Faith’s mouth opened and closed, hot words burning themselves out on her tongue as she thought of every argument to refuse to go. She couldn’t leave Rory behind at such a critical time, nor deprive him of the chance to compete her horse Baron Areion, who had now changed disciplines from dressage to eventing and was flying through the ranks. In the end all she could splutter was: ‘Rio is staying here!’ and run to her room to ring her best friend, Carly. When there was no answer, she texted:
PICK UP – URGENT!!!
She rang the number again on redial, but again the call went straight through to voicemail.
Had it been anybody else, Faith would charitably assume that their phone was out of charge, or that they were out of range, in a tunnel, in the theatre or in hospital – possibly dead. But Carly never, ever allowed her precious pink Motorola to be out of connection.
Carly had been avoiding Faith all week. The on-off best friend status, having been firmly on in recent weeks, now appeared to be off just when Faith badly needed advice.
When the Brakespear family had moved from Essex to the Cotswolds, separating the two teenage friends by almost two hundred miles, Faith’s tenacity and loyalty, matched with Carly’s need for a sounding board outside her immediate social group, had kept the friendship alive. For over two years they had emailed, texted and often spoken daily.
At first glance unlikely allies, the girls had become friends at school when bonding through their mutual passion for horses. Then, as now, Faith was gangly, gingery, frizzy-haired, flat-chested and socially inept, but she had one great asset that made pony-mad Carly court her adoringly. She was a naturally gifted rider, her wealth of horsemanship gleaned from growing up with two dressage Olympians as parents. The girls became great foils, and the tradeoff was simple. Streetwise Carly had the glamour, feminine wiles and know-how with boys, and Faith had the riding expertise.
As well as adapting to long-distance separation, their friendship had this year even survived the ultimate betrayal when Carly had got a boyfriend. Hugely sensible, bright and straight-talking, Faith made a perfect sounding board through the ups and downs of first love.
Recently, in the wake of the monumental split between these two lovebirds – at least as traumatic and calamitous as Brad and Jen, according to Carly – the friendship had been experiencing a purple patch. Through the weeks of A level exams and then celebratory holidays combined with anxious waits for results, Faith had drawn surprising satisfaction from helping her friend through the break-up. In exchange, Carly had galvanised Faith’s determination to change her own life for ever.
Faith’s mother Anke might have been concerned that all the late-night chats and emails were distracting her from her revision, but in fact they’d had the opposite effect, focusing her on the importance of academic credentials when faced with the sketchiness of Carly in a crisis and the fact that her friend was blowing all her chances of scraping the two Cs and a D required to get into the University of Essex.
‘How can I concentrate on media studies when my heart is broken?’ she had lamented to Faith.
Faith, whose own heart had long been hammered hard by its fruitless love for charming, womanising Rory, sympathised, although Carly failed to see the parallels at first.
‘Your crush on that posh bungalow is nothing to my love for Grant!’ she had raged.
Faith agreed wholeheartedly. ‘That’s why I need your help getting the posh bungalow to raise his shutters and see me blossom as soon as exams are over.’
With A levels behind them, it was time for Carly to assist Faith’s plans to make Rory see her as more than just a tomboy cross-patch.
Carly was six months older than Faith, an age advantage she liked to point out with the sort of pride that insinuated the age gap was the equivalent of light years socially – and in many ways it was. Pretty, busty, petite and as blonde one month as she was raven-haired the next, Carly kept up with the latest trends in fashion, music, TV and language with an insatiable appetite for weekly gossip magazines. Her heroines were Posh Spice, Paris Hilton and
Sylva Frost. She had even gained that ultimate credential – cosmetic surgery (admittedly it was just having her ears pinned back on the NHS, but it still counted). She had always led the way with the opposite sex while Faith trotted around in circles, but now it was time for Faith to gallop alongside her.
In recent weeks the friends had a worked out a seduction strategy to make Rory fall in love with Faith at long last; she would acquire a whiter than white smile, buoyant 32EE Hollywood ice cream scoop boobs, a pert bottom and a tiny button nose to wow him and become his inseparable other half, living, riding and competing side by side like Tash and Hugo Beauchamp or her mother’s friends the Moncrieffs.
