Tash flashed a weak smile. ‘Actually, it’s a boy.’
‘Oh, lovely,’ the manager beamed at little Cora, who had a finger rammed in each nostril, her tongue poking out between pudgy thumbs. ‘One of each. When’s he due?’
Tash started heaving her canvas shopping bags in to the trolley, longing to sit down. ‘First week of August.’
‘Here – let me,’ the manager took over. ‘So he’ll be an Olympic baby. You could name him after a gold medallist.’
‘His father would certainly like that.’
‘We’ve got a local hopeful here – lives up on the downs. Hugo something … Beaumont or Butcher? Comes in here quite a lot. Everyone says he’ll bring back gold this year. Rides horses, I gather – not really my thing. I’m allergic, and I always think the poor horse does most of the work, don’t you? They should get the medals! This
bloke’s a right toff and a bit of an arrogant sod, to be honest, but you forget that when national pride’s at stake, don’t you?’
‘You certainly try.’
‘So do you have any names lined up?’
‘His father wants to call him Hugo.’
‘Does he? What a coincidence!’
‘I’ve steered him towards Amery.’
‘What?’
‘Amery – it’s a Beauchamp family name.’
‘Beauchamp, you say?’ The manager started to grow pale.
‘Cora’s daddy is Hugo Beauchamp, isn’t he darling?’ Tash smiled at her little girl and then laughed as she excitedly lisped: ‘Daddy winth gold! Daddy winth gold!’ as Hugo had taught her, although she didn’t understand what it meant. Along with ‘star’, ‘pig’, ‘hug’ and ‘dog’, these were the only words she could say. To Tash’s continual concern she had yet to say anything close to ‘Mummy’.
The store manager was still blustering with embarrassment as she lifted the last of the shopping into the trolley. ‘I’m sure he’s not at all arrogant at home – busy man like him hasn’t much time for pleasantries in a supermarket.’
‘He’s supremely arrogant at home.’ Tash sighed fondly, eyeing the green bag that was spilling with ingredients for the intimate Olympic send-off meal she was planning for that evening.
‘But romantic.’ The manager was eyeing the groceries too – the clichéd champagne, truffles, smoked salmon and strawberries. ‘You’re a lucky couple. Once we had kids, the husband and I were lucky if we managed half an hour together to sit down in front of
EastEnders
, let alone fresh flowers every week and romantic candle-lit meals.’
Tash removed the candles from Cora’s sticky grip, as she was using them to smack the manager on the bottom. ‘What flowers?’
‘The ones your husband buys here every week,’ she beamed cheerfully.
Tash swallowed, trying very hard to beam back.
Hugo never bought her flowers.
‘His father was
just
the same,’ Alicia sniffed disparagingly when Tash called in to drop off her fags and gin. ‘He started taking mistresses as soon as I had the boys.’
Tash gaped at her mother-in-law, who was already pouring two vast gin and Its, even though it was barely midday.
‘I’ll stick to tea, thanks.’ She headed for the kettle, waving away Alicia’s offer of a Rothmans.
‘You girls today!’ She sparked up, but in a conciliatory gesture reached behind her to open a window. ‘I smoked all the way through both my pregnancies and look at Hugo and Charles. Both marvellous specimens.’
‘Hmm.’ Tash topped up Cora’s beaker of juice with water from the tap and handed it down to her, where she was playing with Granny Lish’s elderly pug, Beefeater. Unlike his predecessor, Gordons – known universally as ‘Thug the pug’ – Beefy was as long-suffering and gentle as he was sad-eyed, creased and curly-tailed. He and Cora adored one another.
‘The secret to stopping him straying is to get your figure back as soon as you’ve had the baby,’ Alicia commanded grandly, draining the first gin and It and starting on the second.
‘Really?’ Tash looked over her shoulder worriedly as she put a teabag into a chipped bone-china cup.
‘Absolutely!’ Alicia avowed, Spode-blue eyes briefly appearing through their curtains of pale, crepey skin as they stretched wide in Tash’s direction and then cast their critical way down to her bottom. ‘Men can’t stand the great fat Hausfraus most women become after childbirth. I existed on gin, cigarettes and sultanas for six months after Charles.’
‘You still do,’ Tash muttered, having as usual filled her mother-inlaw’s fridge with ready meals that she knew would get thrown out by the char at the end of the week, when they had passed their sell-by dates. In the short time that she had been shopping for Alicia the week’s list never altered – a litre of Bombay Sapphire, a litre of Martini, two hundred Rothmans, two lemons, two packets of Ritz crackers, soft cheese and a biscuit assortment box.
