Lysander Hawkley appeared to have everything. At twenty-two, he was tall, broad-shouldered, heart- stoppingly handsome, wildly affectionate, with a wall-to-wall smile that withered women. In January 1990 at the finals of a Palm Beach polo tournament, this hero of our time was lying slumped on a Prussian-blue rug in the pony lines sleeping off the excesses of the night before.
The higher the standard of polo the better looking tend to be both grooms and ponies. On this punishingly hot, muggy day, all around Lysander beautiful girls in Prussian-blue shirts and baseball caps were engaged in the frantic activity of getting twenty-four ponies ready for the match. But, trying not to wake him, they swore under their breaths as they bandaged and tacked-up charges driven demented by an invasion of mosquitoes. And, if they could, these beautiful girls would have hushed the thunder that grumbled irritably along the flat, palm-tree fringed horizon.
But Lysander didn’t stir — not even when an Argentine groom working for the opposition jumped a pony clean over him on the way to the warm-up area, nor when two of his team mates, the Carlisle twins, Sebastian and Dominic, roared up in a dark green Aston Martin yelling in rage and relief that they’d finally tracked him down.
People loved doing things for Lysander. The grooms had kept their voices down. In the same way Seb and Dommie, both England polo internationals, had persuaded Elmer Winterton, the security billionaire who employed them for the Palm Beach season, to fly Lysander out as a substitute when the fourth member of the team had broken his shoulder in the semi-finals.
‘The little fucker,’ howled Seb, leaping out of the car, ‘after all the trouble we took getting him the job.’
‘He rewards us by getting rat-assed,’ said Dommie.
Together they gazed indignantly down at Lysander, sprawled lean-hipped and loose-limbed as a lurcher puppy. Lazily he stretched out and raked a mosquito bite in his sleep.
‘No-one looking at that angelic inertia,’ went on Dommie grimly, ‘could imagine his ability for wanton destruction when he’s awake.’
‘Well, if he channels some of that ability against the opposition we’ll be OK,’ said Seb, and, picking up a Prussian-blue bucket, he dashed the contents into Lysander’s face. ‘Come on, Mr Hawkley. This is your wake-up call.’
‘What the fuck?’ Leaping as though he’d been electrocuted, frantically wiping dirty water out of his eyes, Lysander slowly and painfully focused on two, round, ruffian faces and four dissipated blue eyes glaring down at him from under thick blond fringes.
‘Oh, it’s you two,’ he groaned. ‘For a terrible moment I thought I was seeing double. What the hell are you trying to do to me?’
‘Nothing to what you’re doing to yourself,’ said Seb briskly. ‘Game starts in half an hour. Get your ass into gear.’
‘Did you pull that blonde?’ asked Dommie, unbuttoning his grey-striped shirt and selecting a Prussian-blue polo shirt from the back of the Aston Martin.
‘I’m not sure,’ Lysander’s wonderfully smooth, wide forehead wrinkled for a second. ‘I went back to her place, certainly, but I’ve got a terrible feeling I fell asleep on the job. I’d better ring and apologize.’
‘Later.’ Seb chucked him a polo shirt.
‘I bloody can’t,’ complained Lysander, taking a sodden piece of paper from his shirt pocket. ‘She gave me her number but the ink’s run. I’d like a tan like that,’ he added, admiring Dommie’s solidly muscled conker-brown back.
‘Well, you won’t get one unless you play bloody well this afternoon,’ said Seb, stepping out of his jeans. ‘Elmer’s threatening to send you home on the next plane. The fax in the barn is for business use only. Elmer is desperate for details of some massive Jap deal, and all morning the machine has been spewing out the racing pages of every English newspaper.’
‘Oh, great! They’ve arrived.’ Leaping to his feet, Lysander tore off his shirt without bothering to undo any buttons. ‘If I get changed quickly, I can have a bet. If Elmer won’t let me use the telephone in the barn, can I borrow yours?’
‘No, you cannot!’ Grabbing Lysander’s arm, Seb yanked him back. ‘Bloody get dressed and warmed up. We didn’t bring you all the way from Fulham to make fools of us.’
‘Foolham,’ said Lysander. For a moment, his head went back and his big mouth stretched in a roar of laughter showing off wonderfully even teeth. Then he looked perplexed.
‘Now, where did I leave my polo gear?’
The opposition team, who were called ‘Mr Beefy’, consisted of a fast-food tycoon, Butch Murdoch, a good consistent player, and his three Argentine professionals, one of whom, Juan O’Brien, was the greatest player in the world. Wearing red shirts, they were already hitting balls across a field which rippled beneath its heat haze like a vast green lake. A red mobile canteen was handing out free hamburgers to Mr Beefy supporters. Inhaling a waft of frying onions, as he and the twins rode onto the field, Lysander retched and clamped his mouth shut. Unable to find his kit, he was wearing boots that wouldn’t zip up, borrowed knee-pads and a too-large hat which kept falling over his perfect nose and which did nothing to deflect a white-hot sun from his murderous headache.
An utterly instinctive horseman, Lysander’s polo career had been held back in the past by his ability to be distracted during matches.
‘Oh wow, oh wow,’ he was now muttering as he took in the glamorous, gold-limbed female supporters, crowding the stands and lolling on the burning bonnets of the Cadillacs and Lincolns lining the field.
‘God, I’ve got a hangover. This horse is
‘Kerr-ist!’ Lysander nearly lost his hat as he swung round. ‘Look at the legs on that brunette in the pink skirt.’
‘More to the point,’ Seb lowered his voice, ‘see that man in the panama in the second row of the stands. He’s an England selector flown specially over to watch you.’
‘Really!’ Lysander’s blue-green eyes widened in wonder.
‘So get your finger out.’
‘You bet!’ Squeezing the chestnut, Lysander galloped off in a cloud of dust, tapping a practice ball effortlessly ahead of him.
‘That’s not true,’ said Dommie who had slightly more principles than Seb.
‘Of course it’s not,’ said Seb. ‘But it might take his mind off fieldside crumpet!’
The twins were basically amused by Lysander’s antics. In their youth, when they had made more money ripping off rich patrons than by their polo skills, their own wildness had been legendary. But the chill hand of the recession was making patrons more parsimonious and hot horse deals less easy and, as Elmer Winterton paid them a long salary and picked up their expenses, it was very much in their interest that Lysander distinguished himself that afternoon.
And here at last, trailing security guards, and perennially late because he liked to give the impression of being delayed by matters of state, came Elmer Winterton. He was followed by a private ambulance even larger than Mr Beefy’s and manned by more paramedics.
Elmer’s company, Safus, not only produced the Safus House which was allegedly so well secured that no intruder could break in, but also specialized in screening high-risk computers for the American government and industry. Elmer could frequently be heard boasting that only he knew the passwords to the nation’s most crucial secrets.
Having flown several senators and their wives down from Washington by private jet to watch him play, he was desperate that his team should win the cup under the Prussian-blue Safus colours.
Dark, swarthy, squat, with eyebrows that without ferocious plucking would have met in the middle, Elmer had mean, small eyes and a long nose that jerked up at the end like a white rhinoceros. He also displayed the rhino’s erratic belligerence and was so unable to control his overbred ponies that he was as likely to crash into his own side as the opposition.
It would be hard to have been uglier or a worse rider than Elmer, as he lumbered on to the field intolerably pounding the kidneys of his delicate dapple-grey pony, but such were his power and riches that the gold-limbed girl groupies licked their lips and rolled their shorts up an inch or two higher as he passed.
The heat was stifling. To the west, sinister black clouds advanced like a procession of Benedictine monks.
