Well Groomed (78 page)

ON FRIDAY MORNING, THE heavens were as wide open as shop doors on the first day of the sales, and throwing down water as though baling out a sinking ark.

Top hat tilted against the driving rain, wet shoulders shining like jet and breeches sodden, Hugo and Snob displayed a mastery of horsemanship over weather conditions during the dressage test, but they inevitably suffered from the pelting rain in their faces whenever they turned towards the judges’ caravan. Snob’s red ears were flat back to his head most of the way round, like a hosed-down lion. Although they did have some brilliant moments, their lines were practically never straight as Snob shuffled sideways trying to turn his back on the weather, spooking at the television cameras and throwing a wobbly whenever they neared the bank of flower arrangements that were flapping around in the wind like formation swimmers wearing textured petal swimming caps. They finished the day well down the placings.

Tash spotted him afterwards, listening to one of Glen Bain’s many personal theories – all of which related eventing to sex.

‘Dressage is like foreplay. The more you can hold back, keep control and set yourself up, the better the big event – the cross-country,’ Glen was saying earnestly.

‘More like four-ply out there.’ Hugo towelled his hair and, seeing Tash approaching, headed off towards the riders’ tent to wait for his disappointing score.

Tash was too disheartened to follow. She’d wanted to commiserate with him, but he’d run away from her yet again. Now she felt rather proud of her red rebel for giving Hugo such a hard time and headed to the stables, where Jenny was rubbing him down, to give him a big kiss on the neck. But, breathing in his damp, familiar smell, Tash was yet again shot through with the pain of facing up to parting with him once the Sunday of reckoning was over and Lisette knew she wasn’t marrying Niall.

‘Nice weather for ducks,’ Jenny said cheerfully as she wiped water from the sweat scraper with an old stable rubber.

‘Especially sitting ones,’ Tash said bleakly, moving off to watch Stefan’s dressage.

By the completion of all the dressage tests on Friday afternoon, Tash and Hunk had slipped down to thirteenth place, which made her want to run around spotting black cats, four-leafed clovers and new moons to dispel the bad luck.

Having driven around the roads and tracks once again with Gus on a borrowed scramble bike, she took her final walk around the next day’s cross-country alone, trying to absorb every last undulation and divot on the route, but in reality more preoccupied with Zoe and Niall. She wished at least one of them would get in touch; every night she meticulously checked Gus’s mobile phone for messages, but there had been none. At the farm, Rufus reported that he had seen neither of them all week and that, as they were all away, he was having a party for ‘just a few friends’ on Saturday night. Penny, guessing that this meant the entire sixth form of Rufus’s school had been invited, refused to let Tash tell Gus in case it ruined his concentration for the competition.

Double-checking her time check-points against the sheet of paper that she would attach to her arm the next day, Tash tried to keep her turbulent thoughts away from Hugo, but his face flashed in front of her eyes every minute, as though caught on a continual spool.

She could see him in the far distance with a group of cronies, including Stefan, Brian Sedgewick and the cheerful, libidinous Glen Bain, measuring the course with a wheel and talking strategies as they headed for the Lake which was pitted with ripples as rain lashed down on it.

Tash hung back, taking a long time to walk the long, level gallop through the park that preceded the fence. Beside her, workmen were unwinding the last of the rope barriers which would stop the crowd wandering into the tracks of the horses. Beyond these the park was now dotted with royal blue Portaloo cubicles, some singular for officials, some in multiple lines like garish phone-boxes on a railway concourse. To the left a large stand had been erected for spectators to get a good view of the Lake in case anyone had the misfortune to fall in. Tash shuddered, whistling for Beetroot who had been investigating beneath it. But when she looked for her, the dog had disappeared.

Squinting ahead, Tash saw that she had raced on ahead to join Hugo and his gang, cavorting merrily with Glen’s cairn terrier, Burns. Laughing, Hugo threw a stick for her and headed towards the Mitsubishi Pick-ups fence, two huge cars parked back to back.

‘At least Beetroot still gets on with him,’ Tash muttered under her breath, walking the rest of the course in solitude.

