Well Groomed (57 page)

Tripping out of her changing room – pleased to move away from so many reflections of her sun-reddened face and dreadful hair – she was greeted by muted reactions from Alexandra and Sophia, although Polly wolf-whistled and expressed admiration for the pins.

‘It’s a bit of a tent on her, isn’t it?’ Sophia tilted her head. She and their mother were sitting on a cream chaise-longue, drinking espresso from tiny ivory cups. Tash was certain that, had she been holding one, she would have thrown it over the hated dress – and legged it towards the gare du Nord and the Eurostar express.

But, aware that her mother was spending a fortune on it, she said nothing.

‘You’ve lost so much weight since I took your measurements last Christmas,’ Alexandra sighed, watching as Patent Bun twitched around Tash, pulling pins from between her teeth and tightening the fit.

Tash felt as though she was being fitted into a strait-jacket. With every tuck and fold, she lost a little more freedom.

Patent Bun was waffling on about the need for further fittings, but Alexandra shook her head. ‘
C’est impossible – ma fille demeure en Angleterre
.’ She raised her hands in apology.

Eyes narrowing, Patent Bun thrust a pin deep into Tash’s bottom.

There then followed a trail of head-dresses, veils, shoes, stockings and jewellery which Tash couldn’t hope to take in. She listlessly picked several at random and then acquiesced as Sophia and her mother argued her towards others. She didn’t care. She wasn’t going to marry Niall. This was all an awful, expensive mistake and she wanted to scream it in Patent Bun’s face as she frisked around as attentively as Cariola attending the Duchess of Malfi during her last desperate hours of life.

As soon as they were out of the cosseted cream womb, Tash grabbed her mother’s arm. ‘I need to talk to you, Mummy – can we go for a coffee?’

Looking at her watch, Alexandra grimaced. ‘You were due at the salon quarter of an hour ago, sweetheart. And I said I’d go and fetch Pascal and Ben while you’re there.’

‘Salon?’

‘The top hair-stylists in Paris,’ Sophia corrected. ‘And I’m being done too, so we can sit and gossip beneath the drier – I’m dying to know which of Niall’s famous friends are coming to the wedding. Has Brad Pitt said yes? He’s frightfully dishy.’

WHEN THEY RETURNED TO the
manoir
, Niall was already two-thirds of the way down a bottle of wine, and fell about laughing when he caught sight of Tash.

‘Christ, angel, you look like Crystal Tips!’ He bounded over to kiss her and say ‘hi’ to the others, spinning a delighted Polly around and around in an exuberant hug until she was screaming with laughter, her rubber-top squeaking.

Despite the disastrously unflattering new cut, Tash cheered up considerably; his mood was much, much cheerier than the night before. Relaxed by a long sleep in the sun and a ramble down to the village bar for a baguette and beer at lunchtime, he was bright-eyed and animated.

Outside on the terrace, Tash sat in one of the last patches of evening sun, finding herself between Sophia and her mild-mannered brother-in-law, who was having considerable difficulty erecting a wooden Raj chair which collapsed every time he sat in it. Once he was finally on board, its long leg rests swung round and trapped him inside like a child in a high chair. Not seeming to care, he placed his drink on the wooden bar in front of him and donned a pair of scratched dark glasses that made him look like a blond Hank Marvin.

‘You seen much of old Hugo lately?’ Ben asked her, scratching his chin with the rim of his glass.

She shook her head, watching Niall wander towards a balustraded wall to stare out across the darkening valley, his dark eyes crinkled against the sun so that he almost looked to be wincing in pain.

‘He’s been keeping a pretty low profile lately,’ said Tash, unwilling to say too much. ‘I saw him at the Blewford trials last week, but he left early.’ He had fallen off a novice that day, cracking a rib and consequently scratching all his other entries and leaving in a high old rage. Stefan, who had also been competing, had been forced to beg a lift back to Maccombe with the Moncrieffs after Hugo had sulkily abandoned him.

‘You won a couple of classes there, didn’t you?’ Ben tried to cross his legs and found that the bar in front of him prevented it. Instead he sat knock-kneed like a bashful debutante.

‘Just one.’ She took a slurp of her drink and winced as she realised how strong it was. Alexandra always poured pastis as though it would evaporate on contact with the glass. ‘I won an intermediate class with Mickey Rourke.’

‘Is that the chestnut beast?’ asked Sophia, who never kept up with Tash’s horses.

‘Dappled grey,’ she corrected. ‘Hugo bought him from Gus a while back, but they didn’t get on, so he’s given me the ride. My new sponsors are covering the cost.’

