‘Unwise of Ricky and Grace,’ said Bart, drawing her close.

For the first time he looked her straight in the eye and kept on looking. Her skin was translucent, her hair tousled, her wanton sleepy eyes as violet as the shadows beneath them.

‘You could strip a man’s aftershave off with a look like that,’ said Bart.

‘Wish I could strip off Victor’s chest-hair. At least he has the manners to dance with his hostess,’ said Chessie drily as Sharon and Victor quickstepped past.

Gathered round a billiard table in the next room, Jesus, who’d just spent half an hour on David Waterlane’s telephone ringing Chile, Seb, Dommie and Perdita, who still hadn’t returned to her boarding school, were demonstrating polo plays with sugar lumps.

‘At the hit-in you should have tapped the ball to Seb and he’d have hit it to me,’ said Dommie, moving a sugar lump. ‘I was here.’

‘No, you was ’ere,’ said Jesus, moving it to the right.

‘And you should have been here,’ said Perdita, moving it back to the left.

‘You seem to know more about it than us,’ said Dommie, squeezing her waist.

‘I ought to go,’ said Perdita ruefully. ‘They lock the fire escape at midnight. We’ve got biology first thing tomorrow, and I haven’t revised at all.’

‘If you’re weak on the subject of human reproduction,’ said Seb, starting to plait her long, blond mane, ‘Dommie and I could give you a quick crash course. There are plenty of beds upstairs. How old are you?’

‘Fourteen,’ said Perdita.

‘Gaol bait as far as we’re concerned,’ sighed Dommie. ‘Come back in two years’ time. What are you going to do when you grow up?’

‘Play polo.’

‘You’d do better as a stockbroker or a soccer player,’ said Seb. ‘There’s no money in polo.’

‘I know,’ said Perdita, ‘but at least I’d rub up against all the richest, most powerful men in the world.’

‘Like Mrs France-Lynch,’ said Dommie, watching Chessie rotating her flat, denimed belly against Bart’s crotch. ‘That looks like trouble to me.’

‘Bloody ’ell,’ said Jesus ruefully. If he hadn’t spent so long on the telephone, he might have scored there. He toyed with the idea of cutting in, then decided he might want to play for Bart one day.

Aware that they were being watched, Bart and Chessie retreated to David Waterlane’s study. Tearing himself away from the photographs of ponies and matches on the wall, Bart discovered Chessie looking down her vest examining her breasts.

‘Whaddyer doing?’

‘They say everything you touch turns to gold. I wondered if I had.’

‘Let me try again.’ Bart slid his hands inside her vest. ‘Christ, you’re sexy.’

They were interrupted by Mrs Hughie, who, like the Brigadier, rather ineffectually tried to act as a custodian of morals at polo parties, and was now trying to foist strong black coffee on unwilling guests.

‘Hello, Chessie,’ she said, averting her eyes as Chessie re-inserted her left breast. ‘Jolly bad luck about Matilda. Ricky’s been playing so superbly too. I was trying to remember, what’s his handicap?’

‘His personality,’ said Bart bleakly.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that.’ Mrs Hughie gave a nervous laugh as she handed Chessie a cup.

‘D’you take sugar?’

Chessie looked straight at Bart.

‘Only in Daddies,’ she said softly.

‘I actually came to find you,’ said Mrs Hughie hastily, as the whoops increased next door. ‘I’m awfully fond of Seb and Dommie, but they have had a bit too much to drink, and they’re with a dear little soul called Perdita Macleod, who’s boarding at Queen Augusta’s. Could you possibly drop her off on your way home, Chessie?’

‘Thereby killing two birds who might otherwise get stoned,’ said Chessie.

Bart was absolutely furious, but as she and Perdita left the floodlit house for the moonlit night, Chessie reflected that Bart would be more likely to renew Ricky’s contract if she held out.

Storming up Ricky’s drive, twenty minutes later, twitching with desire and frustration, she was alarmed to find the house in darkness. Even worse, the front door was open and no-one was at home.

Panic turned to rage, however, when she discovered Ricky still in his breeches and blue polo shirt, fast asleep in the stable next to Matilda’s. Will, also asleep, lay in his arms. They were surrounded by two Labradors, a whippet, the stable cat, assorted plastic guns and dinky toys and a copy of Thomas the Tank Engine. The Labradors blinked sleepily and thumped their tails. Matilda, hanging from her sling, looked up watchfully. In Chessie she recognized a rival. But Ricky and Will didn’t stir.


4


Chessie woke at noon feeling hungover and guilty. She shouldn’t have got tight or off so publicly with Bart. Gossip spread round the polo community like napalm. If Ricky didn’t know by now, his grooms certainly would. Her fears were confirmed when Will wandered in later from playgroup, bearing paintings to be admired, stories to be read, and his hands crammed full of yellow roses pulled off by the head for her.

