Polo

45

The weeks until Luke left for England were the longest of his life. He made a day chart and through sleepless nights read a lot of poetry, and for the first time stick and balled in jeans in the hope of getting a decent tan, but merely ended up with more freckles. He had, however, played more magnificent polo, managing with Angel’s and Fantasma’s help to power Hal Peters’ Cheetahs to the Finals of the Rolex and the World Cup. Here he was only beaten by the O’Briens and his father, who was predictably foaming at the goal-mouth that Luke was off to play for Ricky. Hal Peters, who had very reluctantly released Luke for the summer, said he would be praying daily that Luke would not succumb to Dancer’s wicked ways.

Sitting on Concorde, being plied with champagne and caviar which he was too excited to eat, Luke wasn’t sure he hadn’t already succumbed. His only sadness was that Leroy wasn’t sitting beside him in a collar and tie. The hulking black dog had seemed to shrink to pug-size as he crept into Luke’s suitcase, burrowing frantically under the new sweaters bought for an English summer, gazing up at Luke with despairing eyes. Luckier were Fantasma and the rest of Luke’s ponies, who, having completed quarantine, would be over with the grooms in a fortnight. Normally Luke would have insisted on travelling with them, but fortunately Fantasma had at last suspended hostilities with Lizzie, Luke’s comely head groom, and grudgingly allowed her to look after her when Luke wasn’t around. His longing to see Perdita again and Dancer’s increasingly frantic pleas to come and sort out Apocalypse had also sent him on ahead.

Luke was so nervous and excited at the thought of Perdita coming to meet him that he had drenched one shirt with sweat. He took another from his overnight bag. Yellow and white striped, it came from Worth Avenue and had been given him with a honey-coloured silk tie ‘to match his eyes’ by Lizzie and the other grooms for his birthday, the previous day.

It had never occurred to Luke to match something to his eyes. He considered his mug too ugly to be enhanced by anything he wore. At least the Concorde Johns were big. Usually he could hardly get his shoulders through those buckling doors. It was a beautiful shirt, but his hands were shaking so much he couldn’t do up the cufflinks, so he rolled up the sleeves and left off the honey-coloured tie.

It seemed strange to leave New York in blazing lunchtime sunshine and arrive three hours later in the middle of the English night – like plunging into Hades. He anticipated a long wait at customs. Seeing polo sticks, officials invariably imagined drugs or illegal currency and tended to disembowel everything. But under Dancer’s aegis he was whizzed straight out into the airport, his knees hardly able to carry him, his crashing heart bruising his ribs, walking past the eager faces, searching everywhere for Perdita. But she wasn’t there. It was as though Miguel O’Brien had clouted a penalty two slap into his belly. Twenty minutes later the crowd had dispersed. Fighting despair, exhaustion and post-champagne depression, Luke mindlessly gazed at The New York Times crossword. If he nipped off to call Ricky’s, he’d be bound to miss her. Give it five more minutes.

Then he caught his breath, for, pummelling her way through the crowd forming to meet the next plane, scowling with fury like a winning yachtsman pegged by a sudden squall, came Perdita. There was a smudge on her cheek, her hair was escaping from its plait, she still wore breeches, boots and a ripped polo shirt, but, as choirs instinctively turn eastwards in the Creed, everyone swivelled round to gaze at her.

‘Bloody, bloody traffic,’ she screamed. ‘I’ve been in a traffic jam on the M4 for over an hour, and when I parked the car outside some dickhead in a peaked cap rushes up and tells me I can’t, so I left it. I expect it’s been towed away by now with Wayne’s bridle just back from the menders in it. Christ, I hate this country.’

‘Hush, sweetheart. I’ve come 3,000 miles and I’d like to say hello.’ Luke held out his arms and she went into them. For a second she was rigid with rage, then she relaxed against him. Her hair smelt of sweat, the stables and cigarette smoke, but her clear, white forehead glowed like the moon. Then she looked up and grinned.

