by Jilly Cooper
‘You’d better start tunnelling. You don’t have to eat that.’
Thinking how surprisingly nice he was, and that Lysander had got his father totally wrong, Georgie blurted out: ‘It’s a compliment really. I can’t eat when I fane… I mean… find someone attractive.’
David flushed.
‘And Guy always says I’m the worst boner of soles,’ she giggled, the drink taking effect. ‘I’m a better barer of them.’
‘I’ll do it for you.’ Pulling her plate towards him, he plunged his knife into the crisp brown-speckled skin. Lovely deft hands, thought Georgie.
‘What about you?’ she asked tentatively as he chucked the transparent bones on to a side plate. ‘Have you got over Pippa at all?’
David handed her back her plate.
‘She was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known.’
‘I know.’ Georgie hung her head. ‘I saw a photograph when I was snooping through Lysander’s wallet. I was madly jealous until I twigged who she was.’
He’s got the most gorgeous hair, she thought hazily, striped grey and black like morning-coat trousers and a gorgeous aquiline nose and even more gorgeous eyes, hard and unblinking. His only similarity to Lysander was the long, lustrous, curly eyelashes and Georgie felt he would have straightened these if he could.
‘She was also the most promiscuous.’
‘What?’ Georgie was shaken out of her reverie.
‘Grindy pepper,’ said the landlord’s wife, brandishing a huge wooden pepper-pot.
Frantic to discover if she’d heard right, Georgie waited until they were alone once more.
‘Promiscuous?’ she repeated incredulously.
‘She slept with my elder brother, Alastair, even when she was engaged to me. He trained racehorses. He was the one who sold that hopeless horse Arthur to Lysander for such an outlandish price. Alastair was a constant, but she always had several others on the go — junior masters, senior boys.’
‘Pippa?’ said Georgie bewildered.
‘She was insatiable,’ said David harshly. ‘When I was head of a school in Yorkshire, before I took over Fleetley, she left me for a month to live with the local vet. All the masters had a whip-round for her leaving present, a rather expensive fridge. The sixth form all sent her a telegram saying: WHAT’S WRONG WITH US?’
He was perfectly in control of himself, except for his hands like rigid claws clamped on his knee.
‘Oh, my God,’ said Georgie in horror. ‘It was so public! How did you cope?’
‘Pride, stiff upper lip, gritted teeth — all the clichés. Men tend not to dump, women do. That’s their strength.’
Georgie shook her head. ‘I’ve dumped too much. It’s a drug. I don’t believe it, she looked so sweet and innocent. Why didn’t you chuck her out?’
‘Everything all right?’ said the head waiter, looking at the untouched plates. He always wanted to make a pie from the uneaten fish and call it Lovers’ Leftovers. Nixon, the hotel cat, was going to have a field day.
‘For the same reason you don’t leave Guy,’ said David. ‘I suppose I loved her.’
‘And you had Lysander and the other boys.’
‘Christ, I was jealous of Lysander.’ It was all coming out now. Georgie felt she ought to be wearing a dog collar and have a grille between them.
‘Pippa worshipped him,’ muttered David, ‘gave him everything when it seemed she gave me nothing. She used to cover him with kisses deliberately. I was too proud to beg. It didn’t help Lysander. Alexander and Hector beat him up, because they were jealous, too. I sent him to a different school, because they were so bright, I didn’t want them to show him up, but he was so unhappy, he ran home along the railway track to Pippa all the time. Then in his second term a horsebox rolled up outside the school. He’d only gone out and bought a racehorse. It had to go back, of course, and he was so heartbroken he ran away again. So I let him stay at Fleetley. I know I was vile to him. He hates me and blames me utterly for making his mother miserable.’
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ said Georgie indignantly. ‘Anyway,’ she lied, ‘Lysander doesn’t hate you, he’s just in awe of you. Someone must tell him the truth.’
‘Christ, no!’ David was really shocked. ‘He must have that untarnished image to cling on to.’
‘But it’s totally false! He ought to be falling for girls his own age.’
This time Georgie had eaten most of her sole, and David’s was untouched. Seeing she’d finished, he clashed his knife and fork together.
‘D’you mind if I smoke?’
Watching two middle-aged matrons trying not to water at the mouth as they inspected the pudding trolley, Georgie was reminded of the way women looked at Lysander. She wondered why she found his father so much more attractive. Perhaps Lysander was too sweet, too easygoing. She’d never be able to push David around, yet Pippa obviously had. Neither of them wanted pudding, but Georgie was shocked how happy she felt when he ordered two glasses of Armagnac.
‘Should we? We’ll be running round the water meadows with nothing on at this rate.’
‘And all my days are trances, And all my nightly dreams,
Are where thy grey eye glances, And where thy footstep gleams,’
murmured David. ‘I dreamt about you last night.’
Flustered, absurdly flattered, Georgie felt able to ask what happened to Pippa at the end.
‘She fell hook, line and stinker,’ David circumcised the end of his cigar with grim relish, ‘for our local MFH, Tommy Westerham, a terrific womanizer. He got bored with her, and then had the gall to ring me and tell me to tell her to get off his back. His wife’s very rich and he was terrified of being kicked out.’
Georgie’s mouth opened in horror. ‘Oh, God!’
‘I broke it to her as gently as I could, but she didn’t believe me, she thought it was a ruse to stop her seeing him. So she rode straight over to his house. Car backfired on the road. Horse went up. She wasn’t wearing a hard hat.’
