by Jilly Cooper
But Martha had beaten the butler to the telephone.
‘Oh, hi.’ She was poised between tears and a screaming match. ‘I didn’t want to spoil your fun. No, no.’ She was apologetic now. ‘I wasn’t implying anything.’
Lysander could now hear Elmer yelling. Martha seemed to slump.
‘OK, right, sleep well.’ Slowly she replaced the receiver.
‘Elmer’s over the limit. He’s spending the night at the barn.’
‘Yippee.’ Lysander hugged Tyson. ‘Let’s have another bottle.’
‘And he’s got a dozen guards who could drive him home if he wanted. He’s only drunk with lust. I guess he and that tramp were bouncing around in the Jacuzzi when he called me. That would have given him a charge.’
She burst into tears.
Lysander was a shining example of the continued existence of the age of chivalry. He hadn’t read endless articles in the women’s pages about the caddish chauvinism of his sex, he had never heard of New Man or sexual harassment. His heart entirely ruled his head. Anything in distress moved him and just as he had gathered up poor, miserably disturbed, aggressively insecure Tyson, now he bounded over to Martha.
‘Don’t cry. You’re so beautiful and he’s such a toad.’
Folding her into his warm, tender embrace, he tried to still her trembling body, smoothing away tears and mascara with his thumbs; then, when she still sobbed, comforting her in the only way he understood by kissing her smudged quivering mouth. For a second she fought him off, then, desperate for reassurance, she gradually responded to his wonderful enthusiasm.
Her skin was as smooth and silken as her shirt but, as he started undoing her buttons, she jumped away.
‘I’m too skinny. Elmer says I’m like an ironing board with two buttons sewn on to tell you which the front is.’
Lysander winced, then drew her back into his arms. ‘All the better to press my suit on.’ Then, as Martha smiled, ‘I’m going to kiss every freckle.’
‘You’ll be here for a thousand years.’
‘Wouldn’t be long enough. Let’s go upstairs.’
‘We shouldn’t.’
‘We can’t fight Mystic Meg.’
Tyson, however, in true Dobermann fashion, refused to let Lysander out of the room until his basket had been carried up to the bedroom and he’d been settled in with strokes and Bonios which gave Martha time to undress and hide herself under the ivy-green silk sheets of the vast emerald and white striped four-poster. Books were piled high on her bedside table. On the other side there stood only a digital clock and a silver-framed photograph of Elmer and George Bush.
‘Elmer only reads balance sheets and the messages on T-shirts,’ said Martha with a sob.
‘Hush, don’t think about him.’
Still in his clothes, Lysander waded through a pampas-grass of long white carpet and gently drew back the sheets. Instantly Martha’s thin arms flew to her tiny breasts. But, like Aladdin stumbling on his cave and touching each gold bar, precious stone and rope of pearls with amazed joy and excitement, Lysander slowly examined her body, stroking her nipples and her concave belly and breathing in the remains of Diorella behind her ears and inside her wrists.
‘Christ, you’re gorgeous!’ He ran his hands up the inside of her long slender legs. ‘I freaked when I first saw these in the stands.’
Dropping his clothes on the floor, he stripped off with total unselfconsciousness and rightly so because he was glorious, with a body as white, firmly curved and inviting on those emerald-green sheets, as early morning mushrooms in a dew-drenched field. His well-developed chest with a slight down of light brown hair narrowed to the flattest stomach and more downy hair from which his cock reared up as jaunty and as confident of bringing joy as a conductor’s baton raised for action.
‘I’ve only been married five months,’ mumbled Martha. ‘We really shouldn’t.’
‘We should, too.’
‘Wouldn’t Dolly be upset?’
‘Probably, but basically I can’t help myself.’
His fake tan was turning orange, his bluey-green eyes were crossing with drink, but, as the big laughing mouth came down on hers, Martha was reduced to the same slobbering ecstasy as Tyson.
Wriggling down the bed, Lysander kissed the arch of her instep, each coral-painted toe, then slowly, slowly up the velvet thighs, feeling the increasing tension as his hands grazed her breasts and shaven armpits, never stopping caressing.
‘We really shouldn’t,’ said Martha faintly.
Reaching out Lysander turned the photograph of Elmer and George Bush to the wall.