‘I am really pleased to see you. I need you so badly.’

‘You do?’ asked Luke, madly encouraged.

‘To sort out my game,’ said Perdita. ‘I’m playing like shit, and that asshole Ricky won’t let me near the ball.’

Not knowing whether to laugh or cry, Luke laughed.

‘You haven’t changed.’

‘I didn’t have time. I came straight from the yard. D’you know, the Kaputnik Tigers thrashed us 8-0 yesterday, and Victor didn’t do a bloody thing all the match. Oh yes he did, he fell off.’

Luke went to bed deeply depressed. Ricky had welcomed him guardedly and without any friendliness, making it clear he was the boss of Apocalypse and would only seek Luke’s advice if he needed it.

After Florida in the nineties, Robinsgrove seemed bitterly cold. As a polo player, Luke was used to lousy accommodation, but there was something particularly chilling about Ricky’s spare room, with the heavy, dark furniture, bare floors, apple-green walls and a royal-blue Best Playing Pony blanket instead of a counterpane. There were no flowers, and a pile of yellowing 1981 Tatlers and Harpers and Queens indicated that no one had used the room since Chessie left.

Woken next morning by the cuckoo, however, he looked down Eldercombe Valley and freaked. Below him lawns, dotted with daisies, flowed into an orchard foaming with coral-pink apple blossom, then into paddocks full of buttercups and sleek, grazing ponies, then falling into the jade-green ride which fell three-quarters of a mile down between wooded cliff walls to the little cottage where Perdita lived. The sweet scent of the montana clambering round his window and the primulas and dark red wallflowers below were fighting a losing battle with the rampant reek of the wild garlic which was sweeping the woods in an emerald-green tidal wave.

And whoever wakes in England,

Sees some morning unaware, thought Luke.

Wandering downstairs in search of breakfast, he paused to examine the photographs in the hall. Christ, that was a Westchester team beside the grandfather clock. He found Ricky drinking black coffee, feeding pieces of sausage to Little Chef and making lists matching ponies to players for the medium-goal match at the Rutshire Polo Club that afternoon.

‘This house is incredible,’ said Luke. ‘And the view from my room is to die for, and who are all those guys in the photographs in the hall?’

‘Oh, various relations,’ said Ricky, uninterested.

Luke admired the drawings of ponies crowding the kitchen walls. ‘Those are neat. Who did them?’

‘Perdita’s mother. Not bad, is she? She’s just painted Rupert Campbell-Black’s wife, Taggie. Even Rupert liked it after the hundredth sitting.’

‘Paint must never hope to reproduce that faint half-flush that dies along her throat,’ murmured Luke. ‘What’s she like – Perdita’s mother?’

Ricky looked up from his lists and frowned. ‘Sweet, like a hot bath after hunting. I wonder if Wayne’s fit enough to play two chukkas.’

To Ricky’s and Perdita’s irritated envy, Dancer had provided Luke with a brand-new, dark green Mercedes, stuffed full of classical tapes. As Don Giovanni serenaded nesting birds on the way to the match, Luke was so knocked out by the beauty of the Rutshire countryside that he kept forgetting to drive on the left side of the road. Like sleeping, yellow, Labrador puppies, the ancient Cotswold villages seemed to sprawl across the wooded valleys. The fierce sapphire of the bluebells had been faded by a hot April to pale periwinkle-blue, but the verges frothed with cow parsley, the fields were full of cowslips, silver cuckoo flower and leaping lambs, and many of the trees were putting out acid-green leaves against a threatening navy-blue sky.

To the right Perdita pointed out David Waterlane’s splendid Queen Anne house, peeping over its dark fan of yew hedge, and the sweep of land Rupert and Bas had snapped up on which to build polo yards.

Then, driving through large, lichened gates up a long drive of beech trees, passing little gazebos and towers on the edge of grassy rides or adding lustre to a view, they finally reached the clubhouse and the fields with their ring of splendid trees and the magnificent stands donated by Bart.

