Sam. With fire in my heart and port in my belly, I couldn’t help but leg Thumper through to the front.
‘Hi, Sam!’ I called, aware of shining eyes and a very broad grin. Not his.
If he was surprised, he mastered it beautifully. He touched his hat and smiled.
‘Good morning, Poppy.’
But rather than stopping for some golly, fancy-seeing-you-here chat, he was off in moments, at a very fast trot down the drive, after the hounds. Angie was beside me in a flash.
‘Always, always call him master,’ she hissed. ‘Even if you privately know him as fluffy-bumkins. Even if you’ve shared a pillow the night before!’
Many heads nodded in severe agreement at this, faces grave. I’d obviously breached a sacred code.
‘Oh, OK. It’s just we did share a pillow and he said Sam would be fine,’ I told her airily, clearly disastrously pissed.
Some people thought this was quite funny and tittered, for which I was grateful, but not Angie. She shot me a withering look and trotted off to join the thrusters at the front. Hard not to join them, actually, as Thumper surged excitedly beneath me, doing an extended trot down the drive. I managed to hold him back a bit, though, and keep some distance. As we went through a gate into pasture we all broke into a canter and I scanned the airborne bottoms of Angie’s smart crowd ahead. I recognized a local actress with pale blue eyes on an iron grey; Hugo, Angus’s grandson, on an overwrought roan, one or two mates of his from Harrow ragging alongside him. Then there were the gays who ran the garden centre and quarrelled incessantly – one was prodding the other spitefully with his whip even now; a judge Dad knew, whose horse was called Circuit so that, if anyone rang, his clerk could truthfully say, ‘He’s out on circuit’; then a very attractive couple I couldn’t quite place until … good God. Simon and Emma Harding. I nearly fell off my horse. Why weren’t they on their honeymoon, for Christ’s sake? Was she going to be everywhere I went?
I yanked hard on my left rein and sped towards Angie.
‘Angie – Emma Harding’s here!’ I gasped as I galloped up beside her. It wasn’t hard, Thumper was pulling like a train.
‘I know, bloody cheek, isn’t it?’ she yelled back, instantly on my side despite my earlier jibe, bless her. We cantered along together, the wind whipping our words away. ‘They’re having their honeymoon later, apparently,’ she told me. ‘She clearly means to stick around like a turd on a shoe – bloody nerve!’
‘I’m going to out her,’ I seethed into the wind. ‘Just wait and see what everyone thinks when they know it was my husband she was … Holy shit. We’re not jumping that, are we?’
Up ahead was a sizeable post and rails with quite a few foot followers gathered around it. I spotted Jennie, Dad and my children clustered excitedly. Clearly we were. Sam flew over it, followed by the gays, then Hugo et al., then Simon and Emma. Right. So this was my Becher’s Brook. But, boy, was it huge. Thumper pulled excitedly at the sight of it, and as Angie sailed confidently over ahead of me, I was right on her heels. Too close, actually, but too late to do anything about it because I was already airborne. I clung on to the plaits for grim death, losing the reins as we landed, so that Thumper, given his head, let out the throttle and sped away. As we galloped towards another jump, a small hedge which he took in his stride, I realized something alarming was happening here: I was having trouble staying on board and pulling the reins at the same time. I could do one at a time, but not both together, and certainly not with jumps thrown into the equation. I plumped for staying on board and clung to his mane, which meant that Thumper – who, if he hadn’t been hunting before, was loving every minute of it – had a free rein to take me wherever he wanted, at whatever speed, which was top, and straight to the front.
Spectacularly out of control I rocketed past Angie, Simon and Emma, the actress on the grey, Hugo and his muckers. Then I cannoned past Sam in pink, who shot me a startled look, then the huntsman and the whipper-in, in mustard. Finally – trust me, it didn’t take long – I shot past the