The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous

hair and his nose broken off, but he was flanked by stone angels, with a little dog like Jack at his feet. Kitty ran a finger down his pale battered translucent face.

Oh, let angels ride on Lysander’s shoulders, too. Wiping away the tears, she quickly lit a candle for him. Walking towards the door, she saw a man standing beneath the tattered colours of the local regiments. He looked vaguely familiar, so she smiled, then went absolutely scarlet as she realized the last time she’d seen him she’d been in her bra and knickers, bopping in the rain. As she scuttled out, however, she looked round.

‘Good luck,’ she stammered.

‘Good luck, Kitty,’ said David Hawkley.

Any comfort she might have felt evaporated as Clive slid forward out of nowhere to open the door of the Mini to take her to the races.

Rutminster racecourse on the final day of the meeting had never been fuller. Anticipating victory for Rupert, who was a huge local hero, and forgetting the recession, the multitude were drowning their sorrows. Penscombe Pride would get them out of trouble, pay their mortgage arrears, their poll tax and their daughter’s wedding. As the beautiful little bay with his bright questing eyes and his zig zag blaze, who had never fallen in his life, or lost in his last eight races, strutted round the paddock like a bantam cock, no-one would have thought he carried top weight and the expectation of hundreds of thousands of punters. Ten-deep, they gathered round the rails to admire him.

He was followed at a respectable distance by The Prince of Darkness, who was a hand bigger. He looked magnificent with his blood-red rug rolled back to show rippling muscle worthy of a black middle-weight champion. But his evil eye rolled and his jaws strained against his muzzle and everyone kept clear of his hoofs because he could lash out with all four of them.

Of the thirty other runners, the most serious contenders were Camomile Lawn, a fleet chestnut mare so flashy Tab said she ought to wear an ankle bracelet, Male Nurse, a stocky brown gelding who jumped and stayed well, Yummy Yuppy, the handsome dark bay who had fallen last year, Blarney Stone, who had won the Irish Grand National, Paddywack, who was third to Penscombe Pride and The Prince of Darkness last year and Fraulein Mahler, Rannaldini’s second horse, whom Lysander had ridden into the lake last summer.

A ripple of delighted laughter ran through the crowd as Arthur entered the paddock. A hand bigger than any other horse, shambling round like a great circus elephant, his coat gleaming like an iceberg, he was plainly delighted at the attention he was causing. The crowd, particularly the men, admired his slim blond stable-girl with her exquisite bone structure and arrogant eyes, and, seeing RC-B on Arthur’s new blue rug, made the connection and nodded wisely.

‘That horse couldn’t win if it started last week,’ yelled a wag on the steps.

‘Don’t be so fucking sure,’ yelled back Tabitha.

The crowd roared, in no doubt now that she was Rupert’s daughter, and they were delighted when Georgie Maguire, ravishing in a suit of grass-green silk, sheltered by a pink peony-patterned umbrella gave Tab the two- hundred-pound prize for the best turned-out horse.

Up in the private boxes, after excellent lunches, the rich and sometimes famous and their satellite freeloaders looked down on the runners. The noisiest, most glamorous, throng inhabited the Venturer Television box. They included Freddie Jones, Pridie’s co-owner, as plump and as jolly as his writer wife, Lizzie, and Taggie’s parents, Declan and Maud O’Hara, who hadn’t forgiven Rupert for his crack about Arthur staying longer than she did. Billy Lloyd-Foxe, Rupert’s old show-jumping crony, who was doing the commentary for Venturer, and his wanton, blond wife, Janey, who was covering the race for the Daily Post, and finally Ricky France-Lynch, polo captain of England, who’d had Lysander’s ponies at livery, and his adorably pretty, painter wife, Daisy, who was busy sketching everything in sight.

By ghastly irony, Rannaldini’s box was bang next door, and Rannaldini ignored them icily. But he couldn’t stop Freddie Jones gossiping to Larry about the way the recession had stymied the electronics business, nor Meredith and Hermione, radiant in squashy blond furs, casting covetous eyes at Rupert, nor the chairman of the New World Phil, who was enjoying the hospitality more than the horses, gazing at Taggie, who echoed Rupert’s colours in a dark blue suit with an emerald-green turban, and whose navy-blue-stockinged legs were longer than any of the horses’.

