The Country Escape (10 page)

‘I worked with a beauty therapist like that once,’ Dawn sympathized. She loved horses, but she
preferred them waiting clean and tacked up a short drive from the M25.

The walk back to Lake Farm was even more circuitous than the one via the graveyard as Kat needed to divert to a grand black and white timbered farmhouse with a lot of decorative, fluffy-legged bantams strutting around between its saddle stones.

‘Miriam’s place,’ she explained. ‘I promised I’d drop off that solicitor’s
letter.’

Then she took a big box of eggs she’d been hawking around with her to Russ’s uncle and aunt (no sign of Russ in the apple orchards, Dawn noted), and finally she stopped at the village hall to write ‘Fully Subscribed’ across the poster on the notice-board advertising her boxercise self-defence classes.

Now bow-legged and aching, her hangover back with a vengeance, Dawn almost
crawled the mile back to Lake Farm, not caring if a wild boar charged her – in fact, she could have done with a helpful shove to keep moving. ‘I don’t know how you can take the pace here. I’m going to need to lie down for a week to recover when I get back to Watford.’

‘You’ll visit again, won’t you?’

‘Definitely.’ Dawn held open a gate, leaning heavily on it as she got her puff back.
‘Sign me up for that class when you get an opening. I’m right onside if this new landowner needs fighting. You can’t let this place go.’

‘You really mean that?’

‘It’s amazing, Kat. You’re amazing. It needs decent central heating and a bloody good make-over, but it’s got something magical about it. It’s a healing place.’

‘Come and open a health spa here,’ Kat said excitedly,
distracted by a large cardboard box left on the old milk churn stand at the yard entrance, from which small squeaks were emitting. ‘Oh, bugger. Not more.’

‘Kittens!’ Dawn laughed delightedly when they opened the top to find a squirming mass of ginger fluff, white paws and pink pads and noses.

‘People keep abandoning unwanted litters with us.’

‘Well, you
are
an animal sanctuary.’

‘We’re not really set up as a rescue centre. It’s bad enough that Russ keeps luring in pheasants and finding broken-winged ducks and myxy rabbits to try to bring back to life. We don’t have the facilities or any way of rehoming them. I’ll take these to the local RSPCA centre. We’ll drop them off when I drive you to catch your train later.’

‘I’ll have one!’

‘You don’t even know
where you’ll be living.’

But Dawn had already picked the smallest, squirmiest kitten from the box, so tiny it fitted into the palm of one hand as she dropped kisses on its pink nose.

Kat looked at her anxiously. ‘Are really sure you want a cat?’

‘I promised the old Watford gang that I’d bring our lovely Kat back.’ She grinned, pressing the soft orange bundle to her chin. ‘I
can’t let them down.’

Miriam was so astonished by the contents of the solicitor’s letter, which Kat still hadn’t read, that she called an emergency meeting of the sanctuary committee and hurriedly baked lemon shortcake to offer with the coffee.

Convinced that the call to arms had come, the elderly farming sisters, Pru and Cyn, arrived at Lake Farm in their Land Rover, towing
a trailer loaded with rolls of barbed wire and electric fencing to strengthen the farm’s defences, along with sandbags and a generator in case Dair’s dirty tricks resumed. The older and bossier Pru was a tall, thin stick of no-nonsense discipline topped with a glossy iron-grey pudding basin, like a German
Stahlhelm
, while Cyn was a small, excitable ball of romantically wild ideas with a mousy,
white-rimmed bun like an iced doughnut and watery blue eyes – they were rumoured to have had different fathers. Today the spinster sisters were dressed in matching country khaki and tweed camouflage fatigues, ready for action and united in a fierce determination to protect the sanctuary.

Following hard on their heels, Frank Bingham-Ince had brought with him an ancient klaxon that could
raise the alarm to the village and, indeed, most of Herefordshire, while Tireless Tina had home-made mustard spray and spare lead ropes to walk the animals to safety. Russ and Mags, who weren’t officially invited because they weren’t on the committee, had muscled in to offer support, talking loudly of protests and direct action.

Miriam silenced them: the spirit of the letter, she told them,
couldn’t have been more co-operative. Standing at one end of the long kitchen table, like a big-busted ship’s figurehead in a Hermès scarf with bright coral lipstick, worn in Frank’s honour, she précised the letter: ‘The new owners of Eardisford would like to apologize for any inconvenience during the restoration work on the house and parkland,’ she informed them. ‘As a gesture of goodwill, they
have made a donation of ten thousand pounds to the sanctuary.’

