‘I’m fine, thanks,’ she managed to croak past welling tears.
She heard him step behind her, his voice low and kind, that lovely sound she so seldom heard because he spoke so rarely. ‘You’re not fine. I can tell.’
‘It’s nothing!’
He laid a hand on shoulder, but she didn’t dare look up. ‘Is it Lem?’
‘Lem?’ she repeated in confusion, trying to join the dots through the misery of losing her first and only boyfriend by her own stupidity. But she had never really loved Lemon. And all you need is love, after all.
Eyes shining with tears, she suddenly jerked back her chin and stared at Lough through the darkness. ‘Why are you trying to wreck Tash’s marriage?’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘Yes. I d-don’t understand why you would want to stay on here and do this, when it wasn’t her you came to … it wasn’t why you …’ She still couldn’t bring herself to admit to their text life out loud. ‘We both know what happened before you came.’
‘That wasn’t why I stayed,’ he said quietly.
Beccy knew she’d asked for that. Winded with pain, she wanted to run and flee, but he still had hold of her shoulder. ‘I could ask you the same question. Why do you stay?’
She hung her head. ‘I feel safe here. It’s the first time I’ve felt safe in so long. I thought that was down to Lem, but I was wrong. It’s the whole yard family, with Tash as mummy and Hugo as daddy. I love it here.’
‘Strikes me as a pretty abusive family.’
‘Then you know nothing.’
‘I have first-hand experience,’ he corrected.
‘Tash is lovely.’ She admitted it for the first time, and it made her cry even harder as she remembered how jealous she’d always been, how she’d dismissed her stepsister as just plain lucky and undeserving of Hugo. ‘She was the only one of the Frenches who wrote to me in jail,’ she sobbed. ‘She sent me drawings of Cora and the horses. But I was so ungrateful because I just wanted a picture of Hugo. I swapped them for tobacco. I’ve never felt lonelier in my life than I did there.’
‘I have first-hand experience of that too.’ Lough looked up at the navy blue sky, where a few dim stars were blinking between the high shadows of clouds.
‘How did you cope?’
‘I thought about …’ He stopped, clearly about to say ‘her’. But he knew that wasn’t really right. Instead he said ‘coming here.’
‘I wish I’d known I was coming here,’ she sighed. ‘I just thought about growing old in there. I read books – that’s all visitors are allowed to bring prisoners. For twenty hours a day, I shared a cell with twelve women, with just straw mats to sleep on. I didn’t think I’d get out until I was almost pensionable.’
‘How come you ended up there in the first place?’
‘I have bad taste in men.’
He waited for more, knowing it would come.
‘I’d been living in an ashram in Tamil Nadu for a few years, but it was closed down and I went back to Thailand to look up some of the people I’d met there, the ones who worked stalls and bars on the islands, taught diving or yoga. Most had moved on, of course, but there was a Dutch guy who ran a surf hire shop in Phuket who remembered me and introduced me to some new friends. One of them was called Angel.’ She pronounced it ‘ann-hel’.
‘Angel?’
She nodded. ‘He couldn’t have been less angelic, but he was so funny and charming I adored him. He came from Chile and had this fantastic accent, like a bandit in a movie, you know?’
Lough nodded, wondering how on earth she ever survived all those years on the road without being gang-raped or murdered.
‘About five of us travelled through Cambodia and Malaysia together. It was a great time.’
‘And you and Angel got it together?’ He sat down on the ramp, patting the matting beside him.
She shook her head, settling down too. ‘He flirted with everyone, but to be honest I don’t think he really fancied me like I did him. But he was very kind. I got seriously freaked out when we got to Singapore – I hadn’t been back since we lived there and my dad died – and Angel was fantastic. He looked after me through it and talked to me lots. He loved horses too, and I think he’d done some race riding in Argentina when he was younger.
Lough smiled. He was starting to see the pattern forming.
‘He had this dream of owning a little finca in Spain and breeding horses to sell back to South America – he said they paid huge money for them there. His uncle’s family had invited him to live with them in Jerez and find him work with local breeding studs until he set himself up. He asked me if I’d like to be a part of it. I was so happy.
‘Of course it was all pipe-dreams. Neither of us had a bean. I knew I could probably get a bit of money from my mother and James – they were desperate to get me home by then – but it would never be enough.’
