Riders

Enrico, thought Fen dreamily, was stiff but not worried.

The grandfather clock in the hall struck the quarter hour.

“We’re leaving in fifteen minutes,” said Dino.

“I’ll be ready. Don’t worry.”

At that moment Tory came in. “Oh Fen, where have you been?”

“I got diverted,” said Fen, weaving joyfully towards the door, “highly diverted. I’m sorry to have caused so much trouble.”

Never had her bed looked so inviting. She’d only had time for a lightning shower and a change when she heard the lorry revving up. Bloody hell! Dino was just doing that to wind her up. Sweeping everything on top of her dressing table and the contents of her washbasin into a holdall and throwing Lester on top, she fled downstairs.

47

It was not an ’appy treep. Fen’s hangover descended like a million thunderbolts just as they reached Southampton. The crossing was frightful and she spent the entire time commuting between the hold, where she comforted a terrified Hardy until the petrol fumes overcame her, and the ladies’ loo. Her face, as a result of Enrico’s stubble, was blotched like salami.

Dino, Louise, and Sarah, blisteringly unsympathetic, went off to a huge lunch and didn’t even buy her a brandy to steady her stomach. As the lorry, which seemed so pedestrian after Enrico’s Ferrari, steadily ate up the miles, she was overcome by the depression that goes with extreme tiredness. It had all been a dream. She should never have let Enrico take her to bed on the first night. She would never see him again. It was eleven o’clock when they reached Amsterdam; midnight before the horses were stabled and fed and they reached the hotel. Louise was sleeping in the lorry, Sarah, Fen, and Dino in the hotel. Dino pointedly carried Sarah’s suitcase but not Fen’s. The manager came out to welcome them in perfect English. “Miss Maxwell, Mr. Ferranti, you must be very tired. Would you like something to eat? We can make some sandwiches.”

“I’d sure appreciate a drink,” said Dino, stretching after the long drive. “We’ll be down in a minute.”

The porter took them upstairs. He reached Fen’s room first and threw open the door. Fen was knocked sideways by the most heavenly scent. She could hardly get inside for the flowers — roses, gardenias, stephanotis, banks and banks of freesias and hyacinths. It was like suddenly coming out of a freezing cold night into a heated conservatory.

“How gorgeous,” she gasped.

“My God,” said Sarah. “Someone must have denuded every flower shop in the low countries. Not Interflora, but Entireflora, ha-ha. Who on earth are they from?”

Fen took a card out of the tiny envelope lying on the bed.

“Adorable Fen, you were magnificent, I die till Monday week, all my love, E.”

“I say,” said Sarah, snatching the card.

“Don’t,” screamed Fen, trying to snatch it back and keep the silly grin off her face.

“Who the hell’s E?” asked Sarah. “Prince Edward, Edgar Lust-garten, Ethelred the Unready, Edward Fox, ’Enry Higgins, Eamonn Andrews? Go on, who is he? Who is E?”

“I’m not going to tell you,” said Fen. “My trap is shut.”

Dino appeared at the door, “If we’re going to catch the restaurant before it closes…Christ.”

“Fen has a new boyfriend,” giggled Sarah. “His name begins with E.”

“Stands for excessive, extravagant, and extremely silly,” snapped Dino.

“No, it doesn’t,” said Fen, putting a freesia behind her ear and waltzing round the room. “It stands for ’edonism.”

Throughout the show, Fen jumped atrociously. Her mind was simply not on the horses. She couldn’t eat, she couldn’t sleep at night, as she inhaled the heavy scent of the flowers, which brought back the powerful disturbing image of Enrico. No man had any right to be that attractive. He had discovered erogenous zones she didn’t know existed. She kept looking at her watch, surprised that only a minute had passed.

On Saturday night he telephoned her from New York. The manager brought the telephone to the table where she and Dino and Louise were having a very scratchy dinner, attempting to celebrate Dino’s win in a big class that evening. The line was awful.

“I cannot wait to have you in my arms, cara,” said Enrico and, proceeding to tell her all the unmentionable things he was going to do to her when they met again, Fen was surprised the telephone didn’t turn blue. Fen in turn went redder and redder, acutely aware of Dino listening in stony silence.

Fen got an earful from Jake when she got home. Even though they arrived back after midnight, he had her up at the crack of dawn the next morning, insisting she jump a new and extremely difficult novice round the indoor school, with her arms folded, stirrups crossed, and reins knotted. She fell off four times and ended up on the floor screaming at Jake.

“You’re not going to make a bloody fool of yourself at Olympia,” he said.

“I suppose Tory and Dino have been sneaking.”

“They didn’t need to. One of the Olympic scouts was in Amsterdam. He said if Jesus Christ had ridden that donkey into Jerusalem the way you were riding Laurel and Hardy all week, he deserved to be crucified.”

The end of term jollities of the Olympia Christmas show were lost on Fen this year. Parties were held every night in lorries and on trade stands. Dino went to all of them, each with a different girl, and deliberately got drunk. Fen went to none, because she wanted to look beautiful for Enrico, which was difficult, with the long hours and the airlessness of Olympia and because sleep, when she finally got to bed, again evaded her because of the din outside.

Gossip circulated as usual. Rupert Campbell-Black had acquired a new wonder horse from America called Rock Star, which was reputed to have cost him $200,000. His marriage, on the other hand, was in trouble. Helen had managed to do her Christmas shopping without visiting Olympia once. The Lloyd-Foxes, by contrast, were blissfully happy. Janey had embarked on a book on postnatal depression called The Blues of the Birth. Jake’s leg was mending, but no one thought he would make Los Angeles. Fen was showing a dramatic loss of form, and so was Dino Ferranti. Wishbone, despite being in the whisky “tint” every day, had been placed in every class.

The days crawled by. Not eating properly, Fen was appalled to see that she was getting spots again. Not knowing where she was staying, Enrico sent flowers to her care of the BSJA tent and lots of giggling ex-debs carried them down to Fen’s lorry, which now, according to Dino, looked like a hearse.

At long last it was the final day of the show and Enrico was due that evening.

“What d’you think?” said Fen, teetering on one of the bunks in the lorry so she could see her bottom half in the mirror opposite. She was trying on a new pair of white sharkskin breeches, specially made for her.

“Brilliant,” said Sarah, who was cleaning Hardy’s bridle. “I’ve never seen anything so sexy. They make your legs go on forever, but you must wear panties underneath.”

“No. It’ll ruin the line.”

“It’ll ruin your reputation if they split.”

Fen bent down, straining the breeches to the limit, and extracted a riding coat from the tissue paper in the cardboard box.

“Now what d’you think of these together?” she said triumphantly, when she’d shrugged her way into it. The coat was dark purple instead of the regulation black or midnight blue, lined with rose-pink silk, tightly fitting, and only just skirting the top of her hip bones. It made the perfect foil for the white breeches.

Sarah whistled. “You’ll never get away with that. It’s a bum freezer. Colonel Roxborough will have another stroke.”

“You wait,” said Fen, “I bet it starts a trend. Everyone’ll be wearing them in a few months.”

“Not if you’ve got a bum Griselda’s size,” said Sarah.