Well Groomed (8 page)

Zoe wrinkled her long, straight nose as she passed Tash a box of kitchen matches. ‘Bit hectic. Gus had invited a load of people who he hadn’t told me about, as ever.’

Even her voice was as warm and rich as butterscotch. Both sisters had cut-glass, almost antiquatedly clipped accents, harking back to hours of elocution lessons forced upon them by their snobbish parents. But whereas Penny had a high, slightly quacking voice that could split eardrums, Zoe’s was so soft and velvety that she merely melted them.

‘I was here when they arrived,’ Tash reminded her. ‘I saw Stefan Johanssen poling up along with Brian Sedgewick’s mob. And two of Gus’s brothers were arriving as I left.’

‘So you were.’ Zoe rubbed her forehead. ‘Well, one chap got so paralytic he had to stay, and then Enid took a piece out of him when he came down for a glass of water during the night.’

‘Poor thing.’

‘It’s okay, she calmed down once she realised he wasn’t an intruder, didn’t you, darling?’ She blew a kiss to her nervy Dalmatian who was curled into a tight, uncomfortable knot in one of the tiny cats’ beds by the Aga. Certifiably paranoid and singularly devoted to Zoe, Enid was wildly jealous of anyone her mistress touched or spoke to. Ears sinking back into her head, she blinked her pale amber eyes worriedly, anxious that she was being picked on.

‘I was referring to him.’

‘Oh, he’ll live. Gus administered a tet jab with remarkable skill considering the number of bottles he’d sunk.’

‘Christ, I’m glad I just had Matty and Sally snoring on our sofa.’ Tash gazed around the kitchen, seeking comfort in the familiar, tatty paintings, over-stuffed shelves, piles of post and horse paraphernalia which littered every available surface. The room always smelled of hot coffee and wet boots.

‘So Matty and Sally enjoyed Christmas with you, did they?’ Zoe asked coolly.

‘Sally did.’ Tash gazed at the large, wipe-clean wall roster which had her marked as off work for the week. There was very little writing on it at all at this time of year as most of the horses were roughed off for winter and there were no events to attend apart from the odd hunt or indoor jumping competition. Come May it would be covered in bright felt pen marks like a toddler’s mad doodling.

‘And Matty?’ Zoe was trying to coax Enid into eating a Bonio.

‘Sulked throughout, as ever.’ She sighed. ‘I think they’ve got a lot of money problems at the moment. But Niall cheered him up in the end – he was wonderful, making everyone laugh so much.’ She noticed that the list of next year’s scheduled BHS trials was up on the wall at last, Blu-tacked beside the work roster with those competitions they were already entered for marked in red and those still pending in pencil. Eventing was so over-subscribed these days that sending off an entry fee was no longer a guarantee of competing – there was always a chance of being balloted out, and one had to choose which events to give top priority very carefully. Tash noticed to her delight that she was pencilled in for the biggest spring event, Badminton, on both of her top horses and a big grin spread across her face without her even noticing it.

Watching her, Zoe picked up a dead match and played with it thoughtfully. She knew Tash pretty well by now, realising that beneath the shy, rather clumsy exterior there existed a far tougher, more decisive heart. A heart that would tear itself out for something it loved and believed in, but with a good deal of self-preservation embedded in it too.

Tash was often embarrassed by the impact of her own physical presence. Despite an urge not to stand out, she was not a person who blended easily into the background. Extremely tall, curvy, and in possession of two huge, oddly coloured eyes, she inevitably drew attention as she dominated every crowd, her unkempt mop of hair several inches above everyone else’s crown. These were not always admiring glances either: Tash had the natural hunched gaucheness of the self-conscious and seldom made an effort to dress up. She was renowned for looking dreadfully scruffy on almost all occasions. But this simply enhanced the effect whenever she did dress up. And, unusually, she had dressed up today.

Dark, smudgy kohl lines encircled her green and amber eyes, a beaded pin was holding her thick, curling hair up from her face to show off those high, pink cheek bones and long, long neck. She was even wearing a dress – the first time Zoe had seen her in one. Short, bias-cut and silky, it showed off her elongated curves and endless legs, although a tiny ladder was already threading its way up her tights.

‘What’s the occasion?’ She smiled. ‘I thought you’d just popped in for a coffee.’

