bashing away at her typewriter in some foreign hotel bedroom, wasn’t conducive to Billy getting any sleep before a big class. Nor did Janey, hopelessly unpunctual, endear herself to other members of the team by making them late for dinners and parties. Billy was too besotted to notice. His horses were going well. Mandryka, the dark brown Hanoverian Ludwig von Schellenberg had given as a wedding present, upgraded himself incredibly quickly and was showing all the makings of being as great a horse as The Bull, or Moggie Meal Al, as he was now renamed. Billy winced, but not much. At ?50,000 a year from Kevin Coley, it was worth wincing for. Anyway he was still the same Bull in the stable.
In fact, in that first year of marriage, Janey and Billy were extremely rich. Janey’s salary, plus expenses, plus Billy’s steady winnings, plus Kevin’s sponsorship, added up to nearly ?100,000 a year. And although Billy was always buying Rupert drinks and gave Helen his winnings for housekeeping (when he hadn’t spent them celebrating), gas, electricity, telephone, and heating bills at Penscombe were invariably picked up by Rupert.
When they were in England, Billy and Janey lived with Helen and Rupert and muttered vaguely about house- hunting. In the end it was again part of Rupert’s colossal generosity towards Billy that he let them have Lime Tree Place, an enchanting but dilapidated seventeenth-century cottage on the Penscombe estate, which had just become vacant, on condition they pay for doing it up. Planning permission had to be obtained to extend the kitchen and build on a dining room, two more bedrooms, and a nursery. Being twenty-nine, Janey hoped to start a baby almost immediately. In time, they would turn the moldering, moss-encrusted outbuildings into stabling for a dozen horses. Helen came down to the cottage and talked a lot about closet space and knocking down walls, and, inspired by the beauty of Penscombe, Janey felt there was no need to spare any expense.
For Janey and Billy, that first year seemed effortless, because at home they were backed up by Helen’s clockwork domestic routine which ironed Billy’s breeches, washed his shirts, remembered to get his red coats and dinner jackets back from the cleaners; and by Miss Hawkins, who saw that Billy’s entry forms were sent off and bills were paid and appointments put in the diary.
For Janey’s liking, they had spent rather too much time with Kevin and Enid Coley, who flew out to several of the foreign shows and were always hanging about at Wembley, Crittleden, and Olympia.
Billy made excuses for Kevin, saying he was merely proud that Billy’s horses were going so well and particularly that Moggie Meal Al came second in the European championships in Paris. And if Kevin did tell Billy how to ride and Malise exactly how to run the British team, Billy felt Malise was perfectly capable of taking care of himself. Janey was rather less tolerant. As a wedding present, the Coleys gave them a large china poodle lifting its leg on a lamppost. Janey wrote Enid a gushing letter of thanks and put the poodle in the cellar.
There were also too many invitations to visit Chateau Kitsch, as Janey called Kevin’s mock Tudor castle in Sunningdale, where there was lots of horseplay and one was likely to be pushed into the heated swimming pool at any moment. But on the way home, they enjoyed lots of giggles about the electric toadstools that lit up on either side of the drive at night, and the huge luminous Moggie Meal Cat symbol outside the front door which winked and me-owed when you pressed the doorbell, and the button in Kevin’s den which had merely to be pushed for the entire leather-bound works of Dickens and Scott to slide back, revealing a bar offering every drink known to man.
Janey, reared in Fleet Street, could drink even Billy under the table. Looking out of the window one evening, Helen saw them coming up the drive hysterical with laughter, as Billy pretended to lift his leg on every chestnut tree.
“Billy’s being Kevin’s china poodle,” explained Janey. “Christ, my feet are killing me. We ran out of petrol and had to walk from Stroud.”
Helen had mixed feelings about Janey. In the end you couldn’t help liking her. She was fun and marvelously iconoclastic about show jumping, but she was a bit too easy to talk to. Any secret confided would be round Penscombe and Fleet Street in a flash. And Janey was so messy, wandering round the house with her cat, Harold Evans, riding like a parrot on her shoulder, eyes screwed up against the cigarette smoke, spilling ash and leaving a trail of dirty cups and, after midday, glasses.
