Well Groomed (43 page)

The forge was icy cold as the Rayburn had puttered out again. Howling and whimpering sulkily, Beetroot was shut in the bedroom away from Niall’s ankles.

He had all but polished off the bottle of malt they had been going to give Hugo for his birthday when Tash rolled in. ‘I got a lift back with Godfrey Pelham.’ She watched him closely, anxious to gauge his mood.

But, shrugging, he said nothing. He looked impossibly depraved and poetic – dark hair tickling his bloodshot eyes, stubble pricking out of his cheeks, body an indolent, slothful sag of alcoholically relaxed muscles. He didn’t even comment on her bootless feet or muddy face and clothes. Nor did he complain when she clambered on to the sofa beside him and curled up into a tight foetal ball in his arms.

‘D’you have a good time tonight?’ She clenched her eyes shut and pressed her nose against one of his shirt buttons.

‘No.’ He stroked her ears softly as though distractedly caressing a cat.

‘Me neither.’

‘I love you so much.’ He pressed his lips into her hair, breath as usual smelling of whisky. It reminded her of Hugo’s. She wished hell-raising men would stick to something more appetising, like vodka. Or Listermint.

‘I love you too.’ She pressed her cheek to his wide, warm shoulder. ‘To distraction, to bits, to death and too much.’

Drifting off to sleep, she dreamed that Hugo was licking her legs while she was trying to perform a dressage test on Snob. Snob had just very alarmingly turned into Niall giving her a piggy-back when she was woken at four in the morning by Niall – who was absolutely paralytic – dropping her as he tried to carry her upstairs.

THE NEXT MORNING, TASH encountered Zoe and Gus in the kitchen at Lime Tree Farm, gossiping happily about the party. Zoe, who had left early with Niall to ferry the drunken Rufus home, was dying for news. Gus and Penny had stayed to the bitter end and had therefore got a lot of bad behaviour to report – mostly details of eventers getting off with one another, which was not unusual, especially amongst the younger ones. The fact that two of them had chosen to rise to the pelvic trot in Hugo’s bedroom while Alicia was using the lavatory three yards away was alarming but not as shocking as the rumour that Hugo himself had been in bed at the time and had slept on throughout.

Trying to listen in, Tash drank strong, black coffee on the run and fell over Beetroot who was following her around imploringly, her breakfast having been overlooked in the rush.

She was running late and had just under an hour to get Snob ready to travel to the Lowerton trials with Hugo and Stefan, who were due to collect them at seven.

Not really following the rather fanciful tales of party antics, she only picked up a few bald facts, snatched as she dashed around in search of drying numnahs and clean shirts. Ted had stayed the night with Hugo’s buxom head girl Franny, with whom he was now seemingly reconciled, and was in Gus’s bad books as he hadn’t yet arrived to do the feeds and mucking out. After Tash had left the night before, Sophia had gone into hysterics on discovering her Trollope being used as a beer mat, Hugo had later been hauled up from the bottom of Twenty Acres almost an hour after Tash had walked up, blind drunk and very bloody-minded. He had then downed yet more scotch before passing out on a sofa, at which point Lisette had coiled herself into the space beside him and asked him yet again to agree to Haydown’s being used for the Four Poster Bed shoot.

‘She was all over him like aftershave,’ Penny giggled. ‘There were all the other men in the room with their eyes on stalks, absolutely spitting with envy, and Hugo could hardly open his eyes.’

‘He only woke up when she practically grabbed his groin to get his attention,’ Gus said in near-disbelief as he wandered through the kitchen to fetch another sweater.

‘Did he say yes?’ Zoe asked. ‘To the location shoot, I mean.’ For some reason she looked at Tash when she said this. Flustered, Tash pretended to be engrossed in untangling a pile of exercise bandages.

‘Not sure.’ Penny wrinkled her nose as she downed Alka-Seltzers dissolved in orange juice. ‘I think he might have been concussed from coming off that bike with you, Tash. How you could just leave him down there with a head injury, I’ll never know. Everyone at the party was talking about it.’

‘He was fine!’ Tash bristled, a blush curling into her cheeks. ‘He was walking and talking perfectly well. It was just a scratch.’

Penny gave her an old-fashioned look. ‘Bloody foolhardy thing to do, if you ask me.’

