Kiss and Tell (42 page)

Faith looked him square in the eye, saying nothing but thinking back to the past few weeks of simply throwing herself into the work to make up for all those unanswered texts and late and lonely nights sitting in the caravan, or occasional dreadful evenings out on the town with Carly trying to be something she wasn’t. She thought about Sylva Frost and her high-maintenance glamour, seducing her dreams away. She thought about her beloved Rio relocating to the Beauchamps’ fantastic Berkshire yard along with half a dozen other Overlodes competition horses. She felt increasingly like poor White Lies who had been left behind, overlooked because he was no longer considered useful.

Faith still remembered the first time Rory had let her ride Whitey in open country, and the sheer speed with which he’d powered over hedges and ditches. ‘We would have won the Foxhunter Chase if we’d stayed in racing,’ Rory had laughed afterwards. But when Faith had asked why he hadn’t done just that he’d looked at her askance. ‘Just because you
can
win something doesn’t make it the natural choice. Where’s the challenge in that? It’s what you
want
to win that counts.’ It was one of the wisest things she could remember him saying, and the reason she’d decided Rio should swap from dressage to eventing.

Faith had been bred to be a dressage rider. It was in her genes, just as being flat-chested, ginger-haired and long-legged were part of her make-up. She’d come away to reinvent herself, but instead of becoming more feminine and beguiling she’d found her body toughening to muscle with all the hard work, her resolve hardening and her skin thickening as she reverted to type. Yet her heart was utterly unchangeable; it wanted to break out of the arena and gallop across country.

Kurt strode back to the fireplace, where he stood facing her, hands on hips, issuing the challenge again. ‘So what’s it going to be, Faith? Are you going to fight?’

She had a sudden ludicrous image of them grappling one another
down on to the designer hearthrug to battle it out like Grecian wrestlers while Graeme watched on, a poodle to each side of him. It reminded her of the film
Women in Love
. She wasn’t sure if she had grown from girl to woman while she had been away, but she knew she was in love.

‘I want to have a go at eventing,’ she said in a small voice.

Kurt’s handsome, tanned face lengthened with disappointment and he looked away.

On the sofa, Graeme snorted with laughter. ‘Oh God, it’s worse than we thought. Not only has she been under the knife in the name of love, now she wants to pop logs with hunting toffs and farmers from the colonies.’

‘It’s the best test of horse and rider!’ Faith flared. ‘Four-star eventers have more courage and skill than anyone.’

‘You won’t get anywhere with that attitude, smiler,’ Graeme snarled back, though he was quietly thrilled by this turn of events, having already lined up a lovely young Swedish rider as Faith’s replacement.

Faith rounded on him. ‘I
like
my attitude!’ She cocked her chin, displaying some of that fire at long last. ‘
And
I like my teeth. In fact, I wish I’d had more work done!’

‘Why not?’ sneered Graeme. ‘You’ll have plenty of time now you’re out of a job.’

Faith’s mouth hung open, showing off her very white teeth as she registered what was happening.

Confirming her fears, Graeme looked victoriously at Kurt. ‘In the words of Alan Sugar …’

With a shrug of regret, Kurt nodded. Graeme had been impossibly jealous since Faith’s arrival, having never really dealt with Kurt’s previous marriage or his stepchildren. He was all for an easy life. There was no point having a protégée if she wasn’t ready to be tamed, and he really preferred riding the horses himself. But he would miss Faith’s pure, raw ability.

She hung her head. ‘I really am sorry about the stallion. I hated lying.’

To her surprise, Kurt waltzed forward and took her face between his hands. ‘My darling child, you have a
lot
to learn. But your attitude – and your teeth – are quite dazzling. What better for the girl who always bites off more than she can chew?’

*

Later that same drizzling grey October morning, Faith made the long, traffic-choked drive from Essex to the Cotswolds. She had never been so mortified. Before today, she hadn’t been given so much as a detention or an official reprimand of any kind. Now her gayfathers had just fired her.

Her eyes barely focusing on the road beyond the sweeping wind-screen wipers, Faith deeply regretted her shabby behaviour towards Kurt and Graeme. They had been good to her. They were family, and she’d abused their trust. Her mother would be livid.

