They all watched in silence as The Fox cruised around the space in his energetic, springy trot, as smooth and powerful as a train on rails.
The Moncrieffs had just been for a surprisingly jolly meal at The Terrier in Maccombe to celebrate their wedding anniversary. It was practically unheard of for either of the couple to go out to lunch, even rarer to do so together, so the uncommon treat had loosened them both up. Penny was feeling especially emotional.
‘Lovely, lovely horse.’ She sighed again – she had a tendency to repeat herself after more than a thimble of wine. ‘Best in the world right now.’
‘He’s already a freak of nature,’ Gus tutted. ‘No horse should be that talented
and
that nicely put together
and
that well-mannered. There’s got to be a catch.’
Dillon laughed, looking from one Moncrieff to the other. ‘Has Hugo sent you along here to influence me?’
Now they both looked from him to the horse and back in equal bemusement.
‘Don’t tell me you’re here to try to
buy
Fox?’ asked Penny, making it sound as though he might intend to enact nefarious Wicca rituals on the horse and should be arrested.
‘Hugo wouldn’t part with that animal for under a million,’ Gus spluttered in disbelief.
‘Of course he wouldn’t,’ Dillon agreed.
‘Exactly,’ Penny smiled, turning to look at Fox again as Gus clambered through the rails into the arena to give poor Beccy some unwanted instruction.
‘You’re lower leg is bloody
awful
– needs to go back at least six inches to stop you hollowing your back and collapsing forward like that …’
Beccy’s face tightened miserably. Since arriving at Haydown, she’d
barely ridden at all. Her one and only lesson with Hugo, staged yesterday on an old schoolmaster that she couldn’t get on the bit, or even to go forwards, had been a disaster. He had walked off in a huff, saying she was unteachable. It was many years since she’d ridden at all, apart from the odd camel and mule trek, and it certainly wasn’t like riding a bike. Just hacking out left her massively saddle sore. Being asked to ride the yard’s top horse was like being asked to take a Formula One car for a spin around Brands Hatch after a decade spent on car-free Sark and just a few refresher lessons in a Nissan Micra. Yet she’d thought she was doing a pretty good job up until now.
‘Boy, do you need my help!’ Gus marched towards her to grab her knee and reposition it.
Eyeing him warily Beccy quashed the urge to throw herself off the horse and run back to the house. Sitting on The Fox was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and she couldn’t bring herself to pop the bubble just yet, especially if she was going to get some much-needed tips that might mean Hugo could see past her rustiness.
Turning away, Penny picked up Gus’s smouldering cigarette butt, which he had abandoned in the dirt underfoot, and carefully extinguished it before putting it in her pocket. He was always blunt to the point of rudeness, although he meant well enough. It was just his way. A decade earlier he had shouted at Tash in a similar fashion every day – when she wasn’t hacking up to Haydown to let Hugo shout at her – and she had gone on to the country’s senior elite squad before giving it all up to have babies.
Glancing across at the house, its windows glowing in the sunshine, Penny braced herself to meet the second of those babies. It was a tough call.
After seven years of expensive private fertility treatments that had put their marriage and finances under almost impossible strain, Penny and Gus had recently admitted defeat on their own hopes of children.
If only conceiving babies was as easy as foals, she reflected. Boozy Floozy, Penny’s own favourite mare, was still competing with Gus while breeding like wildfire through embryo transfer.
And then there was dear Tash, as fecund as a rabbit. Penny, meanwhile, appeared to be as barren as the Gobi.
A voice broke into her consciousness, the accent reminding her rather thrillingly of Pierce Brosnan. ‘You ride much?’
She turned to see the man with the very white teeth and very blue eyes regarding her thoughtfully.
With his silly, scruffy clothes, which were probably the height of fashion, he looked faintly ludicrous, but experience had taught her that, generally, the more messily a man dressed the more money and class he had.
‘I ride a bit,’ she said stiffly. ‘You?’
He shook his head, creasing his eyes and glancing thoughtfully into the distance. ‘I was never much good – had a crashing fall a couple of years ago and decided I was safer on the ground. I own a couple of event horses now.’
‘Good for you,’ she said in the clipped, chipper voice she used when talking to the wilder boys in the Pony Club. She turned to look at Fox, who was standing patiently with Tash’s stepsister on board while Gus stalked around her like Basil Fawlty, waving his arms around and telling her how to completely redress her position. ‘Who do you keep your horses with?’