Having won a small cash fortune in a local competition the previous year – wisely gathering interest in a savings account thus far – Faith was, on Carly’s advice, now planning to blow the lot on a makeover of industrial proportions. She had already made contact with a top London dentist and a cosmetic surgeon, although couldn’t actually book the veneers, boob job, nose job, lipo and chin implant until after her eighteenth birthday because she would need her mother’s permission before then.
But now that she had almost come of age and could at last green-light the offensive, she’d suddenly come up against a serious obstacle and urgently needed Carly’s help.
Again she texted
PICK UP!!!
. Again her subsequent call was redirected to voicemail.
Faith howled with frustration.
The following Saturday was her eighteenth birthday. Having anticipated it eagerly for weeks, she now doubted that her best friend was even planning to come to the party her family were foisting upon her. It was vital that Carly was there to help her get ready and to discuss the way forward.
But Anke had just scuppered all her daughter’s well-laid plans to lay Rory and share his life. Ironically, she had done this by using links with her own horsy ex-husband, the other half of the legendary über-pairing, the most talked about equestrian duo for over a decade, who had simply been known as ‘Anke and Kurt’.
At last her phone burst into life with the ringtone that she had assigned only to her most intimate loved ones. ‘Two Souls’ by Dillon Rafferty rang out to pull at her heartstrings and lift her spirits.
But it wasn’t Carly, or Rory; it was her brother Magnus, calling to congratulate her on finishing her A levels and ask if he could bring a couple of extra guests to her party.
‘Depends who,’ she hedged.
‘Nell …’
Faith groaned. Magnus’s ex Nell, with whom he had a one-year-old daughter Giselle, was always horribly conceited and pointedly ignored her whenever they met.
‘… and her new boyfriend, now that it’s official.’ The crowd noise in the background was almost drowning him out. ‘I’ve just spoken to them in New York. He sends his love, by the way.’
‘His what?’
‘His love!’ Magnus repeated loudly. ‘The guy adores you. He’s never got over the day you legged up his lead guitarist on to one of Rory’s horses so powerfully that he flew clean over it. I think he wants to offer you a job as his personal bodyguard.’
‘Might be better than a year in Essex.’ Faith sighed, wondering how much her brother knew about the Kurt offer.
But someone was calling Magnus off the phone now. ‘So I can bring them, yeah?’
‘Okay.’ She agreed as casually as she could, heart skipping.
Tellingly, when Faith texted Carly yet again, this time to let her know of the VIP additions to the guest list, she got a call straight back from her friend, ‘Two Souls’ trilling out from the little Samsung on her bedside table. She listened to the whole of the refrain before answering.
‘You are
joking
me, right?’ Carly demanded breathlessly. ‘Dillon Rafferty is
so
not coming to your party.’
‘He is. I told you. He’s a mate of Magnus’s, after all.’
‘Ohmygod, I can’t believe Magnus is your brother. He’s
so
cool.’
‘He’s okay.’ Faith found it impossible to see her brother as anything other than a trendy dork who played guitar with admirable talent – and who wrote very catchy songs with lyrics she didn’t quite understand.
With his girlfriend Dilly, he had now recorded an album that was enjoying modest success on the back of the music festivals they’d been playing. The duo had developed a local fan base and increasing word-of-mouth popularity. It barely registered on the celeb scale compared to Dillon Rafferty’s stratospheric fame, but Faith was still
growing increasingly proud of her lofty, blond brother and his undoubted talent.
‘I can’t believe I let Magnus slip through my fingers.’ Carly sighed, having once snogged Faith’s brother at a barbecue when he was a spotty teenager. ‘He’s really made the big time if he mixes with Dillon Rafferty.’
‘
I
know Dillon personally,’ Faith reminded her hotly. ‘He owns some event horses at Rory’s yard, remember. We go way back. That’s why he wants to come to my party.’
‘T’yeah!’ Carly scoffed disbelievingly. ‘And I have a hot date with R-Pattz next weekend, so I’m going to have to blow you out.’
‘You are coming, aren’t you?’ Faith checked in a panic. She hated parties and was only really going along with this one to keep her mother happy, and because it enabled her to have an essential confab with Carly about her makeover, or Double-D Day as Carly had dubbed it.
‘Course.’
‘So why haven’t you been answering my calls?’
‘Dad’s confiscated my mobile because the last bill he got for it was over three hundred. He is
so
mean. I’m only allowed one call and two texts a day.’
