Well Groomed (4 page)

In the first year of their relationship, she and Niall had spent about two months together, and most of that in the company of others. Tash had visited him on location several times, but it was a closed, cliquey world in which he worked fifteen-hour days and lived so far beneath the skin of the character he was portraying that it was like visiting a stranger – and not a very nice one of late, as he was increasingly being cast as baddies in action movies. In turn, Niall battled to be there to support her when she competed, but he inevitably turned up too late to see her ride, or not at all as he was so often delayed on set. Once he had even travelled to entirely the wrong horse trials and had waited in vain for her to appear.

In despair they had arrived at the conclusion that the only way they were going to stand a chance of seeing one another was for Niall to move his permanent home from London to the tiny West Berkshire village in which Tash’s team was based.

Huddling in the higgledy-piggledy hills that peaked and troughed alongside the far more graceful crest of the Wayfarer’s Ridgeway, like muscles alongside a backbone, the Fosbournes were a clutch of villages within an ancient and remarkably unspoilt parish. It was a piece of anachronistic old Berkshire, almost untouched by the silicone valley industrial estates, business parks and out-of-town superstores that sprawled between identikit suburban housing estates further to the east. Too far away from a large town or flat land to be of much use, the Fosbournes housed a friendly if reactionary community which tolerated its few sacrifices to Thatcher’s years well – the odd modern bungalow, DIY extension enthusiast or wailing weekday exterior alarm on a weekender’s cottage. It was true that nowadays the narrow lanes were more often patrolled by Ford Escorts with thumping stereos and local entrepreneurs’ flashy four-wheel drives than farmers’ pick-ups or tractors, but Niall adored the place and had set about house-hunting like a zealot.

He had rented the old, converted forge six months earlier so that he and Tash had a base to be alone in together. Before then she had occasionally travelled up to his London flat when she had time, or more often he had stayed with her at the Moncrieffs’ cramped farmhouse, where she was based for her work. Conducting their relationship surrounded by children, grooms, dogs, horses and the constant stream of visiting friends that the Moncrieffs attracted had been fun but frustrating.

He’d rented the cottage in mid-summer, when wistaria had curled seductively around its small, deep-set windows and pools of dappled sunlight had streamed into the vast, cool reception room. Once the village forge, it was bang in the centre of Fosbourne Ducis, equidistant between the pub and Lime Tree Farm, nestling in its rather ugly, squat way amongst barn conversions, brick and flint cottages, oak trees, high hawthorn hedges and narrow, patched-up Tarmac lanes. The long-neglected forge had been bought by weekending yuppies in the eighties and, with the addition of a loft conversion, bathroom and open-plan kitchen, they had transformed it into a stylish, if rather twee, love nest with a huge stone hearth which ate coal, a forest of knotted elm beams and more olde-worlde charm than Bilbo Baggins’s cottage.

When Niall had first seen it drenched in sunlight, he’d fallen madly in love with it, rejecting the far grander old rectories and manor houses that his estate agent had deemed more fitting to his star status. He and Tash had moved there in late-July and experienced three heavenly weeks of love-nesting instincts, occasionally staggering out to the Olive Branch or the local post office store when they could be bothered to get dressed. Niall had then flown to the States to work on some terrible action adventure film, leaving Tash to divide her time between decorating and the autumn eventing season. It was then that she’d discovered the mould growing on their gingerbread cottage.

In autumn it was awash; in winter it was a freezing tomb. The roof leaked, the damp spread, the rot rose and the pipes froze. Set right on the main village lane just yards from the ford that allowed the little River Fos to trickle from the Lime Tree Farm fields down to Fosbourne Manor’s lake and then on to Mill House, it flooded with alarming regularity. Tash had got used to keeping her wellingtons at the top of the stairs ready to don before she descended to breakfast each morning. She looked forward to travelling away to weekend events because the horse-box – even though on its last legs – was warmer and drier.

When Niall flew back for a rushed reunion, he found the forge’s rustic drawbacks charming. He laughed as they squelched around on the sodden rugs and boiled kettles to fill the bath, finding the whole experience wonderfully refreshing after the anonymous, clinical luxury of five-star hotels and top-of-the-range location trailers, not realising how tough it was to live with such inconvenience seven days a week. Tash, in turn, was so pleased to see him and so preoccupied with enjoying every moment of having him around, that she couldn’t bring herself to complain.

