Riders

6

Six long months after she arrived in London in 1972, Helen Macaulay met Rupert Campbell-Black. Born in Florida, the eldest daughter of a successful dentist, Helen was considered the brilliant child of the family. Her mother, a passionate Anglophile and the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, was constantly reminding people of her English ancestry. In fact, a distant connection had come over, if not on the Mayflower, perhaps by the next boat. Mrs. Macaulay glossed over this fact and from an early age encouraged the young Helen to read English novels and poetry and admire all things English. Later, Helen majored in English Literature at the University of Tampa, where she was confidently expected to get a brilliant degree.

Deeply romantic on the one hand, Helen was also repressed by the rigid respectability of her family. The only proof that her parents had ever copulated at all were the four Macaulay daughters. Helen had never heard her mother and father row, or seen either of them naked. Her mother, who always insisted on women doctors, never mentioned sex, except to imply that it was degrading and wicked. Neither of her parents ever told her she was beautiful. Work to keep sin at bay, feel guilty if you slack, was the Macaulay motto.

Until she was nineteen, Helen never gave her parents a moment’s trouble. She worked at school, helped her mother in the house, never had acne or gained weight, and never answered back. At Tampa, at the beginning of the seventies, however, she came under the influence of the women’s movement — anathema to her mother, who believed a woman’s place was in the home. Her mother did, however, support the feminists’ view that a woman should never allow herself to be treated as a sex object, nor be admired for her body rather than her mind.

To her parents’ horror, Helen started getting caught up in student protest movements, demonstrating against the Vietnam war and joining civil rights marches. Even worse, she came home on vacation and said disparaging things about Richard Nixon. But far worse was to come. During her third year, Helen flunked out with a nervous breakdown, pregnant by her English professor, Harold Mountjoy.

Heavily married, but accustomed to the easy conquest of female students, Harold Mountjoy was quite unprepared for the torrent of emotion he unleashed in Helen Macaulay. It was Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester, Charlotte Brontë and her professor all over again. Except that Helen was a beauty. Only a tremendous earnestness and dedication to study had kept her on the straight and narrow so long at Tampa. On campus she was known as the fair Miss Frigidaire. Harold Mountjoy set about defrosting her. Seeing her huge hazel eyes fixed on him, like amber traffic lights, during lectures he should have read caution. Instead, one day after class, he kept her back to answer a complicated question on Browning’s “Paracelsus.”

Discussing ambition in life, Harold had lightly quoted: “ ‘I am he that aspired to know, and thou?’ ” To which Helen had instantly, almost despairingly, quoted back: “ ‘I would love infinitely, and be loved!’ ”

Harold Mountjoy realized he was on to a good thing and asked her for a drink. Secret meetings followed; self-conscious letters weighed down by literary allusions were exchanged, and finally Helen’s virginity was lost in a motel twenty-five miles from the campus, followed by fearful guilt, followed by more motels and more guilt. Under Harold’s radical guidance, Helen embraced radical causes and on vacation shocked her parents even more.

Finally, towards the end of the summer term, Helen fainted in class. Her roommate, who, despite Helen’s attempts at secrecy, had regularly been reading her diary, went to the head of the faculty. He, in turn, was highly delighted, because for years he had been looking for an excuse to dump Harold Mountjoy, whom he regarded as not only immoral but, far worse, intellectually suspect. Helen’s parents were summoned. Appalled, they removed her from college. Her father, being a dentist, had the medical contacts to organize a discreet abortion. Helen and Harold were forbidden to see one another again. Harold, clinging to his job, terrified his wife would find out, complied with the request. This was the last straw for Helen. Losing her virginity had meant total commitment. She had expected Harold to tell her to keep the baby and to divorce his wife.

Desperately worried about her, her parents, who were kindly if rigid people, packed her off to England in the hope that this other great imagined love of her life would distract her. She was to stay for at least a year. Helen rang Harold Mountjoy in despair. He urged her to go. They would both write. In time they would meet again. There was a possibility he’d get over to England in August. At last Helen agreed.

The head of the faculty wrote to his London publishers, giving Helen an excellent reference and praising her diligence, and they agreed to give her a job, reading manuscripts, writing blurbs, and copyediting. He also fixed her up with digs with a female author in Hampstead.

So Helen pieced her broken heart together and came to England in October, unable to suppress a feeling of excitement that she would soon be able to visit St. Paul’s, where John Donne had preached, and Wimpole Street, where Robert Browning had courted Elizabeth Barrett. She might even get up to the Lakes to see Wordsworth’s cottage, or Haworth, home of the Brontës.

Sadly, England proved a disappointment. Accustomed to year-round Florida sunshine, Helen arrived at the beginning of the worst winter for years. She couldn’t believe how cold it was.

