Kiss and Tell (40 page)

‘Lough reckons she’s the best woman rider in the world,’ Lemon was saying.

‘Who?’ Hugo snapped, draining his scotch on the way to the door.

‘Someone like Marie-Clair Tucson is much more stylish,’ Rory countered.

‘Lough’s shagged her,’ Lemon sniggered.

‘Who are we talking about?’ Hugo repeated witheringly.

‘Tash.’

‘Lough’s shagged Tash?’ Rory hooted, deliberately misinterpreting.

Lemon joined in, almost weeping with laughter. They shared an appallingly silly sense of humour.

A scotch glass was slammed down on the scrubbed pine between them with such force that it cracked clean in two, leaving behind a dent like a horseshoe.

Outside, Beccy stood shivering beneath the clock-tower arch, which afforded her a clear view through the kitchen windows of the main house, where she could see Hugo, Rory and the little New Zealander having an animated conversation. She knew that Lough had not arrived as expected, but she was still fuming with indignation that she hadn’t been included in that night’s meal – even as a gesture of thanks for her contribution to Rory’s success at the competition. All Tash had said was that she must be wiped out after all her hard work, so was bound to want an early night. She didn’t want an early night. She wanted to be a part of the action. She felt as alien as the Czechs, currently moving about above her head in the little clock-tower apartment and, from the sound of things, having a heated argument while listening to strange, yodelling folk music.

But Beccy envied them their togetherness. At least they had each other in the overpoweringly selfish world of the Beauchamps. Beccy only had Karma, and the disloyal minx had now formed an unshakeable attachment to Beetroot, following her around adoringly.

‘Well, I’m not following bloody Tash around,’ Beccy fumed.

She took out her mobile phone and scrolled through the half-dozen messages she’d received from New Zealand in recent days. Jealousy bubbling in her hot blood and tears drying on her face, she re-read them all, pretending that Lough knew that he was really sending them to her and not Tash.

One sentence from that final, heart-wrenching message ran past her eyes again and again imprinting itself there:
Never had you to lose – my greatest regret.

Feeling strangely calm and composed, Beccy pressed Reply.

You haven’t lost me, Lough
…
you just haven’t found me yet. I am here. It’s easy, as the song says.

Despite sleeping just a few metres apart in the stables flat, their bedrooms to either side of the little galley kitchen, Lemon and Beccy didn’t speak properly until the following morning, packing down the muck-heap into stepped layers. It wasn’t the most glamorous spot to bond, but Beccy later reflected that it was rather apt given Lemon’s love of what he openly called ‘shit-stirring’.

‘You know, I reckon Hugo’s happy that Lough’s lost in transit. You’d think he was the Home Guard about to get a German prisoner of war. Christ, he’s a bad-tempered bastard.’ He threw up straw, compact little biceps bulging in his tight sweatshirt. He might have a face like a cherub, but he had arms like a boxer. ‘Lough’s gone AWOL before: he once went walkabout for a month after a horse of his got killed at Puhinui trials. He gets like that sometimes. I reckon he’ll turn up soon enough.’

‘It’s a bit weird, though, isn’t it?’ Beccy was thinking anxiously about all the frantic texts she had ignored. ‘Could something have happened to him?’

‘Nah. He was sorting out some shit to do with his dad, but that’s nothing to do with it, I reckon.’

‘What shit?’

‘Not this shit, that’s for sure!’ He flicked a forkful of droppings at her.

Shrieking, Beccy flicked some back and soon they were having an all-out dung fight. Afterwards, breathless with giggles, they looked like swamp monsters and smelled so noxious they had to shower before breakfast.

Lemon was childish, crude and cocky, but Beccy thought he was the most entertaining thing to happen at Haydown since Dillon Rafferty landed on Flat Pad in a helicopter.

Over coffee in the flat, while he gelled his Mohawk back into place and she dried her dreadlocks with a towel, he eyed her with interest. ‘Aren’t you a bit old to be a working pupil?’

‘I travelled a lot.’

‘Ever come to New Zealand?’

‘No,’ she muttered. Then, eager to change the subject, ‘I like your hair.’

‘Lough says I look like a Yellow Crown Amazon – that’s a bird we have in New Zealand, yeah? He knows all that sort of shit.’

‘Is he a twitcher then?’

‘A what?’ he laughed.

‘A bird fancier.’ She blushed, remembering Lough’s birds-of-a-feather text after her quacking gaffe.

