Polo

sweated.

Outside, a band, redder than their tunics, were playing the British Grenadiers as clouds, blacker than their bearskins, marshalled on the horizon. A curious light had turned the field viridian as military men with lean figures strode around barking instructions into walkie-talkies.

Ricky, who was madly superstitious, was slightly cheered as the band, bored with military marches, launched, to the ecstasy of the crowd, into ‘Four Horsemen’.

‘Four Hor-ses, white horse, black horse, red horse, pale horse, plague, famine, justice, death, riding, riding, riding,’ roared the crowd stamping their feet in time on the wooden boards, as the menacing music swept through the ground.

‘Isn’t that marvellous!’ cried Perdita.

‘Unfair bloody advantage, hyping up Apocalypse,’ snarled Bart to the Napiers and the uncomprehending Mexican.

‘Let’s object,’ said Ben Napier, two spots of colour staining his cadaverous cheeks as, exactly on cue, a vast, black helicopter cast its shadow over the pitch.

With great difficulty and the help of a dozen security guards Dancer fought his way through to the pony lines.

‘Fuckin’ ’ell, don’t it sound grite?’ he grinned at his team-mates. ‘I might go out and give them an encore. I love the Guards Club,’ he went on, lowering his voice. ‘They can’t believe anyfink as cockney as me can play polo. Colonels keep comin’ up and saying “’Ullo, Dancer, you over from New Zealand again?”’

Perdita giggled; even Ricky smiled slightly. But he was watching Bart who’d cut all the Apocalypse team, even Luke, stone dead and was now shouting at the Napiers and into a telephone at the same time. How could Chessie be married to that, he thought with a shudder. Luke edged closer to his father.

‘I don’t give a shit if it has crashed,’ Bart was saying. ‘I can’t bring them back to life. Put Winston Chalmers on to it at once. I’ll call you later.’

‘What’s happened?’ Luke asked one of Bart’s grooms whom he knew from Palm Beach. The groom pulled a long face.

‘Alderton Pegasus totalled in the desert with no survivors.’

‘Shit,’ said Luke. ‘Dad should fly home.’

‘And miss a final? Pigs would fly,’ said the groom.

The Queen had arrived. State trumpeters and drum horses from the Household Cavalry in their gold uniforms, followed by the band, were lining up between the goal posts to lead the two teams, with the two umpires as a bolster between them, ten abreast on to the field. Players tend to ride their oldest, quietest horses in the parade in case the bands and the crowd overexcite them. Apocalypse, however, stuck to their theme. Ricky rode the pale yellow Wayne, Perdita was on Hermia, her red-chestnut friend from Pony Club days who leapt all over the place snatching excitedly at her bit. Dancer had a safer passage on black Geoffrey, the hangover horse. Luke had reluctantly agreed to ride Fantasma, the only white horse in the yard, and had great difficulty controlling her. A natural loner, she longed to be out in front leading the parade. When she wasn’t humping her back in temper, she was taking bites out of poor, kind Geoffrey on her right, and, less advisedly, out of umpire Shark Nelligan’s horse on her left. Despite this, Apocalypse, in their black shirts with their black hats over their noses, looked both sinister and threatening.

Ricky had just galloped Wayne back after the parade and was mounting a hopelessly overexcited Sinatra when he heard a frantic clicking of cameras as journalists and photographers broke through the ropes. Then he heard a soft voice saying, ‘Hello, Luke darling.’

Catching a great waft of Diorissimo, Ricky swung round as though a rattlesnake had bitten him, colour draining from his face. The heat had made everyone appear as though they’d been boiled alive. Chessie, by comparison, looked like a lily of the valley just picked from some cool, shady dell. She wore a pale green linen suit, exquisitely cut to show off the fragility of her body, and flat green pumps on her feet. Her face, faintly flushed from champagne in the Dunhill tent, was tanned to a smooth cafe au lait, the eyes were turned to aquamarine by the green suit and her full, pouting lips were as palely pink as the wild roses dying in the hedgerows.