‘Can’t manage sultanas nowadays – not with these teeth,’ Alicia veiled her clever blue eyes behind their creases once more and bared her teeth instead – very expensive but ill-fitting bridgework in pale cream marbled with old gold nicotine stains, like antique ivory.
Tash made her tea and then settled at the kitchen table to watch Cora play, her back aching.
‘When do your new couple arrive?’ Alicia had noticed how much
Tash was struggling in late pregnancy, although she hadn’t offered to help at all. Since writing off her car when flying rather high on gin and winnings on the way back from a bridge night at Busty de Meeth’s Wiltshire pile, Alicia had been in no hurry to replace it. Having relied upon a personal driver up until the age of fifty-three, she had loathed taking the wheel in recent years and was enjoying the return to delivered groceries, chauffeured transport and more visitors, even if that did put rather a lot of pressure on her already over-stretched and heavily pregnant daughter-in-law. Nor was Alicia keen to help out with childcare; having relied entirely upon nurses, nannies, housekeepers and cooks when bringing up her own sons, she had no real working knowledge of babies whatsoever, although she was pretty useful with foundling lambs, whelping dogs and foaling mares.
‘The Czechs can’t start until the end of August,’ Tash sighed. ‘The agency couldn’t come up with anybody sooner. Radka and Todor really left us in the lurch.’ The Bulgarian couple that had been working for Tash as au pairs for almost a year had done a moonlight flit a fortnight earlier, to go vegetable packing in Lincolnshire for three times the money.
‘I thought they were called Ratty and Toad?’ Alicia flicked her fag ash into the sink.
‘That’s what Hugo called them. No wonder they left. They came here to improve their English, poor things, and as soon as they learned enough to find out what we were calling them they buggered off.’
Tash felt absurdly hurt by the defection, having thought herself very close to Radka, who adored Cora and who shared a very giggly sense of humour with Tash. She and the easy-going but money-obsessed Todor had become like family, and now Tash felt as though a younger sister had run away from home. Added to which, she was really struggling to manage the house and riotous garden at Haydown with just the family’s pensionable retainers Gwenda and Ron for help.
Totally wrapped up in the Olympic build-up, Hugo barely registered the Bulgarians’ absence, whereas Tash mourned them like missing limbs.
‘Isn’t your mother supposed to be staying with you for the Olympics?’
‘She cried off. Something came up and she can’t get away – to do with Polly, I think.’
Tash’s mother Alexandra lived in France with her second husband, Pascal, and their eighteen-year-old daughter Polly, who had deferred her place to study fashion at a Parisian college and was currently causing her parents a great many sleepless nights as she spent the year backpacking with a group of friends.
‘Beautiful child.’ Alicia was a great admirer of aesthetics and Polly was very aesthetic indeed, if completely untamed. ‘Bound to be kidnapped by slave traders or suchlike.’
‘God, don’t say that!’ Tash gulped, stooping awkwardly to gather Cora protectively to her bump. ‘After what Daddy and Henrietta went through over Beccy, Mummy is fretting all the time.’
‘Your stepsister? Wasn’t she banged up for drug smuggling?’
‘It was awful. Daddy had to fly out to Singapore four or five times. Poor Henrietta had sworn she’d never go there again – her first husband died out there, you see. She must think the place is cursed.’
‘Rubbish. I adored Singapore. Henry and I were regulars. So much more evolved than Hong Kong, I found. The Martini bar at Raffles mixes a very game gin sling.’ She reached for her drink with a nostalgic sigh.
The conversation had triggered a vague memory that Tash was grasping to retrieve. On cue her mobile phone rang in her bag. It was Hugo, the personalised ringtone set to galloping hooves, which he found hugely embarrassing.
Cora immediately started screeching excitedly, a trick she had recently developed to distract her mother during calls and draw attention back to herself.
‘Hello … Hi … What? Sorry – I can’t hear a thing; Cora’s shouting and it sounds as though you’re sitting on a tractor.’
‘I
am
sit … on a tract … or!’ he bellowed, though to Tash his voice was barely audible. ‘The bloo … muck … eap needed emptying and … know what Jenny’s … ike about revers … this … ing.’ Their head girl was terrified of the old yard tractor. ‘Your … mother’s here.’
‘My mother?’ She gasped in delight. Perhaps Alexandra had changed her mind about coming after all.
Hugo sounded far from delighted. ‘And your sister. They … to lunch, appar … tly.’