By day she froze in her publishing house, by night she froze at her digs, which were awful. The female author was an ancient lesbian who watched her every move. Upstairs was a lecherous lodger who made eyes at her at mealtimes and kept coming into her room on trumped-up excuses. The place was filthy and reeked of a tomcat, which her landlady refused to castrate. The landlady also used the same dishcloth to wash up the cat’s plates and the humans’ plates. The food was awful; they seemed to eat carbohydrates with carbohydrates in England. She found herself eating cookies and candy to keep out the cold, put on ten pounds, and panicked.

At the weekends she froze on sightseeing tours, shivering at Stratford, at the Tower, and on the train down to Hampton Court, and in numerous art galleries.

The English men were a bitter disappointment, too. None of them looked like Darcy, or Rochester, or Heathcliff, or Burgo Fitzgerald, or Sebastian Flyte. None of them washed their hair often enough; she never dared look in their ears in the subway. They also seemed de-sexed by the cold weather. They never gazed or whistled at her in the street. Anyway, Helen was not the sort of girl who would have picked up men. As the days passed, she grew more and more lonely.

Harold Mountjoy was another disappointment. After one letter: “Darling girl, forgive a scribbled note, but you are too precious to have brief letters. It would take a month to tell you all I feel about you, and I don’t have the time,” he didn’t write at Christmas or remember her birthday or even Valentine’s Day.

Finally, at the beginning of March, Helen decided she could bear her digs no longer. On the same day that her landlady used a cat-food-encrusted spoon to stir the beef stew with, and the tomcat invaded her room for the hundredth time and sprayed on her typewriter cover, she moved into Regina House, an all-female hostel in Hammersmith, which catered exclusively for visiting academics, and was at least clean and warm.

Nor was her job in publishing very exciting. The initial bliss of being paid to read all day soon palled because of the almost universal awfulness of the manuscripts submitted. To begin with, Helen wrote the authors polite letters of rejection, whereupon they all wrote back, sending her other unpublished works and pestering her to publish them; so finally she resorted, like everyone else, to rejection slips.

Her two bosses took very extended lunch hours and spent long weekends at their houses in the country. One of the director’s sons, having ignored her in the office, asked her out to dinner one evening and lunged so ferociously in the car going home that Helen was forced to slap his face. From then on he went back to ignoring her.

The only other unmarried man in the office was a science graduate in his late twenties named Nigel, a vegetarian with brushed-forward fawn hair, a straggly beard, a thin neck like a goose, and spectacles. For six months, Helen and he had been stepping round each other, she out of loneliness, and he out of desire. They had long political arguments and grumbled about their capitalist bosses. Nigel introduced her to Orwell and bombarded her with leftist literature.

He was also heavily involved with the anti-fox hunting movement and seemed to spend an exciting resistance life on weekends rescuing foxes and hares from ravening packs of hounds, harassing hunt balls with tear gas, and descending by helicopter into the middle of coursing meetings. He was constantly on the telephone to various cronies named Paul and Dave, arranging dead-of-night rendezvous to unblock earths. Often he came in on Monday with a black eye or bandaged wrist, after scuffles with hunt supporters.

One Friday, towards the end of March, he asked Helen out to lunch. He was wearing a yellow corduroy coat, a black shirt, had clean hair, and looked less unattractive than usual. Inevitably, the conversation got around to blood sports.

“They think we’re all lefties or students on the dole living in towns,” he said, whipping off his spectacles. “But we come from all walks of life. You see, the fox,” he went on in his flat Northern accent, “beautiful, dirty, hard-pressed with so many people after him, hounds, foot-followers, riders, horses, terriers, he needs us on his side to tip the balance a little.”

Helen’s huge eyes filled with tears. For a moment, in his blaze of conviction, Nigel reminded her of Harold Mountjoy. He speared a piece of stuffed eggplant with his fork. “Why don’t you come out with us tomorrow? We’re driving down to Gloucestershire to rot up the Chalford and Bisley. It’s the last meet of the season. Dave’s got hold of a lot of fireworks; it should be a good day.”

Helen, unable to face another weekend on her own, trailing round galleries or visiting the house of some long-dead writer, said she’d love to.

“And afterwards, we might have dinner in Oxford,” said Nigel. “They’ve opened a good vegetarian restaurant in the High.”

And now she was rattling down the M4 to Gloucestershire and wondering why the hell she’d agreed to come. The dilapidated car was driven by a bearded young zoology graduate named Paul, who had cotton wool in his ears and was already losing his hair. Beside him sat Nigel. Both men were wearing gum boots and khaki combat kit, and khaki, she decided, simply wasn’t Nigel’s color.

Even worse, she had to sit in the back with Paul’s girlfriend, Maureen, who was large, dismissive, and aggressively unglamorous, with dirty dark brown hair, black fingernails, and no makeup on her shiny white face. Between her heavy lace-up boots and the bottom of the khaki trousers were two inches of hairy, unshaven leg. She was also wearing a voluminous white sheepskin coat which stank as it dried off. It was rather like sharing the back with a large unfriendly dog. Even worse, she insisted on referring to Helen as Ellen.

