The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous

‘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 cliches. 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.