The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous

by Jilly Cooper

  ‘Kitty, Kitty, Kitty. It sounds as though I’m calling a cat in the dark. Did I wake you? What time is it? Five-thirty? Oh shit, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. It’s the nicest wake-up call I’ve ever ’ad. Now I can read.’

  ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘A book called Love’s Young Dream.’

  ‘Tell me what it’s about. I’ve got to page twenty-five of The Mill on the Floss, so you can tell how bored I am. Where’s Georgie? I daren’t leave a message on the machine in case Guy Fucks picks it up.’

  ‘Probably pulled the phone out. She’s working ever so ’ard.’

  ‘Will you call round and beg her to ring me, please, Kitty? I miss her so much. Have you heard from Ferdie?’

  ‘Only that Maggie’s in season, and ’alf the dogs in Fulham are baying outside the door.’

  ‘Oh God, poor Ferd. I’ll ring him. Jack’ll be in there. He’s such an operator. They’ll have gorgeous puppies. I’ll give you one. How much d’you weigh now?’

  ‘Eight stone eleven, but it’s ’ard to diet when the wevver’s cold. Wasn’t it sad about Mrs Fatcher?’

  ‘I know. I really cried when I saw her leaving Downing Street in her crimson suit.’

  ‘Awful ’aving to move ’ouse in three days.’

  ‘I sent her a good-luck card.’

  ‘That was kind. John Major seems nice.’

  ‘Are you sure Georgie’s OK? Is she missing me?’

  ‘I’m sure she is.’

  ‘Well, I’ll be home for Christmas. I’ve got you a present to make up for Dinsdale chewing up your boomerang. Bye, Kitty darling.’

  Putting back the telephone, Kitty thought how empty Paradise seemed without Lysander. Out in the night, a sharp frost was bringing down the last leaves. She felt sad there was no-one to witness their fall, like soldiers dying alone on the battlefield. How awful if Lysander or Wolfie or Ferdie got sent to the Gulf.

  Australia grew hotter and Lysander, missing Arthur and his dogs, and having restored the errant sheep farmer to his lovely wife, decided to fly home and surprise Georgie whom he missed most of all. He spent the twenty-four-hour flight gazing at her photograph, which had grown cracked and faded in his wallet and landed on a bitterly cold morning in the first week in December. Collecting an ecstatic Jack and Maggie, who seemed to have put on a lot of weight, from Fulham, he found Ferdie leaving for work and extremely disapproving.

  ‘You can’t go back to Paradise. The Press are still sniffing around. Everything’ll blow up again.’

  ‘I must check if Arthur and Tiny are OK. My stuff’s all at Magpie Cottage, and I’m frantic to see Georgie.’

  ‘Well, for God’s sake, ring first. You don’t want to bump into Guy.’

  Lysander left a message on Georgie’s ansaphone, and then played Georgie’s sixties tape, which he’d nearly scrambled, all the way down. He was so tired, the drive seemed longer than the flight. He remembered how, after any time apart, his mother used to race out of the house, arms open wide, eyes wet with tears of joy, and tug him into a warm, scented embrace. If he had Georgie, Christmas wouldn’t be so bleak.

  Stripped of its green leaves, Paradise was as he remembered it on his first visit. Crows cawed morosely, the stone of the houses had lost its lustre, everything was blanketed in mist. Grey and sullen, Valhalla had retreated into its trees like a murderer with a gang of retainers. The only colour came from the last saffron of the larches and the faded red of the Turkey oaks. Georgie’s soaring angels looked in need of thermal underwear.

  Anxious to get into the house out of the vicious wind, Lysander parked the Ferrari across the drive and loaded himself up with a koala bear, a huge bottle of Giorgio, a pearl necklace and twelve bunches of pale pink roses he’d bought on the way. Dinsdale welcomed him and the dogs with great delight. The Rover outside, as highly polished as an elderly army officer’s shoes, looked vaguely familiar, but Lysander was in too much of a rush.

  ‘Georgie, it’s me,’ he yelled, letting himself into the house.

  His heart was hammering with excitement, he was so dying to hold her in his arms.

  ‘Georgie, where are you?’

  After too long a pause, she came downstairs, wrapped in a dark brown towel. She looked so terrified that Lysander thought for a ghastly second that Guy might be at home. There was a faint smell of fish. She must be cooking Charity’s cod.

