Well Groomed (40 page)

To her relief Tash spotted what appeared to be an interconnecting bathroom and darted guiltily inside.

There was no lock, so she shut the door firmly and perched on the edge of the bath with her feet inside it to remove her wet boot. The dregs of Lisette’s wine spattered out as she pulled it off, staining the white enamel of the bath like diluted blood. It smelled foul – a nose-punching mixture of hot foot and fruity Brouilly.

Popping the boot on the loo seat, Tash pulled a lime-encrusted brass shower attachment from its antique telephone-like rest above the taps and twiddled the knobs to rinse her foot. The water that jetted out on to her red-stained toes was at first icy cold and then almost immediately so scalding that it almost took her skin off. Letting out a yelp of pain, Tash drenched most of the bathroom as she fell backwards off the bath rim, landing on a scratchy, balding rug and knocking all the air painfully from her lungs.

From her upside-down position, she watched with motionless, winded horror as the bathroom door was pushed open above her head and a pair of long legs walked in, trouser fly already being wrenched open in anticipation of a quick slash. Craning her neck, Tash could just make out the bottom of Hugo’s chin, and was perfectly positioned to look up both of his nostrils.

‘Hi,’ she croaked as, not spotting her at his feet, he almost trod on her face.

Stumbling around to avoid falling over her, he backed away in astonishment as he took in her supine position and the fact that she was clutching his shower attachment to her chest.

‘I might have bloody guessed,’ he sighed, squatting down so that she could see up his nostrils in even closer focus. They were remarkably clean and hairless, she noted with interest, taking advantage of her rare stance to have a good peek. She was starting to get her breath back at last, although it was still shallow and gasping. She tried to get up, but something seemed to be holding her down.

‘Tash, what the hell are you doing?’ He glanced across at her damp boot, which had landed in a large money plant when she’d knocked it off the loo seat in falling.

‘Cleaning my foot.’ Tash smiled weakly up at him, realising that her only escape was to brazen the circumstances out honestly. She was having considerable difficulty getting up now. ‘It got covered in wine, you see.’

‘I see.’ He plainly didn’t, blue eyes narrowed with irritation and mistrust. ‘Wouldn’t you be better off doing it in the bath?’

‘Well, I was, but I . . . ’

‘In your own bathroom,’ he added, leaning across her to turn off the shower which was still dribbling on to the floor beside Tash’s knee.

In doing this, he practically had to clamber over her, and Tash found to her horror that her face was pressed into his hard, muscular stomach just inches above his waistband. She lay flat against the floor like a corpse to avoid touching him. He was wearing a crisp cotton shirt that smelled deliciously of aftershave and deodorant as it brushed against the tip of her nose. She fought an urge to breathe in more deeply.

The shower curtailed, he backed off hastily and regarded her from a safe distance. Tash made another effort to get up and was again cut short.

‘Are you hurt?’ Hugo muttered coldly.

‘Er – no.’ Tash smiled apologetically, wriggling around on the floorboards. ‘But my dress appears to be attached to the floor.’ She rolled her eyes upwards, indicating the back of her neck where her zip had become intimately involved with a large amount of tassel, tethering her to the ancient rug like a prisoner-of-war pinned out in the midday sun.

Swearing under his breath in exasperation, Hugo moved forward to free her – cursing as the tassel refused to budge, and finally using his teeth on the knot. As his hot breath involuntarily caressed the top vertebrae of her spine, Tash tried not to enjoy the sensation at all, but her pulses had started to skip disobedient beats. Flinching away as his lips accidentally made contact with the back of her neck, she didn’t like the ominous ripping sound with which she was finally freed.

‘Thanks.’ She clambered up, using his leg as support before realising what it was and hastily letting it go.

‘Now can you push off so that I can take a piss in private?’ He nodded impatiently towards the door.

As Tash dashed out, she was unpleasantly aware of a chill breeze against her back. But even more discomforting was the pronounced limp she now had as a result of wearing just one boot. The other was still in with Hugo. She couldn’t realistically expect to head downstairs and mingle into the background with one leg four inches shorter than the other and her dress undone. She groaned to herself quietly. However much distance she was longing to put between herself and Hugo’s wet bathroom, she would have to wait for her hostage boot to be released.