Taking one look at Helen’s rust corduroy trousers tucked into brown shiny boots, dark green cashmere turtleneck jersey, and brown herringbone jacket, she said, “I don’t expect you’ve ever demonstrated against anything in your life, Ellen.”

Helen replied, somewhat frostily, that she’d been on several anti-Vietnam war marches, which launched Maureen, Nigel, and Paul into an unprovoked attack on America and Nixon and Watergate, and how corrupt the Americans were, which irritated Helen to death. It was all right for her to go on about corruption in America, but not at all okay for the Brits to take it for granted.

Sulkily, she buried herself in a piece in the paper speculating as to whether Princess Anne was going to marry Captain Mark Phillips. She’d been following conflicting reports of the romance with shamefaced interest. Mark Phillips was so good-looking, with his neat smooth head, and gleaming dark hair, so much more attractive than Nigel and Paul’s straggly locks. In America, hair like theirs had long gone out of fashion, other than for aging hippies.

They were off the motorway now, driving past hedgerows starry with primroses. Buds were beginning to soften and blur the trees against a clear blue sky. Flocks of pigeons rose like smoke from the newly plowed fields. Helen felt tears stinging her eyes once more.

“Spring returns, but not my friend,” she murmured, thinking sadly of Harold Mountjoy.

“I suppose foxes do have to be kept down somehow,” she said out loud, feeling she ought to contribute something to the discussion. “They do kill chickens.”

“Rubbish,” snapped Maureen. “These days, chickens are safely trapped in battery houses.”

“And Ellen,” said Paul earnestly, “only five percent of foxes ever touch chicken.”

Helen had a sudden vision of the five percent sitting down to coq au vin with knives and forks.

Now Maureen, Paul, and Nigel were slagging someone they referred to as R.C.B.

“Who’s R.C.B.?” asked Helen, and was told it was Rupert Campbell-Black, the one the Antis hated most.

“Male chauvinist pig of the worst kind,” said Maureen.

“Upper-class shit who makes Hitler look like Nestlé’s milk,” said Paul.

“Always rides his horses straight at us,” said Nigel. “Broke Paul’s wrist with his whip last autumn.”

“Remember that hunt ball when he smashed a champagne bottle on the table and threatened you with it, Nige?” said Maureen.

“What does he do?” asked Helen.

“Show jumps internationally,” said Paul, “and allegedly beats up his horses. But he’s so loaded, he doesn’t need to do anything very much.”

Helen noticed the curling copies of the New Statesman and Tribune on the backseat and a tattered copy of Bertolt Brecht in the pocket of Maureen’s coat. These are people who care about things, she reproved herself, I must try to like them better.

“What do we do when we get there?” she asked.

“The basic idea, Ellen,” said Maureen, “is to copy everything the huntsmen do. We bring our own horns — Paul here actually plays the horn in an orchestra — and use them to split the pack. We’ve perfected our view halloos, and we also spray the meet with a special mixture called Anti-mate, which confuses the hounds.”

Nigel looked at his watch, which he wore ten minutes fast, on the inside of his wrist. “Nearly there,” he said.

Helen got out her mirror, added some blusher to her pale, freckled cheeks, ran a comb through her gleaming dark red page boy, and rearranged the tortoiseshell headband that kept it off her forehead.

“You’re not going to a party,” reproved Maureen.

Defiantly, Helen sprayed on some scent.

“Nice pong,” said Paul, wrinkling his long nose. “D’you know the one about the Irish saboteurs, Ellen? They spent all day trying to sabotage a drag hunt.”

“Don’t tell ethnic jokes, Paul,” said Nigel, smiling as widely as his small mouth would allow.

They were beginning to overtake riders and horses hacking to the meet. A pretty blonde on an overexcited chestnut waved them past.

“You’ve no idea how we’re going to cook your goose later, my beauty,” Nigel gloated.

Soon the road was lined with boxes and trailers, and Paul drove faster through the deep brown puddles in order to splash all those riders in clean white breeches standing on the grass verge. Now he was fuming at being stuck at ten mph behind a huge horse box which kept crashing against the overhanging ash trees.

The meet was held in one of those sleepy Cotswold villages, with a village green flanked by golden-gray cottages, a lichened church knee-deep in daffodils, and a pub called the Goat in Boots. A large crowd had gathered to watch the riders in their black and scarlet coats saddling up, supervising the unboxing of their horses and grumbling about their hangovers.

“What a darling place,” said Helen, as the sun came out. The Antis, however, had no time for esthetic appreciation. Paul parked his car on the edge of the green and, getting out, they all surged forward to exchange firm handshakes and straight glances with other saboteurs. Both sexes were wearing khaki anoraks or combat kit as camouflage, but with their gray faces and long straggly hair and beards, they couldn’t have stood out more beside the fresh-faced, clean-cut locals.

