by Jilly Cooper
‘Well played, you stuck-up little bitch,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll get you in the end.’
Next minute Perdita had slapped him across the face.
‘Fuck off, you great oaf,’ she screamed.
Laughing, Randy cantered off. Trace Coley, who’d lost a match and a lover in as many minutes, burst into tears.
Dismounting to rest Hermia, Perdita walked off the field straight up to Ricky.
‘Was it OK?’
It was the first time she’d seen him look really happy.
‘It was f-fucking wonderful.’
Oh God, thought Daisy, he mustn’t smile at her like that, he’s utterly irresistible.
Kevin and Enid Coley were slightly compensated by the barrage of cameramen, particularly one from The Tatler, who photographed them talking to Lord Cowdray, and later handing out prizes and cups.
Tabitha Campbell-Black was livid because she won a bag of Bailey’s Performance Mix horse feed rather than a T-shirt with a picture of a polo pony on the front.
‘I’m sure your performance isn’t at all mixed,’ murmured Rupert to Mrs Sherwood who seemed to have accepted South Sussex’s defeat with great equanimity. The Brazilian lover was looking increasingly disconsolate.
The prize-giving was supposed to be compèred by Fatty Harris, but having taken so many nips while he was commentating, he had to pop into the Portaloo immediately after the match. He then had the humiliation of being locked in and towed away, with all the Pony Club screaming with delight at the sight of his vast red-nosed, anguished face and hammering fists at the window.
Horse boxes and cars were already driving off as Trace Coley, looking sexy in her father’s panama, sauntered up to receive a body brush and a blue rosette as one of the runners-up in the Jack Gannon.
Hastily scribbling out his copy for The Times on the bonnet of his car, J.N.P. Watson wrote:
‘The star of the side, however, was seventeen-year-old Perdita Macleod, the Rutshire Number One, who scored three goals. Working at Richard France-Lynch’s yard for the past two years, she showed much of the old France-Lynch magic, and must be regarded as high goal potential.’
‘And finally,’ announced Brigadier Canford, ‘we come to the Mary Tyler Award for the most promising girl player.’
Daisy watched an expectant Trace Coley re-arranging her panama in the driving mirror of her father’s Rolls as Brigadier Canford put on his spectacles to have a better look. Then he beamed with delight. ‘Which goes to Perdita Macleod.’
For a second Perdita froze as the reluctant cheers began to crescendo and stuffed her fists in her eyes, fighting back the tears. Then, immediately pulling herself together, she strolled up and thanked Kevin and Brigadier Canford very sweetly for her polo stick, before flicking a very obvious V-sign at Trace on the way back. Immediately Drew took her aside. ‘Will you bloody well pull yourself together. Non-stop swearing, stripping off on the field, making V-signs at the sponsor’s daughter. I saw you. Do you want that scholarship or not? After all the trouble your mother’s taken driving you round the country, why the hell are you deliberately trying to hurt her?’
‘So we’ll no more go a-Land-Roving so late into the night,’ sang Daisy five minutes later, as, dizzy with pride and vodka, she weaved back to Drew’s boot looking for her bag and went slap into Drew.
‘The Coleys have asked us back for drinks at Château Kitsch – that’s worth seeing anyway,’ he said, ‘but lots of potential patrons will be there and the Pony Club Committee, so it could be useful to Perdita. They’ve just confirmed her scholarship by the way, but don’t tell her or she might blow it. It’s nothing to cry about.’
‘I don’t know how to thank you, and I’ve got nothing to wear,’ mumbled Daisy.
‘You look fine. No one’ll change.’
Daisy wished just for once that Drew could see her when she wasn’t looking awful.
‘Are Ricky and Dancer going?’
‘They’ve gone home. Ricky’s just been even ruder to Kevin than Rupert was. Told him he didn’t want to accept hospitality from patrons who go round cuckolding their players. It gave him a ghastly feeling of déjà vu.’
‘Does Kevin know what déjà vu means?’
‘He does now. And Enid’s hopping.’
Half an hour later Enid had calmed down, at least on the surface, and changed into her aquamarine lurex hostess gown. As her hair had been squashed down by her David Shilling spotted hat, she put on her prettiest blond wig with the tendrils over the forehead. Drenched in Shalimar, wearing her pearls, because her diamonds might make people who’d been unable to change feel under-dressed, Enid awaited her guests, radiating regality.