When she got back to the yard, Beetroot was waiting with Ted who was giving Vic a Cromovet inhalation for his wind. She looked both very muddy and very pleased with herself, a manky-looking stick protruding from her mouth like an Argentinian siren’s rose after a particularly rampant tango.

‘Hugo delivered her back,’ Ted explained. ‘Said you looked like Ophelia out on the course, and you need a waterproof hat.’

Amazed that Hugo had even noticed her, Tash pulled her wet rats tails behind her ears and took Beetroot back to the box for a good towelling.

That night she couldn’t sleep for erotic thoughts of him. Over and over again, she played back that kiss two years earlier beside her mother’s pool at Champegny. Immediately afterwards, she had told herself that it had been a way of exorcising her crush, of laying a ghostly half-love that had haunted her teens. But, looking back now, she knew she had never been kissed like it before or since.

If I win on Hunk this weekend, she told herself, then Hugo has promised to kiss me. Please, please God, let me win. And if I do, let it be a kiss like that one.

Endurance day started with one of the worst storms of the week. It brought down several trees in the park – two of them across the steeplechase course – so the start of the day’s competition had to be delayed and the spectators, who had braved the elements to turn up early, were asked to avoid walking directly on the cross-country course at all costs as their trampling feet could turn the going into an ice-rink.

Due to be one of the first to start, Tash – who had taken Hunk out for a quick breather already – hovered around the yard waiting for the go ahead, her heart pounding. It had only just really dawned on her what she had undertaken. Hunk was a big, easy-going horse who seldom got ruffled, ate up ground with his long, bounding stride and jumped accurately, if occasionally lazily. But he lacked Snob’s athleticism and, although not one to allow himself to be fazed, had never faced a course this big in such awful conditions. Over the past year, Tash had devoted much more time to working on Snob with his doubtful temperament and hatred of flat-work. Hunk had been sidelined with lameness for a long time, and was not as familiar a ride. Tash knew he had the scope and talent, but she doubted both his stamina and her own confidence.

As she walked to the entrance of the yard to find out what was going on, she could see that out in the park the rain was still lashing down in whips and the wind bent the trees on their sides as though they were doing a communal aerobics class.

‘I am about to ride Badminton in a storm,’ she told herself, trying to stop her teeth chattering as she watched India stacking together all the essential equipment and spares that they would need for the ten-minute break between the roads and tracks phases, and the cross-country.

An official was waving Tash and a couple of the other early starters towards him in the yard entrance. ‘We’re ready to go,’ he told them. ‘Now the going isn’t as bad as we feared but as you’ll be riding on the top of the ground it’ll be pretty damned slippery out there. So for God’s sake, use fat studs and be careful. Best of luck.’ He glanced at his watch.

Tash felt such a heaving cluster of butterflies take off in her stomach that she rushed off to be sick, finding herself chucking up in the next cubicle along to Kirsty who was due to start three horses after her.

‘No need for Flab-busters now,’ she joked feebly. ‘This is the best diet in the world. I’ll have to slip more lead into the cloth before weighing out.’

Riding Hunk on a long rein to the start box to weigh out, Tash said her second prayer in twenty-four hours. Only this time she wasn’t praying for a kiss. She was hoping she’d live through the day.

The first of the roads and tracks sections, Phase A, was a fairly leisurely three-and-a-half-mile hack around the park. It was timed, but the limit was lenient and competitors could walk and trot throughout and still make it easily within the limit. It was little more than a gentle warm-up for what was to come. Tash wanted to gaze around the tracks she had walked so intently earlier that week and enjoy the breather, but she hunched up her shoulders against the wind and glanced sporadically at her watch instead, moving it around on her wrist to ensure the best position and continually cross-referring to the times on the check-list she had strapped to her left arm. The ink had started to run despite its plastic cover. She knew she was being over pedantic, but it was the only way to keep her nerves at bay.

She had longed for Hugo to appear in the yard that morning as a sort of lucky emblem but, due to his late start time, he had clearly decided to occupy himself elsewhere.

