The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous trc-4

by Jilly Cooper

  ‘But Guy’s always been turned on by my having other men,’ said Georgie, bursting into tears. ‘When we were first married and I went on tour and had the occasional one-night stand he used to love hearing about it when I came home — although he made me promise never to see them again. I often made things up to excite him, so he thinks I’m far more promiscuous than I was.’

  ‘But he’s never faced serious competition on his own doorstep,’ interrupted Ferdie. ‘The first thing to do is to start eating, cut out the booze and get some sleeping pills.’

  ‘I won’t be able to work. They make me so uncoordinated in the morning,’ said Georgie in panic.

  ‘You’re not working anyway. When he starts next week, Lysander will take you shopping. Don’t buy anything strapless or sleeveless. You’re too thin at the moment. And no minis, either, it looks too feverish. And,’ Ferdie added sternly, ‘you must do something about that scurf.’

  ‘It isn’t scurf.’ Georgie frantically brushed her shoulders. ‘It’s sand from burying my head like an ostrich for so many years.’

  Back at Marigold’s house, Lysander sank into the blackest gloom. Even Marigold taping EastEnders and The Bill didn’t raise his spirits. He’d last seen Marigold six months ago, when she’d been down to eight stone, looking terrific and was giving off sexual vibes like a mare in season. She had also provided him with comfort and a home when he desperately needed it. He had therefore carried an idealized picture of her in his head, which had sometimes merged with that of his mother. The reality was a let-down. Marigold was more matronly, bossier — all that fuss because they’d forgotten to ask Georgie about the Nearly New Stall — and much commoner than he’d remembered her.

  She was now having a double chinwag with Ferdie as she painted bluebells on a pink chair.

  ‘Gay, Ay’m afraid, has been rather a swayne to Georgie,’ she was saying.

  Part of Lysander’s buzz at taking on Georgie had been that it would give him the chance to bonk Marigold again. Now he wasn’t sure he wanted to. And Georgie had been harrowing. He was fed up with self-obsessed, desperately unhappy, married women. He wanted some fun. Clutching Jack, as he always did in moments of stress, he announced: ‘I can’t take Georgie on. She’s too old and too far gone. She ought to be in the funny farm.’

  ‘Oh, please,’ said Marigold, who was secretly relieved Lysander didn’t fancy Georgie. ‘She’s so low and you were so wonderful at bringing Larry back.’

  Ferdie noticed the Picasso and the Stubbs had vanished from the drawing-room wall. He’d always suspected Larry was over-leveraged. It must have cost a bomb getting rid of Nikki, or keeping her quiet if he’d perhaps weakened and seen her again. Marigold might well need Lysander’s services.

  The puppy, who was stretched out beside Lysander on the sofa, gave a whimper and flexed her toes in her sleep. Her skin drooped between each rib. Ferdie knew how to touch Lysander’s heart.

  ‘Georgie’s like that little dog,’ he said gently. ‘She may not have cigarette burns on her back, but she’s in just as bad a way. Give it a try for a week.’

  There was a long pause. Safe from the banging clays, pigeons cooed contentedly in Marigold’s wood.

  ‘Oh, OK,’ said Lysander crossly.

  ‘Come and have a look at the cottage I’ve found for you,’ said Marigold, ‘and then we’ll have some dinner.’

  Magpie Cottage stood in the far side of dense woods on the edge of Larry’s land. Approached from the road by a rough cart-track, its front garden consisted of neat squares of lawn bordered by iceberg roses. Pink rambler roses and purple clematis swarmed over the door. Inside there was a kitchen, a dining room and drawing room knocked through and two bedrooms upstairs. Out at the back was another little lawn, a scented flower-bed filled with white stocks, pinks and tobacco plants, a pond and a white bench under a walnut tree. A four-acre field filled with dog daisies and red sorrel curved round the house and garden like a magnet.

  ‘It’s seriously nice. Arthur’ll love it,’ said Lysander, who had cheered up. ‘He’s so nosy he’ll be able to put his head in through all the downstairs windows.’

  ‘It’ll need a few pennies spending on it,’ admitted Marigold.

  ‘Judging by the smell a few pennies have been spent in it already,’ said Ferdie.

  ‘A keeper had it,’ explained Marigold, ‘hence the pong of ferret. Ay’ll get it painted and cleaned up and you’ll need a cooker. Would you prefer gas or electricity?’