Helen, so fastidious, couldn’t bear the fact that Janey kept pinching her perfume and makeup and borrowing her clothes. There was an embarrassing occasion when Helen and Rupert were away for the weekend and Janey borrowed one of Helen’s dresses to go out to dinner with the Coleys and split it, not even down the seam, so it was beyond repair.
Even worse was the time Helen came downstairs, ashen, because her mink coat, given to her by Rupert on their second anniversary, was missing. She was about to ring the police, when Janey suggested they look round the house first.
“Isn’t this it, bundled up in the downstairs loo?” Janey announced rather casually two minutes later. “Mrs. Bodkin must have brought it down for refurbishing — ha-ha, that’s a joke — or something.”
It was unfortunate that Janey had left three toffee papers, and a program for a Michael Frayn play that had been on in Bath, in the pocket. Helen was very upset, but too nice to shout at Janey. Instead she went to church and asked God to make her more tolerant.
Occasionally, Janey cooked, but made such a mess in the kitchen that it took Helen twice as long to clear up afterwards, and she wished Janey wouldn’t take books out on her library tickets, read them in the bath, and forget to return them, or even worse, lose them abroad. Helen, who’d never kept a library book too long, and always renewed them, was upset and bustled.
In a way, Billy and Janey’s presence helped Rupert and Helen’s marriage. Rupert tended not to be so intolerant if the others were there; but in another way their happiness showed up the flaws.
Rupert was wildly jealous of the love Helen lavished on Marcus. “I’m so enjoying him,” she kept saying. (“As though Marcus was a quadruple vodka and tonic,” said Janey.) He was also envious of the relaxed hedonistic relationship Billy had with Janey. When had Helen ever got tight with him. When had they last been hysterical with laughter? He heard the giggles and gasps of pleasure issuing from their bedroom. Mrs. Bodkin was always finding empty bottles under the bed.
Janey, Helen thought, brought out the worst in Billy. She encouraged him to drink more, bet more, always dine out rather than eat at home. Billy, more emotional and physically less strong than Rupert, couldn’t cope with such excess.
The blatant sexuality of the relationship unnerved Helen, too. Billy and Janey were always sloping off to bed. You only had to look at Janey’s washing on the line. Mrs. Bodkin’s mouth disappeared in disapproval at the black and scarlet crotchless knickers, the cut-out bras, the G-strings, suspender belts, and fishnet stockings. Janey, careless and thoughtless, left her vibrator in their unmade bed, which was found by Mrs. Bodkin.
“Billy’s got a bad back. It’s for massaging his spine,” explained Janey, airily. Mrs. Bodkin was not convinced; Janey was a minx.
Helen and Janey’s attitudes to each other were ambiguous. Janey was jealous of Helen’s beauty. Helen even looked gorgeous in a bath cap, and Billy would never say a word against her. Helen, spurred on by Janey’s fame and journalistic success, started working on her novel again.
“She talks as if she’s writing
“She doesn’t mean it bitchily,” Billy kept protesting.
“Oh, she does, Buster, she does,” said Janey grimly.
Helen, in fact, was jealous of Janey for being so sexy. Occasionally she worried that Billy, Rupert, and Janey spent so much time abroad together. Rupert did little to dispel this fear. It diverted any suspicions she might have had about him and Hilary.
Show jumping and Rupert changed during the midseventies. As the sport became more popular and sponsorship increased, so did the prize money. Before, the show-jumping season had lasted from April to October; now, riders could jump all the year round and, because of the number of indoor evening shows, they were kept busy by night as well as by day. When he started in the sport, Rupert would buzz off to Argentina to play polo, or go racing at Longchamps or skiing at Klosters. Now, show jumping had become an all-consuming passion. Always on the circuit, he was jumping his horses so hard, he wore them out in a year or so and, as a result, was endlessly
