Polo

Luke touched her cheek with his hand.

‘You’re beautiful. No one holds a candle to you.’

He ought to go home and tune up the horses for tomorrow. He also had a mass of paperwork to go through, having been away so long, but to cheer Perdita up he took her to Palm Beach Polo Club, which was only a mile from his barn.

Entering the gates, they passed incredibly manicured land, flawless lawns, tennis courts and swimming- pools. On the left were khaki lakes and polo pitches, flanked by mushroom-coloured houses with wonderful gardens overflowing with hibiscus, oleander and bougainvillaea. Fountains and sprinklers sparkled in the brilliant sunlight. Only the palm trees, lurching lanky and gawky with their scruffy mopheads, seemed out of place.

‘Six years ago there was nothing here,’ said Luke. ‘Cattle grazed and most of it was swamp. That house belongs to an oil heiress. She’s twenty-three. That house cost fifteen million. The husband bought it for his wife because she likes to watch polo. They spend two weeks a year here, and that’s Polo Island, and there’s the house Auriel’s rented.’

‘They look like upmarket mud huts,’ said Perdita sourly. ‘Fancy paying fifteen million for one of those.’

‘There’s the Players Club. I’ll take you there tomorrow after the match, and there’s Field One. Doesn’t that give you a frisson?’

Driving on, Luke pointed out the most amazing barns, each one painted in a different colour, pale pink, sky- blue, black and white, all open-plan and with the sort of gardens you could open to the public.

‘You’d expect the ponies to spend all day painting their toenails and reading Vanity Fair,’ said Luke. ‘Instead they come out on to the pitches and get bashed and yanked to pieces in the roughest polo in the world. It all looks so perfect, but up in those palm trees live rattlesnakes, and in those smooth brown pools lurk alligators. They symbolize the play. A handful of the richest men in the world converge on Palm Beach every January, merely for the buzz of taking each other out. My father rolls up like Genghis Khan with seventy horses. He’s run out of challenges in the boardroom. Screwing a billion out of the government, raking up another billion in the portfolio, stripping assets, stripping girls, is nothing to being within an inch of death while you kick the shit out of Victor Kaputnik, or Lando Medici, or even Hal Peters, on the field. Over in the UK you don’t get the thrust of the patron. They don’t play to win here, but to annihilate.’

‘Wow,’ said Perdita, startled out of her sulks. ‘You do sound disapproving – talk about the Sermon on the Mounted.’

Luke grinned. ‘Sorry, I was getting heavy. It’s taken the fun out of polo, but I guess I’ll exploit it until I make enough dough not to have to sell on ponies I like. Come and see the best-run barn in Palm Beach.’

As he swung the truck to the right Leroy jumped across Perdita’s legs, scrabbling at her leather trousers – not that it mattered, beastly hot things – and started barking provocatively out of the window at a couple of Rottweilers who nearly broke their chains barking back.

Bart’s barn, El Paradiso, was built in the middle of an orange grove. A colonnade of white pillars, smothered in white roses and jasmine led up to where loose boxes, painted duck-egg blue, the Alderton Flyers’ colours, contained the sleekest, fittest thoroughbred ponies Perdita had ever seen. An amazing tack room housed a computer giving print-outs of every chukka every pony had ever played. On the end was built an apartment with a bar, a kitchen, a shower room, a massive jacuzzi to soothe aching polo bones, and a living room with a vast portrait of Bart on a pony, as well as a Stubbs, a Herring, and two Munnings on the walls. How extraordinary, thought Perdita, to have two such lavish establishments within half an hour of each other and no wonder they needed all those security guards and Rottweilers on the gates.

Outside, white geraniums and impatiens grew in blue tubs and hanging baskets, and a fountain fell as regularly as a transparent comb into a pond edged with white irises. Everywhere the orange blossom wafted suffocatingly sweet.

Luke whistled at Leroy who, at a safe distance, was still winding up the Rottweilers.

‘Come and meet Red,’ he said.

Overwhelmed by such blatant perfection, Perdita snapped back sulkily that she absolutely loathed men with red hair.