The presence of both the Prince of Wales and Dancer Maitland in the same match had attracted a much larger crowd than usual for a Thursday afternoon. Perdita, who had changed into her black shirt with the red horse on the front, and who was more nervous than she cared to admit of playing in front of Luke again, shot off to the pony lines. She was enraged to go slap into Daisy.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Cheering you on,’ said Daisy, not altogether truthfully. Drew was playing for opposing Rutminster Hall with David Waterlane, the Prince and an underhandicapped Chilean called José.

‘Is Luke playing?’ asked Daisy.

‘How many times do I have to tell you fifteen’s the limit for medium goal? Luke and Ricky add up to sixteen between them. We’re playing with Dancer and Mike Waterlane, who’ll be useless because his father’s playing for the other side.’

‘Is Luke here?’

‘Over there, listening to some stupid Mozart tape,’ and she raced off to find Ricky yelling at Louisa, who’d replaced Frances as head groom and who’d put in the wrong bridle for Tero.

Fischer-Dieskau finished the aria. Coming down to earth, wishing he was as successful with women as Don Giovanni, Luke discovered an adorable brunette tapping on his window. Unable to find the button to lower it, he opened the door and the next moment was being licked all over by a large, scruffy English setter.

‘I’m desperately sorry,’ gasped the brunette, ineffectually trying to tug the dog off.

‘It’s OK. I like dogs, particularly when they come on the end of such pretty ladies.’

The brunette blushed. ‘I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m Daisy Macleod. I wanted to thank you for being so kind to Perdita.’

Luke’s jaw dropped. From Perdita’s chronically unflattering descriptions he’d expected some bushy-haired middle-aged weirdo with vinaigrette stains all over her caftan. Christ, she’s not much older than me, he thought.

‘It was so wonderful of you to give her Tero last Christmas,’ went on Daisy. ‘She’s so adorable. She used to be petrified of me, but she wintered in the field near our, or rather Ricky’s, cottage. I used to feed the ponies carrots and Tero’d always lurk at the back, never barging like the others. Then I discovered she adored toast and Marmite, and we used to have secret trysts behind hawthorn bushes so I could feed her when the others weren’t looking. She’s got such a sweet way of coming up and giving you a little nudge in the back. She got so tame, she came into the kitchen while we were having Christmas dinner. She adores Spotty; they lie down side by side. Perdita says ponies never normally do that in case their legs get entangled. I’m sorry,’ she flushed again, ‘I didn’t mean to bore you.’

‘Bore me?’ said Luke. ‘I’m just blown away how young you are. You haven’t got a portrait getting all wrinkled in the attic?’

‘Only ones painted by me,’ giggled Daisy.

‘I saw your drawings in Ricky’s kitchen. If I save up, will you do Fantasma when she comes over?’

‘I’ll do her for nothing after all you did for Perdita. She’d never have survived Argentina without you.’

Goodness, he’s tall, thought Daisy, as Luke got out of the car. And what a friendly, charming and amiable face – you felt you could tell him anything.

Daisy shivered in the sharp east wind which whistled across the field. She’d been baking when she’d left the shelter of Snow Cottage, particularly as she’d just blow-dried her hair for Drew. Not wanting to waste a chance to get brown she had unearthed an ancient, blue sun-dress with lacing across the front, which was now strained horizontally across her breasts. Duo-tanned legs on their fifth day were turning purple. Taking off his US Open jacket, Luke put it round her shoulders.

‘You’ll need it, coming from Florida,’ stammered Daisy. Luke grinned. ‘I’m tough.’

What a lovely man, thought Daisy.

‘Will you come to dinner tonight?’ she blurted out.

But before Luke had time to answer, Perdita had thundered up on Spotty.

