Well Groomed (34 page)

For the next few days, he barely saw her. He spent increasing amounts of time sitting in the kitchen with Zoe, bemoaning her absence and drinking Gus’s scotch, which he replaced regularly before drinking it again.

‘It’s always like this at the start of the season. She has to qualify Mickey Rourke for some Intermediate events,’ Zoe explained. ‘And although Snob is technically qualified for Badminton because he won so much last year, she needs to give him some tough tests to prepare him this year. She’s having one hell of a struggle with him at the moment – he almost broke her neck at Harewood last week.’

‘I’ll break her neck if she doesn’t sit down and talk to me soon,’ moaned Niall. ‘I have to go back up to Scotland tomorrow, then straight to Shepperton for the dubs and on to Yorkshire for rehearsals. I won’t be back until the end of March.’

‘For Hugo’s birthday party?’ Zoe brightened.

‘So it is.’ Niall seemed to have forgotten. ‘That should be fun.’ He didn’t sound at all enthusiastic.

‘Ish,’ she shrugged, not noticing his ironic tone. ‘His bash is the day before Lowerton – the biggest advanced trials before Badminton. Apart from Saumur in April, it’s absolutely the most vital comp for anyone hoping to give their horses a real test. Most of the eventers will be drinking like AA converts to keep their heads clear the next morning.’

‘That should be fun,’ Niall repeated, hardly listening.

Watching his pinched face, Zoe put down the entry forms she had been sifting through and sat down opposite him at the table. She was wary of probing too deeply. Yet he looked so tired and forlorn, she couldn’t ignore him.

‘It’s not going too well at the moment, is it?’ she asked gently.

A black eyebrow shot up and he smiled sadly. ‘Not brilliantly, no.’

Zoe took a deep breath. ‘You’re not having second thoughts, are you? About the wedding?’

He looked at her for a long time, saying nothing, until Zoe squirmed with embarrassment at her nosy do-gooder inquisition. She had not forgotten his rude abruptness the night he had returned from the christening without Tash.

‘Sorry – I’ll butt out.’ She made to stand up but he grabbed her arm to stop her.

‘Has she said anything to you?’

Settling in her seat again, Zoe was as gentle and soft-spoken as Selina Scott drawing out a repressed royal in a one-off interview.

‘I think she was very hurt by whatever happened in Scotland,’ she murmured, her pale, focused eyes soaking up his face. ‘She needs you to give her a lot of reassurance. I can tell she’s desperate to talk things out, but she’s clamming up because she’s so afraid you don’t love her as much as you did.’

‘I adore her!’

‘Then tell her,’ Zoe said simply. ‘She obviously feels horribly alone right now.’

‘Then I wish she was as up front about it as you are.’ Niall smiled sadly, letting go of her arm and sagging back in his chair.

‘I’m not marrying you, Niall, so I can say what I like.’ Zoe gave him a sage smile. ‘A wedding’s an enormously stressful thing to organise. Her mother and step-mother are putting her under a lot of pressure to come up with a guest list; there’s less than three months to go now.’

‘Shit!’ Niall’s face darkened.

Zoe bit her lip, on the verge of digging deeper, but he was staring broodily at the wall chart now, eager for a distraction.

‘Fucking Gus is working her to death, so he is,’ he sighed. ‘She puts in more hours than a junior hospital doctor. That’s why she’s stressed out.’

‘We’re all working hard. The yard’s in crisis.’

Niall rubbed his eyes. ‘I know how it feels. I’m shattered. I owe the tax man thirty grand – Christ knows where I’ll find it. And until I can get our settlement reassessed in the States my ex-wife takes practically every penny I earn – ironic as she’ll be paying me in May. Or rather
Cheers!
will. I haven’t had a holiday in months. It’s one of the reasons I was so bloody wired in Scotland.’

‘Tash said you weren’t yourself.’ Zoe picked at a pock-mark in the table.

‘Nor was she!’ He looked offended. ‘She was extremely bloody-minded, so she was, stomping off like that.’

‘I think she feels pretty guilty about that.’

‘Did she say so?’

Zoe shook her head, not quite looking him in the eye. ‘We had words, but she didn’t say much. I bungled it, to be honest. I took your side rather.’

‘My side?’ He tilted back his chair despondently, eyes raking the ceiling. ‘Jesus! I wasn’t aware that we were that divided now.’