‘Rory Midwinter. He just won the Scottish Open at Baloney Palace.’ The man was staring at her face closely for reaction.
‘Bloneigh Castle,’ she corrected kindly. ‘I heard Rory did a super job there. That augurs well. This chestnut chap of Hugo’s won there a couple of years ago, and look at him now – although quite frankly I think a gold-medal horse doesn’t deserve to find himself being treated like a riding-school plod. What was Hugo thinking, putting Beccy up? She’s pretty basic, which means Gus can’t resist interfering.’ She squinted through the sunlight to Fox, who was nodding off, while Gus slapped his own thighs and buttocks and gave his terminally dull spiel on seatbones. He looked rather like an excitable Bavarian dancer without the music or Lederhosen.
Dillon followed her gaze. ‘He’s just fabulous.’
‘He’s pretty special,’ she agreed.
‘Have you been married long?’
Realising that he was talking about Gus not the horse, she laughed. ‘Twenty years to the day. I was barely out of my teens; the first of my friends to marry and now one of the few not divorced.’
‘It’s your anniversary?’
‘Yah.’
‘Congratulations. Wow. Twenty years.’
‘A score, as they say.’
‘Wow.’ He whistled, as though it was some sort of record. Perhaps it was in his line of business; Penny assumed he had to be in show-biz or the Euro jetset.
‘Is Rory your boyfriend?’ she inquired politely.
It was his turn to laugh. ‘You obviously don’t know him
that
well.’
‘Oh, I’ve taught plenty of dishy young eventing chaps like him that squire every female on the yard before coming out of the closet as spectacularly as a stallion charging down a lorry ramp. Most end up turning to dressage.’ She shuddered. ‘Such a loss to the sport, not to mention the gals.’
‘Lucky you bagged yourself a straight one.’
‘You think so?’ She creased her crow’s feet into the sun in a cross between a smile and a grimace, not looking at him. ‘Yah.’
Dillon cocked a brow, amazed to find somebody in this day and age who still spoke like one of the Mitford sisters.
Not taking her eyes from the horse that was framed in front of them in sunlight so bright and luminous that his coat looked like molten caramel, she added, ‘He’s having an affair, of course.’
A tiny smile flicked on and off her lips, like a punctuation mark.
Dillon had no idea how to react. The country set baffled him. They were acutely, pathologically secretive about the oddest things, like whether they had a paid job, and yet they thought nothing of discussing adultery with absolute strangers.
‘Bad luck,’ he said eventually.
‘Yes, isn’t it? I bet he dresses better for her; he didn’t even change for lunch. Said his one suit smells so badly of mothballs it would have put us both off our grub.’
They watched Gus for a few moments as he continued stalking around Fox on long, skinny legs, sending up puffs of arena sand and barking about ‘stickability’. He was wearing faded grey breeches, blue and green striped knee-high socks, battered paddock boots and an England rugby shirt with a large mud stain on the front. His creased, weathered face with its sharp, broken nose and hooded, faded green eyes was handsome in a craggy way, and he had wonderfully wild, leonine head of hair that was a bit thin on top. He was more Richard Harris in
A Man Called Horse
than Robert Redford in
The Horse Whisperer
, but nonetheless dashing.
‘Anyone you know?’ Dillon enquired politely.
‘Not yet.’
Her acceptance baffled him, making him think of a mother standing on a touchline during a school rugby match and saying of her son, ‘Of course, he has attention deficit disorder, you know. Ransacks the house on a regular basis and shot the family cat last week. But we love him.’ These people were extraordinary. When Fawn had discovered that he’d slept with their nanny while she was away filming – a deeply regrettable one-off, and a clichéd cry for help brought about by booze, cocaine, loneliness and sheer lazy stupidity on his part – she had taken the kids straight to the States to live with her parents, not telling a soul what had happened. The press still hadn’t found out to this day. Only Dillon, Fawn and the nanny knew, the latter having been paid for her silence with a very big cheque from Fawn’s personal fortune. The girl had walked away from the marriage with almost as much as Dillon.
Mannerly, well-spoken Penny, however, seemed to find it perfectly acceptable to talk about it.