Alexandra was right. Tash had found it horrifically lonely without Niall and, in the last few weeks, had spent more nights than she cared to admit sleeping in her old room in Lime Tree Farm, which was tatty but warm, particularly when she was joined by the Moncrieffs’ border collie, Wally, and Zoe’s neurotic Dalmatian, Enid.

She spent so much time with the Moncrieffs – schooling and fittening the horses, taking her share of the day-to-day tasks in the yard, eating Zoe’s eclectic food, filling in entry forms, travelling to competitions, working out diet and exercise plans for the horses, drinking and talking late into the night as they planned the year ahead – that there seldom seemed any point in staggering the half-mile home. And Niall knew that if she didn’t answer the phone at the forge, she would almost inevitably be sitting on the splitting leather sofa at the farm with Wally’s head in her lap and a glass of wine in her hand, laughing with Zoe or helping her kids with their homework.

‘He’s been doing the most Godawful work in order to pay off the divorce settlement – cast three times in the past eighteen months as a Middle-Eastern baddie in muscle-men war movies. It keeps them apart so much, and he loathes the scripts. I bet Lisette’s grinning from Versace earring to earring. She wants him back, I’m certain.’

Sally, the most wildly indiscreet member of the family, was busily filling in Alexandra and Etty on all the latest gossip about Niall’s and Tash’s lives and those of anyone else that they mutually knew, when Niall re-emerged wearing what he had been dressed in the night before – a very grubby pair of white jeans and a vast navy blue Guernsey with cracked leather elbow patches and an unravelling hem. His dark locks were all over the place, he’d cut himself shaving and he was still squinting with hungover tiredness. Yet such was his presence and charm that when he smiled his big, lazy smile at Etty, she flushed delightedly under her bearskin and took a hasty swig of gin to calm her nerves.

Sally quickly shut up about Niall’s ex-wife and asked Alexandra what she and Pascal were planning to do during the rest of their stay in England.

‘Oh, darling, I wish we could cram everything in!’ Alexandra was still clutching her coat around her oddly animated stomach, even though the fire was now heating the room to toasting point. ‘There are so many old friends I want to catch up with, but we’ve got to fly back for New Year’s Eve because Pascal’s father is eighty and he’s having a huge, boring old party in Paris. So we’re whizzing to London the day after tomorrow for a quick stint at the Ritz and lots of drinks parties, then we’ll take Mother back to Scotland and fly to Paris from there.’

Etty started grumbling rather heavily under her breath about Paris in January and perhaps never seeing it again, so Alexandra rushed on.

‘Of course tomorrow is Sophia’s usual Boxing Day do – so nice to be able to go for once. We usually can’t get a flight over. You are going, aren’t you?’

Sally swallowed awkwardly and shot a suspicious glance at Matty.

‘We haven’t actually been invited this year,’ she admitted.

‘Don’t be ridiculous, darling!’ Alexandra laughed. ‘Of course you have. Sophia wouldn’t not invite her brother, however snobbish she’s been about the fact that you turned up in jeans the year before last. She always invites the entire family for Boxing Day. Always.’

Matty cleared his throat and looked away furtively.

‘Well, we’ve agreed to go to some friends in London for lunch tomorrow anyway,’ he muttered uncomfortably, toying with a button on his oversized cardigan. ‘It would be a lot of effort to drive back to London tonight then Worcestershire tomorrow just to see more or less the same people again.’

‘Nonsense!’ Etty joined in the fight, loving an argument. ‘You can stay ’ere tonight,
non
?’

‘We couldn’t possibly – it’s far too small!’ Matty snapped.

‘Surely the Moncrieffs would put us up?’ Sally suggested. She was rather excited by the prospect of getting another gawp at Matty’s elder sister and her husband Ben’s stately pile, which they so seldom visited. That would also get her out of lunch with Matty’s interminably dreary, politically correct friends, Tony and Hetty.

‘No!’ Matty snarled rather too forcefully. ‘It’s Christmas night, for Chrissake. We can’t just turn up uninvited at the farm and beg a bed.’

‘Joseph and Mary did,’ Alexandra pointed out smoothly.

‘Sure, they wouldn’t mind about that now,’ Niall pointed out from the kitchen where he was at last pouring some drinks and once again getting under Pascal’s feet. ‘Would you like me to give them a call after lunch and ask? Better still, we could walk over there and say hi.’