Kat’s jaw dropped. ‘Does it say who they are?’

She shook her head. ‘The payment is being made through solicitors.’

Kat was opening the door to let out Daphne. She jumped as she found a box of venison waiting on the step and Dair backing away, the peak of his flat cap down to the tip of his nose.

‘I can see
you’ve got company,’ he said gruffly.

‘I heard he’s a businessman called Stefan,’ Cyn was saying, the village whispers having mutated wildly between the pub and the sisters’ remote farm in the last forty-eight hours. ‘Or was it a Welshman called Gareth?’

‘One of the ladies at the tennis club told me it’s a film star called Ethan.’ Miriam sounded excited. ‘What have you heard, Kat?’

‘A Yorkshireman called Seth.’ She raised her eyebrows at Dair.

‘His real name is Arjan Singh,’ Dair breathed, so that only Kat could hear him, the others still unaware of his presence. ‘But I didn’t tell you that.’ With a nod, he hurried away.

‘You didn’t get the television series, Dougie.’ Abe sounded poleaxed when he called his client. ‘Another dude will carry the Confederate flag into three million homes coast to coast.’ The role had gone to a far more experienced actor,
he explained. ‘I just came off the phone to the casting agent and, man, am I pissed. This morning that part was yours. Now the producers have stepped in and cast someone else over her head.’

Hearing the name, Dougie was far from consoled. ‘He’s about a hundred, Abe, and gay as fuck!’

‘He’s A-list. You’re not,’ Abe concluded philosophically. ‘But I have something else cooking, something
with Kiki. You two are dynamite on screen.’

Dougie held the phone close to his head as he stalked out of the crowded bar at the ski lodge to get some air. The entrance foyer was a forest of heavy wooden folk-art sculptures that their host had been trying to flog to the cast and crew all fortnight. He leaned against a cross-eyed snarling bear, willing it to come to life and swallow him up.
The civil war series had been his get-out-of-jail-free card.

He narrowed his eyes suspiciously, remembering who else had known about the project. ‘Have you heard of somebody called Seth?’

‘Seth McFarlane?’

‘Just Seth. One name. Like Sting or Bono.’

‘Yeah, sure. Dotcom billionaire worth more zeroes than the binary for my fucking IQ. He owns half of Bollywood nowadays.
He’s on board a few projects over here too. We’re talking
major
investment.’

‘Does that include television?’

‘I can find out, but it won’t get you the part.’

Hanging up, Dougie listened to the raucous partying in the bar. It was their last day on location. Tomorrow he would head back to LA. His little tattooed runner had been shadowing him all day, her eyes full of tears.
Kiki was bombarding his phone with messages, saying how much she was looking forward to seeing him.

His phone rang again.

‘Okay, what’s going on, Dougie?’ Abe was riled. ‘Seth’s just bought the production company that’s making the series. It’s a shit-hot investment and this civil war thing is tipped to be huge – but you probably don’t want to hear that. So what’s he got against you?’

‘I’ve never even met him. His assistant turned up here and offered me a job.’

‘What is it?’ Abe smelt his ten per cent. ‘Why don’t I know about this? What’s the role?’

‘I’m not taking it,’ Dougie said emphatically.

His agent let out a worried sigh. ‘I have to warn you that if you turn this guy down I don’t think you’ll be working for the rest of the year.’

But
when Dougie explained that taking the job would mean Abe getting ten per cent of the return from a hunt master’s guarantee, an old-fashioned upfront payment that must last a year and pay for horses, hounds and hunt staff as well as his own living, his agent laughed incredulously, and told him to hang tough. ‘I’ll find out what the hell’s going on. And I’ll get back on the case with the Kiki project.
Her people are super-keen. The backers are all family so nobody will buy them out of it. If it’s as big as
High Noon
, it’ll pay for the wedding and one fuck-off palace of a house in the hills. You’ll even have space for all those horses of yours, kid.’

Dougie’s heart sank. ‘What if I say I don’t want to work with Kiki again?’

‘I’d say why let this Seth guy try to screw your career
when you can do it yourself?’

The following morning, as the cast and crew packed their bags into taxis and coaches ready to head to the airport, a helicopter swept down towards them and Dougie groaned, bracing himself for an argument with Seth’s emissary – right now he wanted to hurl snowballs at her and push her off a mountain. But it turned out it was just the transport booked
to take the Welsh lead actor to the airport in style.

