Well Groomed (71 page)

‘No,’ she said firmly, not moving and not dropping her gaze.

‘No?’

‘No.’ She shook her head, jumping as another clap of thunder boomed across the valley, much closer this time.

‘Okay then.’ He shrugged. ‘Just thought I’d ask, seeing as you’re hanging around. I thought that was what you were after.’

Tash sighed. ‘Please, Hugo, don’t start all this again. Not here – not tonight.’

‘All what?’ he demanded, his face momentarily illuminated by a flash of sheet lightning, pale and wild-eyed.

‘This “You’re gagging for me, Tash” line you keep feeding me. It’s hurtful and humiliating and I wish you’d get off my back about it.’

‘You were the one who asked me to kiss you if you won Badminton,’ he snapped.

Looking insolent, he watched her through narrowed eyes.

‘I know I did.’ She stared to the turbulent sky in shame. ‘I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing to ask.’ She pulled her hair back from her face.

‘Well, why did you then?’

She blinked as a huge splash of rain ricocheted off her nose. She badly wanted to gibber a great, long explanation, but he was staring at her with such wild-eyed, distraught intensity, she bottled out. It was probably the last thing in the world he wanted to hear right now. If she told him what was going on, she knew she’d crack up completely, and she owed it to Hugo to be strong. She had no right to suck him into her own swamp of problems.

‘My heart goes out to you tonight, Hugo,’ she said. ‘I’d give anything to take time back, to restore Bod to you. But I can’t. All I can be is your friend, and be here for you, but you make it so bloody difficult sometimes.’ She stretched out her hands to clutch his, but his fingertips slithered away as silently as a spider.

A steady patter of rain had started tapping on their skulls as the heavens started to open – tentatively at first as though checking that the mechanics were working before opening the sprinklers to full power until it was rattling on the roof of the Land-Rover cab like shingle thrown against a window.

‘I’ve tried to make it difficult.’ He suddenly grabbed her wrist tightly. ‘Christ, I’ve been trying to make it impossible. I don’t want to be your fucking friend, Tash! Can’t you see that? Haven’t I been trying to tell you that all year?’

She tried to pull her hands away, but he had a tight hold. The patter was intensifying on their heads now, like the drumming of impatient fingers. Tash’s hair was being plastered to her face and her silk shirt was starting to wrinkle and cling like old skin.

‘I don’t want you as a friend,’ he repeated, fingers digging into her tendons like piano wire. ‘I can’t bear that – it hurts too much. I thought I could hack it, but I can’t.’

Wrestling free, Tash rubbed her wrists and watched him hunch away from her, head hanging in utter despair, hair dripping water on to his nose. Her heart had started to do its mad leap-frogging act again and she was fighting for breath. This was absolutely the wrong time to discuss her feelings for him, she realised, but her timing always had been lousy.

‘What do you want then?’ she managed to croak.

He looked up, his eyes red and hooded with tiredness. ‘What’s the point? What’s the point in fucking telling you?’

Tash realised she had started to shake as the biting wind and driving rain seeped into her skin. The rain was being thrown down in such stair-rods now that it seemed they were almost underwater. It was running into her eyes, trickling into her shoes and pouring in rivulets along the creases of her leather jeans.

Still neither of them moved.

There was a distant rattle above the heaving rain as a motorbike started to approach the yard from the long back driveway. Tash glanced at the headlight bobbing in the distance, refracting in the pressure-hose angled rain, and then back to Hugo.

‘I think that’s Stefan.’ Her voice was drowned by a heavy crash of thunder. A moment later and an arrow of forked lightning unzipped the valley.

As it abated, Tash could hear the bike roaring into the yard entrance behind them, its engine cutting almost immediately.

‘I’ve loved the same man for years and years,’ she told Hugo hurriedly, her voice wavering all over the place in her haste to get out the confession before Stefan got close enough to hear. ‘And it’s not Niall.’

Hugo turned to stare at her, his gaze devouring her face, sad eyes as dark and misty as bilberries. Behind them, Stefan was already wading through the puddles in the yard.

‘I’ve only ever been in love once,’ Hugo suddenly muttered, his voice almost inaudible under the din of the storm. ‘Bloody awful emotion – I couldn’t cope with it at all. I suppose it’s okay if you both do it – like eating garlic. I just couldn’t get rid of the taste.’