‘Why did you do it?’ Zoe joined her sister in looking disapproving. ‘I’m sure Niall would never have left the party if he’d thought you were going to start leaping on motorbikes and careering around Hugo’s fields the moment he turned his back.’

‘It was a dare.’ Tash was aware that she was slouching around like a surly teenager. ‘And, anyway, I thought Niall was coming back.’

‘Sorry, my fault.’ Zoe looked apologetic. ‘It took ages to persuade Rufus that it wasn’t a good idea to go to bed in the back of the car. Niall was wonderful with him so I offered him a coffee for his efforts. Then we started talking and we didn’t notice the time.’

‘You drank coffee?’ she asked casually.

Zoe nodded. ‘Gallons of it. Niall was just telling me about the Anne Brontë adaptation when India wandered in – she got a lift back from the party with the Cubitts.
Wildfell Hall
’s one of her set texts at the moment, so they were discussing it forever – they were like a couple of swots revising for Oxbridge entrance. He said she’d given him such good ideas that he wanted to rush back to the forge to go through the script and make notes.’

Instead, he went back to the forge and drank a bottle of scotch while waiting for me, Tash realised with a plummeting heart. She could still hear Hugo’s words of the night before stinging in her ears. She longed to confess her fears to Zoe, but had to race outside to bandage up Snob so that he would be ready to load the moment Hugo’s box arrived. With Ted not on hand, she had a pile of things to do.

Tripping over a hungover Gus who was listening slyly to Today on the tack-room wireless, she was still well behind schedule when Franny drove into the yard, glowering behind the wheel of Hugo’s vast high-tech lorry, stereo pounding out the Chris Evans morning show.

Scruffy and unshaven, Ted leaped down from the cab, grinning the happy, Cheshire cat smile of the recently shagged. He had a woolly hat pulled over his shorn scalp to protect against the early-morning chill.

‘Hugo’s conked out in the back, so don’t panic.’ He started to gather up tack and heave it over to the huge holds at the base of the lorry. ‘Christ knows how he’ll get round – he’s been vomiting rainbows all morning, and Surfer hasn’t qualified for Badminton yet, so they have to go clear.’

With a grumbling Gus roped in to help, they were on their way within half an hour, Snob trying to kick his way out of the rear as he always did on his way to competitions, thoroughly het up with excitement, like a football hooligan on his way to a grudge match.

‘Shut that fucker up or I’ll shoot him!’ came a deep voice from the living compartment.

‘Hugo’s unusually cheerful.’ Ted didn’t look up from the
Sun
.

In the cab, Tash and Franny tried not to giggle. Stefan, in the back with Hugo, was throwing up over and over again in the tiny loo cubicle.

‘He looks hellish,’ Franny whispered as they raced up the slip road and on to the M4, her rubber t-shirt straining over her vast chest as she craned to look in the wing mirror. ‘And I’m sure he’s still half-cut. Everyone at that party was off their heads – I reckon there’ll be a lot of falls today. You were one of the only ones to stay sober and leave early, Tash. You should coast it.’

Walking the course before her dressage test, Tash had grave doubts that she would coast it at all. She had even less hope of Hugo being capable of mounting, let alone riding his nervy, clever liver-chestnut, Surfer. Thankfully it was a two-day event, which meant that both the show-jumping and the cross-country phases were to follow the next day. All they had to do that morning was perform their dressage tests. They were walking the course early because another intermediate competition was running alongside the more senior class, and those entrants went across country that afternoon, using part of the same course. It meant it would be hard to get close enough to the fences to study them any later that day, but both Stefan and Hugo grumbled like mad at the early start.

Lowerton was an extremely tricky, undulating course on which it was almost impossible to get a good, flowing rhythm as the track twisted around like a snake with colic, forever changing direction and gradient. The fences themselves were a tricky bunch of corners and arrow-heads which needed supreme accuracy and strong control. The latter was something Tash had lacked of late with Snob. She was certain that she’d have a battle on her hands the next day trying to hold him on line. These days he took more diversions than the North Circular.

Hugo made no comment about the night before. Hardly speaking to Tash at all, except to snap at her to hurry up as they walked the course with Stefan, he was sullen and jittery, eyelids dropping over diabolical bags beneath.

