by Jilly Cooper
Queuing for her coat five minutes later, Perdita listened to a rapturous Sukey.
‘D’you know, we made fifteen thousand on the auction. I was terrified that lovely Zandra Rhodes dress wouldn’t reach its reserve. But Dancer Maitland bought it – so sweet.’ Then, lowering her voice to Mrs Hughie, she confided, ‘He’s frite-fly nice for a queer.’
‘Probably going to wear it himself,’ said Chessie.
Bart, who’d sold his London house to realize capital, was flying straight back to New York with Bibi to mastermind some take-over before the Gold Cup. Red, because he couldn’t be bothered to drive back to Bart’s house in Sussex, had booked himself and Perdita into the Savoy. Chessie had also booked a room there and to Red’s absolute fury came along to their suite for a drink.
‘I do not want to listen to her bitching all night about my father,’ he said, going off to bed and slamming the door behind him. So poor Perdita had to sit up until dawn listening to Chessie sobbing her heart out.
‘I can’t stand it any more. I know he loves me but he’s so appallingly uncompromising. Says I’ve got to leave Bart or nothing.’
It seemed unfair, too, that Perdita had to leave Red in bed, but she was determined to have her tooth capped before she drove down to meet Auriel.
Outside, London had recovered its youth, the rain had washed the dust off the plane trees and heightened the reticulated giraffe-patterning of their long, lanky trunks. Bronze workmen were stripping off in the sunshine. As Perdita came out of the dentist, however, a cloud blacker than her bruised eye hung over the west. Ringing the Royal Berkshire she discovered the match had been cancelled.
Bliss, thought Perdita, she could go back to the Savoy for a jolly lunch with Red. She hadn’t had a day off for ages. It was lovely to be in London. The girls looked so pretty in their summer dresses; people were drinking outside pubs; the flower shops were a riot of colour.
Stopping off at Harvie & Hudson, Perdita bought their latest shirt, lilac and pale blue stripes, as a present for Red. If it clashed with his hair she could always wear it.
Maids were clearing away breakfast as she got back to the Savoy. A ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign hung on the door of their room. Red would sleep all day given the opportunity, thought Perdita fondly as she let herself in very quietly. Then she heard voices. He must be watching television.
‘I’m back,’ she barged into the bedroom. ‘The match was cancelled and I’ve bought you the most divine shirt.’ The words shrivelled on her lips, for, lying in bed, one light gold, the other darker gold, were Chessie and Red. Chessie was lying on her belly. Red was kissing her shoulders, caressing her bottom with one hand, the other was buried in her pubic hair. For a moment they all stared at each other.
Perdita was so shocked she could only think how beautiful they looked in that huge bed reflected in the mirrored fronts of the cupboards which lined the left side of the room. Then she screamed and was about to run out of the door when, quick as a lurcher on a hare, Red had seized her.
‘You’re not going anywhere!’ He shoved her into the bathroom and slammed the door, clinging on to the gold handle for grim death, as Perdita tugged, screamed and pummelled against the other side, which gave Chessie the chance to put on her pale blue dress and make a bolt for it.
Releasing her, Red expected a monumental scene, curious what she’d throw at him first; but she stumbled out as grey and subdued as a released hostage.
‘Why?’ she whispered. ‘Why her? I don’t understand.’ Red never blushed; it didn’t go with red hair. Slowly, deliberately, his hands totally steady, he put a yellow Sobranie between his faintly smiling lips.
‘I wanted to prove what a little tramp she was.’
‘But she spent most of last night telling me how much she loved Ricky.’
‘Perhaps she does.’ Red’s lighter flared. ‘Perhaps she wanted to put you off the scent. Did she actually mention Ricky’s name? She’s such a bitch, she’s been trying to get me into bed for years. She may have been uptight because I’d been dancing with Auriel.’
Straightening a magazine that had been knocked crooked, he moved towards the fridge. ‘D’you want a drink?’
Perdita shook her head. ‘But you must have planned it deliberately, knowing I’d be away?’
‘I know.’ Red banged the steel ice-tray on the top of the fridge. ‘I wish to hell they’d use plastic. I was kinda curious what she’d be like. I guess one occasionally likes variety. It’s as simple as that.’
Like a lift whose cable has broken, Perdita sat down suddenly on the sofa.
‘Was this the first time?’
Red paused a fraction too long.