‘Niall’s taking me out for dinner at the Olive Branch tonight.’ Tash was staring at one of Zoe’s daughter’s GCSE drawings which was curling its way from its Blu-tacked position on the wall. ‘That’s a great picture – India just gets better and better.’ She glanced at Zoe again. ‘I was hoping the others would be here.’

‘Well, Gus and Pen should be back any minute – they’re raiding Tesco’s wine department for New Year’s Eve. You two are coming, aren’t you?’

‘To the party?’ Tash grinned at her. ‘Try and stop us.’

‘Hugo will be back from Oz by then too – in fact, I think he’s due back today, so he’ll add to the glamour.’

‘And to the drinks bill,’ Tash sniffed.

‘You two still not talking?’ Zoe cocked her head critically. With her blonde, blunt-cut hair and thoroughbred features, she bore a rather startling resemblance to Joanna Lumley as Purdey. The cool, velvet voice and cat’s eyes added to the illusion. There were moments Tash almost ducked for fear of getting a karate kick in the eye.

She pursed her mouth uneasily. ‘Not sure. I’ve avoided him since the end of the season.’

‘Mmm.’ Zoe eyed her thoughtfully. ‘I think Gus mentioned that you wouldn’t even go hunting in case he was out with the field and tried to run you into a ditch.’

‘Something like that,’ Tash muttered. Although she had used the excuse of avoiding Hugo for not hunting this year, Tash had other reasons as well. A childhood accident and a general disapproval of the barbarity of the sport kept her away more than her tall, arrogant bête noire.

Hugo Beauchamp ran an eventing yard just a few miles away from Lime Tree Farm. He’d known Penny and Gus Moncrieff for years and they were mutually reliant upon one another, trading horses between the two yards, swapping advice, sharing the transport to many of the more distant events and helping one another out in a crisis. Hugo, who had a private income and a fat sponsorship deal, often benefited from the relationship more than the Moncrieffs, buying their best youngsters for the cash they desperately needed to keep the yard running. As a result, he was ranked amongst the top five riders in the country and had clocked up a large number of international honours to prove it. He even had an Olympic medal as the chain of his downstairs loo, which Tash thought horribly ostentatious.

Initially helpful when Tash had entered the sport, Hugo Beauchamp had been growing increasingly unpleasant of late. All had been well when she was a clumsy novice who seldom made it to the end of the cross-country phase, let alone into the money. Hugo, one of the sport’s biggest stars, had coaxed her through her first year with rather condescending largesse, selling her his good novice, Drunken Hunk, giving her hours of coaching and ferrying her to events in his five-star lorry when Penny and Gus needed their dilapidated box elsewhere. But now that Tash was so regularly placed that she was climbing the overall leaderboard and getting ever-closer to making it into an international team, Hugo had gone right off her. He’d won last year’s British Championship at the Gatcombe Open Trials just a weekend after Tash had moved into the forge with Niall, loudly rumour-mongering that she had done badly because she was thinking about kitchen cabinets and not the course. When she had beaten him into second place at Burghley three-day-event two months later, he had grown actively hostile, cutting her dead or putting her down at every opportunity. Hurt by his about-face, Tash now thought he was unspeakably spoilt and petty.

‘Try to make friends again, huh?’ Zoe uncurled her feet from beneath Wally the collie and stood up to put the kettle on.

‘He’s the one being unfriendly,’ Tash pointed out tetchily.

‘Well, I know.’ Zoe was framing her words carefully, aware of how sensitive Tash could be about Hugo. ‘But it does make things rather awkward for Gus when there’s this ruck between you two. You know how much he relies upon Hugo’s support.’

‘Humph.’ Tash stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Hugo takes him for a ride almost as often as his own nags. Gus is better off without him.’

‘Not really,’ Zoe said kindly. ‘I mean, I know that the majority of Hugo’s actions are born out of self-interest, but he’s not a bad ally for all his faults. He gets Gus liveries, gives him a lot of his time and cast-off equipment, sends Franny down here to help out when we’re short-staffed.’

‘I hardly think Hugo’s forcing her!’ she snorted.