‘We don’t need an audience.’
Then, plunging his face into her pubic hair, snuffling as appreciatively as a truffle pig, he mumbled, ‘As I was saying to Martha’s bush.’
Feeling him helpless with laughter, she had to join in, but soon her laughter turned to gasps. Only when he knew she’d come did he keep her pleasure on the boil with half a minute of slowly stabbing fingers.
‘Come inside me,’ urged Martha.
‘Just wait a sec, while I slip into something tight,’ murmured Lysander, reaching for a condom from the back pocket of his jeans. Then as joyously as an otter diving into a summer stream he plunged his cock inside her.
‘Oh wow, that was terrific,’ said Martha as they lay back afterwards, sharing a cigarette.
‘I didn’t get a Christmas bonus because I didn’t sell any houses so it’s been worth waiting till January. You are so lovely.’ Lysander kissed her hand.
‘How come you are such an incredible lover?’
‘Basically, Dolly taught me a lot. One of the advantages of having an older woman.’
‘How old is she?’ Martha snuggled against his chest.
‘Twenty-four.’
‘Ouch.’
‘But she started at fourteen, so there’s a lot of mileage. Look, I just adored sleeping with you.’
‘Me too.’ Martha found she couldn’t keep her hands off him.
Noticing polo bruises darkening his ribs, arms and thighs like the purple markings on a white violet, she wanted to kiss them all better and explore in return his wonderful body.
‘You’re a really sweet guy with the softest heart and the hardest cock.’
‘Better than the other way round.’ Lysander dropped ash on the pampas-grass. ‘I wish I was someone who could go on for hours, but I get so excited, particularly when it’s someone like you. Dolly always makes me stay awake afterwards and stroke her for ages. I find that the most difficult part.’ His voice was slurring, his eyelids drooping. ‘Let’s do it again in a minute. Will you come with me to Disneyland tomorrow? I want to get Donald Duck’s autograph.’
Martha removed the cigarette as he fell asleep.
4
Elmer Winterton’s evening had deteriorated. Bonny, having consumed too much champagne and sucking pig, had suddenly lurched out of the Jacuzzi and for want of a bowl had thrown up in Elmer’s fish-tank. Whereupon his piranhas had swarmed up to the surface and eaten the lot which had turned Elmer’s stomach. Feeling a longing for his shy slender wife, he had been prevented from going straight home by Bonny passing out. Not trusting his guards at the barn not to blab he was reduced to driving her thirty miles home himself.
None of his guards in the gate house felt like telling Elmer he had a houseguest. It was only after he had noticed a T-shirt warning him: Sex is Evil on his bedroom carpet that he glanced up and found his number one player and his wife as enchantingly entwined as Cupid and Psyche.
For the second time in twenty-four hours, Lysander was roused from sleep. But Elmer, red and roaring, was a considerably less attractive alarm clock than the twins.
‘I don’t employ you on my team to hump my wife,’ he howled.
‘Didn’t secure her very well, you fat ape,’ howled back Lysander. ‘How can you chase disgusting slags like that when you’ve got something so beautiful at home?’
That Lysander was right didn’t imp
rove Elmer’s temper. Gathering up a bowl from a table by the door, he was about to hurl it at Lysander.
‘Not the Ming, Elmer,’ wailed Martha.
Elmer paused, which gave Lysander time to wriggle over Martha, scoop up her pale pink silk knickers as a fig leaf, and shoot round the bed out of the room just as a glass bottle of Jolie Madame missing him by inches, smashed against the dragged green wall.
‘Not out,’ squealed Lysander, belting across the landing and down the stairs three steps at a time to find the front door quadrupally locked, whichever way he pulled and tugged it. For an agonizing second he was reminded how his father used to bolt the great oak door at home and his mother used to steal down the back stairs to let him in through the kitchen. Then he jumped out of his totally unprotected skin as shots rang out, shattering the chandelier in the hall. Grabbing a bronze of Elmer astride a polo pony from the hall table, like a weightlifter on a second surge of strength, he hurled it at the window. But the bullet-proof glass didn’t even dent. Instead, like a mass castration of howler monkeys, an ear-splitting alarm blasted the house.
‘Oh, shut up.’ Lysander clutched his head, then jumped as steel shutters clanged like guillotines across the windows and the outside doors.