“Here’s your own supply of Anti-mate,” said Nigel, dropping two aerosol cans into the pockets of Helen’s coat. “Spray it on hounds or riders, whenever you get the chance.”

Helen thought irritably that the cans would ruin the line of her coat, and when Nigel insisted on pinning two badges saying “Hounds Off Our Wild Life” and “Only Rotters Hunt Otters” on the lapels of her coat, she wondered if it was necessary for him to take so long and press his skinny hands quite so hard against her breast. Perhaps she’d have to use the Anti-mate on him.

Two sinister-looking men walked by with a quartet of small bright-eyed yapping dogs.

“Those are the terriers they use to dig out the fox,” whispered Maureen.

Helen also noticed several crimson-faced colonels and braying ladies on shooting sticks giving her dirty looks. A group of men in deerstalkers and dung-colored suits stood grimly beside a Land Rover.

“They’re paid by the hunt to sabotage us,” explained Maureen indignantly. “Given a chance, they’ll block the road and ram us with that Land Rover.”

Helen was beginning to feel distinctly uneasy. She edged slightly away from the group of saboteurs, then said to herself firmly, “I am a creative writer. Here is a golden opportunity to study the British in one of their most primitive rituals.”

Listening to the anxious whinnying from the boxes, she breathed in the heady smell of sweating horse, dung, and damp earth. The landlord of the pub was dispensing free drinks on a silver tray. His wife followed with a tray of sandwiches and sausage rolls. Helen, who had had no breakfast, was dying to tuck in, but felt, being part of the enemy, that she shouldn’t.

Nigel and Maureen had no such scruples.

“Good crowd,” said Nigel, greedily helping himself to three sandwiches. “Oh dear, they’re ham,” he added disapprovingly, and, removing the fillings, he dropped them disdainfully on the ground where they were devoured by a passing labrador.

Suddenly, as the gold hand of the church clock edged towards eleven o’clock, there was a murmur of excitement as a dark blue Porsche drew up.

“There he is,” hissed Maureen, as two men got out. Helen caught a glimpse of gleaming blond hair and haughty, suntanned features, as the taller of the two men vanished in a screaming tidal wave of teenagers brandishing autograph books. Others stood on the bonnets of their parents’ cars, or clambered onto each others’ shoulders trying to take photographs or get a better look.

“Worse than that Dick Jagger,” snorted an old lady, who’d been nearly knocked off her shooting stick by the rush.

A girl stumbled out of the melée, her face as bright pink as the page of the autograph book she was kissing. Half a minute later she was followed by her friend.

“He used this pen,” she sighed ecstatically. “I’m never going to use it again.”

Gradually the crowd dispersed and through a gap Helen was able to get a better look. The man had thick blond hair, brushed straight back and in two wings above the ears, emphasizing the clear, smooth forehead and the beautiful shape of his head. His face, with its Greek nose, high cheekbones, and long, denim blue eyes, was saved from effeminacy by a square jaw and a very determined mouth.

Totally oblivious of the mayhem he had caused, he was lounging against the Porsche, talking continuously but hardly moving his lips, to a stocky young man with light brown curly hair, a broken nose, sleepy eyes, and a noticeably green complexion. The blond man was signing autograph books so automatically and handing them onto his companion, that when the queue dried up, he held his hand out for another pen and a book.

“What a beautiful, beautiful guy,” gasped Helen.

“Yes, and knows it,” snapped Maureen. “That’s R.C.B. and his shadow, Billy Lloyd-Foxe.”

The landlord pressed forward with the tray.

“Morning Rupe, morning Billy. Want a hair of the dog?”

“Christ, yes.” Reaching out, the stocky, light-brown-haired boy grabbed two glasses, one of which he handed to Rupert. Then, getting out a tenner and two flasks from his pocket, he handed them to the landlord, adding: “Could you bear to fill them up with brandy, Les? I’ll never fight my way through Rupe’s admirers.”

“Bit under the weather, are you, Billy?” said the landlord.

“Terrible. If I open my eyes, I’ll bleed to death.”

A groom was lowering the ramp of a nearby box and unloading a magnificent bay mare, sweating in a dark blue rug edged with emerald green with the initials R.C.B. in the corner, and looking back into the box, whinnying imperiously for her stable companions. Rupert turned around.

“How is she, Frenchie?”

“Bit over the top, sir,” said the groom. “She could use the exercise.”

He swept the rug off the sweating, shuddering mare and slapped on a saddle. Suddenly she started to hump her back with excitement, dancing on the spot as the hunt arrived in a flood of scarlet coats, burnished horses, and jolly, grinning hounds, tails wagging frenziedly, circling merrily, looking curiously naked without any collars.

Helen felt her heart lift; how beautiful and glamorous they all looked.

“Little people get on big horses and think they’re gods,” said Nigel thickly in her ear. “Those hounds haven’t been fed for three days.”

