by Kathy Lette
‘Maybe he is telling the truth,’ I ventured to my friend as we tailed him towards Hampstead. ‘He’s nearly home.’ I yawned. ‘Can we call it quits now?’ I still had an hour’s marking to do. (Q: What is grammar? A: Grammar is how to talk good and stuff.) And I was desperate for a pee.
Finally even Jazz was ready to admit defeat. ‘Okay, Cass. Maybe I was over-reacting.’
We were just about to abandon the chase, when Studz hung a suicide right off Haverstock Hill and headed back down towards Camden. Our hire car juddered around the corner after him on two wheels. The upside of being female undercover agents is that you can hang onto a car seat using labia suction. After I’d recovered from this heart-stopping manoeuvre, we stooged around looking for his car, before finally spotting it idling, kerbside, outside a row of snaggle-toothed tenements decayed with age and leaning erratically.
Studz was on his mobile phone, engine still running, when a young woman in a brightly-coloured poncho strode from the fluorescent foyer of a block of council flats, phone to ear, and vaulted energetically into his passenger seat.
Jazz lurched forward, fingers gripping the dashboard as though on a white-knuckle ride at a funfair. ‘It’s Phillippa. She researches for him.’
‘Maybe he’s just got something for her to research,’ I hazarded, but anxiety was skittering through my belly. ‘If it makes you feel any better, only about seven females in the world look good in a poncho. And they’re all under nine years old – or Nomads tending their yaks.’
But Jazz was in no mood to banter. We followed unobtrusively, and in silence, as he drove Phillippa to the marital home. We watched, from two houses back, as he led the young woman inside.
It was midnight. London lay grey as a graveyard. Dark clouds sloshed across the bruised sky. The smoke of our breath steamed. A single light appeared in the master bedroom.
And, soon afterwards, it went out.
Despite the fact that we were on a covert operation, Jazz emitted a howl loud enough to be heard in one of those base camps in Antarctica. Something seemed to crack open inside her. This was open-heart surgery. There she sat sobbing, with this gaping wound. Is there a doctor in the house? Ah yes, but he was showing off his bedside manner to another woman at the precise moment that his wife lay bleeding to death outside his house in a hire car. I moved Jazz over into the passenger seat, took the wheel and swerved toward home, too upset to drive straight.
Jazz cried for an hour before I could coax her inside. ‘He took her home to our bed! Actually it’s not my home any more. It’s Fuckingham Palace.’
She was in agony. Childbirth with no epidural would hurt less than this. ‘Come on, darl,’ I said gently. ‘You need a drink.’
‘What I need is to climb into the bath with an electrical appliance,’ she replied between wracking sobs.
Once inside, I made inadequate comments along the lines of how most men are like worms, only taller, but Jazz just took to the spare bed in the flat behind Rory’s surgery, curling herself foetally around a whisky bottle. The sight of her burned itself indelibly into my retinas. Rubbing the small of her back, I reflected that husbands should come with a warning. This person could be dangerous to your mental health. I also got a feeling that Jazz had never read the small print on her marriage licence.
On Tuesday night the mood in our hire car was sombre as we followed Jazz’s husband to a fundraiser for AIDS in Africa organized by the Prime Minister’s wife in a marquee at Kensington Palace. High-pitched quartet music twanged in the background. Two freezing hours later, Studz and others adjourned to Chinawhite for a nightcap.
‘How long do you think they’ll be?’ I asked. Clouds were scudding low across the night sky as though it was cloud rush-hour and they were in a desperate hurry to get home. Everyone was in a rush, except for us, apparently. ‘I’ve got loads of maths homework to mark. “A circle is a straight line except that it goes around and has a hole in the middle of it”,’ I quoted from one kid’s paper. ‘These children need help!’
Jazz shrugged dismally, too miserable to speak.
‘Oh, okay,’ I conceded. ‘But let’s not stay for too long. Should I go for food supplies?’
She shrugged again, then said weakly, ‘Get something vaguely healthy.’
I returned with two low-fat muffins. ‘Would madam like the banana Styrofoam or the blueberry Styrofoam?’