‘I
am
privileged.’
‘Too right you are. I got a text from Grant today asking me to call him. He wants us to get back together.’
‘And you called me instead?’ Faith was wildly gratified.
‘Yeah. Well, I think I’ll make Grant stew until after your party. Who knows – I might get lucky. Not that Cotswolds guys are a patch on Essex lads.’
‘They’re much better!’ Faith said hotly, thinking of Rory. ‘Yours are all footballers, boy bands and reality TV stars.’
‘At least they’re under fifty. Yours are all wrinkly has-been actors and ancient rock grandfathers. Talking of which, isn’t
the
Rockfather moving in up the road from you? Are you sure you’re not getting Daddy muddled up with son and Pete’s the one coming to your party – I hear he likes young girls. You might be in there …’
‘Don’t be disgusting! He’s
so
old!’ Faith squealed with laughter.
For months it had been common local knowledge that Dillon Rafferty’s even more famous rock-legend father, Pete ‘the Rockfather’ Rafferty, had bought magnificent Fox Oddfield Abbey,
just a couple of miles from his son’s more modest working-farm country retreat, and after lengthy renovation work that had kept all the locals agog was poised to move in with his young model wife. The press were on tenterhooks for moving day – and out in force in the locality – in the hope of capturing any reconciliation between Pete and Dillon. The father–son relationship was famously fiery, and the two had now been estranged for several years. It was rumoured that the Rockfather’s move to the Lodes Valley was a big gesture towards rapprochement.
‘My mum is really excited,’ Faith told Carly now. ‘Can you believe she used to have all Mask’s albums when she was my age? She swears he was as big as Dillon then, and just as good looking, although I can’t see it. Pete Rafferty is such an old raisin.’
‘Maybe he’s your real dad!’ Carly suddenly shrieked. ‘He lived in Ireland for ages, didn’t he?’
‘Pete Rafferty is not my biological father,’ Faith said through gritted teeth, wishing Carly didn’t always see her unconventional parentage like the plot of
Mamma Mia
. ‘And he is
not
coming to my party, Dillon is. You don’t have to believe me until you see for yourself, but you
do
have to promise me that you won’t go all silly when he’s near or flirt with him, because he’s off limits. Like Rory’s off limits. Dillon’s bringing Nell Cottrell. It’s all over the papers – you must have seen it.’
A fortnight earlier a tabloid had photographed trust-fund babe Nell coming out of Dillon’s London townhouse one Sunday afternoon, wearing the same clothes that she had been wearing when the couple had been snapped leaving Bungalow 8 in the early hours of Saturday morning. ‘Raff’s Lost Weekend with Single Mum’ the headline had shouted, much to Nell’s disgust. The media had been after the story for weeks: Dillon Rafferty, the heartthrob superstar whose comeback single had been at the top of the charts all summer, had a new love interest.
‘Ohmygod, it
is
her!’ Carly clearly believed that, at least. ‘I read about in
Closer
this week and thought I recognised the name. It’s that poisonous cow who tried to trap Magnus, isn’t it? What do men
see
in her?’
‘She’s very beautiful.’
‘If you like the boyish Carla Bruni look,’ Carly sniffed.
‘Some men do,’ Faith mused, fleetingly wondering whether she
really needed to endure the pain of a boob op. Rory had also once been in love with Nell, after all – a girl in possession of a chest as flat as her own. But that was years ago and Rory’s cleavage tastes had evolved, besides which, whereas Nell had the sexily androgynous look of a tall Milanese street urchin, Faith had the wide-shouldered heavy features of a rugby forward.
‘Only closet gays, in my experience,’ Carly was pondering androgyny and sex appeal.
‘Dillon Rafferty is
not
a closet gay.’
‘If you say so. You obviously know him
so well
…’ Carly said then, realising that cutting off her nose to spite her face was not wise when she desperately wanted to come and advise Faith on how to have her nose redesigned to suit her face, she hastily added, ‘I promise I won’t flirt with him or swoon in his starry presence if he actually turns up, which I somehow doubt. Please tell me you have
some
decent single lads coming, that don’t have number-one albums all over the globe and a leech girlfriend parking her Kelly bag on their Porsche dashboard. I
have
to make Grant jealous. I called you instead of him today, remember? Don’t let me down, Faith.’