But Helen was gazing at Rupert Campbell-Black, who was taking off his navy blue jersey and shrugging himself into a red coat. Goodness, he was well constructed. Usually, men with such long legs had short bodies, but Rupert, from the broad flat shoulders to the lean muscular hips and powerful thighs, seemed perfectly in proportion.

Just as he and Billy mounted their horses the local photographer arrived, pushing his way through the ring of admirers.

“Hello, Rupert, can I have a photograph of you and Billy?”

“Okay,” said Rupert, gazing unsmiling into the camera.

“I’m not looking my best,” grumbled Billy. “I haven’t washed my hair.”

“Good chance for publicity,” said Maureen sententiously, and barging her way through, she handed Rupert an anti-hunting leaflet.

“Thank you very much,” he said politely. “Can I have one for Billy?”

Maureen turned round to face the camera between them.

“Can I borrow your lighter, Billy?” said Rupert. Next minute he had set fire to the two leaflets and dropped them flaming at Maureen’s feet.

“You’re not even man enough to read them,” she said furiously.

Rupert looked her up and down. “It’s rather hard to tell what sex you are,” he drawled, “but you’re certainly not good-looking enough to hold such extreme views. Go away, you’re frightening my horse.”

The crowd screamed with laughter. Maureen flounced back to Helen. “The bastard, did you hear what he said?”

Over Maureen’s head, for a second, Rupert’s eyes met Helen’s. Then he looked away without interest. They’re right. He’s poisonous, she thought.

At that moment a beautiful, but over-made-up woman, her black coat straining over a splendid bosom, trotted up to Rupert with a proprietorial air.

“Darling, how are you feeling? I actually made it.”

Simultaneously the landlord arrived with the two filled flasks. As he handed one of them to Rupert she grabbed it, taking a large swig.

“Don’t drink it all,” snapped Rupert.

“Darling,” she said fondly, screwing back the top, and handing it to him, “you can come home later and drink as much of ours as you like.”

Rupert put a long booted leg forward and pulled up the mare’s girths.

“I don’t know if I’ll need Monty as well,” he said to the groom. “With these bloody hunt saboteurs about, we may not get much action. If you lose us, wait at the Spotted Cow.”

The next moment the hunt clattered off. Helen was amazed to see Nigel suddenly leap out of a hawthorn bush and squirt the hounds with Anti-mate. Next minute a little girl had rushed up and kicked him so hard on the ankles that he dropped the aerosol can with a yell.

“Stop it, you horrid man,” she screamed.

Rupert Campbell-Black, who was passing, grinned down at her: “Well done, angel. I’ll marry you when you grow up.”

The saboteurs leapt into their five cars.

“Keep your eyes peeled for foxes,” hissed Paul. Nigel was still grumbling about his ankle.

Hurtling down a country lane, sending the catkins shivering, they found hounds being put into the palest green larch covert. The saboteurs parked above it and the next moment a posse, including Nigel and Paul, vaulted over the fence and, armed with Anti-mate, disappeared after them. Judging by the expletives and the shaking of fists, they were causing havoc in the woods. The master decided to move on.

“Out of my way,” he said bossily to a group of girl riders, “you’re not with the pony club now. I expect you’ve only come out to gaze at Rupert Campbell-Black.”

The saboteurs moved off in search of fresh sport. Stopping in a layby to spray pepper, they got stuck in the mud. Two foot-followers, not realizing who they were, pushed them out.

The next two hours were like being at a race meeting, permanently under starter’s orders. Every time the hunt picked up a scent the Antis managed to foil them.

Later, Maureen and Helen hung over a gate watching a sluggish stream choking its way through overhanging osiers and pussy willows. Fat celandines were pushing their way through the dead leaves. Helen gloried in the spring sunshine beating through her dark green jersey.

“Are the saboteurs anti-fishing as well?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” said Maureen earnestly. “Our more extreme members feel it’s cruel to the worm.”

Helen’s stomach gave an ominous rumble.

“I’m starving,” said Maureen. “Thank God I had a cooked breakfast. We’re all rendezvousing at the Spotted Cow at one o’clock.”

Helen, who had had no breakfast and only scrambled eggs the previous night, had visions of gins and tonics and pub steak and kidney pudding. The plowed brown fields in their evenness reminded her of mince. Perhaps there’d be shepherd’s pie for lunch.

But in the end, they only stopped at the village shop to buy oranges and some Perrier.

“Can’t squander the saboteurs’ funds on food and drink,” said Nigel, offering her his bottle of Perrier.

Helen suddenly thought how much she’d prefer to share a flask of brandy with Rupert Campbell-Black. If she’d been out with him, she figured, he’d have made sure she was properly looked after.

The saboteurs were parked outside the Spotted Cow as the hunt came past, looking understandably bootfaced after such an abortive morning.

“Pull the choke out,” whispered Paul. “It’ll muddle the hounds.”

On the other side of another wood, the hats of the riders could be seen moving ceaselessly back and forth.