‘So you decided to raise the cash for a farm by smuggling drugs?’ Lough was staggered by her gall. His own underhand methods of raising capital had been nothing compared to Beccy’s, it seemed.
‘Of course not.’ She rubbed her face with shaking hands, having gone through the events that led up to her arrest a thousand times. ‘I had no idea what was going on, but of course that counted for nothing with the authorities there.
‘I had just enough money to get us both back to Europe. I found flights direct to Madrid, but Angel wanted to go via Schiphol, saying he had an errand to run for our friend at the surf shop, so I went along with it. It meant catching different flights because we were on stand-by, but that was cool. He went on ahead, saying he’d meet me there.’
Lough closed his eyes, the scenario easy to imagine. Poor, besotted Beccy happy to check in bags for her great friend Angel, only to find one of them jam-packed with Class As. He couldn’t believe she’d been so naive.
‘What were you carrying?’
‘Khmer royal gold.’
‘
Not
drugs?’
‘God, no! They’d have executed me for that. The press over here often reported it wrong: it was jewellery. Rings mostly, just a few pieces, but incredibly old and rare so worth a lot of money. Angel must have got hold of it while we were travelling through Cambodia.’
‘Did you ever hear from him again?’
She shook her head.
Lough looked across at the stars again, brighter now the clouds were blowing over. He could see Ursa Major lifting its saucepan high in the sky. ‘You must have been so terrified.’
‘My mother and stepfather flew over straight away and worked with the British consul, pleading for clemency. James put the best legal team together while I was on remand. When I was found guilty I was told I was lucky not to get the death sentence, but James insisted on an appeal and I was eventually freed on a technicality, something to do with the source of artefacts being untraceable.’
‘He sounds amazing.’
‘He’s certainly pretty stubborn,’ she said stiffly.
‘Must be where Tash gets it from.’
Beccy fell silent, also looking up at the night sky. ‘I used to gaze at the Great Bear from Changi and remind myself it would follow me home if I ever got here.’
‘I did the same from my cell in Auckland.’
He turned to her, but Beccy’s mind was still crossing its own continents. ‘In India, they call it Saptarshi and each star is a sage. Some say they’re the sons of Brahma,’ she tilted her head up higher, ‘but I secretly always preferred the story I learned in Classics at school, that Hera turned one of Zeus’s lovers into a bear in a jealous rage, so he put that bear up in the sky to stop it being hunted.’
‘That’s more romantic, certainly.’ His deep voice had a sardonic undertone.
Hugging herself for warmth, Beccy noticed the light was still on in the stables flat. She hadn’t thought about Lemon at all for the past half-hour, she realised. The moment she did, a sob rose in her throat. ‘Lem isn’t at all romantic. I sometimes think he’s quite nasty.’
‘He’s great with horses.’
‘Just not women.’
‘He doesn’t know how.’
‘He’s like Lignère,’ she said quietly, referring to the character from
Cyrano de Bergerac
, handsome Christian’s offensive friend.
When Lough said nothing she stood up, rubbing her numb backside and fighting another onslaught of tears as she realised how pitiful her relationship with Lemon had been, and how shallow he was compared to Lough’s unfathomable depths. ‘Thanks for listening.’ She started to walk down the ramp. ‘You must be dying to get to bed.’
He stood up too, catching hold of her arm. ‘Beccy, I must ask you …’
‘Yes?’ she froze, hardly daring to hope that he might at last start to see past Tash’s leggy sweetness.
‘Has she said anything to you?’
Beccy chewed her lip, her chest concave with the blunt pain of being less than second best, not caring if she was quoting out of context. ‘Just that she wants Hugo to win.’
He drew a sharp breath.
Beccy turned back to him, savage with disappointment. ‘I used to think that if I rode well enough Hugo would fall madly in love with me, but it doesn’t work like that. We all want to win for ourselves. We do it because the adrenalin and the high of beating the field is the closest thing there is to that first punch-drunk moment of love. I stopped being competitive for a long time, but you know what? Now I want another chance.’
‘To win what?’ He stepped back, alarmed by her fervour. ‘Not Hugo, surely?’
She shook her head. ‘Respect, Lough. I want to win respect.’
