Riders (26 page)

“Who’s your father married to at the moment?” said Nanny.

“Some Italian whore,” said Rupert.

“I suppose you had to get married?” asked Nanny.

“No, we did not.”

“Whatever happened to Bianca? And Melanie Potter? She was a bonny girl.”

“She’s married with two daughters. I told you last time.”

Nanny knew everything about him, and every round he’d jumped in the last two years.

“Your mother remembered my birthday,” she said accusingly. “More than you did, and so did your brother Adrian. I hear he’s got a girlfriend.”

“Are you sure?” said Rupert in amazement. “I don’t think so.”

“Never knew he was bispectacled,” said Nanny.

Helen didn’t dare look at Rupert.

“Helen’s American,” said Rupert.

“So I read,” said Nanny. “Never thought you’d end up with a foreigner. I’ve read about Watergate,” she added, as though Helen were personally responsible.

Helen was so hot she took off her jersey, revealing her slender brown arms and waist.

“Not much of her, is there?” said Nanny. “Anorexic, I suppose.”

Finally, when Helen thought she’d faint from the heat, she said, “I think we ought to go, Rupert.”

Nanny was not at all upset; she didn’t even come to the door. Desperate to get out into the fresh air, Helen made her good-byes and fled, but not before she heard Nanny say, “Got money, I suppose? Only reason for marrying a foreigner really.”

“Isn’t she a gem?” said Rupert on the way home.

“She’s a Machiavellian old monster,” said Helen.

“Doesn’t mean it; she’s nearly eighty. All the same I can’t wait for you to have a baby so we can get her out of mothballs to look after it.”

It was plain, in fact, as the months went by, that Rupert and Helen were very different. Rupert was spoilt, easily irritated, and didn’t flinch from showing it. His ambition in life was to get his own way and beat the hell out of the opposition. He had many moments of frustration and boredom in life, but very few of self-doubt.

Helen, on the other hand, was riddled with self-doubt. She believed that one should not only constantly strive to improve oneself and others, but that work would indeed keep the devil at bay.

To begin with, therefore, she made heroic efforts to interest herself in horses and learn to ride, but she was too tense and nervous and the horses sensed this, and the way she always caught her breath got on Rupert’s nerves. Then Marion (Helen never knew if it were deliberate) put her up on one of the novices, who carted her through a wood with low-hanging branches and finally deposited her on the tarmac of the village street. Helen bruised herself very badly and after that gave up trying to ride.

She still took an interest in show jumping, however, reading every book on the subject, scanning the papers for horsey news. She even started reading dressage books and discussing her theories with Rupert, trying to show him where he was going wrong. Rupert was not amused. He did not want gratuitous advice that Macaulay might go better in a running martingale, or Belgravia might profit from learning to execute half-passes.

“When all’s said and done,” he told her sharply, “I’m riding the fucking horse, not you, so belt up.”

Helen, during the long, long hours that Rupert and Billy were occupied with the horses, turned her attention to the house and soon had the place swarming with builders, plumbers, electricians, and painters.

“You’d think they were building the Pyramids,” grumbled Rupert.

But gradually the damp and the dry rot were eradicated, and a new heating and wiring system installed. Pastel colors replaced the crimson and dark green wallpapers and old brocades. Tattered silks and moth-eaten tapestries were succeeded by new pale silks, glazed chintz, and Laura Ashley flower prints.

Helen also employed a decent cleaner, Mrs. Bodkin, paid her well, and managed to keep her. Mrs. Bodkin admired Helen. She found her formal and distant and not given to gossip, but she was kind, straight, listened to Mrs. Bodkin’s problems, and was prepared to muck in with the cleaning.

She certainly needed to. Rupert and Billy were appallingly untidy. Both dropped their clothes where they took them off, never brought a cup or glass downstairs, and, if they couldn’t find a boot jack at the front or back door, trailed mud all over the hall and the new carpet, followed by a convoy of dogs with dirty paws.