‘Sure. She called me this morning.’
‘Are you going to tell your father?’
Red laughed and emptied the whisky over his ice. ‘Not yet. I don’t want to be disinherited.’
‘How can you do that to him? You bastard!’ hissed Perdita. It was her sole outburst of reproof.
‘On the contrary,’ said Red mockingly. ‘Unlike you, I was regularly conceived.’ Drifting towards her, he examined her new tooth.
‘That’s better. D’you want to stay with me?’
Frantic he was going to chuck her, Perdita nodded.
‘Well, you better keep your trap shut for a change. No blathering to Simpson Hastings this time. If you tell anyone, in fact, you and I are over – understand?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘And since you interrupted what I’d started with Chessie, I’d quite like to finish it.’ As he pulled her towards him, his cock jabbed her stomach. Beneath the feline languor, she could sense his frenzied excitement. Never had he made love to her more passionately, and when the manager rang up asking them to check out he booked in for another night.
65
Perdita told no-one about Red and Chessie except Tero into whose sympathetic grey shoulder she sobbed endlessly, trying to make sense out of what had happened. Did Red really loathe Chessie? Had he just pulled her to prove he could and that Chessie was a whore, or was it for the novelty of something as utterly verboten as a cream bun in a health farm? Even more confusingly a couple of days after she’d stumbled on them, she had a letter from Chessie:
‘Dear Perdita,
Sorry about Thursday morning, but please don’t blame me. I’d never have gone to bed with Red if he hadn’t pestered me ever since I married Bart (that’s why he’s always been so poisonous to me), so that I finally gave in, because I was flattered, I suppose, and because I was so miserable about Ricky. I’m sorry you’re hurt, but if you hadn’t come back you’d never have found out. Yours, red-faced and red-handed, Chessie.’
Even when she’d shattered someone’s life, Chessie couldn’t avoid being flip. Either she or Red was lying, but Perdita couldn’t imagine Red pestering anyone. She knew she should pack her bags, but where could she go? Tero and Spotty could hardly live in a bedsit, and would Red give her custody of the six ponies, and all the jewels and clothes he’d given her? She hadn’t saved a penny, relying on the wads of dollars and pound notes he’d thrust so freely into her eager hands. What terrified her most was the total loss of pride and willpower. She loved him too much to walk out, however much he humiliated her. As electrodes of jealousy wracked her body, she realized for the first time how much Luke must have suffered.
Perdita’s game disintegrated. If Red and Angel hadn’t continued so majestically together, the Flyers would have never reached the final of the Gold Cup. After a very tough draw, in which they beat the Tigers in extra time, Apocalypse also reached the final.
Ricky tried to sleep on the eve of the match but kept listening for the banging of hooves against the stable walls, which would tell him one of his horses had cast itself or was down with colic. When he did drop off, he found he was playing the whole world in his dreams. At three he got up and wandered round the house. It was unbearably hot and stuffy with distant thunder grumbling round the Rutshire hills. Little Chef, who’d trailed hi
s restless master all day and tried to bring a smile to his lips by rushing in with a clothes brush or lying on his back sneezing with his paws over his eyes, followed yawning and blinking. The thunder was getting nearer.
On the drawing-room table lay the endlessly rescribbled and crossed-out lists of tomorrow’s playing order. He had spent hours working out which horses would go best in which chukka, so one always had a balance of speed and manoeuvrability. Heavy rain would change all that. He was also in a dilemma about Wayne, who, as an old horse, didn’t go well in very hot weather and who’d got crafty recently and, fed up with Ricky making him do sharp turns at a gallop, had started falling over deliberately. Nor was he entirely reliable in ride-offs. Seeing a bump coming, he’d hesitate and take Ricky out of it. Young horses loved to bump. Old horses like Wayne tended to cheat on you.
Like young wives, thought Ricky bitterly, which brought him back to Chessie. If he won tomorrow – what then? It was the first rung reached, but if Chessie came back, would he ever trust her again? He wished Luke were here. Dancer was frozen with panic, unable to eat. Even the twins were subdued, like puppies removed too early from their mother, so Ricky himself had to be the stabilizer. The smell of meadowsweet drifted hot and soapy from the lake. At the bottom of the moonlit valley, like a low, low star, Ricky saw Daisy’s light on. He glanced at her painting of Will which had brought him such bitter-sweet pleasure. Suddenly the temptation to dump was too much. If he weren’t playing Wayne tomorrow, he could ride him down to see Daisy.