‘I didn’t realize it was going to be a tented wank,’ said Drew, as Sukey applied a dash of pink lipstick. It was not yet dusk, but the drive up to Kevin’s mock Tudor house was lined with lit-up toadstools. The front door was flanked with the famous Moggie Meal cat and the Doggie Dins terrier. Six foot high and floodlit, they winked, mewed and yapped when the door bell was rung. Inside, maids in black took coats for tickets, and told everyone to go through the lounge as Mrs Coley was receiving in the pool area.
Perdita listened to her mother grinding gears and going on and on and on about how marvellously Perdita had played and how it had been the proudest moment of her life, and how everyone from Rupert to Brigadier Canford said what a great future she had and Drew this and Drew that. And of course, being Daisy, she was quite unable to resist telling Perdita the thrilling news which she mustn’t tell anyone, that she’d got the scholarship.
‘Just think,’ she raved on, as they drove past honey-suckled hedges and trees covered with reddening apples, ‘six months in New Zealand. Hot springs and Kiwis and,’ Daisy couldn’t remember anything else about New Zealand, ‘oh yes, Maoris, of course.’
‘Maori, Maori quite contrary,’ said Perdita gloomily.
Why wasn’t she flying back to Robinsgrove with Dancer and Ricky? She didn’t want to go to New Zealand. She’d die if she was parted from Ricky for five minutes. He’d been so lovely, and her shoulder still burned where he’d put a hand on it after the game. If she stayed in England with him, she’d learn much faster than shovelling horse-shit in New Zealand and being made to get up early in the morning. Getting up early was only worth it if she were going to see Ricky.
‘I wonder if you’ll be in South Island or North Island,’ said Daisy, narrowly avoiding ramming the car in front which had braked suddenly.
‘Oh, shut up, Mum, I want to think.’
By the pool at Château Kitsch, which was as blue as Enid Coley’s hostess gown, Trace, who’d changed into a slinky black dress, was having a row with Randy Sherwood.
‘How dare you kiss Perdita Macleod in front of everyone?’ she hissed.
‘Because I want to screw her,’ said Randy unrepentantly. ‘I bet she’s a virgin, and she’d be volcanic in the sack.’
Perdita had just walked in. She was still wearing muddy breeches, black socks and Merlin’s polo shirt. Her hair was scraped back in a pony tail, her face was smeared with mud. What was the point of tarting up if Ricky wasn’t there? Ignoring Randy’s imperious wave, she walked over to talk to Mike Waterlane.
On the edge of the pool, knowing there was a possibility of Kevin sponsoring Drew, Sukey was chatting up Enid Coley. Perdita remembered Sukey being just as deferential to Grace Alderton three years ago, the first time she’d seen Ricky in the flesh. I can’t go to New Zealand, she thought.
The food being handed round was quite awful – muesli sticks, unsalted nuts, prunes, figs, sliced bananas. Huge jugs of fruit juice were being pressed on guests, rather than booze.
Randy Sherwood edged up to Perdita.
‘My mother’s just gone off with Rupert Campbell-Black,’ he said. ‘I think he is the coolest guy in the world, and the richest. I wouldn’t mind him as a stepfather.’
Reaching out for a vegetarian Scotch egg, and hurling it at his brother, Randy added casually, ‘Will you h
ave dinner with me tonight?’
But Perdita wasn’t listening; she was far too engrossed in Sukey’s conversation with Enid Coley.
‘When one thinks of the number of miserably displaced children from broken homes who’ve been given a sense of purpose by the Pony Club,’ Sukey was saying, then, lowering her voice, ‘take Perdita Macleod. She was a little horror when Drew took her over – but look how she played today.’
‘Given one or two shocking lapses of behaviour,’ snorted Enid Coley. ‘Mind you, it can’t have helped working all this time for Ricky France-Lynch. He is the rudest, most arrogant man I’ve ever met. I mean, who does he think he is? I totally understand his little wife going off with Bart Alderton. Kevin and Bart do a lot of business together.’
‘He did lose a child,’ said Sukey.
‘Because he was drunk. From all Bart says, he was rude and arrogant before that. That’s what stopped him getting to the top.’
‘What did you say?’ said an icy voice.
Beneath the mud smears, Perdita was as white as a new polo ball. She was shaking with rage, there was fifth-degree murder in her eyes.