‘I must say, Tash, you’re doing exceptionally well – bloody well.’ Ben raised his glass approving. ‘I keep hearing your name being bandied around as a new hot shot – should be capped soon, huh?’

Hating to tempt fate, Tash shrugged.

‘Surely you wear a cap, darling?’ Alexandra asked in concern. ‘I thought they made you these days – for safety reasons?’

‘Are you going to take more of a back seat in the sport once you’re married?’ Sophia asked rather crushingly. She hated to hear about her sister doing well, especially from Ben.

‘Of course not,’ she muttered, not wanting to talk about it.

‘But you’ll want to start a family soon, surely?’

‘Nope.’ She noticed that Niall had already drained his drink and was still staring out at the valley, eyes performing their Clint Eastwood enigmatic trick.

‘Oh.’ Sophia looked across at Niall as well. ‘I must say you’ve both lost bags of weight recently – have you been dieting together?’

‘No, we’re just starved of conversation,’ said Tash sadly.

That night, Tash was hugely grateful to Niall for holding their shabby act together at dinner. He regaled them all with scandalous anecdotes about his recent films, didn’t drink so much that he lost his edge and only flirted a moderate amount with Sophia, who looked delighted by his sparkly-eyed flattery and obvious admiration for her beauty. Even Ben seemed delighted that his wife merited such attention. Tash privately thought him a terrible wimp, and found to her horror that she was comparing Ben’s reaction to that she imagined from his closest crony, Hugo. He would have made no secret of the fact that he was irritated by Niall’s behaviour and either bawled him out for it or employed the subtler tactic of flirting twice as brazenly with Tash in return. The thought made her feel rather heady.

‘What are you sinking about, Tash?’ Pascal asked, pouring her another glass of wine, his wise eyes watching her affectionately.

‘Oh – only Hugo,’ she said mindlessly. Unfortunately this came at a lull in the conversation at the table and the others turned to her in astonishment.

‘I was – er – just thinking how awful it would be to lose Snob as he did his horse Surfer,’ she went on, flustered into an obvious, ham-fisted lie.

‘Oh, I see.’ Pascal turned back to fill his wife’s glass, dropping his voice and whispering in her ear, ‘I was just going to say ’ow ’appy she was looking. I assumed she was sinking about the wedding.’

‘Right now,’ Alexandra regarded her daughter over her husband’s head, ‘I think that’s the last thing on Tash’s mind.’

In bed that night, Sophia removed the witch-hazel aromatherapy pads from her eyes, rubbed in the last of her lipo-reactive, sebocel-firming face cream and turned to her husband.

‘Am I right in thinking that you once – mistakenly – believed Hugo to be rather fond of Tash?’

Ben guffawed affectionately and put down the copy of the
Telegraph
, which he had bought at the Waterloo Eurostar terminal three days earlier and had been reading ever since; he had yet to reach the Court and Social pages.

‘Yes – barking up the wrong tree there, huh?’

‘I’m not so sure.’ Sophia slipped off her wrist watch and stretched across to the bedside table to put it down. ‘I rather think I underestimated your judgement, darling.’

‘Oh, do you?’ Ben – who was very seldom complimented on his acumen and perception – looked delighted. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘Whenever one talks to Tash about Niall, she adopts the look of a long-suffering sister excusing the antics of a ruffian brother. But when one mentions Hugo, she looks just as she did as a teenager – all flustered and guilty and rather on her nerves. She had a huge crush on him for years, you know.’

‘So she did – rather a hoot that.’ Ben folded the
Telegraph
into a very neat triangle and cast it to one side. ‘But what makes you think I was right about old Hugs’s feelings?’

‘Because, my darling,’ Sophia kissed him on the nose before turning to the bedside light, ‘he looks exactly the same way when one mentions her.’ She flicked the switch. ‘But without the flustered bit, natch.’

‘Natch.’ Ben head-butted his way into the bolster beside her before stretching a tentative hand across to her thigh.

‘Not now, darling.’ Sophia firmly steered it away. ‘I’ve got fat-reducing cream on my stomach. Tomorrow perhaps.’

‘Oh – right-oh.’ He gave her hand a squeeze. ‘Night then.’

‘Night.’ Sophia strained her ears for sounds of activity in the next room, but there were none.

Tash lay awake for hours, trying to muster the nerve to elbow Niall awake and have everything out, but she couldn’t pluck up the courage and besides, she told herself, he badly needed his sleep at the moment. She waited and waited for her own dreams to arrive and deaden the panic in her head, but they would not come. Instead she once again watched the dawn lighten the room and listened to the morning chorus rise and work through its vocal exercises.

Sophia and Ben were already taking morning showers and chatting loudly over the gushing water in the next room when she fell into the bottomless pit of a dreamless sleep.

