Well Groomed (3 page)

‘Matty’s coming down today, isn’t he?’ Penny asked smoothly as they wandered towards the sagging farmhouse, their wellies crunching through frosted straw. ‘Are you going to whistle him up a soya-bean drumstick?’

‘God, I hadn’t even thought,’ Tash groaned. ‘He’ll just have to have a double helping of veg.’

She supposed that hosting a dinner for her mother’s entourage plus her brother’s brood was a tad ambitious as a first foray into independent yuletides. She wished now that she had stuck to Niall’s idea of heading for Ireland and taking in the hospitality of his raucous family, or simply holing up in the Old Forge together and staying in bed all day. Either was preferable to the task ahead.

‘I’d really better get back,’ she sighed ruefully. ‘My mother – given her unpunctuality – will just about be arriving now. My brother – given his – will storm into the village in less than an hour.’

‘Just come in for one more drink, huh?’ Penny’s wet berry eyes gleamed cheerfully through her untidy dark-blonde hair, worn down for once. ‘Gus will want another Christmas kiss, and you must collect your presents.’

‘Oh God, I left yours at the Old Forge!’ Tash remembered the Selfridge’s bag with a wail.

Polly, who had by now opened all the presents destined for Penny, Gus and Zoe at Lime Tree Farm, was starting on the ones under the threadbare tree, which was still undecorated.

‘Are these for my
maman
?’ she asked, holding up the extremely flimsy lace underwear that Niall was intending to give to Tash far later that day, when once again alone with her.

‘Don’t be silly,
chérie
.’ Alexandra was helping herself and Etty to two more huge gin and tonics as Niall clearly wasn’t too good at refilling glasses. ‘Those are far too young for me.’

‘I don’t know.’ Pascal cocked a rather excited furry eyebrow as he placed garlic and salt-encrusted potatoes on to a roasting dish and doused them in olive oil and rosemary.

Perched on a very scruffy sofa beside her daughter, Etty shivered slightly from the cold and sniffed disapprovingly. The place smelled very stale, she noted, and there were five unwashed mugs gathering mould on the table beside her. She clutched her gin and tonic – smeary glass, too – to her fur chest, unwilling to place it amidst such contamination. Whilst fearfully dishy, her grand-daughter’s Irish partner was rather odd. It was now after one and he still hadn’t dressed.

Niall, who had built a large fire that was smoking slightly more than he was in Tash’s absence, was tugging on his fifth Camel Light and wandering round in his striped dressing gown, getting under Pascal’s feet as he tried to make them both a strong black coffee. They were now out of instant and the filter machine had broken weeks ago, so he was forced to improvise with grounds through a tea towel, generating a great deal of gritty brown mess.

‘I wonder where Tash has got to now?’ He looked up fretfully as there was a commotion of motorised clanks outside, followed by the sound of a car being reversed into a wheely bin.

This was soon replaced by the banging of car doors and the excited chattering of children. The next moment, Sally’s pretty, rose-cheeked face was peering through the frosted windows and Matty, loaded down with baby equipment, elbowed his way through the front door.

‘Hi, all.’ He dropped a massive packet of nappies in at the door and scratched his head under his crocheted hat. ‘Something smells good. Christ!’ He caught sight of his grandmother and tried not to look too horrified.

Etty glowered back at him. They had never been the best of friends.

‘Matty darling!’ Alexandra sprang up from the sofa and rushed across the room to hug him which Matty, despite stiffening slightly, took in festive good humour.

‘You look great, Mother.’ He grinned, taking in the usual impracticality of her heavy silk jacket, bottle green wool trousers and high suede mules.

‘’Lo, everyone!’ Sally appeared through the door carrying Linus in his carry cot, her messy honey-blonde mane already falling out of its scrunchy, grey eyes merry, denim dress covered in baby food. ‘Merry Christmas! The kids are busy peering at the puppy in the Mercedes. Isn’t it a bit cruel leaving it there in the cold?’

‘Probably warmer than it would be in here,’ Niall laughed, greeting his friend Matty with an affectionate arm around the shoulders and kissing Sally on both her pink cheeks.

‘Christ, the puppy – I quite forgot!’ gasped Alexandra, rushing outside to rescue her present and welcome her grandchildren.

‘Get dressed, you lazy slob.’ Matty grinned at Niall, pleased to see him looking so well. ‘Tash still in bed?’

