Polo

Perdita found her hand being engulfed in an incredibly strong grip, and Luke looked down at her, grinning lazily and appreciatively.

‘What are you doing here?’ asked Ricky.

‘Being used as cheap labour to break Alejandro’s ponies,’ said Luke, taking Perdita’s suitcases from her, ‘in return for picking up a few tips from the master.’ (He pronounced it masster.)

‘Thank Christ for that,’ said Ricky. ‘You can look after Perdita.’

‘Shouldn’t be too much of a hardship,’ said Luke, then eyeing Perdita’s slender arms, ‘but she better start pumping iron if she’s going to play high goal.’

As he sorted out the porter with amazingly fluent Spanish, Perdita noticed he was wearing a bomber jacket with US Open printed on the back.

‘Who’s he?’ she whispered to Ricky.

‘Bart’s son by a previous marriage,’ said Ricky. ‘Potentially the best back in the world.’

Within seconds they’d piled into a battered Mercedes and were fighting their way out on to the airport road. Luke pointed to a red spotted scarf gathering dust up on the dashboard.

‘You may want to put that over your eyes, the driving’s kinda crazy here,’ he said as ten cars hurtled forward with absolutely no lane discipline, and all went straight through a red light with furious honking. Next moment a huge bus with Jumbo El Rapido on the side tore past overtaking and cutting in front.

‘Christ,’ muttered Perdita.

‘Good training for the polo here,’ said Luke. ‘The Carlisle twins and my brother Red were down here last week with Victor Kaputnik. They came out of a restaurant and had a race with Juan O’Brien and two of his cousins. Victor nearly had a triple by-pass. He jumped out of Red’s car yelling, “Taxi, taxi”. He was so frightened he wouldn’t let the driver go across a green light in case he hit Red and the twins coming the other way.’ Luke shook with laughter.

‘Who’s staying with Alejandro?’ asked Ricky.

‘Well, one guy couldn’t stand the pace and Ray Walter broke his wrist and went home, and there’s an Argie, Angel Solis de Gonzales, ex-Mirage pilot, trying to make it as a pro. Not wildly pro-Brit understandably.’

‘Any good?’ asked Ricky.

‘Awesome. He’s only been playing seriously for a couple of years,’ said Luke, hardly flinching as a car cut right in front of him, missing them by millimetres. Leaning out of the window, he let loose a stream of abuse.

‘How come you speak such good Spanish?’ asked Perdita.

‘Last time I was here it rained for forty days. The only answer was to learn Spanish. They say my accent is ’orrible, but at least I can understand what they’re saying on the pitch and suss out their Machiavellian little games.’

They were into flat, open country now. Perdita looked at the huge puddles reflecting a vast expanse of sky.

‘I’m really, really here.’

Luke smiled. ‘You will fall madly in love with Argentina,’ he said in his deep husky voice, which had a slight break in it, ‘with the wild life, the birds, the open spaces. But you will find it unconquerable, the extremes, the ferocity, the apparent heartlessness, the hailstorms that can wipe out a crop in half an hour. People own masses of land, not developing it or working it. It’s just there.’

‘How very un-American,’ said Perdita.

Looking sideways at Luke, she decided that he wasn’t at all good-looking but definitely attractive. A tawny giant with shoulders and arms like a blacksmith’s, he had lean hips, more freckles than a gull’s egg, a snub nose, sleepy honey-coloured eyes, Bart’s pugnacious jaw and red-gold hair sticking up like a Dandy brush. He was also attractive because he was so reassuring.

On top of the dashboard was a poem called Martin Fierro and a Spanish dictionary lying with its spine up, to which he must have been referring as he waited.

‘It’s the great Gaucho poem,’ he told her. ‘Martin Fierro’s aim in life was to sleep on a bed of clover, look up at the stars, and live as free as a bird in the sky. He put his horse and his dog a long way before his wife.’

‘You don’t look as though you read poetry,’ said Perdita in amazement, ‘and Martin’s a very naff name for a Gaucho.’

