Kiss and Tell Read Online Free PDF Page A

lined up for that good-luck supper into a girls’ lunch instead.
    Watching her, Beccy vowed that she would never, ever get pregnant. Tash had once been really quite stunning – Beccy had certainly envied her height and athleticism over the years. With a fine-boned, striking face set on a long, elegant neck, she had always possessedhead-turning looks, made all the more stunning by her mismatched eyes, one amber and one green. Admittedly, she’d never learned to tame that mop of rather bushy, wavy brown hair which every riding hat moulded into a different, rebellious shape, and her dress sense had always been very hit and miss, but Beccy – who had struggled to do anything with her limp blonde tresses and extensive range of pastel fleeces and pale jeans before discovering dreadlocks, hats and Indian silk kaftans – was not particularly critical on that front. What appalled her was the bulge.
    It stuck out like the huge bonnet of an ugly American car, a great snarling radiator grille of checked maternity top leering over Tash’s wrinkly navy leggings, emphasising her long, bandy legs and – horrors – a bottom that had spread far and wide since forfeiting the saddle for the birthing ball.
    Rendered red in the face from just the simplest of exertions, like chopping salad or loading plates on a tray, Tash panted her way around the kitchen on swollen ankles. Beccy was too busy observing in appalled wonder to offer to help and Henrietta, chattering nonsensically with a giggling Cora, didn’t seem to notice.
    Tash’s skin looked dry. She had bags under her eyes and her usually high, hollow cheeks were puffy and blotchy. She even has a bit of a double chin, Beccy realised. And aren’t those upper arms just beginning to get a hint of dinner-lady bingo wing? Oh. My. God. I am never having a baby.
    Oblivious to the scrutiny, Tash had loaded two trays and was rubbing her wrists which were numb in parts and stinging with pain in others.
    ‘We’ll eat outside on the terrace,’ she announced, unable to face clearing the huge scrubbed-pine table in the kitchen that was so overloaded with detritus these days that it had taken on the shape of a rhino. Nor could she face the dusty formality of the dining room proper. The house had really begun to go to pot since Radka’s departure. She felt ashamed, doubly so because Henrietta always kept Benedict House so immaculate.
    But Henrietta was far more concerned about safeguarding her expensively styled hair than encountering a little house dust. She had promised to look in on an old school-friend near Marlborough for tea and didn’t want to arrive looking like Boris Johnson after a boozy lunch.

    ‘Isn’t it a bit breezy?’ she worried.
    ‘Nonsense. It’s bracing!’
    They ate lunch with their windswept hair and flapping clothing sticking to their food, forced to shout to make conversation above the sound of the groaning trees, flapping parasol and madly rustling leaves.
    Only Cora was spared the elements. Hastily stuffed with an organic pouch meal and a satsuma, she now napped peacefully upstairs with the black-out blind lowered, a lullaby CD on auto-repeat.
    Tash battled to keep her rocket and watercress salad on her plate as she alternately made small talk and apologised for Hugo’s absence.
    ‘The build up to the Olympics is always absolutely frantic,’ she explained. ‘He’s hardly here, and when he is there’s a mountain to do. Normally I can take the slack, but with this so huge’ – she patted her unborn boy – ‘I’m next to useless around the yard – I can’t ride, I can hardly muck out and groom, he won’t let me turn out or lunge.’
    ‘Well that’s one of the reasons we’re here—’ Henrietta started, but her daughter interrupted.
    ‘It must be crap being sidelined after all the excitement of both going last time.’
    Four years earlier, Tash was one of the Olympic team that had flown their horses half way around the world, hotly tipped for gold. It