The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous

Sprinklers undulated languidly like strippers casting off rainbows of light over the emerald-green lawns. Old roses in every pastel shade, tawny honeysuckle, regale lilies, single and double white philadelphus, pale yellow lime blossom all seemed to be dabbing their sweetest scent on the pulse spots of the valley. Like women in their Ascot finery jostling forward to watch a big race, the herbaceous border was overcrowded with white-and-pink phlox, dog daisies, red-hot pokers, foxgloves, yellow snapdragons and soft blue cathedral spires of delphinium. A strange, very clear light heightened every colour, the smell of each flower intensified by the hot muggy air.

For a while neither Rannaldini nor Flora spoke, watching black-and-white cows like scattered dominoes in the fields below and listening to the tetchy bleating of sheep and the rattling hoof-beats of Rannaldini’s horses as, maddened by flies, they galloped about neighing. A red tractor chugged back and forth cutting Rannaldini’s hay. Swallows dived after insects.

‘It’s going to thunder,’ Flora said finally. ‘Mum’s got a ghastly headache.’

‘Perhaps she doesn’t want to sleep with your father.’

Rannaldini flipped through Flora’s music. ‘D’you want to sing to me?’

‘No.’

On the inside page of ‘The Magnet and the Churn’ she had written Flora Seymour, Lower Sixth A.

‘Beautiful trochaic name, Flora.’

‘It’s gross. How’d you like to have flat-stomached men mouthing your name across supermarket freezers? And as for Interflora, you can imagine what the boys at Bagley Hall made of that.’

Black clouds were edging round the sinking sun. Saying he had to walk his dogs, Rannaldini took Flora round the garden which seemed deliberately designed for love. Despite the drought, streams still hurtled through narrow ravines. Naked statues were strategically placed in sheltered glades. A little summer-house here, a white seat under a weeping ash there, beckoned dalliance. As he passed, Rannaldini let his hands rove suggestively over each romping nymph.

‘It’s like a nudist colony,’ grumbled Flora.

She was more charmed by Rannaldini’s Rottweilers who bounded ahead, muzzles covered in grass seed, soothing their thistle-pricked, nettle-stung paws in the streams, attacking clods of wet turf and wood, shaking and worrying them, emerging with dirty wet faces, giving skips in the air and bouncing fatly away.

‘Avant-garde dogs — they’re sweet.’ Flora hugged Tabloid.

‘To people who are not afraid,’ observed Rannaldini. Passing under a pergola fantastically entwined with pale pink roses and acid-green hop, they reached a frantically rushing stream, almost a river, but narrowed to a width of six feet between dark, drenched, very slippery rocks.

‘The sounding cataract ’aunted me like a passion,’ said Rannaldini softly, gazing down into the white churning water. ‘This whirlpool is called the Devil’s Lair. In the eighteenth century the young Westalls and their friends had bets eef they were brave enough to jump across. Several young men were keeled.’

Springing across like a great cat, Rannaldini turned towards her.

‘Come, leetle Flora.’

‘It’s a hell of a long way,’ snapped Flora, as the Rottweilers, distraught at being separated from their master, but not brave enough to jump, whimpered and barged round her legs. ‘Unlike you, I’m much too young to die.’

‘Life ees about taking risks,’ whispered Rannaldini, his dark eyes glittering, his teeth gleaming in the half- light. ‘Jump, leetle animal, or are you scared?’

Refusing to be beaten, Flora took a great leap, slipped on the damp moss and was only just pulled to safety in time. For a second Rannaldini held her shaking with fury and terror.

‘Let me go, you fucker,’ she screamed, ‘I want to go home.’

Releasing her, Rannaldini trailed a warm caressing hand over the goose-flesh of her bare waist.

‘Why you fight me?’

‘Because I really like Kitty, because I’m not into gerontophilia and because I’m sleeping with your son.’

‘And he satisfies you?’

‘He’s known as Trunch at Bagley Hall,’ spat back Flora.