  She wore no make-up, except mascara smudged under her eyes, and, although her hair was tousled, she was growing her fringe out and wearing it brushed sideways off her forehead. Having gazed at a very glamorous photograph of her for two months, Lysander thought she looked much older.

  ‘I was having a bath,’ she stammered.

  Clutching his presents, his curls flopping over his bruised eyes, his chin resting on massed pink roses, Lysander looked like some Bacchante strayed out of an all-night revel.

  ‘D’you want a drink?’ she said nervously.

  ‘No, I want you.’ Dropping the presents on the hall table which was so small that half the roses fell to the floor, he hugged her. ‘Let’s go to bed. God, I missed you.’

  Looking down at her feet, bare on the flagstones, he felt weak with love. ‘You’ve got chilblains. You must wear slippers. I’ll buy you some. Chilblains means it’s going to snow. I’ll take you tobogganing. You don’t seem very pleased to see me,’ he added in bewilderment.

  ‘Of course I am. I wasn’t expecting you, that’s all, and Flora drives now, and – er – as she’s broken up, she might roll up at any minute. Come on, let’s have a drink.’

  ‘OK. You put on something warm. I’ll get a bottle.’

  ‘I’ll get it.’ Georgie’s eyes flickered.

  But as she went towards the kitchen, there was a crash and the sound of a window being slammed. Jack bristled and barked.

  ‘What’s that?’ Pushing her aside, Lysander sprinted into the kitchen and froze.

  For out of the banging window he could see a man in his trousers and socks, carrying his shoes and jacket and frantically buttoning up his shirt as he hotfooted across the garden round to the Rover.

  Lysander couldn’t move. He would recognize that broad-shouldered, ramrod-straight back anywhere. Jumping into the Rover, David Hawkley drove off in a flurry of leaves, unaware that his son had seen him.

  Lysander thought he was suffocating. On the kitchen table lay a copy of his father’s translation of Ovid. Flipping it open, he saw his father had written on the fly leaf: TO DEAREST GEORGIE, and followed by some incomprehensible Latin tag. By the recipe books he found three of his own letters unopened.

  Georgie was sitting on the stairs, surrounded by pink roses, looking sulky, dead eyed, caught out, but not nearly sorry enough.

  ‘Tell me this is a bad dream.’

  ‘It’s a bad dream.’

  ‘How could you, Georgie?’ whispered Lysander, clutching the door for support. ‘How could you? You were so unhappy. I worked and worked to get you over Guy and I find you bonking my father – like a couple of bloody dinosaurs. He’s a geriatric, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘He’s only five years older than me,’ said Georgie, flaring up.

  ‘He’s a bastard. Guy’s a saint by comparison. You’re revolting, Georgie. I don’t understand you.’

  A combination of guilt at being caught out, or fierce protectiveness towards David, and blazing jealousy of the dead Pippa, unleashed Georgie’s legendary Irish temper.

  ‘Your father is the dearest man in the world, and what’s more he’s been a wonderful father to you.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ shouted Lysander, so loud that Maggie cringed terrified against the door, and Jack started to yap.

  ‘He’s incapable of love. He was diabolical to Mum.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ screamed Georgie. ‘Your mother was a whore. D’you know how many lovers she had when she was married to your father?’

  At the top of her voice, saliva flying, face engorging and disintegrating like beetroot in the Mouli
nex, she proceeded to scream chapter and worse. Lysander couldn’t stop her, he’d never been quick enough for back chat. He just mouthed at her, utterly shattered, fists clenched, rigid but trembling.

  ‘Did you know,’ yelled Georgie finally, ‘your Uncle Alastair was her lover for years and she was having an affair with Tommy Westerham? His picture from Horse and Hound was found in her bag the day she died, galloping down the main road to plead with him not to dump her.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ whispered Lysander. ‘My father told you this to get you on his side, to poison you against me and Mum. The lying, lying bastard! I’m going to kill him when I catch up with him.’

  For a second, as he grabbed Georgie’s shoulders, shaking her like a rat, his beautiful face contorted into frenzy, Georgie was terrified he was going to kill her as well.

