Jump! (74 page)

‘Could you bear to say you were celebrating Mrs Wilkinson’s victory with Woody and me in “Sebastian” until dawn?’

‘Who’s Sebastian?’ asked Etta.

Amber woke from an excellent night’s sleep. She was delighted with Mrs Wilkinson’s win yesterday. She had no hangover. She had been miffed last night that no sex had taken place. Marius had twice called her ‘Olivia darling’, but before he passed out he had promised her a ride on History Painting. This all meant she could face Rafiq, who got so stormily jealous, with a clear conscience and drive down to Exeter without any fear of being breathalysed.

In the old days, she’d have got legless or stoned and gone on the pull. Now she was twenty, she had become so much more mature and professional and was really getting her career together. She must spend more time in the gym so she was really fit to ride History Painting.

It was getting light outside. Hearing desperate sobbing as she passed ‘Alonso’, she found the door ajar and Trixie slumped on the bed, naked except for a white hotel dressing gown. There was sick all over the carpet and on the pillow. The room reeked of rotten alcohol.

‘Go away,’ wept Trixie, ‘I can’t talk. Leave me alone.’

Grabbing a box of tissues, soaking a towel, Amber cleaned up, threw the pillowcase on the bathroom floor and gave Trixie a glass of water.

‘Whatever happened?’

‘I can’t tell you, I promised not to.’

Amber sat on the bed, pushing Trixie’s damp hair back from her sweating forehead and feeling even more mature.

‘Tell me, babe, I won’t tell anyone.’

‘It’s Seth,’ howled Trixie. ‘I don’t know how it happened. I loved him so much. He pursued me and pursued me, ringing me
at school, texting me the whole time, sending flowers. I didn’t want to know. I kept asking him if he had any attractive grandsons. Gradually I got hooked.’

‘Hardly surprising, he’s well fit.’

‘He was so loving when he was coaching me, then he backed off, didn’t answer my calls or texts, all over that vile Bonny. Last night he totally blanked me, but when I came out of my room he was waiting. He kissed me so lovingly and led me back into what I thought was his room and it was Bonny’s.’

Trixie was crying so much, Amber could hardly distinguish what she was saying.

‘B-b-bonny was on the bed starkers, Seth made her shag me. It was hideous, she kept smacking and pinching me and laughing at me for being crap in bed, then Seth joined in. Oh God, I feel so dirty.’ She blew her nose on the duvet cover.

‘Not your fault, babe.’ Amber felt more mature by the minute as she stroked Trixie’s hair. ‘Threesome’s nothing. Loads of grown-ups do it. Like jumping on everyone else’s horses at the end of Pony Club camp. Bloody Seth shouldn’t have forced you, even if he was drunk.’

‘It was a foursome,’ whispered Trixie, ‘Rogue was there too.’

‘Rogue,’ screamed Amber, ‘Rogue! The bastard, how dare he, the bastard.’

‘He was laughing his head off and very drunk. Bonny kept ticking him off for not concentrating,’ confessed Trixie. ‘He was always into group sex when he lived in Willowwood.’

Amber couldn’t speak for fury, so Trixie carried on.

‘Bonny was drunk too. She doesn’t drink normally. She showed off terribly, proving how brilliant she was at blow jobs and things, oh yuck.’

‘The bitch,’ whispered Amber. ‘The bitch, how dare she.’

‘Please, please don’t tell anyone.’ Trixie looked terrified. ‘Granny would die if it got out. She thinks the world of Seth. And Uncle Martin and Romy would be so censorious. Mummy’d kill me, she doesn’t understand love, and Daddy’s so wrapped up in Tilda Flood.’ The desolation in Trixie’s voice for a moment distracted Amber from her own misery.

‘Rogue ought to be shot.’

‘Please don’t say anything to him, or Seth says he’ll never see me again. How can one hate someone so much and still adore them?’

Seth last night had been slightly disconcerted, on reaching ‘Ferdinand’, to be greeted by a sleepily replete Corinna:

‘Darling, thank you for the best fuck I have ever had.’

But he cheered up when he read his reviews on a hotel laptop. For once they compared very favourably with Corinna’s, which were so good she wouldn’t give a stuff who’d been shagging who last night.

