‘That’s fine, don’t thank me,’ he muttered, heading towards the door. He marched off to check the mare, wishing that he had sent Lemon and the horses back to New Zealand that day. The thought of Lough finally arriving made him very jumpy indeed.
In Rumorz nightclub in Marlbury, Libido-ration was not happening for Faith. The cube-like building had once been a gym, adapted into a club when it went bankrupt with a tiny dancefloor crisscrossed with coloured lights. The music was anonymous techno anthems, interspersed with two lurching ballads an hour to get the clients necking. Just to keep them on their toes, a DJ also occasionally broke through the rhythmic beat to shriek something along the lines of ‘Party on, Marlbury girls and boys!’ which was singularly inappropriate given that there were only eight people in there for most of the night, three of which were the gang from Maccombe.
Burping at regular intervals from so much Diet Coke and fizzy water because she was driving, Faith was dying of boredom. The clientele – two lads from a National Hunt yard on the downs, two IT boffins from a company called Wigitex in the thriving Marlbury silicon valley and a man called Gutter who winked a lot and said he was a council operative – had all tried and failed to chat her up. She was medusa to all who approached.
For all Lemon’s lecturing, she wanted Rory to be the one who
claimed her cherry in the pact. Anything else seemed like cheating, and strangers were too stomach-turning to contemplate. She just didn’t want to know them.
Lemon, however, was determined to have fun. He’d bought an ecstasy tab from one of the bouncers, which he shared with Beccy. Faith refused to touch any of it. Her Brain Candy night had put her off drugs entirely.
Lemon washed his fragment back with Mexican beer.
Beccy slugged hers with a WKD.
Faith texted Rory.
Wish You Were Here.
He didn’t reply.
Leaving Lemon and Beccy eagerly awaiting their high, Faith went and danced alone in a dark corner. When Gutter started rubbing up against her she decided to go and sit in the car with the doors locked and Radio Three for company, reaching on to the back seat for an old sweatshirt and bodywarmer because it was freezing cold. She extracted her chicken fillets and threw them on the passenger seat before locating a packet of tissues in the glove compartment to wipe off her make-up. Then, with Handel’s
Messiah
for company, she played loves me loves me not with passing car headlights on the nearby flyover.
The half-hourly ballad struck up just as Beccy and Lemon were reaching the perfect pitch, and Dillon Rafferty’s version of ‘A Winter’s Tale’ raunched its way through the cube.
The floor was theirs.
The club had finally started to fill up, but nobody was occupying the small laminated square as they wrapped their arms around one another and camped it up.
Beccy could feel the blood in her veins, the love in her heart and the beat through her feet.
When Lemon’s lips connected with hers it seemed beautiful and right. When his tongue circled hers, so muscular and wholehearted, she joined in with abandon.
Their bodies ground together. Somewhere, in that hollow cube, libido-ration was unleashed in Beccy.
Her breasts tingled, nipples so electric that she was certain a blue arc could be seen crackling between them; her groin throbbed with the beat as though she had her own personal drummer in her g-string. She felt wholly, all-consumingly sexy.
When cheesy but sexy Rafferty was replaced with Massive Attack and far more dangerous ‘Inertia Creeps’, Beccy kissed for all she was worth. Lemon responded with alacrity. It was heaven.
She closed her eyes and imagined it was Hugo’s lips on hers, his body moving with hers, sinew and muscle and hot skin, the promise of pleasures untold and passion unlocked.
They broke off for a moment to breath, sharing sweet gulps of the same air.
Hugo was still in front of Beccy, her mind’s eye projecting him there.
‘D’you fancy me more than Tash?’ she breathed, hardly aware she was saying it.
‘I don’t fancy Tash,’ he nibbled her ears. ‘Too bloody tall to do this to for a start.’
She giggled, ‘And married, of course.’
‘Yeah, to a total shit.’ He pressed his lips to her neck.
‘Oh, don’t stop,’ she sighed.
‘He doesn’t care about anyone but himself.’ The bitterness that cut through his voice was pure venom. ‘He doesn’t deserve any of it – his wealth, his beautiful wife, or his victories. He was just born lucky. Lough should have won gold.’ He stepped back, eyes semi-focused.
‘I meant don’t stop kissing me,’ Beccy craned forward to be embraced again, giddy with lust.
