The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous

‘I’m desperately sorry, Ferd, I couldn’t just leave her. The other problem is basically my car’s been nicked. When I came out of her flat in Drake Street it had gone.’

‘Probably towed away.’ Ferdie was furiously crashing plates and mugs into the dishwasher.

‘It wasn’t. I stopped off at a champagne tasting at Oddbins on the way home. They let me use their telephone. Then I went to The Goat and Boots. That’s where I met Syd, that blind bloke. His guide-dog was incredible; she was called Bessie. You’d have loved her, Jacko.’

As he opened the kitchen door, Jack rushed out and an icy blast rushed in.

‘We’d better call the police about your car,’ said Ferdie.

‘Rachel was so pretty in a leggy sort of way.’ Lysander glanced at his watch. ‘Hell, I’ve missed Coronation Street.’ Going into the sitting room he switched on the television. ‘I must find out who won the 2.15. Where’s the remote control?’

But, as he upended a box of tapes on to the floor in an attempt to find it, Ferdie flipped.

‘Just shut up for once,’ he howled, ‘and go to fucking bed.’

6

Next morning Ferdie had to relent because Lysander woke up, as he so often did, crying for his mother.

‘Oh Ferd, I dreamt she was alive, the fog came down and I couldn’t find her.’

Dripping with sweat, reddened eyes rolling in terror, bedclothes thrown all over the sitting room, Lysander reached for a cigarette with a shaking hand.

Slumped in despair, he let the bubbles subside in the Alka Seltzer Ferdie brought him. The cartoons on TV AM which usually produced whoops of joy failed to raise a smile. He was too low even to switch over to Ceefax for the day’s runners and his horoscope.

‘What’s the point of Russell Grant rabbiting on about a romantic day for Pisces when I’ve got to go and tap Dad?’ He started to shake again.

Ferdie sighed. As Lysander’s car hadn’t been found and he’d promised to be at Fleetley, the public school in Gloucestershire where his father was headmaster, by eleven-thirty, Ferdie agreed to drive him down for a fee. Not that he’d ever get it, and he’d have to pretend to the office that he was out viewing properties.

‘You ought to get something inside you,’ he chided Lysander. ‘You haven’t eaten since yesterday morning.’

‘I feel sick.’

Lysander jumped at the telephone, always hoping it might be his mother and her whole death a terrible dream.

Picking up the receiver, Ferdie listened for a minute, before snapping: ‘He’s not here, and if he were, he wouldn’t have anything to say,’ and crashed it down again.

‘You’re going to feel even sicker. That was the Sun. Beattie Johnson’s dumped in The Scorpion. They’ll all be baying at the door in a second. We better move it.’

On top of The Financial Times and the Estate Agent’s Gazette, the newsagent on the corner placed a copy of The Scorpion.

‘Lover Boy’s in trouble again,’ he told Ferdie with a smirk. ‘Remind him he owes me sixty quid for mags and fags.’

‘I’m first in the queue,’ said Ferdie, grabbing a packet of toffees. ‘Oh my God!’

On the front of The Scorpion was a ludicrously, wantonly glamorous photograph of Lysander surrounded by foliage and wearing nothing but a flannel. ‘WHO COULD BLAME MARTHA WINTERTON?’ said the huge headline.

‘What the hell possessed you to pose virtually naked for Beattie Johnson?’ asked Ferdie as he got back into the car.

‘I was having a bath when she arrived,’ said Lysander sulkily.

Lysander, whom Ferdie described as the Geoffrey Boycott of reading, was still digesting the full horrors when the BMW shook off the remnants of rush-hour traffic and reached the M4.

‘Drop dead handsome,’ he read out laboriously. ‘And he nearly did when the bullets of Elmer’s guards rang out. Frozen in his tracks, Lysander could have passed for a statue of Adonis (who’s he?) in that moonlit garden!

‘“I aim to be a jump jockey,” says twenty-two-year-old Lysander, who should have no trouble with Bechers, if he can clear Elmer’s twenty-foot electric fence without a horse.

‘Oh Christ, it goes on about me being “the youngest son of David ‘Hatchet’ Hawkley, headmaster of Fleetley, one of England’s snootiest public schools (fees ?12,000 a year). Perhaps Hatchet will give cheeky Lysander six of the best when they meet.”

‘Jesus, Beattie is a bitch,’ said Lysander furiously. ‘She promised she wouldn’t print any of the things I told her off the record. I’d have taken that Ferrari if I’d known. We’d better step on it before some do-gooder shows Dad The Scorpion. Thank goodness it’s banned at Fleetley. Dolly’s going to be livid, too. I feel seriously sick.’

He groped for a cigarette and was soon coughing his lungs out and dropping ash and toffee papers all over Ferdie’s very clean car.

‘That is the ultimate obscenity,’ he said disapprovingly as they got stuck in the fast lane behind a blonde in a Porsche going just below the speed limit, so Ferdie was forced to overtake on the inside.

‘Ought to be driving funeral cars.’ Lysander swung round to glare at her, then changed his mind. ‘Quite pretty though. Perhaps she’s just passed her test. Looks like that girl in the house next door. Did you ever bonk her?’

Ferdie nodded gloomily. ‘We had a bloody good four days while you were in Palm Beach. I even took her to San Lorenzo. Then she announced she was flying back to Australia to get married, and she’d only been practising on me.’

Ferdie told it as a big joke, but Lysander sensed the hurt. He longed for Ferdie to attract girls as effortlessly as he did.

‘Stupid cow,’ he said crossly, then to cheer Ferdie up, as they came off the motorway, ‘God, you shift this car. I’ve never done it this fast even at night.’

As they approached Fleetley through the bleak winter landscape with its patches of snow and icy wind flattening the pale grass on the verges, Jack started to snuffle at the window at familiar territory and Lysander grew lower and lower.

‘I can’t believe she won’t be here,’ he muttered, pulling Sherry’s blue baseball cap further over his nose.

He could never understand why his mother had stayed married to his stiff-upper-lipped, rigidly conventional, father. But, as a gesture of conciliation, he stopped in Fleetley Village to buy him a bottle of port and a packet of Swoop for his parrot, Simonides.

Fleetley School had once been inhabited by dukes. Now only the iron gates flanked by rampant stone lions and the avenue of towering flat-bottomed horse-chestnuts, and the great house itself, square, yellowy-grey and Georgian, remained. All round like mushrooms had sprung up classrooms, science labs, gyms and houses for masters and boys. The great lake had been turned into a swimming pool.

Nowhere for Arthur and Tiny to graze now, thought Lysander, gazing at the silvery-green stretches of playing field.

‘Oh no!’ He gave a whimper. The stables where he and his mother had kept their horses had already been flattened to make way for the new music school towards which, Mrs Colman, his father’s secretary, had helped raise ?300,000.

‘You coming in?’ he asked Ferdie.

Ferdie shook his head: ‘I’ve got some calls to make.’

Although Ferdie had got straight As in four A levels, and David Hawkley had privately admitted he would be