The dogs drove Helen increasingly crackers, shedding hair, barking, fighting, claiming Rupert’s attention. Also, the colder the winter got, and the last one was a killer (you could skate on the water in the john) the more the dogs tried to climb into bed with them. Rupert, who fell asleep the moment his head touched the pillow, didn’t notice or mind Badger lying across his feet, or a Springer Spaniel curled up in the warmth of his back. Helen, a nervous insomniac, was kept awake night after night, shoving the dogs out of bed and listening to them licking themselves or scratching interminably in creaking baskets.

As the winter got colder, and the winds blew off the Bristol Channel, and the central heating was not yet installed, poor Florida-reared Helen developed a hacking cough. Rupert, who like most very healthy people, lacked sympathy with illness, suggested she should get a job coughing between movements on Radio Three.

And that was another problem. Culturally they were so different. Every time she wanted to listen to classical music, Rupert turned on Radio One. Every week she determinedly read the
Times Literary Supplement, Encounter,
and
New Society.
She started to read the
New Statesman,
but Rupert canceled it; he was not having subversive Trotskyite rubbish corrupting the dogs, he said.

Then there was the matter of the Augustus John drawing. Helen, having spent a long time deciding what would really please Rupert for a wedding present, spent her entire savings on a drawing of a horse by Augustus John.

Rupert was enchanted.

“I think that was the old roué who had a walkout with my grandmother.”

He was studying the drawing in great detail when the doorbell rang. It was a man about the washing machine. When Helen returned quarter of an hour later, Rupert had propped the drawing on the sofa and was looking at it with satisfaction.

That’s better.”

“What?” said Helen. Then, noticing a pencil and rubber in Rupert’s hand, gave a gasp of horror. “What
have
you done?”

“Redrawn the near side hock. Chap simply hadn’t got it right.”

“But you can’t tamper with the work of great artists,” said Helen, appalled.

“I can, when they can’t draw,” said Rupert.

Although he insisted on buying her a completely new wardrobe, making her look, he’d told Billy, like the aristocrat she plainly isn’t, on the whole he approved of the changes she made to the house. But he drew the line at mats under glasses to stop the drink rings, and he tore down the net curtains in the first-floor bedrooms and the downstairs loo, and he threw all the artificial flowers she bought to brighten up the dark hall into the boiler.

Their worst row was triggered off, however, when Helen introduced discs into the lavatory cisterns to disinfect the water and dye it blue. Rupert came roaring into the kitchen, one of the blue discs in his hand, dripping dye all over the floor.

“What the fuck is this?” he howled. “Have you gone mad? Are you trying to poison my dogs?”

“They shouldn’t drink out of the john,” screamed Helen. “Then they go and lick everyone. It’s disgusting. They’ve got water bowls in the kitchen, and a water trough, and a lake in the garden. Why do they bother with the john?”

“Because they always have. I’m not having you introducing any more of your dinky little American ideas. It’ll be chiming doorbells and musical lavatory paper next. I want the water clear by the time I get home, and if any of the dogs get ill, I’ll report you to the RSPCA.” And he stormed out, slamming the door. Helen and Mrs. Bodkin removed the blue discs.

Poor Helen tried and failed to impose gracious living on Billy and Rupert. She yearned for candlelit dinners with the silver out, damask napkins, intelligent conversation, and lingering over coffee and liqueurs. But, looking after horses, there was no guarantee what time Rupert and Billy would get in. After three attempts at boeuf en croute that turned out tougher than a tramp’s boots, Helen found out that all they really wanted was sausages and mash, or Irish stew on their knees, slumped in front of the television. Usually they argued across the program about the day’s events, or some horse they were thinking of buying. Rupert bolted his food, hardly noticing what he ate. She was often tempted to offer him Chappie and Winalot. Often they were so tired, they fell asleep in the middle of a meal.

