‘Thanks,’ she said in a muffled voice.
‘How can you eat or drink with that thing on your head?’
‘I can’t,’ Tash admitted, uncomfortably hot and dehydrated in the baking evening sun. ‘Hugo’s gone to find me a straw. I hear you’re doing brilliantly. Well done.’
But Rory surprised her by announcing how homesick he was. ‘God, I miss you all – and the Lime Tree mob! How is everyone? Beccy? Faith?’
‘Oh, all fine,’ Tash said vaguely. She didn’t want to think about Beccy right now. ‘You’re doing really well, I hear.’
‘Not sure how much longer I can stick it,’ Rory confided in an undertone. ‘MC is a slave driver – even worse than Hugo, although at least Hugo doesn’t expect me to shag him after riding six horses across country. That’s your job, ha ha.’ He certainly looked tired, with dark rings beneath his sleepy almond-shaped eyes.
As gossipy as ever, Rory was keen to swap stories and recounted a couple of scandals: ‘Have you heard the rumour that Lucy Field’s married lover is, in fact, a
woman
? … Did you know when Hugo
turned up here with India – who’s lovely, by the way – everybody assumed that you’d finally run off with Lough and that this was his new squeeze. Isn’t that a hoot?’
Tash forced a jolly little laugh. Rory continued, now complaining about his celebrity owner: ‘Honestly, I’ve left enough messages for Dillon, letting him know what’s going on, but I never hear a thing. The Fox is representing Great Britain in the Europeans in less than a fortnight, and this is Humpty’s first four-star. You think he’d at least send a text, wouldn’t you? Faith is brilliant at keeping in touch about Rio. Really professional.’ He sighed rather forlornly. ‘She always seems incredibly busy.’
‘The Moncrieffs work her pretty hard,’ Tash said distractedly as she caught sight of Hugo bearing down on them. ‘She’s doing well on your grey, though. Got a double clear at Brigstock last week.’
Hugo clearly wanted to spirit Tash away, but Rory was hungry for more gossip. ‘Is it true Lough’s competing here?’
‘He’s at Bramham,’ Hugo snapped.
‘Not what I heard.’ Rory pushed back the bearskin that was falling over his eyes. ‘The Kiwis say he’s been offered the ride on Arondight.’
‘Laura McRae’s Olympic horse?’ Tash remembered the hotly tipped New Zealand team horse that had fallen badly at the Games and was now only just coming back to form.
‘Poor Laura broke her leg at Bialy Bor a couple of weeks ago,’ Rory explained. ‘Rumour has it she’ll be off for the rest of the year, so the owners have offered the horse to Lough if he gets his arse over here on time. Might not be true, of course.’
‘He wasn’t at the trot-up,’ Hugo snarled. ‘He can’t possibly declare this late in the day. I’ll complain to the ground jury if he does.’
Suddenly Tash realised what Lough had been trying to say to her that day in Northamptonshire. He’d been warning her that he might be competing in Germany too. Sweating in her cat suit, she felt sick and faint, uncertain how she – and Hugo – would handle it if he did. It was one thing seeing him at a crowded event at home, quite another in the confined crucible of a foreign three day event.
Hugo was still muttering angrily about Lough breaking the rules.
Desperate to change the subject, Tash turned to Rory, inadvertently clouting Hugo in the groin with her tail, which at least silenced him. ‘Where’s MC this week?’
‘Husband,’ Rory muttered, rolling his eyes. ‘They’re at a very serious dinner party. No bad thing because, between you and me, the sex is
exhausting
. You older women are insatiable.’
‘Let’s get some food,’ Hugo suggested irritably as, this time, he dodged his wife’s swinging tail.
‘Yes, let’s,’ agreed Rory, sidestepping to avoid a whack on the bottom. ‘I need to talk to you about coming back to Haydown, if you’ll have me.’
‘Of course we’ll have you. We need you back.’ Hugo nodded, suddenly cheering up. The two men started to walk away and he beckoned for Tash to follow.
But she shook her big orange head, her appetite gone as she thought again about the impossibility of controlling The Cub. She had to cool off and concentrate on tomorrow’s dressage test. The smell of the barbecue was making her feel nauseous so she pulled off her big paws and grinning head and went for a walk in the shade of the pine woods behind the lorries, ripping open the long Velcro seam up the back of the sweltering fur suit to let in some air. She started to run the dressage test through in her head. It was a new test to her, with endless changes of tracks and a very complicated canter mid-section involving multi-looped serpentines up and down the arena. She’d watched it many times, but riding it was another matter.