  Then he caught the reek of cod again, and recognized the smell of sex, and with his father, and threw her back against the stairs. As he stumbled out, trampling the roses underfoot and slamming the front door behind him, Georgie realized what she’d done. She tried frantically to trace David, who now would never forgive her. Nor would Lysander, who would probably kill either himself or his father.

  Lysander’s only thought was to find someone who had known his parents well enough to refute Georgie’s horrific accusations. Hurtling out of Paradise with Jack and Maggie huddled together on the seat beside him, he frantically punched out numbers on his car telephone, repeatedly getting wrong people because he kept misreading his address book and misdialling. By the time he had narrowly avoided crashing into several stone walls, he had learnt that his brothers were both out of their offices, his grandmother was whooping it up at some bridge party and his mother’s sister was in the Seychelles. In despair, he decided to drive down to Brighton to see Uncle Alastair’s widow, Dinah, a tetchy old soak, who spent her life outwitting a succession of companions paid by the family to keep her off the booze. If he hurried, he might catch her while she was sober enough to make sense.

  Brighton looked its least seductive. An icy wind savaged the tamarisk bushes along the front, a sullen grey sea pummelled the shingle. Aunt Dinah’s flat stank of torn cat, long-term dirt and stale booze. Lysander remembered how his mother had referred to her mockingly as an auntie-depressant. Mrs Bingham, the paid companion, tweed-suited and tight-lipped, had the same gaoler’s eyes as Mustard.

  ‘Mrs Hawkley’s in the lounge. Would you care for some refreshment?’

  ‘I’d love a drink.’

  Mrs Bingham offered tea or coffee.

  Lysander said he’d prefer a large whisky.

  ‘Oh, we don’t keep alcohol in the flat, I’m afraid.’

  Looking at this wild-haired young man, totally inadequately dressed in a Foster’s Lager T-shirt and dirty white jeans, clutching a koala bear and with shakes even worse than his aunt, Mrs Bingham deduced alcohol must run in the family.

  ‘Who’s there?’ came Aunt Dinah’s gin-soaked yell.

  Lysander found her in the sitting room, reading Dick Francis with a huge magnifying glass with the television roaring. She was wearing a grey wool dress so tight it had ridden up to reveal stocking tops and thighs like unbaked suet. Although her black wig was worn at a rakish angle, her once-fine features had collapsed with the booze. Beneath eyelids swollen like shiny white maggots, however, her bloodshot eyes had the craftiness of an old hippo.

  A large tabby cat covered most of her lap. Fear of her dashing husband leaving her had kept her sober and reasonably attractive for thirty-five years, but when he did go, albeit to another world, she had given up. Even in his state of shock, Lysander felt huge pity, and wished he had brought her a box of chocolates.

  ‘It’s Lysander, Aunt Dinah.’

  As he leant forward to kiss a cheek on which red veins tangled like candy floss, he caught a waft of stale sweat and Gordon’s. The paid companion wasn’t being as efficient as she thought.

  ‘Just been watching a flick called The Bengal Lancers.’ Aunt Dinah spoke in a very precise voice to conceal the slurring. ‘Everything wrong as usual. They never had pig-sticking on the Frontier, but Gary Cooper was certainly a dish. Sorry, I can’t get up – cat on lap.’

  ‘I’m sorry to barge in. I need to talk to you.’

  ‘She offered you a drink?’ said Aunt Dinah as the paid companion sidled in, plonked her tweed bottom on the sofa and got out her knitting.

  ‘I’m OK.’ Collapsing into the armchair nearest the electric fire, Lysander noticed a cat’s earth box beside his aunt’s chair. From the smell, it hadn’t been cleaned out recently. He suppressed a wave of nausea.

  ‘You get more and more like your mother.’

  Glancing up, he was disconcerted to see both Dinah’s crossed eyes concentrating on him.

  ‘It’s Mum I came to talk about.’

  A long sigh ruffled the tabby cat’s fur.

  ‘I wondered how long it would be.’

  Lysander turned to Mrs Bingham. ‘Look, d’you mind awfully if we talk alone?’

  ‘My job is to stay with Mrs Hawkley.’

  ‘Oh, bugger off,’ snarled Dinah. ‘I’m not likely to get up to anything with my nephew. No doubt you frisked him before he came in.’

  As Mrs Bingham flounced out, the cat started to purr.

