The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous

by Jilly Cooper

  It was the eve of Valhalla tennis tournament. Cecilia had mercifully disappeared to Paris in a ravishing pink shorts suit and Rannaldini’s helicopter. Rannaldini, who was at home for once, had retreated to look at rushes of Fidelio in his tower. Kitty had hoped for peace to make cakes and sandwich fillings for tomorrow and to give herself a perm, but alas Rachel turned up trailing two fretful children who found making fortresses out of egg boxes insufficiently amusing during a hot summer afternoon.

  Kitty had been very kind to Rachel, listening endlessly to her problems and looking after her children when Rachel needed to practise or see lawyers. Rachel felt it was only fair, in turn, to prevent Kitty poisoning herself and the environment.

  ‘Why make a strawberry flan,’ she was now complaining, ‘when strawberries are out of season and there’s a glut of apples? And tuna fish – tuna fish,’ shrieked Rachel. ‘Didn’t you know tuna congregate beneath schools of dolphin, and the tuna fleets haul up dolphin at the same time? Nearly a quarter of a million dolphin die in the Pacific.’

  ‘Poor fings,’ muttered Kitty, appalled. ‘I’ll remember next time.’

  ‘Good, though, to use brown flour,’ said Rachel, feeling she’d been a bit sharp. Then, catching sight of a packet of Tampax in Kitty’s shopping bag, ‘but I wish you’d use STs. Tampons floating round in the sea take a hundred and twenty days to biodegrade.’

  Shut up, Kitty wanted to scream. Normally as regular as clockwork, she was a week late and praying that at last she might be pregnant. Like taking an umbrella out on a sunny day, she had bought the Tampax.

  Rachel was now glaring at a screen Kitty was secretly covering with photographs of Rannaldini and the famous for his birthday in December.

  ‘Christ, look at him leering at Princess Di. Your husband is such a lech, Kitty. Why d’you put up with it?’

  ‘I love ’im.’

  ‘God knows why. I wish he’d stop dropping in on Jasmine Cottage. I wish all the husbands would. One’s so defenceless being so close to the road. Everyone can see lights, or hear the radio.’

  Not Rachel as well, thought Kitty hopelessly. On the dresser was a letter from her mother enclosing a postal order for three pounds and a card with a printed message wishing a wonderful daughter many happy returns tomorrow. Rannaldini was sure to forget it was her birthday.

  As it was Mr Brimscombe’s day off, she’d better water the new plants. The roots of older plants were supposed to go down far enough to find water. Emptying an entire watering-can over a bluey-mauve clematis against the wall, she reflected that new plants, like new or potential mistresses, required attention. Was this why Rannaldini was giving Rachel all this work, and insisting she came to the tournament tomorrow, and making sure Gretel looked after her children?

  Dear God, help me to stop grumbling, pleaded Kitty. If I’m pregnant, I’ll never, never grumble again, and at least Rannaldini hasn’t taken Hermione back.

  As Rannaldini’s tournaments were so unbelievably competitive, Marigold and Georgie had arranged to play a warm-up foursome with Ferdie and Lysander the evening before. Guy had gone to Salisbury to look at a private collection. Larry wasn’t due back from London until later, so the coast was clear.

  On the way over to Angel’s Reach, Lysander had to pop in to Rannaldini’s yard to pick up some worming tablets for Tiny and Arthur.

  There had been no let-up in the weather. The authorities were even muttering about standpipes. Traveller’s joy fell in creamy festoons over the hedgerows, which were weighed down with haws and shining scarlet hips. Ferdie could have leant out of the Ferrari and helped himself to huge ripe blackberries if Lysander hadn’t driven so fast. A glut of crab-apples crunched beneath the wheels.

  Lysander was unsettled by the tang of bonfires. In October his mother would have been dead a year. He clenched the steering-wheel to ease the pain. He must put some flowers on her grave. Perhaps he should make it up with his father.

  Autumn had been daubing Rannaldini’s woods yellow and orange. The Virginia creeper smothering the grooms’ cottage had already turned crimson. Walking into the immaculate but deserted yard, Lysander heard a blood-curdling scream, like a rabbit caught in a snare. Whipping round, he was relieved to see Maggie and Jack still sitting beside Ferdie in the car.

  ‘No, please, please no,’ screamed a female voice.

  For a horrified second Lysander thought it might be Kitty being savaged by The Prince of Darkness, but no, he was safely muzzled in his box.