‘Hullo.’ Daisy answered the telephone on the first ring, her voice tremulous with excitement.
‘It’s Ricky.’
There was a pause.
‘How are you?’ said Daisy, trying to keep the desperate disappointment out of her voice.
‘Can’t sleep. It’s so light outside. Can I come over?’
The same moonlight that flooded the Eldercombe Valley silvered Chessie’s naked body as she lay in the great, green silk four-poster listening to the crunch of the security guards on the gravel outside. Beside her, Bart churned with demoniacal sexual excitement. Challenges were his fix, and this was the greatest challenge he’d ever faced.
Alderton Airlines was about to merge with EuroElectronics. Determined to merge with a splurge, Bart was flying in both his own and the German boards who would enjoy a splendid lunch in a duck-egg-blue tent before watching the Flyers retain the Gold Cup.
Bibi had been so incensed by such extravagance that she’d refused to come.
‘We can’t pay wages or suppliers, Dad.’
‘We can after we’ve closed the deal,’ said Bart. Helmut Wallstein, the Chairman of Euro-Electronics, owned race horses and would recognize quality when he saw Bart’s ponies.
He longed to screw Chessie to release the tension, but he always avoided sex before a key match. He needed the built-up pressure to zap the other side. Hearing her reach out for a glass of water, he said, ‘Remember that red suit you wore at last year’s Gold Cup? It brought us luck. Will you wear it again?’
‘On one condition,’ Chessie wriggled up to him, ‘that you fuck me stupid now.’
In contrast to its cool, silver, moonlit appearance, her sweating body gave off a white-hot heat.
‘I mustn’t,’ said Bart regretfully. ‘Tomorrow night I’ll bang you insensible.’
‘Real men screw their wives and win matches,’ taunted Chessie, climbing on top of him and taking his cock between her lips.
‘With access to this,’ mumbled Bart, as the oily, silken warmth tickled his face, ‘I must be the luckiest guy in the world. I’d kill to keep you, you know that.’
The thunderstorm broke in the west around breakfast time and reached Cowdray by midday, with lightning unzipping a purply-black sky and deafening claps of thunder unnerving the ponies. The storm passed on, but driving rain birched the faces of the two teams as they cantered a lap of honour and bounced off a pitch which, after weeks of sunshine, was now dangerously slick and greasy on top and as hard as Red Alderton’s heart underneath.
But rain had never stopped play at Cowdray. The scarlet ribbons on the hats of the band playing ‘Four Horsemen, Riding, Riding, Riding’, the umbrellas of the spectators and the duck-egg-blue shirts of the Flyers provided the only colourful notes.
‘And they’ll be black with mud by treading-in time,’ said Dommie through chattering teeth, ‘and we’ll all be black and blue before it’s over.’
Wayne loathed rain and his long, yellow ears never left his ewe neck as Ricky rode him in the parade. But when he was untacked and realized he wouldn’t be playing, he put his ugly head down, hunched his shoulders and, ignoring everyone, sulked in the corner.
Angel, who hated rain even more than Wayne, was near suicide. Bibi hadn’t come over for the match and the icy west wind whistling across the pitch felt to him as if it was coming directly from her in New York. Perdita felt even worse than Angel. Ricky had cut her dead again, so had Dancer, and Rupert had just come into the stands.
Yesterday, she’d begged Red to stick and ball with her in a faint attempt to capture her lost form. He had rolled up an hour late.
‘You got me out of bed, OK?’ he had snapped. ‘Whatja want me to tell you?’
Then, at the team meeting in the pony lines, Bart had had such a row with Red and Angel, who’d both refused to lunch in the Alderton tent with all the Krauts, that nothing was discussed at all. Bart, in turn, was enraged because Chessie had turned up late for lunch wearing a brown suede jacket and gauchos tucked into black boots and clinched with a big black leather belt, and making all the other women, who’d expected a heatwave, look silly in their flimsy dresses.
‘You promised you’d wear your red suit,’ hissed Bart.
‘I tried it on,’ said Chessie lightly, ‘but the skirt was last year’s length.’
