by Jilly Cooper
‘I’ll show them,’ she thought, shoving her nose in the air. ‘Don’t jibe at me, Argentina.’
Reaching the middle of the field, she laid the nearside rein on the chestnut’s neck to tell him to go right. Instantly he did a lightning U-turn and set out back to the stables, leaving Perdita swearing on the stone-hard ground while all the onlookers roared with laughter and Alejandro shouted in broken English at her. She had three more falls before she and a handful of other players started stick and balling. She was just getting used to the chestnut when Alejandro moved her on to a dark brown mare who, when it wasn’t bucking, shied at the ball, and then on to another chestnut, whom she had great difficulty in holding.
She was also staggered by how energetically the Argentines played, hitting balls up in the air, juggling and tapping them, twisting, turning and stopping, followed by Ferrari bursts of acceleration before circling again. Then they did the whole thing all over again without stirrups, and all the time talking and shouting to one another. She was also aware of Angel, the Brit-hater, who hadn’t once eaten at the same table as her since she arrived, who was now riding harder and turning faster than any of the others, urging his pony on with great pelvic thrusts. It seemed he was deliberately galloping very close past her to upset her chestnut mare, who kept taking off into the pampas.
She had fallen off twice more and ridden twelve different ponies by lunchtime and was so tired she could hardly eat. Although Luke translated the whole time for her, she felt desperately isolated and sick with longing for Ricky. He must have nearly reached Palm Springs by now.
Tugged out of her siesta like a back tooth, she staggered groggily out to the yard. The sun was shining platinum rather than gold now, and beating down on her head. To her intense humiliation, Luke, Angel, Alejandro, three of Alejandro’s sons, and two of their friends who’d come to lunch were playing on one pitch while Perdita had been put on another with Alejandro’s three younger sons and four of their cousins – none of them a day over twelve.
‘Talk about going back to playgroup,’ snarled Perdita.
The ponies were tied up in the shade to the branches of a row of gum trees which divided the two pitches. Gulls flapped around uttering their strange cry of ‘Tero, Tero’, and swooping down to scavenge whenever play moved on. A strong lemon smell, from a local herb known as black branch, hung on the hot steamy air. The mosquitoes went to work on any available flesh. After the throw-in the ball came out miraculously in Perdita’s direction.
Now I’ll show them, she thought, lifting her stick for a flawless offside drive. Next second she gave a scream of rage as she was hooked by an eleven-year-old cousin, who then proceeded to whip the ball away down field. One of Alejandro’s sons playing back rode him off for the backhand and hit it up the field to his brother who dribbled it a few yards, then sliced it to Perdita. Instantly an eleven-year-old cousin pounced on her, shielding her from the ball and riding her off.
All of them played with such ferocious energy and skill that, for the next nightmarish seven minutes, she didn’t touch the ball.
‘Faulazo,’ they yelled, as they teased her into crossing in front of them.
‘Dejala,’ they yelled as she rode in for the big swipe and missed it.
‘Hombre, hombre, hombre,’ they chorused, urging her to take her man, and ‘Que lenta,’ they screamed when she failed to catch up with her number four, and he went up the field and scored to loud cheers. A huge cow bell was rung at the end of the chukka, but the boys went on playing.
‘Perdita,’ yelled Alejandro, ‘change the horse.’
‘Better change the rider,’ said Perdita, fighting back the tears. She was sore all over, out of breath, pouring with sweat, and there were three more chukkas to go. ‘I don’t want to play with kids,’ she screamed at Luke. ‘They’re all laughing at me.’
‘Not at you,’ said Luke soothingly, while saddling up a black mare with a white star for her. ‘They always talk and joke among themselves. You’re over-reacting. This pony’s much easier. She follows the ball and positions herself for every shot. Just leave it to her.’
Perdita was settling down and had even hit a respectable forehand which only just missed the goal when Alejandro, out of some devilry, swopped one of his sons and a cousin for Luke and Angel.