Feeling her face start to burn, she sat on the edge of his bed and waited for him to emerge. Fiddling awkwardly around behind her neck with her hands, she managed to get her zip about two-thirds of the way up but beyond that it gritted its teeth and refused to budge, like Snob on a bad day.

He took ages. Waiting nervily, Tash gnawed at her nails and gazed around the room, now realising that it must be his. He was pretty messy, although nothing on Niall’s grand scale of chaos. The huge, dark wardrobes had gaping doors with ties hooked over them like thirsty tongues panting at a trough; a dressing gown was tossed over an old altar stool and a pair of trousers were trying to kick their way back out of a laundry bag. The open drawers of a tall chest were spilling out clean socks and underpants – natty black jersey ones, Tash noted. From the state of the room, she guessed his mind wasn’t set on seduction that night. Even given his devastating good looks, it was pretty off-putting. None of the eventing groupies putting themselves on offer downstairs would mind, but Hugo wouldn’t see them as conquests. Tash doubted he was planning to take Lisette later – not unless he tidied up first. Lisette struck her as a woman who wouldn’t just want a man to take his socks off before sex – she’d prefer that all eighteen pairs were off the bed too.

For something to do, she matched a few clean pairs together and balled them up before stopping herself, realising what Hugo would make of her if he caught her pairing up his socks like a crazed Mary Poppins when he re-emerged. He was taking positively ages in there, she realised worriedly. She hoped he wasn’t ill. She had read somewhere – in a Robert Maxwell biography, she suspected – that men’s blood-pressure could fall dramatically when they relieved themselves, making them drop in a dead faint. She hoped Hugo hadn’t passed out. Men’s lavatorial habits were largely a mystery to her – she tried to discourage Niall from wandering in to take a slash while she was in the bath because she felt some things should remain a mystery, her bath-time habits for one.

Gazing at the walls, she wondered whether his bed was a mess because Kirsty’s boyfriend was shacking up at Lime Tree Farm, meaning that she would go home with him and not stay on at Haydown. He was certainly in a pretty stinky mood considering it was his own birthday party. Perhaps he minded turning thirty, Tash mused, looking at her watch. He really was taking ages in the loo. She hoped he wasn’t doing anything gruesome to her boot; her one bare foot was starting to get seriously chilly.

His taste in pictures was a conservative mix of hunting oils, naive square farm animals and a couple of family portraits, although she was wildly flattered to spot one of her own oils of his old event horse, Saxophonist, in amongst the far grander marques.

There were piles of papers, schedules, notes and coins on every surface, as though he had emptied his pockets all over the room and never bothered to fill them up again. Tash could see two mobile phones, a Walkman and a digital organiser on one vast dressing table alone. It, too, had gaping drawers, from one of which poked a very tempting-looking hunk of family-sized Galaxy bar, the foil glinting seductively in the dim light.

Her stomach was growling and pleading like a small child tugging its mother’s skirt outside a sweet shop. Tash gazed at the chocolate longingly. It had been a stressful night, and she was certain that Hugo wouldn’t miss a couple of squares. He was still busily occupied, water swooshing now, hot pipes clanking. She briefly wondered if he was having a shower or, even more uncharacteristically, cleaning up after her boot blitz.

Dashing across the room, she broke off several squares of chocolate and was chomping frantically when something caught her eye in the drawer below. With bulging cheeks, she rooted urgently amongst the teenage fan mail, bank statements and credit card slips to extract it.

There it was in all its dreadful splendour – her mis-routed Valentine’s card, complete with lipstick kisses and semi-nude photographs.

Looking at it once again, Tash gasped in horror as she took in the full implication of sending Hugo such a thing. The pictures were simply ghastly – more like mug-shots of a dead prostitute in a Lynda la Plante mini-series than titillating self-portraits. She had been far bigger then, positively bursting out of some of the underwear, and her mastery of the timer on the Polaroid had clearly not been great – most of the pictures were at very odd angles, cutting off a vital limb, her head or most of her body altogether. Sadly, they were all in clear focus. Squinting at a close-up of her cellulite-and-G-string look, Tash wanted to curl up and die with shame, particularly when she spotted the pizza delivery boxes and empty wine bottles in the background of the shot. What was even more ghastly was that Hugo had kept it to gloat over. She hoped to God he wasn’t planning to blackmail her with it.