‘Hush.’ Rannaldini put a finger, which smelt of wild mint, over her mouth. ‘I want confirmation not details.’

‘And if that weren’t enough,’ went on Flora, ‘you’re utterly unselective. Natasha told me about Hermione and jumping on her mother every time she hits London, and bonking every female musician in the London Duodenal, not to mention choral sex with all those panting groupies in their — I LOVE RANNALDINI T-shirts. You just pick them off.’

They had reached a little bank, covered in pink-spotted orchids. A blushing sun was retreating behind the wood. Kicking off her espadrilles Flora cooled her dusty feet in the long wet grass. Like Rannaldini, his sprinklers went everywhere.

‘I am Don Juan,’ said Rannaldini, sticking to the path above which made him taller, ‘or, being Italian, Don Giovanni. I seek the perfect woman and always despair of finding her because all women are the same. You would be different. You are not classically beautiful, but you light up when you smile.’

‘Dad doesn’t smile when I light up.’

‘You shouldn’t smoke when God has given you a voice.’

‘I’d rather he gave me Boris Levitsky,’ taunted Flora, disappearing into the fringed depths of a weeping ash.

‘Boris not Goodenough,’ said Rannaldini chillingly.

‘Why did you marry Kitty?’ Flora emerged from the far side of the weeping ash. ‘Was it an act of deliberate sadism? Did they toll the punishment bell at your wedding? Did the Paradise Lad howl on the first night?’

Rannaldini gave a shrug. ‘Kitty run my life. She was brought up by elderly parents so I seem like spreeng chicken, and she help her mother look after other people’s children.’

‘So she has no problem with your brat-pack?’

‘Correct.’ Rannaldini moved off down the ride, pausing to caress the upturned face and breasts of a naked wood nymph, then letting his hands stray downwards.

‘Eef one is going to run more than one woman,’ he continued, ‘one must have a loving wife rather plain so one’s mistresses don’t get jealous, rather working class, so women think Keety is fortunate to be plucked from her humble origins and to have landed such a mesmerizing — ’ Rannaldini paused mockingly over the word — ‘husband that she cannot expect heem to be faithful to her.

‘Above all,’ he went on with a satanic smile, ‘Keety is the perfect alibi. Eef Hermione is being difficult and I want to see Cecilia, I tell Hermione that Keety is in town so I cannot get away. Eef I want to see someone else, you, for example’ — briefly he touched her cheek — ‘I tell both Hermione and Cecilia, Keety is in town. If I want to drop someone I say: “I am so sorry, my dear, Keety has found out, and I cannot ‘urt Keety.” If a woman suddenly refuses to get out of my bed or one of my ’ouses, I say: “Keety is due any minute, you must go.” Finally eef any of them are foolish enough to want to marry me I tell them I cannot leave Keety, she do nothing wrong, it would be like throwing a freshwater fish into the sea.’

He has got the most beautiful voice, thought Flora, husky, caressing, anodyne. Perhaps it was an essential of adulterers because so much of their campaigning was done on the telephone.

‘You’re such a shit,’ she said fascinated.

‘Like Byron.’ Gently Rannaldini fingered the crutch of the wood nymph. ‘We love our men of genius not because they are perfect but because they are great.’ Then, running his hand over the wood nymph’s bottom, ‘Still warm from the sun as though she has been given a spanking, I would love to spank all the bad temper out of you, leetle Flora.’

‘You bloody wouldn’t.’ Outraged, yet excited, Flora plunged back into another weeping ash. As she emerged Rannaldini drew two ropes of fronds round her neck, trapping her.

‘I ’ave a ’ole in my heart from Cupid’s arrow,’ he whispered, tightening the fronds. Aware that he could throttle her, Flora gazed into his mocking, sensual, infinitely cynical, face.

‘My father was a Spanish Captain,’ she sang softly,

‘Went to sea a month ago,

First he kissed me, then he left me,

Bid me always answer No.’