‘And now?’

He shrugged bleakly. ‘Whoever said it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all was just a loser.’

‘Tennyson.’ Her voice wobbled.

‘You always were better read than me.’

‘There are lots of poems about unrequited love,’ she croaked. ‘And I’ve had a lot of years to read them.’

He said nothing, bilberry eyes blinking away the rain which was beading his lashes.

The next moment Stefan was towering over them, absolutely sodden, looking the picture of sympathy, his schoolboy face pinched with worry.

‘Shit, I’m cracking up for you, my friend.’ He loped over to Hugo on his long, thin legs, dripping water everywhere from his cycle leathers. ‘Jack phoned the farm to say what had happened.’ He wiped water from his face with the back of his glove. ‘God, you’re both drenched. Come inside.’

‘Ah – the next nursing shift, how timely.’ Hugo smiled at him before turning back to Tash. ‘You can piss off now, Sister French.’

‘Hugo—’

‘PISS OFF!’ His face was venomous.

‘Steady on, Hugs.’ Stefan held him back as he made a lunge for Tash who scuttled off the car bonnet, tripping in her haste.

‘You’ve had your fun and heard all you wanted to hear to make you feel good.’ Hugo spat out his words. ‘Go back to Niall and tell him what a sad bastard I am.’

‘Hugo, please listen to me—’

‘Fuck off, fuck off, FUCK OFF!’ he yelled, burying his face in his hands and starting to sob. ‘For Christ’s sake, get rid of her, Stef. Get her out of here.’

As Hugo wandered unsteadily towards the house, Stefan hastily kissed Tash’s cheek and pushed her into the Land-Rover, ducking as the rain flattened his spiky hair and ran into his eyes.

‘I’d better follow him,’ he yelled over the machine-gun rattle of the downpour on the cab roof. ‘I’m sorry, darling. Take no notice of what he said – he’s feeling so hellish about Bod that he needs to savage something. I’ll look after him. For Christ’s sake, drive carefully.’

Tash cried all the way back to Fosbourne, which barely mattered as she couldn’t have seen a thing through the windscreen even had she been dry-eyed. The wipers were next to useless in the downpour, and she relied upon knowing the lanes to get her back. Even though she took large chunks of several verges with her, she made it safely. There were floods in several spots, some already almost a foot deep. Had she been in the design classic, she would have been stranded miles from a phone.

She knew she should deliver the car back to Gus and tell them what was going on, but she couldn’t bring herself to.

The forge was in power-cut darkness and poor Beetroot, who was terrified by the storm, crawled out from her hiding place beneath the coffee table, positively trembling with fear.

Tash collapsed on the sofa and cuddled her.

‘He thinks I’m so blissfully happy with Niall,’ she told Beetroot in disbelief. ‘How can I adore someone who can be that thick? And so downright, pigheadedly, bloody-mindedly proud?’

Beetroot licked her tears, desperate to reassure her.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, THE Lime Tree Farm mob were eating their usual noisy breakfast, agog to know what had happened at Haydown the night before. Only Zoe was away – out stocking up at Tesco’s according to the others.

‘Is it open at this time in the morning?’ Tash looked at her watch tiredly. It was still before seven.

‘Must be,’ Penny said brightly.

Settling at the kitchen table, Tash wished that Zoe was around; she was desperate to talk to her about Hugo. His car was still parked in the lane outside the farm from the night before. She’d wanted to drive straight up there that morning to see how he was, but hadn’t had the nerve. She had a pretty shrewd idea that she was the last person he’d want to see.

‘Sally’s just called,’ Penny told her, towelling her wet blonde hair dry and eating toast at the same time. ‘Apparently she turned up on location first thing this morning to find Hugo shivering in the kitchen with his dogs, and Stefan fast asleep at the table. She thinks they’d stayed up talking all night, but Hugo is still pacing around like a mad thing. I could hear him yelling in the background while she was on the phone.’

‘His best horse was destroyed last night,’ Tash sighed, helping herself to a coffee. ‘I don’t think I’d sleep if it happened to me.’

‘So what exactly happened?’ Gus noticed her red eyes. ‘We thought you’d come back here afterwards.’

‘We waited up for hours.’ Penny was towelling her ears vigorously now.

