The Country Set Read online

  ‘Must have lost your number,’ Petra deflected. ‘Really, there’s no flirtation between us.’ She fell silent as, with regrettable timing, a Land Rover appeared through a gate further along the lane, an arm dangling from the driver’s side, checked shirt rolled up to reveal Riviera-tanned skin, heavy Tag watch and glinting signet ring. It lifted in greeting as the driver spotted the riders in his wing mirror.

  Heart racing, blush rising, Petra waved back as he roared away, two retrievers swaying in the back.

  ‘Admit it, he’s your hot new SMC,’ teased Bridge, the Safe Married Crush being a Saddle Bags rite of passage.

  ‘Please let’s not bang on about it.’

  ‘Beats fecking gardening.’ The Connemara, catching sight of a whole family of lop-sided scarecrows in one garden, started to go backwards. ‘Oh, heck.’

  ‘Ride on my inside,’ Gill ordered briskly, blocking the pony’s escape and half passing her against the verge.

  As the foursome moved into a brisk trot past the monsters, Petra quashed a suspicion that Gill might be shadowing the grey to hide Bridge’s pink flowery wellies. They made an incongruous pair, school prefect with a naughty pupil, but that was true of all the Bags – one reason she was so absurdly fond of this particular friendship group, her lovely horse collective.

  The Bags’ conversations had got a bit prosaic lately, mind you. Petra wished something exciting would happen in the village to give them something new to talk about. A few scarecrows hardly measured up to the Bardswolds’ big-cat sightings, the transgender vicar or Eyngate Hall being used as a location for a Richard Curtis film last year. It was also a far cry from the intense era of hot-headed Bridge almost leaving husband Aleš on a weekly basis, or Mo’s dilemma when she thought her elderly parents were no longer coping as crisis followed crisis. Even dry-humoured Gill was usually guaranteed to keep them agog with tales from the equine clinic she ran with her cycling-fanatic husband Paul, a hub of local horse gossip and marital discord, but it had been a very dull summer.

  The Bags had a rule: what’s said in the saddle stays in the saddle. It was why they could all speak about their marriages so openly, sharing secrets with unswerving support, understanding and gales of laughter. Petra owed it to them to liven things up a bit, especially as she’d been the one to introduce the idea of the Safe Married Crush, their way of cheerfully deflecting from those neglectful husbands. Emotional infidelity didn’t count, she’d told the Saddle Bags cheerily. Feeling attracted to someone other than one’s spouse was as healthy as reading an escapist novel – or, in her case, writing one; you were secure in the knowledge that it was all in the mind. Now that her marriage was nearing the end of its second decade and lovemaking had waned to high days and holidays, Petra always tried to keep at least one SMC on the go, an instant guilt- and calorie-free heart-warmer. She justified these innocent infatuations by thinking of them as research. Inspiration for historical erotica was hard to come by when one’s entire life sometimes felt like a never-ending rota of drop-offs and pick-ups, co-ordinating the complicated demands of her teenage and tweeny children, commuter Charlie, and their menagerie of animals, often at the expense of her own fading career. The Safe Married Crush unleashed something wild in buxom, smoky-eyed Petra, which helped her write steamy fiction, as well as immunising her against her husband’s indifference.

  None of the Bags took the crushes seriously – Bridge’s on sleazy farrier Flynn was a cause of much hilarity, Mo’s on devilish lurcher-enthusiast and lamper Jed Turner more so, Gill’s on the oleaginous local MP an obvious smokescreen – but they were a source of fun during lean periods, comforters that helped them through the long weeks between Poldark series or anything starring James Norton, especially if one’s husband was only home at weekends, as Petra’s was. Until recently, her secret whim had lain safely with London theatre director Kit Donne but her eye had been drawn inexorably to Compton’s dishiest farmer.

  Bridge was right: she did have quite a big crush on Bay, but it was at a very delicate stage. The whole point of a Safe Married Crush was that it was innocent, and this one felt unnervingly reciprocal. The texts had been bouncing back and forth all summer, all the best Petra and regards Bay quickly becoming ‘Pxx’ and ‘Bx’. They’d be carving their names in tree trunks next.