Another posse of saboteurs moved in from the right, view-hallooing to distract the hounds and throwing in a couple of firecrackers, which set the already excited horses plunging.

“Pa, pa, pa, pa,” came the tender melancholy note of the horn.

“Oh, good. I mean, oh dear!” said Helen. “They’ve found a fox.”

“That’s Paul,” said Maureen smugly. “He can blow a horn as well as any huntsman.”

Two women supporters in green quilted coats and tweed skirts parked nearby and got out of their car.

“Bloody Antis,” said one, incongruously smoothing a wildlife sanctuary sticker on her windscreen.

“Have you heard how the Paignton-Laceys” dance went?” said her friend.

“Fiona’s not up yet this morning, but I saw Primrose, who said it was frightfully good. More chaps than girls for a change. Rupert Campbell-Black disgraced himself as usual. Got off with Gabriella. Evidently they disappeared for hours and hours. Charlie got quite frantic. They’ve only been married a year.”

“Better than Marcia’s dance,” said the first one. “Evidently he got simply plastered and docked the tails of all the yew peacocks; I mean they’ve taken literally hundreds of years to grow. I’d have sued the little beast.”

“He gets away with it,” said the first one, “because he is so frightfully attractive.”

Suddenly she gave an enraged bellow as Nigel and Paul, spattered with mud, their hands cut and bleeding from the under-growth, tore up the hill with the heavies hot on their trail, and leapt into the car.

Taking off, Paul shook off the heavies, finally stopping at the edge of a beech wood looking down a valley. In the back, Nigel was noisily sucking an orange. Getting out of the car, Helen caught her breath, for there, slowly riding up the hill, came Rupert Campbell-Black, his gleaming bay mare and his red coat the only splashes of color against the greens and browns. Gaining the top of the hill, he paused, trying to work out which way the hounds might run. The sun, which had been hovering in the wings like an actor waiting to make an entrance, broke away from the clouds, warming the brown fields. Nigel got out of the car, wiping his hands on his trousers.

“ ‘To one who has been long in city pent,’ ” he said pompously as he edged towards Helen: “ ‘ ’Tis very sweet to look into the fair and open face of heaven.’ ”

Helen, who privately thought it would be much sweeter to look into the fair and very close face of Rupert Campbell-Black, edged away again.

“I think they’re going to draw this covert,” said Nigel, vanishing into the beech copse, followed by Paul.

A hound spoke. Then the triumphant chorus rang out and there was the wild cry of the true horn. Suddenly, with the master cheering them on the line, hounds streamed down the valley in a dappled cloud. Then came the field, galloping, jumping, barging through gates with a clash of stirrups. There was Rupert, looking in a completely different class to the others, riding so easily and fluidly, almost nibbling his horse’s ears as he seemed to lift her over a huge hedge.

“Wire on the other side,” he yelled back to Billy, who gathered his black cob together and cleared it just as easily. There was a clattering of hooves as they jumped into the road and out again, and set off towards the beech copse, which had been liberally sprayed with pepper and Anti-mate. As they entered the copse, Nigel and Paul stood on a nearby fence and started to blow a horn concerto, utterly muddling the hounds who, distracted by the pepper and the Anti-mate, charged around, frenziedly zigzagging back and forth, whimpering with frustration as they tried to pick up the scent.

Helen suddenly felt furious with Nigel and Paul. What right had they to spoil everyone’s day? She and Maureen were standing in the field skirting the copse when suddenly Nigel came hurtling out of the wood, followed by Paul. The next minute Rupert Campbell-Black galloped around the corner, riding straight at them, his eyes blazing.

“He won’t touch the girls,” screamed Nigel, promptly plunging his horn down Helen’s new dark green cashmere jersey, stretching the neckband, and disappearing over the hedge. “Chivalry will prevent him,” he called over his shoulder.

Chivalry prevented Rupert doing no such thing. He rode straight up to Helen, reined in the plunging mare, and, before Helen could stop him, leaned over, put a warm hand down the front of her jersey, and retrieved the horn.

“A good-looking Anti,” he said in mock-wonder. “I never expected to see one. What’s a pretty girl like you doing, getting mixed up with a desiccated creep like Nigel?”

“How dare you?” gasped Helen, hand to her breast as though she’d been violated.

“How dare you?” said Rupert. “This is private property. You’re trespassing. I’d go back to London and not get involved with a lot of rent-a-crowd lefties.”

“All right, Helen?” asked Nigel, emerging from the under-growth.

“She’s not getting much help from you, you little rat,” said Rupert. “She’s got a very good body, though.”

Blushing crimson, hopelessly aware how unbecoming it was with her red hair, Helen gazed fixedly at Rupert’s highly polished boot.

“Don’t you insult my girlfriend,” said Nigel, striding up, slipping in a cowpat and putting his arm round Helen’s shoulders.

Equally furiously, she shrugged him off.

