The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous

by Jilly Cooper

  ‘It’s that BMW, you idiot,’ screamed Georgie. ‘The Ferrari’s being serviced.’

  ‘I was scoring with that brunette,’ grumbled Dommie Carlisle, climbing sulkily into the back.

  ‘Of all the ungrateful sods,’ said Seb, climbing in beside him. ‘Not sure Lysander’s safe to drive,’ he muttered to Georgie.

  ‘I bloody am,’ said Lysander, backing briskly into a parked Mercedes.

  ‘I’ll drive,’ said Georgie, panicking the police would catch up with them, triggering off some frightful scandal. ‘For God’s sake, move over, Lysander.’

  The twins were now having a punch-up in the back.

  ‘I would’ve scored.’

  ‘Bloody wouldn’t.’

  ‘Would.’

  ‘She was a slapper.’

  ‘She was not.’

  ‘For God’s sake, stop them,’ Georgie screamed at Lysander, as she set off with a jerk and furious revving.

  ‘I can’t. I’m navigating.’ Lysander stared fixedly ahead. ‘I’ll be sick if I look round.’

  ‘I’m going back to score.’ Dommie leapt defiantly out, running straight into the arms of the police.

  As Georgie drove towards Knightsbridge, the gutters were filled with brown plane leaves and the gardens with Japanese anemones and shaggy yellow chrysanthemums. Then she twigged. Rosary Road was where Julia had lived in London. How often Guy must have bowled down the Fulham Road in excitement and told the taxi to turn left.

  She dropped Seb off at Sloane Square. Lysander, slumped beside her, was too far gone to notice the tears streaming down her cheeks all the way back to the hotel.

  ‘Just walk in, don’t look to left or right,’ she hissed as she steered a buckling Lysander twice round the swing door.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Maguire,’ said the doorman.

  As soon as his head hit the pillow, Lysander passed out. Georgie removed her hellish make-up and, suddenly icy cold, had a long, hot bath, waving two metaphorical fingers at Rachel as she wasted a great deal of water. Then she removed Lysander’s flowered tie and took off his only pair of Guccis Maggie hadn’t eaten. His brown lashes nearly covered the shadows beneath his eyes, there was a sprinkling of freckles on his sunburnt nose, and his big mouth was smiling as he reached out in his sleep for her. As Georgie nuzzled into his neck, he smelled as sweet and fresh as violets.

  Too exhausted to sleep, she saw her bare shoulders, her long red hair and pale sad face reflected in the mirror opposite. Once again it was as though Julia was gazing back at her.

  The next day, after a leisurely lunch and several Alka-Seltzers, as they set out for Angel’s Reach in the BMW, Lysander handed her a copy of Hello!.

  ‘To distract you on the journey. I used to buy one for Mum. She was so terrified of my driving.’

  He didn’t add that it was the anniversary of his mother’s death. In their separate anguish, they didn’t confide in each other. Despite Hello! Georgie had to bite her lip and cling on to the seat as the speedometer reached 120 m.p.h. The radio was playing the new tape of her sixties songs. Turned up fortissimo, it gave her a blinding headache. Even with all the windows open and in spite of the time of year, the day was impossibly hot and sticky.

  Lysander, thought Georgie with infinite sadness, was adorable, but he needed children his own age to play with. Nor could she transfer her love to him. She lacked skins.

  Back at Angel’s Reach, longing to have a bath and change, she found a note from Mother Courage: Cat’s been sick, downstairs toilet blocked and water packed up. Got Debenham. See you later.

  ‘That’s all I bloody need.’

  ‘Hurrah, you can come and stay at Magpie Cottage,’ said Lysander.

  ‘I’ll join you when I’ve got things together this end,’ said Georgie, leafing through the post. ‘Guy’s sent me a postcard of a ruined abbey. Is that supposed to symbolize the state he’s reduced me to?’

  Upstairs, she turned on the ansaphone.

  ‘Hallo, Panda,’ said Guy’s deep voice. ‘Been thinking of you, hope everything went all right. Give me a ring. Miss you.’

  The next call was from a jubilant Flora, who’d passed her driving test. Clever little duck, thought Georgie fondly, but it was going to complicate things having her rolling up unannounced at any time of day. The third call was from Sabine Bottomley saying Flora wasn’t working. The fourth was from Guy again saying he missed her and would she ring him back.

  Perhaps I’m imagining things, Georgie felt suddenly happier. Then she went into the bathroom and saw Guy’s organic toothpaste.

