Jilly Cooper: Polo

Queen Augusta’s Boarding School for Girls has a splendid academic reputation, but on a sweltering afternoon in June one of its pupils was not paying attention to her English exam. While her classmates scribbled away, Perdita Macleod was drawing a polo pony. Outside, the scent of honeysuckle drifted in through the french windows, the cuckoo called from an acid-green poplar copse at the end of the lawn. Perdita, gazing out, thought longingly of the big tournament at Rutshire Polo Club where the semi-finals of the Rutshire Cup were being played. All her heroes were taking part: Ricky France-Lynch, Drew Benedict, Seb and Dommie Carlisle, the mighty Argentines, Miguel and Juan O’Brien, and, to crown it, the Prince of Wales.

Fretfully, Perdita glanced at her exam paper which began with a poem by Newbolt:

‘ And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat ,’ she read,

‘Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,

But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote –

Play up! Play up! and play the game!’

‘Are Newbolt’s views of team spirit outdated?’ asked the first question. Perdita took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote ‘Yes’ in her disdainful blue scrawl, ‘the schoolboy in the poem must be an utter jerk and a poofter to boot to prefer his captain’s hand on his shoulder to a season’s fame and a ribboned coat.’

She put down her pen and thought how much she’d like a ribboned coat, one of those powder-blue blazers, braided with jade-green silk. Hamish, her ghastly stepfather, never gave her nearly a large enough allowance. Then she thought of fame. Perdita wanted to be a famous polo player more than anything else in the world. Being at a boarding school, she could not play in the term-time and had so far only achieved the first team of a suburban pony club of hopelessly low standard. When her family moved to their splendid new house in Rutshire in the autumn, however, she’d be able to have a pony and join a good club like Rutshire or Cirencester just over the border.

God, she was bored with this exam. She lit a cigarette, hoping it would encourage her form-mistress, who was adjudicating, to expel her. But, despite the furious wavings of paper by the swot on her right, her form-mistress didn’t react. She was far too engrossed in Perdita’s Jackie Collins, which she’d confiscated the day before and round which she’d now wrapped the dust jacket of Hilary Spurling’s biography of Ivy Compton-Burnett.

Perdita took another drag and glanced at the next question: ‘Do you find the poems of Thomas Hardy unduly preoccupied with death?’

It wasn’t an afternoon for death. Perdita slid through the french windows across the sunlit lawn. Once out into Rutminster High Street, she tugged out the tails and undid the top buttons of her shirt, hitched up her navy-blue skirt a few inches and wrinkled her navy-blue socks. Conscious that men fancied schoolgirls, she left on her black and pink striped tie, but loosened her hair from its tortoiseshell clasp so it cascaded white-blond down her back, eliciting wolf-whistles from two workmen mending the road.

Perdita stuck her nose in the air; her sights were set higher than roadmenders. She was a big girl for fourteen, tall and broad in the shoulder, with pale, luminous skin and a full, sulky mouth. A long Greek nose and large, very wide-apart eyes, as dark as elderberries, gave her the look of a creature of fable, a unicorn that might vanish at any moment.

The main gates of Rutshire Polo Club were swarming with police because of the Prince’s visit. Taking a short cut, Perdita clambered over a wall to the right, fighting her way through the undergrowth, scratching her legs on brambles and stinging nettles, until she reached the outskirts of the club. A vast emerald-green ground stretched ahead of her. On the right were the pony lines, where incredibly polished ponies, tied to iron rails in the shade of a row of horse chestnuts, were stamping, nudging, flattening ears at each other and aiming kicks at any fly eating their bellies.

God, they were beautiful, thought Perdita longingly, and curiously naked and vulnerable with their hogged manes and bound-up tails.

Beyond the pony lines stood the little clubhouse with its British, American and Argentine flags. Beyond that reared the stands and the pink-and-white tent for the sponsors’ lunch before Sunday’s final. Cars for today’s semi-final already lined both sides of the field. Polo fever had reached an all-time high this season due to the Prince’s impending wedding to Lady Diana Spencer.

Ringing Ground One and Ground Two behind the clubhouse were massive ancient trees, their wonderful variety of green occasionally interrupted by the rhubarb-pink of a copper beech. With their lower branches nibbled level by itinerant cows, they looked like an army of dowagers in midi-dresses. To the north, through this splendidly impressive backdrop, could be glimpsed the rose-pink roof of Rutminster Hall, a charming Queen Anne manor house, home of Sir David Waterlane, a polo fanatic who owned the surrounding nine hundred acres.

Perdita scratched her nettle stings. The moment she was famous, she decided darkly, as an orange and black striped helicopter landed on the greensward behind the clubhouse, she would go everywhere by air. Envy turned to excitement as the helicopter doors burst open and two young players, both in evening shirts and dinner jacket trousers, jumped out. Instantly Perdita recognized Seb and Dommie Carlisle, otherwise known as the Heavenly Twins. Vastly brave, blond and stocky like two golden bear cubs, it was said that any girl in the twins’ lives, and there were legions, had to play second fiddle to polo and the other twin.

Next moment a small, fat, bald man with the tiny mean eyes and wide jaw of a bilious hippo, who was wearing an orange-and-black polo shirt and straining white breeches, charged up bellowing, ‘For Christ’s sake, hurry up. The umpires are waiting to go on. We should have started five minutes ago. Why are you so late?’

‘We started late,’ said Seb Carlisle, putting his arm round the fat man’s shoulders. ‘Dommie had this terrific redhead.’

‘No, Seb had this terrific brunette,’ came the muffled tones of Dommie Carlisle. Having whipped his shirt over his head to reveal a bronzed and incredibly muscular back, he nearly collided with the little fence round the clubhouse as he desperately tried to undo his cufflinks from the outside.

‘Well, if I can be on time, I can’t see why you bloody can’t,’ shouted the fat man, whom Perdita now identified as Victor Kaputnik. Originally Hungarian, Victor was a pharmaceutical billionaire and famous polo patron who employed the twins as professionals and whose helicopter and fuel had just transported them from London.

Polo players are rated by handicap, which ranges from minus two goals, which means an absolute beginner, to ten goals for the very top-class player. This has nothing to do with the number of goals they may score, but is an indication of their ability. Although only twenty, the twins already had four-goal handicaps. Much of their energy was spent ripping off Victor Kaputnik. Longingly, Perdita watched them sprint into the clubhouse.

Outside, people carrying glasses of Pimm’s or beer were drifting towards the stands. Perdita was dying for a Coke and a sandwich, but she hadn’t brought any money. She lit another fag to take the edge off her appetite. Looking at the scoreboard, she saw that today’s first semi-final was a needle match between Victor’s team, the Kaputnik Tigers, who were wearing orange-and-black shirts, and the Alderton Flyers, in duck-egg blue, who were all four sitting near a Lamborghini parked under a chestnut tree, zipping up their boots. There was The Hon. Basil Baddingham, a notorious roué with patent-leather hair and a laughing, swarthy face, who gave Perdita a terrific eyemeet, and Drew Benedict, a clashing blond captain in the Welsh Guards, with very regular features and eyes to match his blue shirt. And there, Perdita caught her breath, was her utter, utter God: Ricky France-Lynch, grimly fastening on his kneepads and refusing to exchange banter with the others. Ricky, who had the beautiful, lean, powerful body, the coarse, black curls and the sensitive, yet virile, features of a Russian ballet dancer, was the best-looking player in England, and had a nine-goal handicap. The most talented and dedicated player, he was also the most tricky. Not for nothing had the Argentine players nicknamed him El Orgulloso , the proud one.