“On the contrary,” said Rupert, pocketing the horn. “I was being excessively polite, telling her she’s the only decent-looking girl I’d ever seen out with the Antis.” He nodded in Maureen’s direction. “What d’you use that one for, breaking down lift doors?”

For a second he made the mare plunge towards Nigel, who retreated into the hedge, then, wheeling round, he was off.

“I’ll get even with you,” screeched Nigel.

As they set off again, Helen sat in the back, stunned. Rupert was simply the most wrong but entirely romantic person she’d ever met. She was appalled how violently she felt attracted to him. She could still feel the warmth of his leisurely hand and remember the way the brilliant blue eyes had moved over her, assessing, absorbing data like a computer.

“ ‘My only love sprang from my only hate,’ ” she whispered.

As Rupert cantered back to join the despondent remains of the hunt, Gabriella, who’d earlier helped herself to his hip flask, caught up with him.

“Coo-ee, darling, where have you been?”

One of the added irritations caused by the saboteurs, thought Rupert, was that it had been impossible to shake Gabriella off. Last night, belonging to someone else, with her magnificent white bosom rising out of plunging black lace, she had been a far more desirable proposition. He had taken her in a cordoned-off bedroom, hung around with tapestries. In the middle, a long line of foot-followers had actually congaed unknowing through the room, whooping and yelling and reducing them both to helpless laughter. Today, red-veined from an excess of wine, with her makeup running, her hair coming down in a lacquered mass, and her bulky thighs in too-tight breeches, she had lost all her charm, though none of her ardor. Rupert had a sudden yearning for the whippet-slim Anti, with her hair the color of the bracken still strewing the rides.

“What a bloody useless day,” he said.

“It could be improved dramatically,” said Gabriella, riding her horse alongside him. “Why don’t we slip home? Charlie’s gone shooting.”

“Probably like to count me as part of the bag,” said Rupert, looking at his watch. “It’s only a quarter to three. Worth giving it another hour.”

He was relieved to see Billy emerging from the wood, his head buried in his horse’s neck to avoid the branches.

“I feel better,” said Billy. “I’ve just been sick behind a holly bush. Have you got any brandy left, Rupe?”

“Not much,” said Rupert, handing him the flask. “Better finish it.”

Rupert’s fiendish behavior was soon relayed with relish to the rest of the Antis. Helen, unable to work up any indignation at all, picked a bunch of primroses and wrapped them in a paper handkerchief dipped in a puddle.

Briefly, Paul and Nigel had lost the hounds, but had found them again in full cry within the walls of some huge estate. Unable to get at them physically, the saboteurs launched their toughest offensive. All hell broke loose as smoke bombs and thunderflashes exploded, foghorns wailed, and horns and whistles were blown.

“Jesus Christ! Some buggers are shooting in the covert. Pull hounds out,” yelled a huntsman.

Helen hid behind an ash tree, saying her prayers as the saboteurs charged about, yelling, screaming, slipping on wet leaves, tripping over bramble cables and the long silver roots of beech trees. Hounds had gone to pieces. All Helen could hear was whimpering. Nigel shimmied up the wall to look.

“Master’s lost control,” he said happily.

To the left, the Land Rovers with the heavies were moving in threateningly. Paul seized Helen, bustling her into the front of the car.

“Let’s beat it,” he said.

“Where are Maureen and Nigel?”

“Mo’s in one of the other cars,” Paul put his foot down on the accelerator, “and Nigel’s got some ingenious plot of his own, but my lips are sealed. He’s taken Fiona’s car; said he’d join us later.”

It had started to spit with rain. Old ladies hurried home, putting on headscarves. Women rushed out into the cottage gardens, taking in washing.

“You’re not wearing your safety belt, Ellen,” said Paul. “Wouldn’t want an attractive young lady to come to any harm.”

Turning on Radio Three, he accompanied a Beethoven sonata in a reedy tenor. Helen had a feeling he was glad they’d shed the others.

“I know you’re Nige’s girl,” he said throatily.

“I am not,” said Helen tartly. “There is nothing between us.”

“That makes a difference. Didn’t want to tread on anyone’s corns. I happen to be playing at a concert at the Festival Hall next Saturday. Wonder if you’d care to come. We could have an Indian afterwards.”

Helen, who hated curry, said she’d look in her diary, which he seemed to regard as a satisfactory answer. As he rabbited on about the orchestra and the paper he was writing on shrews, Helen found it was unnecessary to make any other comment than the occasional “um.” Breathing in the apricot dusk, she wondered what Rupert Campbell-Black was doing now.

Rupert and Billy hacked back to their horse box through the pouring rain, discussing which horses they should take to the Crittleden Easter Meeting, which started on Friday. Billy, who’d put his collar up and turned his hat back to front to stop the rain running down his neck, was trying to light a cigarette.

“Did you see the girl with the Antis?” asked Rupert, in that deceptively casual way that meant he was interested.

