There was to be no glamorous Olympic medal-winners’ parade along the Mall in an open-topped bus for Hugo. Just a week after standing on the podium in front of a global television audience of millions, lowering his head for a brace of golds, he was competing between thunderstorms in a humble little Cotswolds event with dressage and fence judges lurking behind their swishing windscreen wipers in ageing hatch-backs, muddy-breeched amateurs falling off under-schooled horses in the minor sections, a windswept blue
plastic loo cabin and a rain-lashed burger van totalling the ‘facilities’. It’s what earned him his real money. All three youngsters were leading their sections. Two were up for sale. If they went well across country today’s successes might just secure buyers in an increasingly sticky market.
The team gold and his individual glory was no doubt set to give the sport a great boost as such successes inevitably did, particularly at the lower levels with novice riders inspired to start taking part, but that couldn’t detract from the fact that event horses were proving very tough to sell right now, and when they did they commanded far lower prices than a year ago.
Hugo needed to sell several big-money horses to bring in much-needed revenue and save on hiring more staff. But the negative publicity surrounding silly, streaking Debbie Double-G still lingered like a bad smell as she did the celebrity circuit, determined to make a career from her endeavours, and certainly didn’t help Hugo as he tried to get back to the day job. Far from giving him the Midas touch, his gold medals appeared to come with an Inca curse.
Blinded by sideways rain, Hugo’s horse crashed through the first fence, which hardly improved their chances.
Watching from the sidelines, Alicia was joined by her crony Gin Seaton, a grey-haired battleaxe who had been following the sport for as long as anyone could remember and had owned several horses with Hugo over the years. ‘I gather congratulations are in order, Alicia.’
‘Hardly,’ she winced at the clattering of poles. ‘He’ll never win from this score.’
‘I was referring to your new grandson.’
Before she could reply, Alicia let out a wail of alarm as something started buzzing and chiming in her pocket, making Beefy growl.
‘That’s your mobile phone,’ Gin pointed out kindly.
When Hugo trotted out with a disappointing twenty penalties, glaring at a big bald event photographer who clearly fancied himself as a paparazzo and had been following him around all day, his mother thrust his mobile up at him.
‘Someone on the phone about buying a horse,’ she barked, taking his reins.
‘Yup?’ he muttered into the handset, jumping off and starting to walk to his horsebox to fetch out his next ride. ‘Yup … yup …’
Not noticing that the headstrong ex-hurdler he’d handed to Alicia was tanking past him to the lorry park, trailing his mother like string, Hugo turned his back to the wind and rain and listened very carefully indeed.
‘I’m all ears,’ he suddenly smiled, flicking two fingers at the snap-happy photographer who was now loitering behind the blue loo, his huge lens poking around it like a marksman’s rifle.
At Haydown, far from the early autumn storms that were rattling around the Cotswolds, Tash tried both Beccy’s mobile number and the yard line, wondering where on earth her stepsister was. She’d promised to be around to help with Cora’s lunch, and it was now after one-thirty.
Physically very limited after her surgery, and trapped in the office by endless phone-calls and paperwork, Tash resorted to feeding the little girl a carpet picnic of finger food on plastic plates. She hoped that Beccy was back on the yard and that nothing was wrong. She gazed through the open window to the bright sunlit stables in the distance, but all was still, a heat haze dancing above the long stretch of lawn that needed mowing. She’d take the children out to see what was going on after the next feed, she decided.
Checking that Amery was still asleep in his Moses basket and Cora happily banging plastic blocks together on the hearthrug, Tash waded through a few more bills, plucking out the truly urgent and the final reminders.
Beside her was a list of her own clients to ring – portrait commissions that she had taken on shortly after finding out that she was pregnant, believing that she could complete them all before the birth and put some much-needed cash in the family coffers. Painting and sketching horses, dogs and quite often people had been a very profitable sideline for Tash over the years, particularly during the winter ‘closed season’ months, and her lively, accurate depictions were always in demand. But she’d developed severe carpal tunnel syndrome, an uncomfortable side-effect of pregnancy, and all painting and sketching had ground to a halt as her fingers rapidly became numb and her wrists shot through with pain. Holding a paintbrush had been impossible for months now. She had a long waiting list and her subjects were all still patiently waiting to be captured in oil or watercolour, but although the feeling in her hands and wrists was
returning to normal her timetable – especially now with two children in tow – was set to be more chaotic and stretched than ever.