  There it was again. Another dreadful wail coming from the indoor school in which Rannaldini enjoyed being left alone to dominate difficult horses. His methods were very cruel, according to Janice the head groom, but, being well paid, she let well alone.

  Beckoning frantically for Ferdie, Lysander loped round the corner and found the door of the indoor school locked.

  ‘No more, please.’ The moaning voice was too deep and throaty for Kitty’s.

  ‘You agreed to do everything I asked.’ It was Rannaldini, spine-chillingly cold.

  Clambering on to Ferdie’s broad shoulders, Lysander straightened up and nearly fell off. He must be seeing things. For there in the centre, wearing shiny black riding-boots and the tightest buff breeches, stood Rannaldini. With one hand he held a hunting whip which he was cracking like a rattlesnake, with the other a leading rein, which was attached to a studded dog-collar round Hermione’s neck.

  Hermione was totally naked except for tight-fitting high-heeled boots. Her body ran with sweat. Her large, wonderfully firm breasts bounced as she trotted round in a circle, her big curved bottom was already slightly pink, her eyes glistened in terror and excitement.

  ‘You’re not going fast enough,’ snapped Rannaldini, cracking the whip again, so the wicked thong caught her left buttock. With a neighing scream, Hermione broke into a canter.

  Wrong leg, thought Lysander.

  She was panting hard now; Rannaldini smiled, but his eyes were dead.

  ‘Are you sorry for the way you behaved?’

  ‘Oh yes, Rannaldini.’

  ‘Sorry you made scenes?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘What are you going to do about it? Head up, straighten your back.’ With another vicious flick he caught the underside of her breast.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ shrieked Hermione.

  ‘I said, “What are you going to do about it?”’ Yanking her towards him, nearly toppling her, he put a hand between her legs. ‘You’re getting bloody excited. Loving it, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Rannaldini.’

  ‘Then we’ll try a few jumps. Come on, bitch.’

  At this moment Lysander tumbled off Ferdie’s shoulders and sent a yard broom flying.

  ‘Who’s there?’ called out Rannaldini.

  Just in time, Ferdie and Lysander leapt behind the mounting block. At least the Ferrari was parked round the corner. As Rannaldini came out they flattened in terror. Fortunately lust drew him back again.

  ‘Must have been a horse,’ they heard him say, as the key turned in the lock.

  ‘What was going on?’ hissed Ferdie. Lysander, bright red with shock, trying not to laugh, mouth wide open in amazement, couldn’t utter, until they had hurtled to the boundaries of Rannaldini’s land, and turned into the road up to Angel’s Reach.

  ‘Oh, Ferd, you never saw such a thing in your life! Talk about undressage. He was schooling her and she was bollock-naked except for her boots. She’s got the most fantastic body! You can see exactly why he stays with her. She was giving excited little squeaks like Maggie when she gets on a rabbit trail. Give me a cigarette – and they were obviously about to have the most enormous bonk. God, it was gross, but seriously sexy. Wow! I’ve never seen anything like that.’

  ‘You must have in a porn mag.’

  ‘Dearie me, I’ll never get rid of this erection.’

  He took a cigarette from Ferdie, gave a long drag, and gasped in horror. ‘You don’t suppose he schools poor darling Kitty, do you?’

&nbs
p; ‘She’d be a lot thinner if he did.’

  Georgie looked better, really wonderful, thought Ferdie, as he and Lysander went into the kitchen at Angel’s Reach. He felt distinctly envious, when, after pecking him on the cheek, she turned to Lysander, wrapping him in a warm, voluptuous embrace and kissed him quite openly on the mouth. She was wearing a torn grey T-shirt of Flora’s and a pair of Guy’s boxer shorts covered with bonking alligators. Despite chunkier legs, she looked twice as sexy as Marigold, who was all done up in a pleated white tennis dress with her hair in a pink bow.

  ‘Ay’m afraid Ay always maintain the discipline of wearin’ whayte,’ she said apologetically.

  Lysander wouldn’t let anyone hit a ball until they’d drunk a bottle of Muscadet and he’d relayed every detail of his adventure.

  The grass court was tucked away behind the house. Marigold was a good player. Having spent her youth aspiring to join a tennis club, she had been much coached in later life and as a non-working wife played all summer. Ferdie was overweight, but he had a good eye, and got most things back. Georgie had no backhand and was out of practice but she played with Lysander who was so soaringly better than anyone else that they beat Marigold and Ferdie 6-0, 6-1.

