Kiss and Tell Read Online Free Page A

vague memory that Tash was grasping to retrieve. On cue her mobile phone rang in her bag. It was Hugo, the personalised ringtone set to galloping hooves, which he found hugely embarrassing.
    Cora immediately started screeching excitedly, a trick she had recently developed to distract her mother during calls and draw attention back to herself.
    ‘Hello … Hi … What? Sorry – I can’t hear a thing; Cora’s shouting and it sounds as though you’re sitting on a tractor.’
    ‘I am sit … on a tract … or!’ he bellowed, though to Tash his voice was barely audible. ‘The bloo … muck … eap needed emptying and … know what Jenny’s … ike about revers … this … ing.’ Their head girl was terrified of the old yard tractor. ‘Your … mother’s here.’
    ‘My mother?’ She gasped in delight. Perhaps Alexandra had changed her mind about coming after all.
    Hugo sounded far from delighted. ‘And your sister. They … to lunch, appar … tly.’
    ‘But Polly’s in Vietnam— shh, Cora.’ Tash lifted her chin up asthe little girl tried to grab at the phone. Denied her target, she shrieked at the top of her voice.
    ‘Not … olly. Th … sh … Jailbird … bloody inconvenient … lympic … bloody … uck off.’
    ‘What? I really can’t hear anything, Hugo.’
    Realising Tash needed help with Cora, Alicia lunged forwards and started to try to distract her granddaughter by waving her cigarette around in pretty patterns and clinking the ice in her glass, blowing kisses and humming ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’’. Cora, enchanted, fell silent and stared. Tash, appalled, couldn’t concentrate on what Hugo was saying at all.
    ‘Just get back here!’ he ordered and rang off.
    It was a beautifully bright, blustery morning as Tash drove the short distance across Haydown land from Alicia’s cottage, which her mother-in-law grandly insisted upon calling The Dower House, but was in fact the old gamekeeper’s lodge. The avenue of beeches that led out of the woods was rustling feverishly overhead and casting dappled shadows through the open sunroof.
    ‘… and on that farm he had a cow, ee eye ee eye oh!’ Tash sang along to the nursery rhymes CD on the stereo. Behind her Cora was making ‘moo’ sounds from her car seat and pointing at a field of sheep through the window.
    The land surrounding them was farmed by the same two tenant families that had maintained it when Henry Beauchamp had been alive. The fourth generations of the Bell and the Caroll families (the Ding Dongs and the Singalongs as they were affectionately known to the Beauchamps) were respectively custodians of a small mixed dairy, beef and sheep herd run on the sheltered and lush meadows of Lower Farm, and five hundred acres of arable on the fertile, open hills of Upper Farm. The rest of the estate was divided into huge tracts of dark, serried woodland and flinty, windswept downland that was variously leased out for shoots, timber production and grazing, plus the long tree-skirted valley of neglected parkland closer to the house, and the huge equestrian operation that Tash and Hugo ran from the main house and yard.
    And Haydown House never failed to lift Tash’s heart when she saw it. A brick-and-flint William and Mary country house with the show-stoppingly perfect symmetrical face of a great classical beautyand the broad shoulders of a paternal hug, it was an amazing place to call home. Perched high on the Berkshire Downs, on the edge of the pretty village of Maccombe, surrounded by protective high pink-brick walls, beautiful gardens and its courtyards of old stables, coach house, cottages and barns, it was a daydream of a place to live.
    Even though it was getting very ragged around the edges, cost a fortune to run and was impossible to keep remotely clean and ordered, Tash adored it with a passion second only to that for her family and animals.
    As she drove along the farm track that led past the orchards and then beneath the clock-tower