The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous

fantastic,’ she turned adoringly back to Lysander, all thoughts of tractor-drivers forgotten. ‘Can I do him when I come back at weekends?’

Looking from Tab to Lysander, Rupert gave Taggie the faintest smile.

‘All right, you’re on,’ he told Lysander, after he had dealt with Ashley. ‘Three months’ trial, but if you step out of line just once, you’re fired. You can ride out for me, and if any of the other jockeys don’t want a ride in a race you can have it. You’ll need ten wins or places to qualify for the Rutminster.’

Tabitha got up and hugged her father. ‘I love you, Daddy.’

‘Oh gosh, thank you so much. That’s seriously, seriously kind,’ Lysander was able to stammer out at last.

‘You’ll have to lose a stone — which you can ill afford. So you’ll have to build yourself up at the same time. And remember, no booze.’

Lysander turned green. ‘Surely the odd glass of wine wouldn’t matter?’

‘It would be odd if you stopped at one,’ said Rupert. ‘Not a drop till after the Rutminster.’

57

Lysander was so unhappy that the weight dropped off him. He had never been up at six in the morning before unless he’d been partying all night. Nor had he ever been worked so hard. Rupert immediately moved him into Penscombe, putting him up in a little room under the eaves with low beams — ‘one can’t concuss him more than he is already’ — a patchwork quilt and paintings of Rupert’s old ponies on the whitewashed wall.

‘I’m not having you mooning around in Magpie Cottage with your bins trained on Valhalla,’ he told Lysander. ‘I want you here where I can keep an eye on you.’

Lysander would never have survived without Rupert’s girl grooms. Once they realized they weren’t going to get him into bed — and he rejected their offers so sweetly — they stopped squabbling over him and covered up for him instead.

Every morning they would shake him awake, practically dressing him, forcing extra jerseys over his diminishing frame, frogmarching him to whatever difficult horse — Lysander could never remember — that Rupert had earmarked for him the night before.

But however difficult the horse, he seemed to steal into its head and heart before arriving somewhat to his amazement on its back. Horses really wanted to go well for him and seemed delighted by their own capabilities.

His problem was concentration. If he started thinking of Kitty when he was three lengths clear in a gallop, he’d be trailing the field in a matter of seconds. He was also a chatterbox, talking constantly on the gallops and even when jumping fences. If a jockey or a horse had a fall he had to pull up instantly to see if they were all right, and walking Arthur round the Gloucestershire lanes took hours because he stopped to chat to everyone — anything to avoid going back to clean mountains of tack or spend hours dunking hay in icy water to get rid of the dust.

Having lost an efficient if truculent tractor-driver in Tabitha’s boyfriend Ashley, Rupert made an early mistake of handing over the job to Lysander. Flying home the following evening Rupert was appalled to see lines that should have flowed straight over the rich brown earth tangled together like a kitten’s ball of string. A very harrowing experience, admitted Rupert, when he’d regained his sense of humour and put Lysander back to cleaning tack.

Taggie was the person who really saved Lysander’s life. If he hadn’t been so hopelessly in love with Kitty he would have certainly been smitten. Worried about his pallor and dramatic weight loss, while the other riders were joyously guzzling fried eggs, sausages and bacon sandwiches after the gallops, Taggie tried to tempt Lysander with grilled soles, or steaks dripping with herbs and butter. She put slimming biscuits in a flowered tin in his bedroom and made him hot chocolate with skimmed milk at night to help him sleep, which he surreptitiously emptied down the sink because he couldn’t stand the stuff.

And Taggie listened when he banged on about Kitty — the grooms restricted him to five minutes an hour. Still numb at the loss of her own baby, when she was not cooking for Rupert’s staff, she was always bottle-rearing calves and lambs, or feeding hens and ducks, or Rupert’s dogs, or topping up the birdtable, or smuggling forbidden toast and marmalade to Arthur when he hung forlornly out of his chewed-down half-door.

Owners bored Rupert, but Taggie was always ready with a sympathetic ear, a cup of tea and home-made chocolate cake.

This led to problems. Checking on Arthur one afternoon, Lysander was amazed to discover Taggie cringing at the back of the box, stroking an outraged Tiny.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Hush!’ Taggie went scarlet. ‘Mr Pandopoulos is here, and he keeps groping me. If Rupert found out he’d hit him across the yard and tell him to take his horses away, and we really can’t afford it at the moment.’

Lysander’s face fell. ‘And Rupert’s keeping me and Arthur and Tiny for nothing. Oh, when’s he going to let me race ride, so I can start earning my keep?’

‘You’re doing that already. Rupert’s really pleased with the way the horses have improved. Being tough is the only way he feels he can get results.’

Lysander had never met a couple so aware of each other, as they drifted together, watching, touching, like each other’s shadows. Their love filled Lysander with envy. But Rupert was very tricky. Lysander had to be careful not to be too friendly to Taggie. The only thing male and beautiful Rupert really wanted in his yard was horses.

Lysander hardly noticed the war, as bulletins came and went on the tack-room radio, but, reeling from one of Rupert’s tongue-lashings, he often felt like Baghdad after a night’s bombardment.

In the second week in February he was just schooling a vastly improved but still cussed Meutrier over a row of fences. The setting sun, like an exploding ball of flame rising into a thick black nuclear cloud, seemed to symbolize everyone’s worries over the approaching land war.

Planes had roared overhead all day. Rupert, who was in a particularly foul mood because King Hussein, a fellow old Harrovian, appeared to be supporting the Iraqis, called Lysander over.

‘Why the fuck don’t you use your whip?’

‘My Uncle Alastair said it was a lazy way of riding,’ said Lysander, quaking but defiant. ‘Meutrier was really trying, so it’s stupid to hit him. And when horses are exhausted, it only slows them down. Honestly, Rupert, it makes me sick to see jockeys flogging horses. There’s no need to hit them so hard.’

This was an oblique reference to Jimmy Jardine, Rupert’s second jockey, who’d just begun a fortnight’s suspension for excessive use of the whip — probably at Rupert’s instructions.

‘So, you think Jimmy’s had nearly ninety winners this season just by feeding his horses sugar lumps. If you ride for me, you use your whip.’

For a second they glared at each other. Lysander lowered his eyes first. He couldn’t face that cold dismissive contempt. Swinging Meutrier round, he rode wearily back to the yard. Overtaking them in the Land-Rover, Rupert was on the tack-room telephone when Lysander got back.

‘OK, Marcia, Jimmy’s been suspended, but I’m not sure he and Hopeless were twin souls. Anyway, I’m putting a new boy, Lysander Hawkley, up on him. You’ll like him, Marcia, he’s better-looking than Jimmy. Yes, the 2.30 tomorrow, Maiden Hurdle, Worcester.’

Putting back the telephone, Rupert saw Lysander mouthing helplessly in the doorway, hanging for support from Meutrier’s sweating chestnut neck.

‘You heard me,’ said Rupert. ‘And you’d better take a whip or you won’t get Hopeless off the starting line.’

Unplaced in her last eight races, Hopeless was an appropriately named chestnut mare with spindly legs, wild eyes and a punk mane, too sparse even to plait. Her owner, Marcia Melling, a glamorous but ageing divorcee, only kept the horse in training because she had a massive crush on Rupert, who in turn only trained the horse, and then with minimum effort, because he charged Marcia three times as much as any other owner.

It was not with any hopes of victory that Lysander set out with Samantha and Maura, two of the girl grooms,