  After that they started fooling around, pretending the ball was Hermione and saying: ‘You’ve been a naughty girl, whack,’ and giving a shriek, and getting so weak with laughter, that Maggie got excited and ran off with all the balls, with Jack yapping encouragement, so they packed it in.

  Georgie seemed so happy that, as they walked back to the house, Ferdie dropped back and asked Lysander if she knew anything about Guy pursuing Rachel.

  ‘No, I’m sure not. Why upset her?’

  ‘God, this weather’s bliss. If this is the greenhouse effect, long may it last,’ said Georgie, emptying a watering-can over a panting Dinsdale.

  ‘Don’t let Rachel hear you,’ said Marigold nervously, ‘and don’t let her see you wastin’ water laike that. She’s given me hell about Larry’s floodlaightin’ and our chandeliers in the lounge.’

  It was the most perfect evening. Night-scented stock and tobacco plants mingled their sweet scents with the first autumnal waft of the poplars. A pale blue-and-cherry-red air-balloon drifted home into a rose-pink sunset passing the bright star Arcturus which had just appeared above the wood.

  ‘Rannaldini’s going to be livid Lysander’s so good,’

  said Marigold. ‘He’s so used to being the best player by miles.’

  ‘You and I might beat him,’ said Georgie fondly.

  ‘Aren’t you going to play with Guy?’

  ‘No, I’m not. He gets so cross if I serve double faults.’

  Lysander couldn’t get the scene in the riding school out of his mind. It was the act of a seriously depraved man.

  ‘Why doesn’t Kitty leave him?’

  Georgie shrugged, her face in shadow. ‘Why doesn’t anyone leave anyone? Mental paralysis, a belief in fidelity? Kitty’s awfully religious. She worships the bastard, and he’s sapped her confidence. Anyway, where would she go? Her mother’s in a home.’

  ‘Rannaldini won’t let her go. She’s far too useful,’ said Marigold.

  An owl hooted, pigeons cooed. Across the valley they were shooting clays. Georgie topped up everyone’s glass and took another bottle out of the ice bucket for Lysander to open.

  ‘I’ve had a brainwave,’ she said patronizingly. ‘Kitty’s got a birthday this month. She’s a Virgo, wouldn’t you know. Why don’t we club together and give Lysander to her as a present?’

  She turned to Lysander. Her sludge-green eyes dark brown and mocking in the half-light. ‘You’re always talking about the need for a real challenge. Forget the Rutminster, try Kitty.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Lysander with rare ill temper. ‘It’d be a farce. There’s no way I could get Rannaldini back for Kitty. He was never hers in the first place. For Marigold, for you, for Hermione, not that she needs it, for Rachel even, no problem. But not poor little Kitty, for Christ’s sake.’

  With her sad, round, formless face, Kitty reminded him of the huge white moon hanging like a plate above Larry’s woods, hardly discernible in the pale azure sky of the first dusk.

  ‘Go on,’ urged Ferdie, scenting more cash. ‘Give it a try.’

  If Lysander was refusing to leave Paradise and Georgie, this seemed a good way to supplement his income.

  Lysander scooped up Maggie who was trembling at the bangs of the clay shoot, cuddling her to his chest.

  ‘You just collect the ten per cent,’ he said crossly. ‘You get Rannaldini back if you feel so strongly. I’m having none of it.’

  The others proceeded to get drunk and noisy. Lysander sat in silence, watching the moon rising, turning from a pale pinky-orange to butter-gold like one of Miss Cricklade’s sunflowers, to incandescent mother-of-pearl, and then flooding the whole valley while the sky deepened from smoky-blue to sapphire as the doomed, menacing notes of Rachmaninov’s third and most difficult piano concerto floated up from Jasmine Cottage.

  ‘Rachel plays wonderfully well,’ said Marigold. ‘Larry says she’s going to be a big star.’

  ‘Might cheer her up,’ said Georgie. ‘Better than grumbling about junk food and fending off passes from Rannaldini.’

  ‘You’d be a true knaight in shining armour if you rattled Rannaldini and made him naicer to Kitty,’ said Marigold.

