Jilly Cooper - Polo

Chessie woke at noon feeling hungover and guilty. She shouldn’t have got tight or off so publicly with Bart. Gossip spread round the polo community like napalm. If Ricky didn’t know by now, his grooms certainly would. Her fears were confirmed when Will wandered in later from playgroup, bearing paintings to be admired, stories to be read, and his hands crammed full of yellow roses pulled off by the head for her.

Stocky as a Welsh cob, Will had a round pink face and dark brown slanting eyes with long curly lashes tipping the blond fringe of his pudding-basin hair. No child could be more edible, even allowing for a mother’s bias. How could she have dallied with Bart and jeopardized this, thought Chessie, hugging him fiercely.

‘Did you bring me a present?’ demanded Will.

‘I didn’t go anywhere I could get you one,’ said Chessie. ‘Who brought you home from playgroup?’

‘Fuckies,’ said Will, who couldn’t pronounce Frances, the head groom’s name. ‘Fuckies say Mummy got pissed up last night.’

‘Mummy did not.’

‘Mattie got sore leggie,’ went on Will.

‘As if I didn’t know,’ snapped Chessie.

‘Want some crisps.’

‘Ask Daddy.’ Chessie snuggled down in bed.

‘Daddy gone to London.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Daddy loathes London.’

Ricky avoided London at all costs. Only his passion for Chessie after they’d first met had dragged him up to her flat in the Cadogans, and then he’d always got lost. As Will pottered off crispwards, Chessie thought about Bart. He reminded her of all those rich, ruthless, cynical, invariably married men whom she’d met and had affairs with when she used to cook directors’ lunches in the City. One of them had been about to set her up in her own restaurant in the Fulham Road, called Francesca’s, when she had met Ricky.

It had been at her rich grandparents’ golden wedding. With an eye to inheriting loot rather than a sense of duty, Chessie had reluctantly driven down from London expecting to be bored rigid. Instead she found that her plain, horsey cousin Harriet, who at twenty-five had never had a boyfriend, had turned up looking almost pretty and bursting out of her brown velvet dress with pride because she had Ricky in tow. Despite having absolutely no small talk and the trapped ferocity of a tiger whipped into doing tricks at the circus, he was the most attractive man Chessie had ever seen. It took her exactly fifteen minutes to take him off her poor cousin Harriet, gazing sleepily at him across the gold candles throughout dinner, then dancing all night with him. The chuntering of outraged relations was so loud, no-one could hear the cracking of poor Harriet’s heart.

Offhand with people to cover up his feelings, unused to giving or receiving affection, Ricky had not had an easy life. The France-Lynches had farmed land in Rutshire for generations. Horse-mad, their passion for hunting had been exceeded at the turn of the century by a passion for polo. Herbert, Ricky’s father, the greatest polo player of his day and a confirmed bachelor, had suddenly at fifty-five fallen madly in love with a twenty-year-old beauty. Sadly she died giving birth to Ricky, leaving her arrogant, crotchety, heartbroken husband to bring up the boy in the huge, draughty Georgian house, which was called Robinsgrove, because the robins in the woods around were supposed to sing more sweetly there than anywhere else on earth. Ricky needed that comfort. Determined that his son should follow in his footsteps, Herbert was appalled to discover that the boy was left-handed. This is not allowed in polo. Consequently Herbert spent the next years forcing Ricky to do everything right-handed to the extent of tying his left arm to his side for hours on end. As a result Ricky developed a bad stammer, for which he was terribly teased at school.

Although Herbert adored the boy, he couldn’t show it. Only by playing better polo could Ricky win his father’s approval. Herbert went to every match, yelling at Ricky in the pony lines. The cheers were louder off the field than on when Ricky started yelling back. Herbert’s vigilance was rewarded. At just twenty-three, when he met Chessie, Ricky’s handicap was six and he had already played for England.

To Chessie he was unlike anyone she had ever met. In the middle seventies, when men were getting in touch with their feelings and letting everything hang out, Ricky gave nothing away. A tense uncompromising loner, lack of love in his childhood had made him so unaware of his charms that he couldn’t imagine anyone minding being deprived of them.

Chessie had had to make all the running. Smitten by her, Ricky was terrified to feel so out of control and went into retreat. He was always away playing in matches or searching for new horses. He never rang because he was shy about his stammer, and he knew it would wreck his polo career to marry when he needed all his concentration to make the break. Gradually, persistently, Chessie broke down his resistance.

Herbert had been violently opposed to the marriage, but when the tetchy old eccentric met Chessie he was as bowled over as his son, even to the extent of moving out of Robinsgrove, which had grooms’ flats, stabling for twenty horses and four hundred acres of field and woodland, and moving into the Dower House two miles away, to make way for her and Ricky. At first the marriage was happy. Herbert went to matches with Chessie and enjoyed her cooking at least once a week, and when Chessie produced an heir two years later the old man was happier than he’d ever been.

But although Herbert had initially settled £200,000 on Ricky, Chessie, used to having her bills picked up and being showered with presents by besotted businessmen, soon went through it. The land, which included a large garden, a tennis court and a swimming-pool, needed maintaining and the house, with its vast rooms, needed a gas pipe direct from the North Sea to keep it warm.

Also Ricky’s dedication, aloofness and incredible courage on the field, which had attracted Chessie madly in the beginning, were not qualities she needed in a husband. Ricky adored Chessie, but he was far too locked into polo, and after the first two years too broke, to provide her with the constant approval, attention and material possessions she craved.

Resentful that Ricky wouldn’t pay for a nanny, Chessie was always palming Will off on his grooms. Most top-class players employ one groom to three ponies; Ricky’s grooms had to look after five, even six, but they never minded. They all adored Ricky who, beneath his brusqueness, was fair, kind and worked harder than anyone else, and they were proud to work for such a spellbinding player.

Chessie, a constant stranger to the truth, had also failed to tell Bart at the Waterlanes’ party that she had caused Ricky’s rift with his father. Gradually Herbert had recognized Chessie for what she was: selfish, manipulative, lotus-eating, narcissistic, unreliable and hopelessly spoilt. One rule in the France-Lynch family was that animals were fed before humans. Horrified one day when Ricky was away that the dogs had had no dinner by ten at night and the rabbit’s hutch hadn’t been cleaned out for days, Herbert had bawled Chessie out. Totally unable to take criticism, Chessie complained to Ricky when he came home, wildly exaggerating Herbert’s accusations, triggering off such a row between father and son that Herbert not only stopped the half-million he was about to settle on Ricky to avoid death duties, but cut Ricky out of his will.

Although both men longed to make it up, they were too proud. Ricky, whose family had always been the patrons, was forced to turn professional. Incapable of the tact needed to massage the egos of businessmen, desperately missing Herbert’s counsel, appallingly strapped for cash – Bart’s £25,000 for a season went nowhere when you were dealing with horses – Ricky threw himself more into polo and devoted less time to Chessie.