But Jazz left her banana cake after one bite because her husband had just emerged, along with the Pop Princess recently appointed a Good Will Ambassador by the UN. We trailed them back to the Savoy Hotel – the more discreet River Entrance. Studz parked the car on a double yellow line and tossed the keys to the doorman as though this were routine.
‘Maybe they’re just going to the American Bar, for a cocktail of puréed unhusked wheat kernels or whatever the hell is her preferred non-carcinogenic tipple,’ I suggested feebly.
Jazz just stared grimly ahead. Here, by the river, the streets were creamy with fog. Having parked, we just sat watching the leering grille of Studz’s Jaguar. After one hour, I reminded Jazz that a celebrity is nothing but a nonentity who got lucky. The Thames twitched beside us, pale as milk in the misty moonlight. After two hours, I pointed out how one day Kinkee’s youth would fade and she’d end up going ‘Whoo, Whoo’ behind a J-Lo female impersonator tribute band. My only answer was the seagulls squawking like teething babies. I tried to mark geometry sheets by the streetlamp glow, ‘An angle has wings and comes from God’, but quickly lost the will to live. After three hours, my best friend started crying without any noise at all; she just hunched there, shuddering.
‘What do you want to do?’ I asked dispiritedly. ‘Perhaps a call to one of the tabloids would be appropriate? You know, the News of the Fatuous Gossips? or Louth mouthed, Inane, Ill-informed Perspectives OF THE WEEK.’ I was trying to cheer her, but Jazz curled up into a ball.
‘I couldn’t do it to Joshua,’ she said in a whisper, before the smell of banana vomit invaded the car.
On day three of Jasmine’s Indian Ocean holiday, we took yet another trip down Infidelity Lane. From the anonymous safety of our hire car parked opposite, we saw Jazz’s husband waiting at the stage door of a West End theatre where they were performing a revival of Cats. The side alley where he had parked was urinous, villainous and dark as a ditch. But with the nocturnal accuracy of a bat, David Studlands could home in on any pretty woman. He was waiting for a kitten who appeared wearing spray-on snakeskin trousers, killer heels and a fedora hat. He took her arm and steered her into his Jag.
In silhouette, we saw them kiss. We then watched open-mouthed as they clambered over into the back seat and the car started shaking and quaking. The Jag was rocking so hard on its springs that I thought it might be in labour. I kept checking the exhaust pipe to see if two or three miniature versions of Studz’s Jaguar had popped out.
‘Really she’s in the wrong musical. It should be “Guys In Dolls”,’ I said. It was a little laboured but I was desperate to kick-start some of Jazz’s trademark caustic humour.
Jazz blew her nose cacophonously. ‘I think it’s time Andrew Lloyd-Webber sold those cats to some lab for cosmetic testing, don’t you?’ she said with melancholic acerbity.
One thing was for sure. Three women in three nights? It was no wonder he was mainlining Viagra. Jazz’s surgeon husband obviously thought he was in a Carry On, Doctor movie.
Day four and Studz was appearing in a live debate on the use of torture to combat terrorism. We knew because the programme had been flagged on the BBC all day. I tried to talk Jazz out of stalking and into having an early night. Three nights of no sleep and my face had gone a fetching shade of green. The livid semicircles beneath my eyes gave me the look of a suicidal racoon. It was my turn to drive, but I was so tired I was manoeuvring the hire car to Shepherd’s Bush like a pill-crazed, long-haul truck driver. ‘There are only two jobs where eye bags don’t count against you. President of the United States and a Vulcan crewmember on the Starship E
nterprise,’ I whined, parking by the security gate.
But Jazz maintained that her husband was a snake. And that snakes always hunt at night – their sensors striking in the dark at anything warm . . . even a famous BBC interviewer, I realized, as Studz flashed past us in her chauffeured car. Jazz had an eerie calm about her which I didn’t like. ‘You’re thinking about how to kill him, aren’t you?’
‘Let’s just put it this way. I wouldn’t advise him to start watching any long-running soaps on TV,’ she said grimly.
When Jazz’s husband disappeared into the presenter’s house in Notting Hill Gate, my best friend suggested I get a mop and bucket because we would need it when she removed her husband’s kidneys with her nail scissors to sell on the black market. ‘Well, why not? He’s got two of them . . . just like he’s got two faces.’