‘Oh well, perhaps I don’t,’ she admitted in a small voice a second later. For there, cantering round a jade- green paddock with a cordless telephone in one hand and a polo stick in the other, his reddy-brown boots the same colour as his sleek sorrel pony and his gleaming chestnut hair, was Red Alderton. But there was no red in his deep, smooth mahogany suntan, which was enhanced by onyx-brown eyes with thick very dark lashes, a short straight nose and a wonderfully passionate, smiling mouth.

For three and a half years Perdita hadn’t been remotely sexually attracted to anyone but Ricky, but Red jolted her. Not only was he the best-looking man she had ever seen, but from the way he had knotted the reins on his pony’s neck, and was guiding her round the paddock with his thighs and his lean, supple, whipcord body, he was also the most effortlessly gifted polo player.

‘Hi, you guys,’ he said, waving his stick at them, and still giving himself time to execute another perfect shot, ‘be with you in a second. Lucy, baby, I gotta go. He’ll be home tomorrow, won’t he, so I’d better not call. Who did you say Chuck had run off with?’

A typical Gemini, Red lived on the telephone, adored gossip and had an increasingly low threshold of boredom. People were invariably pleased to see him because he made them laugh and had so much charm. Despite his languid insouciance, however, he had Bart’s killer instinct and, although he adored Luke, had to beat him at everything. Normally he never bothered to stick and ball. He was only doing so today because Luke, by sheer grind, had gone above him in the November handicap ratings.

He was now winding up his conversation.

‘Look, meet me at Cobblestones at six tomorrow. Love you too, baby.’

‘Cobblestones is the bar where all the players and grooms hang out,’ explained Luke.

And that’s not Auriel Kingham he’s talking to, thought Perdita.

As Red switched off the telephone, Luke introduced Perdita. ‘She’s from England. She’s going to play with Ricky and Dancer Maitland next year.’

‘I met Dancer at a Band-Aid concert in New York last week,’ said Red. ‘Christ, I wish I didn’t know it was Christmas. Nice guy, though, kinda fun to play with. I figured my stepmother had put me off English women for good, but,’ he smiled at Perdita, who blushed to the roots of her hair, ‘I guess you could convert me. How are you enjoying this hot, swampy, mosquito-infested paradise?’

Realizing Perdita was too jolted to speak, Luke said: ‘We only arrived yesterday.’

‘Bring any good ponies?’

‘One genius,’ said Luke, ‘and I’m not selling her on. Where did you get that one?’

‘Miguel bought her,’ said Red. ‘Got the speed, but still a bit green. Thank Christ you’ve come back to help us clinch the match tomorrow. Before the semi-finals Auriel and I had our own private party and I went on to the pitch absolutely looped. All I could see was two balls, two mallets, eight goal posts, four pony’s ears in front of me, sixteen players, four screaming umpires and after the match my father twice over chasing me round two polo fields, out to bury me. Jesus!’

Throughout this languid patter, dispatched with the broadest of grins, Red’s eyes roved over Perdita in a way that made her feel edgy and hopelessly excited at the same time.

The telephone rang, making the sorrel mare jump.

‘Hi, Lorna, sweetheart, how ya been? Sorry I didn’t call, I’ve been up to here.’ Then, suddenly flaring up, ‘Oh, for Chrissake, get off my case.’ Red switched off the telephone so she couldn’t ring back.

Then, as Leroy bounced up and nipped the sorrel on her pink nose, making her jump more than ever, he added, ‘And keep that brute away from me. He was so pissed off waiting for you to come home, he bit me last week. He’ll bite a patron one of these days.’

‘How’s Auriel?’ said Luke, calling an unrepentant Leroy to heel.

‘Pretty good,’ said Red blandly. ‘I’m teaching her to play polo. She’s teaching me other things. She’s in LA making a movie about the corrupting effect of money. As she’s making five million bucks out of it, I guess she’s being corrupted all the way to the bank.’

‘D’you want to play in a charity match next Sunday?’ asked Luke.

Red looked wary. ‘Not a lot.’

‘It’s for Ethiopia. Bob Geldof’s flying down.’