  ‘Basically I don’t cook,’ said Lysander, ‘but gas is better for lighting cigarettes.’

  ‘You will keep the garden taydy, won’t you, Lysander? Paradayse has won the Best-Kept Village award ten years runnin’.’

  Marigold worked fast furnishing the cottage with, among other things, a large brass four-poster, blue-ticking sofas and chairs and a big wooden bishop’s chair she’d found in a jumble sale. Eight days later, Lysander, Arthur, Jack, Tiny and little Maggie moved in. Loot from grateful wives now included six polo ponies which Lysander was keeping over at Ricky France-Lynch’s yard at Eldercombe and Mrs Gunn’s promised yacht which Ferdie had already swapped for a new soft-top dark blue Ferrari. He felt it was important for people to be able to see Lysander driving round Paradise and, besides, he wanted to appropriate the red Ferrari himself.

  After moving in, he and Lysander went out to The Heavenly Host where they dined outside under the stars in the buddleia-scented dusk. Taking off his jacket Ferdie noticed Lysander’s post which he’d left in his inside pocket.

  ‘I forgot to give you these. Fan mail still coming in for Arthur and three letters from your father.’

  ‘I don’t want to see Dad. He was so horrible last time.’

  ‘Well, at least open the one from your bank.’ Ferdie chucked a thick white envelope across the red-check tablecloth.

  ‘Are you determined to ruin my dinner? Gregor and I lost a hell of a lot of money in the casino at Palma. If only you’d let me come home straight away.’

  ‘Open it,’ said Ferdie, ‘I promise you’ll be pleasantly surprised.’

  With shaking hands Lysander tore open the envelope and holding up a candle scanned the contents for a long time, his lips moving as he read, growing paler and paler.

  ‘My God,’ he whispered, ‘I’m £102,000 overdrawn and I’ve got to pay £750 interest. What am I going to do? The Ferrari’ll have to go and the ponies and what about Arthur’s vet bill? Oh Christ.’

  ‘It’s in credit, you jerk,’ said Ferdie. ‘And you made £750 in interest just last month. So you can bloody well buy me dinner.’

  It took him several minutes to convince Lysander, who promptly suggested they went out later and blew some of it at the nearest casino.

  ‘We will not,’ said Ferdie tartly. ‘I’ll be fired if I don’t put in some work at the office and you’ve got to move in first thing on Georgie. Here’s the way I suggest you play it.’

  28

  A heavy dew silvered the parched fields. Invisible larks carolled joyously in a sky as blue as Mary’s robes. However, as Lysander drew up at Angel’s Reach the following morning, Georgie Maguire greeted him in a dressing gown and tears.

  ‘I thought Guy’d left me a little love note on the kitchen table,’ she sobbed, ‘but when I looked it just said: Don’t forget the dustbins. And even worse he’s written Julia’s number, without her name of course, on the inside of his Parish Council file.’

  She waved a buff folder. ‘I felt so miserable I’ve written Cuckoo beside it in biro, and now I can’t rub it out.’

  ‘Pas de problème.’ Taking the folder, Lysander tore off the corner with Julia’s number and chucked it in the bin.

  ‘Guy will notice that even more,’ said Georgie aghast.

  ‘Say it’s mice, or better still, moths. The waitress at The Heavenly Host says there is a plague of moths because of the drought.’

  ‘There aren’t any clothes for them to eat because they’ve all gone to Marigold’s Nearly New Stall,’ said G
eorgie, but she stopped crying.

  ‘Go and have a nice long bath and get dressed,’ said Lysander, dumping several carrier bags on the kitchen table. ‘I’m going to make you porridge for breakfast. No, I promise it’s delicious, with cream and treacle, and then croissants with black-cherry jam.’

  ‘D’you know how to make porridge?’ asked Georgie.

  ‘I’ve made enough bran mashes in my life. You just read the directions. Then I’m going to take you to meet Arthur and then we’ll have lunch at The Pearly Gates to get people gossiping and then go shopping for lots of glamorous clothes. Bath’s better than Rutminster. Oh look, there’s a little green van going up Marigold’s drive.’

  ‘That van goes to all the big houses in Paradise every Monday,’ said Georgie sadly. ‘It takes away old plants and replaces them with shiny new ones with flowers. They ought to do the same with wives.’