  Craving truth, she dialled Rachel’s number. If she was at home there was no need to worry. She was about to ring off when the telephone was picked up. Hell, thought Georgie, I’ll have to ask her to something now.

  ‘Hallo, Rachel.’

  ‘No, it’s Gretel. I’m just feeding the cat.’

  ‘When’s Rachel coming back?’

  ‘Tomorrow, she’s abroad.’

  Georgie slammed down the telephone, hands shaking, heart pounding, body drenched in sweat. She was out of the house in ten minutes. Then the telephone started ringing and ringing.

  42

  The other man whose mind was very much on the late Pippa Hawkley on that heavy, thundery, suffocatingly close afternoon was her husband, David. Putting a bunch of tiger lilies, flowers as beautiful and exotic as Pippa herself, on her grave, he had prayed she was resting more in peace than he was in life. A year on he was still wracked by anguish and confusion. Despite overt offers from Mrs Colman and half the mothers who came to discuss their sons, he had remained celibate. But a couple of porn magazines, confiscated from a boy that morning and shoved in his desk drawer to burn later, had reminded him what he was missing. Glancing at the wanton, knowing girls with their tangled hair, hillocks of breast and buttock, and pink, glistening lips, he felt as parched sexually as the dusty dried-up pitches outside his window.

  Slamming the desk drawer shut, he grimly turned to Catullus. A kindly letter from his publisher earlier in the week reminded him that his translation should have been delivered in January.

  An earlier translator had written: ‘Hard it is to put aside long-standing love.’ His sixth form would have probably put: ‘It’s a bitch to get over a long-standing relationship.’

  ‘How can I forget someone I have loved for ever?’ wrote David Hawkley. Catullus might have written the poem specially for him. He was roused from his sad dreams by a knock on the door. It was ‘Mustard’ with a vase of bronze chrysanthemums.

  ‘Thank you,’ said David, thinking how Pippa had loathed chrysanthemums.

  ‘Mrs Harefield’s favourite flowers,’ said Mustard reverently, who was the most awful star-fucker. ‘You haven’t forgotten she and her son Cosmo are due in five minutes?’

  David had not. He even looked forward to Hermione’s visit. Her exquisite voice had comforted him through many a long night of insomnia. Strange that even in the blackest despair, one searched for love.

  Hermione was searching for a public school for little Cosmo. Having witnessed the dreadful rudeness of Flora and Natasha, she had no intention of subjecting her Wunderkind to the co-educational anarchy of Bagley Hall. Fleetley had been top of her list because of its high academic record and David Hawkley’s reputation as a disciplinarian.

  Having been ushered into his study by a fawning Mustard, Hermione decided it would be extremely exciting to be disciplined by ‘Hatchet’ Hawkley, and that he was decidedly attractive in a brilliant, implacable High Tory way. Rannaldini had been neglecting her again. He never answered her calls. Hermione was consequently casting around for a new beau. This stern handsome widower would fit the bill perfectly – and might even allow little Cosmo in cheap.

  One look at Cosmo, who was bursting out of his sailor suit like Tom Kitten, with his sailor hat atop his flowing black curls, and his evil black eyes rolling in search of diversion, convinced David that this vile child must never enter his school.

  ‘Most of
our boys are put down at birth,’ he said truthfully, then less so, ‘I’m afraid we’re booked solid until AD 2000.’

  ‘Come, come,’ said Hermione skittishly. ‘I know that powerful headmasters can always waive the rule for friends, and I know you and I are going to be very special friends.’

  David knew no such thing as little Cosmo proceeded to lay waste to his office, overturning files, putting sticky fingers on first editions, scattering sweet papers, and finally pulling a penknife on Hesiod, the school cat, who was sleeping peacefully in a patch of sunlight. When chided fondly by his mother, Cosmo ordered her to piss off.

  ‘Cosmo,’ went on Hermione, ‘is severely gifted, so he needs to be stretched.’

  On the rack preferably, thought David, wondering how a woman so beautiful and so gloriously talented could be quite so awful.

  As little Cosmo was now applying his penknife to the big oak table, David suggested a look round the school.

  ‘That would be fun, wouldn’t it, Cosmo?’

  Cosmo said it wouldn’t, and raising his mother’s skirt, asked her why she wasn’t wearing any knickers. Hermione was undeterred.

  In the music room, where the choir was rehearsing ‘How Lovely Are Thy Dwellings’, she leapt up on the stage and sang along for a page or two, before telling the cringing music master he looked just like Paul Newman.

