Well Groomed (81 page)

‘We are – I mean, he is. But we have to talk about this wedding very urgently, darling, so I had to track you down for a chat.’ Alexandra backed off and gave her a beady look from under her hat brim. ‘Now say hello to your pa and Henrietta and let’s all get huge drinks somewhere.’

After the hellos were done with – Tash noticed that she received her frostiest reception yet from Henrietta, but a far warmer one than expected from her father – they moved towards the start box in a straggling group. Henry was still wailing loudly, although he was now being held by the Merediths’ vast French au pair who kept asking where the lavatories were.

‘Is this the way to the bar?’ Alexandra asked hopefully. ‘I have to talk to you straight away, darling.’

Not liking the excitable tone of her mother’s voice, Tash ignored her and trudged towards the ten-minute box where Gus was remounting ready to start. Not able to take her family into the horse area, she parked them at the fence.

‘Tash!’ he called from up high, just stopping Vic from ploughing down the ring fence as he recognised her and nosed for a mint.

Tash fed him one of the treats from Hugo’s coat pocket and wished them both luck.

‘Rotten shame having to pull out like that.’ Gus smiled sadly, nodding to Tash’s family who were all trying to say hello at once. He hadn’t the time or inclination to get involved in the greetings. He reached a hand beneath his leg to check the girth a final time, face scrunching up with effort.

‘I won’t mind nearly so much if you go clear,’ Tash told him. ‘Best of luck.’

Gus pulled a face and stretched down to kiss Penny before moving towards the start box.

Once he was counted down and on his way, Penny dragged Tash to the riders’ tent to watch the television coverage.

‘Will your family be all right?’ she asked anxiously as they found a couple of seats.

‘Shit! I forgot about them.’ Tash made to stand up again, but Penny gripped tightly on to her hand. ‘Stay here – I need you more. Where’s Ted?’

‘Still in the endurance box, I should think.’ Tash looked around. She wanted to slope back there too and collect her family. She was feeling hugely guilty now. But she was also uncomfortably aware that all of them – with the possible exception of Ben – today possessed the avid, earnest look of a minority pressure group marching to lobby Parliament. It frightened her. She wasn’t sure she could hold out.

‘Damn! I wanted him to hold my other hand.’ Penny was fretting.

‘I’ll do that,’ Glen Bain offered slimily.

Penny gripped on gratefully and watched the ensuing twelve minutes in terrified, shaking silence, punctuated only by the odd gasp of relief when Gus made it through a sticky moment or Vic slithered in the soup-thick mud.

‘He’ll be fine,’ Tash assured her as her hand was mashed to a pulp. ‘Vic has studs in the size of conkers.’

‘Matches his brain then,’ Penny said in a tight voice. ‘How are they doing for time? If he gets a good place here, he’ll have clinched the Bettapet sponsorship deal. If Brian goes faster on Foreign Agent, he gets it. It’s hateful, but it’s our only chance to keep going.’

They raced back to the box to watch him take the last fence, face plastered with mud and smiles.

Gus pounded through the finish just thirteen seconds over the maximum time and grinning from ear to ear. He’d had the second fastest clear of the day and he couldn’t talk for excitement. When he slid off Vic, Julia Ditton thrust a microphone in his face and asked him how it had gone, but he just smiled goofily and silently into it until she gave up.

He hugged Penny until she practically snapped and loped into the weighing tent to sign in before bounding back to hug Tash, Penny and Ted, who was holding a panting Vic. Then he hugged them again. About to embark on a third round of hugs, he let out a cry of joy.

‘He did it!’ he wailed, giving Vic such a patting that the old horse looked likely to develop a dent in his neck.

‘Tash!’ yelled a voice from behind, and she swung around to see Ben waving his arms at her and pointing to the far side of the box where a familiar chestnut was looking eager to slay a few random grooms.

‘Shit!’ She remembered that she had promised to meet Hugo and raced off.

He was sitting on an upturned bucket as Jenny greased Snob’s stamping legs, aided by India, who was holding his head to stop him from taking lumps out of her. The vets had already given the big chestnut the all clear and had backed hastily away. In contrast to Hunk earlier, he was barely sweating, although his coat was damp with rain. He gave a huge, rumbling whicker as Tash approached and delved into her borrowed coat pockets for treats.