Scrutinizing Jazz in the wan light, I realized that she wasn’t joking. If I were David Studlands, I’d be thinking long and hard about what happened to John Bobbitt.
I touched her arm tenderly. ‘Is there anything I can do to cheer you up?’
‘Yes, I must cheer up. After all, I read somewhere that it takes forty-two muscles to frown but only four to pull back my trigger finger on my father’s hunting gun,’ she replied menacingly.
‘The only shooting you’re supposed to do are the rolls of film from your tropical holiday,’ I reminded her. ‘Speaking of which – you must get to a tanning salon before Sunday.’
But Jazz wasn’t listening. She put her hands in the prayer position. ‘God grant me the patience to tolerate the things I cannot change, change the things I cannot tolerate, and to find a really good hiding-place for the body of my philandering arsehole of a husband.’
Day five found Studz in the company of a glamorous Mayfair feline. She was a mink-lined-hatbox, white-poodle-on-adiamond-lead, invitation-to-spend-summer-on-Valentino’s-yacht kind of woman.
‘Ohmygod. I sat next to her at the quiz night to aid the campaign for the abolition of the death penalty in the Caribbean,’ Jazz reported amazedly.
Actually, at that moment I would have liked nothing more than to bring back the death penalty, in England. Not for every crime. Just for, say, breaking your wife’s heart.
‘Oh, I know the breed. One of those glamour-puss models who married for money and is now busily developing a social conscience to compensate for her fading career,’ I guessed.
‘But David hated her! God! I’m overheating.’ Red-faced, Jazz opened the window to guzzle down the chilly air. ‘He said she had the IQ of a school of plankton.’
We trailed them to an exclusive restaurant in Piccadilly. ‘You wouldn’t believe how mean Studz is with me. He makes me reuse my dental floss! He cleans it with alcohol and then hangs it out to dry. “I do so hate to discard a length of essentially unworn floss, Jasmine” and then he takes her to the Caprice???’ she said tragically. ‘Is there air conditioning in this car? I’m burning up here,’ she gasped, fanning her flushed face, as I sat shivering.
By the time we shadowed them to the woman’s Mayfair mansion, Jazz was gesticulating like the heroine of some Jacobean tragedy.
‘You’re upset because you’re faking the odd orgasm with Rory? But men! Men can fake a whole fucking marriage.’
On day six, Studz ventured into the wilds of Hackney. I couldn’t believe that he could possibly seduce another female. I mean, if so, David Studland’s appendage would be a celebrity in its own right. It would need its own agent. ‘Your hubby is a spermicidal maniac,’ I observed dubiously as Studz got out of his car.
For this excursion Jasmine’s husband had dressed down in jeans and leather jacket. Having beeped his Jag locked, he ventured into a grimy-looking Irish pub which boasted live music by bands called, invitingly, ‘The Red Hot Sticky Helmets’ and ‘Right To Devour’.
As we loitered outside in our hire car, a group of yobs swaggered by, kicking vehicles. We’d discussed the danger of muggers here and had decided that telling them, ‘Jesus says I am the Chosen One’ would act as a suitable repellent. In the end, we settled on a demand from me in my best headmistressy voice as to whether or not they’d done their homework? And did they know that a hooligan was just a polygon with seven sides?
At this, the yobs dispersed in double-quick time, so we alighted and pressed our noses up against the pub windows. Studz was sharing pints with a twenty-something girl with caramel freckles and thick honey-blonde hair which she’d torniqueted into a ponytail.
‘Good God! It’s our masseuse, Carmel,’ Jazz said damply, as damply as the low sky which bulged with rain.
‘Et tu, cutie,’ I surmized as the wind slapped our faces.
We watched agog as Studz loosened the girl’s ponytail so that her fair hair fell wantonly over her shapely shoulders.
‘She’s been our masseuse for three years. I mean, how long do you think he’s been seeing her?’
The man really was a dastardly moustache twirler. All that was missing was the railway track. It shocked me how we all thought of Studz as being so brave, bringing medical help to war-torn, disease-riddled countries, when it was clear that Jazz didn’t even have to leave her home to find a hostile environment.