‘Sounds like a good plan.’ His eyes glittered. ‘Perhaps one day, if I ride fast enough and well enough, I’ll shake the devil off my back too.’
‘He who dares wins.’ She smiled sadly. ‘Tash has no idea how lucky she is to have you. Then again, she’s the only one round here who’s stopped wanting to win.’ With that, she shook off the hand on her arm and hurtled down the ramp, running back to the flat.
The music was still booming from Lem’s room; the hob had been turned off, but the pan remained in place, its contents reduced to a solid, blackened mess.
Wearily, Beccy went to clean her teeth before locking herself in her own room and plugging in her iPod. The first song lined up on her playlist was ‘All You Need is Love’. She wept herself hoarse, but whether she was crying for Lemon, for her wasted crush on Hugo or even for Lough, perhaps the greatest missed opportunity of her life, she couldn’t tell.
There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done, she reminded herself firmly, knowing she had to get through the next few days without being a weeping wreck. Lough was right, Lemon had no idea how to handle women, although knowing that didn’t stop the feeling of loss that now ripped at her throat; she had just as little idea
how to handle men, after all. She thought back over that recent, amazing conversation and suddenly yelped in alarm as it occurred to her what she’d said.
He who dares wins
.
Eager to boost her profile, Sylva was determined to get Dillon to Badminton to watch his horse compete, but he had dug his heels in. Buried in a London studio most days, laying down the tracks of a new album, Dillon was uncommunicative and exhausted, only returning to the Cotswolds for brief periods to snatch sleep and check progress on the farm, or to entertain his daughters when they visited. He looked terrible, and was piling on weight from snacking through the long working hours, permanently unshaven and wearing the same ancient cut-offs and Gay Pride T-shirt everywhere because he claimed none of his other clothes fitted.
Based in Le Petit Château with Mama and the family, and working her own long hours promoting her books, beauty lines, perfume and lingerie, Sylva felt powerless. Their relationship didn’t amount to very much at all, apart from press excitement and a couple of quick sexual encounters, the most recent of which had involved flying to the States for an unpleasantly rushed dinner at Nobu Malibu, which had left her with indigestion and carpet burns from the upholstery in her hire car. They’d had far more play-dates with all the children, Hana, Mama and Indigo than hot dates together. She now hated coming back to the Lodes Valley, finding its picture-postcard perfection too sugary and limited, its gardens already bursting with lupins and foxgloves, clematis and roses like sweets displayed in the window of the honey-stone shop to one side of the West Oddford Organics flagship store in Morrell on the Moor. She longed for something grander and wilder. She needed adrenalin and crowds and a man at her side.
Badminton Horse Trials with Dillon was her ticket to a little much-needed attention, public and private, and she wasn’t going to relinquish it easily. Every obstacle he threw up, she overcame. The girls would be coming over: not a problem, they’d take them along
with Hana and Zuzi – the more the merrier. He was needed in the recording studio all day Friday: not a problem, his driver could bring him straight to the hotel afterwards.
At Mama’s insistence, Sylva had block-booked rooms at Calcot Manor Spa for the entire run of the competition. The luxurious surroundings, pampering and five-star food were exactly what they needed, Mama maintained, and it would finally kick-start the romance that was destined to lead to love and marriage, and the seven-figure exclusive wedding features that she and Sylva’s management team were currently negotiating with
Cheers!
.
But a phone call to Dillon on the Wednesday of Badminton week yet again threatened her well-laid plans.
‘We’re just about to leave, darlink,’ she told him as she stood on the drive outside Le Petit Château, kicking at the gravel with a pointed suede toe and watching nannies and drivers loading up her convoy.
Her camera team were filming her from behind a tubbed bay tree. She zipped up her little red suede jacket and turned away from them so that they couldn’t see her face. She was already wearing big dark glasses and a baseball cap, picking up vibes from Dillon who loathed Rodney’s presence and refused to let his team film him or his children.
‘Leave where?’ He sounded distracted, music and conversation in the background.
‘For Calcot Manor. I’ll see you there on Friday, yes?’
‘Not sure I’ll make it.’ ‘You have to!’
‘There’s so much to do here. We’ve all agreed to push on through the weekend if we need to.’