Thankfully the downpour was at last easing off and the storm clouds seemed to be rumbling east to pester Oxford and then London.

On the other side of the fence from the box, Tash’s family were rowing and fretting, still clustered together like a small group of political activists. At least the au pair seemed to have whisked Henry off to a convenient lavatory. Leaning over the fence, Alexandra was trying hard to have an animated conversation with Hugo who was sensibly ignoring her. Henrietta was entertaining Lotty and Josh by pulling funny faces, at which James was looking both peeved and jealous.

Tash squelched through the mud to Hugo’s side.

‘How’s he going?’

‘Like a bloody rhino on steroids,’ he groaned, looking up through a damp forelock. ‘My arms ache. I think I’ll lose the use of both if I get on there again.’ He rolled his eyes towards Snob.

Tash smiled. ‘He’s much more fun across country than roads and tracks,’ she assured him. ‘And his steeplechase is always done full pelt, however hard you try and pace him.’

‘Tell me about it.’ He flexed his fingers to get some feeling back into them. ‘Jenny’s just given me a ticking off for going too fast but believe me, if I could have got him to go slower, I would have.’

Tash giggled. ‘He’s so fit, it won’t have taken anything out of him – in fact, it will have done him good. Composed him a little.’

‘Practically decomposed me.’ Hugo stood up, glancing at Jenny who mouthed, ‘
Three minutes
.’

‘D’you need any help?’ Tash looked around awkwardly, trying to ignore her mother’s frantic hand signals.

‘You can wish me luck again,’ he said lightly, pulling on his gloves.

‘Good luck.’ She watched his clever, focused eyes.

‘I didn’t mean like that.’

Heart leaping, she gazed around at several adoring young female fans who had come to see him off, and her bickering family who were hissing over the fence that they simply had to talk to her right this minute. Suddenly none of them seemed to matter.

‘Good luck.’ She stretched up and kissed him very slowly and lightly on the mouth. Just for a second his lips yielded.

His eyes seared into hers with such intensity, she thought he was going to kiss her back properly and almost fainted with excitement. But he simply smiled broadly, leaping back on board and circling Snob at the start to try and calm him. Already snatching at the bit in anticipation, his mouth foaming, Snob looked thoroughly overexcited, his dark eyes bulging eagerly.

‘Just like me,’ Tash murmured to herself faintly, ducking out of the box to join her family, not hearing a word they said until Hugo and Snob bounded out of the start, mud flying.

‘Can we all talk now?’ Alexandra pleaded as soon as they had streaked out of view.

But Tash was already trotting through the park, her ears on elastic for the commentary.

She longed to watch the round from the comfort of the TV tent surrounded by friends who would hold her hand and understand her current free-fall adrenaline rush, but as her family contingent was far too big to be smuggled in, she rushed them and Beetroot to watch from the large stand by the Lake which, for the first time in years, had spaces in it because of the awful weather.

‘You and Hugo seem to be getting on jolly well,’ panted Alexandra excitedly as they climbed up to a suitable vantage point.

‘We are,’ said Tash, listening as the commentator announced that Snob was clear over the enormous Zig Zag. She sat down between her mother and Ben, who were the only two to have kept up with her.

‘And Niall?’

‘What about Niall?’ Tash pulled Beetroot on to her knee and watched the rest of her family clamber up to join them, faces red with effort.

‘Is he having an affair with Zoe Goldsmith?’ Alexandra didn’t waste time with platitudes. Settling in beside Ben, Henrietta was agog that she was being so direct. ‘Sophia says he is.’

Sophia, furious at finding herself trapped at the far end of the family line, was leaning across her father, step-mother and husband in an attempt to listen in.

‘Yes, he is. They’re in love,’ Tash said simply. ‘Shut up a sec, Hugo’s getting a mention.’

The public address declared Hugo and Snob were clear through the first Luckington Lane crossing and going great guns. Tash was about the only person taking in every word – everyone else around her was listening in on her family’s extraordinary conversation.

‘Are you seriously saying Niall is in love with someone else?’ Henrietta stammered, pale eyes huge and disbelieving. ‘But you’re engaged to him, dammit!’ James was joining in now.