Angel proceeded to put on an incredible display of histrionics, peacock-blue eyes flashing, nostrils flaring above his furiously pouting mouth, as he shouted and swore at Alejandro.
‘What’s he saying?’ Perdita asked Alejandro’s twelve year old, who blushed. ‘He say he no want to play with Eeenglish – er – scum.’
‘Charming,’ snapped Perdita.
‘Choto,’ Angel swore at her as he galloped past to defend his goal and, however much Luke set up shots for her, Angel rode her off. Then, after a whispered word with one of the cousins, Angel and he galloped up on either side of her and neatly lifted her off the little black mare.
‘Bastards,’ howled Perdita, sitting on the painfully hard ground, and bashing it with her stick, ‘fucking bastards.’
‘No understand Eeenglish,’ mocked Angel. ‘Go back home,’ and launched into a stream of expletives in Spanish. Perdita replied in equally basic English.
Next minute Luke had cantered up with Perdita’s black pony. ‘I’m not going to translate for either of you,’ he said softly. Then, turning furiously on Angel, ‘For Chrissake, pack it in.’
Five minutes later Luke blocked a brilliant goal from the youngest cousin and cleared. Christ, he really can smite the ball almost the length of the pitch, marvelled Perdita. Angel, racing towards the enemy goal, tried to intercept with an air shot. Missing, he swung his pony round in pursuit, and when it didn’t turn quickly enough, clouted it very hard round the head with his stick. In a flash Perdita closed on him and bashed him across the knuckles with her stick.
‘You triple bastard! I’ll report you to the RSPCA.’
Turning, realizing it was Perdita, Angel gave a howl of rage and set off in pursuit. So blackly venomous was his expression that Perdita fled towards the next pitch, scattering the polo balls which lay like a hatch of goose eggs near the goal posts. Angel, on a faster pony and using his whip, had nearly caught her up when Luke thundered up and rode him off. Such was the force of the bump that Angel’s horse crashed to the ground, temporarily winded.
Leaping to his feet, Angel charged Luke, about to drag him off his horse.
‘I wouldn’t,’ said Luke raising his stick. ‘Stop behaving like a two year old. She’s a woman.’
‘She’s a beetch, and English beetch, like Margaret Thatcher,’ growled Angel. ‘I keel her when I catch her.’
‘You’ve been winding her up all day,’ shouted Luke. ‘D’you want to put her off completely?’
‘Yes,’ hissed Angel, looking at his bleeding knuckles. ‘Then she’ll go home for good.’
For a second they glared at each other. Then Angel vaulted back on to his pony, which had just tottered groggily to its feet, and galloped back to the stables.
Back in her room, Perdita fell on her bed, too despairing and exhausted even to cry. She’d been a disaster and let Ricky down. They’d pack her back to England.
There was a knock on the door. It was Luke again.
‘Baby, it’s OK.’ He took her in his arms.
‘Ouch,’ grumbled Perdita. ‘You’ve got hands like sandpaper.’
‘To rub off all your rough edges,’ said Luke.
‘I made such an idiot of myself. Those were children. The standard is ludicrous. I’ll never cope.’
‘Hush, hush,’ said Luke. ‘Argentines learn polo like a language. Those boys have been playing with a short mallet since they were two. By the time they’re ten or eleven they’re on a six handicap. Look, you’re jet lagged. You couldn’t understand what they were saying. There’s hours till dinner. Let’s go into General Piran and I’ll buy you a drink.’
It was so hot that Perdita would have liked to have worn shorts or a dress
, but her mosquito bites had come up in huge red bumps and were oozing and itching like mad, so she settled for her pale pink jeans and a dark blue shirt. A huge yellow sun was gilding the puddles and turning the poplars the colour of lemon sherbets. A cloud like a fluffy white crocodile basked at the bottom of the vast open fan of fading turquoise sky. Luke drove slowly to avoid the potholes, just two thumbs on the steering wheel.
‘I had one hell of a hassle when I first came out. I was used to riding with my reins hanging in festoons. Alejandro and his son all stop horses with five-inch curbs and send them on with spurs about the same length. I kept being carted all the way to Buenos Aires.’
