her if she’d like another vodka and orange.
‘Another thing to remember at the interview,’ said Sukey pointedly, ‘is to let Perdita do the talking. Some mothers answer all the time for the children, which makes the Committee think the child lacks initiative.’
‘What have you done to my Mum, Suke,’ sang Perdita.
‘Shut up, Perdita,’ said Drew and Daisy simultaneously.
‘And do try and appear really keen, Perdita,’ advised Sukey. ‘The Committee loves enthusiasm.’
The interview lasted half an hour. Very kindly, they asked Daisy about her financial circumstances. She stuck out her darned leg, hoping to give an impression of genteel poverty, smiled so much her face ached and, despite Sukey’s warnings, found herself talking too much to compensate for Perdita’s bored indifference.
Brigadier Canford, who was indeed a lover of pretty girls, looked at Perdita’s impassive, dead-pan face, and had a strange feeling he’d seen her before somewhere.
‘And what d’you want to get out of polo?’
‘I want to go to ten.’
‘Bit ambitious. Nearest a woman’s ever got is five.’
Out of the window Perdita could see children riding in pairs and dribbling balls in and out of soap boxes.
‘I know, but there was a piece in a polo magazine the other day saying many women were ten in beauty, but never could be ten in polo. Fucking patronizing.’
‘Perdita,’ murmured Daisy.
‘I hope you wouldn’t use language like that in New Zealand, young lady,’ said the Brigadier. ‘You’d be representing your country, you know.’
‘Still patronizing.’
Later they watched her playing a chukka with seven other contenders for the scholarship.
Brigadier Canford admired the lightning reflexes, the way she adjusted to a not-very-easy pony in seconds and showed up the others as she ruthlessly shoved them out of the way and cat-and-mouse-whipped the ball away just as they were about to hit it.
‘Wow,’ he said, turning to Drew. ‘I’m not sure she couldn’t go to ten, and she’d certainly be ten in looks if she smiled more often.’
Puzzled, he shook his pewter-grey head. ‘I can’t think where I’ve seen her before.’
20
Apart from Perdita, the Rutshire team for the Jack Gannon Cup consisted of Justin and Patrick Lombard, farmer’s sons who’d spent their lives in the saddle and who made up for lack of finesse with dogged determination, and David Waterlane’s son, Mike, now nearly twenty-one, who played like an angel when his father wasn’t on the sideline bellowing at him.
In an exhausting, exhilarating fortnight, they moved round the country triumphing gloriously at Cheshire, being demoralized at Cirencester, where they drew against a vastly inferior team, cockahoop at Kirtlington, and nearly coming unstuck at Windsor, where Perdita was sent off for swearing, so Rutshire had to play the last chukka with only three men, and only just won.
On the first Friday in August they finally reached Cowdray and won the semi-finals by the skins of their gumshields. The Quorn, opposing them, had rumbled Drew’s Exocet weapon, and spent the match giving Perdita so much hassle that she only hit the ball twice. The Lombard brothers and Mike Waterlane, however, scored a goal apiece to put Rutshire into Sunday’s final against the mighty South Sussex, who hadn’t been beaten for three years.
The entire Championships were being sponsored by petfood billionaire and fitness freak, Kevin Coley, Chairman of Doggie Dins, Moggie Meal and the newly launched Fido-Fibre. Kevin had formerly sponsored show- jumping, but five years ago had run off with Janey, the wife of Billy Lloyd-Foxe, one of his professionals and Rupert Campbell-Black’s best friend. After Janey went back to Billy, Kevin had patched up his differences with his wife, Enid, but one of the conditions had been that Kevin would sponsor polo instead of show-jumping to avoid bumping into Janey on the circuit, and because their daughter, Tracey, would meet a nicer class of young man in polo. Trace – as she liked to be called – at eighteen was playing in the crack South Sussex team against Rutshire in the final. If she wasn’t quite up to her other team-mates, her presence there vastly increased her father’s generosity. The whole South Sussex team had been driving round the country in a vast aluminium horse box, evidently the latest thing in America, and Kevin had provided each player with four top-class ponies.
The South Sussex team was also more than compensated by the rock solidarity of a boy called Paul Hedley at back, and the dazzling Sherwood brothers, Randolph and Merlin, who’d pulled out of high goal polo for a fortnight to piss it up with the Pony Club.
Randy Sherwood, who was known as the Cock of the South, had a handicap of two and was so glamorous with his long, long legs and curly hair that fell perfectly into shape, that girls clamoured to groom for him for nothing. Merlin, who was quieter, but just as lethal, had pulled a different groupie every night of the Championships. Randy, going amazingly steady for him, had spent the fortnight screwing Trace Coley, who was as pretty as she was spoilt, because he’d heard rumours that Kevin was thinking of including him in his team next year.
Perdita and Trace had detested each other on sight and, together with Randy, Trace spent a lot of time when they weren’t screwing, winding Perdita up. Not only did they drench her in a water fight when she didn’t have a change of clothes and throw her on the muck heap, but on Friday evening offered her a roll filled with Doggie Dins, so she spent the rest of the night throwing up. Perdita reacted with screaming tantrums. Trace, suspecting Randy’s incessant baiting might have some basis in desire, stepped up the spite.
And now it was Finals’ Day and the number two Ambersham ground at Cowdray was a seething mass of caravans, tents, trailers, canvas loose-boxes for 200 ponies and rows of cars belonging to team managers and exhausted parents. Breakfast of sausage, egg and chips was sizzling over camp-fires. The mobile loos had worked until the day before, but now each bowl was an Everest of Bronco and the stench was getting worse.
With fifty teams present, there had also been one hell of a party the night before. Now, revellers nursed their hangovers. All the Beaufort and the VWH had been penalized for skinny-dipping. One of the Quorn had been discovered in a very loose-box with a girl from the Cotswold and dropped from his team. Perdita, not in a party mood, had stayed in her tent reading
Daisy, having taken a fortnight’s holiday to drive Perdita around in yet another hired car, had never felt so shattered in her life. She spent the morning scrubbing out the ponies’ boxes because the Rutshire team manager, miffed that Drew seemed to have utterly taken over, threatened dire reprisals if a blade of straw was left on the floor. In despair at the greasiness of her hair, Daisy had washed it in the river – how the hell had women coped in biblical times? – and it had dried all crinkly. The cornflower-blue dress she had brought to wear at the finals had been slept on by Ethel and was impossibly creased, as was her face after two nights sleeping in the car. Her legs, not brown enough, were becoming bristly.
She was miserably aware of getting on Perdita’s nerves, and, as all the fathers had rolled up, of the loneliness of being a woman on one’s own. She was almost abject with gratitude to Drew who’d insisted she use his Land-Rover as her base, and who’d come up specially that morning to invite her to lunch and to watch the match with him and Sukey.
Among the Pony Club, Daisy noticed, Drew was a Superman. A fortnight ago he had played for England against America in the annual International. Only his two hard-fought goals and grimly consistent defence had prevented the game turning into a rout. Now he couldn’t move twenty yards without signing autographs. In his cool way Drew found this gratifying.
Marrying Sukey had admittedly enabled him to buy a string of cracking ponies and build a much-envied yard, but he was increasingly irked by the curbs on his freedom. Sukey raised eyebrows when he ordered rather too good a bottle of claret in restaurants. She winced at the size of his tailor’s bill and questioned him going to Harley Street to replace two teeth knocked out in the Gold Cup when there was a perfectly good National Health dentist down the