Tash was home alone four days after a caesarean with a toddler and a newborn to look after, and a stepsister who had vanished yet again.
‘Beccy?’ she called out now. But there was no answer, and Tash suddenly worried her short temper earlier had made her pack it in for good. She could be notoriously hair-triggered.
Feeling suddenly overwhelmed, she covered the seemingly impenetrable pile of bills with the latest issue of
Horse & Hound
and, admiring Hugo’s standing-in-stirrups Olympic victory salute captured on the front cover, answered the ever-ringing phone.
‘What are you doing there, Fangs?’ demanded the bossy but kind voice of her older sister Sophia. ‘You should be in hospital.’
‘They let us out early for good behaviour.’
‘I hope you’re in bed with your feet up.’
‘I’m not allowed upstairs till Hugo gets home,’ she sighed. She also wasn’t allowed to drive, to lift weights – not even Cora – nor to make sudden moves or wear pants smaller than a galleon sail. She was exhausted and overwrought with sudden crying fits from ever-changing hormones. The house was filthy and a bombsite. The stable staff, a merry but ever-changing gaggle of freelancers and part-timers borrowed from friends’ yards, kept appearing at the door asking questions. The phone rang non-stop. She missed the orderliness of hospital, the regular meals, the lack of responsibility, the regime.
But she was still delighted to be back. If it weren’t for the stitches, discomfort and wrinkling surgical stockings, she’d have danced around Haydown with her children in her arms.
‘Where is Hugo?’ Sophia was demanding
‘Oh – he just popped out,’ she lied.
He would be away until late afternoon. Tash would never have been discharged had the maternity ward staff known what awaited her, but such was the force of her desire to be at Haydown – and the practical need – she’d convinced them to let her go. So when Hugo had collected her first thing that morning, sending the maternity ward hearts fluttering, neither he nor Tash let on that he would be driving off in the horsebox as soon as he posted his family home. On the way home, worried by her obvious discomfort, he’d offered to
forfeit the Ampney trials and stay with her, but Tash wouldn’t hear of it, knowing that horses entered there needed to be sold. She had Beccy around to help, and she deliberately ignored Hugo’s aside that this was like having a well-meaning but very senile relative in situ.
‘How are you feeling?’ Sophia was asking. ‘Still agony?’
‘Not bad,’ Tash assured her. ‘They’ve given me lots of painkillers and I can get about pretty well.’
‘You shouldn’t be home at all, Fangs!’ The older the sisters got, the more Tash saw their father in Sophia, with his sharp temper, perfectionism, superhuman organisational skills and reluctant yet assured social charm.
As children the sisters had adopted the nicknames Enid and Fanny because of their habit of chattering away like two little old ladies, and Sophia still called her sibling ‘Fangs’ now. She’d always been the leader. Three years older, exquisitely pretty and precociously charming, Sophia’s path through life had always seemed gilded, whereas Tash’s was boggy and random. Yet both had ended up at a very similar point – country mothers married to two old school friends, although their routes there couldn’t have been more different, Sophia starting out as a model in an era when rich and powerful rock stars, aristocrats and media moguls chose their wives from the pages of
Vogue
, calling up the modelling agency to arrange a date. Matched up with the dashing, highly eligible Ben Meredith, Viscount Guarlford, Sophia had gone on to excel as a society hostess, charity fundraiser and country set power player, turning around the fortunes of Holdham Hall in an era when many similar family estates were being sold off as corporate headquarters or boutique spas. A decade later, with three stunning children and an address book that was the envy of all, Sophia had been promoted. Last year Ben had inherited the title upon the death of his father and she’d become the Countess of Malvern, wife of the twelfth Earl. The dowager countess, Beatrice, had then graciously vacated the family rooms in the east wing to make way for her successors. In moving from Home Farm to the main house it seemed that Sophia had also taken on her mother-in-law’s legendary fierce manner. Combined with their father’s short fuse, it made for an irascible mix.