“Bit thin,” said Billy.

“Marvelous face, though. Doesn’t sound English. How the hell did Nigel get hold of her?”

“Perhaps she likes his mind.”

“Hardly likely to be anything else.”

Rounding the corner, fifty yards away, they saw Nigel busily letting down the tires of Rupert’s horse box. Riding on the verge, he hadn’t heard them coming.

“Leave this to me,” said Rupert softly.

Sliding off the mare, throwing the reins to Billy, he sprinted down the road and, taking a flying leap, landed on Nigel with a crash, knocking the breath out of his body. Next minute he had dragged him up a grassy side lane and was systematically beating him to a pulp. It was Billy who dragged Rupert off.

“For God’s sake, that’s enough. You don’t want to be done for murder.”

At that moment Frenchie, the groom, woke up from sleeping off his lunch and appeared out of the front of the horse box, rubbing his eyes.

“Where the hell have you been?” snarled Rupert. “Getting pissed as usual, I suppose. Here, take the horses and get me some rope.”

Pulling off his hunting tie, he stuffed it into Nigel’s mouth, then systematically stripped off Nigel’s clothes, looking down with distaste at the white skinny body. As Rupert tied his hands and feet with spare head-collar ropes, Nigel gave a groan and started to wriggle.

“Think he’ll be all right?” said Billy.

“Sadly, yes, the little shit,” said Rupert, giving him a kick in the ribs. “It’ll take him half an hour to wriggle down the road. It’ll still be light; someone’ll pick him up. Pity it’s such a warm night.”

He picked up Nigel’s combat jacket and removed his address book from the inside pocket. As he flipped through it, they hitched a lift in the horse box back to the blue Porsche.

“How riveting,” said Rupert. “He’s got Fiona’s telephone number, and mine, the little bastard, and yours too. What did he call that girl? Helen, I think. Here’s one. Helen Macaulay, Regina House, W. Fourteen. Where the hell’s that?”

“Shepherd’s Bush or Hammersmith.”

“Frightfully unsmart,” said Rupert. “I wonder if that’s her.”

Helen got in around midnight. The walnut and cottage cheese paté and the vegetable curry had been disgusting. She’d hardly eaten anything, but, still dazed by Rupert Campbell-Black, had drunk more cheap elderberry wine than was good for her.

Maureen had glared at her all evening; Nigel had never turned up and Paul had somehow engineered that he drop her off at Regina House after dropping Maureen at her digs.

“I won’t come up for a coffee, Mo. I expect you’re tired,” he said.

Helen suspected that Maureen, standing in her furry coat like a disgruntled Pyrenean mountain dog, was no such thing. Outside Regina House Paul said, “May I kiss you, Ellen?” and lunged goatily. His beard tickled, he had B.O., and his breath smelled of curry. Helen lost her temper.

“You’re too sanctimonious for words, right. You had a glorious day playing cops and robbers and feeling smug to boot, and what’s more I’d like to report you to the RSPCA for being horrible to hounds.” Leaping out, she slammed the car door in his face.

Now she sat in her room feeling ashamed of herself and gazing at Harold Mountjoy’s photograph, which seemed to have lost all its appeal. She noticed the spoilt, slightly weak expression, the hair carefully combed forward to cover the lined forehead and crow’s-feet round the eyes.

“ ‘My only love sprang from my only hate,’ ” she whispered. She’d never see Rupert again. He obviously had millions of girls after him and, anyway, he was thoroughly spoilt. She looked at the primroses in the tooth mug with the ochre centers and pastel petals. She’d have to put him in her novel, then she could dream about him. Slowly she undressed, gazing at her body in the mirror. She’d never really studied it before, and yet he’d said it was beautiful. She found she’d put her nightdress on inside out; that was supposed to be lucky. She could do with some luck. She jumped at a sudden pounding on the door. It was the principal of the hostel in a camel hair dressing gown, hair in a net.

“Telephone,” she snapped. “Person says it’s an emergency. Can’t see how it can be.”

Helen sighed; it must be Nigel. Perhaps he’d been arrested and needed bailing out, or was grumbling because Paul had driven off without him. At least he couldn’t accuse her of getting off with Paul.

In the telephone booth someone had left a copy of Lorca. Helen picked up the receiver: “Hello.”

“May I speak to Helen Macaulay,” said a voice. She’d recognize that clipped, light drawl anywhere. Her palms went damp, her knees turned to jelly.

“This is she.”

“Well, this is the enemy speaking — Rupert Campbell-Black.”

“How did you get my number?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Is Nigel all right?”

“As right as he ever could be. What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Going to church in the morning.”

In the background she could hear the sounds of music and revelry.

“Shut up, you maniacs,” yelled Rupert. “Look, I’ll take you to church, then I’ll give you lunch. I’ll pick you up at half-past ten.”

She liked the way he pronounced it: “H’pp’st’n.”