‘Mummy,’ bellowed Will, suddenly scared.
‘Stop him,’ yelled Chessie.
But Ricky was already sprinting across the lawn, with Will bawling his head off, and next minute the BMW was careering down the drive, scattering Rottweilers. They met Bart coming the other way and had to mount the verge to pass him. Ricky was in luck. Bart, because he was coming to pick up Chessie, had left the gates open. Poor Millicent was bouncing around in the back.
As stone walls and dusty August trees flashed by, Ricky knew he ought to fasten Will’s seat belt, but all that seemed important for the moment was putting as much distance as possible between himself and Bart. There was a crossroads in half a mile where he could lose him. In mounting the verge he had spilt the whisky and the car reeked of drink.
‘Want Mummy!’ howled Will. ‘Want Mummy!’
‘It’s all right, darling, you’re safe. Daddy loves you, you’ll see Mummy soon. I’ve got a present for you at home.’
Will’s sobs subsided a little. Ahead the River Fleet gleamed in the moonlight. As they hurtled towards the bridge, Ricky put a hand on Will’s leg to steady and reassure him. Next moment the moon slid behind a big, black cloud. Too late, he saw, in the pale glow of the headlights, a fox cub racing down the middle of the bridge towards him, its eyes yellow and panic-stricken. Instinctively Ricky swung to the left and hit the side of the bridge head on. Over the almighty crunch, he heard Will scream, felt an agonizing pain in his elbow and then blackness.
The two speed cops reached him before Bart. Millicent was whimpering in the back. Will was killed outright, his neck broken by the impact of the dashboard. Ricky was unconscious, the gash down the side of his face pouring blood, his right arm in a curiously vulnerable position. You could smell whisky all over the car.
‘Plastered,’ said one of the traffic cops, shaking his head, ‘and neither of them wearing seat belts.’
Then, as the moon came out, he noticed the polo stickers on the windscreen and the little silver pony clutched in Will’s hand.
‘Christ, it’s Ricky France-Lynch,’ he said.
As his companion rang for an ambulance, he tried to coax Millicent out of the back. Seeing Ricky’s licence on the floor, he flipped through it.
‘Thought as much,’ he muttered. ‘Two drunk-driving charges already. They’ll clobber him for manslaughter, poor sod. He thought the world of that kid, poor little bugger.’
8
Nearly four months after William France-Lynch was killed in a car crash and his father arrested on charges of manslaughter and drunken driving, Perdita Macleod broke up for the Christmas holidays. Having been expelled from Queen Augusta’s for carousing with the Carlisle twins and walking out of her English exam, she had been dispatched to an even stricter and more expensive boarding school. Only the threat that she wouldn’t be given a polo pony for Christmas had prevented her running away.
To the bliss of breaking up was the added thrill that her mother and stepfather had at last moved into Brock House, a rambling medieval rectory on the Rutshire-Gloucestershire border. Six miles from Rutshire Polo Club, it was, even more excitingly, only two miles from Eldercombe, the village in which Ricky France-Lynch lived. Although the poor darling, Perdita reflected bitterly, was still cooling his heels in Rutminster gaol awaiting trial.
Terrified lest her mother would be eccentrically dressed or, even worse, blub in ‘Oh, Little Town of Bethlehem’, Perdita had failed to send home the invitation to the end-of-term carol service, merely telling her to pick her up afterwards. Perdita was normally too idle to lift anything heavier than a cigarette, but today, in the hope of a lightning getaway, she had lugged her trunk, her record player, carrier bags full of posters, dirty washing, polo magazines, holiday work (some hope), Vivaldi the hampster and a yucca called Kevin down three flights of stairs and piled them up outside her school house.
Alas, just as everyone was spilling out of chapel – identikit mothers in on-the-knee suits, identikit fathers in fawn coats with brown velvet collars – Perdita’s mother, Daisy, rolled up in an absolutely filthy, falling-apart Mini and immediately started tooting and waving like a rainbow windmill. Abandoning the car and blocking everyone’s way, she ran across the tarmac to fling her arms round her daughter.