Sukey started. ‘Oh, Perdita, I’d no idea you were there.’
‘We were saying,’ said Enid, without looking over her hefty lurex shoulder, ‘that Ricky France-Lynch’s personality stopped him getting to the top.’
‘Well, you’re going to the bottom, you disgusting old bag,’ screamed Perdita, and the next moment she had butted Enid in the small of a very large back right into the swimming-pool. Jumping in after her, Perdita pulled off Enid’s wig to reveal scant grey wisps and pushed her under the water, where the aquamarine hostess gown billowed up to display fawn pop socks at the end of fat, purple legs.
‘How dare you slag off Ricky?’ screamed Perdita. ‘How dare you? How dare you?’
Everyone was shouting. There were even some cheers. Next minute, Kevin, Drew and Randy Sherwood, who was laughing his handsome head off, had jumped into the pool and were trying to prise Perdita away.
‘Stop it,’ said Drew, pinning her arms behind her back and grimly increasing the pressure until she gasped with pain and let go.
‘Did you hear what she was saying about Ricky?’ she cried hysterically.
‘You’re not helping him by behaviour like this,’ snapped Drew.
For a second Perdita struggled with him, then watched with mixed emotions by Sukey, Daisy and a drenched Randy Sherwood, she collapsed sobbing in his arms. ‘No one understands Ricky like I do.’
22
Ricky was so furious with Perdita for deliberately sabotaging her scholarship that he gave her the sack.
Even the sight of Little Chef and the ponies longingly looking out for her every morning didn’t make him relent.
‘He’s a hard man,’ said plump Louisa, who also missed Perdita dreadfully. Only the sullen, scrawny Frances was delighted.
At home Perdita behaved more atrociously than ever before, storming round the house, refusing to get a job and screaming at Violet and Eddie when they returned bronzed from a month in LA with Hamish and Wendy. Nor were matters helped by Violet gaining ten ‘A’s in her O levels, losing a stone and getting her first boyfriend, who rang her constantly at all hours of the night from Beverly Hills. Violet and Eddie then went back to their respective boarding schools, paid for by Granny Macleod, which only stepped up Perdita’s paranoia and jealousy.
At the end of September Violet came home for a long weekend and Perdita was so bloody-minded that in despair Daisy escaped to Harvest Festival for an hour of peace. Eldercombe Church was packed. Miss Lodsworth, who organized the flower rota, had excelled herself. Huge tawny chrysanthemums big as setting suns, gold dahlias like lions’ manes, yellow roses, sheaves of corn, briar and elder glowing with berries all brought a glow to the ancient yellow stone. Every window-ledge was crammed with apples gleaming like rubies, vast vegetable marrows and pumpkins and, more prosaically, tinned fruit, sardines and baked beans. Some joker had even added a tin of Doggie Dins.
Daisy also noticed, as she slid into an empty pew at the back, that the church was unusually full of attractive women. There was Philippa Mannering looking avid in a beautifully cut check suit and a brown beret at a rakish angle. There was the pretty girl from the village shop wearing an emerald-green dress more suited to a wedding. Exotic scent mingled with the more religious smells of incense, furniture polish and veneration. Putting paid to Daisy’s hour of peace were also hoards of children clambering over pews, chasing each other down the aisles, punching their mothers, and having to be repeatedly hushed for talking. Not children used to being brought to church, thought Daisy. Then she realized she’d forgotten to kneel down when she came in, and blushing, sank to her knees.
Oh, please God, she prayed, shake Perdita out of this ghastly mood and make her happy again, and look after darling Violet and Eddie, and Gainsborough and Ethel, and please God, if you think it’s right, let me fall in love with a man who isn’t married, who falls in love with me and don’t make it too long.
Hell, she’d picked a pew next to the radiator. She’d be as red as those beetroots in the window in a minute. Please God, don’t make me so vain, she asked, scrambling to her feet with the rest of the congregation as the organ launched into ‘We plough the fields and scatter’.
Then Daisy twigged the reason for all those glammed-up women. Far ahead, in the France-Lynch pew, poignant because he was the sole inhabitant, stood Ricky. He was looking unusually smart in a pin-stripe suit and a black tie which was the only colour he’d worn since Will died. With the pile of huge marrows, the whole service seemed like some ancient fertility rite, with Ricky the unattainable corn king whom everyone wanted.