This time his mouth was hard against hers, biting at her lips, tongue lashing angrily past her teeth. Beccy found it dizzyingly exciting, passion sparking as her Hugo fantasies ignited further and her head spun.
Then, suddenly Lemon pulled away. ‘Fuck, I’m going to be sick. Sorry Becs.’ He lurched off towards the loos.
She didn’t see him again. Libido-ration stalled.
Cast adrift, she saw shapes and sounds drift past. Strangely her sense of happiness and wellbeing didn’t immediately desert her, but she missed having Lemon at her side, that stout little bamboo cane that had held up her flowering blossom head tonight. She was out of control and top-heavy.
Suddenly she wanted to go home. She looked around for Faith, but she – and Lemon – were missing. They must be together, she realised with a heart-stab of jealousy.
‘Are you all right?’ One of the little racing lads who had been chatting up Faith earlier was looking at her worriedly.
‘Have you got a car?’
In Wantage, Spurs Belling was having supper with his cousin, an event usually guaranteed to be a raucous catch up, but Rory was noticeably lacking his usual happy-go-lucky outlook.
‘Now Hugo’s back throwing his weight around I feel like a bloody yard hand,’ he complained. ‘I’ve been running that place with Tash while he’s away, not that I get any thanks from him or the others. Tash is sweet about it, but she’s always so busy. Lemon is pure poison and Beccy’s frankly weird.’
He snatched up his phone as it rang out with a message alert. As he read it, Spurs noticed the colour in his cousin’s cheeks.
‘Secret lover?’
Rory shook his head, ‘I wish. My love life’s dead in the water. It’s just Faith with one of her weird texts. Drives me mad: she ignores me all day, then sends these strange messages that make no sense. I think she’s on drugs. It’s such a waste.’
‘I thought she worshipped the ground you canter on?’
He looked up in surprise. ‘In between being incredibly sarcastic, maybe. It’s got worse since hanging out with her new cronies. They’re all out ‘clubbing’ tonight. They invited me, but I’d rather assault my eardrums in private, where I don’t have to pay a fiver for a bottle of water. Man, I wish I were back in my own yard. I’m not good working with other people.’
‘You worked with Faith at Overlodes.’
‘She was different then.’
His cousin looked at him levelly. ‘Do I detect a growth spurt?’
‘She’s certainly “blossomed”.’
‘I was talking about you.’ Spurs raised his black brows above his distinctive silver bullet eyes. Having grown up cheek by jowl, he and Rory were almost as close as brothers and he sensed a sea change. Going to Haydown had been good for Rory, he realised. He was taking control at last. As a teenager, Rory had been forced to grow up very fast, very young, whereas it was Spurs who’d gone off the rails. Obliged to work hard and live independently Rory had never rebelled, but he had a fatalistic outlook that had been allowed to run riot. In a way it was why he was so brilliant at what he did – he was a fearless
rider with no dependants, whose passion for horses had always eclipsed personal relationships – but it also meant that he didn’t look after himself, was easily seduced and rarely valued what he had.
In many ways Rory was very like his father, who Spurs remembered idolising for his dashing charm and wild riding, and the succession of beautiful women he had dated. James Midwinter’s great mistake had been to marry capricious Truffle, who already had one failed marriage, to a polo player, behind her and a reputation for taking flight at the slightest sign of trouble or ennui. James worshipped her, but married life was never easy for this free-spirited, boozy, philandering charmer and Truffle left him many times during their time together. For seven years James always managed to forgive and talk his wife back to the decrepit farmhouse he’d inherited high on the Foxrush ridge. Eventually, however, Truffle ran away for good, to live with a point-to-point trainer near Great Tew, keeping Rory with her until he could be sent off to boarding school like his sister Diana. A succession of marriages and love affairs followed, with Rory largely overlooked by his reluctant step-fathers and discouraged from spending the school holidays at home.
Occasionally he stayed at his father’s farm, which grew damper and more dilapidated in tandem with his father’s descent into drinking and gambling. More often, Rory was despatched to stay with friends or other members of the family, such as Aunt Isabel ‘Hell’s Bells’ Belling and her son Jasper.
Spurs remembered Rory as a tough, awkward little boy who wet the bed, broke toys and struggled academically, yet who lit up with such talent when he rode that he found salvation in the saddle, becoming a Pony Club favourite, adored by mothers and daughters alike. In horses, he seemed to find the love he so craved at home. Rory barely appeared on Truffle’s radar unless her ex-husband’s school-fees cheque bounced again; Diana ran away from home when he was just eight; and James Midwinter loved scotch more than his son. But horses never let him down.