  Lusting after Bay Austen was hardly an exclusive gig. Many village wives were in Petra’s SMC team. The sexy, roguish agricultural entrepreneur had long been the local pin-up, a good-looking charmer, whose cool Dragon’s Den business head had breathed new life into the family farm, turning his parents’ large arable holding, with its fishery and shoot, into a huge money-earner. Compton Manor Farm was now a Mecca for craftsmen, holidaymakers, yummy-mummies and foodies, with its business units, farm shop, micro-brewery, yurts and Wagyu cattle, while its small, exclusive shoot was legendary. Taking a gun at one of the Austens’ cliquey invitation-only days had long been an ambition of shooting-mad Charlie; celebrities and royals were reported to be regulars, along with enough City hedge-funders to enclose the Square Mile in privet and – most importantly to Charlie, whose occasionally ragged career at the Bar relied heavily upon old-school ties in the Legal 500 – a great many high-flying, crack-shot solicitors. His enthusiasm for an alliance between Bay and the Gunn family made her crush even more awkward: Charlie had even been overheard loudly encouraging the dashing farmer to buy Petra’s books for his very beautiful, very bored wife.

  Bay had bought Petra’s entire backlist – Got one for all the family! B – then teased her when he found out how racy the plots were: Kept them all to myself. Up all night reading, I am officially your biggest fan. Bx. A handsome, bouncy Labrador of a man, constantly waggy-tailed and encouraging, he was hard to put on a discreet pedestal. It had been so much easier to harbour her longing for Kit Donne, who visited his cottage so rarely that it was like fancying a distant celebrity. He’d once owned the Gunns’ farmhouse yet had no idea who Petra was. Bay, by contrast, had her number on speed-dial, a terrible reputation as a flirt and a way of looking at her that made her feel sexier than she had in years.

  ‘You got an idea for your new book yet?’ Mo huffed beside her.

  ‘No, but I’ve a feeling it’s going to have lots of bedroom scenes.’ She grinned.

  *

  ‘So have you gone to bed yet, mate?’ Ed Gunn hung upside down off his bunk ladder talking into his phone camera.

  ‘No, mate. How cool was that game? Those dudes in the States were Clash of the Clans pros, then when the Aussies joined us, I cracked open a Monster. Still buzzin’.’

  ‘Same here! It’s, like, da boss flipping it, yeah?’ He gave the camera eye a sideways-V peace sign. ‘My olds have no idea what I get up to whe—’ The phone was plucked out of his hand, the Skype call to a school friend abruptly ended. ‘What the fuh?’

  ‘Did you ask permission to use my phone?’

  Ed glared up at his older brother, a thin-lipped mask behind an overlong fringe, sixteen-year-old disciplinarian to thirteen-year-old upstart.

  ‘It’s not your phone, bro. It’s Dad’s old one.’

  ‘Which he gave to me when he upgraded.’ Fitz tossed aside his forelock, eyes narrow.

  ‘Yeah but you’re still using Mum’s old iPhone, so the BlackBerry is up for grabs.’ Ed turned the right way up, with effort, and clambered down from the ladder. ‘Mine’s jank, you know that, and the webcam’s broken on my laptop. That thing’s fully loaded and going to waste.’

  ‘Not the point.’ Fitz put it into his dressing-gown pocket. ‘The point is, Dad gave this to me. And you went into my room, went through my stuff, and took it without asking.’

  ‘Chill.’ Ed held up his hands, then slouched out of his room to go downstairs for Frosted Flakes and FaceTime on his mother’s tablet instead. ‘I saw in your bedside drawer by the way. Kinky.’

  Fitz lobbed a pillow after him, knowing his brother had seen nothing more incriminating than a few flash sticks, torches and old trading cards. The most perverted
thing in there by far was the phone, but he’d made sure its darkest secret was protected with a password that even geeky genius Ed would never crack. Their father was a dolt with technology, which was why Fitz had seen what he had on there. He was still working out what to do with it.

  He went up to the attic floor and put the phone back in his bedside drawer. Last night, while his brother was gaming with geeks around the world, Fitz had lain awake trying to work out what to do for the best. He was still no closer to an answer. He was Perseus squaring up to slay the monster without winged sandals or reflective shield.

