‘Well, you better keep your trap shut for a change. No blathering to Simpson Hastings this time. If you tell anyone, in fact, you and I are over – understand?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘And since you interrupted what I’d started with Chessie, I’d quite like to finish it.’ As he pulled her towards him, his cock jabbed her stomach. Beneath the feline languor, she could sense his frenzied excitement. Never had he made love to her more passionately, and when the manager rang up asking them to check out he booked in for another night.
65
Perdita told no-one about Red and Chessie except Tero into whose sympathetic grey shoulder she sobbed endlessly, trying to make sense out of what had happened. Did Red really loathe Chessie? Had he just pulled her to prove he could and that Chessie was a whore, or was it for the novelty of something as utterly
‘Dear Perdita,
Sorry about Thursday morning, but please don’t blame me. I’d never have gone to bed with Red if he hadn’t pestered me ever since I married Bart (that’s why he’s always been so poisonous to me), so that I finally gave in, because I was flattered, I suppose, and because I was so miserable about Ricky. I’m sorry you’re hurt, but if you hadn’t come back you’d never have found out. Yours, red-faced and red-handed, Chessie.’
Even when she’d shattered someone’s life, Chessie couldn’t avoid being flip. Either she or Red was lying, but Perdita couldn’t imagine Red pestering anyone. She knew she should pack her bags, but where could she go? Tero and Spotty could hardly live in a bedsit, and would Red give her custody of the six ponies, and all the jewels and clothes he’d given her? She hadn’t saved a penny, relying on the wads of dollars and pound notes he’d thrust so freely into her eager hands. What terrified her most was the total loss of pride and willpower. She loved him too much to walk out, however much he humiliated her. As electrodes of jealousy wracked her body, she realized for the first time how much Luke must have suffered.
Perdita’s game disintegrated. If Red and Angel hadn’t continued so majestically together, the Flyers would have never reached the final of the Gold Cup. After a very tough draw, in which they beat the Tigers in extra time, Apocalypse also reached the final.
Ricky tried to sleep on the eve of the match but kept listening for the banging of hooves against the stable walls, which would tell him one of his horses had cast itself or was down with colic. When he did drop off, he found he was playing the whole world in his dreams. At three he got up and wandered round the house. It was unbearably hot and stuffy with distant thunder grumbling round the Rutshire hills. Little Chef, who’d trailed his restless master all day and tried to bring a smile to his lips by rushing in with a clothes brush or lying on his back sneezing with his paws over his eyes, followed yawning and blinking. The thunder was getting nearer.
On the drawing-room table lay the endlessly rescribbled and crossed-out lists of tomorrow’s playing order. He had spent hours working out which horses would go best in which chukka, so one always had a balance of speed and manoeuvrability. Heavy rain would change all that. He was also in a dilemma about Wayne, who, as an old horse, didn’t go well in very hot weather and who’d got crafty recently and, fed up with Ricky making him do sharp turns at a gallop, had started falling over deliberately. Nor was he entirely reliable in ride-offs. Seeing a bump coming, he’d hesitate and take Ricky out of it. Young horses loved to bump. Old horses like Wayne tended to cheat on you.
Like young wives, thought Ricky bitterly, which brought him back to Chessie. If he won tomorrow – what then? It was the first rung reached, but if Chessie came back, would he ever trust her again? He wished Luke were here. Dancer was frozen with panic, unable to eat. Even the twins were subdued, like puppies removed too early from their mother, so Ricky himself had to be the stabilizer. The smell of meadowsweet drifted hot and soapy from the lake. At the bottom of the moonlit valley, like a low, low star, Ricky saw Daisy’s light on. He glanced at her painting of Will which had brought him such bitter-sweet pleasure. Suddenly the temptation to dump was too much. If he weren’t playing Wayne tomorrow, he could ride him down to see Daisy.
‘Hullo.’ Daisy answered the telephone on the first ring, her voice tremulous with excitement.
‘It’s Ricky.’
There was a pause.
‘How are you?’ said Daisy, trying to keep the desperate disappointment out of her voice.
‘Can’t sleep. It’s so light outside. Can I come over?’
The same moonlight that flooded the Eldercombe Valley silvered Chessie’s naked body as she lay in the great, green silk four-poster listening to the crunch of the security guards on the gravel outside. Beside her, Bart churned with demoniacal sexual excitement. Challenges were his fix, and this was the greatest challenge he’d ever faced.
Alderton Airlines was about to merge with EuroElectronics. Determined to merge with a splurge, Bart was flying in both his own and the German boards who would enjoy a splendid lunch in a duck-egg-blue tent before watching the Flyers retain the Gold Cup.
Bibi had been so incensed by such extravagance that she’d refused to come.
‘We can’t pay wages or suppliers, Dad.’
‘We can after we’ve closed the deal,’ said Bart. Helmut Wallstein, the Chairman of EuroElectronics, owned race horses and would recognize quality when he saw Bart’s ponies.
He longed to screw Chessie to release the tension, but he always avoided sex before a key match. He needed the built-up pressure to zap the other side. Hearing her reach out for a glass of water, he said, ‘Remember that red suit you wore at last year’s Gold Cup? It brought us luck. Will you wear it again?’
‘On one condition,’ Chessie wriggled up to him, ‘that you fuck me stupid now.’
In contrast to its cool, silver, moonlit appearance, her sweating body gave off a white-hot heat.
‘I mustn’t,’ said Bart regretfully. ‘Tomorrow night I’ll bang you insensible.’
‘Real men screw their wives and win matches,’ taunted Chessie, climbing on top of him and taking his cock between her lips.
‘With access to this,’ mumbled Bart, as the oily, silken warmth tickled his face, ‘I must be the luckiest guy in the world. I’d kill to keep you, you know that.’
The thunderstorm broke in the west around breakfast time and reached Cowdray by midday, with lightning unzipping a purply-black sky and deafening claps of thunder unnerving the ponies. The storm passed on, but driving rain birched the faces of the two teams as they cantered a lap of honour and bounced off a pitch which, after weeks of sunshine, was now dangerously slick and greasy on top and as hard as Red Alderton’s heart underneath.
But rain had never stopped play at Cowdray. The scarlet ribbons on the hats of the band playing ‘Four Horsemen, Riding, Riding, Riding’, the umbrellas of the spectators and the duck-egg-blue shirts of the Flyers provided the only colourful notes.
‘And they’ll be black with mud by treading-in time,’ said Dommie through chattering teeth, ‘and we’ll all be black and blue before it’s over.’
Wayne loathed rain and his long, yellow ears never left his ewe neck as Ricky rode him in the parade. But when he was untacked and realized he wouldn’t be playing, he put his ugly head down, hunched his shoulders and, ignoring everyone, sulked in the corner.
Angel, who hated rain even more than Wayne, was near suicide. Bibi hadn’t come over for the match and the icy west wind whistling across the pitch felt to him as if it was coming directly from her in New York. Perdita felt even worse than Angel. Ricky had cut her dead again, so had Dancer, and Rupert had just come into the stands.
Yesterday, she’d begged Red to stick and ball with her in a faint attempt to capture her lost form. He had rolled up an hour late.