Bonny was not so sanguine. After her first furious text, Seth had ordered a fry-up and shut himself in the bathroom to call her.

‘Have you seen the internet, such fantastic notices … How are you, Bon-Bon, you looked ravishing last night – fun, wasn’t it?’

‘How could you let that happen?’ shrieked Bonny. ‘What in hell did you slip in my drink? It could constitute rape, that little tramp is sure to tell Dora and it’ll be all over the papers. When I think of the efforts I’ve made to safeguard my reputation … And I can’t see Rogue staying shtum either. How
could
you?’

‘I’ll square Trixie,’ reassured Seth.

‘And I’ve had an email from Martin Bancroft, who wants me to be the War on Obesity icon. If word gets out, they’ll pull the plug.’

Seth had had enough. ‘Oh shut up,’ he said, ‘I’ve got a headache. That’s room service just arrived. The good news is my agent’s just emailed me that there’s big interest in you playing Gwendolyn.’

‘Gwendolyn Framlingham – over my dead body,’ shrieked Bonny, remembering Cindy’s dismissive remarks about her boobs. ‘I wouldn’t work with those two.’

‘Wilde’s Gwendolyn, dumb-dumb, for the BBC. They want me to play Jack Worthing and, wait for it, they’re going to offer Corinna Lady Bracknell. See you.’

Etta lay on her bed giggling hysterically.

‘Our revels now are ended,’ she read on the wall above, ‘These our actors,/As I foretold you, were all spirits and/Are melted into air, into thin air.’

So no one had got off with anyone.

Room service then arrived with an enormous breakfast of bacon, sausages, tomatoes, fried bread, two fried eggs, mushrooms, orange juice, croissants and apricot jam.

Etta rang Miss Painswick.

‘Joyce, I’ve been sent a huge breakfast by mistake, please come and share it with me and have a post mortem.’

‘Mr Pocock rang and asked if I’d like a nightcap,’ said Miss Painswick smugly as she accepted another mushroom. ‘Must have
been tiddly but I said no because I’d got my curlers in. Who d’you think got off with who?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Etta, spreading marmalade on a piece of fried bread, ‘but the Vicar, Seth, Alan and the Major (yes) rang me and begged me to confirm that they’d spent half the night drinking in my room, which they certainly had not.’

Flattering in a way, she mused, that they’d turned to her, yet rather unflattering was the assumption that if they had been with her, their other halves would assume nothing could possibly have occurred.

‘Shall we take the sausages back to Priceless,’ she said, ‘and the rest of the croissants for Pavarobin and the bird table?’

Amber hurtled down to Throstledown in a red mist – road rage, Rogue rage. Why was she so devastated? Was it because underneath she believed, despite Rogue’s scores of women, that a special spark flickered between them that, if allowed, would flare into a conflagration? Or was it, more shamingly, jealousy? Bonny was stunning and made no secret of her dislike of Amber. Rogue had always said how silly Bonny was, but silliness, when allied to beauty, never deterred men. And why wasn’t she jealous of poor victimized Trixie?

Pink aeroplane trails were playing noughts and crosses with the departing stars and a rosy glow in the east echoed her red mist as she stormed up Marius’s drive.

In the yard Mrs Wilkinson was banging her food bowl against the wall – winners deserve breakfast. Chisolm, hooves up on the stable door, bleated hello. From Sir Cuthbert’s box she could hear singing.

‘Gaily the troubadour touched his guitar,
When he was hast’ning home from the war.’

Rafiq often sang the Crusader’s song with which she had first taunted him. As he emerged, she noticed the black smudges beneath his bloodshot eyes and how drawn he looked, having done all the hard work last night while she partied. Them and us. But his face lit up when he saw her.

‘Singing from Stratford hither I come,
Rafiq Khan, Rafiq Khan, welcome me home,’

sang Amber.

This is reality, she thought, the way Rafiq trembled as he kissed her, so tentatively and then so passionately.

An equally exhausted Tommy, looking rough and pug-like as she came out of History Painting’s box, shot back in again, burying her face in his big, dark brown shoulder while he nudged her sympathetically and repeatedly. He was such a kind horse. They both jumped as Amber’s voice said, ‘Wake up, you two. Can you walk him up to see if he’s sound? You’ll never guess what: Marius says I can ride him at Wincanton next week.’