He barely seemed to be taking in the fences as they tottered around, meeting a lot of other green-faced eventers en route – all of them gossiping about the party and muttering darkly about deliberate sabotage on Hugo’s part. It was only when they saw his pale green face that they realised he was feeling the roughest of them all.

‘Are you two planning to ride pillion across country, like you did last night?’ Lucy Field giggled, digging for gossip.

‘Tash never lets me ride Snob,’ Hugo muttered darkly. ‘She thinks I might show her up.’

‘You wouldn’t know which way to point him if you rode him tomorrow,’ Tash said pettily, noticing that he’d given one of the hardest fences on the course – a vast bounce over a footbridge – only the most cursory of glances.

‘I’ve ridden this course for the last four years,’ he muttered as she pedantically paced out a double of bullfinches at the brow of a hill, which gave one the impression of jumping into the sky.

‘There are a couple of new fences this year,’ she pointed out, retracing her steps to check she had counted right.

‘Well, I’ll make sure I introduce myself to them then.’ He staggered off, hardly glancing at the bullfinches.

Rolling her eyes, she carried on with her meticulous appraisal of every fence and alternative route into them. Tottering wanly beside her, Stefan threw up behind practically every single one, but at least he diligently worked out the distances and approach lines, unlike his crabby boss.

‘I can’t think what’s got into him,’ he complained as they trailed through ominously slippery mud. ‘I’ve seen him hungover before, but never like this. I’d say he was under a black cloud, but then again we all are.’

The sky was so heavy with rain, it seemed to be dropping by feet every second, like a plunging grey parachute canopy, yet no drops fell as a squally breeze buffeted hoods against the backs of heads and knocked bush hats into adjoining fields where they had to be chased along like stray kites.

Back at the lorry, Ted and Franny had settled the horses in the temporary stabling nearby and were huddled in the living quarters microwaving mugs of coffee and looking glum. Franny’s straining leather trousers were covered with purple antiseptic spray.

‘Bodybuilder cut his fetlock slipping down the ramp.’ Franny tipped the peak of her baseball cap away from her nose and gazed at Tash forlornly. ‘Hugo’s just fired me for the third time today.’

Tash winced. ‘So he’s just got Surfer to compete?’

She nodded. ‘No bad thing – he has such bad shakes, he’ll be using the reins as divining rods in the dressage.’

Later that afternoon, Tash managed a fairly respectable dressage score, enhanced by the fact that everyone else, hungover to the back teeth from Hugo’s party, performed abysmally. She had never known so many top drawer eventers forget their tests.

‘It’s bloody sabotage,’ cursed one of the best British riders, Brian Sedgewick, whose lop-sided rugby-player’s face was almost grey with nausea. ‘Hugo should be shot.’

But the grumblings stopped when Hugo’s own test was the worst he had executed in over five years. Surfer was a lean, graceful liver-chestnut with long, nervy rabbit’s ears that twitched like antennae with concentration as he listened to his rider’s every breath. They were usually a lethal combination, with Hugo’s fluid, almost imperceptible aids spurring the horse into balletic brilliance. All the other riders envied Hugo like mad for clicking with him. But today those Cadbury brown ears were flat to the horse’s neatly bobbled plaits as Hugo sat hunch-backed in the saddle, his concentration in tatters. He forgot his way twice, flopped around in the saddle like an amateur, and his mouth disappeared entirely for the last few moments as he battled not to throw up. Riding out of the ring, he was off Surfer in super-quick time and, chucking the reins to Franny, hared off to the Portaloos.

A bleach-faced Stefan received the dubious honour of being the first person ever to fall off during the Lowerton dressage phase. He came out looking very hang-dog with a muddy top hat and pride as bruised as a windfall.

No one was feeling particularly social that evening; Tash had been invited to a pasta session in a nearby box, but just wanted to use the cab phone to call Niall and then go to bed in anticipation of the dawn start the next morning. At least Hugo had stomped off in high dudgeon to spend the night at his friend’s farmhouse and was no longer lurking around to snarl and mob her up.

The following morning everything was freshly rinsed and still dripping. Drizzle leaked through layers of clothing, left tiny droplets on hair and made the competitors’ paper numbers as soft and rippable as damp tissues. Most kept theirs inside the plastic bibs they wore on their chests, but for the few who didn’t it was a case of shouting out their number each time they passed a fence judge.