Unconsciously, she started to make her way through the test’s shapes in the thick, springy grass of a shady clearing, striking off with canter left and criss-crossing the imaginary arena with flying changes at X, her tail swinging jauntily.
It was a while before she realised that she was being watched.
Lough was leaning against a tree, unsmiling even though he had just stumbled upon her riding an imaginary dressage test in a fatbellied Garfield suit.
Tash halted suddenly, not at all four square. ‘You
are
here.’
‘I’m here.’
‘When did you arrive?’
‘A couple of hours ago.’ ‘Why aren’t you at the party?’ Her voice sounded ridiculously sing-song, her small talk rattling artificially from her mouth while her heart crashed around in her throat.
‘Needed to sit on a horse and walk a course.’ He played idly with the rhyme. ‘Besides, I don’t really know Dolf.’
‘You know Jenny.’
‘I’m not in a party mood.’
‘Me neither,’ she admitted, stooping to reclaim her cartoon head, which was face down in a patch of bracken.
‘How’d you get the black eye?’
‘Silly accident.’ She scuttled past him to pick up Garfield’s paws, which she’d thrown down near his tree. Her hands were shaking so much they wobbled like fluffy orange jellies.
‘You don’t have to be frightened of me, Tash,’ he said softly. ‘I’m quite safe.’
‘I’m not frightened of you.’
‘You look terrified.’
‘I am terrified, just not of you.’
‘Hugo?’
‘Partly.’ She felt disloyal saying it, and quickly added: ‘It’s the horse really.’
He’d seen her grapple with pre-competition nerves often enough to realise there was truth in that, at least, but this was a great deal worse than anything he’d helped her work through in the past. Tash knew her face was slick with sweat from wearing the head, her wet hair was plastered to her head, the ugly black eye swollen and closing, her skin grey from nausea and worry. Yet Lough was regarding her with that amazing, intense expression she knew so well, as though she was the most precious and beautiful creature in the world.
‘I’m here if you need me.’
She nodded, feeling incredibly sick again. She longed to offload her worries that she wouldn’t be able to hold the horse across country, but she knew he was absolutely the wrong person to be talking to. She started to turn away. ‘Hey, it’ll be fine. I’d better get back; Hugo will be wondering where I’ve got to.’
‘You’re pretty easy to spot in that outfit.’
‘I think that was the general idea.’
‘Perhaps you should do up the back first.’
There was nothing suggestive in his tone, that flat, dry New Zealand drawl that gave so little away. Yet every hair on her body felt as though it had a pair of tweezers plucking at it. She could feel the cool breeze against her naked spine now, and remembered the way Hugo had removed her bra earlier that evening, his lips on her neck,
sparks in her belly. The open seam went from neck to tail, revealing a long stripe of bare skin and buttocks, with just a wisp of black lace framing them. Tash spun back to face Lough and hide her nakedness, her tail crashing through the bracken. As soon as she looked in to his eyes she was lost.
What was happening to her? She wondered. She was a nymphomaniac despite being sick with nerves and possessing a marriage laden with secrets and lies, held together only by increasingly competitive lovemaking. And here she was, panting over Lough again.
Taking another step back, she found her eyes couldn’t leave his. She was tumbling in, faster and faster, dizzyingly and lustily falling.
‘Jesus!’ Lough leapt forwards to catch her a fraction too late as she blacked out.
The next thing Tash knew, she was looking up at tiny pinpricks of fading, red-streaked sky flickering through tree branches.
‘What happened?’
‘You fainted,’ Lough told her as his face appeared between her and the pinpricks. He smiled anxiously.
‘I’m so hot.’ She reached up to wipe her sweaty face with the paw gloves that were stitched to the costume.
‘Hardly surprising in that creation.’ He touched her forehead. ‘Christ, you’re burning up. Here – ’ He tugged at the fluffy hands to help her free them.
Elbows pinned fast against the orange fur to cover her modesty, Tash let him tie the costume arms around her back. Now the monstrous garb looked even sillier, like a fat-bellied furry boob-tube, but at least her temperature began to drop and her head to clear.