The flame flickered over his tormented face like hellfire, as he tried to hold a match still enough to light his cigar.
‘I keep reproaching myself. If I hadn’t told her then, had let things take their course, she might be still alive. Did I want to spare her humiliation, or was I secretly enjoying humiliating her by telling her Tommy wanted out?’
For a moment he rested his eyes on the balls of his hands.
‘You couldn’t see the churchyard for flowers at her funeral and the church was full of her lovers, clapping kind hands on my shoulder. They must have thought me a cold fish. Hector, Alexander, Lysander and I carried her coffin. Lysander stumbled once. It was like Christ collapsing under the Cross.’
He glared at Georgie. ‘I’ve never told anyone this,’ he said slowly, ‘because I felt so ashamed, but as they lowered her into the grave, such a slim coffin, I felt only relief that at last she was sleeping alone.’
‘Oh, God!’ Tears were flooding Georgie’s flushed cheeks. ‘I’m so desperately sorry.’ She put a hand on his. ‘And Lysander knew nothing?’
‘Nothing. He was so on her side. He never realized my intransigence stemmed from frustration. I should have risen above it, but I was strait-jacketed into my misery.’
‘Break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.’ Georgie shook her head.
‘Lysander was deranged with grief. I thought he’d drive over a cliff, or drink himself to death. I didn’t know how to comfort him.’
Taking a slug of Armagnac, he choked slightly. Patting him on the back, Georgie encountered muscles, and fought a temptation to run her hand upwards and stroke his sleek head.
‘More coffee, Miss Maguire?’ asked the head waiter, who’d been reading The Scorpion in the kitchen and had put two and two together.
Georgie shook her head. Seeing a fat woman splashing through the water meadows in the wake of a jolly black Labrador, she said regretfully, ‘I must go home and walk Dinsdale.’
‘Shall I come with you?’<
br />
‘Oh, please.’ Georgie beamed up at him. ‘My world’s tumbling about my ears. Why on earth do I feel so happy?’
‘Probably booze,’ said David drily, then suddenly he had a horrific vision of having Georgie as a daughter-in-law. ‘It isn’t serious, you and Lysander?’
Georgie’s pony-tail flew as she shook her head: ‘No, no, it’s utterly platonic. We’re just terrific friends.’ She had conveniently forgotten that Lysander had asked her to marry him two days ago, and how distraught he’d been when he’d left for the airport that morning. ‘Ferdie insisted no bonking from the start,’ she went on. ‘Lysander’s suffering slightly from calf-love maybe. Anyway, toy boys are like tadpoles. If you’re sporting you throw them back at the end of the season.’
‘All the same, he ought to get a proper job,’ said David, making a writing sign to the waiter.
‘Shouldn’t give it up too lightly,’ said Georgie. ‘He’s the only person I know making serious money in the recession.’
‘I’m still trying to think of a word to rhyme with asp,’ said David, getting out his cheque book.
‘When was Catullus supposed to be handed in?’
‘January.’
‘That does make me feel better.’
‘D’you read poetry?’
‘Not since I picked up Herrick the other day, and found Guy had marked all the poems to Julia. I’m sure Herrick praised Julia’s leg for being white and hairless because it meant she wasn’t always pinching his razor.’
‘D’you mind coming upstairs a minute?’ asked David as they left the restaurant.
For a second, when he produced a pair of scissors from the dressing table, she backed away in terror thinking he was some kind of maniac, but he laughed and said he only wanted to cut half an inch off her fringe so he could see her eyes.
David had had a wretched year of insomnia, apathy, exhaustion and terrible migraines from bottling up his emotions. He was a man who liked to have control of himself and other people; he shrank from physical displays of affection; was often brusque and offhand to hide his feelings, but, once smitten, he went truly overboard.
Half an hour after Georgie got home, the telephone rang.
‘I’m not The Scorpion,’ said David. ‘If you use worm instead of asp, there are lots of words that rhyme with it.’
‘Poisonous worm, you’ll end my term. Goddit,’ said Georgie. ‘You are marvellous.’
‘I hope I see you before the end of term.’
‘It’s half-term next weekend,’ said Georgie.
44
The streams came back to Paradise and so did Guy Seymour. He was photographed looking handsome and suntanned at Heathrow and repeated his vows to stand by his errant wife, adding with a manly, slightly crooked smile, that as a Christian and father, he didn’t believe in divorce. In fact he couldn’t afford to be anything but magnanimous. His French trip had cost a bomb. Half the galleries in the West End were going belly-up, and he needed financial help from Georgie to keep going. And, utterly perversely, Georgie had suddenly started looking fantastic, and he found himself fancying her rotten once again. As Lysander was in Australia, he felt less threatened and that Georgie was genuinely trying to save the marriage. They got on better than they had in months and the Press, increasingly preoccupied with the Gulf War, drifted away.
As autumn gave way to winter, Georgie found she was looking at her own and David’s horoscope long before Guy’s, Julia’s, Lysander’s or even Rachel’s. Guy was delighted Georgie was burying herself in work. Marvellous tunes floated from her turret room like banners, and she sang even more beautiful versions in her bath.
Lysander, however, was stuck in the outback, rattling a sheep farmer who’d been cheating on his wife and playing a lot of polo. Missing Georgie constantly, he grew increasingly frustrated when she never answered his letters which admittedly were pretty short, and always seemed out when he rang. If he didn’t get her, as Rannaldini was still away, he’d ring Valhalla.
‘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, let
ting 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.