‘Not side, exactly.’ Zoe blushed. ‘Sorry – bad choice of word. I was angry with her for doing a bunk from Scotland.’

Niall stared at the ceiling in silence for a few moments. He looked as though he was praying.

‘I don’t blame her to be quite honest,’ he sighed, tipping the chair forward again and staring at Zoe’s cat brooch. ‘That’s a sweet wee thing, now.’

‘Why don’t you blame her?’

He flipped a teaspoon over on the table and pressed his finger into its bowl.

‘I think I’ve made a big mistake, Zoe.’ He let the spoon go and rested his creased forehead in his palms.

She froze, guessing he was about to confess to not wanting to marry Tash. She wasn’t at all certain that he should be telling her so.

‘What makes you say that?’ She cleared her throat anxiously.

‘I always fuck up.’ He looked at her with a lop-sided grin. ‘I find Tash so hard to read – I mean, Christ, I love her but you know even when I first met her, I couldn’t tell if she was attracted to me or not. She gives out very funny signals.’

‘I know that.’ Zoe smiled. ‘She’s the most bashful extrovert in the world.’

‘So I thought she was all for this thing, but now I reckon she’s not keen.’ His palms hit his forehead again. ‘In fact, I keep expecting her to beg me not to go through with it.’

‘Things aren’t that drastic, surely?’

Niall shrugged. ‘She seemed really happy about it to start with, but I suppose she just wanted what I wanted. Now she’s so frosty and uncommunicative, I think I should just call it all off – buy myself out of the contract.’

Zoe looked at him wonderingly. He was rather losing her here. She kept finding that her eyes were drawn to his hands – they were so bony and long-fingered that they seemed to have a life of their own, dancing around the table in search of distraction. She longed to stretch out an arm and still them for a moment.

‘What exactly do you mean?’ she asked, watching as his fingers played with the teaspoon.

Niall sighed deeply, reaching down to scratch Enid who had crept anxiously up to him, topaz eyes bulging as she contemplated dashing away again.

‘I wasn’t altogether honest with her,’ he started. ‘I just couldn’t bring myself to tell her until it was too late and too difficult.’ He stopped, biting his lip so that Zoe could see his lovely, uneven white teeth reddening the flesh to the colour of Parma ham.

‘What didn’t you tell her?’

‘That Lisette’s behind it all,’ he sighed, closing his eyes. ‘And will be there throughout.’

‘Who’s Lisette?’ Zoe asked. The name was only vaguely familiar.

‘She’s my ex-wife and still pretty predatory.’ He grimaced. ‘I can handle her but Tash goes to pieces when she’s around. It could be a bit of a walking on eggshells situation.’

Zoe’s mouth was hanging open. She was finding this hard to take in. His ex-wife persuading him to marry Tash? It seemed insane.

‘Go on,’ she murmured numbly.

‘Well, I flunked telling Tash until I was in Scotland and then just blurted it down the phone during a row.’ He groaned at the memory. ‘She’s been like a hurt dog ever since, cowering away from me. And I guess I’ve been pretty belligerent too, ashamed of myself for being so cowardly – drinking too much, flirting my bollocks off, acting the hell-raiser as of old. It’s a defence mechanism. I know I do it, and I know it’s madness, but it just feels so easy to slip into.’

‘Like a bottle?’

He looked at her sharply and then shrugged. ‘I guess. A little. Lisette used to give me a really hard time about it, but Tash tries to ignore it, which means I just do it all the more and that hurts her so badly.’ He looked up guiltily. ‘I was a bit of a sod in Scotland.’

Zoe nodded carefully, not knowing how to frame her next question but desperate to know.

‘Niall . . .’ She coughed. ‘Tell me – why on earth is your ex-wife behind your decision to marry Tash?’

His dancing fingers momentarily stilled, Niall pulled back his chin in confusion, trying to figure out what she meant. Then, supposing she was asking him why his first marriage broke up, he shrugged.

‘I adored Lisette – idolised her even.’ He scratched Enid’s nose, careful not to frighten her. ‘I think I was a bit obsessive, a bit cloying for her, but I just loved her so damned much – she’s alive and ambitious and in control whereas I’ve always been a bit of a dithering bugger. She supported me, believed in me; I think her faith in me helped me focus in those early years when I went after the jobs rather than them coming after me. Christ, I did everything from washing pots to driving cabs as I waited for adverts in
The Stage
and prayed for big breaks.’