Yet a part of her couldn’t help feeling liberated. She longed to see Rory and was desperate to get back to the way things had been before. She would never let him down, or desert him, again.

Turning on the radio, she found Samuel Barber’s
Adagio for Strings
playing on Classic FM, so absurdly romantic and yet saddening that rare tears almost blinded her progress along the M40, her battered heart at bursting point.

The truth hit her with every passing slip road. She wasn’t going home to Rory. He had gone to Berkshire without looking back. He had taken her horse. He had sent just a one-line text to let her know. Worse than all of that, he had played with the ultimate Slovakian sex kitten. Rory, her beloved, her only Rory, was increasingly a stranger.

She took a deep breath, blinking to see, wishing that she had asked Mr Ali Khan for massive Sylva Frost boobs after all, as well as a tiny button nose and buttock implants. Carly had been right all along, she needed some mileage. She had an awful lot to learn about men and sex. An eighteen-year-old virgin had no hope of bagging a seasoned playboy.

Faith drove the last few miles home to Wyck Farm on autopilot, running straight past her waiting mother and shutting herself in her bedroom.

There, back in her familiar surroundings, looked down upon by walls decked with posters of dressage and horses, pictures of Rory, rosettes and one solitary Brad Pitt photo ripped from one of her parents’ Sunday supplements, she felt hollow with inexperience and ignorance.

Now she was determined to wise up, to be as cool as Sylva Frost. Even if she could never hope to be that beautiful, she could try to be that assured, to acquire a little of that attitude and sexual poise.

‘I love him, I love him, I love him.’ She exhaled, her breath a dragon puff of hot, scorching truth.

Anke was not at all pleased to have Faith home in such disgrace. She’d been appalled to learn from Kurt and Graeme that her lovely, athletic, handsome daughter had sneaked off for cosmetic surgery to alter the way she looked for ever.

When she hadn’t emerged from her room for almost an hour Anke took up a cup of tea and knocked on the door before going in to perch on the edge of the bed. Faith was texting Carly to let her know the latest.

‘How could you do it to yourself,
kaereste
?’ she asked, trying not to stare at the vast, gravity-defying hemispheres jutting through Faith’s polo shirt.

With a sigh, Faith cast her phone to one side and started to pull up the shirt.

‘No – please don’t!’ Anke looked away, unable to bear seeing that body she had created from her own now so mutilated.

Something warm and rubbery landed in the palm of her hand.

Anke looked at it in wonder. ‘What is this?’

‘My fake tits. I put them in today because I thought I might see Rory. Even though he told me not to have the operation, he is such a boob man that I have to try something. Then I remembered he’s not here any more.’ Her face pinched with disappointment, she looked away.

‘Rory talked you out of surgery?’ Anke gasped in disbelief, tears springing to her eyes as she realised her beautiful daughter wasn’t really altered at all, apart from very white teeth and a very black mood.

‘Men are such hypocrites!’ Faith fumed. ‘He said “don’t do it to yourself, Faith”, but his latest lover is so plastic she’d melt if she sat too close to a radiator.’

Anke stroked her back. ‘Men can be like that,
kaereste
. What they want with their hearts and want with their eyes doesn’t always match up.’

‘Do you think Rory might want me with his heart then?’

‘Maybe one day.’ Anke stretched forwards to give her daughter a rare hug, immensely grateful that there was nothing fake to get between them. ‘But you must give him time to find that out for himself.’

When Anke went back downstairs to tell Graham the good news that his stepdaughter was not quite as distorted as they first thought, he was surprisingly disappointed.

‘You’ve got to admit it would have been an improvement,’ he said.

‘There’s nothing wrong with the way she looks.’

‘I’m not saying that. I’m just saying cosmetic surgeons are God’s way of touching up His handiwork. What girl wants a flat chest and big nose?’

‘She inherited those features from me, Graham.’

‘Nonsense,’ he blustered. ‘They came from her father’s side, I reckon, along with that wilful streak of hers. She’s put you through all this worry over nothing, and now she’s lost her job in the best dressage centre in the country. She’ll have to make up for it.’

Anke found his comments very hurtful, but she did back up his determination to keep Faith on a short leash for the time being.

‘You’ll have to get another job, of course,’ Graham told Faith when she emerged from her bedroom to check her email account on his computer. ‘You can’t mope around here for months on end until you go to university. We had enough of that with your brother.’

