Kiss and Tell (16 page)

‘There’s a back way out.’ He beckoned for Hugo to follow.

‘There’s a camera in here. They’ve taken my wallet.’

‘Nobody here knows who you are, I’m sure if it. And I took your wallet,’ Lough held it up, already moving away from the door. ‘They didn’t get to look at your ID or copy your cards. I’ve had it all along. It’s cool.’

‘I don’t understand …’ Hugo staggered out into the corridor, still disoriented and ricocheting off walls.

Lough was at the far end, heading for a fire door. ‘We have to get out before they come after you.’

Following almost blindly, Hugo felt a blast of fresh, early morning air in his face before he found himself being hustled along narrow back streets towards an intersection with a bigger thoroughfare, where they hailed a solitary cab.

He pressed his face to the cool of the window, fighting the urge to vomit. Dawn was breaking. The city looked drab and monochrome, its streets gleaming metallically, zig-zagging urban snakes of stone and steel totally alien to him. He felt like he’d woken up in another man’s life.

‘What possessed me?’ he breathed. ‘Whatever possessed me?’

Beside him Lough said nothing, staring straight ahead.

‘I can’t thank you enough,’ Hugo turned to him. ‘I know I deserve no loyalty, but you got me out of there. I can never thank you enough for that.’

‘It was nothing,’ Lough said with feeling, eyes unblinking.

‘I swear I have never done anything like that in my life.’

‘They drugged you. That’s what happens. They wanted your cash. Your wedding ring was a giveaway.’

Hugo looked at his ring and groaned, closing his eyes. ‘What if Tash ever finds out?’

‘Why should she?’

He opened his eyes and studied Lough’s profile groggily, unable to work him out at all. ‘They had a camera.’

‘They thought we were South African rowers,’ Lough reminded him.

‘Did they?’ Hugo rubbed his head painfully.

‘Well we “rode” in the Games,’ Lough joked drily, but Hugo didn’t smile. ‘I won’t say anything, trust me.’

‘I must do something to thank you. You name it. Money, a horse, the job …’

‘I thought I told you I can’t be bought – or shopped.’

Hugo winced, unable to remember. There was an awkward pause and he cleared his throat before trying to return to his default setting of flippancy. ‘So I take it the answer to the work rider offer is no?’

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘And I really can’t offer you anything else by way of thanks?’

Lough pressed his lips together. ‘I’ll stick to our bet, thanks.’

‘What bet?’

‘That Tash will turn me down.’

‘What are you talking about, Lough?’

‘Last night, you offered me a night with your wife.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Lough! She’s about to have a baby.’ He glanced at his watch, trying to fathom out what day it was and how long it must have been since he and Tash had spoken.

‘I know what you said, Hugo.’

Hugo gaped at him in utter disbelief. Meanwhile, Lough fished in his pocket and pulled out a page ripped from a newspaper. ‘You’d better look at this.’

Hugo scanned it before screwing it up. ‘Total pile of lies.’

His arrogance stirred up more hot springs of anger in Lough.

‘Get this straight, Hugo,’ he said. ‘I didn’t help you because I think you’re a great bloke. I helped you because your wife deserves better.’

‘Don’t push it,’ Hugo muttered, fingers raking his hair as he fought yet again to remember what he had said and done the previous night.

Lough turned to him at last, dark eyes glittering with intent. ‘I take it the job offer still stands?’

‘Try not to push, Tash!’

‘I need Hugo. Where’s Hugo?’

‘The surgeon won’t be long. He’s performing another emergency caesarean, but he’ll be with you as soon as he can. Please stop pushing, love.’

Another contraction ripped through her, a high-speed train crash scraping and tearing inside her body, pulling her along with it.

Tash gripped onto the midwife’s hand and, gritting her teeth in an effort to deny nature and not push, she felt the engine scream through her, carriage after carriage buckling and roaring. When nature briefly won out and she strained to push she heard the regular little beeps from the foetal heart monitor beside her slow down.

It was exactly the same scenario she’d had with Cora eighteen months earlier. Her baby boy had twisted around inside her during a long false labour until he was in an impossible position to deliver,
despite the powerful contractions and full dilation that now told her exhausted body to work its hardest to get the head through the birth canal.