  ‘Common, isn’t she? Doesn’t like Thatcher,’ yelled Dinah over the television. ‘The one coming next week, according to the hand-out, has wide experience with handicapped children.’ She gave a cackle of laughter.

  ‘D’you mind if we turn the television down a bit?’

  Jane Asher was in her kitchen talking about Christmas cake. She looked so fresh, pretty and alien to his current squalid surroundings that Lysander wished he could climb into the set with her. After turning her face bright orange and changing channels twice, Dinah found the mute button.

  Ramming his hands between his knees to stop them trembling Lysander took a deep breath. ‘About Mum. I honestly don’t want to upset you, but basically Dad’s got a new woman.’

  ‘Mrs Colman. I’ve met her. That voice would drive me cuckoo.’

  ‘No, a newer one. Basically she’s been slagging Mum off, I don’t believe her, but I just wanted proof that she was lying.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘That, that – I’m really sorry – that she was having an affaire with Alastair.’

  ‘Ah.’ Dinah’s dirty-nailed fingers stopped stroking the cat.

  ‘And loads of other people.’

  Outside he could see two gulls and a boat with a red sail battling desperately with the gale. The pause seemed to go on for ever.

  ‘She was rather unfaithful,’ said Dinah.

  ‘She was?’ Lysander was aghast. ‘Then Dad drove her to it. He’s such a shit.’

  ‘Your father put up with a lot. They were never suited. He brought her to stay when they were first engaged. He was dotty about her. The first afternoon he went to his room to write a review for The Spectator and Alastair offered to show her the garden. Looking down from my bedroom, I saw them kissing in the orchard. All the blossom was out. It was like a Barbara Cartland book jacket.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ hissed Lysander.

  ‘It’s true.’ Dinah’s words were slurring now. ‘I caught them out so many times. Christmas, birthdays, your grandfather’s funeral – even your christening. Some people even thought – no, forget that. Alastair and Pippa would be the life and soul of every party, but suddenly they’d vanish like gypsies’ lurchers.’

  Lysander had put his head in his hands. Now he looked up, his eyes cavernous in horror and bewilderment.

  ‘It was a pity Alastair died so suddenly. Didn’t leave his affairs in very good order.’ Staggering to her feet, tipping the cat on to the carpet, Dinah lurched towards the desk and after pulling out several drawers, took out a salmon-pink file on which the words: TWO YEAR OLDS, 1983 had been crossed out.

  ‘It’s all here. When I want a masochistic charge of adrenalin late at
night I go through it.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘And wish they were both alive, so I could kill them.

  ‘Alastair was crazy about her,’ she went on. ‘In the beginning he blamed the male menopause. Twenty years later Pippa was an old man’s folly. But there were always others. She loved collecting scalps, then telling him about them.’

  Opening the file, she emptied it out on to a nearby table, knocking over a dying cyclamen and a Staffordshire dog. Photographs, bills, letters fluttered everywhere all over the carpet.

  With a stab of anguish, Lysander recognized his mother’s scrawl on a piece of blue writing paper.

  ‘Darling Alastair,’ he read laboriously. ‘That was the best fuck I’ve ever had.’

  ‘As your father got crosser and grimmer, your mother got wilder,’ mumbled Dinah picking up the Radio Times. ‘Nice lunch party I went to yesterday, with even numbers for a change. All the men were queer of course, but at my age, you have to expect queers.’

  This isn’t happening to me, I can’t read any more, thought Lysander.

  ‘Here, give that back,’ said Dinah as he chucked the letter on the electric bars of the fire.

  ‘Time for your medication, young lady.’ Mrs Bingham, dying to know what was going on, marched in with a glass of water and two yellow pills on a plate.

  Trying to shield his mother, Lysander hunched himself over the letters and photographs, as he frantically gathered them back into their file. For a second they were all distracted by the giant tabby cat lumbering into its earth box scattering cat litter as it rose like a Deux Chevaux, and noisily evacuated.

  Then, as Lysander shoved the file viciously back into the drawer, he caught sight of a photograph that had fallen on to the floor and nearly blacked out. It showed Uncle Alastair with a great grin on his face, lounging in an armchair with a cigar in one hand, and his mother kneeling at his feet and laughing as she held his rampant cock towards her mouth between two fingers as though she were about to smoke it. They were both naked.