Amber schooled History Painting several times in the following days, impressed by how beautifully and carefully he jumped for a big horse. Concentrating on the race ahead, she tried to forget Rogue. But when she rang up Marius to confirm the ride, he denied all knowledge of giving it to her.

‘D’you honestly think I’d put you up on my best horse? Rogue’s riding him.’

‘But you promised at Stratford, you promised.’

‘You must have heard wrong.’

‘I did not. You must have been too bloody drunk to remember.’

‘If you don’t learn some bloody manners, you won’t even ride Mrs Wilkinson again, so shut up,’ howled Marius and hung up on her.

Such was her rage, though aware she was treating with the enemy, Amber texted Shade Murchieson. She hoped Olivia wasn’t peering over his shoulder, remembering that the last time they’d met he’d offered her a ride for a ride.

Within ten minutes he’d texted back.

‘As promised, a ride for a ride.’

She was to come to his Larkshire house at midnight that evening and ring when she got to the gates. Not a please or thank you: what had she unleashed? To ward off evil, she’d put on her lucky pants, white lycra but with snazzy lace panels, which she’d worn every time she won on Wilkie.

It was a viciously cold night. The stars glittered as though Olivia had scattered Shade’s diamonds over the sky. Shade’s house, lowering, dark, four-square, like him, loomed up at the end of a long drive.

Shade himself let her into a vast hall with a glossy oak floor and serious pictures. Amber recognized a Lowry and a mournful Landseer hound rather like Alban, alternating with glassy-eyed stags and bisons’ heads. Shade, resplendent in black evening trousers and a frilled cream shirt, wore even more scent than she
did. His dinner jacket and black tie hung over the chair. The central heating was stifling, even a bra was too hot.

Shade had just flown down from London. Immediately he boasted of the ministers and bankers with whom he’s been dining, indicating, as he poured her a glass of Krug, that a peer-age was imminent.

He’d taken her into the drawing room to show off more serious pictures on wallpaper covered in glittering humming-birds.

‘Cool paper,’ murmured Amber.

‘Should be at ten thousand a roll.’

‘And that’s Degas,’ said Amber, admiring an oil of jockeys and horses circling at the start.

‘I’ve got another Degas in the Lear.’

‘Shame if it crashed.’

‘It’s insured. Bring your drink upstairs.’

‘Am I worth ten thousand a roll?’ asked Amber.

‘That’s what we’re going to find out.’

Shade’s bedroom – Amber wondered if it were Olivia’s too – was even more stifling, an approaching storm indicated by the matching thunder-blue curtains, window seats and wallpaper. A massive stretch of sheepskin rug covered the floor. A vast bed, with a leather headboard, hung with straps was the only furniture.

Shade stood in the doorway staring at her. He was definitely attractive in a repulsive sort of way – well over six foot with dark olive skin and wide but not heavy shoulders. His eyes, large, black-coffee-coloured to keep you awake at night, with heavy lids and the thickest black lashes, had already stripped off her clothes. His smile was all-knowing, predatory, a panther selecting a plump gazelle. His unbuttoned shirt showed the slight reddening of a recent chest wax.

‘You’re well fit for a geriatric,’ taunted Amber.

‘You’re too young to need the lights dimmed,’ quipped Shade, pressing a button and flooding the room with Romeo and Juliet.

‘Oh lovely.’ Amber sang along for a minute, remembering with a stab of anguish singing with Rafiq to an accompaniment of stamping horses on long journeys. What the hell was she doing here?

‘A ride for a ride,’ Shade reminded her.

‘Then you ought to play the Post Horn Gallop instead of Tchaikovsky.’

‘And you ought to be in the parade ring. You’ve always disturbed me, you spoilt, upmarket bitch. Get your kit off.’

As Amber pulled off her pale grey jersey dress and unhooked her bra, Shade breathed a little faster and ran big, warm, pudgy hands over her very high, springy breasts.

‘I must be worth a monkey each way,’ mocked Amber to hide her sudden excitement, as Shade tugged her roughly into his arms, then kissed her surprisingly expertly, big tongue tickling her lips, sucking then gently exploring, then stabbing her mouth.