As each contraction brought an ever greater urge to push, she felt unutterably terrified and desperately alone. Listening to those electronic beats drop again and again, she was isolated in a clean, scrubbed bubble of fear along with her tiny baby and his straining heart that was being weakened with every move that she made to try to bring him into the world and have him in her arms.

At last the surgeon appeared and the delivery team went into an urgent huddle. Tash could hear snatches of sentences that frightened her more ‘… foetal distress …’ ‘… heart under strain …’ ‘… blood pressure dropping …’ An unfamiliar face appeared at her knees, chin hammocked in a surgical mask. She obediently opened her legs for her tenth internal examination in as many hours, now no longer caring if the entire hospital staff trooped by to take a look just so long as she could have her baby safely.

Within minutes an anaesthetist had given her an epidural and she was being wheeled to the operating theatre, unable to hold back the tears. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.

Then somehow, from somewhere, Hugo appeared beside her in the hospital corridor, blue eyes blazing with love and fear. Tash had never been more relieved to see anybody in her life.

‘Where were you?’ she asked shakily, the epidural having made her teeth chatter like maddened castanets.

‘I got lost,’ was all he would say as he took her hand tightly in his and kissed the gold band on her ring finger. ‘Hopelessly, hopelessly lost, but I’m here now.’

Quickly scrubbed, robed and masked, he sat at her head and took hold of her hand again. Her belly was hidden behind tented green cotton. She was already open, the surgeon delving around inside her as though she was a lucky dip.

Then he extracted a very healthy, red-faced baby.

While Tash wept with joy, Hugo blinked back rare tears and took his newborn son in his arms.

Within half an hour Amery had been wiped, measured, weighed, placed skin-to-skin, fed his first toot of colostrum and was contentedly asleep on Tash’s chest.

*

When Beccy brought Cora in to hospital to meet her new brother later that day, she encountered Hugo marching along the ward towards her and it almost winded her with joy. He was her dream, from the true blue eyes to the long stride that turned all the female heads in the maternity ward. Never had the force of her self-destructive love for him felt greater, and never had it seemed more ill-fitting as he joined his young family. She wanted him to be the roguish rake who flirted away from home in the three day event lorry parks, not this tableau of doting fatherhood. She wanted to run away.

‘We’d given you up for dead,’ she managed to croak her first words to him in ten years, nothing like the long monologues she’d so often rehearsed in her travels. She couldn’t even look him in the face.

His reaction was nothing like her rehearsals either as he hissed, ‘I got delayed. Now drop it.’

Beccy quailed, glancing at Tash.

But with Cora squeaking ecstatically at this strange new creature on her mother’s chest, and Amery starting to wake up again, Tash was too distracted to care where Hugo had been the previous night. It was irrelevant. There was another gorgeous, blue-eyed male distraction in her life now.

‘I never did get to do that running jump into your arms,’ she looked from Amery to Hugo, tearful with hormones and happiness. ‘And the village will miss welcoming home the Maccombe heroes.’

‘This is all the welcome I need.’ Hugo sat on the bed at her hip and kissed her, then dropped kisses on Cora’s tortoiseshell curls and Amery’s tiny bald pate. As he kept his head lowered, breathing in the perfection of his beautiful family, Tash lifted a hand still spiked with a cannula, its wrist encircled with a pale blue hospital ID tag, and ran her fingers through his hair.

Beccy had to look away, jealousy and loneliness burning holes in her chest.

Hugo left Tash with Beccy and went home to shower and change, finding it odd the return to Haydown after so many monumental events in short succession, and for the yard to be so utterly unaffected. His mother was barracking the temporary yard staff; Jenny was supervising and settling Fox back into his familiar surroundings and the dogs crowded around him as he climbed from his car. In the
circumstances, there had been no grand welcome home, and Hugo was grateful.

He was equally grateful that it seemed the gutter press was already losing interest him. The phone messages waiting for him were from local papers and the equestrian press interested in his win, or just friends, owners and sponsors calling to congratulate him.

‘You beat that bloody Kiwi!’ his oldest friend Ben Meredith chortled patriotically on an answering-machine message.