Tash ignored them. The commentary switched back to Hugo again: ‘. . . flying over centre walk and . . . clear over the second crossing, taking the direct route. Hugo Beauchamp really attacking this course on Foxy Snob now . . .’

She heaved a sigh of relief. They were almost a third of the way around already, with some of the nastiest fences already tackled. She was drenched in nervous sweat. The Three Scythes was in just a couple of fences’ time.

Alexandra and Sophia were both squawking excitedly about Niall, but their voices were drowned by an enormous cheer, and prop-forward-faced Brian Sedgewick, the country’s favourite, thundered into view on his second ride, Foreign Agent. Within seconds they had splashed through the Lake in copy-book fashion, leaping out over the upturned boat and pounding towards the Pick-ups, drips flying. There was tremendous support for him at the event now that people had found out his younger horse had lost an eye. Such was the fickle nature of public sentiment, Tash realised, it had more or less eclipsed the greater loss Hugo had suffered earlier that week.

‘You don’t seem that bothered, Tash,’ Alexandra wailed as the cheering died down.

‘I’m not,’ she said simply. ‘Now keep quiet, I want to hear this bit.’

‘. . . Hugo Beauchamp and Foxy Snob clear over the Vicarage Vee now, with a tremendous bold jump over the direct route – this combination really flying. Coming up to the Three Scythes – no one’s successfully tackled the direct route on this fence so far, but Hugo seems to be going for it . . .’

Tash held her breath in horror, digging her elbow hard into her mother’s side as she opened her mouth to speak again. Furious, Alexandra shut up.

‘. . . but no, Hugo’s tackling the fence to the left . . . first time we’ve seen this today . . . and he’s through and clear – very clever bit of riding there. These two very much in contention despite their overnight dressage score . . . Lucinda Chucklesworth and Ravish A Radish, a refusal at the Sunken Road . . .’

Tash was grinning from ear to ear. He’d taken her advice and ridden the route she suggested. She wanted to hug him to bits, she was so proud.

‘I must say, Tash,’ Henrietta was talking again, her voice high and emotional, ‘you’re not reacting at all as we imagined.’

‘Am I not?’ She beamed at her step-mother.

‘No – we thought you’d be terribly upset!’

‘I couldn’t be happier.’ Tash listened as the Tannoy declared Hugo and Snob over the Leap of Luxury and heading down the long gallop to the Lake.

As whistles blew to warn of his impending arrival, Tash clutched on to Beetroot and blocked out the jabbering of her family all around her, instead craning around to catch her first sight of him. As soon as the galloping red streak was in sight, her only thoughts were for the horse she loved and the man she adored.

The Lake this year consisted of a huge leap into deep water over a fence that had been built to resemble a storm-wrecked jetty. Then one had to turn sharply right in the water to jump out over a ‘ship-wrecked’ rowing boat which had been hollowed out so that one jumped on to a platform then into the arrow-head of its bow, finally bounding out over the rear of its hull.

Tash could see that Hugo was having to use every last ounce of his considerable strength and skill to keep control – his face was gritted with determination and coated with mud, his steel-strong legs barely moving as he channelled all Snob’s furious energy into his great, spring-like hind quarters. She suddenly knew for certain that had she been on board, she would have never been able to hold him like that. Snob was absolutely fearsome in his desperation to get going and get at it, as though terrified that the fences would walk away without him to tackle them. But, thundering towards the complex, he seemed to take in the crowd for the first time, and panic, utterly fazed by the great, gawping mass of faces, bustling bodies, bright hats and waggy-tailed dogs. Suddenly all over the place, he careered sideways and lunged into a series of terrifying, panic-stricken, nose-diving bucks that threw Hugo entirely off balance and dragged the reins from his rain-wetted gloves. The next moment, Snob was accelerating towards the Lake at full throttle, head between his knees. As they got within strides of the fence, he threw up his neck and surged forwards.

Oblivious of all around her, Tash screamed.

Battling to get Snob’s head down, Hugo barely had time to check him or see a stride before the fence was upon them. They plunged into the water at a racketing pace and seemed to be leaping deeper and deeper into the Lake in great dolphin-arcs of splashing water. Tash was amazed that Hugo stayed on board amidst so much see-saw lunging and kicked-up spray. She’d almost certainly have been doggy-paddling to shore by now.