Perdita stared moodily at the horizon.
‘You’ll be playing in matches soon. You’ll enjoy that. You can’t go back to England without taking some Argentine silver.’
‘Some hope!’
To distract Perdita’s attention from a terrified stray dog that was cringing on the right of the road, Luke pointed out three tumbledown houses on the left.
‘Known as Death Row. In that house lived a bricklayer who murdered the baker because he thought he’d stolen one of his pigs. Then four brothers turned up in a bus and killed three brothers who lived in that house next door. Then the grocer who lived in the third house shot himself.’
‘If you hadn’t bumped that sodding Angel there’d have been another murder this afternoon,’ said Perdita sulkily. ‘What a dinky little country this is. What a dump,’ she added as they entered the village.
Luke pointed out the little white church, with its red corrugated roof, that was always having its windows broken by the football pitch next door.
‘At least it provides air-conditioning in summer,’ he went on. ‘And that’s the gas station. The prettiest girl works there. Angel’s dating her and spends his time filling up Alejandro’s truck. The gasoline bill at the end of the month is going to be something else!’ He shook with laughter.
‘Does he put draw reins and a five-inch curb on her?’ spat Perdita. ‘I’m surprised he didn’t break that pony’s jaw this afternoon.’
Because of the mosquitoes they sat inside the bar.
‘Señor Gracias, buenas noches,’ said the owner as he took Luke’s order for a vodka and tonic and a Bourbon.
‘I’ll pay for it,’ said Perdita, defiantly brandishing a $100 bill. She was in no mood to accept charity from anyone. ‘How much is this worth?’
‘About fifteen dollars. Put it away.’
‘D’you want water?’ asked Perdita, reaching for the jug on the bar counter.
Luke grinned and shook his head. ‘I’m a tidy person, I like my whisky neat.’
On the wall was a gaudy oil painting of a bull pouring blood with pics sticking out of it like a pincushion. A smirking matador, with a pink satin bottom even tighter and more uppity than Angel’s, was lifting his jewelled sword for the kill.
‘God, they’re cruel. They never speak to their ponies except to curse them.’
‘They’re different from us,’ said Luke. ‘If Americans – and particularly the Brits – have a horse or a dog that behaves badly – they admit the fact, and rather celebrate and make a joke of it, right? Whereas to an Argentine, it’s a matter of pride never to have a horse or dog that’s anything less than perfect. They can’t understand anyone not minding losing and they want to shine individually. My buzz is being on a team. I don’t give a shit about not scoring goals. If I’ve set up the play that leads to goals, that’s OK by me.’
‘You’re too fucking Christ-like,’ snapped Perdita. ‘You get no prizes for coming second.’
Luke picked up his whisky, his freckled hand was so big you could hardly see the glass. He didn’t tell her it broke his heart every time the Argentines hurt a horse or he saw a terrified stray dog racing by the side of the road. He knew the cruelty she was going to witness over the next three months would be agony for her because, for some reason, she trusted animals far more than humans, but, like a nurse looking after animals in a vivisection clinic, he couldn’t prevent her pain, only alleviate it as much as possible.
‘There’s certainly a degree of roughness with horses,’ he admitted. ‘The Argies have so many, they can afford to dispense with them. When Red and I were kids we had races jumping on ponies in the fields and galloping them round a tree and back without a bridle. We could never do that with Argentine ponies: they just bolted in terror. The Argentines break them by fear and pain, but they get results. Look at those kids today.’
‘Look at Angel clouting that sweet little mare with his stick – the fucker.’
She was paler than ever and, Luke noticed, that in that shirt, her eyes were more navy blue than black.
‘He’s OK Angel,’ he said, ‘Argentine saying – never judge a man until you have walked two moons in his shoes.’
‘Well, he needn’t take it out on me. I wasn’t part of the bloody task force.’
Back in his bare, little room, Angel lay on his bed smoking one cigarette from another. He should have been with the girl from the petrol station half an hour ago, but he was too eaten up with jealousy that his dear amigo, Luke, had taken that white-haired she-devil out for a drink.