  ‘Now, now,’ reproved Lysander. ‘You’ve got to stop sniping and cheer up.’

  The ice was broken by Lysander reading all the directions wrong and making porridge so thick the spoon set in it like cement — so they had three croissants each and gave the porridge to Arthur. When they returned much later in the day they discovered that the video that Lysander’d thought was a jolly musical turned out to be an incredibly blue movie about rent boys.

  As a result Lysander sat through the entire video in mounting horror with his T-shirt neck pulled up over his eyes, only lowering it occasionally when Georgie, in fits of laughter, said it was safe to look or when he wanted another drag at his joint.

  ‘I really like gays,’ he kept saying in bewilderment. ‘Who would have thought my friend Gregor could do things like that? I’m sorry, Georgie.’

  He’s still only a child, thought Georgie, but certainly a very endearing one.

  When Guy returned on Friday he was relieved to find the house a lot tidier and flowers in the downstairs rooms — but no little posy to welcome him in his dressing room. Nor any whisky, nor dinner on, nor any sign of Georgie. Usually the sniping started as he crossed the threshold. When she drifted down the backstairs from her study half an hour later she looked noticeably better, as though an iron had smoothed out her face.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked in amazement.

  ‘I usually come home on Friday,’ said Guy nettled.

  ‘Is it Friday? I didn’t realize. O God, I haven’t done anything for supper.’

  ‘Work must be going well!’ Guy was nonplussed. Coming home had recently been like being parachuted into an effing mine field.

  Next morning Georgie rose early insisting she must walk a surprised and intensely irritated Dinsdale before it grew too hot. She put on a new and becoming T-shirt, and lots of lipstick and scent before she left, then stayed away for two hours reading Billboard and The Face under a chestnut tree. On the way home she carefully removed her lipstick with a Kleenex and rubbed into Dinsdale’s fur some of Lysander’s Eau Sauvage, which they’d hidden in an oak tree on the edge of the wood. This made her giggle so much she walked into the house looking happy for the first time in months.

  Returning from a Sunday afternoon trip to get more petrol for the mower and ring Julia, Guy was disconcerted to find a note from Georgie: ‘Just popped down to The Apple Tree to get some milk.’

  ‘You’ve lived here for over four months,’ reproved Guy when she returned an hour later, ‘and you hadn’t realized The Apple Tree is shut on Sunday afternoon. They have to have some time off.’

  ‘Aren’t I stupid?’ said Georgie blithely.

  ‘And we’ve got plenty of milk.’ Opening the fridge door, Guy confronted her with a regiment of white bottles.

  ‘I must be going senile.’

  On Sunday night Guy, who was getting edgy, heard Georgie singing ‘Stranger in Paradise’ in her bath. Christ, the whole village must be able to hear that raw, thrilling, yelping voice ringing round the valley. Georgie hadn’t sung in her bath since Julia came down.

  One of the great set-backs to Guy’s amorous career had been having to sell the BMW to appease the bank and other creditors. Going to the station in a battered Golf which had no air-conditioning didn’t have the same kudos and the loss of his car telephone had really clipped Cupid’s wings. At least he’d got a phone card with his own personal number so he could put any calls made from telephone boxes or from home on the gallery number. The new monitoring of calls was an awful bore.

  He and Julia had made plans to travel up to London together the following morning, but it would mean him getting a later train than usual because Julia’s babysitter couldn’t reach her until half-past eight. Terrified of rousing suspicion he waited until Georgie emerged pink and reeking of Floris from her bath before announcing that he intended catching the nine o’clock train instead of the seven.

  After a perceptible pause, Georgie said: ‘I wouldn’t. At least you’ll get a seat on the seven. The nine’s packed out on a Monday.’

  ‘At least it gives me another hour in bed with you,’ said Guy gallantly.

  Thinking how much better Georgie looked as she slithered into her cream satin nightdress and climbed into bed, Guy edged up and slid a hand round her left breast. Feeling his cock stiffening, drowsy from a Mogadon taken half an hour ago, Georgie curled up like an armadillo, elbows on her hip bones, knees up to her wrists, shutting him out.

  ‘Night, darling,’ she murmured and was asleep.