Ricky, sharing the back with two polo helmets, a new saddle and numerous carrier bags of shopping, was beginning to relax.

‘How’s Alejandro?’

‘Probably had ten more kids since you were last here. Argentines adore their kids,’ Luke told Perdita. ‘Their big interest is the family. They won’t pay taxes, and they never stop at red lights.’ He put out a huge hand to shield Perdita as a car shot out.

‘Who are you playing for next year?’ asked Ricky.

‘Hal Peters – the automobile king – nice guy,’ said Luke. ‘Thought about nothing but cars for the first twenty- five years of his life, now he thinks about nothing but polo. He’s given me a free hand to buy horses. But every time I show any interest Alejandro quadruples the price. I guess I’m lucky to be working. Young American players are really feeling the cold at the moment. They can’t get sponsorship, because all the patrons think it’s chic to have an Argie on their side.’

‘Your father has three,’ said Ricky bleakly. ‘What’s Red’s handicap now?’

‘Six, should be higher. He hates to stick and ball. His mother allowed him to sit out college for a year and he never went back. He won MVP awards – Most Valuable Player,’ he explained to Perdita, ‘all summer, then blows it by testing positive for drugs the day before the US Open. Gets suspended and fined $5,000.’

‘Is he coming down here?’

‘Well, he’s always expected, like the Messiah,’ Luke grinned at Perdita. ‘My kid brother’s kind of wild. Like Richard Cory he glitters and flutters pulses as he walks. Look, heron on the edge of that alfalfa field.’

With the amazing eyesight that had helped him become a great player, Luke pointed out egrets, storks and even a snake that whisked into its hole before Perdita could see it.

Passing through a town, Perdita noticed someone had painted a blue-and-white flag and a ‘Malvinas belong to Argentina’ slogan on the plinth of a statue of a general.

‘For Christ’s sake, keep your trap shut about the Falklands when we get there,’ said Ricky.

‘Alejandro’s not anti-Brit,’ said Luke. ‘He likes anyone he can sell horses to. He still talks mistily about Cowdray, and Guards and the parties, and the hospitality, and the women you didn’t have to date twenty-two times before laying them.’

They were deep in the country now, driving through absolutely flat land like a table top. Slowly Perdita was trying to absorb the immensity of the pampas. The vast unclouded duck-egg-blue semi-circle of sky, like a protractor on the horizon, was only broken by the occasional windmill or fringe of acid-yellow poplars or milk-green gum trees. The grass seemed to flow on for ever like a millpond sea. Occasionally, like a liner, they passed an estancia with stables and a drive flanked by poplars and sailed on. At last Luke swung on to a dirt road potted with huge holes. His left elbow, sticking out of the window, was soon spattered with mud as they shattered vast puddles reflecting the blue of the sky.

‘Sorry,’ he said as Perdita nearly hit the ceiling. ‘You should have taken a sleeping pill.’

On the right was a sunlit village with square white houses like a Western shanty town.

‘This place is called General Piran after some top brass who defended his country against the marauding British. It’s the nearest civilization to Alejandro’s place,’ explained Luke. ‘That’s the phone exchange which never works. That’s the fire station. They’ve got two fire stations, but all the houses are so far away they never get there in time. The teachers are all on strike, hardly surprising when they’re only paid a hundred dollars a month, so all Alejandro’s kids are at home getting under their mother’s feet.’

He is nice, thought Perdita. How did anyone as vile as Bart produce a son like that?

‘Alejandro’s land begins here at the water.’ He pronounced it ‘wott-urr’. ‘He owns everything in front of us as far as the eye can see.’

They had swung into an avenue lined with gums, their stark, white trunks rising like pillars. At the end on the left was a stick-and-ball field, a polo field covered with gulls, paddocks full of polished horses, then a group of red modern buildings. ‘Barns to the right, grooms’ quarters to the left, Alejandro’s straight ahead,’ said Luke as he drove up to a large ugly mulberry-red house with flowerbeds full of clashing red tulips, primulas and wallflowers,