Stocky as a Welsh cob, Will had a round pink face and dark brown slanting eyes with long curly lashes tipping the blond fringe of his pudding-basin hair. No child could be more edible, even allowing for a mother’s bias. How could she have dallied with Bart and jeopardized this, thought Chessie, hugging him fiercely.

‘Did you bring me a present?’ demanded Will.

‘I didn’t go anywhere I could get you one,’ said Chessie. ‘Who brought you home from playgroup?’

‘Fuckies,’ said Will, who couldn’t pronounce Frances, the head groom’s name. ‘Fuckies say Mummy got pissed up last night.’

‘Mummy did not.’

‘Mattie got sore leggie,’ went on Will.

‘As if I didn’t know,’ snapped Chessie.

‘Want some crisps.’

‘Ask Daddy.’ Chessie snuggled down in bed.

‘Daddy gone to London.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Daddy loathes London.’

Ricky avoided London at all costs. Only his passion for Chessie after they’d first met had dragged him up to her flat in the Cadogans, and then he’d always got lost. As Will pottered off crispwards, Chessie thought about Bart. He reminded her of all those rich, ruthless, cynical, invariably married men whom she’d met and had affairs with when she used to cook directors’ lunches in the City. One of them had been about to set her up in her own restaurant in the Fulham Road, called Francesca’s, when she had met Ricky.

It had been at her rich grandparents’ golden wedding. With an eye to inheriting loot rather than a sense of duty, Chessie had reluctantly driven down from London expecting to be bored rigid. Instead she found that her plain, horsey cousin Harriet, who at twenty-five had never had a boyfriend, had turned up looking almost pretty and bursting out of her brown velvet dress with pride because she had Ricky in tow. Despite having absolutely no small talk and the trapped ferocity of a tiger whipped into doing tricks at the circus, he was the most attractive man Chessie had ever seen. It took her exactly fifteen minutes to take him off her poor cousin Harriet, gazing sleepily at him across the gold candles throughout dinner, then dancing all night with him. The chuntering of outraged relations was so loud, no-one could hear the cracking of poor Harriet’s heart.

Offhand with people to cover up his feelings, unused to giving or receiving affection, Ricky had not had an easy life. The France-Lynches had farmed land in Rutshire for generations. Horse-mad, their passion for hunting had been exceeded at the turn of the century by a passion for polo. Herbert, Ricky’s father, the greatest polo player of his day and a confirmed bachelor, had suddenly at fifty-five fallen madly in love with a twenty-year-old beauty. Sadly she died giving birth to Ricky, leaving her arrogant, crotchety, heartbroken husband to bring up the boy in the huge, draughty Georgian house, which was called Robinsgrove, because the robins in the woods around were supposed to sing more sweetly there than anywhere else on earth. Ricky needed that comfort. Determined that his son should follow in his footsteps, Herbert was appalled to discover that the boy was left-handed. This is not allowed in polo. Consequently Herbert spent the next years forcing Ricky to do everything right-handed to the extent of tying his left arm to his side for hours on end. As a result Ricky developed a bad stammer, for which he was terribly teased at school.

Although Herbert adored the boy, he couldn’t show it. Only by playing better polo could Ricky win his father’s approval. Herbert went to every match, yelling at Ricky in the pony lines. The cheers were louder off the field than on when Ricky started yelling back. Herbert’s vigilance was rewarded. At just twenty-three, when he met Chessie, Ricky’s handicap was six and he had already played for England.

To Chessie he was unlike anyone she had ever met. In the middle seventies, when men were getting in touch with their feelings and letting everything hang out, Ricky gave nothing away. A tense uncompromising loner, lack of love in his childhood had made him so unaware of his charms that he couldn’t imagine anyone minding being deprived of them.

Chessie had had to make all the running. Smitten by her, Ricky was terrified to feel so out of control and went into retreat. He was always away playing in matches or searching for new horses. He never rang because he was shy about his stammer, and he knew it would wreck his polo career to marry when he needed all his concentration to make the break. Gradually, persistently, Chessie broke down his resistance.

Herbert had been violently opposed to the marriage, but when the tetchy old eccentric met Chessie he was as bowled over as his son, even to the extent of moving out of Robinsgrove, which had grooms’ flats, stabling for twenty horses and four hundred acres of field and woodland, and moving into the Dower House two miles away, to make way for her and Ricky. At first the marriage was happy. Herbert went to matches with Chessie and enjoyed her cooking at least once a week, and when Chessie produced an heir two years later the old man was happier than he’d ever been.