‘You’re too fucking Christ-like,’ snapped Perdita. ‘You get no prizes for coming second.’

Luke picked up his whisky, his freckled hand was so big you could hardly see the glass. He didn’t tell her it broke his heart every time the Argentines hurt a horse or he saw a terrified stray dog racing by the side of the road. He knew the cruelty she was going to witness over the next three months would be agony for her because, for some reason, she trusted animals far more than humans, but, like a nurse looking after animals in a vivisection clinic, he couldn’t prevent her pain, only alleviate it as much as possible.

‘There’s certainly a degree of roughness with horses,’ he admitted. ‘The Argies have so many, they can afford to dispense with them. When Red and I were kids we had races jumping on ponies in the fields and galloping them round a tree and back without a bridle. We could never do that with Argentine ponies: they just bolted in terror. The Argentines break them by fear and pain, but they get results. Look at those kids today.’

‘Look at Angel clouting that sweet little mare with his stick – the fucker.’

She was paler than ever and, Luke noticed, that in that shirt, her eyes were more navy blue than black.

‘He’s OK Angel,’ he said, ‘Argentine saying – never judge a man until you have walked two moons in his shoes.’

‘Well, he needn’t take it out on me. I wasn’t part of the bloody task force.’

Back in his bare, little room, Angel lay on his bed smoking one cigarette from another. He should have been with the girl from the petrol station half an hour ago, but he was too eaten up with jealousy that his dear amigo, Luke, had taken that white-haired she-devil out for a drink.

On the wall was a painting of a Mirage wheeling away from a flaming British aircraft carrier, with the sea and sky incarnadined by the blaze. On the chest of drawers was a photograph of his elder brother Pedro in uniform, his pale patrician face the image of Angel’s, except for a black moustache. There were also photographs of his weak and charming father, who had read Pravda and the Daily Telegraph every morning, and his beautiful feckless mother, who’d run off with an Italian and now lived in some palazzo in Rome, and of the huge house in which he’d been brought up.

Besides these photographs were Pedro’s polo helmet, which now had a map of the Malvinas stamped on the front (which Angel always wore in matches), and a jar of earth he’d dug up from the Islands on the day he’d been sent home as a prisoner of war.

The Solis de Gonzales family, eight-generation Irish intermarried with Spanish, were immensely rich. Angel had had a magical childhood, bucking the system at the smart Buenos Aires boys’ school of Champagnat and living during the termtime in a large house in the Avenidad del Libertador. Let loose on the family estancia during the holidays, he and Pedro had played cops and robbers on horses, and later polo with his cousins, who all came from large houses near by.

In their teens Angel and Pedro had hung around the polo grounds, waiting for players to fall off, so they could substitute for them. Angel had never had a lesson; he played as naturally as he walked.

Angel’s branch of the Solis de Gonzales, however, were no good at looking after their business affairs. His father, separated from his mother, lived six months of the year in Paris. Every so often the camp manager would telephone from the estancia: ‘We have no more money.’

‘Then sell some land,’ Angel’s father would say, and go back to his latest mistress or the gambling tables or the racecourse at Longchamps. He never took care of the land, nor did he put anything back.

Denied parents for so much of the year, Angel had idolized Pedro. On the polo field they had been dynamite and almost telepathetic in anticipating each other’s moves. But there had been no question of them taking up polo professionally. Polo was all right as a hobby, but for a living, as Angel’s father, who prided himself on his English had pointed out, it was distinctly ‘Non-U’.

He disapproved almost as much when Pedro, who was mad about flying, but unable to afford a plane, had joined the air force in the late seventies to be followed, two years later, by Angel. Disapproval turned to horror when both boys set off in their Mirages for the Falklands. Both were brilliant pilots, having the same reckless flamboyant courage and ability to get the last ounce out of their ancient machines in the air as their ponies on the field.

A fortnight after Pedro’s plane plunged flaming into the sea, Angel was shot down behind British lines and escaped with a smashed kneecap and concussion. When he came round, he was interrogated by one particularly phlegmatic, poker-faced Guards Officer, a polo player who spoke fluent Spanish. To someone as proud as Angel, this, and the result of the war, had been the ultimate humiliation. But, even knowing how strong the British now were, he would give up polo tomorrow and climb back into his cockpit and resume the attack on Port Stanley. Returning home with the other prisoners of war, he found his father had died of a heart attack.