‘Nah,’ Lemon was predictably coarse. ‘Only birds he fancies have tits and arse.’

‘So he’s a ladies’ man?’

‘A
ladies’ man
!’ he cackled, mocking her voice. ‘Nah, he’s too obsessed with horses and winning. He once told me he lost his heart years ago, but I reckon it grew back while he wasn’t looking.’

Beccy hoped so. She really hoped so. However fraught with danger and deceit, her texts with Lough felt incredibly special and, even though she knew it was only ever really a fantasy, she treasured the early ones.

And now her heart was glowing like a freshly stoked fire from having Lemon around. It was a long time since she’d had a friend.

He soon called her Limey and flirted relentlessly. ‘You’re really beautiful, you know that?’; ‘Christ, you have a hot body, Limey’; ‘Fancy a quick roll in the hay, yeah?’

On the surface she took it all with a pinch of salt – the limey compliment to his tequila-slammer humour and down-in-one flattery – but deep down it opened the flues of her heart and kept the fire burning there. It was nothing to the all-consuming flames of her love for Hugo and the burning shame of her strange,
Cyrano de Bergerac
relationship with the missing Lough, but it made her fingers and toes tingle as she embraced the working day with enthusiasm at long last.

Chapter 24

‘Voila!’ the
Cheers!
photographer’s assistant finally made the reflective umbrella stay put beside a large marble urn in the Garden Suite at Eastlode Park.

Lounging on the vast four-poster bed – carved from a six-hundred-year-old oak for a mistress of Charles II, it was said – Sylva
regarded the two different teams shooting her with impassive calm, despite being dressed in no more than a loose-stayed corset, silk camiknickers and silky striped over-the-knee ‘sockings’, a new hosiery trend that was proving a triumph of branding over practicality.

‘I can see some nipple on the right!’ the
Cheers!
photographer called out, causing a stylist to leap into frame and start adjusting.

‘I can move my own breast,’ Sylva muttered as tit tape and curses landed upon her massive mammary.

‘Yes, but I’m paid to do it,’ the stylist snapped. ‘You’re paid to lie back and take it. I’m sure you’ve done that plenty of times before.’

There was a time when Sylva would have had the girl fired for less than that, but she was mellower these days – and she had her documentary team’s cameras trained on her.

Today Rodney was in his element, enjoying a terrific, unexpected angle to this particular episode of Sylva’s reality show that came from the fact that Eastlode Park – normally a bastion of discreet efficiency – had double-booked. For while Sylva Frost, the nation’s favourite single-mum superstar was being captured by
Cheers!
curled up with a down-filled bolster in one wing of the Palladian mansion, supermodel-turned-child-adopting-global-campaigner Indigo Rafferty was in the opposite wing, holding up a glass of vintage Dom Perignon and steaming in the spa with a tame photo crew from
Hello!

Fed up with her husband’s failure to officially move into his new Oddlode pile, Indigo had decided to take matters into her own hands and announce their arrival at the Abbey with a glossy photo spread featuring all eight of her adopted children. Naturally reluctant to reveal her newly redecorated inner sanctum to the masses, she had elected to host her Cotswolds photoshoot at the nearest five-star spa, where oiled water now slid from her dusky skin in the fabulous evening sunlight that streamed in through the pool wall of Italian glass.

Pete was, predictably, nowhere to be seen.

‘Probably busy searching for the third Mrs Rafferty,’ muttered Sylva at the opposite end of the hotel when news of the Rockfather’s absence reached her.

A clash was inevitable. Throughout the day the women, aware of one another’s presence, edged closer like prize fighters unable to resist a pre-bout showdown.

Indigo’s crew set up in the vast marble-clad reception hall where she dangled from the
bianco carrara
pillars in designer cocktail dresses like a pole dancer warming up. In the neighbouring ball room, Sylva’s two crews caught every aspect of her posing in diaphanous silk against a backdrop of sun-drenched parkland caught through floor-to-ceiling Georgian windows so that every curve of her glorious body was cast in silhouette. The two photo shoots finally met on the battlefield of the long gallery as Sylva’s team set up one end with a suit of armour, a bell-sleeved Guinevere outfit and an orb, while Indigo’s posse noisily arrived at the other complete with fake-fur rugs, primitive musical instruments and small, beautiful children.