‘I’m already looking for work. I’ve posted an ad on yardand-groom already. That’s why I’m checking email.’

Graham was pleasantly surprised, although he needed more control. ‘You will work with your mother at the bookshop.’

‘I don’t
think
so.’ Faith was already online and accessing Hotmail. ‘We agreed I could work with horses this year.’

‘That’s before you let us down so much.’ Anke was peering over her daughter’s shoulder, surreptitiously trying to read her messages. ‘I can’t trust you on your own again.’

‘It was my money to spend as I like.’

‘Not during work hours, it wasn’t. D’you know how many young riders would sell their souls to train with Kurt and Graeme?’

Faith had stopped listening as she scrolled through her mail. She’d had quite a few responses to her ad, although none of them were in the discipline she had hoped.

‘Racing!’ Anke managed to read one. ‘You cannot go and work in racing!’

Faith had to admit her size was against her – she weighed more than most racing staff – but she was a good rider and a hard worker, plus the National Hunt yards that were dotted all around the downs
close to the Beauchamps’ base were not as weight-obsessed as the flat yards.

‘You cannot work in racing!’ Anke said again.

Faith knew that the hours were awful and the pay was worse, but the geography was perfect and from what she’d heard a busy National Hunt yard full of red-blooded lads living in close proximity would be the perfect start for her sexual learning curve and development of Sylva Frost attitude.

‘I would rather be based in an eventing yard, but there’s nothing on offer now it’s the end of the season,’ she pointed out as she started typing enthusiastic replies to the enquiries, suggesting she could start as soon as they confirmed the job and accommodation.

‘Eventing?’ Anke sounded even more appalled.

‘Yes, I’ve gone off dressage,’ Faith said coolly, practising her attitude. It sounded good.

Anke bit her lip. She knew full well that this was about Rory, and she could tell that fighting it was hopeless. Graham was right: Faith had a wilful streak that had no link to her mother’s fair-minded Danish blood. At least if the family supported this change of discipline Faith was unlikely to revisit notions of going under the knife. Big breasts might be a disadvantage in dressage, but they were a positive danger in eventing.

‘Wait there! I’ll make a couple of calls,’ Anke insisted, rushing into the kitchen for her old Filofax that contained numbers dating back to her professional career when she had been dressage coach to most of the top event riders in the South of England.

Chapter 26

Every year for almost a decade Tash and Hugo had taken a family holiday in France after Pau three day event, letting the grooms take the horses home in the lorry while they headed to Alexandra and Pascal’s manoir in the Loire Valley. There they would rest and eat and drink and talk themselves hoarse before heading home. It was a hugely relaxing break, and Tash always looked forward to it
immensely, never more so than this year with a new baby to show off to her ever more remote mother.

But then, just days before Hugo and Rory set off for the Pyrenees, a postcard arrived from Tibet, featuring a large yak lying down, wearing a brightly coloured blanket.
Taking a year out with P & P, so you will miss your R & R, darling ones. But I will have such tales to tell my wonderful grandchildren when I come home! xxx

‘She’s
where
?’ Hugo laughed when she showed the card to him.

‘She and Pascal must have gone travelling with Polly and her friends,’ Tash gasped, hardly able to take it in. ‘I know she was incredibly worried about letting her go backpacking, after what happened to Beccy.’

‘Isn’t this a bit extreme?’ He studied the card. ‘Surely a good global roaming mobile and Hotmail account would cover it?’

‘She’s always loved travelling. Pascal retired this year so they have the time now.’

‘Knowing your mother, they’re doing it in style, with hot and cold running Sherpas and a fully loaded portmanteau.’ Hugo seemed impressed, having always admired Alexandra’s spontaneity and sense of adventure.

‘She could have told us what she was planning.’ Tash felt terribly hurt. ‘They’ve been gone weeks.’

‘We had the Olympics and then the new baby all over us – they probably didn’t want to stress you out even more.’

Nevertheless, Tash was shocked. She and Alexandra hadn’t spoken in weeks, but she’d been pinning her hopes on the holiday, knowing that her capricious mother could be hard to contact but that she wouldn’t dream of missing the opportunity to meet her grandson at last.