  ‘You will be teaching my Cosmo.’ She drew her wunderkind forward. ‘Music is Cosmo’s life.’

  ‘Your flies are undone,’ said little Cosmo loudly.

  Instantly the hands of both headmaster and music master flew to their zips.

  ‘April fool,’ said little Cosmo, giving a maniacal cackle.

  ‘Little Cosmo has such a sense of humour,’ said a beaming Hermione.

  Back in David’s study, Mustard was waiting to pour.

  ‘Camomile tea and honey or Earl Grey, Mrs Harefield?’

  ‘How very caring,’ Hermione clapped her hands. ‘And flapjacks, too, my favourite. You have done your homework.’

  She turned to David. ‘You were going to show me your Oxbridge results, Headmaster.’

  Mustard had just gone to find the file, when little Cosmo let out another maniacal cackle. Having discovered the porn magazines in David Hawkley’s top drawer, he was now leering at the colossal breasts of a blonde in thigh boots and a cowboy hat.

  ‘Confiscated at lunchtime,’ spluttered David, snatching back the magazine, as Cosmo gave him a pull-the-other-leg smile.

  ‘Mrs Colman,’ yelled David, ‘could you amuse Cosmo for a minute or two?’

  ‘Ah sons, sons,’ sighed Hermione, leaning forward in her pink Chanel suit to reveal a bosom just as splendid as the blonde in the porn mag.

  ‘It must be difficult, with your exacting career, to spend enough time with Cosmo,’ observed David.

  ‘Quality time, I give him quality time,’ murmured Hermione. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you – are you any relation of Lysander Hawkley?’

  ‘My youngest son,’ said David warily.

  ‘You must be so proud,’ said Hermione, who actually disliked Lysander intensely. ‘I haven’t discovered what Lysander does, but such a good-looking, clearly gifted boy. He gets all that from you, of course, but he’s lucky to have such a generous father.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘He must have a massive private income to run a Ferrari,’ said Hermione with her little laugh, ‘and all those polo ponies, and he’s always buying diamonds for his numerous ladies. What delicious flapjacks! I just assumed Fleetley was doing so well, you were able to give him a huge allowance, or perhaps he’d made a killing on the horses.’

  David choked on his Earl Grey, turned purple, but made no comment.

  The moment Hermione left, Mustard, unaware that little Cosmo had emptied his Ribena into her word processor, came bustling in.

  ‘What a lovely lady. She wanted the recipe for my flapjacks. And what a dear little lad. Didn’t he look sweet in his sailor hat?’

  ‘Only if he wore it over his face,’ snapped David.

  ‘You know I never read the tabloids,’ went on Mustard, in almost orgasmic excitement, because of her pathological jealousy of Pippa Hawkley, ‘but Matron just showed me this.’ She handed David the Evening Scorpion. With a deep sigh, he put on his bifocals.

  Across pages four and five were slightly blurred photographs of Lysander kissing Georgie on the dance floor at last night’s party and of Georgie showing a lot of leg as she straddled the wall at the bottom of the garden. There were clearer photographs of Martha Winterton and Guy and Georgie together.

  ‘FALL GUY,’ said the huge headline. ‘Hunky Hubby of the Year Guy Seymour,’ ran the copy, ‘is such a tolerant husband he allows wife, singer-songwriter Georgie Maguire to kiss and cuddle in candle-lit restaurants night after night with Lysander Hawkley, the man who makes husbands jealous. Last night they were spotted escaping from a Fulham rave-up during a drugs raid.

  ‘Fun-loving Lysander is the youngest son of “Hatchet Hawkley”, headmaster of snooty Fleetley (fees £14,000 a year with extras).’

  With a bellow of rage, David scrumpled up the paper. Lysander must be pushing drugs to make the kind of money Hermione was talking about. Degenerate rock stars like Georgie Maguire were always into that kind of thing.

  Picking up the telephone, he dialled the deputy head.

  ‘I’m desperately sorry, Headmaster. I’ve seen the article.’

  ‘I better take twenty-four hours’ leave and try and sort things out.’

  ‘Absolutely. We’ll hold the fort till you get back.’

  Alone at Valhalla, Kitty welcomed the prospect of a free evening. She had missed Lysander a lot – he was so lovely to have around – but he’d be pleased she’d lost another eight pounds, and had cheek-bones, ribs, ankles and flapping waistbands for the first time in her life. She must keep busy and not weaken. She had contracts to go through for Hermione, Rannaldini, and now Rachel; and darling Wolfie, having sent her a boomerang and a furry duck-billed platypus for her birthday, deserved a long chatty letter.