  38

  At six o’clock the following morning, Kitty was woken by the hiss of illicit sprinklers defying the hose-pipe ban. The floodlights of Paradise Grange across the valley had been switched off, which would delight Rachel, but to the left Venus blazed golden, and as Orion, followed by his yawning dogs, pulled on his boots and climbed up the sky, Kitty could see Mr Brimscombe wearily picking up discarded underclothes round the pool. Natasha and a crowd of friends had gone skinny-dipping in the middle of the night. Their shrieks must have roused the whole neighbourhood.

  Glancing in the mirror, Kitty gave a wail. Desperate at the lankness of her hair, in her tiredness she had misread the home-perm directions and left the mix on too long. The result was a scorched, frizzy mass. If only she could hide behind the tea urn this afternoon, but, at the last moment, Rannaldini had asked the vicar, whose wife was away, and would expect Kitty to make up the numbers.

  Falling to her knees, Kitty prayed to God to make her less vain.

  ‘And let me not let my partner down too badly this afternoon and please don’t let anyone find out it’s my birthday or they’ll be embarrassed.’

  It was already hot and airless as she crept downstairs. Amid the chaos of dirty glasses, mugs, beer cans and overflowing ashtrays, there was a note from Natasha about not singeing her tennis dress. Kitty wanted to scream, but at least she hadn’t got the curse and Mrs Brimscombe was coming to help with tea.

  Matters were not improved by Cecilia wandering down at lunchtime wanting three exquisite tennis dresses she’d bought in Rome ironed, and Rannaldini arriving from a morning on the Fidelio set, finding fault with everything, and insisting she repack his suitcase should he decide to push off back to Germany tonight instead of early tomorrow.

  Now, in accompaniment to Richard Strauss’s Arabella, Kitty could hear the buzz of three hairdriers upstairs, as, fearful of Rachel arriving early and bollocking her for using aerosols, she gave a closet squirt of Mr Sheen to the dining-room tables before laying out the tea things.

  The main tennis court at Valhalla lay some three hundred yards from the house beyond the swimming-pool. It was ringed by a thick high hornbeam hedge, which also encompassed grassy banks, where spectators could lie out, and a charming duck-egg-blue pavilion. Opposite this, a spyhole had been cut out of the hornbeam, giving a delightful view of the valley and Magpie Cottage. Although Valhalla was greener than anywhere else in Paradise on this stiflingly hot day, Rannaldini couldn’t entirely stem the approach of autumn. Despite Mr Brimscombe’s incessant sweeping, the lawn was strewn with gold leaves and chatterin
g swallows lined up on the grey roof of the house. On the table in the pavilion Kitty had put a big blue bowl of greengages and plums from Rannaldini’s orchard, a matching blue vase of yellow snapdragons and red dahlias and two big jugs of lemon barley water – but no alcohol. Tennis was taken deadly seriously at Valhalla. Pained by such a hideous colour combination, Rannaldini removed the red dahlias from the vase, chucking them on the grass to be trodden underfoot by the first arrivals.

  As beautiful as the peacock butterflies crowding the Michaelmas daisies round the pavilion gathered the ladies of Paradise, their limbs as smooth and shiningly brown as the conkers hanging in their prickly cases on the great golden chestnuts on the edge of Rannaldini’s woods. Cecilia wore the palest pink dress, with huge cut-outs at the waist, Natasha a zip-up white mini with her dark hair in a long plait tied with a scarlet ribbon. Marigold had covered her bulges with a broderie-anglaise shift and flaunted her lovely legs in the tiniest of white shorts. She was kicking herself for lending an adorable white cotton-jersey dress with a lace neckline to Rachel, which clung to Rachel’s figure and showed off her even lovelier, long, lily-white legs, which Rachel loathed herself for shaving. Nor had being gratuitously rude about the monstrous expense of the dress deterred Rachel from wearing it.

  Arriving late, Georgie instantly cursed herself for not making more effort. Touched because Guy had brought her breakfast in bed, exhausted but happy after a long, successful morning’s work, she hadn’t bothered to wash her hair. Unable to find the new white shirt and flowered Bermudas she’d specially hidden from Flora, she’d been forced to wear yesterday’s grey T-shirt and a pair of cycling shorts which had looked fine in the bedroom mirror. Only outside did she realize how pallid the backs of her legs were. Flora looked her usual truculent sexy self in the baggiest of white T-shirts.

  The male players on the whole looked less glamorous. The vicar, sporting a NAZARETH CARPENTER SEEKS JOINERS sticker in the back of his ancient Ford, rolled up in baggy greying shorts of just the wrong length.

  ‘Tepid rather than hot pants,’ murmured Georgie.