Kiss and Tell Read Online Free PDF Page B

quietly.
    ‘Why ever not?’ Tash had forgotten most of the details of her stepsister’s attempt at a competitive career, which had been going on at about the time she and Hugo had first got together, almost ten years earlier, although she did recall her father buying Beccy a very expensive horse. And Beccy had definitely possessed a lot of talent as a jockey, she recalled, but as with most things she’d quickly lost interest once the going got tough.
    ‘James and I had a falling out,’ Beccy muttered now.
    ‘Yes, well, he’s always felt rather guilty about that.’ Henrietta cleared her throat, hair whipping up from her face to reveal deep worry lines embossed on her brow.
    ‘He sold my horse,’ she gulped.
    ‘That sounds familiar.’ Tash sympathised, having fallen foul of her father’s rather brutal brand of paternal vengeance several times in her early years.
    ‘To Hugo,’ Beccy was close to tears now.
    ‘Which one was it?’
    ‘Butternut Squash.’
    ‘But he—’
    ‘Was sold straight on to America for twice the money,’ Beccy nodded forlornly. ‘Hugo promised James that we would always have first refusal if he sold him.’
    ‘Oh dear.’ Tash watched as another piece of bread flew off her plate, this time wedging itself in the foliage of the golden hop climbing an upright of the pergola behind Beccy. ‘It was a long time ago. Hugo has mellowed a lot since then. And the horse did really well, didn’t he? Kirsty Johanssen bought him when she and Stefan moved out to Virginia, I remember. He was placed at Kentucky one year.’

    ‘ I could have gone four-star with him,’ Beccy lamented, conveniently forgetting that the chances of herself at seventeen producing the horse to international level had been nil, whereas Hugo had spotted his potential and moved him on to a top-flight career path.
    ‘Instead you went backpacking for a year and ended up staying away for almost a decade,’ Henrietta muttered under her breath, ‘half of it incarcerated in a potty bloody cult and then in prison.’
    ‘Do not pass go, do not collect five hundred pounds,’ Beccy sniffed, shooting her mother a dirty look.
    ‘It cost your stepfather considerably more than that to secure your liberty,’ her mother whispered, now holding her hair down with one hand and eating with the other.
    Tash swallowed awkwardly. She was never sure whether the subject of her stepsister’s jail sentence was off limits or not. It seemed impolite to casually drop it in to conversation – ‘Now you’re back from Changi Women’s Prison, you must relish these cool summer days?’ – yet to ignore it was ridiculous. Similarly, for several years before fatefully moving on to South-East Asia as a part of her travels, Beccy had sequestered herself in an ashram with a mystical guru who took all her money, but that long episode was also never mentioned, despite the many trips Henrietta had made at the time to try to talk her daughter into coming home. Back then Beccy had taken the clothes, the money and the Marmite on offer and stubbornly stayed put, claiming that she had seen the light. Thus her ‘year out’ had slowly become almost a decade’s sabbatical of expensive self-denial, self-discovery, self-satisfaction and self, self, self. She hadn’t won many allies among the Frenches.
    It was common knowledge in the family that, at Henrietta’s behest, James had continually fed funds into his stepdaughter’s account to safeguard her travels and enable her quick passage home whenever the need arose. Unfortunately that need had only presented itself when Beccy – finally leaving the safety of the ashram because the mystic suddenly closed it down to relocate to Epping Forest and buy himself a premier-league football team – travelled on to Singapore and found herself behind bars, her charmed travels coming to an abrupt end. As a result, that passage home had been very hard won and very, very expensive. Ten months in a Singapore women’s