Well Groomed (48 page)

‘Don’t take any notice of Hugo’s flippant façade, my dear.’ He lolled against the rails. ‘That man is going for the full hearts and flowers deal, believe me. He’s looking for true love. He’s always so sarcastic about you and Niall that he can only be wildly envious of what you two have together.’

‘Or just bloody perceptive,’ Tash muttered under her breath, urging Hunk into a trot again.

‘I wonder just how amazing in bed Kirsty is?’ Stefan sighed thoughtfully, not hearing her.

Even though she was wrapped up in work, Tash couldn’t fail to notice that Niall had only rung once from Yorkshire, just to tell her he’d arrived safely. Since then it had been the same story as ever – she’d left endless messages at his hotel reception, with assistant directors, on his mobile answering service. But the pattern had changed slightly – this time the return messages and faxes from him were not in evidence.

‘He’s probably frantically busy,’ Zoe reassured her.

Tash tried desperately hard to believe it.

On the weekend after Lowerton she travelled to Dorset with Gus and Penny to compete at some novice trials which included an open competition, thus allowing Hunk his first outing of the year. Revelling in the soft turf and low fences, he pounded around clear and was only beaten by a young lawyer called Roger Monk, whose brown mare had been walking away with all the smaller competitions that year.

‘See you at Badminton!’ he called after Tash as they pounded out of the ring after the prize-giving.

‘What did he mean?’ she asked Penny when they were back at the box. ‘Surely that mare of his isn’t experienced enough?’

Penny shrugged awkwardly, her berry eyes dull. ‘Gus has sold him Sex Symbol.’

‘No!’ Tash wailed. ‘But he won you your gold medal.’

‘Gold medals don’t buy hard feed, Tash.’

‘Gus has had him for ten years. He’s fifteen. You can’t sell him now.’

‘Roger paid through the nose,’ she explained sadly. ‘He’s dying for a crack at Badminton, and he himself is qualified and entered – but his senior horse went lame. He knows Symby is on his last furlong. Says he’ll give him a good retirement, which we can barely afford. His parents have a huge farm in Suffolk, so Symby will have a great old age.’

Tash travelled back to the farm in sombre mood. She wanted to commiserate with Gus who had now lost his ride at the event he had always coveted, on a horse who was amongst the favourites to win. But he seemed chipper and chatty, hiding his disappointment with pleasure at the money he had gained through the sale, money that would help them limp along for a few more months.

‘I’ve still got Fashion Victim to take there,’ he consoled himself. ‘Although I suspect the lazy devil’s odds would be longer than his teeth. And I’m talking to some more potential sponsors this week – one looks promising. They want to ride me off against Brian Sedgewick to see who gets the deal.’

‘Isn’t that a bit mercenary?’ asked Tash.

‘It’s business, darling.’ He gave a withering look. ‘We’re all mercenary. Why do you think I took you on in the first place?’

‘What do you mean?’ She was baffled.

‘Shut up, Gus,’ Penny hissed from behind the wheel where she was trying to get past a clutch of spring cyclists out on a wobbly jolly.

Tash was gazing at Gus enquiringly, desperate to know what he meant, but he raised a sardonic blond eyebrow and said no more. Later, she asked him where this ‘ride off’ for the sponsorship deal would take place if it went ahead.

‘Ah, you’ll like this bit,’ Gus laughed dryly. ‘Badminton. Ironic, huh?’

He’d just sold the one horse he possessed that stood any chance of winning. However much she wanted to rant and rage on his behalf, Tash knew that he’d had no choice. The farm’s scarlet bank balance couldn’t hold out for three more months to keep Sex Symbol in the yard until June. By then the debts would have become so crippling that they’d be spending Badminton weekend in the bankruptcy courts.

IN LATE APRIL, NIALL came back from Yorkshire and stayed at the forge while he commuted to London for studio work on Wildfell Hall. This involved hellishly early starts but, as Tash herself was unwillingly up at the crack of dawn each day, she felt this was one of the few things they had in common.