Springing upright, Tash realised that she had no time to lose; she was going to have to destroy the evidence.

It was too big to fit into her bag to steal away and dispense with in private later, and the cardboard was too thick to rip. When she tried, she merely bent it around and caused two of the photographs to fall to the floor.

Hearing the loo flush on the other side of the bathroom door, she looked around desperately for inspiration. Bingo! In front of her was the open window, and on a table in front of that were several match books.

Not thinking too far ahead, Tash fumbled with the matches until one spluttered and took. The card was largely made up of glue and photographic card so went up like a toxic bomb, blue-black smoke licking towards her fingers in seconds. Victorious, Tash threw it out of the window.

Gusted by the wind, it flew straight back in again and landed on the laundry basket.

In a panic, she ran over to it and tried to pick it up, but it was a ball of foul-smelling flame now and threatening to ignite the basket and its contents within seconds. Hugo’s trousers were already developing scorch marks. Tash searched madly for something to pick it up with, but there were no tongs to hand.

In a total flap now, she grabbed the two mobile phones from the top of the dresser and, extending the aerials, carefully used those as metal chopsticks to lift the flaming card from its wicker tinder and rush it towards the window.

She almost made it, but at the last minute her flaming bundle crackled loudly, shooting sparks into her face before plunging to the floor.

‘Shit!’

Wailing, Tash started to stamp on it with her one boot. It stuck fast to the plastic sole, threatening to burn off her leg. She let out an anguished shriek and started to hop around like a crazed hopscotch champion.

Wandering out of the bathroom at long last, Hugo was remarkably quick at sizing up the situation. Within seconds he had sped back into the bathroom, fetched a plastic cleaning bucket of water and tossed it over Tash’s melting boot, extinguishing the flame instantly.

She was breathless with relief and mortification, but as she opened her mouth to gulp her apologies, Hugo held up his hand, face stony with fury.

‘Don’t even bother to explain,’ he hissed. ‘I can’t take it right now.’

Shutting her mouth again, Tash swallowed and nodded meekly.

He started to pace around the room as though chained there, his tortoiseshell hair on end where he had rubbed his hands through it, blue eyes searing into the furniture with such angry intensity that Tash expected every piece spontaneously to combust.

She backed away slightly, aware of the water in her boot starting to warm up. A repulsive smell of burning plastic lingered in the air. Biting her lip, she wondered whether she should boldly walk into the bathroom, extract her boot and then leg it, but she supposed that wouldn’t be diplomatic. After all, she had just tried to flood his bathroom and burn down his bedroom. They were tremendously competitive with one another, but these acts of sabotage were rather too much even by Hugo’s Machiavellian standards.

Thankfully he had stopped pacing and was staring at her with an unreadable expression that could register anywhere between utter contempt and mild fear on the emotional scale.

‘Er – sorry,’ she muttered, but Hugo butted in before she even got the word fully out.

‘Shut up.’ He started pacing again.

Clearly not the right move, Tash realised. In fact, she had regressed the situation somewhat.

The pacing was really fraying her nerves. She thought about joining in and pacing – or limping – around with him, but decided not to risk it. He wasn’t beyond hitting her when he was in this state. Besides, she was standing in a pool of water and figured that wading it around the room wouldn’t go down too well.

She was dying to escape back to the party and dive into a huge drink. Niall would think she’d gone home without him at this rate. But Hugo was pacing between her and the door now, barring her way. And she really needed that other boot. Keeping an eye on his restless stalking, she started to edge towards the bathroom.

He stood stock still and swung around to her, making her jump backwards in fright and almost land on the bed.

‘You’ve already done in there,’ he drawled. ‘Don’t you want to throw paint over one of the drawing rooms, or torch my kitchen instead?’