‘What a cock-up! Neither Dancer nor Mike has arrived. The Prince has got to be in London to unveil some plaque by seven and Ricky’s having a blazing row with that prat Harris who says we’ve got to forfeit if the match doesn’t start on time.’

‘Your mother’s just asked me to dinner,’ said Luke. ‘I don’t know what Ricky’s plans are. Why don’t we eat out?’

‘Bloody stupid idea,’ snapped Perdita. ‘Ricky’ll be in no mood to go anywhere if we have to play two against four,’ and she stormed off.

Luke grinned at Daisy. ‘Let’s go find a seat.’

On the way they passed Ricky shouting in the pony lines. Kinta’s bandages were too tight. Spotty had the wrong martingale, Tero the wrong bit. Luke hoped Ricky was just psyching himself up.

It was so nice to have someone to sit with, thought Daisy. As they climbed to the top of the stands, Luke was greeted from all sides by players who knew him from Palm Beach.

‘Trust you to pick up the best piece of crumpet in Rutshire. I’ve been trying to become Mrs Macleod’s toyboy for years,’ yelled Dommie, patting the seats beside him, and offering a bite of his Mars Bar to Daisy. ‘Go on, you might burst even more out of that exciting dress. Welcome to Rutshire,’ he added, extending a hand to Luke.

‘Nice dog,’ said Luke as Decorum, the bull terrier, greeted his friend Ethel so delightedly that his tail dislodged the tweed cap of Brigadier Hughie in front.

‘Lovely,’ agreed Dommie. ‘Apocalypse certainly needs you, Luke. We lynched them two days ago. Ricky’s absolutely livid you’re here. Worried you’re going to queer his pitch, or,’ Dommie giggled at his own joke, ‘pitch for his queer. I see Dancer’s given you a new Merc. What’d you have to do for that? Bend over?’

‘That’s not funny,’ rumbled Brigadier Hughie disapprovingly.

‘Should think not,’ said Dommie. ‘More likely bloody painful.’

Totally unfazed, Luke grinned broadly.

‘Oh, here come the Prince and Drew,’ said Daisy excitedly, as Rutminster Hall rode on in their cherry-red shirts and security men with expressionless faces and walkie-talkies spread out round the field.

Luke admired the upright figure of the Prince of Wales.

‘He’s a good back,’ he told Daisy. ‘Always takes his man out. It’s incredibly difficult to get past him.’

‘Have you ever played against Drew?’ Daisy couldn’t resist asking.

Luke nodded. ‘He’s pretty good. Gets all his team working for him. Never has any passengers.’

‘Captain Benedict’s having an affair with someone,’ said Dommie, unwrapping another Mars Bar. ‘We tried to tail him the other night, but he really shifts that BMW. I’m surprised Sukey hasn’t put a combination lock on his flies.’

Feeling her leap beside him as though the dentist had hit a nerve, Luke decided that Daisy, in addition to being terrified of Perdita, was also in love with the handsome Captain who was now tapping the ball around the field with incredible assurance.

‘Here’s José the Mexican, Sharon’s latest, and here’s Seb,’ cried Dommie gleefully. ‘Green as the field! People are going to tread him in at half-time. Forgot he was umpiring today when he got pissed last night. Ben Napier’s the other umpire. He hates Ricky so much, he’ll give goal after open goal to Rutminster Hall.’

Aware that he’d got the attention of the entire stand, Dommie opened a can of Coke with a hiss, and asked loudly, ‘What we’re all riveted to know is what will happen when your fiendish father meets Ricky on the field this summer? Will we have the first polo murder, sticks flying, duel in the sun, Bart coming at Ricky at 100 m.p.h? And isn’t Chessie going to love it – two knights jousting for her favours? Well?’

Luke shrugged and grinned back at him. ‘You expect me to answer all that?’

‘I’ll give you time to think,’ said Dommie. ‘Oh, look here comes the Puffatrain.’