As usual when engrossed in a part, he took a lot of adjusting to. At first Tash was wary and more than a little frosty, brooding on his recent neglect. But he was too excitable and attentive to sulk at for long. Spending almost twenty-four hours a day in character, he was a lovable bounder. This struck Tash as odd since the character that he was playing, Arthur Huntingdon, was a singularly unpleasant individual – a hell-raising, Byronic rake who treated his wife appallingly. He’d been spoilt rotten throughout his life, but deprived of emotional support to such a degree that he had matured without humanity. His world was peopled by free-loading lechers, card sharks and other hell-raisers who indulged him in his insatiable lifestyle. Despite being graced with tremendous charm, wit and good looks, his immoral greed for kicks prevented him from denying himself a single indulgence.

Reading the novel in the lorry as the Lime Tree contingent drove to events, Tash was appalled by the character’s nastiness, and even more alarmed when Niall announced that he had based the character almost entirely on Hugo.

‘Rubbish!’ she railed. ‘Hugo can be bloody mean-spirited and self-indulgent, but he’s got some compassion.’

‘Admittedly he treats his dogs better than Huntingdon, but I ’clare, they have everything else in common.’

‘Well, Huntingdon would have been okay if he hadn’t had such depraved friends and such a pious, unloving wife,’ Tash bristled. ‘He adores her in the book, but she shrugs him off every time he wants to grope her.’

‘Which is more than can be said for you,’ growled Niall, pulling her into a clinch.

The one thing that had to be said for this Niall-as-Huntingdon character, Tash realised, was that he was irresistibly sexy, despite the rather off-putting sideburns that the director had insisted he grow. She loved the way he couldn’t keep his hands off her and made it so obvious what a turn-on he found her. Their sex life owed everything to Anne Brontë right now.

‘I’d have quite gone for Huntingdon,’ Tash admitted. ‘Gambling, womanising and all – he just needed the love of a good, racy woman up to his rakish Regency ways.’

‘At least he has a sense of fun.’ Niall started to undress her with his teeth amidst much shrieking. ‘I think I’m beginning to rather like the old sod.’

So much so, Tash noticed, that he was living life in his guise. Gradually, Niall became more and more demanding and dictatorial, less sympathetic. Increasingly, he was making no secret of the fact that he resented her time away competing. He helped less in the forge, drank even more than ever, and his sex drive shot through the roof. Not only was he dragging her off to bed earlier each night, but he was flirting more unashamedly than ever. No one was safe as he used his towering charms on everyone from Penny, Denise in the Olive Branch, his co-star Imogen Glenn, Godfrey in the local shop, Zoe, and even Kirsty, who was back from Scotland and throwing herself into her work to compensate for not throwing herself on to Hugo. Worse still, the dreaded Minty was playing the demonstrative, adulterous friend, Annabella Wilmot, with whom Huntingdon has a wild affair. Tash became accustomed to dropped calls and enigmatic faxes which she was certain were from the infatuated actress. Only Niall’s derisory indifference to them saved her from the jealous demons. He was living the part to the hilt.

‘What’s got into him lately?’ Zoe laughed one night when they had all been drinking in the Olive Branch. ‘He seems to have had a new lease of life.’

‘Character acting,’ sighed Tash.

‘Well, I’m not sure I’d give him a character reference. He’s jolly headstrong at the moment.’

‘D’you think so?’ Tash looked to the bar where he was flirting with one of Denise’s daughters. ‘I rather like it. He’s more fun.’

He was difficult, argumentative and selfish, but Tash found him far less withdrawn than he had been all year. Together, they started to laugh again, play silly games, dare to be sarcastic or confrontational, and she had to admit the sex was great. Even Beetroot called an uneasy truce, cowed by his new found domination. In a moment of excitable master-and-faithful-hound role-play Niall even spent a day off from filming teaching her to sit, stay, beg and shake hands.

He was so delighted with his conquests that he insisted on showing Tash as soon as she walked through the door, returning whacked from a competition the other side of Windsor. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that Beetroot knew every one of the tricks he had ‘taught’ her already.

‘I walked up to show Zoe earlier,’ he told her. ‘And she kept laughing at me. Can’t think why. I said I’d give Rufus a couple of driving lessons if I get the time.’

‘In what?’ Tash giggled. ‘The design classic?’

‘Of course. It’s the greatest car ever created, so it is.’

‘Its gear-stick is above the steering wheel,’ she pointed out. ‘And it has no clutch.’

‘So? If he can drive that, he can drive anything.’

Tash hugged him for being so hopelessly gorgeous.