Frantically checking the ground floor, he found every exit blocked and himself back in the hall.
‘Try and escape, you son of a bitch,’ bellowed Elmer, reappearing on the landing.
As Lysander ducked behind a large fern, bullets buried themselves in the panelling behind him. Diving for a side door, he raced up some stairs. Behind him he could hear shouting and dogs baying; he was going to be ripped apart. Bolting round the circular landing, deterring an approaching Dobermann by hurling a cheese plant, he shot into Martha’s bedroom.
‘Dum, di di, dum di, dum di dum di.’
Giggling hysterically, gasping out the James Bond tune, Lysander snaked under the green silk sheet, pulling a pillow over his head.
‘Gemme out of here.’
In answer, half-crying, half-laughing, Martha ripped off the sheet, shoved a swipe card into his hands, then, sliding open a wardrobe, dived through a dense forest of dresses to a secret door at the back.
‘Through here,’ she hissed. ‘At the bottom of the stairs, turn right. At the end of the passage next to the Samuel Palmer of hay making by a full moon, you’ll find a little door. Put my swipe card in the slot then dial this number, thirty (for my age, remember), forty-nine (for Elmer’s). Hurry, for God’s sake. Elmer won’t take any prisoners.’
‘Thanks for everything.’ Leaning back through the forests of scented taffetas and silks for a last kiss, Lysander raced down the stairs and found the painting. The full moon was honey gold not grapefruit pink this time. And there was the little door.
His hands were trembling so badly it took three goes to slot in the swipe card. Now, what was the number? His brain froze. Martha’s age? He punched up a three then a nought, but what was Elmer’s? About a hundred. The frenzied growling grew closer; any second they’d realize he’d escaped this way. Elmer? Elmer? Would the thirty be still working or would it run out like a half-rung telephone number? That was it. He punched a four and a nine. Nothing happened. Perhaps he’d put the card in back to front or upside down.
‘Oh please God,’ he moaned, ‘I’m sorry I screwed Martha, but you’d have done the same, God, she was so beautiful.’ As he hurled himself against the door it caved in and he was out in the dripping garden, darker now because the moon had vanished behind a big black cloud.
The smell of orange blossom was suffocating. Venus blazed above the ficus rampart. As Lysander bolted, white and leggy as a unicorn, across the perfect lawn he triggered off the underground sensors. Suddenly 1000-watt lamps lit up the garden brighter than day and closed-circuit television cameras swung round to trap him on a dozen monitors in the house and at the gate. Elmer’s guards had simply to pick him off. Hearing the blood-curdling barking as the pack of dogs was unleashed, Lysander ducked behind a traveller’s palm to avoid a hail of bullets.
The ficus hedge topped by razor wire was twenty yards away. Streaming as he was with rain and sweat, it would electrocute him instantly. Ahead loomed a vast individual ficus tree, Falstaffian in girth and so old that its lower branches rested their elbows on the ground. Scuttling up the nearest branch like a squirrel, Lysander managed to wriggle round the trunk just as the dogs began leaping for his feet with gnashing teeth. Swinging out on to another branch, he dropped into the street.
Heart hammering, legs trembling and giving way, sobbing with terror, Lysander collapsed against the huge hedge wondering what the hell to do next. The practical answer was to put as much distance between himself and Elmer as possible, but, bollock-naked with no identification except bruises, he’d probably get arrested and slapped into a loony bin and get his brains sawn open like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
The streets were deserted, but the sky was lightening. Loping eastwards he was overtaken by yet another open stretch and, as he cringed into the nearest hedge, feeling the clipped twigs scraping his bare back, the driver stopped and reversed.
A blonde in a black strapless dress with huge sapphires hanging from her ears and circling her neck and wrists, she was a good deal older than Martha but almost as stunning.
‘What happened to you?’ she asked, looking him up and down in amusement.
‘The husband came home.’
‘Well, at least you’re not armed. You’d better get in.’
Lysander shot into the car.
Seeing the Wall Street Journal lying on the back seat, Lysander covered himself with the front page like a car rug.
‘Phew — it’s really kind of you.’
‘I figured I heard shots, or was that Elmer Winterton cracking his knee joints?’
‘He tried to kill me,’ said Lysander, perking up.
