Jilly Cooper - Score!

‘Oh, how lovely!’ cried Lucy ecstatically. ‘Look at its nose, and its head and little legs.’

‘Rather like E.T.’ Meredith took the photograph gingerly as if it were a newborn baby.

‘What a little angel,’ said Oscar, who was the proud father of five.

‘Hello, Tab,’ shouted Griselda, as Tabitha half sheepishly, half defiantly, sidled into the canteen and dropped her bag on an empty table. ‘Come and look at this sweet little babba.’

‘Oh, no,’ Lucy muttered. But it was too late.

As Tab gazed at the photograph, tears trickled down her cheeks.

‘It’s adorable,’ she whispered. Next moment she had fled.

‘What is the matter with that girl today?’ grumbled Ogborne.

‘Someone’s left a bag,’ said Simone, who noticed everything.

Inside were only a tattered Dick Francis, a bottle of Evian, a Coutts Switch card and photos of Isa, Sharon and The Engineer.

‘It’s Tab’s,’ said Wolfie.

‘Not the sort to bother with a compact, lipstick or even a comb,’ said Chloe dismissively.

‘She doesn’t need to,’ Wolfie was amazed to hear himself saying.

Behind his smooth, broad, fast-browning back, Meredith and Baby exchanged glances.

‘Do you think he and Tab are going to be the next item?’ Griselda whispered excitedly to Simone, who was suddenly looking very sad.

Tab refused to answer her telephone but, seeing her dirty green Golf outside Magpie Cottage, Wolfie decided to return her bag in the tea-break. Through the car windows, he breathed in great wafts of wild garlic pestled by rain and the soapy smell of the hawthorns. In the lane up to Magpie Cottage, light brown puddles reflected hedgerows and overhanging trees like an album of sepia photographs.

Tab’s lawn was blue with speedwell. A few white irises were fighting a losing battle with the nettles round the egg-yolk-yellow front door. The reek of more wild garlic from the woods behind didn’t altogether disguise the stench of unemptied dustbins. No-one answered the bell, so Wolfie let himself in.

Tabitha, cuddling Sharon on the sofa, was wearing a pale green vest, a bikini bottom, dirty gym shoes and was watching racing on television with the sound turned down. Her face was deathly white, except for her reddened eyes, but nothing could take away the beauty of her long pale legs.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

Sharon, who had better manners, jumped down and brought Wolfie a small rug, revealing a pile of dust. Wolfie handed Tab her bag.

‘I brought this back.’

‘Thanks.’ Staggering to her feet, kicking an empty half-bottle of vodka under the sofa, antagonism fighting with loneliness in her eyes, Tab asked him if he’d like a cup of tea.

Wolfie followed her into the kitchen and nearly fainted.

‘I’m sorry.’ Tab smashed a cup, as she tried to get the kettle under the tap in a hopelessly overcrowded sink. ‘I only tidy up before Isa comes back.’

She had cut herself on the cup. Tugging off a piece of kitchen roll, Wolfie wrapped it round her finger, then started to load the contents of the sink, mostly glasses, into the dishwasher, which was empty except for a shoal of silver on the bottom.

‘How’s your marriage?’ he asked.

‘A bed of roses.’

Wolfie looked sceptical.

‘With the thorns sticking upwards,’ said Tab.

‘You could stop drinking.’

‘I don’t drink at all, I’ve given up.’

‘What’s this, then?’ Wolfie produced the Evian bottle out of her bag.

Tab brightened. ‘I’d forgotten that. I think we’re out of tea-bags.’ Fretfully she opened a cupboard and a lot of pasta packets descended on her head. ‘Oh, Christ, we’d better have a slug of that instead.’

But before she could grab the Evian bottle, Wolfie had emptied it into the sink.

‘Whydya want to waste perfectly good alcohol?’ screamed Tab. ‘Now what am I going to do?’

‘Go to AA.’

‘One is supposed to meet rather nice men there. I might find a new husband.’

‘I’ll take you along. There must be a Rutminster branch. I’ll check out the time of the next meeting.’

‘Just stop it,’ Tab flared up again.

Hearing a patter on the trees outside, Wolfie glanced across the valley at tassels of rain hanging from the clouds. They wouldn’t be shooting for a bit.

Why had she been so upset at lunchtime? he asked, knowing the answer, but feeling she needed to talk.

‘It reminded me of my own baby,’ muttered Tab. ‘Isa won’t discuss it — won’t really discuss anything. Then I got a letter from Mummy this morning, raving about my brother Marcus’s recital in Moscow. And how charming Alexei, Marcus’s lover, was being. I bet she drives him crackers, and the mean old cow’s locked her bedroom door so I can’t help myself to her stuff.’

Wolfie laughed but, noticing Tab shivering, unearthed a bottle of orange squash, poured an inch into a mug and switched on the kettle as she talked.

‘Even if everyone else thought I was a nightmare,’ Tab was saying, ‘I was always convinced I could whistle Daddy back. Marrying Isa was the easiest way to hurt him. Christ, I need a drink.’

Wolfie poured the boiling water on to the orange squash.

‘Have this instead.’

‘And another thing,’ Tab was pacing round the kitchen, ‘everyone cooing over the photograph of that baby reminded me how jealous and awful I was when my stepsister Perdita arrived, and even worse when Daddy and Taggie adopted Xav and Bianca. I tried to be good, but I wasn’t.’

As she hung her blonde head, she reminded Wolfie of the cowslips fading in the valley.

‘So did I,’ he said roughly. ‘I was Papa’s first child, and now I have seven stepbrothers and sisters, not to mention Little Cosmo, and a pack of illegits, and I wanted to kill each one when it arrived. I remember thinking, When will Papa ever have the tiniest bit of love or time left for me?’

‘You do make me feel better,’ sighed Tab. ‘If Mummy suddenly gets pregnant we can drown our sorrows.’

As she took a sip of orange squash listlessly, Wolfie noticed how thin her arms were. ‘When did you last eat?’

‘Dunno.’

The telephone rang.

‘You answer it.’ Tab led him back into the sitting room.

If it were Isa, it might make him sit up, but it was Bernard breathing fire.

‘Gotta go,’ said Wolfie, putting down the receiver, then blushing. ‘Would you like to have dinner tonight?’

‘Men don’t ask me out.’

For a second Wolfie thought Tab was going to cry.

‘You’re like a very rare and beautiful orchid,’ he stammered. ‘People feel they ought not to pick you.’

‘That’s nice.’ For a second Tab examined Wolfie’s dark blue eyes, matching his polo shirt, his square-jawed, slightly old-fashioned Action Man features, his reddish complexion turning brown. He would make a good, dependable friend.

‘I’d like to,’ she said.

‘I’ll take you to Shako’s.’

‘We’d never get in.’

‘Wanna bet? There are advantages in having a famous surname. We can take your dustbins to the tip on the way.’

‘Oh look! There’s Daddy.’

Tab lurched towards the television, turning up the sound and fingering her father’s face. Wolfie and he were both tall and blond but it was like comparing a cob with a thoroughbred.

Rupert had just paid seventy-five thousand to make a late entry in the Derby.

‘That’s a lot of money,’ John Oaksey was saying. ‘You must be sure Peppy Koala’ll do well.’

‘Very,’ said Rupert.

‘Oh, my God.’ Tabitha had turned as pale green as her vest. ‘If Peppy Koala wins, Isa will murder me.’

She rang at nine o’clock just as Wolfie was leaving Valhalla, her voice slurred.