“Oh, Jake, oh, Jake.”

Without fumbling, he undid the buttons of her dress and switched off the light, and they were on the bed of deep clean straw, with the light of the moon now filtering in through the skylight. He unfastened her bra and the splendid breasts overflowed, soft and sweet-swelling, like a river bursting its dam.

For a small, slight man, Jake was sexually well endowed, but he spent enough time fingering a spot which Tory afterwards discovered was her clitoris, and she was so slippery with longing that she hardly felt any pain after that first sharp thrust inside her. She’d always heard it was awful the first time, but despite the scratching of the straw on her bare back she felt only ecstasy.

“Now I know why it’s called a loose box,” said Jake, extracting himself and wiping her with a handful of hay from the rack.

“Any minute Africa’ll wander in and say, who’s been sleeping in my bed,” said Tory with a giggle.

“Not much sleeping,” said Jake.

He rested his head on her breasts. Actually she was much less fat without her clothes on; rather splendid, in fact.

“I didn’t hurt you too much?”

“No, no. It was lovely.”

“And you do like me?” he said.

Tory nodded in the dark, then kissed him passionately, adoringly uncritical, like a dog greeting a returning master.

“Enough to marry me?”

Tory gasped, and stopped kissing him.

“I know I can make big money out of horses, once I get started,” Jake said. “I just need a break.”

“I’ll help you,” said Tory in excitement. “I’ve got £5,000 a year.” Admittedly a lot of that had gone on Africa and been given to her mother for new clothes and the cocktail party. But if she married Jake, she wouldn’t have to go to her own cocktail party or to any more dances.

Five thousand a year, thought Jake. That must mean at least £100,000 in the bank. If only he could get his hands on that, they could buy a place and a dozen horses.

“We’ve got to find somewhere to live,” he said. “There’s no point in getting anywhere too small. We need stables and at least fourteen acres; the house needn’t be big.”

“I could paint it,” said Tory.

“And I could build the jumps,” said Jake.

She could feel him hot with excitement beside her.

“The only trouble is that I’ve only got about £1,500 in the bank at the moment. That won’t buy us a house, and everything else is tied up in trust till I’m twenty-one.”

Back came the black gloom, the pit, the despair; the stable door was locked and bolted on him again. It wasn’t going to be any good after all. Jake slumped back on the straw.

Then he realized that Tory was full of plans to break the trust.

“The capital’s mine. After all, Daddy left it to me. It’s just sitting there, and there’s a whole lot more to come when Granny dies.”

It was as though she was talking about having a good crop of runner beans in the garden and another crop coming up in a few months.

“I can’t just take your money,” he said.

“Of course you can,” she said. “I’m only crying because I’m so happy. We’ll go and talk to Granny Maxwell. She’ll help us.”

They tried to keep their visit to Granny Maxwell secret. Tory arranged to go and see her the following Saturday. Alison, the stable girl, would lend them her car to drive up to Warwickshire. Molly, however, distrusting Tory’s almost too passive acquiescence, guessed something was up and intercepted a letter from Tory to Jake which fell out of Fen’s pocket on the way to the stables.

The letter spoke of them marrying, as well as the visit to Granny Maxwell, and the scenes that followed were terrible. Molly’s hysteria knew no bounds. How could Tory be ungrateful and stupid enough to throw herself away on this penniless, illegitimate nobody? In fact, Molly suddenly realized that she would no longer have her daughter as an unpaid babysitter, cook, cleaner, shopper, and errand runner. She would have no one on whom to vent her rage, to grumble to and about, no one so easy to cadge money off. She was in danger of losing her whipping boy and she didn’t like it one bit.

She dispatched a reluctant Colonel Carter to have a blimp-to-man talk with Jake. But, as Jake saw the colonel as that monster who’d nearly destroyed Africa, the meeting wasn’t a success. “Dumb insolence” were the colonel’s words for it. “Fellow just gazed out of the window and read the paper upside down. Anyway, how can you expect a chap who wears earrings and hair over his collar to see reason?” Molly felt the colonel had failed her. Malise Gordon would have had much more success.

In the face of Tory’s intransigence, Molly buried her pride and rang Granny Maxwell, her ex-mother-


in-law, whom she’d always hated and suspected of plotting against her.

“Yes, I can see he doesn’t sound very suitable,” said Granny Maxwell, “but I prefer to judge for myself. Tory is bringing him down to meet me on Saturday.”

