Molly Watson - In The Pink: A Rural Odyssey

MY SISTER BEE has always been a practical joker. When we were children, April Fools Day never passed without her leaving an effigy of my favourite pet lying stricken in the lane that ran in front of our house, or scratching Bee is a Pig deep into the mahogany sideboard in the hall and then sticking around to watch when my mother, her purple flogging espadrille already in her hand, came to collar me for it. But a decade has passed since then. Woodworm has done for the sideboard, and now that she no longer has the time nor the handicraft skills to knock up a convincing tabby cat carcass, the best Bee could manage this year was to ring up and pretend that her boyfriend had given her the elbow instead.

I returned from scavenging for cut-price Easter eggs at the petrol station at the end of our street to find an Oscar-winningly bleak message from her on the answering machine. Snivelling from a fug of tear-soaked paper hankies in a voice faltering with hurt and exhausted rage, she told me it was all over between her and Daniel. He didnt love her. Maybe he had never loved her. Would anyone ever really love her again?

As jokes go it was pretty lame, mainly because it would never happen. Annabel Vivienne Watson, blonde, twenty-three years, 34-22-32 inches, is not the type of girl to get dumped. Ever since she was old enough to understand the rules of kiss-chase shes been besieged by men frantically reciting their best comic material at her in the hope that shell stay still and in view for just a little while longer. These boys have a point. Bees charms dont stop at her face and figure. Shes extremely good company and blessed with an almost French capacity for pouty sulking. Even her own sisters, usually relegated to crowd control roles when she attends parties, have occasionally been struck by how beautiful she looks when shes angry.

Like I said before, the whole point of Bee is that shes never going to get ditched.

Or is she...

Shes certainly behaving very oddly. Today she took her first ever sickie from the head-hunting firm for whom she works with ruthless efficiency. I know this because she tipped up at our basement flat, a venue she usually avoids on health and safety grounds, soon after breakfast. This time she came in and went to lie face down on my flatmate Christys bed.

Christy and I immediately abandoned the grubby corner of the sitting room where we languish in front of our laptops reading the newspapers so slowly that we never get any of our own writing done, and beetled through to hear the details. But alas, Bee refused to be squeezed for juice or even to turn over.

It appears she may have actually walked here. Only a five-minute stroll through the canoodling rent boys of the Brompton Cemetery separates this flat from Bees, but her decision not to take a taxi even for a piddling distance like that shows she really isnt herself at all.

She seems to be in a bad way something a tiny, horrible, sisterly part of me cant help feeling slightly cheered by.

Shes sunny side up today but still not speaking. Conversely weve had much chatter from the couple of dozen boys who rang to check if she was okay about the break-up and feeling up to letting them buy her dinner yet.

I made an executive decision not to relay this rash of condolences. Bee needs her rest, and after a lifetime of watching her glide along in a golden shimmer of male admiration that has always been tantalisingly out of my older, uglier grasp, I find I need to prolong the tonic of seeing her lovely face swollen from crying for as long as I can.

Christy and I have been admirably quick off the mark with the unsolicited advice though. As a veteran of Manhattan, the most inhospitable dating climate on earth and a place where rejection is analysed with scientific rigour, I told Bee that she had simply fallen victim to a recognised seasonal phenomenon. The theory goes that all over the world men made dizzy by the first days of spring sunshine offload their girlfriends in the hope of acquiring a better model for the bikini season. Yet as summer passes and the warm weather wanes, their feelings of regret increase. By September Daniel would be apologetic; by Harvest Festival hed be begging for reinstatement.

Christy told Bee that what she needed was a few glasses of Campari and then maybe some wine.

Bee told us to please draw the curtains and go away.

I spent most of the afternoon in a spa being rubbed with mushed-up ginger in the hope that my skin will be so tingly and fired up with pheromones that Rob, a gorgeous young management consultant and one of Bees most persistent callers, wont be able to keep his hands off it at dinner tonight.

Unfortunately this meant I left for the restaurant smelling like an undercooked biscuit, but all went well over dinner. According to Rob, Bee has gone to the mattresses a classic mafia crisis tactic. Ideally one should get ones men and their mattresses round to a deserted warehouse and then spend a few days lying around on said mattresses arguing about the Sicilian way to make a rigatoni sauce until someone with a name like Clemenza gets word that its time to make a hit on the rest of the Five Families. When shed stewed long enough on her mattress Bee would be ready to take revenge.

It soon emerged that Rob for one wanted a ringside seat when she did. As we sat close in a taxi on the way home he leaned in towards me so tantalisingly slowly we could have been in a movie. But the big screen kiss never came. When I opened my eyes to find out what was causing the hold-up he whipped out his Palm Pilot and asked me for the best address to send her flowers to.

Morales still low but shes recovered enough to be calling out for magazines. All I could find was an ancient copy of Vogue and the latest issue of Horse & Hound, purchased yesterday in the vain hope it might have had hot Grand National tips. To commemorate the Queen Mothers death, this weeks cover bears an archive photograph of her cowering beside and partially obscured by an elated-looking racehorse.

Bee is up, dressed, and demanding to buy a horse. I fear this is retail therapy of the most dangerous sort.

Due to a lack of transport from our neck of the Brecon Beacons to amusements like the Pontypool roller-disco and Cwmbran hydraslides we spent most of our childhoods messing around with ponies. But, fearful of developing the bristly chin, spreading bottom and braying bossiness that my father warned was the eventual fate of all horsey women, I made my exit to London aged eighteen. I still have a nagging fear, fed by the kindlier of my male friends, that I did not get out soon enough.

Thanks to a tendency to fall off so strong that the St Johns Ambulance first-aid team used to go to battle stations whenever she rode into the ring at local gymkhanas, Bee was even quicker to convert her interest in horses from life in the saddle to life on the sofa with a Dick Francis and a packet of chocolate biscuits.

While our four younger siblings joined the Pony Club (one of them was actually presented with a horsemanship trophy by a lady called Mrs Trot), she and I set about transforming ourselves into glossy urban creatures. I was posted to New York to work as the Evening Standards correspondent there and prided myself on coming home for Christmas kitted out in shoes designed to totter only the few metres from yellow cab to nightclub entrance and cashmere barely able to cope with the damp seeping up the walls of the sitting room, let alone helping with the mucking out. Bee burned her wellies, grew her fingernails and e-mailed me in triumph when she heard the others had started calling us the Dry Clean Onlys.