‘You should have frisked the bastard for cruel intentions when you first met at Cambridge.’
We’d parked outside a seedy Japanese restaurant, beneath the neon gaze of its electronic sign – Nippon Tuck. By its harsh strobing light, I saw my friend’s face creased with pain. ‘Trouble is, like most intellectuals, he’s just a clutch of paradoxes,’ Jazz adjudicated sourly. ‘Like the dedicated spanker of teenage prostitutes who publically campaigns against smacking children. Or the sixteen-year-old anti-materialistic vegan daughter who drinks all your Krug and steals your fur coat. And the Human Rights doctor who hates humans. Not in general,’ she amended, ‘but in particular. He can save the lives of people he doesn’t know while decimating the lives of the people he does. I just don’t know him any more,’ she said desolately. ‘Who is this man I married? He’s alien to me.’
An alien from Planet Shag, I thought to myself, turning the hire car for home.
‘The stupid thing is, I still love him, Cass,’ she said with melting vulnerability. Love was a feeble word for what Jasmine felt. David Studlands was her whole life.
It was starting to seem that love prepares you for marriage the way needlepoint prepares you for round-the-world solo yachting.
Day seven was the Sabbath. Surely this had to be Studz’s day of rest? What was the jerk doing – auditioning mistresses? He’d had sex with so many women this last week his penis must have developed scar tissue.
Not only was I haemorrhaging money on babysitters as Rory was away at a conference, but I was so tired from a week of late nights that I was throwing clothes into the washing machine with the kids still in them. When I was making my daughter’s breakfast, I buttered my hand and placed it on Jenny’s plate.
But no. The very day Jazz was due back from her allegedly tranquil seaside sojourn, Studz was in their marital bed with a lithe, blonde-highlighted, forty-year-old university lecturer Jazz recognized as one of his private patients.
Sitting in the rental car opposite Jazz’s house watching them draw the blinds in the master bedroom, I made a stab at jocularity because, really, we were both beyond shock now. ‘My husband’s a vet. Let’s just hope Rory doesn’t sleep with his patients.’
‘Maryanne, that’s her name,’ said Jazz. ‘I saw her at our house once. After her face lift, she started suffering from fainting fits, as I recall. Obviously I had no idea that the cure was to take deep breaths, lean forward . . . and put her head between the legs of her doctor.’
I laughed tartly. ‘What does she lecture on, this Maryanne? Husband rustling?’
‘Sylvia Plath.’
‘So she’s Plathological,’ I punned.
We roared at that. Great belly-wrenching guffaws. Exhaustion and emotional overload had kicked us up into a state of near-hysteria.
�
�I think it’s time I left David a note. Hello, darling. Dinner is on the table and . . . your wife’s head is in the gas-oven.’
We laughed until we cried . . . Only when Jazz stopped laughing, she just kept right on crying.
5. If He Wants Breakfast in Bed, Tell Him to Sleep in the Kitchen
Marriage, I’d now realized, is for Extreme Sports enthusiasts. It’s a highwire act with no safety net. The Amazing, Dare-Devil, Flying Married Couple! Trapeze Artists Extraordinaire!
And Jazz had fallen. Splat. Leaving Hannah and me to try to pick up the pieces. It was Sunday afternoon and we were sitting around my crowded kitchen drinking neat Scotch and painting Jazz’s naked body with fake tan before a fan heater. She was due back at Heathrow from her Sri Lankan holiday in an hour. Hence this crisis meeting.
I was slightly nervous as I don’t often entertain visitors. This is mainly to do with the abundance of methane-gas-producing canines. Guests were constantly reeling back, eyes smarting, lungs scrambling for oxygen, great-grandfathers reliving the mustard gas attacks they endured in the trenches . . . or worse. The one and only time I’d attempted sweet-talking my Headmaster, Mr Scroope, over dinner about the up-and-coming Deputy Head vacancy, he’d fled in humiliation after one of Rory’s pet rats tried to mate with his hairpiece. But this was an emergency. My kids had been banished to their rooms and some dental-drill rap was now vibrating down through the ceiling.
Predictably, the conversation kicked off with Jazz blaming herself. As I sloshed whisky into chipped glasses, she began to make a squeaking noise like a stuck drawer.