Franny was Hugo’s Rubensesque and rather terrifying head girl who dressed like an S & M mistress of pain and had a whip-like tongue to match. For the past six months she had been conducting a very public affair with Gus’s much younger and less efficient groom, Ted. It paralleled and helpfully shielded the far more private liaison which Hugo was conducting with Gus’s senior working pupil, Kirsty Judd, a Scottish event rider who used the yard as her southern base. Kirsty, who had worked in Australia for several years as a riding instructor, was engaged to a very rich, very macho Australian solicitor with whom she was spending Christmas. The fact that Hugo was also in Australia for the festive season had not gone unnoticed. Just as he took especial pleasure in riding dangerous horses, so, it seemed, he preferred his relationships with the heat on and the risk-factor high.

‘Go easy on him on New Year’s Eve, huh?’ Zoe pleaded, handing Tash a chipped mug full of coffee. ‘He’s only mad at you because he’s jealous.’ She carefully didn’t add what specifically he was jealous of. She privately doubted that it was just professional. Hugo was a far more complicated character than Tash gave him credit for.

‘I’ll try,’ she sighed.

For years, as a teenager, Tash had lusted after Hugo from afar with a passion that only the hormonally confused youngster can harbour. A close friend of her brother-in-law Ben Meredith’s, he had drifted around in the background of her family’s social calendar like a beautiful spectre, and haunted Tash’s dreams like a goading nightmare. His total disdain for her had been crucifying. While Tash had wept and daydreamed over pictures of him cut from
Horse and Hound
, Hugo had treated her with the curtest of uninterested scorn in return, hardly seeming to notice her existence.

It was only when they had been forced to endure one another’s company during a long, lazy holiday with Alexandra, Pascal, and the rest of their assorted family and friends two years earlier that they had struck up an unexpected, if uneasy, friendship. Hugo had helped her get to grips with the difficult, hot-headed Snob, given to his step-daughter by Pascal as a holiday challenge. Hugo had admired her courage and talent, and helped her get a job with the Moncrieffs as a result. For a brief and rather terrifying moment, he had even appeared to be attracted to her. The sense of amazed, disbelieving victory which Tash had experienced at that time had only been overtaken by the giddy joy of falling madly in love with Niall. Hugo had gone off her pretty quickly afterwards, and wasted no time in working his way through a string of staggeringly beautiful girlfriends, most of whom he treated appallingly.

Since then, Hugo had not shown the slightest interest in Tash as anything but a horsewoman and pupil, a fact which, in her very darkest, late-night moments, far away from Niall’s comfortable, sleeping embrace, rather offended her. She knew that was fearfully disloyal to Niall, whom she loved with more depth and honesty than she had ever felt for Hugo during the agonising length of her fierce crush. But there was something competitive in her relationship with him that fed off a spark of sexual attraction. And, apart from that briefest of moments when he had wanted to take her to bed – in fact, Tash only guessed that he’d wanted to take her to bed, for he’d never actually stated the intention – all that attraction had been one-way. She had adored him for far, far longer than he’d ever fancied a quick night with her. Somehow, it left her feeling rather one down.

Zoe was still watching her closely as she stirred cream into her coffee from a plastic tub. ‘You’re not – no, no, forget it.’

‘I’m not what?’ Tash could hear Gus and Penny’s grumbling old Land-Rover rattling over the frosted pot-holes in the drive outside.

Hearing it too, Zoe automatically reached for two more mugs.

‘Not what?’ Tash persisted.

‘You’ll bite my head off for this.’ She smiled apologetically. ‘But I have to ask to satisfy my insatiable curiosity. I was going to ask if you weren’t just a little miffed about Hugo’s affair with Kirsty? Because I rather get the impression that you still hold a bit of a torch—’

‘No I do bloody not!’ Tash could feel herself reddening.

‘It’s just that you’ve been far more anti-Hugo since it started.’

‘The only reason his affair with Kirsty pisses me off is because she’s stopped pulling her weight around here,’ Tash pointed out piously. ‘They can bonk morning, noon and night for all I care – until the suspension breaks on his ruddy horse-box, in fact. But if she asks me to exercise or muck out her bloody nags one more time, I’ll shoot them both.’

‘Right. Sorry. I was quite mistaken.’ Zoe hid a smile. ‘No torch, then.’

‘Not even a match,’ Tash insisted, disliking Zoe’s smug smile. ‘Anyway, how could I possibly feel a thing for that spoilt, stand-offish prig, when I’m going to marry Niall?’

‘Quite.’ Zoe was distracted by the banging of the back door as Gus and Penny staggered in, preceded by Wally who headed straight for Tash with a big, panting grin.