okay, she might take a while to crack,’ he conceded, at which point Sri’s long curling ears twitched and she took off like
a rocket, carting him into the sunset.

Kat watched them race away across the meadow with some satisfaction, her morose mood lifting briefly as Sri took charge, a small patchwork missile.

‘Atta girl,’ she said, echoing Constance. After such a wretched twenty-four hours, it was a shamefully enjoyable sight.

He really is a
very
handsome boy, Katherine. Lovely relaxed hands. And
quite fearless.

‘Eardisford’s own cavalier,’ she said out loud, as she watched him charge past in the opposite direction.

When Dougie finally pulled up, his smile was so wide it almost touched his ears. ‘This mare has some spirit!’ he called, as he rode back to her. ‘They say you tell a gelding and ask a mare, but this one needs a peace force. She was born for a challenge like the
Bolt. How soon do you plan to attempt it?’

Kat could still hear Constance’s voice, forthright and passionate:
It will set you free.

‘This summer.’

‘Then we’ll have to put in a lot of work.’ He looked excited, the big smile no longer remotely wolfish. ‘She needs to be fitter and you need to be the one in control.’ Pulling at the mare’s curly ears, which were flicking back and
forth on high alert, he dismounted so that he was standing beside Kat, his eyes catching hers and holding them, flirtation creeping back. Only Dougie Everett could look absurdly sexy in a pink plastic helmet. ‘I want you here every evening.’

When Kat looked up ‘callipygian’ in the dictionary later, she found it meant having well-shaped buttocks.

‘I can’t believe you let his body go to the hunt kennels!’

Russ had come back to Lake Farm to wash, collect some clean clothes and use the computer before setting off for a midsummer-solstice music festival. An evening that
had started with a much-needed Russ bear-hug to console Kat over the loss of Sid had quickly degenerated into a debate about the morality of Constance’s wishes.

‘The old bat belonged to another era, we know that – and asking you to ride the Bolt! She was bloody barking.’

‘I am going to ride it!’

‘You don’t stand a chance, everyone knows that.’ He was pulling T-shirts out of
the laundry basket while he waited for his bath to run.

‘Constance had faith in me even if you don’t. She said it would set me free.’

‘Bollocks it will. It’ll just land you in hospital. The Hon Con was a decrepit old imperialist who got her kicks out of ordering her minions about – even after her death.’ He threw a pair of mismatched socks with holes at both heels on to his pile.
‘Daring you to ride the Bolt was a sick old masters-and-servants joke, unlike condemning her animals’ cadavers to be ripped apart by foxhounds after their death, which is just sick.’ He picked up the socks again and laid them on top of the dresser where the sewing kit lived.

Watching him, Kat realized she couldn’t let it drift any longer. The list in her head kept being added to by the
day: no more dirty laundry, no more Tantric sex, no more of Mags’s pheasant casualties, no continued abuse of the Lake Farm printer, no lectures about Constance – on it went, and it was her responsibility to re-lay boundaries and claim back the sanctuary and her home.

‘Russ, we have to talk.’

‘What – now? I’m running a bath.’

‘After your bath. And please don’t use my Body
Shop mitt this time.’ It was another item on the list: remove scum-line and pubic hair from bath and toiletries.

Kat decided to write a few bullet points to help her explain herself, but by the time Russ joined her at the kitchen table and started opening two Sui-Ciders – which the Eardisford Arms had been trialling through June without success – the piece of paper in front of her still
had just one line.
This is my home
. As she tried to explain the new ground rules, she saw in horror that there were tears in his eyes, his Shakespeare-hero face at its most misunderstood and tragic.

‘Do you want me to move out permanently?’

‘I think it’s best you don’t sleep here any more.’

He nodded, chewing at a thumbnail. ‘And the injured wildlife?’

‘They can stay.
You can come and go as much as you like – if you need to leave some stuff here, that’s fine. You’re a huge help to me and a great friend, and I love hanging out with you and all that you do to help here, but I need my space back all to myself.’

‘It’s the sex, isn’t it?’ He put his head into his hands.

Kat doubted it would make him feel better if she pointed out that, no, it wasn’t
just the sex. It was the mean-spirited, bad-tempered, selfish freeloading and the totally obvious undying love for Mags, which was undoubtedly the reason he couldn’t get aroused. His compassion for animals was inspiring and his intelligence was breathtaking, but he was the broodiest sod she knew and appallingly undomesticated.

All this raged in her mind as she took his hands and forced
herself to stay calm. ‘You’ll overcome this problem, Russ, I know you will. Just not with me.’

‘That’s exactly what Mags says. She says two wrongs don’t make a right, and the fact you have such big hang-ups about sex just makes me worse.’

‘There you go,’ she said tightly, appalled that he’d told Mags.

‘It’s hard for her to understand my problem. It never happens when I’m with
her, you see.’

‘Really?’ She let go of his hands, her voice climbing scales. ‘You found this out recently, did you? Was that before or after you offered me your “fidelity”?’

‘You can’t stop a grand passion like this, Kat. It’s like a tsunami.’ The tortured bear eyes lowered. ‘I have only ever loved one woman. I’m sorry, Kat. I tried so hard not to go there again. She’ll never leave
Calum and his kids for me, I know that, but he can’t give her what she needs either.’ He cleared his throat. ‘He’s only into C and B sex these days.’

‘What’s that?’ she asked in alarm, imagining a torture chamber beneath the falconer’s cottage.

‘Christmas and birthdays. Even that makes me want to kill him. I can’t share her. He doesn’t deserve her. He’s a jealous sod too. I half
suspect Mags wants it out in the open so we can fight for her.’

‘Well, it’s bound to be harder to keep secret now you can’t use me as cover,’ she muttered, horrified that she had been so naïve as to believe all the lines about a teenage love affair that had petered out.

‘It wasn’t like that, Kat! I care deeply about you.’

She rubbed her forehead. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘If she really won’t leave him for me, I’ll move on after the apple harvest’s in, I reckon. Go travelling, find a volunteer project overseas where I can do some good. The orchards are in great nick now. It’ll be a record-breaking year if the sun stays. Guess we got one thing right as a couple. The Wassail King and Queen brought a bumper harvest.’

She smiled sadly, thinking back to
the wassail ceremony on Twelfth Night and their first kiss, fuelled by Bill’s spiked cider, followed by the first of many disastrous attempts at seduction.

Sitting up straight again, Russ launched into one of his rallying cries: ‘Rest assured, Kat, I’m not leaving this village until I know that you and the animals will be safe here, and the estate wildlife is protected.’

‘I’ll be
fine.’ She smiled.

But he shook his head, dark eyes flashing a warning. ‘It’s not safe here. This farm’s too important to the estate for them to leave you in peace, especially if they’re hunting outside the law. Dair’s wearing his flat cap lower than ever and Meat and Two Veg are patrolling the footpaths like never before. There’s definitely something dodgy going down. I bet Everett knows
the truth. What’s he said?’

‘That he’s hunting with stunts. “Shtunting,” I guess.’

He didn’t smile. ‘You are ’mazing to put up with all his crap, Kat. I know how hard it must be riding out with the bastard, but you’ve got to keep digging for the truth. I’m still here to look out for you, you know that. Me and Mags. We both love you to bits.’ The bear-hug offered itself again.

Kat forced a smile and accepted the gesture, deciding that, as break-ups went, it was a very comforting one.