But however much Rupert fell asleep over the television, he always woke up and wanted sex when they went to bed, and again in the morning, and often popping in, if he wasn’t at a show, in the middle of the day. “I’m happy as long as I’m mounted,” he used to say, “and you’re so compulsively ridable, my darling.”

If they ever had a row, Rupert had to make it up because he wanted to sleep with her. If she found his demands excessive, and she frequently didn’t achieve orgasm herself, she never said so. But after nearly a year she still grabbed a towel when he walked into the bedroom and found her naked. She always locked the lavatory door, and she only really liked sex if she’d just had a bath. She was embarrassed by his unashamed delight in her body. She still couldn’t convince herself that he really enjoyed doing those things he insisted he liked doing long enough to make her come, so she often wriggled away pretending she had, then felt desperately ashamed of faking. But she found him irresistible and she needed his constant assaults as evidence that he still doted on her.

For there was oodles of competition. Wherever they were, girls ran after Rupert, clamoring for his autograph, mobbing him at parties, even pulling hairs out of his horses’ tails as souvenirs, until they were almost bald. And although she got kudos, wherever she went, as Rupert’s beautiful wife, and there was a great feeling of mutual congratulation in being such a handsome couple, it was Rupert people really wanted to see.

Marion troubled her too. She longed for Rupert to sack her (as he was always threatening to do) but was too tactful to say anything. But she remembered Marion’s reddened eyes, particularly after their wedding. She tried to be particularly nice to the girl, giving her a beautiful black cashmere jersey for her birthday, which Marion never wore, and was constantly urging Rupert to ask her to dinner and suggesting handsome young men to meet her. But Marion politely refused and kept her distance, gazing at Helen with the hostile somber eyes of a prisoner of war.

Billy explained to Helen that Marion was so good with the horses that it was worthwhile putting up with her moods. Billy was such a comfort. He’d offered to move out when Helen and Rupert got married, but neither of them could bear to lose him. After all, he and Rupert had been inseparable since they were eight, and they were business partners, and Rupert needed someone to talk horses with. As the weeks passed Helen decided Billy was simply the nicest person she’d ever met. He was so kind, funny, easygoing, and, she flattered herself, just a tiny bit in love with her. If she had a row with Rupert, Billy stuck up for her. If Rupert was irritable because the horses were going badly, she could dump on Billy, knowing she wasn’t being disloyal, because Billy understood Rupert and loved him, at the same time as knowing all his faults. It was a very happy arrangement. Billy obviously wasn’t serious about Lavinia Greenslade and wouldn’t get married for years.

Rupert sometimes complained of being gentrified, but he and Billy soon found it a boon that the house was run like clockwork, that their suits and red coats were always back from the cleaner’s, that there were always enough clean white shirts, ties, and breeches, that their boots were mended, that the house was ordered and tidy, that entry forms were filled in, that fan mail was answered, and endless requests to speak or open fêtes and supermarkets were politely refused by return of post.

This left Rupert and Billy to concentrate on the horses, which they certainly needed to do. The three-day week brought extra costs. Petrol prices in particular shot up. There were forecasts of economic doom for years to come, and, with the Socialists coming to power, there was more chilling talk of a wealth tax, which would cripple Rupert’s income. It became increasingly vital to win and win. And they did. There was no doubt that since Rupert married Helen he and Billy had calmed down, and were now both regular fixtures in the British team.

So now Helen, on the eve of leaving for Rome and Madrid, gazed out on the green valley. She was really looking forward to the trip. For the first time she felt she could leave the house without the workmen doing something frightful. She loved going abroad, picking up antiques and pieces for the house, visiting galleries and museums, learning new languages. Also it meant a holiday from all the dogs in the bed, and as Rupert was far less famous abroad they weren’t constantly besieged by groupies (or “Rupies” as Billy called them). And Malise Gordon was there. She always enjoyed spending time with him. They often went to galleries and museums together when they were away, making Rupert slightly edgy. He was jealous of something that Malise and Helen shared that he couldn’t give her, so he continually mocked it.