‘He only is the maker of all things near and far,’ bellowed Miss Lodsworth, totally out of tune. ‘He paints the wayside flower, He lights the evening star.’
Daisy’s eyes filled with tears. What beautiful words. Would she ever find time to paint wayside flowers again? Ricky certainly lit the Evening Star for Perdita. She must ask him round for a drink.
The gay Vicar, who loved the sound of his own voice, took a long time over the service and Daisy’s thoughts started to wander. Tears filled her eyes again as she thought of the little gravestone in the churchyard: In loving memory of William Richard France-Lynch, 1978–81.
Oh, poor Ricky. Daisy blew her nose on a piece of blue loo paper. She felt even sorrier for him with that stammer when he went up to read the first lesson, and had to announce that it came from the eighth chapter of Deuteronomy, a word which took him four goes. His face was impassive, his hands steady. Only the long pin-striped right leg, shuddering uncontrollably, betrayed his nerves. Now he was wrestling with the bit about ‘God leading thee into the w-w-wilderness for forty years to humble thee and to p-p-prove thee.’
Comparing his grey frozen features with the carved stone angel beside the lectern, looking at the long lit-up scar, and the furrowed forehead as he wrestled with the difficult words, Daisy thought he didn’t need to humble or prove himself any more. She supposed because he was ostensibly Lord of the Manor, he felt he had to do it. Dancer would have had much more fun.
Daisy was sweating for him, and as he stumbled over the word ‘pomegranates’, she could feel the collective goodwill of the painted ladies in the congregation urging him home like the favourite in the Grand National.
The Vicar then took the text for his sermon from the second lesson, ‘God loveth a cheerful giver’, and was so carried away by his own rhetoric that he absent-mindedly helped himself to most of the grapes hanging down from the top of the pulpit.
Daisy was screwing up her courage to accost Ricky and ask him for a drink after church when the Vicar launched into the final prayer about being made flesh, and she suddenly remembered the vast ox heart cooking in the oven for Ethel, which would burn dry if it wasn’t taken out, so she belted home. Anyway Ricky had been buttonholed outside the church by the gay Vicar and scores of eager ladies.
‘Come to dinner this evening, just kitchen sups,’ Philippa was saying.
‘I’m afraid I’ve got to work,’ Ricky said brusquely.
‘I’d simply love to,’ said the Vicar.
Daisy was still giggling when she got home to Snow Cottage and made the mistake at lunch of telling Perdita that Ricky had read the lesson.
‘Did you speak to him?’ demanded Perdita, dropping her forkful of braised fennel with a clatter. ‘What did he say about me? Did you ask him for a drink?’
‘I didn’t get near him. He was surrounded . . .’ Daisy was about to say ‘by women’, but hastily changed it to ‘by members of the congregation as I was leaving, and I had to get back for Ethel’s heart.’
‘What about my fucking heart?’ screamed Perdita. ‘You don’t give a shit that it’s broken. You’re so bloody wet, one could grow waterlilies all over you,’ and, storming out of the kitchen, slammed the door behind her.
‘Why don’t you stand up to her, Mum?’ asked Violet.
I must not cry, Daisy gritted her teeth. After she’d cleared up lunch she hoisted Ethel’s huge ox heart out of its water on to the chopping board. Usually she got through cutting it up by fantasizing that she was Christian Barnard saving the life of Francis Bacon or Lucian Freud. Today it didn’t work, the tears started flowing again. I mustn’t go to pieces, she whispered, tomorrow I’ll be brave, and ask Ricky round for a drink.
Fortunately the Caring Chauvinist was away the following day, but Ricky’s number was always engaged. Only when she checked with directory enquiries did she learn that the receiver was off the hook.
Getting home from the office, she found Violet and Perdita having another screaming match.
‘I’m not coming home at half-term if she’s here, Mum,’ complained Violet. ‘She’s destroying all of us.’
Having cleaned her teeth, washed, put on a bit of make-up and brushed her hair, Daisy set out up the ride to Robinsgrove. The sun was sinking in a red glow, the lights were coming out in Eldercombe Village. Once more Daisy was knocked out by the fecundity of everything, the blackthorn purple with sloes, plump hazel nuts already shredded by squirrels, elderberries shiny as caviar hanging like shower fittings from their crimson stems. She ought to make elderberry wine, then she wouldn’t spend so much on vodka.