The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous

sure she was there twenty minutes before kick-off, only to find the place deserted except for a handful of technicians up ladders adjusting spotlights, and softening the filters on the camera lights which hung from the ceiling.

To emphasize the marine theme of the album, a large papier-mache rock had been plonked in the middle of the room. A cardboard lighthouse flashed on and off in one corner. Lobster pots had been placed round the walls from which hung fishermen’s nets, cut-outs of fish sea-horses with lit-up eyes and clumps of seaweed which were beginning to smell.

Monitors showed the same clip of Georgie clinging voluptuously to the rock. Waitresses wearing matelot jerseys and bell-bottoms, many of whom remembered Georgie from the sixties, crunched around a floor littered with sea-shells and sand, making up a rum punch and putting out glasses. Caterers, who were knocking up a sea- food buffet, crept out of the kitchen wiping prawn juice on their aprons to have a gawp.

‘It all looks wonderful. If only I was slim enough to wear horizontal stripes! You’ve gone to so much trouble.’ Georgie drifted among them in tearful ecstasy, captivating, flattering, signing autographs, then adding to Guy in an undertone, ‘and absolutely no-one’s going to turn up.’ Then, because Guy hadn’t given her time to get ready she shot into the Ladies to titivate.

Immediately she was joined by a girl in a dark blue velvet dress with a pie-frill collar, which flattened her breasts and stopped at mid-calf above sensible, medium-heeled shoes. Blond hair, held in place by a black velvet band, emphasized a long nose and a thin beige predatory face, giving the distinct impression of the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood trying to pass himself off as Alice in Wonderland.

‘Hi, Georgie,’ said the blonde in a deep, put-on voice. ‘I’m Nikki, Larry Lockton’s PA. We met when you came to the office.’

‘Oh, right,’ said Georgie, who didn’t remember at all. ‘How nice to see you. God, I’m nervous.’

Not nearly as nervous as I am, thought Nikki, trying to soften the black kohl round her eyes with a shaking finger.

Ever since Larry had been to see Marigold last week he’d been tetchy and withdrawn and the weekend with the boys had been disastrous, not to mention the mud all over her new cream carpet. To cap it there’d been a piece in the Daily Mail that morning about the way the careers of high flyers took a dive when they left their wives for bimbos. Nikki’s aim tonight was therefore to look even more wifely than Marigold.

Georgie, who loathed being talked to when she was getting ready, was trying to secure her newly washed hair, which Guy had insisted she wore up to banish any sixties hippy image. She wished this silly girl, who was now rabbiting on about the wonders of Paradise, would go away.

‘You must drop in if you’re ever in the area again,’ murmured Georgie.

It was her standard response to any fan. She would have died if they’d taken her up on it.

‘We’d like that, Georgie,’ said Nikki. Little do you know, she thought, that I’m going to be your neighbour and the wife of your record producer, able to control your fat advances. Then she added out loud, ‘I’m dead excited about meeting Rannaldini, aren’t you?’

Momentarily, Georgie was roused out of her trance. ‘I’d forgotten he was coming,’ she said.

‘They say he picks women off like ducks bobbing past in a shooting gallery,’ said Nikki, adjusting the garters holding up her deliberately wifely, nutmeg-brown stockings.

Not that she’d attract Rannaldini like this. But there would be years ahead when, as the mistress of Paradise Grange, she reverted to her normal, shimmeringly sexy, black leather, tousled-blond self.

Having charmed a large Bells out of the waitresses, Guy Seymour was lining up glasses and press releases and delightedly noticing the number of Press who were signing their names in the visitors’ book, when Larry Lockton stormed in.

God, he looks ridiculous, thought Guy.

Larry was wearing a scowl, a black leather jacket, a white T-shirt hanging outside black jeans. Any inches added by black, high-heeled cowboy boots were negated by the weight of gold jewellery and the black hair which was beginning to cascade in ringlets over his collar and sweating forehead.