  Named William, after a grandfather he’d disliked intensely, he had somewhat pretentiously adopted the name of his mother’s old college, Fitzwilliam, to differentiate him from the three other Williams in his year at boarding school. He was a sporty high achiever, socially aware and determined to be a big mover and shaker in human-rights law. Good-looking, charming and manipulative, he’d entered his GCSE year in every first team and top set, with captain’s badges and colours striping his blazer lapel, his parents’ golden boy, predicted to wipe the board with straight A stars come the summer. He’d worked blisteringly hard all year to maintain his momentum. Last term that had been turned upside down. Now Fitz was on borrowed time.

  Grabbing the phone back out of the drawer, he swiped past screens and passwords to the app, typing You bastard! and sending it. Then he went to wake his sisters.

  *

  Carly had eight-week-old Jackson asleep on her shoulder, like a hot, damp gym towel, a heavy weight that shifted as she spilled out breakfast cereal for Sienna and Ellis, both squabbling furiously over who got which bowl.

  ‘Want Toe Nauts!’ toddler Sienna yelled, gripping tightly onto Captain Barnacle with both hands. Just out of her high chair, she was taking a full-body approach to dining.

  ‘Peppa Pig is for girls!’ insisted Ellis, a diehard Octonauts fan who at four already had a bias against all things pink. Carly blamed Great-granddad Norm, the Turner family’s very own Vito Corleone, who greeted the little boy from the confines of his wheelchair with shadow-boxing grimaces and said things like ‘Who’s my big tough man, then?’

  The Turner family’s real big tough man – three feet taller and sixty kilos heavier than his scowling son – was still in bed.

  Leaving the children under ceasefire as they shovelled up sweet, milky treats, she took Ash a mug of tea. When he had been in the army, he’d always been the first up. Now day-to-day life reminded Carly of the weeks he’d been away on exercise in a different time zone, Skyping sleepily at two a.m. to find him squinting in broad daylight.

  Curtains still drawn, their bedroom was a sultry, shadowed hangover den.

  He stretched back, muscles moving beneath tattoos, a smile flashing through the stubble. Then he spotted Jackson and frowned. ‘Put him in his cot and get back into bed, bae.’

  ‘I can’t. I’m taking the kids out.’

  ‘It’s half seven.’ He yawned at the bedside clock.

  ‘They’ve been up since six. I’ve been up all night. They want to see the foals.’

  ‘You want to see them, you mean. Ellis just wants to go to the playground with his cousins. I was the same growing up.’

  Carly smiled vaguely, already aware that the Turners were far from the welcoming new regiment she’d hoped for – she didn’t share their bond of Traveller’s blood, which Ash claimed that decades of settling in one place and marrying out could never dilute. The horde of Turner kids, almost all much bigger than hers, was a close-knit bunch, currently ruling the village playground through the long school holidays, teens by night, tweens by day. She worried Ash was undergoing a similar Jekyll and Hyde transformation as old friendships were resurrected, his clan reabsorbing him as he shook off army discipline and embraced a more nebulous timetable. Unlike Carly, whose days revolved rigidly around the kids and her two part-time jobs, Ash had no fixed routine until his college course started in September, his social life an increasingly exclusive one that existed outside normal hours. They’d moved into the Orchard Estate three months ago, and Carly was still struggling to learn the names of his nocturnal gang of drinking friends and the many family members who were now neighbours, none of whom had shown much interest in her.

  ‘Where did you get to last night?’ She’d kept her voice deliberately light.

  ‘Out with the lads. You knew that.’

  ‘Until after four?’

  He took a sip of tea and grimaced as it scalded his lips. ‘Didn’t fancy walking back in that storm.’

  Thunder and lightning had ripped back and forth along their Cotswold ridge most of the night. It had made it impossible to settle Jackson, whose colicky screams had doubled under the onslaught, his brother and sister waking too.

  ‘Ended up at Flynn’s,’ he said now. ‘Lost sight of time, you know.’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ She stooped to kiss him, feeling his tongue against her teeth, which she kept clamped together in a placating smile. Carly didn’t trust Flynn, the village’s double-denimed rock-god throwback, an old school friend of Ash, recently divorced and out to prove he could do whatever he liked – mostly watching box sets and drinking home brew at antisocial hours. Having been married to the army for eight years, Ash was out to prove much the same thing.

  Jackson let out a bleat of protest, spine arching.

