Jilly Cooper - Polo

Standing slightly apart from the other three, swinging a polo stick furiously round and round, and champing to get into the fray, was their patron, Bart Alderton. An American airplane billionaire and the owner of television stations and newspapers, Bart was a still strikingly handsome man in his late forties, with thick grey hair, tinged with red like a wolf’s pelt and a belligerent suntanned face. One of the most renowned and feared predators in the world markets, where he snapped up companies before they could even blink, Bart had houses and strings of polo ponies in five countries. Known as the artful tax dodger, he seldom paid tax in any of them.

Today Bart was determined to wipe the floor with his old rival Victor Kaputnik, whom Bart had taken a girl off many years ago, and who in revenge last year had appealed to the Monopolies Commission and blocked Bart’s taking over a leading British airplane manufacturer.

Victor had brought down a new bimbo who he was keen to impress and was equally anxious to win.

Bart had Drew Benedict, Basil Baddingham and Ricky France-Lynch on his team for the English season. Bart liked Drew and Bas, who were amateurs, suitably deferential and prepared to socialize with him for the sake of having all their bills picked up. Ricky, who earned a long salary playing for Bart as a professional, was an entirely different proposition. Bart resented Ricky’s arrogance and detachment. He was incommunicative before matches and disappeared home like smoke afterwards. Today he’d even refused to have a team meeting, arguing that there was no point when Bart never did anything he was told.

It further irritated Bart, as the teams walked down to the stretch of green behind the back line where the grooms were warming up their ponies for the first chukka, that all the girls gazed at Ricky, not at him.

The Alderton Flyers were shortly joined on the field by the Kaputnik Tigers, who consisted of Victor Kaputnik, who’d just taken out his teeth and had a slug of brandy to steady his nerves, the Carlisle twins, who erupted on to the field as joyous as otters, and a nine-goal Chilean player called Jesus, who lived in Victor’s house and coached him every day and with whom Victor had just had a blazing row, because the Chilean had run up a £5,000 telephone bill, ringing his girlfriend in Chile.

‘Talk about Chile con carphone,’ said Seb Carlisle, collapsing with laughter, as the two sides formed up on the halfway line.

A second later the umpire, in his striped shirt, had thrown the white ball in, sticks slashed and cracked, stirrups chinked and expletives flew as the players struggled to get it out, followed by a hailstorm of hooves on the dry ground as everyone hurtled towards goal.

Blocking a cut-shot from Jesus, Ricky took the ball back upfield, changing direction three times to fox the opposition. As he hurtled towards goal in a cloud of dust, the obvious pass was to Drew on his right. Looking towards Drew, Ricky flicked a lovely under-the-neck shot round to Bas, who slammed the ball between the posts.

‘Bloody marvellous,’ screamed Perdita, jumping up and down. The rest of the crowd clapped languidly.

As the Tigers edged ahead, however, it was plain to Perdita, who was watching every stroke, that Bart was a much better player than Victor, who despite the Chilean’s coaching, just cantered about getting in everyone’s way. Ricky, she realized, was much the best player, but his team-mate, the blue-eyed Drew Benedict, normally the most dependable of players, must have been celebrating too heavily last night. Missing pass after pass, he was having the greatest difficulty in controlling the Chilean’s dazzling aggression.

Sitting in the stands with the sun behind them, sat the wives and girlfriends of the players, but all wearing dark glasses, so no one could see if they were bored. Bart Alderton’s wife, Grace, a puritan mother in her forties, had breeding and old money and did a huge amount for charity. Marrying her after ditching his loyal and loving first wife had given Bart the connections and the extra cash to turn him into a billionaire. Described by Basil Baddingham as the only social grace Bart had acquired on the way up, Grace was wearing a Cartier watch, a string of pearls and a purple silk dress printed with pansies. Her dark hair was drawn back in a bun, and a straw hat with a purple silk band shaded her austere but beautiful face. Grace considered suntans both vulgar and ageing. In her soft white hands lay a red notebook in which she kept the score and recorded every botched shot and missed penalty during the game and the name of the Alderton Flyer responsible.

Next to Grace sat Sukey Elliott, who’d got engaged to Drew Benedict the day before – hence Drew’s hangover. She seemed to remember every match played and goal scored by Drew in the last two seasons. A keen horsewoman herself, Sukey was the sort of girl who could get up and do the ponies if Drew had a hangover. Sukey had a neat, rather than an exciting, figure, and a horsey, not unattractive, face. Her light brown hair was taken off her forehead by a velvet bow. She was wearing a blue-spotted shirt-waister dress for the party Lady Waterlane always gave in her beautiful house across the park on the Thursday evening of Rutshire Cup Week.

Sukey would make the perfect army wife, always showing a charming deference to the wives of superiors, in this case Grace Alderton. But even more valuable in Drew’s eyes, Sukey possessed a hefty private income which, after marriage, would enable him to resign his commission and play polo full time.

‘We’re thinking of having our wedding list at either the General Trading Company or Peter Jones or Harrods. Which would you suggest?’ Sukey asked Grace.

On Sukey’s left in the row below sat Victor’s bimbo, a red-headed night-club hostess called Sharon, whose heavy eye make-up was running and whose uplifted breasts were already burning.

‘Blimey it’s ’ot,’ she said to Sukey. ‘Why do the ’orses keep bumpin’ into each uvver?’

Grace would have ignored Sharon, regarding her as both common and part of the opposition. Sukey was kinder and enjoyed imparting information.

‘It’s called a ride-off,’ she explained. ‘When a ball is hit, it creates its own right of way, and the player who hit it is entitled to hit it again. But if another player puts his horse’s shoulder in front of that first player’s horse’s shoulder, and a good horse will feel the pressure and push the other horse off the line, then the second player takes up the right of way. If you cross too closely in front of another rider – like someone shooting out in front of you on the motorway – it’s a foul.’

‘Ow, I see,’ said Sharon, who plainly didn’t. ‘And why does the scoreboard say Victor’s team’s winning when there seem to have been more goals down the uvver end?’

‘That’s because they change ends after each goal,’ said Sukey kindly, ‘so no-one gets the benefit of the wind.’

‘I could do with the benefit of some wind,’ said Sharon, fanning herself with her programme. ‘It’s bleedin’ ’ot.’

‘It is,’ agreed Sukey. ‘Would you like to borrow my hat?’

Grace Alderton thought Sukey was a lovely young woman who would make a splendid wife for Drew. She did not feel at all the same about Chessie France-Lynch who rolled up halfway through the fourth chukka in a coloured vest, no bra, frayed denim bermudas and torn pink espadrilles, clutching a large glass of Pimm’s and a copy of Barchester Towers. Chessie, who had bruised, scabious-blue eyes, and looked like a Botticelli angel who’d had too much nectar at lunchtime, made no secret of the fact that she found polo irredeemably boring. Being stuck at home with a three-year-old son, William, polishing silver cups and taking burnt meat out of the oven, because Ricky hadn’t got back from a match or was coping with some crisis in the yard, was not Chessie’s idea of marriage.