Sophia regularly checked for fault lines in Tash’s marriage, much as she customarily checked her own reflection for any tiny wrinkles or crow’s feet indicating that she needed to get her Botox topped up.
‘Who’s there to look after you?’ she demanded now, with steely insight.
‘Oh, just the staff.’ Tash was deliberately vague.
‘What about Mummy?’
‘She can’t come.’
‘What do you mean “
can’t
come”? Is there a complete travel embargo across the English Channel that I haven’t heard about? Or is she being tied to a chair?’
‘Something to do with Polly, I think.’
‘Typical!’
Tash had unwittingly trodden on her first Sophia landmine, their mother’s reluctance to travel from France to see any of her ever-expanding clutch of grandchildren in Great Britain. Alexandra lived between a trio of bases in Paris, Marseilles and the Loire Valley; older age had lent her an increasing excuse for eccentricity, and yet conversely a desire to stay young that infuriated Sophia as Alexandra took up yoga, visited salt spas, hiked up mountains and went clubbing with her youngest daughter, while doggedly refusing to have the Botox her eldest swore by.
‘I spoke to her from Hugo’s mobile when I was in hospital,’ Tash said placatingly. ‘She’s terribly excited about Amery.’
‘But I thought she volunteered to stay at Haydown throughout?’ Sophia raged. ‘And now that you’ve had another C-section you’ll need somebody there to help with the baby and Cora and the house. Believe me, you won’t cope alone. It’s
much
harder second time around.’ She’d had all three of her children by Caesarean – elective rather than emergency – in an exclusive private London unit. Sophia had also employed a small army of nursery staff to see her through those first few weeks each time.
‘I wasn’t due to come out of hospital until the end of the week,’ she reminded her, ‘but Marlbury General said we were doing so well that they’ve let me go early.’
‘Needed the bed, more likely. I told you that you should have gone private. Even Sally forsook the NHS to have hers in a paddling pool in the kitchen.’ Sophia took a quick snipe at their sister-in-law, whose hands-on approach to parenting always made her feel inadequate. ‘You should hire in a maternity nanny. Norland’s are very good …’
Tash was only half listening. Behind her, Cora had tired of her
plastic blocks and was starting to roam from shelves to cupboards in search of entertainment, wreaking havoc.
‘I have Beccy.’ She distractedly searched the desktop for the DVD that she’d brought in with her earlier.
‘Beccy is with
you
?’ Sophia shrieked, making Tash jump so much she knocked over several teetering piles of paperwork.
Sophia thoroughly disapproved of their younger stepsister. As children, she and Tash had often been presented with almost identical gifts: two teddy bears, one brown and one cream; one dark-haired doll and one blonde doll, a pair of kittens with slightly different markings. Pulling rank as older sibling, Sophia had always taken first pick and Tash soon developed a way of coping, which was to feel sorry for the ‘unwanted’ bear, doll or kitten and to adopt it gratefully and lovingly as her own.
In a curious way, a similar thing had happened when, after the ghastliness of their parents’ divorce, James had finally married his long-time secretary and sometime mistress Henrietta, a blonde widow with two young daughters. Prone to favouritism, Sophia had immediately chosen the older, prettier and more glamorous step-sister to be her special pet. Appalled by both Sophia’s and their father’s obvious preference for Em, Tash had briefly tried to befriend the strange, introverted and very ungrateful Beccy – an unsuccessful adoption that had just come back to haunt her. She was no closer to understanding what made Beccy tick now than she had been as a teenager. Even today, when she really needed some help and had trusted Beccy to be there, she’d wandered off without a word.
‘What on
earth
are you
doing
giving her houseroom?’ Sophia was barracking.
Tash had just edged her way to the antique drinks cabinet housing the old combi television that Hugo used to play back footage of lessons and competitions. Hearing her sister’s furious tone she dropped the Maisy Mouse DVD in among the bottles of malt whisky.
‘Sorry?’
‘She is totally unstable and, from what I hear, on
drugs
.’
‘She’s fine.’ Tash fished around for the disc and knocked over a bottle of rare old Mortlach, which cannoned into the others with a series of wine-bar chinks.
‘Are you pouring a drink?’ Sophia had a keen ear.