The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous

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 improve 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