Since she had acquired a title, Sharon had been slowly modelling herself on Sukey. Today they were both wearing blue Puffas, blue Guernseys, striped shirts with turned-up collars, navy-blue skirts and stockings, and Gucci shoes.

‘Good afternoon, Dominic,’ said Sharon graciously. ‘Good afternoon, Luke. When did you arrive?’ Not waiting for an answer, she sat down and gathered up her binoculars, ‘Now, where’s the Prince? Oh, doesn’t cerise suit his Hay-ness. Hullo, hullo, your Hay-ness.’

The Prince of Wales turned, nodding rather vaguely towards the stand.

‘We’ve met him several taimes,’ Sharon told Luke, ‘and of course we ’ad cocktails with his mother when Sir Victor got his knaighthood.’

‘Drew’s known him for years,’ said Sukey slightly acidly.

‘Look at the love bites on José’s neck. I thought you’d gone vegetarian, Sharon,’ chided Dommie.

‘Don’t be cheeky, Dominic,’ said Sharon icily.

Ponies, neighing like mad, were already arriving for the second match. Fatty Harris, on his third whisky, was shouting in the warm-up area.

‘The throw-in will be in five minutes, Ricky, or you’ll forfeit; you’ve had half an hour to get ready. You just delay and delay.’

‘Oh, fuck off,’ snarled Ricky.

Rutminster Hall had dismounted to rest their horses, except for David Waterlane, who rode over to the stands to cadge a cigarette. Seeing Luke, he yelled, ‘That black mare you sold me in Palm Beach, why does she drop her head all the time?’

‘I guess she’s bashful she hasn’t been paid for,’ drawled Luke.

The stand collapsed with laughter. David Waterlane rode off discomfited.

‘He owes Ladbroke's half a million,’ said Dommie. ‘You may be rather low down the list.’

Ricky was in despair. There was bloody Luke Alderton grinning up in the stands and he couldn’t even get a polo side together.

As if in answer to his prayer, Dancer’s black helicopter soared over the trees and landed behind the clubhouse. Mercifully Dancer was already changed. Racing towards the pitch, telling the autograph hunters he’d see them after the game and trailing security men, he jumped on to the pony Louisa was holding.

‘Terribly sorry, Rick,’ he said, quailing at Ricky’s stony face. ‘I overslept. I was recording till four o’clock this morning.’

‘I hope you’re going to get a chance to see England, Luke,’ said Sharon, pressing her knees against his back. ‘Ay’d love to show you round.’

‘I hope Perdita’s going to take me,’ said Luke, ‘but thanks all the same.’

‘Dancer’s security guards are going to have a punch-up with the Prince’s in a minute,’ said Dommie happily.

‘Oh, thank goodness,’ said Daisy. ‘Here comes Mike Waterlane.’

Driving his Golf GTI to a screeching halt at the side of the pitch, a sweating Mike leapt out and, to the disapproval of Miss Lodsworth and her satellite trouts, continued to bray into his portable telephone as he did a one-handed strip out of his pin-stripe suit down to his Dennis the Menace boxer shorts.

‘If you can go to five million, I think I’ve got just the job,’ he went on, as he wriggled into his breeches and his black, Apocalypse shirt, ‘but if you want much more land, you might have to go higher.’

As he zipped up his boots, Louisa fastened his knee pads and plonked his hat on his head.

‘I’ll get back to you later this afternoon,’ he added, hoarse with excitement and, handing Louisa the telephone in exchange for his stick and whip, jumped on to his old pony, Dopey, and thundered off on to the field.

‘What the fuck d’you think you’re playing at?’ howled Ricky and David Waterlane in unison.

‘Mick Jagger had a house under survey,’ mumbled Mike. ‘Discovered it’s got dry rot; wants us to find him another one.’

‘Mike Waterlane is so thick,’ announced Dommie, ‘that he started cheering for Reading University during the Boat Race last week.’

Luke laughed. Oh, to be in England now that April was there.