Hugging Luke, but gazing over his shoulder at Ricky, she murmured, ‘How exciting you’re in the final and how ironic you’re playing against your father. What embarras de Aldertons. The commentator’s going to get so muddled.’

Then, wriggling out of Luke’s grasp, like a sleepwalker she moved over to Ricky. Gazing up, she took in the hollowed cheeks with their suspicion of black stubble and the grim intransigent mouth which was belied by the fierce, yet desperately wounded, dark eyes beneath the black polo hat.

‘Hello, Ricky,’ she said mockingly. ‘How’s our bet going? Still a long way to go. No Gold Cup yet, no ten goal, no Westchester. You’ll have to do better than that.’

Oblivious of the photographers going crazy all round them, Ricky stared down at her. He simply couldn’t get a word out as she gently caressed Sinatra’s silky shoulder. Sinatra had been known to take people’s hands off, but now relaxed almost ecstatically under Chessie’s touch.

‘Four and a half years is a long time,’ she whispered. ‘Haven’t you missed me?’

Seeing her wanton, taunting little face, flawless except for the velvet smudges under the eyes, and her caressing suntanned hand inching towards his thigh, Ricky wanted to gather her up on Sinatra, gallop all the way back to Robinsgrove, ram every bolt and never let her go again.

They were interrupted by Luke, now mounted on Ophelia and looking more thunderous than the cloud now hanging above the pitch.

‘Back off, Chessie,’ he said roughly. ‘I don’t know if Dad put you up to this, but it is definitely out of order.’

Perdita was less reticent. ‘Fuck off, you bitch,’ she screamed. ‘What a bloody awful time to stage a comeback.’

The reporters scribbled avidly.

‘Any chance of a reconciliation, Mrs Alderton?’ asked The Scorpion, wrestling with one of Dancer’s security men.

Chessie gave a sob. ‘You’ll have to ask my ex-husband,’ she said.

‘For God’s sake get on, Ricky,’ snapped Major Ferguson, who masterminded every move at the Guards Club.

The Flyers were already on the field.

‘Here come the undertakers,’ sneered Charles Napier, deliberately barging his big brown mare into Spotty whom Perdita had just changed on to. ‘Black’s the right colour for you lot. You’ll certainly be flying that fag,’ he nodded at Dancer, ‘at half-mast by the end of this match.’

Ricky had gone to pieces. White, sweating, shaking violently, he hardly seemed to know where he was.

‘Take it easy,’ said Luke, putting an arm round his shoulders.

‘Thought Dancer was the fag,’ taunted Ben Napier. ‘Didn’t know you and Ricky were having it off. I hear you had to buy the Rutshire, Dancer, to get your handicap up to one.’

‘Knock it off,’ ordered Shark Nelligan who was umpiring and wanted to throwin.

‘That was definitely below the belt, Dad,’ said Luke as he lined up beside Bart. ‘If you want Chessie to be a widow before the end of the match you’re going about it in the right way.’

‘Whaddya talking about?’ Bart spat out his gum.

‘Sending her out to the pony lines to screw up Ricky.’

For a second Bart was roused out of his obsessive pre-throw-in catatonia.

‘Nothing to do with me,’ he said in outrage. ‘She must have got looped at lunchtime.’

As the ball thumped into the forest of legs and sticks the first three pairs missed it. Luke and Bart clashed mallets for a couple of seconds, then Luke got the ball out, immediately whacking it up towards the enemy goal posts, then, following his right of way, hit it again. But he wasn’t on his fastest pony. At the touch of spurs on her desperately cut-up flesh, Charles Napier’s big brown mare bounded forward like a cheetah. Luke could hear the thunder of her hooves on the dry ground behind him. Then suddenly, to his left, Spotty, electrified by a large cheering crowd, was streaking down the field with Perdita’s arms, legs and whip going like a jockey’s.

Aware that Charles was about to hook him, Luke swung Ophelia to the right and cut the ball to Perdita on the