Glowing with radiance, she found herself winning everything in sight. Hunk, who was growing stronger every day, couldn’t put an oiled hoof wrong and was looking increasingly likely to go to Badminton after all, for which he was still entered. Even Snob was starting to come into hand again, seemingly bowled along by her ebullient mood, although he was always ratty and difficult after a ‘driving lesson’ with Penny.

‘Do you have to teach him?’ Tash asked. ‘I’m quite happy with a hired Bentley and a few ribbons.’

‘Nonsense,’ she pooh-poohed. ‘He’s doing brilliantly. He’s quite used to shafts now.’

Tash, who had picked up a new line in double-entendres from Niall, stifled a giggle.

‘Gus long-reined him in full harness twice this week without a single wobbly,’ Penny went on regardless. ‘And I have to push on somewhat as we’ve only a couple of months to go.’

That scared Tash. Even more so when Henrietta drove to Fosbourne Ducis the following weekend with a stack of invitations, stamped envelopes and various proposed guest lists which she and Alexandra had concocted during their innumerable wedding-plan phone conversations. Although the original plan had been to hold the reception in the grounds of Fosbourne Holt House, where the wedding ceremony was being conducted, Gus was now rather magnanimously suggesting that it be held in the untended gardens at the farm.

‘Too mean to get a taxi home,’ Penny had moaned, dreading the litter on the lawn.

‘Rubbish!’ Gus had railed. ‘I’m too mean to buy them a decent present – this is it.’

Henrietta would rather have gone for the glamour of the stately home and its grand lawns, but at least this way saved James and Pascal a few hundred pounds and she expected the numbers would have to be kept quite low too.

‘Now there are bound to be bags of people you want to add from the eventing and acting worlds, plus friends and locals and what-not.’ She smiled at Tash and Niall when she finally cornered them together in the forge. She noticed fondly that they had that new-love inability to keep their hands off one another.

‘Sure,’ Tash giggled, not really listening because, unseen by Henrietta, Niall had his fingers between her legs underneath the stone-topped table and was doing quite miraculous things with them.

‘But your mother and I have tried to work out most of the family for you to save time.’ Henrietta cleared her throat and went on, ‘We really have left this terribly late, you know. Now, I was a bit woolly on your family, Niall, so you’ll need to help me out on the cousins etcetera. Plus telling me who you want to come along to the ceremony, or just reception.’

‘Fine.’ Niall went on to reel off a list of names so long that it sounded as though he was role-calling the entire cast of Ben Hur. All the time his fingers played delightfully with Tash. He even had the nerve at one point to fumble for a cigarette with his left hand and then ask her to light it for him.

Given the job of looking up the addresses in Niall’s falling-apart Filofax, Tash kept writing them down entirely wrong on the envelopes. At one point she realised that she’d written ‘
Oh Christ yes
’ instead of a London post code.

‘We’ll have to pare these down.’ Henrietta gaped at the list nervously afterwards.

‘Oh, sure – most of my family won’t be able to come over anyhow.’ Niall shrugged. ‘Now, I’d better give you the names of my friends too.’

Henrietta almost fainted, her pen seeming to smoke as she scribbled them down. Getting bored of writing envelopes, Tash lolled against Niall, indulging him in a long, slow finger massage to the back of the neck while she grinned rather inanely at Henrietta.

Her own list, although long by her standards, was pathetically scant compared with Niall’s.

‘Well, I think we need to lose at least two-thirds, don’t you?’ gulped Henrietta, looking down at her three-page list and imagining James’s reaction if she went home with the news that he was footing half the bill for a reception for four hundred actors, Irish Catholics, starving artists, rowdy eventers, and Tash’s old school friends as well as his first wife’s awful family.

Deciding who should attend the civil ceremony was easy, as the long hall at Fosbourne Holt House would only fit in one hundred.

The big marquee reception in the Moncrieffs’ garden, however, was a nightmare to write a list for.

Tash ended up having a blazing row with Niall about it.

She was even more alarmed when he started mulling over who was to be his best man, tossing around the names of several wild men of films, including the self-proclaimed bastion of all ‘lads’, the comic Rory Franks, who had only recently been all over the papers for getting a fifteen-year-old girl pregnant. He was a well-publicised alcoholic and coke addict with whom Niall had once had a tumultuous friendship before backing off, announcing him too dangerous.