‘The guy’s an animal.’
‘No animal is that nasty. Christ!’ Glancing down at the Wall Street Journal Lysander saw Elmer’s photograph glaring up at him. ‘He’s following me. I could tear him out, then my cock would stick through.’
‘Feel free,’ said the blonde.
‘Martha said he was a clinical Nazi.’
‘I thought he was Dutch.’
‘Good thing that tree I shinned up didn’t have Dutch Elmer disease or the branch would have given way.’ Having started giggling, Lysander found he couldn’t stop. ‘I’m sorry. It’s nervous hysteria. Have you got a cigarette?’
‘Sure, in my purse. The name’s Sherry by the way, Sherry Macarthy.’
Protected back and front by more pages of the Wall Street Journal, Lysander slid into Sherry’s house which was bigger and more lushly decorated than Elmer’s with a back garden falling straight into the ocean.
‘I guess you’d like some breakfast and a pair of my husband’s shorts?’
‘You got a husband?’ Lysander shot into reverse.
‘He’s in San Francisco,’ said Sherry soothingly.
Lysander crept back. ‘Could I possibly have a shower? After all that sex and fear I must stink like a polecat.’
Upstairs he admired another vast four-poster, this time swathed in primrose-yellow silk and topped at its four corners by gilded cherubs, none of whom was protected by the Wall Street Journal.
‘Amazing room.’
‘It’s Franco’s, my husband’s,’ said Sherry, who was turning on the gold taps of a vast marble bath next door. ‘Help yourself.’
The doors of a fitted cupboard which took up a whole wall, and which had been lavishly handpainted with pale yellow and coral-pink roses, slid back to reveal hundreds of shirts. There were more scent bottles massed on the bathroom shelves than a duty-free shop. Franco also must have the snakiest of hips. Lysander had the greatest difficulty finding a pair of shorts he could zip up.
‘God, this is great! I haven’t eaten for forty-eight hours.’
Having downed three glasses of orange juice, Lysander was tucking into a
huge plate of bacon, eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms and hashbrowns, while Sherry filled yellow-and-white cups with very black coffee.
They were sitting beside a beautiful blue pool guarded by four big blue china dragons. White geraniums spilled over the faded terracotta pots and little waves gambolled idly on the pale sand below them. Above, the palm trees rattled in their diffident fashion.
Sherry had also showered and had swapped her black taffeta and her sapphires for a flamingo-pink sarong which left bare her almost too brown shoulders. Her still-wet, short blond hair was slicked back Rudolph Valentino style, but was softened by a pink hibiscus behind her left ear. There were crow’s feet round her warmly smiling eyes and the skin was beginning to crêpe on her breast bones and her arms, but she was in great shape and a terrific listener.
‘You can kiss goodbye to that job with Elmer,’ she said when Lysander had finished his account of the night’s escapades.
‘I wouldn’t mind if I hadn’t got Jack, Arthur and Tiny to support,’ sighed Lysander as he spread black-cherry jam on a croissant.
‘You’ve got three kids?’
‘Jack’s my Jack Russell.’
‘Original name.’
The irony was lost on Lysander.
‘Arthur’s my horse. He’s a steeplechaser. He won a lot of races but he’s having a year off with leg trouble. I’m hoping to ride him next season. He’s such a character. Tiny’s a shetland. She’s Arthur’s stable-mate.’
‘They must miss you.’ Sherry edged nearer Lysander.
‘Not as much as I miss them. I’ve got another job to go to,’ he went on gloomily, ‘with Ballensteins, the merchant bank, but that doesn’t start till the first of March. Playing polo for Elmer would have paid off my overdraft and a few bills — and I wanted a suntan to wow the Ballenstein typing pool on the first day.’
‘You’ll wow them anyway,’ murmured Sherry. The boy was positively edible. ‘At least you can get brown round the pool today.’
‘I won’t be in the way?’
‘Have you looked in the mirror recently? But you mustn’t burn.’
The climbing sun had already given a pink glow to his white shoulders. Surreptitiously he undid the top button of Franco’s shorts; they’d castrate him in a minute. Having cleared away breakfast the maid returned with bottles of champagne and Ambre Solaire. Sherry patted the blue-and-white pool-lounger.