‘Of all the fucking things to happen,’ he roared, flattening the waiting Catchitune publicity staff against the walls.

‘We’ve got a lot of heavy-weight Press here already,’ said Guy soothingly, reading upside down as reporters from The Scorpion and The Sunday Times Style pages signed in.

‘Fat lot of good it’ll do us.’ Larry glared round. ‘They’ve all turned up to see Rannaldini.’ Then, as Guy drew him out of earshot of the reporters, ‘The fucker phoned as I entered Old Compton Street, saying he wasn’t coming, so I rammed the Merc in front.’

Rannaldini, he went on, who was on sabbatical from the London Met making a film of Don Giovanni, had been due to fly back for the party that afternoon. Instead he had returned secretly the day before in order to surprise the London Met who were playing Beethoven’s Ninth at the Festival Hall under Oswaldo, their guest conductor.

‘Oswaldo’s too bloody good for Rannaldini’s liking,’ stormed Larry, grabbing one of two more large whiskies conjured up by Guy. ‘Anyway, Rannaldini plonks himself down in the front row, and sits stony-faced with his eyes shut until the last moment when the singing starts. Then he stalks out, distracting everyone from the music, and telling some gleefully hovering reporter from the Evening Standard that he can’t listen to such garbage any longer.

‘So, of course, it is all over the Standard, and, as is his fucking wont to get himself out of trouble, Rannaldini jumps into his jet and shoves off back to LA, missing the fuss and Georgie’s party. The bastard didn’t even have the guts to ring me until he was safely over the Irish Sea. Even Kitty doesn’t know he’s buggered off. She’s on her way up.’

Larry couldn’t have been angrier. He or rather Catchitune had poured vast sums into Rannaldini’s pocket. He and Rannaldini were supposed to be buddies, and Nikki, who was a terrific star-fucker, was dying to meet him, and besides he needed moral support in case Marigold punched Nikki on the nose.

He and Guy were interrupted by a photographer from The Scorpion who was loading up his camera.

‘First edition goes to press any minute. What time are you expecting Rannaldini?’

As Larry opened his mouth, Guy interrupted smoothly: ‘He’ll be along in a minute. Traffic’s terrible.’ Then he murmured to Larry, ‘We’ve got the Press here, let’s use them.’

‘Where’s Georgie anyway?’ asked Larry, suddenly remembering he had an album to launch.

‘In the bog, grouting her face,’ said Guy.

Larry went white. ‘Nikki’s in there.’

‘Shit! She won’t say anything to Georgie about you and her, will she?’

‘She promised not to,’ said Larry gloomily, ‘but she’s so off the wall. I run a billion-pound company and I’ve been answering my telephone all day, while Nikki goes to the hairdresser and tarts herself up.’

‘I’ll yank Georgie out of the bog,’ said Guy, shooting off, ‘and you keep Nikki off the drink. It gets to women.’

‘How’s Rock Star doing, Larry?’ asked the Daily Mail.

‘Breaking all records. We’ve already put on a massive re-press,’ muttered Larry, bolting off to the Gents.

No-one could have been a less heavenly host than Larry. He had no chit-chat, only intense concentration on what temporarily interested him, which on this occasion, confusingly, was both Nikki and Marigold. He also had the nightmare of making a speech. Practice making more and more imperfect, he had been rewriting the draft given him by the publicity department all day.

Outside the Ladies, Guy roared: ‘For God’s sake, come out at once, Panda,’ which was a nickname from when they’d first met, when he could hardly see Georgie’s eyes for sooty black make-up.

‘Thank you,’ said Georgie loudly to the cloakroom lady, as she drifted out, to draw attention to the couple of gold pound coins she’d left beside the silver in the saucer.

Funny, observed the cloakroom lady, as she pocketed the coins, that Georgie, despite her slim top-half, had revealed plump legs when she’d raised her skirt to pull up her tights and the blonde in the ultra-respectable dress had been wearing no knickers at all.