Zoe watched in silence as he sat up again and poured himself another scotch, sending Enid scuttling back to her basket.

‘She worked for the Beeb then,’ he explained. ‘Producing documentaries with Matty. That’s how I met her – Matty and I go way back. But while Matty has the intellectual mind and didactic fervour, Lisette is far, far better at getting people motivated, at wining and dining and shining out as a talent.

She went to work for an independent in the early eighties and her career really took off – long before mine; she supported me for years and I loved her to distraction for it. Then when I started to get the breaks, to work away so much and receive acclaim of my own, the marriage started to lose its way.’

‘Was she jealous maybe?’ Zoe coaxed, but he shook his head.

‘She was proud of me, and proud of her contribution to my success,’ he explained. ‘It was more about my abstraction, the fact I made friends with a new set of people on each job, took them under my wing and all but brought them to live with us. Our marriage became very crowded, Princess Diana-style. An actor is hell to live with, you know.’

‘Sounds like living here.’ Zoe smiled reassuringly.

‘Well, I think she’d started to go off me a bit by then anyway.’ He sighed. ‘She was never very faithful – I knew that early on and went through every type of hell, alternately trying to make her stop and then trying to reconcile myself to it as a factor in our marriage. She never had serious affairs – they were more like quick fixes to make herself feel good, appease the jealousy she felt when seeing me in a clinch with some actress on stage.’

‘But that was just acting.’ Zoe gazed at him. ‘Hers were the real thing.’

‘Don’t be so sure.’ He smiled sadly. ‘She liked the big, bad seductress role, but within our marriage she was far softer, in far greater need of reassurance. She could be a bloody bitch, don’t get me wrong, but it’s impossible not to forgive her – she’s so damned funny and charming and sexy. She’s got tremendous guts too. She would never flinch from owning up, coming clean and sitting down to talk out how we were going to work through something. And I wasn’t altogether blameless.’

‘In what way?’

He took a slug of scotch. ‘I have a tendency to fall in love a lot,’ he confessed. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I don’t shag my way from film set to theatre to television studio. Lisette used to call them my “Rushes Crushes” because they generally petered out by the time the rushes of the love scene were shown the next morning, but my moping around like a love-sick teenager must have irritated the hell out of her.’

‘How did it end?’ She watched his animated fingers drawing intricate patterns on the table top.

He winced. ‘She ran off with an American trustafarian who had convinced her he was the next Quentin Tarantino. Then he fucked off and left her to pick up a decimated career in the States. Even I wondered if she could do it. But she has – and now she’s back to hire me.’

‘She’s hired you?’ Zoe was completely confused, wondering for an awful, ludicrous moment whether Lisette was somehow paying Niall to marry Tash.

‘I’m one of the leads in the next film she’s producing,’ he explained. ‘Didn’t I tell you? It’s why Tash is so upset.’

‘Because Lisette’s given you a job?’ Zoe suddenly realised what he’d been driving at and felt a complete fool for going so far up the wrong tree – like a by-pass protester realising she’s been camped in an oak three miles from the chain-saws. She started frantically to back-track. ‘You think that’s why Tash was unhappy in Scotland?’

‘Of course it is.’ Niall didn’t quite meet her gaze. ‘My bloody awful timing has driven darling Tash into a silence that I can’t shake her out of. I trust her a thousand times more than I ever trusted Lisette, I’d die for her, but she just can’t see that. She’s convinced I’d run back to Lisette if she were just to click her fingers.’

Zoe was watching his face and could see the taut tic of worry working in his cheek.

‘Are you so sure you wouldn’t?’ she breathed, flinching as he looked up at her sharply.

But his answer was cut off as India’s exquisite face appeared around the door.

‘Mummy – er – hi, Niall. Actually you’d be better. Can I ask your advice?’ She was hanging half-in the doorway, most of her body still on the third rung of the stairs.

Niall, staring angrily at Zoe, pulled himself together and smiled across at her.

‘Sure, angel.’

‘I’ve got a date,’ India confessed, absolutely scarlet with embarrassment, ‘and I rather hoped you’d let me know if you think this is a bit too tarty or not?’

As she shuffled into the room, tugging down a rather short skirt which revealed her endless legs, Niall let out a wolf whistle and shook his head. ‘It’s simply lovely – if I were ten years younger I’d fall for you myself.’