‘It’s like
The King and I
meets
The Jungle Book
over there.’ The photographer’s assistant whistled from the medieval end just as Indigo swept in on her endless glossy legs, wearing a leopard-print body stocking and what appeared to be a headdress of antlers. ‘Wow!’

‘Is it panto season already?’ Rodney scoffed, eager to get a furious-looking Sylva on side.

Indigo was an intimidating and breathtakingly beautiful figure. A hybrid of a gerenuk and Medusa, she had golden bronze skin, fierce ebony eyes and unsmiling lips so rosebud plump her mouth was a perfect circle. Her trade mark snaked, braided hair was just visible beneath the antlers.

Several nannies and assistants were attempting to attract the interest of the children, who were gazing rapturously around the room at the portraits, coats of armour and tapestries. Seemingly in charge of this mêlée came a diminutive Chinese man in an expensive suit and sunglasses, who removed the ‘Do Not Sit’ sign from a George III Chippendale armchair and settled delicately upon it before clapping his small hands together and ordering ‘Music!’ like an oriental emperor holding court. With a lot of huffing and puffing, the childminders brought the instruments to life. The children took no notice.

The little group at Sylva’s end ducked for cover.

Pauline, the older and tougher of Sylva’s two PAs, a bull mastiff of a woman who had been known to headbutt more invasive members of the paparazzi, set out to silence the din but Sylva called her back.

‘It’s time I introduced myself.’

Watched by her ranks of supporters, Guinevere swept majestically along the gallery.

She reached the leopard-stag and stood at its hip, a mere five foot five Lilliputian to the seven feet six of former supermodel plus horns.

‘We haven’t been introduced.’ Sylva extended a hand, bell sleeve dangling.

Indigo’s blue-black eyes bored into hers.

For a moment the urge to say ‘I am your future daughter-in-law’ almost overwhelmed Sylva, but she managed to control herself and summon a gracious smile.

‘I’m Sylva. I know you are Indigo. Two colours that compliment one another absurdly, as I hope we shall. Your children are beautiful; I wish mine were here to meet them. Now that we are neighbours, I trust we can be friends.’

Caught off guard, Indigo’s eyes flashed. She didn’t have many friends. Pete disliked her having girlfriends in the same way he disapproved of her wearing jeans and trainers or plain white underwear. He thought them dull.

‘I hope so,’ she purred, reaching out to snatch the proffered hand in a brief salutation, more like a high five than a handshake, that left both their palms buzzing.

Sylva lingered briefly, vaguely hoping for an invitation to coffee at the Rock Palace, but the horned one was sharpening her talons on a faux tiger-skin throw now, so she decided to float away and leave their brief encounter as a marker card. She’d made the first move. That was what counted. The Rafferty poker circle was within her grasp.

And her trump was still up her bell sleeve.

Zuzi. Children were power in the Rafferty clan.

On the short drive back to the château in her chauffeur-driven car, Sylva called her sons at home in Buckinghamshire, cutting the call short while her heart was singing from hearing their voices, just catching herself before she choked up for the want of seeing them again.

Then she texted her sister in Slovakia, saying how much she was looking forward to welcoming her and Zuzi to England. Hana was putting up a lot of resistance and refused to take her daughter out of school before the end of term, but Sylva had no doubt she would
get her way, even if it meant that she had to travel to her motherland to collect them. Finally, she called Tash Beauchamp.

‘It was so lovely to meet you last weekend, darlink. We must have lunch soon. I want to pick your brains about buying a horse.’

Lunch was obviously an alien concept to Tash as she sounded gratifyingly excited: ‘I normally just have a Cup-a-Soup when I come in to give Amery his feed.’

‘You must bring your children,’ Sylva insisted. ‘My nannies will look after them while we gossip.’

‘And your documentary team, will they be there?’ Tash asked worriedly.

‘No, no. Just a quiet girls’ lunch.’

A quiet lunch involving a convoy of cars, nannies, bodyguards and PAs with the paparazzi camped outside, Sylva predicted. Tash would probably be overawed. Indigo Rafferty would have no problems handling it, but Sylva had decided against inviting her too, knowing that it would make her look overeager. She needed to play a long game with Indigo.

They agreed a date the following week. ‘Hugo and Rory will be in France then,’ Tash chattered breathlessly, ‘but I’m sure I can play hooky for an hour or two. God, I must phone Rory to remind him to pick up his passport while he’s at Overlodes this week.’