The mood was all light-hearted cheer and busy activity. Tash could hear India thudding around in her room overhead, and Rufus’s stereo already booming out its early-morning bass tattoo. Someone was whistling up on the landing, and out in the yard Ted and Franny were chattering loudly about some pub gossip from the night before.

Settling beside Gus at the table, Tash gave them a brief, painful précis up until her exit from Haydown House the night before. She carefully omitted to mention their lop-sided conversation about love or the fact that Hugo had practically thrown her out of his yard afterwards. The whole thing seemed like a bad dream, she kept having to pinch herself to believe it had actually happened.

‘I had no idea Bod had Navicular,’ said Gus, absolutely appalled. ‘Shit, what a bloody awful thing to know! And Hugo didn’t breathe a word to anyone. It must have been eating him up, poor bastard.’

‘He was devastated.’ Tash took a slug of coffee and winced as it scalded a filling. ‘But there was nothing he could do. He knew Bod wouldn’t have been able to compete after this year. Badminton was going to be their last big event together. Now he won’t even be going.’

At that moment, Kirsty wandered in, looking ratty. ‘That friend of you guys is still in the bath,’ she moaned, flopping down at the table and starting to leaf through the post. ‘Hi, Tash hen. Sorry to hear about last night. Is Hugo okay?’

‘Not particularly.’ Tash watched her, but she was calmly ripping open a letter from Australia and far more interested in moaning about the bathroom-hogger than asking after Hugo.

‘Half an hour he’s been in there. What’s he doing? Re-tiling the walls?’

‘It’s Matty,’ Penny explained to Tash in an undertone. ‘He got totally plastered last night and had to stay here. There was a bit of a confrontation after you’d gone, actually. Poor Sally went back to the hotel – I think she called just now to check he was okay as much as anything.’

‘Yes?’ Tash wasn’t particularly interested. Her brother’s problems seemed to pale into insignificance right now.

‘You’ll never believe this,’ Penny went pink, ‘but they started having this full dress row at the dining table while we were all tucking in – just after you and Hugo left – it was wildly embarrassing. Niall’s mother almost had a coronary.’

‘Your brother refused to eat the fish because he’s a veggie.’ Gus spooned sugar into his tea. ‘And Sally cracked some joke about him finding salmonogamy hard to swallow. Didn’t quite get it, to be frank. Odd woman, your sister-in-law.’

‘The next moment, they were accusing one another of adultery.’ Penny shook her head. ‘Or rather Matty was confessing to it. With my sister of all people.’

Gus cleared his throat. ‘He told Sally in front of everyone that he’d had a fling with Zoe at one of our parties a couple of summers ago. India and Rufus were sitting at the table listening to it all. Poor Zoe didn’t know where to look. He even asked her to back him up when he went into details.’

‘I thought that was just a bit of a drunken kiss.’ Tash rubbed her eyes tiredly. ‘Nothing very serious.’

‘You knew about it?’ Penny gaped at her.

‘Niall told me. Did he stay here last night, by the way? Talking to Matty or something?’ She hoped he hadn’t passed out blind drunk anywhere.

Gus and Penny exchanged glances. ‘Yes, something like that. He persuaded his mother to stay at the cast’s hotel in Marlbury – she was all set to return to Haydown, which you can imagine would have been a bit sticky. Lisette and David took her in their cab, along with Sally, who was in a state.’

‘Poor Zoe.’ Tash smiled sadly. ‘Her dinner party was a wash-out, wasn’t it?’

‘Oh, I think it had its compensations.’ Gus cleared his throat uncomfortably.

Tash knew she should dedicate a morning to pepping up Hunk’s lack-lustre dressage, but she had to get away from the chat and babble of the yard where talk was of nothing but the disastrous dinner party and Hugo’s awful loss.

She took Mickey Rourke through the Fosbourne villages and out on to the matrix of old, formal rides that criss-crossed the grounds of a local estate, which the landowner allowed them to use. As the lush green canopy enveloped her like a verdant tunnel, she tried to clear her head as she listened to Mickey’s huge, soup-plate feet thud out a muffled, squeaky rhythm in the thick, emerald green grass below. The trees, still wet from the storm, dropped great splashing beads of water on to her shoulders and legs, and Mickey continually tripped over newly exposed tree roots and slithered around on the glassy grass like an oversized grey duckling on a frozen pond. What had Hugo called him: ‘the clumsiest horse I’ve ever encountered’? Tash bit her lip.