Not long after Rory’s tenth birthday his father drowned in the bath after a protracted drinking session. He was forty-one. It was a dishonourable departure for a man who had once been so fêted. Rory, white-faced and silent, had not cried at the funeral. Afterwards his aunts patted him on the back and said, ‘Well done, jolly brave’, as though he’d just successfully completed his Pony Club B Test.
The majority of the Midwinter farm was sold to pay off debts, except Horseshoe Farm Cottage and its stables, where Rory’s Great Uncle Gerald, known to all as Captain Midwinter, had taught small children to ride for as long as anyone could remember, with military ferocity, a long leather-clad cane clamped under his arm at all times and a voice incongrously like Noël Coward addressing a dim-witted chorus line. The captain was a stickler for manners and went to bed at eight o’clock each evening, but had a good heart beneath the bluster and nurtured his nephew’s riding talent. He had once famously ridden around Badminton on three horses in the same day, a feat Rory dreamed of matching. Horseshoe Cottage became Rory’s spiritual home in his later teens, and his uncle was the force behind him joining a point-to-point yard as a sixteen-year-old apprentice instead of struggling on at school as his mother wanted.
When the Captain suffered a fatal stroke at home in bed after a long day’s hunting, Rory had inherited the run-down riding school. Still in his early twenties and forging a good career as an amateur jockey, he’d returned to the Lodes Valley to rechristen the yard Overlodes Equestrian Centre and take up event riding, which had always been his greatest ambition. Since then, he’d slipped into a lot of bad habits, many of which were inherited.
Spurs had watched with concern as his cousin grew more lackadaisical, and increasingly like his father whose life had been such a tragic waste. Tonight, he was showing a little more Midwinter fighting spirit at last, and Spurs was delighted.
‘You are wising up, Rory,’ he told him.
‘Meanwhile everyone around me is dumbing down.’
‘You sound like the Captain.’
‘Do I?’ He laughed. ‘Christ, I’m turning into a grumpy old bachelor. Uncle Gerald was probably a closet gay, I think. I remember all the Pony Club mums hanging round him eagerly, batting their eyelashes. Why do women do that with camp men? Is it the unattainable thing?’
Spurs shrugged. ‘A bit of femininity makes them feel safe, I guess.’
‘Faith’s like that with Lemon – and you should see him. He looks like an Oompa-Loompa, but the girls are all over him. No matter how well I ride, how hard I work, Faith is more impressed by his bad jokes than anything I can do. I might as well not be there.’
‘Maybe she’s trying to make you notice her?’
‘Say again? By ignoring me?’
‘It’s what you do with horses, don’t you? “Join-Up”. You chase the buggers around hassling them until they’re fed up and exhausted, then you ignore them and they come and stand by you and follow you anywhere.’
Rory laughed, ‘So you think Faith’s trying Join-Up with me?’
‘You’re pretty tough to break in,’ Spurs pointed out. ‘All those bad habits from years of having it all your own way.’
Rory’s phone beeped again. This time the colour drained rapidly away. ‘Fuck. Faith’s lost Beccy and Lemon’s passed out cold. She needs help.’
He leaped up, throwing a wad of cash on the table.
Spurs leaned back and smiled up at him, hands aloft. ‘I rest my case.’
Rory was too flustered to listen. ‘Great to see you. Love to Ellen. See you in the New Year.’
‘Aren’t you home for Christmas?’
‘To drink dry Martinis at teatime and share my mother’s spare bedroom with that china doll that looks like Myra Hindley? Not if I can help it.’
Waving him off, Spurs hardly blamed his cousin for wanting to stay away from his immediate family. Widowed twice and divorced twice, Truffle now lived alone in her chocolate-box Georgian townhouse and was never short of dinner dates, most recently enjoying a very flirtatious liaison with retired Danish bookseller Ingmar Olensen. At one point it was rumoured within the family that the pair had secretly married, but Truffle wasn’t letting on and Ingmar had already forgotten. She remained a contrary character and spared her son little affection. Both Truffle and Diana had let Rory down badly over the years, breaking promises, abandoning him, pursuing their own goals at the expense of his, yet he never seemed to blame them, he simply retreated into his own world, trusting horses more than people.