She tilted her head as Gus finally told the girl to start moving again and she kicked Fox into the most fabulous lengthened trot. ‘GOOD! THAT’S THE TICKET!’ she shouted at them suddenly, making Dillon step back in surprise, before she immediately turned back to address him again in her flat drawl. ‘My dressage trainer – also one of your lot – says he’s just attention-seeking. You gay chaps are far more up front about these things, aren’t you?’ She nodded at Gus, who was still performing his strange dance, now bending forwards and patting his own bottom, repeatedly shouting ‘Sit on
this
’ as Beccy cantered around him. ‘What d’you think?’
Dillon swallowed. ‘I’m really not qualified to say, I’m afraid. I’m not usually upfront about anything, nor am I gay, although I don’t mind admitting that I think he’s a fool. You’re a very beautiful woman.’ It was a throwaway Rafferty line, but he meant it. In her cool, clipped way she reminded him so acutely of Fawn that he wanted to curl up at her feet. And it worked a magic spell on Penny Moncrieff.
‘Oh God.’ She went very pink. Then, to his surprise, she started to laugh. She covered her mouth and hooted and guffawed and finally howled with laughter until there were tears in her eyes.
‘Oh you have cheered me up,’ she said when she had recovered enough to speak. ‘I’m so sorry I made assumptions. That was unforgiveable,’ she snorted as another titter gripped her. ‘Thank God you’re not here to buy a horse.’
‘I am,’ he smiled.
‘Oh fuck,’ she laughed more hysterically now, making him think of his father again: posh women swearing was a complete aphrodisiac to Pete.
‘I want the one with the heart-shaped star,’ he said without thinking.
‘Oh marvellous – Tash has been terrified that one will kill Hugo. Do take him away.’
Suddenly Dillon found himself laughing too, knowing his father would just love this world, imagining him let loose in it like an over-sexed wolf in a parade of foxhounds, trying to mount everything except the horses. But Dillon had found it first, quite by chance. For once he was ahead of his father, whose love of horses meant he owned chasers, hurdlers, sprinters and stayers, but had almost certainly never been to a three day event in his life. The wolf would devour it all greedily, but Dillon was upwind with the fastest horse at his fingertips.
‘At least you’re not thinking of buying Fox.’ Penny had stopped laughing with great effort. ‘Hugo would never forgive me. That horse is better than anything out there by a league. But as you said yourself, he’d never sell him.’
‘He’s just this minute sold him,’ Dillon grinned, holding out his hand to shake hers. ‘You made up my mind. Thank you.’
Penny gaped at him incredulously. She took his palm in hers reluctantly, feeling his big silver rings press into her finger pads, hoping to God that Tash would be all right about it. Fox was
her
baby. But, then again, she supposed Tash had a new baby to occupy her now.
‘Congratulations,’ she said, not certain whether to be pleased or concerned. ‘You’re buying a piece of solid gold.’
‘But not the heart of gold,’ he sighed.
‘Oh, I’m sure Hugo will come up with a deal if you want to buy both,’ she urged as he stepped forward to plant a deal-making kiss on each cheek, which made her feel both rather weak at the knees and horribly Judas-like. He smelled of expensive aftershave and clean skin, she realised, a rare treat compared to Gus’s usual working rider pong. Surely, he couldn’t be this sexy
and
straight?
Had she not consumed half a bottle of wine at lunch Penny might been inclined to be cynical, but she was feeling more emotional than
usual. If this attractive, charming, sweet-smelling man was prepared to pay the Beauchamps that much money, she wished them all luck. She just hoped it wouldn’t compromise the best horse the sport had seen in years, possibly ever. Rory Midwinter was inexperienced but talented and, from what little Penny had seen of him, frighteningly capable of beating Hugo – and Gus – at their own game if mounted well.
As Dillon put a call through to Hugo from his jazzy little mobile phone she diplomatically turned away and watched Gus, who was still talking non-stop while Beccy and Fox stood to attention again, swatting flies with crop and tail respectively. He had hold of her thigh now, she noted, and was showing her how to roll it outwards to relax the knee and maximise the effect of the lower leg. Penny’s own lower leg twitched with the urge to sprint into the arena and raise her knee to his crotch. She wished he’d been within earshot to hear that sweet-smelling boy call her beautiful. It was something Gus hadn’t called her in a long time.
Hugo phoned the house just as Tash was loading the children in the buggy.