  Yesterday, in a fit of despair, she’d taken the scissors to her fiendish perm. Shorn of its frizzy halo, her face looked even thinner, and all her features, the wide grey eyes still slightly inflamed by the contact lenses, the squashed nose and the sweet and generous mouth, much bigger. Peering in the mirror, she tugged tendrils of hair over her forehead and down her neck. It was dreadfully short, what would Rannaldini say? Probably wouldn’t notice. Someone was leaning on the bell. On the doorstep stood a distinctly attractive man.

  ‘For you,’ he said, handing her a bunch of carrots.

  ‘Ferdie,’ squealed Kitty in delight. ‘’Oo my goodness, you look terrific.’

  The prospect of winning a bet had concentrated Ferdie’s mind and will-power amazingly. He had lost so much weight he was almost unrecognizable. He was also black-brown from the Algarve sun, with his dark hair streaked blond, and his bone structure re-appeared. The Laughing Cavalier was slowly turning into Mel Gibson.

  ‘Oh, Ferdie,’ sighed Kitty.

  ‘You don’t look so bad yourself.’ Ferdie whistled in amazement, as he walked round her. ‘Your hair’s so much better, and you’ve got your contact lenses in. Oh, Kittywake, we’re on our way. Let’s have a huge drink to celebrate.’

  ‘Lysander’d be ever so shocked,’ said Kitty.

  ‘I’ll take care of Lysander.’

  Neither of them had touched alcohol for a month, but Ferdie persuaded Kitty to bring up a bottle of champagne already chilled by the dungeons.

  ‘We’ve got to weigh ourselves in a minute, so it’s only fair if you drink with me,’ said Ferdie, thinking how sweet she looked, not pretty at all, but appealing like his mother’s Boston Terrier.

  By the time Kitty had filled him in with local gossip and Ferdie had produced his holiday snaps, they’d had another glass, and Kitty, who hadn’t eaten since breakfast, had become incredibly giggly. As they danced upstairs for the gre
at weigh-in, they started squabbling over how much their clothes weighed.

  ‘Men’s clothes are heavier than women’s,’ said Ferdie, removing his shoes.

  ‘Not that much,’ said Kitty, kicking off her white high heels.

  Ferdie took off his shirt to reveal a suntanned chest, solid as a bull terrier’s.

  ‘Oh, Ferdie, you look like Arnie Swart’s what’s it. ’Ave you been working out?’

  Ferdie nodded. ‘Nearly killed me, I’ve still got love handles,’ he seized two chunks of flesh above his waist, ‘but they’re going.’ He filled both their glasses. ‘That dress must weigh a lot. Let’s have it off. Gosh,’ he gasped, as, after a little persuading, Kitty pulled her blue shirtwaister over her head, ‘you’re very voluptuous.’

  ‘That’s a nice way of saying I’m fat,’ came a muffled voice.

  ‘It’s a way of saying you’ve got gorgeous boobs.’

  ‘Have I?’ Kitty emerged scarlet.

  ‘Sure you haven’t hidden tangerines in your bra?’ Ferdie squeezed the ends. ‘No, blimey, it’s all you.’

  Kitty screamed with laughter.

  ‘Tangerines would make me ’eavier, you dope, I want to be lighter than you.’

  It was thus giggling hysterically with Ferdie down to his Ninja Turtle boxer shorts and Kitty in a very white bra and knickers that Lysander, dropping in after his jaunt with Georgie to check on Kitty’s weight loss, found them.

  ‘You’ve got a fantastic body,’ Ferdie was saying admiringly. ‘Take off your bra, it must weigh at least seven pounds.’

  Lysander was absolutely livid. Ferdie had always been so stuffy about not bonking clients, and here he was almost at first base with Kitty. Only just managing to control his temper, he supervised the weigh-in. Kitty had lost a stone and a half, Ferdie a stone and five and a half pounds.

  ‘Bloody good,’ Ferdie conceded. ‘Rannaldini will have to eat his words.’

  ‘I wonder how many calories there are in them,’ said Kitty shrieking with laughter. ‘I’ve won the be-het, I won the be-het.’

  ‘You are both plastered,’ said Lysander icily, as Ferdie, forgetting what day it was, wasted three cheques, giving Kitty her hundred pounds. Having no intention of leaving them alone together in this state, Lysander insisted they come over to Magpie Cottage for supper.