On the wall was a painting of a Mirage wheeling away from a flaming British aircraft carrier, with the sea and sky incarnadined by the blaze. On the chest of drawers was a photograph of his elder brother Pedro in uniform, his pale patrician face the image of Angel’s, except for a black moustache. There were also photographs of his weak and charming father, who had read Pravda and the Daily Telegraph every morning, and his beautiful feckless mother, who’d run off with an Italian and now lived in some palazzo in Rome, and of the huge house in which he’d been brought up.
Besides these photographs were Pedro’s polo helmet, which now had a map of the Malvinas stamped on the front (which Angel always wore in matches), and a jar of earth he’d dug up from the Islands on the day he’d been sent home as a prisoner of war.
The Solis de Gonzales family, eight-generation Irish intermarried with Spanish, were immensely rich. Angel had had a magical childhood, bucking the system at the smart Buenos Aires boys’ school of Champagnat and living during the termtime in a large house in the Avenidad del Libertador. Let loose on the family estancia during the holidays, he and Pedro had played cops and robbers on horses, and later polo with his cousins, who all came from large houses near by.
In their teens Angel and Pedro had hung around the polo grounds, waiting for players to fall off, so they could substitute for them. Angel had never had a lesson; he played as naturally as he walked.
Angel’s branch of the Solis de Gonzales, however, were no good at looking after their business affairs. His father, separated from his mother, lived six months of the year in Paris. Every so often the camp manager would telephone from the estancia: ‘We have no more money.’
‘Then sell some land,’ Angel’s father would say, and go back to his latest mistress or the gambling tables or the racecourse at Longchamps. He never took care of the land, nor did he put anything back.
Denied parents for so much of the year, Angel had idolized Pedro. On the polo field they had been dynamite and almost telepathetic in anticipating each other’s moves. But there had been no question of them taking up polo professionally. Polo was all right as a hobby, but for a living, as Angel’s father, who prided himself on his English had pointed out, it was distinctly ‘Non-U’.
He disapproved almost as much when Pedro, who was mad about flying, but unable to afford a plane, had joined the air force in the late seventies to be followed, two years later, by Angel. Disapproval turned to horror when both boys set off in their Mirages for the Falklands. Both were brilliant pilots, having the same reckless flamboyant courage and ability to get the last ounce out of their ancient machines in the air as their ponies on the field.
A fortnight after Pedro’s plane plunged flaming into the sea, Angel was shot down behind British lines and escaped with a smashed kneecap and concussion. W
hen he came round, he was interrogated by one particularly phlegmatic, poker-faced Guards Officer, a polo player who spoke fluent Spanish. To someone as proud as Angel, this, and the result of the war, had been the ultimate humiliation. But, even knowing how strong the British now were, he would give up polo tomorrow and climb back into his cockpit and resume the attack on Port Stanley. Returning home with the other prisoners of war, he found his father had died of a heart attack.
It is Argentine law that when a man dies his estate must be divided equally between his children. Angel’s father had inherited 4,000 acres, but had sold off so much that only 800 acres were left for Angel and his three sisters. The sisters, who had all married well, were unconcerned that Angel, with only 200 acres of grazing land in the middle of his rich cousins’ estates, had been left to pay his father’s debts. His mother, happy with her Italian, was not interested. His grandmother, living in luxury in the Plaza Hotel in Buenos Aires and grumbling because she had to wash her own stockings, claimed she had no money even to pay her own bills.
In despair, Angel had gone to his rich cousins, pleading that unless they helped him out he would be forced to sell the land to an outsider, a property developer who wanted to build houses there. The rich cousins, thinking he was bluffing, ignored him; then, when he sold the land, they were absolutely furious and banished him from their houses.
Angel was now desperately trying to make his way as a professional polo player. His secret ambition was for the Argentine ban to be lifted so he could get to England and avenge Pedro’s death by taking out the English and especially one poker-faced Guards Officer.