‘No, thanks.’ Matty stalked towards the stairs. ‘We haven’t enough baby stuff to stay a night away. And besides, we’re committed tomorrow. Mine’s a huge scotch, Niall.’ He stomped up, kicking the bare risers with his toes.

‘Which means I’m the designated driver again,’ Sally sighed. ‘Boy, he’s tetchy today – I’m sorry, everyone.’

‘Always was a grumpy little milksop,’ Etty grumbled, listening as, upstairs, Matty told off Tash in an embarrassed and huffy voice for not locking the bathroom door. ‘Just like his ’orrible father.’

‘Mother!’ Alexandra shushed, shooting Sally an apologetic look.

‘It hasn’t got a lock,’ Tash was explaining over her shoulder as she pounded downstairs, having changed from her damp trouser suit to a woolly red sweater dress.

‘Ah, Tash – I’ve got your pressy—’ Alexandra started to open her coat.

‘I suppose that terrible man weel be there tomorrow?’ Etty butted in, pursuing her own line of conversation.

‘I expect so,’ Alexandra sighed, closing her coat again.

‘Who?’ Tash kissed Niall on the cheek and helped him prise open the ice compartment of the freezer.

‘Your father.’ Alexandra wrinkled her nose as though talking about a strong smell.

‘Oh, him.’ Tash shrugged. ‘Now who wants scotch and who wants gin and tonic? Only Niall seems to have poured about seven glasses of both.’

‘How many are there then?’ Niall looked up.

‘Seven adults,’ Tash counted. ‘Three sprogs and Linus.’

‘Ah, well, I know Linus likes a few chasers with his three o’clock bottle.’ Niall held up his hands with a big grin and downed a scotch in one. ‘You okay there, Pascal?’

‘Hmmph.’ Pascal – who had descended into understandable sulks sometime between peeling his eightieth and ninetieth sprout – looked up from his parsnip purée, grey eyes narrowed. ‘Lunch, he is ready in
cinq minutes
.’

‘That’s great, so it is.’ Niall was looking slightly worried. ‘Tash . . .’ He cleared his throat and jerked his head towards the stairs door.

Halfway up them, they went into a huddle.

‘How many plates do we have exactly?’ he whispered.

Tash covered her mouth, eyes widening as she gazed at him.

‘Six settings,’ she muttered through her fingers.

‘Will that stretch to ten?’

Biting her lip, Tash shook her head. She knew her stepfather’s love of formal dining. Having so nobly set to work creating a lunch at which he was supposed to be a guest, and having cooked it with far more skill than she could ever have hoped for, Pascal would now want to sit at the head of a beautifully laid table, playing host with his usual bonhomie and aplomb, as though he was back in his Loire Valley
manoir
hosting a banquet for thirty.

They had the table – a grand, creaking, stone-topped one which Hugo Beauchamp had given Niall as a moving-in present and Tash generally used for spreading out her art equipment. And they had enough chairs – just, if they used the sofa, the bathroom laundry chair and the three garden chairs out of the shed, she worked out. But their crockery and cutlery would never stretch. Why hadn’t she thought of that before?

‘Okay.’ She scratched her head, thinking fast. ‘You dash along to the Olive Branch – they’ll have finished serving lunch by now. Beg and borrow what you can – serving stuff too. Give Ange a present as a bribe – anything you can find. Or tell him I’ll paint a picture of the pub as thanks. Steal if you have to. I’ll set up what I can here.’

While Niall, still pulling on his shoes, dashed along the lane, Tash rushed around the cottage to the bemused speculation of her family, pulling a duvet cover out of the laundry cupboard and spreading it over the table in place of a cloth, and ramming bits of the already bedraggled Christmas tree into a chipped vase between the two stubby candles in the centre.

‘Do you think she’ll stop for a moment?’ Alexandra hissed at Sally as Tash raced around in search of napkins. ‘Only I want to give her this present.’ She opened her coat a fraction.

‘Oh, there it is,’ Sally giggled. ‘I was wondering what had happened to that. Don’t show it to Matty, for God’s sake. He’ll start lecturing about one being for life, not just for Christmas.’

‘Oh, that’s so sentimentally English. This is a French pup, darling.’

‘You
smuggled
it?’ Sally balked.