The little tattooed runner clung to Dougie as he left. He’d spent the previous night with her after drowning his sorrows in the bar and had been so drunk that he couldn’t remember any of it.

Tired, pale and unshaven, with big blue smudges under his big blue eyes, he knew he looked a wreck, yet she gazed up at him as though she
was worshipping a god. This is an industry full of false idols who abuse their position, he thought savagely.

‘Is this goodbye, Mr Happy Ever After?’ She used her nickname for him, lower lip trembling.

‘It’s never Happy Ever After, darling.’ He sighed and gave her a final kiss before clambering into the car. He still didn’t know her name.

On the way to the airport his phone
rang, the voice newsreader cool. ‘I gather you are now available for work, Dougie.’

Dougie had planned to play it super-cool if Seth’s assistant made contact, to match her monotone with a faint sprinkling of 007 irony, to have charm on his tongue but murder in his eyes as he told her, categorically, to stuff her job. But he’d never been good at controlling his anger when his blood was up.
Neither was he very articulate once his heart rate hit three figures, preferring a physical vent like overturning tables or running up mountains. Kiki, who was fond of stoking him to melting point, said Dougie argued like a Daniel Day-Lewis with Tourette’s.

‘You bitch! You fucking bloody bitch! And your boss is a fucking bastard. You’re both bloody evil. Go fuck yourselves.’ He hung up.

‘Spot of trouble?’ asked the actor he was sharing a taxi with.

‘Job offer.’ He cleared his throat, glaring out of the window. ‘Not for me. Type casting.’

The phone rang again. The monotone was warmer, almost seductive. ‘What would your fiancée think if she knew you’d been sleeping with one of the crew on location for the past fortnight?’

‘Why not tell her and we’ll find
out? Now fuck off.’

When Dougie arrived back in LA, the city felt more alien to him than ever. Warm as a British summer day even in February, only the fake smiles were cold and glacier white. He wanted to keep Europe’s chill in his bones. He longed for his team of horses close by, and he priced up flying them over and stabling them in Burbank not far from the condo he shared with
Kiki, but it was totally beyond his pocket. Perhaps that was no bad thing, he reflected, after his first week back in the city. He had no idea how long he’d be hanging around. It wasn’t fair to shunt them here only to move on again, and the Burbank barn was probably too close for comfort. If the wind was in the right direction, they could have pricked their black ears and heard the recently engaged
couple hurling abuse at one another.

This was nothing new for Kiki and Dougie: it was a highly charged form of foreplay. They were always white hot together in bed, their passion involving ferocious arguments and intimate making up. It was exhausting at times, but they had both become addicted to it, like a never-ending game. Having determined to break the habit when he was away filming,
Dougie now found he couldn’t. He was angry at losing out on a big role, at being blackmailed, being ordered by Abe to put up and shut up, and at Kiki’s constant lectures about the need to polish his ‘talent diamond’. The petty argument that had erupted because he’d arrived home hung-over with just a bunch of thirty-dollar roses raged on long after the petals had dropped off.

It was always
worse when they were kept captive in close proximity, particularly when Kiki was rehearsing for a new role and needed to let off steam. Although technically they had co-habited for more than a year, filming commitments meant they had lived under the same roof for barely a tenth of that time, and the apartment Kiki’s parents had bought her when she was first breaking into the big time was far too
small for a relationship that thrived on big scenes. They’d rented the Glendale condo as a temporary stop-gap, but the glass-walled box at the top of an apartment block now made Dougie felt like a toy top-shelved for safe keeping.

It suited Kiki, who didn’t drink anything but twice-boiled water, barely ate more than clear soup and had a liking for see-through clothes; she was transparently
needy emotionally and just as demanding domestically. Her mind and body always whirred at warp speed, needing constant activity to fuel them. Here, there was a gym and a pool in the basement, a macrobiotic café and therapy suite on the first floor, and lightning-fast WiFi throughout the building.

Dougie, who preferred to roar in a cave during times of crisis, felt like a zoo animal in a
glass enclosure. For the first time since they had been together, he was out of work. He’d learned the day after returning that the hobgoblin and fairy fantasy action movie had hit serious financial difficulties during its location shoot, and the five weeks’ studio work he’d thought he was coming back to had now been postponed until a new backer could be found; rumour had it the predicted cost of
CGI made it impossible to see a profit and the film would never be finished.

