The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous

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.