She woke at midday to find the shutters and windows open, and sun drenching her body. Beside her, Niall’s side of the bed was creased and vacant. Blinking and peering out of the window whilst wrapped in a sheet, Tash could just see the corner of the balcony which overlooked the pool. A cloud of cigarette smoke was drifting from it, signifying that Niall was there. He was the only guest other than herself who smoked.

Dressed in a borrowed bikini of her mother’s and Sophia’s apple green sarong, Tash took her very pale and rather stubbly body outside to be put on show beside the pool.

Sophia was already reclining on a sun lounger looking as though every ounce of her had recently been tightened and glossed at great expense. Beside her Ben was turning the subtle pink of uncooked turkey flesh, only his nose having burnt to a rare beefsteak red.

Reading a book on wedding etiquette, Alexandra was sensibly confined beneath a sun-shade, wearing a bright yellow bathing suit that showed off the mahogany glow of her skin.

‘Tash darling!’ she greeted her delightedly. ‘I so envy you your ability to sleep – do have a swim.’

Beside her, Pascal sipped pastis and read the papers, his own deep, burnt oak tan confined beneath cream chinos and a pale blue shirt.

‘Tash,
chérie
,’ he looked up from
Le Monde
, ‘you look sensational – the pale English skin is so
délicat
, like a rose petal,
non
?’

‘Er –
non
.’ Desperate to hide her midge-bitten paleness, she greeted Polly, who was splashing around in the pool wearing a super-trendy crocheted bikini. Badgered endlessly, Tash joined her in a raucous game of ‘dive for the brick’ followed by ‘singing underwater’ and then ‘race widths with arm-bands on ankles and floats stuffed down tops’. Tash longed for the confidence boost of winning something right now but she lost everything, her concentration in smithereens. All the time she was aware of an audience from high up on the balcony as Niall sat chain-smoking, drinking black coffee out of a bowl and watching them all like a psychologist regarding specimens of human behaviour through a two-way mirror.

This is where we fell in love! Tash wanted to scream up at him. What went wrong?

But she simply swam widths and lengths and dived and forward-rolled until her eyes were red and stinging from chlorine, and her fingers were as wrinkled as tinned chestnuts.

‘I love you, Tash!’ Polly screamed happily as she pinned her half-sister to a flapping pool filter with her water-gun. ‘
Je t’aime!
’

‘Will you marry me then?’ Tash asked bleakly.

After lunch, she and Niall found themselves side by side at the pool’s edge sunbathing. Unknown to Tash, Alexandra had spread the word amongst the rest of the family to leave them alone together for a couple of hours. She had spotted the heavy silence between them and wanted to give them a chance to kiss and make up. Tash felt more like socking Niall’s kisser in a punch up, but knew that she was just channelling her frustration at her own dithering inertia into illogical hatred, like Hamlet screaming at Ophelia to get to a nunnery. She wondered vaguely whether she herself might take advantage of a few years in a novice’s wimple? Swapping wedding vows for those of chastity and silence seemed quite tempting right now.

Niall seemed oblivious of her mental churning as he dozed and reposed, buried behind a very intellectual biography of Goethe.

Tash, who was being bitten to itchy distraction by hungry May midges, scratched her stubbly legs and reached alternately for the sun-oil and the insect repellent. Niall only spoke to her when requesting one to be passed in his direction, as formal as a fellow client in a sun-bed salon.

He was buried deep within his book, reading as quickly and avidly as ever; Tash had always envied him his ability to get thoroughly absorbed. She found herself struggling with a magazine these days, which she believed to be a give-away sign of deadened braincells and lack of depth. She had once guzzled literary worthies, biographies, escapist trash and art books with a devotee’s relish – just as she had been able to reel off the Radio 4 schedule, the latest music sensations, best exhibitions and thought-provoking films. Nowadays she was stretched to remember the news headlines. However busy he was, Niall would never fail to keep up with the news, views and previews of the world’s opinion-pollsters. Tash, raced off her feet and confined within the insular world of eventing, knew more about the latest craze in tendon-protection than the latest Terry Johnston play. She sometimes wished she was like Zoe who, although living within that world too, kept her intellectual life intact; Tash had often found her at the kitchen table poring over the review section of the Sunday papers, or covertly watching an arty video which she had recorded whilst the others were glued to
Soldier Soldier
. Tash was acutely aware of her intellectual inadequacies, and of the way she had changed since meeting Niall. Their mutual interests were crumbling away, and it was almost entirely her fault. He remained within his ivory tower while she’d clambered down a rope-ladder and run away to the stable-yard.