‘Why does everyone think that we spend our entire time in bed?’ Niall sighed, wandering back to his coffee-making.

‘Because you more or less do,’ Sally pointed out, kissing Pascal hello and making a tentative approach to Matty’s grandmother. ‘Hello, Etty. What a lovely surprise – we didn’t expect to see you here. Are you well?’

‘Closer to death than ever,
ma chérie
.’ Etty, still wearing her bearskin hat, peered up from her gin. ‘Xandra and James came to Scotland to rescue me from ’aving to spend anozer Christmas with Cass and ’er ’orrible ’usband.’

‘Pascal, Grandmother.’ Matty smiled weakly.

‘I thought he was called Michael?’ Etty gave him a cursory welcoming nod. ‘You look too thin, Matthew.’

‘Cass’s husband is Michael,’ Matty said patiently, watching as Niall, clutching his coffee, wandered up the narrow, twisting staircase to get dressed, followed by what appeared to be a large white turkey. ‘My father is called James, Grandmother. Mother and he have been divorced for years. She’s married to Pascal now.’ He pointed to his step-father, who was grumpily teaching Polly how to peel sprouts. ‘Xandra and
Pascal
came to rescue you from Scotland.’

‘That’s what I said, you stupeed child.’ Etty stretched up a creased, rouged cheek. ‘Now give me a kiss and bugger off and wash your hands – zey’re filthy.’

‘I had to change a tyre.’

Sally tried hard not to giggle as her husband’s twitching face made contact with his grandmother’s heavily made-up one. Matty loathed Etty, blaming her for bestowing the excesses of extravagance and bohemian wilfulness upon Alexandra. Etty, a ravaged French aristocrat who had been sent across the Channel by her impoverished family between the wars to marry a rich Englishman, was monstrously vain, bigoted and devious. She had made Matty’s childhood hell by continually favouring his sisters above him and pretending that it was he and not herself who secretly laid into the gin supply during her stays with the Frenches. But Sally felt a great affection for the woman who had, if her stories were to be believed, spied for England during the Second World War, played poker with Lord Lucan, eaten oysters with the Mitford sisters, and been approached by a young Mitterrand as a potential mistress.

‘Are you his latest,
chérie
?’ Etty asked Sally rather grandly.

Sally gaped at her. ‘I’m Sally – Matty’s wife. You came to our wedding, Etty. And to Tom’s christening.’

‘Oh, did I?’ Etty smiled blithely. ‘I cannot remember. One attends so many society weddings that family ones seem rather piffling.’ She gave Sally a huge wink and jerked her head towards Matty, who was testing Pascal’s cranberry purée with a boot face, his rage barely controlled.

Sally grinned broadly.

Tash, who had cut through a rock-hard ploughed field to get back to the Old Forge in less time, clambered rather clumsily over a frost-dusted fence and suddenly caught sight of her mother’s green wool bottom poking out of the rear door of a silver Mercedes, which was badly parked in the narrow lane. Attached to Alexandra’s shapely ankle was the small, rotund shape of Tor, Tash’s hyperactive blonde niece, her jaunty little pig-tails flopping over her chocolate-smeared face.

Tash drew in a guilty breath. That meant everyone had arrived, and she hadn’t even begun to cook. She wished she hadn’t spent quite so much time giggling with the Moncrieffs and their guests around the vast table in their warm, welcoming kitchen, putting off the moment she had to return to the icy forge. The slight body flush from two glasses of fizzy wine cooled to a shiver once more and, as she slithered off the railed fence, her gloved hands lost their grip on the bag Penny had given her. Her family’s presence always sent her nerves through the roof. She could feel her fists clenching, and the cheap glass ring that she’d just won when pulling a cracker with Zoe’s son, Rufus, scratched against the second and fourth fingers of her left hand. Faced with her turbulent family – especially Matty – Tash always felt like a shy, fat teenager again.

As she stooped to collect some of the presents that had tumbled out of her bag and on to the frozen verge, she spotted Tor’s brother Tom galloping out from behind a green Audi – even more badly parked, Tash noted. Slithering to a leggy halt by the open boot, he saw her and let out an excited, war-like wail before stalking forwards and shooting her with one of his Christmas presents – a super-charged, repeat-action water rifle, of which his father strongly disapproved.

Drenched through, her Puffa as heavy as a bullet-proof vest, Tash mustered a brave smile.

‘Hi, little rat.’ She wiped her wet cheeks and bent down, kissing thin air as he ducked away with squirming shyness. ‘I love your hair – it’s really cool.’