  ‘Have some more kip,’ Carly told Ash. ‘I’m working lunchtime, remember? I’ll leave them with your mum. We’ll all get out of your hair.’ It had grown wild since he’d quit the army, loose black curls springing up where there’d been a number-four buzz-cut. Carly’s Facebook friends oohed and aahed about how handsome he was whenever she shared a family selfie, but she missed her clean-cut soldier.

  He’d left the army four months ago, having served Queen and country long enough to receive his eight-year bonus. Despite a reputation for rebellion and a few close shaves with the military police, he’d done his regiment proud, received campaign and service medals, and was, his commander told him upon discharge, the very body of a soldier.

  Once Ash had made a decision, there was no discussion, no argument, no blackmail that could alter it. Carly had tried every trick she knew on the body of the soldier she loved, running through her full emotional and sexual repertoire – not easy with a huge baby bump and a molten lump in her throat – before she resigned herself to the fact that army life was over.

  She paused on the stairs now, her halfway hiatus between nocturnal Ash and their wide-awake kids, Jackson heavy and hot against her collarbone, the stairs carpet a Cadbury purple that showed every dust particle.

  Ash insisted it had always been his dream to settle with his family in the village where he’d grown up. ‘This will be our for-ever-after,’ he’d promised Carly, when they’d first walked around number three, almost asphyxiated by bleach and Febreze, compensated by every upstairs window looking out to fields and woods and allotments.

  Carly was good at moving house. An army daughter then wife, she’d done it countless times, and she was still only in her twenties. But this time they’d moved all alone without the regiment around them. And she wasn’t sure she’d wanted for-ever-after just yet.

  Ash’s elder sister had organised a council house for them. Carly was wary of Janine, a sister-in-law-unto-herself, whose possessive, controlling hold over the family was an unwelcome part of life. It was Janine’s three-bed semi in which she and Ash now lived, number three Quince Drive. Carly hadn’t quite worked out the deal. The Turner family rented at least nine of the Orchard Estate houses from the local authority, but the names on the tenancy agreements bore no relation to their occupants. Janine lived in Granddad Norm’s four-bedroomed link-detached on Damson Road, with three teenage children, only one of whom was hers. She had never married. After Robbie Williams and nail art, the biggest love of her life was little brother Ash.

  Propping Jackson in the crook of her arm, Carly clenched her fists, trying to discharge the static electricity in her fingert
ips. She’d felt a sense of foreboding since the storm had passed, chest tight, hands tingling. She’d suffered from it all her life, sometimes so bad that she could barely pick up a cup for the scalding heat in her fingers, the fire in her lungs making her mute. Her mum had called it a ‘healing gift’ and said it came from her grandmother. She’d been tested for asthma as a child, later high blood pressure and heart arrhythmia when pregnant, but her palpitations and hot hands were medical oddities, dismissed vaguely as psychosomatic stress.

  She pressed one flaming palm to her cheek now, trying to absorb the heat. It must be because she was worried about Ash. He pretended all was well, but his temper was quicker, his tall tales longer, their conversations briefer. Her fusilier was in danger of turning into a short-fused liar.

  Downstairs, Captain Barnaby’s and Peppa’s faces had re-appeared at the bottom of two bowls.

  ‘Are you ready to go and see Spirit?’ They’d nick-named their favourite foal after the Disney horse because he was the same unusual colour that they called ‘buckskin’ in the movie but was labelled ‘dun’ in the old encyclopaedia of horses Carly had bought at the village fête.

  Ellis and Sienna grabbed carrots from the vegetable rack, fighting over the biggest, then dropped down to pull their wellies onto the wrong feet. As they did so, Carly caught the glint of gold jewellery and a flash of tanned thigh as Janine paused at the side gate, pink talons scrabbling at the bolt as she let herself into the garden. A stranger to doorbells, Janine preferred the proprietorial stealth of bursting in through the back door on dawn raids.

  She ran her cleaning business, Feather Dusters, like an East End protection racket, with mops and Henry Hoovers in place of firearms. She had the monopoly on domestic and commercial contracts in the village and guaranteed cheap labour from family members. Carly’s work-rate was twice that of most of Janine’s team, meaning she was always in demand for the rota. While she hoped to find a job that would give her a break from the Turner family, she appreciated the extra money, and the kids were coping fine with their nan looking after them on the days she worked. But today she had a waitressing shift at a local hotel and didn’t want Janine to strong-arm her into calling in sick so she could help her bring up a weekend cottage’s wet-room grout like new.