The new project Abe had been talking up, spearheaded by Kiki’s film-producing uncle and funded by the family coffers, was months away – they hadn’t even chosen a script. Kiki eagerly piled up classic plays on his side of the bed and urged him back to acting class, promising they were going to be bigger than Brangelina
when he’d polished that diamond. Dougie suspected the project was largely leverage to make him behave himself as he went on a trail of readings, meetings and screen tests, but even though he chased every action-movie bit part Abe put him forward for, his tetchiness won him few recalls. The Everett Effect was hard to sell when his charm was in short supply. Mostly, he paced around at home going
increasingly stir-crazy, planning his exit strategy.

He heard no more from Dollar, which surprised him, given her boss’s efforts to clear Dougie’s diary, although he would have turned her down flat had she repeated the bizarre job offer. He refused to be coerced, which Kiki still struggled to grasp. Now that Dougie had time on his hands, the differences between them had never been more
apparent. She expected him to be butler-cum-personal-trainer and sparring partner, roles for which he was ill-equipped. Home was Kiki’s refuge and had to be perfectly ordered; Dougie treated it like a temporary stop-off. She considered her body a temple, requiring daily worship; he only worked out if a role demanded it. She thrived on arguments; his increasing lack of patience with them – and her
– just fired her up more. The more detached he became, the more engaged she seemed to want to be.

‘Why haven’t I got a ring yet?’ she complained petulantly.

‘The diamond’s not cut and polished,’ he snapped.

In truth, he didn’t have enough money left to buy a ring, let alone the heart to want to. Nobody working on the goblins film had been paid anything yet. His last few thousand
dollars had gone to Rupe to pay the yard rent in Buckinghamshire. He suggested taking on some stunt work to help pay his way, secretly longing to be back in the saddle, but Kiki said it looked bad on his résumé and she didn’t want the apartment smelling of horse.

‘It’s already like living with an untrained hound, baby!’ she joked shrilly.

‘I’d rather go to dog-training classes than
acting ones – at least I might get a sausage and learn how to sit still.’

Dougie’s natural instinct to sleep late, ride all day and play all night brought him under direct fire as Kiki’s insatiable thirst for high drama, stoked up by starring in back-to-back gun-toting thrillers, required intense action at home as well as on set. She found the undomesticated hound easy to goad into a snarling,
hackles-drawn frenzy. The couple’s constant arguments meant they made up with ever-more rapacious sex, but the intimacy became increasingly aggressive. Starved of affection, with little to do, the legendary Everett waggy-tailed wit was quick to wear away.

After one particularly vicious argument, in which she told him that his inability to act truthfully was down to his mother’s rejection,
he’d finally had enough. He threw some clothes into a bag, ready to fly home, but Kiki locked herself into the bathroom and threatened to cut her wrists if he left so he was forced to unpack. He didn’t think for a moment that she was seriously suicidal, but Kiki in full cry had to win an argument at all costs, and he didn’t know how far she’d go to achieve that.

The next day, by way of
apology, she bought him a horse, a magnificent Friesian stallion called Zephyr, whose curly mane reached down to his knees from a thick arched neck as glossy black as a raven’s wing. Dougie was amazed and humbled by such beauty but he longed to do something about the eight horses he’d left in England, not play with a new toy here, bought to keep him in check.

‘
Now
you can buy me a ring,’
Kiki insisted brightly.

Dougie had grown up around horses: he knew all about Trojan ones and looking in the mouths of gift ones. He told Kiki he couldn’t accept Zephyr. She refused to listen. They had another furious row. She insisted he’d feel better when he got another acting role. ‘We all go through this, baby. Actors live with rejection like physicians live with death. You have to work
through it.’

Dougie knew it wasn’t the rejection he was struggling to live with: it was Kiki. But later that day, Abe called and said, in his darkest tone, ‘Do
not
break this up before the Oscars, kid. Trust me, you are
seriously
hot property right now.’

‘So that’s why I feel like I’m living in a blast furnace.’

While feathers flew in private, the press were feeding ever more
ravenously off the celebrity lovebird fusion. Kiki’s uncle had released just enough early rumours of the couple sharing the big screen again to get all cameras focused upon them. Their appearance at the Oscars similarly secured front pages across the globe as Kiki wowed in nude Christian Dior, flashing a rare public smile with the huge yellow-diamond Neil Lane engagement ring that Dougie had no
idea how he was going to pay for. The couple scorched along the red carpet sizzling with sexual chemistry, commentators loving the way their eyes and bodies slid constantly together, the beauty and glamour, and the smudges beneath their eyes that hinted at hot, sleepless nights spent pleasuring one another.