The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous

43

The party broke up very quickly after that. A frantically giggling Kitty, Ferdie, Georgie and Dinsdale spitting out splinters of boomerang were driven away by a very irate Marigold.

‘You’ve really let the sayde down, Georgie, conductin’ black-magic orgies. You must have realized what a pigstay Lysander had reduced Magpie Cottage to, probably contributed to it yourself. And you and Lysander are plastered all over The Scorpion. Gay’s been on the phone all day, trying to faind you. He’s standin’ bay you, bay the way. Ay can’t think way, and all the Press are doorsteppin’ Paradise Grange to get the Catchitune angle from Larry.’

‘It’s all Larry’s fault,’ screamed Georgie, ‘for putting out mugs and T-shirts with Guy and me looking lovey-dovey. I’ll get him under the Trade Descriptions Act. And what’s all this about The Scorpion?’

She couldn’t take in what Marigold was saying. She could only think how embarrassing it was that such a handsome man as David Hawkley should have caught her running around all wobbling and naked.

Having discovered that his youngest son was far too drunk to make any sense and refused to explain how he’d come by any of these amazing perks, David Hawkley drove off into the deluge. After a few minutes he calmed down and decided to put up at a nearby hotel and try a different tack in the morning. As every room within ten miles of Paradise was double-booked by reporters, he ended up at The Bell in Rutminster, an old coaching inn overlooking the River Fleet. The kitchen was closed, but noting his pallor and good looks, the landlord’s wife insisted on sending up to his room a bottle of whisky and a plate of Welsh rarebit, which gave him outlandish dreams of naked ladies frolicking in meadows.

One of them was Georgie Maguire, white feet dancing on the greensward, red hair flying like a maenad, but close up she turned into Mustard wearing nothing but a pie-frill collar, and he woke up drenched in sweat, shaking in horror.

Next morning the papers were full of the chinks in Georgie’s marriage with lots of jokes about Paradise Lust and On-the-Rocks-Star. ‘Caring Guy’ was much quoted from the South of France, insisting that there was no question of divorce and that Lysander Hawkley was a friend of the family, particularly his daughter Flora. At least Lysander wasn’t going to be dragged through some messy court case.

Feeling slightly more cheerful, particularly after some excellent kippers and three slices of toast and Oxford marmalade, David decided to have it out with Lysander. He found Magpie Cottage locked and deserted, except for Arthur and Tiny who were standing gloomily by the gate in the continuing downpour. Paradise Village swarmed with reporters splashing round in the flooded High Street, desperate to find Lysander and a story. More of them were doorstepping Angel’s Reach waiting for Georgie to emerge.

Receiving a tip-off from Miss Cricklade, who was unblocking a drain clogged with leaves outside her cottage, David approached Angel’s Reach from the south side, crossing the Fleet a mile upstream and walking through the woods. The rain had stopped, but the downpour continued as the water sifted and worked its way through twigs, leaves, traveller’s joy and dog mercury to the leafy floor below. The weather was still in the seventies, but not stifling like yesterday. Robins were singing, beech masks and acorns crunched beneath his feet like shingle, but a drenched blackberry he picked was as tasteless as his life.

Reaching the edge of Georgie’s land, he could see the house with its soaring angels turned amber by the rain, and the lake flanked with bulrushes, glinting in the sunshine. Beech trees, stingingly red as Georgie’s hair after yesterday’s deluge, trailed their leaves in the water. Statues gleamed seal-like, red hips glittered on rose bushes puffed out by their weight of water like enraged tomcats. Saffron and sea-green lichen on the flagstones as he walked up the path were almost luminous. The rain seemed to have given the garden back its youth.

In a clump of drying lavender, he found a page of pink flimsy on which Georgie had scribbled some lyrics.

‘You’re a snake on the make, a minx of a sphinx

You’re a wog, I’m a wop, but I can’t give you up,’ he read, then jumped at a Baskerville bay. Dinsdale trying to look fierce at the front, but waving his tail, kept looking back at the potting shed. Here David found Georgie. She was perched on a garden roller, wearing a grey T-shirt and yellow trousers, reading Antony and Cleopatra. Yesterday’s downpour had brightened her pale cheeks (David thought of Lavinia in The Aeneid) and fluffed up her hair, which was tied back with a yellow ribbon.

‘How did you get in here?’

‘Miss Cricklade, rather a fan of Lysander’s, told me a short cut,’ said David, removing his flat cap. Even a red rim across his forehead didn’t diminish his fierce, dark glamour.

‘You don’t know where he is?’

‘Over the hills and far away. Ferdie’s packed him off to Australia on a job. We thought it better to get him out of the country until the dust, and there’s plenty of that in Magpie Cottage, settled. He’s distraught at going — leaving the horses and the dogs.’

And you, too, presumably, thought David. ‘Look,’ he added brusquely, ‘I need your help. I beg you to lay off him. We’ve got to get him back and into some drug rehabilitation centre before it’s too late and with all due respect, you’re much too old for him.’

‘That doesn’t show respect, due or otherwise.’