Bart was a powerful and consistent player, but Chessie’s feverish sexual demands last night and again this morning had sapped him and, with all the Krauts and his own board to entertain at lunch, he didn’t have a chance to distance himself. He’d also mislaid his lucky belt and had turned the house and the barn upside down looking for it. Grace would have found it, he thought darkly, and hosted this lunch and made every Kraut and his wife feel special. Why was he blowing his entire livelihood on this exquisite, irresponsible malicious child?
Perdita watched Chessie, who’d now topped the whole outfit with a black sombrero, saunter up the gangway of the stands, swinging her hips like Gary Cooper in High Noon. God, I hate her, she thought. Three players, Bart, Red and Ricky, are all obsessed with her, Angel wouldn’t say no, and the twins have probably had her in duplicate, which only leaves me and Dancer immune. No wonder she’s looking so chipper.
Huddled under their coloured umbrellas, the crowd chattered in an incredible number of languages. Sharon Kaputnik who’d been lunching in the Davidoff tent, it was noticed by the press, was sharing her rose-lined parasol with David Waterlane because Sir Victor, having been knocked out by Apocalypse, refused to come to the match.
‘So unsportin’,’ said Sharon rolling her blue eyes. ‘Ay wouldn’t refuse to come because I’d been beaten.’
‘I’ll bet you wouldn’t,’ murmured Chessie, who, seeing the front rows occupied by Helmut and Gisela Wallstein and the rest of the Euro-Electronics Board, deliberately sat down between Rupert and Sukey Benedict in the row behind.
‘Davidoff Waterlane is obviously about to havidoff with Lady Shar,’ she said in a stage whisper. ‘I do hope Dancer’s wearing waterproof mascara in this rain. Oh, stop looking so boot-faced, Rupert. Haven’t you forgiven me yet?’
But Rupert had turned his back and was gazing moodily at the huge green field with its egg-yolk goal posts and flags and its panorama of rolling green-and-gold cornfields beneath glowing black-and-grey clouds. The grooves made in the cornfields by the drillers were not much deeper than the lines on either side of Ricky’s mouth as he gave last-minute instructions to his team. ‘Don’t go into a daze,
Dancer. For Christ’s sake concentrate, and if you’re going to change ponies, Dommie, ask first. Last time it cost us a goal.’
‘I thought it was a penalty, so I buzzed off,’ said Dommie, mounting his pony. ‘Christ, my reins are starting to slip already.’
‘We’re the better side, so we attack,’ Bart ordered the Flyers as they rode grimly on to the pitch.
‘Solis de Gonzales and Red Alderton have dominated every headline this summer,’ said William Loyd of the Telegraph, frantically trying to make his biro work on a wet page. ‘Nice to get France-Lynch into a headline.’
‘France-Lynched is the only headline you’re likely to get,’ said JNP Watson of The Times. ‘Case of too many late nights, I’m afraid. Seb, Dommie and Dancer were evidently playing poker till three in the morning last night.’
‘Better than boozing,’ said William Loyd giving up and resorting to pencil. ‘Is Bart going to keep his best pony for the last chukka?’ he asked Chessie.
‘All my husband’s ponies are best,’ said Chessie tonelessly.
It was raining even harder now, but nothing doused the loathing between the two teams, which seemed to singe the clouds above and set the drenched cornfields on fire. Drew was waiting to throw-in as they lined up.
‘I don’t want any aggro,’ he said crisply. ‘Anyone who swears or argues with the umpire will be sent off, except any Argentines,’ he added with a glint, ‘who will be shot.’
Only Bart grabbing Angel’s shirt stopped him flying through the air and landing on Drew.
‘Pack it in. I’m paying you to bury the opposition not the umpire.’
In the first chukka Angel and Red tried to play at their usual breakneck speed, but it was as if someone had spilt turkey fat all over the kitchen floor, and after both had overturned their ponies and Angel had nearly been trampled to death by a furiously galloping Seb, they slowed down. The Flyers were infinitely superior in pony power, but for once they couldn’t take advantage of their fleet, light, thoroughbred horses. The much slower ground played havoc with their timing and the rain not only aquapunctured their faces, drastically reducing visibility, but made reins, gloves and sticks incredibly slippery and almost impossible to hold. Accustomed to such conditions and on much heavier ponies, Apocalypse started winning the ride-offs and, having endlessly practised lofting the ball over a sea of mud, were therefore unfazed when the whole field became black with skidmarks and divots.