It is Argentine law that when a man dies his estate must be divided equally between his children. Angel’s father had inherited 4,000 acres, but had sold off so much that only 800 acres were left for Angel and his three sisters. The sisters, who had all married well, were unconcerned that Angel, with only 200 acres of grazing land in the middle of his rich cousins’ estates, had been left to pay his father’s debts. His mother, happy with her Italian, was not interested. His grandmother, living in luxury in the Plaza Hotel in Buenos Aires and grumbling because she had to wash her own stockings, claimed she had no money even to pay her own bills.

In despair, Angel had gone to his rich cousins, pleading that unless they helped him out he would be forced to sell the land to an outsider, a property developer who wanted to build houses there. The rich cousins, thinking he was bluffing, ignored him; then, when he sold the land, they were absolutely furious and banished him from their houses.

Angel was now desperately trying to make his way as a professional polo player. His secret ambition was for the Argentine ban to be lifted so he could get to England and avenge Pedro’s death by taking out the English and especially one poker-faced Guards Officer.

Alejandro wouldn’t help him. He was jealous of new blood, particularly when it was as blue as Angel’s, but Luke, who knew how hard it was to get established, had recognized Angel’s talent. Before Perdita arrived he and Angel had spent hours talking in the evenings trying to improve each other’s English and Spanish. Luke realized that, beneath his corroding bitterness and pyrotechnic bursts of Latin temperament, Angel was by nature merry, with a kind heart and an even greater sense of the ridiculous. The latter had for the moment deserted him. The Brits had taken Pedro, now this blonde witch had stolen Luke. Angel was biding his time.


25



Perdita refused to admit it, but she was terribly homesick. There was no post nor telephone because of the strike, and she was tormented by fantasies of Ricky being ridden off by starlets in Palm Springs. Used to smothering any animal she met with love, she felt dreadfully deprived when the Argentine ponies flinched away from her. Only Raimundo’s lurchers responded when she combed the burrs out of their coats and fed them bits of meat.

Visiting players, Raimundo, the grooms and Alejandro looked at her with ill-concealed lust, but her dead-pan hauteur and Señor Gracias’ large, looming presence kept them at bay. Angel smouldered at a distance, losing no chance to bitch her up. She was aware that none of the men except Luke took her seriously as a player.

Claudia was enchanting, endlessly kind and sympathetic, but, beneath her preoccupation with her children, Perdita sensed a deep sadness. Her daughters were also charming with their big dark eyes and exuberantly glossy hair and breasts rising like pomegranates, and they giggled in amazed delight when Perdita swore and yelled at the grooms and even screamed at their father. Heavy chaperonage, too, seemed to enhance their value, like jewellery locked in glass cases rather than scrambled in trays on the counter. But to Perdita they appeared curiously passive, sitting and waiting for some man to make them unhappy.

Luke was her salvation. The Argentine night came down like a blind, but, when it was too dark to ride, he seldom took a siesta, struggling instead through Martin Fierro, Don Quixote, or El Cid with the aid of a Spanish dictionary, or listening to music, mostly Mozart. But he was always prepared to turn off the tape and listen to her ranting on about how she missed Ricky and how bloody the Argentines were being to her and to their horses. An inspired listener, he seldom volunteered information about himself.

‘Have you got a girlfriend?’ she asked him once.

‘Yeah.’

‘Are you going to marry her?’

‘Nope.’

‘Why not?’

‘Not in love with her, I guess. There’s only one reason to get married, because you can’t not. And I’ve seen too much unhappiness caused by broken marriages. I want mine to stick.’

A few weeks later Perdita sat under a jacaranda tree which was scattering purply-blue petals all over the parched brown ground. At least the drought had driven off the mosquitoes.

‘Darling Ricky,’ she wrote, ‘David Waterlane’s been here today. He brought a letter from Mum. He’s going on to New York, and promises to post this for me. He bought four ponies, all of which Alejandro swore played in the final of last year’s Open. That makes over fifty ponies he’s sold this year that he claims took part. He must have changed ponies an awful lot. How are you getting on? Have you been signed up to star in a film yet? Has Luke’s bloody sister been in touch with you? Do you miss me a bit? I think I’m getting a bit better at polo. There is a beautiful little iron-grey mare here that Alejandro has frightened out of her wits and says is too wet for polo. I wish you’d bought her, I think she’s brilliant. If you send me the money, I think we could get her for $1,000.