Hunk – who was a complete mudlark – was blissfully unaware of the wet, but Tash was worried for him nonetheless. His old tendon strain could flare up in this sort of weather, and the slippery conditions didn’t help his balance. His ears darted around eagerly as he listened to the public address system gurgling into life in the distance, welcoming spectators to the event and explaining that the first competitor would be out on the course in just under an hour.

They reached the steeplechase course with just over a minute to spare and circled at the start in anticipation of the four-minute gallop ahead, which took place in a figure of eight over standard National Hunt fences. Penny was waiting nearby with some emergency spares, the hood of her coat pulled so low over her face that she looked as though she was about to hold up a building society.

‘Looking good!’ she shouted cheerfully after she had given Hunk a quick check-over. Tash smiled. It was what Penny said at every single event to cheer her gang on. She shortened her stirrups and fiddled with her watch again, ready to spring Hunk through the start.

Out on the course, he settled easily into his mile-eating stride and took the fences as though they weren’t there, never having to adjust his face-chillingly fast stride to clear them. Hearing the wind rush in her ears and his hooves pound smoothly beneath her, Tash started to feel her confidence flood back. She was so used to riding Snob, who had to be treated with kid gloves all the way, she had forgotten that Hunk was the sort of horse who could run on auto-pilot. She had to make herself relax and trust him instead of continually waiting for the explosion.

Checking her stopwatch at the halfway mark, she realised to her horror that she’d somehow switched it off whilst fiddling around with it at the start. She’d have to guess the last half-mile or so. Panic pulled her tongue back in her throat again as she trusted her timing to fate and Hunk’s sublime rhythm. Mud and water were flying up into her face as she crossed the finish line

His sublime rhythm was not on her side. As they slowed gradually to a canter, they passed Penny who was holding up her gloved hands in horror.

‘You were almost a minute over!’ she wailed. ‘What happened?’

‘Watch stopped!’ Tash panted over her shoulder, heading straight out on to the start of phase C which was another set of roads and tracks, far longer than the first and requiring greater timing control. Her watch was flashing the date now. When she pressed the tit again it blanked out totally. She’d have to rely on her plain old wristwatch which was an ancient Swatch with a scratched face and a bent second hand.

Somehow she made it to the endurance box just within the allotted forty-five minutes, but her preoccupation with calculating the time hadn’t stopped her noticing that Hunk was stiffening up badly behind. By the time they trotted towards the vets waiting in the ten-minute break box at the start of the big cross-country phase D, he was clearly not as fluid behind as he had been when starting the day. An enthusiastic India greeted them with words of encouragement as they pulled up, but one look at Tash’s face shut her up.

‘Okay, you can dismount now.’ One of the vets approached them, clip-board in hand. For a moment he reminded Tash of one of the filmies who had been monopolising Hugo’s house recently.

‘Bad luck about the steeplechase,’ India commiserated as Tash jumped off and started to loosen the girths straight away. Behind her, the vet was already taking Hunk’s heart-beat.

‘Is Gus around?’ she asked, gazing round for one of the Lime Tree Farm seniors. She badly needed advice.

India was trawling around Hunk with a bucket and sponge, cooling his throat and belly and waiting for the vet to finish taking his temperature with a thermometer on a piece of string – it always reminded Tash of a Tampax – so that she could sponge between his hind legs.

‘He’s with Kirsty,’ India explained. ‘Betty cast a plate on the steeplechase and Ted couldn’t find the spares – you know, those flat-fronted things she has. Gus had to race over to help out. Penny’s back at the yard preparing Vic for him.’

‘Shit!’ Tash rubbed her head as India started to busy herself greasing Hunk’s front legs with goose fat for the next section. The vet was filling in his clip-board now.

Tash reached into the tack bin to look for the spare stopwatch, and strapped it on in place of the dud, her eyes scouring the box for help. Her first priority was to decide whether or not to run Hunk, and she needed someone to make up her mind for her. Plenty of competitors were milling around, mostly preoccupied with their own impending starts, but it was too early in the day for most of the riders to be at the box – they were all concentrated at the yard.