‘It isn’t funny.’

The deeply etched lines on either side of David Hawkley’s tightly clamped mouth reminded Georgie of an H-block. For a second she dickered, then said: ‘Can you keep a huge secret? Lysander’s not peddling drugs. He hardly smokes dope at all. You cut off his allowance and ordered him to get a job, so he got one. He’s employed by women like me to make their erring husbands jealous and he’s making a bomb.’

‘You mean a sort of gigolo?’ asked David with a shudder.

‘No, no, he just hangs around looking heavenly and rattles our husbands. They’re such an unfaithful bunch, but they don’t like their wives playing the same game, so they come to heel.’ Georgie’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. ‘He’s such a sweet, kind boy, you should be really proud of him. He’s saved far more marriages than Relate.

‘I’m really sorry the Press picked on him and me,’ she went on humbly, ‘it must be awful having your name dragged in. Schoolboys so love that sort of thing. I feel desperate about my own children as well.’

She’s beautiful, thought David, touched by her concern. Pity her eyes were obscured by that thick fringe. He itched to trim it with a pair of secateurs.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘I’m in hot water,’ sighed Georgie, ‘but I have none. I hoped you were the plumber, but at least you’re not Guy. All that sanctimonious claptrap about standing by me, particularly when he’s out in France bonking his brains out.’ She didn’t know for sure but why else would Rachel be in France? ‘I hope The Scorpion catches him.’ She lobbed a Bonio at Dinsdale.

‘I found this.’ David handed her the soaked bit of paper.

‘Oh, lovely! I wondered where it had got to.’

‘What’s it for?’

‘A musical called Ant and Cleo. I’m trying to think of a word to rhyme with “asp”. Look, I know that party last night must have looked the last word in decadence, but it’s the first time anything like that’s happened.’ And she explained about Ferdie and Kitty celebrating losing weight, and then Ferdie producing this amazing dope.

‘That boy’s always been a pernicious influence.’

‘He is not,’ protested Georgie. ‘He’s saved Lysander’s life. He fusses over him like an old nanny and he’s got two horses and two dogs to look after now.’

Unable to banish the memory of Georgie’s rain-soaked body, David suddenly said: ‘I’m staying at The Bell in Rutminster. You’re very welcome to come and have a bath, then we could have lunch. If you’re worried about the Press, I’m sure they could fix a private room. I’d like to talk about Lysander.’

‘I’m not going to bore him by banging on about my marriage,’ vowed Georgie half an hour later, as she lay in a foot of scented water, shaving her legs and downing a large Bacardi and Coke.

David was drinking whisky and soda in the lounge when she came down and reading a small black leather-bound book. Georgie peered at the spine. It was Catullus.

‘Odi et amo,’ she said bitterly. ‘Just like my marriage. How’ve you translated it?’

‘Loving and hating someone at the same time is excruciatingly painful,’ said David, ‘but I’ll have to improve on that.’

The dining room was practically empty. The head waiter gave them a table overlooking the river and flooded water meadows. Like the black tassels of a widow’s shawl, rain was pouring out of approaching clouds, people were running over the bridge under buckling umbrellas. On the far bank hawthorns, groaning with berries, rinsed their bloodstained fingers in the water. Georgie felt heady, detached and very much in need of the second Bacardi and Coke he ordered her. She didn’t want the mood to slip. Guy got furious when she dithered over menus, so she quickly chose hors-d’oeuvres and a Dover sole because they were the things she saw. As she gouged out pink mayonnaise with bits of raw carrot and cauliflower and gazed at the river, David noticed her eyes were the same sludgy green as the water and her nipples which had been sticking up through her grey T-shirt had retreated after a hot bath.

Unable to stop himself touching her freckled cheek, he said: ‘Why do you look so young?’

‘Because I thought I was loved,’ said Georgie sadly, and proceeded to tell him all about Guy, Julia and Rachel.

Melba toast stiffened in a cooled pink napkin, rollmops, asparagus, egg mayonnaise and tiny sweet corn lay untouched on her plate half an hour later.

‘I married a bishop’s son who’s turned into a chess bishop always sliding off at angles,’ sighed Georgie. ‘Now I’ve been caught out, he’ll feel more justified in catting around than ever.’

David, who’d finished his oysters ages ago, waved to the waiter to remove her plate and fill up their glasses.

‘And Lysander didn’t help?’

‘Not really. He jolted Guy to begin with, but it was like putting Band-Aid over a boil. Guy still has the capacity to make me more suicidally unhappy than anyone else.’

‘Then you’d better get out.’ David leant back as the waiter placed two huge soles in front of them with the green-flecked pats of butter already melting.

‘Guy won’t change,’ he said when they were alone again. ‘He may still love you, but he’s lost that unqualified adulation he’s so dependent on, and he won’t rest in his search to find it again. And you’ve lost your hero. It needn’t be the end of the world,’ he added gently. ‘Divorce may not guarantee you happiness, but it might be an end to unhappiness.’

‘It’s the duty of prisoners of war to escape.’

‘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?’

‘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.