‘But Polly’s in Vietnam— shh, Cora.’ Tash lifted her chin up as
the little girl tried to grab at the phone. Denied her target, she shrieked at the top of her voice.
‘Not … olly. Th … sh … Jailbird … bloody inconvenient … lympic … bloody … uck off.’
‘What? I really can’t hear anything, Hugo.’
Realising Tash needed help with Cora, Alicia lunged forwards and started to try to distract her granddaughter by waving her cigarette around in pretty patterns and clinking the ice in her glass, blowing kisses and humming ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’. Cora, enchanted, fell silent and stared. Tash, appalled, couldn’t concentrate on what Hugo was saying at all.
‘Just get back here!’ he ordered and rang off.
It was a beautifully bright, blustery morning as Tash drove the short distance across Haydown land from Alicia’s cottage, which her mother-in-law grandly insisted upon calling The Dower House, but was in fact the old gamekeeper’s lodge. The avenue of beeches that led out of the woods was rustling feverishly overhead and casting dappled shadows through the open sunroof.
‘… and on that farm he had a cow, ee eye ee eye oh!’ Tash sang along to the nursery rhymes CD on the stereo. Behind her Cora was making ‘moo’ sounds from her car seat and pointing at a field of sheep through the window.
The land surrounding them was farmed by the same two tenant families that had maintained it when Henry Beauchamp had been alive. The fourth generations of the Bell and the Caroll families (the Ding Dongs and the Singalongs as they were affectionately known to the Beauchamps) were respectively custodians of a small mixed dairy, beef and sheep herd run on the sheltered and lush meadows of Lower Farm, and five hundred acres of arable on the fertile, open hills of Upper Farm. The rest of the estate was divided into huge tracts of dark, serried woodland and flinty, windswept downland that was variously leased out for shoots, timber production and grazing, plus the long tree-skirted valley of neglected parkland closer to the house, and the huge equestrian operation that Tash and Hugo ran from the main house and yard.
And Haydown House never failed to lift Tash’s heart when she saw it. A brick-and-flint William and Mary country house with the show-stoppingly perfect symmetrical face of a great classical beauty
and the broad shoulders of a paternal hug, it was an amazing place to call home. Perched high on the Berkshire Downs, on the edge of the pretty village of Maccombe, surrounded by protective high pink-brick walls, beautiful gardens and its courtyards of old stables, coach house, cottages and barns, it was a daydream of a place to live.
Even though it was getting very ragged around the edges, cost a fortune to run and was impossible to keep remotely clean and ordered, Tash adored it with a passion second only to that for her family and animals.
As she drove along the farm track that led past the orchards and then beneath the clock-tower archway into the old coaching yard she could see Hugo’s pack of dogs sunning themselves on the flagstones outside his office, but the door was wide open and the place deserted. Glancing left towards the biggest and oldest of the three stable yards she spotted Jenny, sporting a Team GB baseball cap, hosing one of the youngsters’ legs. Waving, she drove on past the big open barn that housed straw and hay and along the back drive to the house itself, passing the overgrown grass tennis court and croquet lawn, and the lichen-flecked walls of the kitchen gardens. Behind the house, by the peeling black-gloss back door to the boot room that absolutely everybody used when calling at the house, apart from Jehovah’s witnesses and travelling salesmen, a smart navy blue Golf was parked beside Hugo’s dusty Discovery.
Tash let out a groan of recognition. It wasn’t her mother that had arrived unexpectedly to lunch. It was her
step
mother, Henrietta.
On cue, she appeared at Tash’s own back door, the perfect hostess as opposed to a forgotten guest, all welcoming smiles and creamy blonde neatness in Berketex and pearls. Then a younger, pinker face topped with purple and green beaded dreadlocks appeared around the door behind her, and Tash realised that prodigal daughter and drug smuggler Beccy had come for lunch too.
‘Oh Christ,’ she covered her mouth in horrified recall.
She had issued the invitation weeks ago, without thinking how close to the Olympic and baby countdowns it would be. It hadn’t been long after Beccy had finally made it back to the UK amid a spattering of press coverage and a huge wave of family relief. Tash had been so excited and pleased that all her father’s hard work to exonerate Beccy and ensure her pardon from her fifteen-year sentence had paid off that she had picked a date at random. She must
have forgotten to write it in the diary. Henrietta meanwhile – as organised a wife, mother and stepmother as she had been a PA to James all those years ago – had stuck faithfully to it, bringing Beccy, a basket of home-made jam and biscuits, a lift-the-flap book for Cora and a clutch of Babygros for the bump. She had even brought a lamb bone for Tash’s dog, Beetroot.