  Going into the bathroom next morning, after a sweatily sleepless night trying to suppress that churning guilty excitement which overwhelmed him whenever he was going to see Julia, Guy was brought up by a rim of fox-brown hairs round the bath. Why the hell was Georgie shaving her legs to write songs up in her turret? After bathing and dressing at lightning speed, a skill learnt through adultery, Guy tracked Georgie down in another bathroom. Thinking how vulnerable she looked with her water-darkened hair streaming away from her thin white neck and far-too-bumpy backbone, he asked her what on earth she was washing her hair for.

  ‘Radio Paradise are coming to interview me at eleven.’

  ‘Their two hundred listeners aren’t going to see you.’

  ‘No, but the interviewer will. I hate having dirty hair.’ Not for me, you don’t, thought Guy. ‘Well, I’d better go.’

  ‘OK, see you Friday,’ said Georgie, aiming the shower at her right temple to shift all the scurf.

  Bewildered not to be clung to and exhorted to ring soon, or even made a cup of coffee, Guy had just gone into the utility room to get some Fairy Liquid soap and toothpaste for the flat over the gallery when the telephone rang in the kitchen. But when he picked it up and said, ‘Hallo’, it was promptly dropped at the other end. Having no idea that it was actually a dripping Georgie ringing him from her private line up in her study, Guy was even more rattled, which was what she had intended. Whoever had rung must have expected him to have left for the seven o’clock by now and meant to catch Georgie.

  After an irksome week when he could hardly get Georgie on the telephone, he decided to catch her out by getting back earlier and was rewarded by having to stand all the way down in appalling heat, crushed against a woman who’d bought kippers for tea. Reaching home, sticky and bad-tempered, he found a dark blue soft-top Ferrari with A DOG IS FOR LIFE… NOT JUST FOR CHRISTMAS sticker on the windscreen parked outside the front door, at a contemptuous angle as though the owner had been in a frantic hurry to get inside. Despite its sleek exterior the car inside was a tip of tapes, race cards, chewed trainers, old copies of the Sun, cigarette ash, Coke cans and polo balls.

  On the terrace Guy found a very suntanned, incredibly good-looking youth who looked vaguely familiar. Light brown curls clung to his smooth brown forehead and a black shirt to his marvellously elongated body. Georgie, who was totally transformed in a clinging leotard, which had just come into fashion and which flowed emerald-green into white-and-green flared trousers, was gazing into his eyes as though she’d like to be clinging to him as well. Her white ankles had turned a lovely
gold and her toenails were painted softest coral. A shaggy, reddy-brown puppy lay between her thighs, and a half-full jug of Pimm’s stood between her and the beautiful youth. Dinsdale thumped his tail but didn’t rise; only a beady-looking Jack Russell went into a possessive frenzy of yapping.

  It is my fucking house, thought Guy as Larry had done six months before.

  ‘Hi, darling,’ said Georgie happily. ‘D’you remember Marigold’s friend Lysander Hawkley? He came to the launching of “Rock Star”.’

  Resisting kicking Jack in the ribs, Guy became extremely hearty and, after discovering Lysander had moved into the area, said: ‘You must meet my daughter, our daughter, Flora. You’re about the same age. She’s coming home this evening, isn’t she?’ he added to Georgie. ‘She’s been staying in Cornwall.’

  ‘I’m expecting her to ring from the station any minute,’ said Georgie.

  ‘D’you want a drink — er — sir?’ Lysander got to his feet. ‘Shall I get another glass?’

  Guy was not amused, by the slightly piss-taking ‘sir’, nor by the strength of the Pimm’s when Lysander filled all their glasses.

  ‘Been playing at the Rutshire?’ asked Guy, looking at his dirty white breeches and bare feet.

  Lysander nodded.

  ‘Got any ponies?’

  ‘Six,’ said Lysander. ‘I’m keeping them at Ricky France-Lynch’s at Eldercombe. I’ve just been playing practice chukkas there.’

  Guy flickered. Ricky France-Lynch’s wife was a painter and a friend of Julia’s. They pushed prams together. It was the sort of connection that might suddenly push Georgie into orbit.

  ‘How was dinner with Larry?’ asked Georgie idly, thinking how hot, middle-aged and crumpled Guy looked beside Lysander.

  Guy flickered again. ‘He cancelled.’

  ‘What did you do instead?’ demanded Georgie, suddenly feeling desperately insecure.