And Molly, for once curbing the fountain of invective surging up inside her, felt silenced and snubbed.

Fen, although horrified at dropping the letter, was thoroughly overexcited by the whole thing.

“I wish I was old enough to marry him. You are lucky, Tory. Have you mated with him yet? I can’t think why Mummy minds so much about his being intermediate.”

The heatwave continued, making the long drive up to Warwickshire sweaty and unpleasant. The sun blazed down on the top of the car, until Tory longed to escape down some woodland glade or picnic in a field by a winding river. The white chestnut candles lit up the valley, the bluebells making an exquisite contrast to the saffron of the young oaks. Cow parsley rampaged along every verge, but Jake was not interested in scenery. He seemed to find Alison’s car difficult to drive and kept grinding the gears and stopping in fits and starts. Probably hasn’t had much practice, thought Tory, watching his bitten-nail hands clenching the wheel. He answered all her questions in monosyllables, so she fell silent. She was dreading the meeting with her grandmother, who could be very rude and difficult. She couldn’t see Jake getting on with her if he was in this mood. And if she won’t help us, thought Tory in panic, perhaps he won’t want to marry me after all. Then again, what did she know about this strange taciturn young man with whom she was hoping to spend the rest of her life? At least she’d shed nine pounds since she met him, and now could get easily into a size sixteen skirt.

Dozing, then waking up, she realized they’d just gone through Cirencester. She looked at the map. “Aren’t we a little off course?”

“No,” said Jake curtly, putting his foot on the accelerator.

Climbing to the top of a very steep hill, he pulled into the side of the road, saying: “Get out for a minute.”

They had a magical view across the valley to where a golden-gray manor house lay dreaming against its pillow of beech woods. In front was lush, stream-laced parkland dotted with big bell-shaped trees, under which horses sought the shade, swishing their tails against the flies. To the left, a good deal of building and excavations were going on. But here, one large flat field had been left unplowed; on it every kind of colored jump was set up. Jake studied the place at length through binoculars.

“Where are we?” asked Tory. The last signpost had been buried in cow parsley.

“Penscombe.” Jake suddenly looked drawn, a muscle was flickering in his cheek. “Rupert Campbell-Black’s place.”

Going back to the car, he scooped all the rubbish off the floor and from the ashtrays, which brimmed with cigarette butts, and tipped it over the wall into Rupert’s land. One of the workmen, looking across, shook his fist at their departing car.

“Serves him right,” said Tory with a giggle. But when she looked at Jake she saw he was not smiling.

Tory’s grandmother lived sixty-five miles on in an equally beautiful but more sheltered position. Gabled and russet, the house peered out from its unkempt mane of Virginia creeper like a Yorkshire terrier.

A troupe of pekes and pugs came yapping round the side to welcome them. Despite the beauty of the day, they found Granny Maxwell sitting in the drawing room, watching racing on the television. She was also trying to read Horse and Hound, Somerville and Ross, and a gardening book at the same time, with three pairs of spectacles hanging round her neck like trapezes. She had a strong face, broad-browed, hook-nosed, the peaty-brown eyes glittering imperiously beneath their black brows, the wrinkles deeply etched round the wide mouth. On her head she wore a gray-green curly wig, slightly askew and held on with sticky tape.

“You’re wearing your nightgown, child,” she said, looking at Tory’s floating white dress. “I like your blue pants.”

Then she held out a wrinkled, black-nailed hand to Jake.

“I assume this is Mr. Wrong,” she added, with a cackle of laughter.

“Granny,” said Tory, blushing.

Jake grinned.

“Sit down, sit down; no, not in that chair,” she said, as Jake was almost bitten by an ancient, rheumy-eyed Jack Russell already sprawled on it.

All the other pekes and pugs lay at her feet snuffling and panting. She wore an ancient cardigan, a lace shirt, obviously for the second or third day, and a tweed skirt with a droopy, descending hem.

She and Lady Dorothy must go to the same tailor, thought Jake. But aquamarines and diamonds flashed on the grimy hands as she talked, and the pearls round her neck were each as big as a mistletoe berry.

“I suppose you want a drink; young people drink at the most extraordinary hours these days. There are some tins of iced beer in the fridge, Mr. Lovell. Unless you’d like something stronger? Then, go and get them, Tory.”