Lough crouched beside her, feeling her forehead once more. ‘That’s better. No wonder you fainted. You’re supposed to go weak at the knees
when
we kiss, not before.’
‘Did we kiss?’ she asked groggily, looking at him in alarm.
His eyes trapped hers again, so intense and sensual, drinking her in.
‘I think we were about to.’ He reached down to brush a couple of pine needles from her face, making her draw in such an anxious gulp of breath that it loosened the knot on the furry sleeves around her back. Then his mouth moved closer to hers and she felt faint again. ‘No, Lough, I don’t—’
‘I’d like to hear you both talk your way out of this one,’ demanded a familiar voice behind them.
They turned in horror to see Hugo framed among the trees.
‘What’s the matter?’ His face was mocking, but his blue eyes blazed with fury. ‘Cat got your tongue?’
Late that night, lying next to the impenetrable wall of Hugo’s turned back, Tash stared up at the dark ceiling, her eyes as wide as a bush baby’s, reliving every dreadful second of turning to see Hugo standing there.
Looking back, she guessed there were few more compromising positions than the one Hugo had found her in, topless and wanton on the forest bed with Lough crouching over her, lips puckered. Every time she thought about it she groaned aloud, her body curling into the foetal position.
Unfortunately, for the next two days she could think about nothing else, even when she was riding her first four-star test in three years and made such a fudge of it, including two errors of course, that she was lucky not to be eliminated.
The encounter had the opposite effect on Hugo, who rode like a man possessed. Sir Galahad was at the top of the leaderboard on Friday, with Lough’s chance ride hot on his heels, just two penalties adrift, and Dolf in third.
Hugo refused to talk about what he had seen. Icily civil to her in public, silent in private, he still shared her bed in the lorry and they ate agonisingly silent meals. He offered Tash no opportunity to make her peace, nor the support she so desperately needed. Yet the night before the cross-country, his hands drifted over her thighs and breasts and she took what comfort she could from it as they made soundless, humourless love in the pitch dark, her insatiable body craving the relief that the quick, heady seizures of orgasm gave so fleetingly.
On cross-country morning Tash was so sick with nerves and unhappiness that she vomited behind every third fence of her final course walk. She took Cub for a short hack, her hands shaking so much that she had to brace her reins and hold on to the saddle like a beginner. She didn’t dare go any faster than a trot in case she vomited again.
Hugo had, predictably, disappeared on a long run – typical behaviour for him on cross-country day. The four-star competitors didn’t start until after lunch, the smaller three-star phase in the morning. Tash sat with some of the British riders to watch, feeling increasingly distanced and unwell. She went to lie down in the lorry and found three voicemail messages from Penny, saying that when they had turned up at Haydown that morning to fetch Beccy for the Great Tew trials they found she’d gone AWOL, her bed unslept in.
Groaning, Tash rang Beccy’s phone continually until she picked up.
‘Where are you?’
‘Somewhere near Sheffield.’
‘Sheffield?’
‘I thought I’d take a drive. It’s all right, I’m going home now.’
Which didn’t really put her mind at rest, although at least she could call Penny and reassure her that Beccy was safe, if not necessarily very well.
‘Good luck today!’ Penny said cheerfully. ‘It’s like old times, eh? You and Hugo going head to head. You’ll feel like you’re back on Snob again.’
Ringing off, Tash realised she couldn’t go through with it. She couldn’t ride across country on such a strong horse with her head all over the place.
Hands shaking, she dialled Hugo’s mobile to tell him that she was going to withdraw, but it rang inside his coat lying beside her on the seat.
Angrily, she wrenched it out of the pocket and scrolled through his messages. There were three texts from V:
So disappointed I can’t be there with you x
…
Thinking of you x
…
Remember your secret ‘other half’ is rooting for you xxx
Hurling the phone across the living area, Tash stood up shakily and changed into her familiar red cross-country kit. Now her sense of indignation was revving at full throttle, she was determined to conquer her fear and go head to head if it killed her. Yet the adrenalin high did nothing to assuage the nerves attacking her ability to function, and by the time she’d walked to the stables she was drenched in a cold sweat, almost hyperventilating and her vision closing.
Holding Cub and waiting to leg her up, India looked at her in shock. ‘You look awful.’
‘I’m s-sick,’ she told her.
‘You’ll have to withdraw.’
‘No way – it’s just n-nerves.’