‘I fancy Male Nurse,’ said Meredith, taking his eyes off Rupert for a second to study his racecard.

‘That figures,’ said Guy. ‘I fancy Busty Beauty.’

That figures, too, thought Georgie.

Georgie didn’t care, because she’d had glorious sex with Guy that morning, because people had shoved Hermione aside to mob her and get her autograph when she’d arrived at the course, and because she’d been asked to present the turn-out prize, and because down below on the grass, watching his son go round the paddock, looking aloof and Byronic, stood David Hawkley. They had just managed to avoid the Press and snatch a blissful two minutes together behind the hot dog stand.

Why, therefore, was she so upset when she caught Guy giving Julia’s friend, Daisy France-Lynch, a discreet wave? Had Ricky and Daisy had cosy foursomes with Julia and Guy?

‘Oh, look,’ Meredith broke into her reverie. ‘Rannaldini and divine Rupert have both come into the paddock. Very dirty of Rannaldini to have raked up Isa Lovell. Perhaps Rupert will challenge him to a duel.’

Weighed out, dressed in his black, white and brown colours, Lysander huddled in the jockeys’ changing room, trying to keep down half a cup of sweet tea. His knees were knocking, his mind a blank. He couldn’t remember any of Rupert’s instructions. Around him jockeys hid their nerves in hectic skylarking. Rushing to the lavatory when he arrived, he had found a note pinned to the door in Bluey’s handwriting: ‘This bog is reserved for Lysander Hawkley for the next two hours,’ and smiled feebly, but he couldn’t join in. All he could think was that he might see Kitty again in a minute, but she was probably too frightened of horses to venture into the paddock, and he mustn’t let Rupert, Tab and Arthur down. At least this morning’s shaving cuts had stopped bleeding.

As tense as a sprung trap in the woods, Rupert didn’t hear a word Freddie Jones was saying as he waited for Isaac Lovell to come out with the other jockeys. He was trying to be rational, but in his head he was back in 1980, with Isa’s father, Jake, winning his silver, and Rupert coming nowhere on the most expensive show-jumper in the world.

There was that shit Rannaldini in his black astrakhan coat and poor little Kitty looking as bombed as a stuffed fox in a glass case. And there, Rupert gave a hiss, was Isa Lovell, a couple of inches taller than Rannaldini, but with the same dark gypsy stillness as his father — which always captivated women and horses. For a second Rupert’s eyes met Isa’s, then slid away, as he felt all the old black murderous churning.

‘He is a little squit,’ whispered Taggie.

Squeezing her hand until she winced, Rupert was relieved when the other jockeys spilled out as if from a conjurer’s coloured handkerchief into the paddock. The safety pin holding Lysander’s high black collar had come undone. Taggie refastened it. Like Arthur, he towered over his rivals, but he was thinner than any of them. Even his brown-topped boots were loose.

Like Scarlett O’Hara being laced into her stays, Arthur groaned as his girths were tightened.

‘It’s all right, darling,’ Tabitha kissed him on his whiskery nose. ‘Tomorrow you’ll be turned out to get fat and eat as much grass as you like.’

Having seen Bluey safely mounted on Pridie, Rupert came over to give Lysander a leg up. Indignant at being ignored by his master, who was desperately scanning the private boxes for a glimpse of Kitty, Arthur deliberately stood on Lysander’s toe.

‘Fucking hell, Arthur, after all I’ve done for you!’ Lysander gathered up the reins.

‘Stop looking for Mrs Rannaldini, or I’ll put you in blinkers,’ chided Rupert, checking Arthur’s girths. ‘Now take it slowly, although you haven’t got much option on Arthur, and remember no black power salutes until you’re ten yards past the post, and don’t forget—’

But Lysander never heard what he was going to say because Arthur, who never forgot a hand that fed him, had given his great Vesuvius whicker and carted his master and Tab, hauling helplessly on his lead rope, across the paddock to lay his great hairy face against Kitty’s and start eating her racecard.

‘Oh, Arfur!’ Kitty hugged the only horse in the world of whom she wasn’t terrified.

For a second she and Lysander gazed at each other. Her little pug face was flushed from the hospitality tent. There were raindrops in her hair which crinkled unbecomingly. Her eyes were red, but, to Lysander, she had never