Finally Perdita, crimson in the face, was able to wriggle free and start hurling carrier bags into the car, as the held-up traffic tooted and everyone, particularly the fawn-coated fathers, stared in amazement.
Why, thought Perdita savagely, does my mother have to be so wacky, and so demonstrative, and, even worse, look half the age of any of the other mothers? Daisy in fact looked adorable. In her early thirties, she had the round, grave, dark brown eyes, the rosy cheeks, the long, straight, shiny brown hair parted in the middle, and gaudy taste in clothes of a Matrioska doll.
But when she stopped worrying and smiled, her eyes had the joyous sparkle and her mouth the dark pink bewitching softness of Hogarth’s Shrimp Girl. Today she was less gaudy than usual. Trying to catch a landscape in a certain light before she left, she had forgotten to take off her painting smock or wash the Alizarin crimson off her hands and looked as if she’d been killing a pig. On her left cheek was a large splodge of burnt sienna, which she’d used to capture the faded ginger of the oak woods beneath the new house.
‘Oh look, there’s Blue Teddy,’ cried Daisy, in her slightly breathless voice which squeaked when she got excited. She propped Perdita’s ancient teddy bear up between Kevin the yucca and the record player. ‘Now he can see out of the window, it’s such a ravishing drive home. Oh, there’s Miss Osbourne,’ went on Daisy, scrabbling in the back as she saw Perdita’s house mistress bearing down on them. ‘I bought her a bottle of Bristol Cream.’
‘No, Mum, she’s an old bitch,’ hissed Perdita. ‘For Christ’s sake, get in, we’re holding up the traffic.’
‘Hi, Perdita! Have a good Christmas.’ A group of classmates, to whom Perdita, with her beauty, outward insouciance and murderous wit, was a source of constant fascination, peered in through the window.
‘Are you Perdita’s friends?’ asked Daisy, who’d never been allowed to meet any of them. ‘How lovely! We’ve just moved to Rutshire. Perhaps you’d like to come and stay in the holidays.’
The tooting was getting deafening.
‘Mum, for God’s sake,’ shrieked Perdita.
‘By-ee,’ shouted Daisy, windmilling to Miss Osbourne and the group of girls as she set off in a succession of jerks down the drive, narrowly avoiding ramming the car in front as she stopped to admire the trailing yellow twigs of a willow tree against an angry navy-blue sky.
‘Can’t think what’s wrong with the car,’ said Daisy as it ground to a halt and died just inside the school gates. The tooting became even more acrimonious as she frantically tried the ignition.
‘Need any help?’ The father of Lucinda Montague, Perdita’s sworn enemy, reeking of brandy from his office party, popped his head inside the car.
‘It won’t budge,’ said Daisy helplessly.
‘’Fraid you’ve run out of petrol.’
Daisy, who always found the wrong things funny, went off into peals of laughter. Perdita put her head in her hands. It was not until four fathers, all roaring with laughter, who’d also obviously been to office parties, lifted the Mini out of the way and Miss Osbourne had provided a can of petrol, and they’d reached the slow lane of the motorway, and Daisy’d apologized a hundred times, that Perdita thawed enough to light a cigarette and ask what the house was like.
‘Oh, gorgeous,’ said Daisy, thrilled to be forgiven. ‘You cannot believe the views. This morning the whole valley was palest cobalt green with frost, and the shadows of the bare trees were . . .’
‘Do Eddie and Violet like it?’ interrupted Perdita who was bored rigid by ‘Nature’.
‘Adore it! There’s so much space after London.’
‘I bet they’ve bagged the best rooms.’
‘Every room is best. We’re going to be so happy. You’ve already been asked to a Pony Club Barn Dance.’
‘I wouldn’t be seen dead,’ said Perdita scornfully. No-one who’d bopped the night away with Jesus and the