Hugo wasn’t so sure as he wandered around his empty house, gathering together things to take to Tash, not noticing the mess or the tea mugs on every surface; just noticing Tash’s absence and hating it. The house felt incomplete, indelibly altered; as though life had changed. It echoed his memory of the previous night.

The contents of those lost hours were shared by just Hugo, Lough Strachan and the shadowy, exotic figures that inhabited a late-night bar in a gloomy little back street far beyond the safe environs of the Olympic village, a place they could never hope to find again even if they wanted to, where their medals meant far less than their hard cash. It was a night of which he remembered little, but what little he remembered thoroughly ashamed him, a blight on his character that was not only deeply dishonourable and aberrant but could also wreck his marriage if it ever got out. Hugo was immensely grateful that their identities had remained secret. In a tight-knit, rumour-mongering sport like eventing, where a whiff of gossip usually spread like kennel cough through a hound pack, this story could ruin him.

When he went back into the hospital for the last visiting hour of the evening Tash was much more together. She even remembered to ask whether Hugo had persuaded Lough Strachan to come to Haydown. He didn’t like to confess that he was striving to remember exactly how he had left the situation, just as he was struggling to piece together the events of the previous night.

‘I have no idea,’ he said honestly, and then added with more ferocity than he intended, ‘but I bloody well hope not.’

Chapter 8

On the same day in August that Amery Beauchamp fought his way into the world in West Berkshire, Faith Brakespear was in the Cotswolds, celebrating the anniversary of her own arrival eighteen years earlier.

With perfect timing, she had received her pre-operative appointment with her chosen cosmetic surgeon through the post that morning; two weeks hence, and by then she would conveniently be based in Essex commuterland. That long-awaited day she would show Farouk Ali Khan her boob and nose scrapbook – over thirty pages of carefully selected faces and breasts ripped from everything from
Elle
,
Cheers!
and the
Observer
magazine to old copies of
Playboy
and
Loaded
she had discovered under her brother’s bed.

In a similar fashion, her mother had discovered the boob scrapbook under Faith’s bed and suddenly appeared to be labouring under the misconception that her daughter was secretly gay and poised to come out of the closet that night as she celebrated coming of age.

Being very open-minded about sexuality – she had, after all, been married to a gay man for many years – Anke was infuriatingly eager to embrace this development, however hard Faith tried to refute it.

‘I am
not
a lesbian! I am in love with Rory and I am going to marry him.’

‘Yes,
kæreste
, but that is just a daydream, isn’t it? This is real life … and if you have been having these feelings, perhaps—’

‘I haven’t been having “feelings”!’ she howled. ‘I know for a fact that I love Rory and that he is the only man, woman or animal for me, okay?’

‘If you say so,’ Anke nodded, unconvinced.

But Faith had far more pressing concerns, such as the need to fulfil her boast to Carly about the number of single studmuffins on the guest list. So far, her RSVPs were almost exclusively female, the only confirmed male guests being attached, gay or under fifteen.

In desperation, with her friend already on her way, Faith put out a call on her much-neglected Bebo page, forgetting to log off afterwards so that her ten-year-old brother Chad read her pathetic plea when he took over the family PC to go on the Cartoon Network site. Clicking his fingers over the keyboard he set to work. As the most
computer-savvy member of the Brakespear household, it took him just moments to spread the word through chat rooms and social forums with the opener ‘My fit older sister is having a party and has no friends …’ The response was gratifying and Chad felt proud. It was the ultimate gift from brother to sister, far better than Magnus bringing along some cheesy old pop star.

At lunchtime Carly made a very stylish arrival through the Wyck Farm gates at the wheel of her pink Mini Cooper – a gift from her indulgent parents for her own eighteenth birthday – in a flurry of spitting gravel, exhausted and overexcited from her longest drive since passing her test the previous month.

‘Motorways are, like, such fun!’ she exclaimed, leaping out to air-kiss Faith and in no way giving away the fact that she had spent most of her time on the M25 in tears, cursing boy racers and white van men, constantly finding herself on the slip roads about to be funnelled on to other motorways or racketing along in a stream of traffic at a speed far faster than she felt comfortable with.