The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous

caused Mrs Colman if she’d seen it.’

Crossing the room, he threw the vile document on the fire, putting a log on top to bury it.

‘What the hell have you got to say for yourself? And take off that ridiculous baseball cap.’

Flushing like a girl, Lysander opened his eyes wide and launched into a flurry of apology.

‘I’m really, really sorry, Dad, I honestly am. Basically it’s very expensive living in London, and I honestly didn’t mean to upset you and Mustard… I mean Mrs Colman, but basically my car’s been nicked and I’d no idea Arthur’s vet’s bills were going to be so high, and I honestly promise to do better, and basically my attitude towards money is—’ He got to his feet to let in the school cat who was mewing piteously on the window-ledge.

‘Sit down,’ thundered his father.

‘But it’s freezing. Hesiod always came in when Mum—’ Then, seeing his father’s face, he sat down. He desperately needed some money. ‘As I was saying, basically my attitude—’

‘That’s enough,’ David interrupted him. ‘You have used the words basically and honestly about twenty times in the last five minutes. There is absolutely nothing honest about your promises to do better, nor basic about your attitude to money. You roll up here, plainly hungover to the teeth. You bring disrepute on the family getting your exploits plastered all over the papers. I hoped you would have learnt that no gentleman ever discusses the women with whom he’s been to bed.’

With a shudder, Lysander wondered if his father had bonked Mustard yet. The fumes of curry were really awful. He hoped the bursar had ordered a consignment of three-ply bog-paper to deal with it. Poor Hesiod was still mewing.

‘What is worse,’ went on his father, ‘is that in order to secure that job in the City — which I gather Roddy Ballenstein has already withdrawn — can’t say I blame him — I have been forced to admit the stupidest boy I have ever come across.’

‘Stupider than me?’ said Lysander in amazement.

‘It is not funny!’

‘I’m really sorry, Dad.’ Lysander noticed with a stab of pain that his father had removed his mother’s photograph from the mantelpiece. Probably Mustard’s doing. Dragging his mind back to the present he heard his father saying:

‘I realize from your letter that you only came down to tap me. Well, I’m not helping you. You’ve got to learn to stand on your own feet. I suggest you send that horse on which you’re always squandering money to the knackers, and get yourself a decent job. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a governors’ meeting.’

Lysander went quietly outside, but when he saw a gloating Mustard peering round the net curtains, something snapped. Raising two fingers at her, he scooped up Hesiod, who was now weaving and mewing round his feet, and bolting down the garden path, shoved the cat into Ferdie’s car and jumped in after it.

In the ensuing pandemonium with Jack nearly getting his eyes clawed out as he tried to swallow Hesiod whole and Lysander trying to separate them and Mustard running down the drive in her medium high heels, crying, ‘Stop thief’, Hesiod started shitting with terror and was forcibly ejected by Ferdie outside the Science Lab.

‘I expect they’ll start experimenting on him as soon as they’ve cut his vocal chords,’ said Ferdie as he stormed down the drive.

Then, seeing Lysander’s stricken face, ‘I’m only winding you up. Quite resourceful of Jacko though, trying to eat that mog. Obviously knows he’s going to have to fend for himself from now on.’

‘What you talking about?’

‘Hatchet didn’t cough up.’

‘He didn’t.’ Lysander rubbed his bloody, lacerated hands on his jeans. ‘Can I borrow another fiver? I must put some flowers on Mum’s grave.’

Unclothed as yet by any lichen or the grime of age, Pippa Hawkley’s headstone looked poignantly white and defenceless beside all the other gravestones lurching higgledy-piggledy in Fleetley Village churchyard.

Almost as white and defenceless as her son, thought Ferdie, as he watched Lysander chuck out some dead chrysanthemums which had blown over and refill their vase with four bunches of snowdrops.

Philippa Hawkley 1942–89, Requiescat in Pace, read Ferdie, and tears stung his eyes as he wondered how anyone so vivid and vital as his ex-headmaster’s wife could ever rest peacefully. Worried that Lysander, who was now swaying beside him, was going to black out, he urged him back into the car and turned up the heat. He ought to belt straight back to London. Yesterday’s Arabs had rung his boss and complained about being bundled into a taxi. Instead he decided to take Lysander for a drive.

7

The sun, an even later riser than Lysander, at last put in an appearance, lighting up frost-bleached fields, yellow stone walls and striping the drying road ahead with tree shadows. As the countryside grew more hilly and deeply wooded, Ferdie drove past a beautiful house on the side of the valley with smooth grey trunks of beeches like the Albert Hall organ pipes soaring behind it.

Lysander was temporarily roused out of his gloom, when Ferdie said the estate belonged to Rupert Campbell-Black, ex-world show-jumping champion and now one of the most successful owner-trainers in the country.

‘Look at those fences! God, I wish Rupert’d give me a job.’ Lysander craned his neck to gaze into the yard. ‘I could ride all his horses and he’d know how to get Arthur sound again. Sometimes I think Arthur’s enjoying retirement and doesn’t want to get sound at all. I can’t work in London any more, Ferdie, I’m having a mid-life crisis at twenty-two.’

‘I realize that,’ said Ferdie. ‘I’ve got plans for you.’

Driving on another ten miles, through tree tunnels and woods carpeted with fading beech leaves and lit by the occasional sulphur-yellow cloud of hazel catkins, they passed a tiny hamlet on the right called Paradise. Five minutes later, Ferdie crossed over into the county of Rutshire, and pulled up on the top of a steep hill.

Climbing out, almost swept away into a dance of death by the violence of the wind, they found themselves looking down into a most beautiful valley. From the top, vast trees descended the steep sides like passengers on a moving staircase. Over the trees were flung great silken waterfalls of travellers’ joy. These seemed to flow directly into a hundred little streams, which flashed like sword blades in the sunshine as they hurtled through rich brown ploughed fields or bright green water meadows into the River Fleet which ran along the bottom of the valley. Ahead, a mile downriver, a little village of pale gold Cotswold cottages gathered round an Early English church like parishioners respectfully listening to a sermon.

‘Below you,’ shouted Ferdie over the wind, ‘lies Rutshire’s valley of Paradise, much larger and more ostentatious than its Gloucestershire namesake. But where everyone wants to live, and where house prices go up rather than down.

‘Here,’ — Ferdie indicated several splendid houses peeping like lions out of the woods on either side — ‘you will find the most Des-Reses in England, because of the magnificent views and the money that’s been spent on them. Rupert Campbell-Black refers to the area as Non-U-Topia because so many Nouveaux have moved in. It’s also been nicknamed the Rift Valley because so many marriages break up.’

‘So what?’ grumbled Lysander, who was cold and having to hang on to his baseball cap and to poor Jack whose ears were getting blown inside out.

‘I did a bit of research while you were unsuccessfully tapping your father,’ yelled Ferdie, who being fat, felt the cold less. ‘You know your friend Rachel? Well, this is the empire of her husband’s conductor-boss, Rannaldini. His is the biggest house up on the right. It’s called Valhalla. The garden’s sensational in summer. You can see the maze and there deep in the woods you can see a little gazebo — Rannaldini’s out-of-control tower — where he has total privacy to edit tapes, study scores and bonk ladies who approach unseen from the other side of the wood.

‘Rannaldini only spends a few weeks a year here,’ explained Ferdie, ‘because he’s always jetting round the