‘Think so?’ Tom looked proud, beaming a toothy smile just like the one his father so rarely gave.

Tash actually thought the trendy cut made him look like a little thug, his shiny brown pudding basin having been shorn off to just a few stubbly millimetres. But she knew how to suck up to her younger relatives. At times, it seemed, they were her only allies in the pushy, selfish babble of her family.

‘Tash!’ Alexandra had backed out of the Merc and was trying to hide something that was squirming under her coat.

‘Hi, Mummy – Happy Christmas!’ Slithering across the frozen lane, Tash dropped all her presents and gave her mother a hug, experiencing, as ever, a sudden oil-geyser rush of affection.

But Alexandra backed out of her embrace with unexpected haste.

‘You’re soaking wet, darling.’ She smiled rather awkwardly, and stooped to detach her grand-daughter from her ankle, into which Tor had been trying to sink her small, white teeth.

‘I know,’ Tash sighed, collecting the parcels that she’d brought back from Lime Tree Farm. They headed inside together, pursued by Tom and Tor. ‘Did you have a lovely time in Scotland?’

‘Lovely.’ Alexandra smiled and dropped her voice. ‘Mummy was a rogue – tried to nick the cutlery from every restaurant we took her to. Says she wants to move back to France with us, which is quite a ghastly idea.’ She raised her voice again. ‘Look who I found outside!’

Tash found herself the recipient of rather lack-lustre greetings as a result of her shoddy hostessing. Just as she started gibbering apologies to Pascal who, having got all the cooking on the go, was now sniffing one of Zoe’s Christmas puddings with mistrust, there was a bellow from upstairs.

‘Is that you, Tash?’

Quailing at the anger in Niall’s tone, she crept towards the warped oak door that led to the steep, narrow wooden stairs.

‘Yes. Look, I’m really sorry I was away so long, but Penny insisted that I—’

‘Where the fock are my clothes?’

‘Ah.’ Tash stood on one foot and glanced awkwardly towards the kitchen. ‘Well, all the stuff you brought back from LA is still in the machine, I think.’

‘And the rest?’

She smiled nervously at her family, who were listening in with interest. ‘Well, I gave a couple of your old suits to charity, and then I started sort of wearing the rest of your clothes to ride out in.’

‘You what?’

‘Back in a min,’ Tash bleated over her shoulder and shot upstairs.

Matty looked across to Sally and rolled his amber eyes with despair.

Having clucked into Linus’s carry cot for a few seconds, Alexandra sank down beside her mother again and readjusted the squirming bulge in her coat.

‘Dreadful hole, isn’t it,
chérie
?’ Etty peered around the room critically, taking in the grubby, white-washed stone walls covered with Tash’s colourful paintings, the threadbare furniture, curling rugs and amassed litter, which now included the stack of old papers that Niall had been reading.

‘Must be terribly lonely for poor Tash while Niall’s away.’ Alexandra gazed around, noticing just how many paintings her daughter had been producing lately.

‘She’s away competing most weekends, I believe,’ Matty pointed out, settling rather uncomfortably on a coffee table as there were no more available chairs.

‘Not this time of year.’ Sally pulled Tor on to her denim lap and wondered whether it would be terribly rude to help herself to a drink as no one had offered her one. ‘Stop shooting Pascal and get the presents out of the car, will you, Tom?’

‘If anyone gives me toiletries I weel make them eat them,’ Etty threatened rather demonically. ‘Ees the Queen’s Speech on yet?’

But when Matty fiddled around with the several remote controls that worked the television, he managed to set the video recorder playing. In it was the blue movie that Tash and Niall had been giggling over the afternoon before. Etty almost ate her false teeth in shock.

When they had met two years earlier, Tash and Niall had fallen for one another as deeply and impractically as only they were capable of, believing that they had finally united two halves of the same huge, ludicrously romantic heart, but not realising quite how incompatible their lives were. Niall, a rising star in the acting world, spent a great deal of his working year on location or touring to publicise films. More recently, with a hefty American divorce settlement against him, he had been forced to take the roles that offered the fattest cheque, necessitating months on end living by West-Coast time. Tash, striving to build a career in eventing, lived a gypsy’s life in summer, touring around the country in the Moncrieffs’ vast horse-box from which she lived, ate and competed. Then in winter she was based in West Berkshire, training, schooling and teaching.