The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous

raised eyebrows if we all go skinny dipping.’

‘You are not going to Leavers’ Ball.’

‘I must. I feel so dreadful about Wolfie. I promised I’d go with him two months ago. I’m not letting him down in front of all his friends. I’m off backpacking soon, so he and I will just peter out without his knowing about you.’

‘Eef you go to that ball, do not come back to me.’

It was her first experience of Rannaldini’s intransigence. She knew she mustn’t give in. She was horrified how difficult she found it.

Having persuaded Georgie to buy a slinky black dress covered in sequins for The Clive Anderson Show so she could borrow it for the ball, Flora discovered it was too tight on the hips. Resorting to half a packet of Ex-Lax she spent the day of the ball on the 100 groaning that she was dying.

That makes two of us, thought Georgie.

Deathly pale, buckling at the knees, Flora managed to gird her ransacked loins to get ready. At least the dress fitted perfectly. Georgie was just fastening her own jade pendant round Flora’s neck when Flora asked her point blank if she’d ever been unfaithful to Guy.

‘No, of course not.’

As Georgie crossed her fingers the jade pendant slithered between Flora’s breasts.

‘And has Daddy ever been unfaithful to you?’

This time, as she crossed her fingers, Georgie held on to the pendant with her thumb.

‘Of course not.’

‘How very boring,’ said Flora. ‘Marriage must be like a prison.’

Next moment her mother had burst into tears, but denied there was anything the matter, just saying work was going badly.

As Wolfie was playing cricket against the fathers and going to be pushed for time, Guy — the ever-willing chauffeur — dropped Flora off at Valhalla where the roses were scattering pale petals all over the lawns.

Rannaldini, who’d just flown in from a wonderfully successful performance of Shostakovich’s Tenth, was delighted to see Flora looking so wan. But she had the wonderful skin of youth where sleepless nights only put darker blue shadows under the eyes and made her look more appealing. He had never wanted anyone more, but icily he ignored her.

Before she left with Wolfie and Natasha, they paraded before the grown-ups in their finery.

Oh, I’d love to be beautiful and thin and go to a ball, thought Kitty longingly.

Wolfie asked his father to tie his tie. He had made another century this afternoon and looked bullish, very brown and handsome.

‘None of our generation can tie bow-ties,’ said Natasha.

‘Family ties are more important,’ said Flora pointedly.

For a second, as his father had to stand on tiptoe to see over his shoulder into the mirror and flick and slot the yellow Paisley tie in and out, Wolfie had a spookie feeling Rannaldini wanted to throttle him.

‘You all look be-yootiful,’ called out Kitty as they drove off.

As Kitty sorted through the mountains of washing from her stepchildren’s trunks the following afternoon she felt really depressed — not only had she got the curse, which meant yet again she wasn’t pregnant, but also because she’d just switched on Wimbledon and seen Hermione and Rannaldini sitting together on Centre Court.

She’d just removed the clothes which Natasha, who was flying to New York the next day, might need, when Wolfie tottered in still wearing his dinner-jacket. At first she thought he was drunk, then, as he collapsed at the kitchen table, she realized he was crying.

‘Christ, I hate my father.’

Kitty went cold. Mindlessly she filled the kettle.

‘Flora was impossible all evening,’ said Wolfie, furiously wiping his desperately bloodshot eyes. ‘Then she vanished and came back all lit up. I thought she was on something. She refused to dance, the sides of the marquee were up because it was so hot, she kept looking up at the stars. Then she gives this shriek of excitement and runs across the pitch leaving her bag, her shoes and her green jacket behind as my father’s helicopter lands on the pitch.’

Wolfie couldn’t go on. The wind from Rannaldini’s blades had blown Flora’s skirt over her head, and his last memory had been of her black legs and suspenders and her red bikini pants.

‘She was so crazy about Boris,’ he said despairingly, ‘and Marcus Campbell-Black, but I thought I’d seen off the competition. But how can I compete when my father comes out of the sky like Close Encounters?’

Wolfie was a kind boy but so deranged with grief he’d forgotten who he was talking to.

‘My mother’s still in love with him and they’ve been divorced for years,’ he went on bitterly. ‘When we were in Salzburg Papa swanned up and put his hand on her shoulders: “You’re looking lovely, Gisela,” and Mum started shaking and shaking. He can have anyone. Why does he have to take Flora as well?’

Suddenly Wolfie realized the cup Kitty was putting down in front of him was spilling tea all over the table.

‘Oh Jesus, Kitty, I’m sorry. I don’t know what I’m saying. You must have known what a bastard he was when you married him.’

When his father returned, even browner, from Wimbledon, having been denied the satisfaction of seeing Boris Becker winning, Wolfie asked for five minutes alone. Expecting trouble Rannaldini was surprised when Wolfie bleakly announced that instead of an eighteenth birthday party he’d like the money to go round the world. Relieved to see the broad back of his son, Rannaldini wrote him a surprisingly generous cheque.

‘I feel terrible,’ said Flora, when Rannaldini telephoned to tell her, ‘and I doubt if he’ll ever forgive you.’

‘Course he will. Sooner or later he’ll need money or a leg-up in his career so bad he have to forgive a leg- over.’

‘You’ve no fucking heart and I’m worried about Mum. If she’s writing a musical called Ant and Cleo, why is she reading Othello?’

Returning to Paradise from her second honeymoon in Jamaica in late July, Marigold rang Georgie and suggested they went for a cheering-up lunch at The Heavenly Host.

‘I can’t face the outside world at the moment,’ mumbled Georgie.

‘Ay’ll bring some smoked salmon and several bottles straight round. We’ve got to talk.’

Half an hour later Marigold rolled up at Angel’s Reach looking gloriously suntanned but a bit plump with an apricot-pink shirt worn outside her shorts to cover the bulges.

‘Ay’m so sorry,’ she hugged Georgie. ‘Kitty filled me in. Ay didn’t realize how awful it’d been.’

She was horrified by Georgie’s appearance. The magnolia complexion which men used to write songs about was all blotchy. She was desperately thin, her skin hanging like loose clothes on a skeleton. She couldn’t stop shaking.

‘Poor Dinsdale’s aged more than I have. He’s been walked so much as an excuse to get out of the house that he hides behind the sofa whenever his lead’s rattled. Oh God, another single magpie.’ Frantically Georgie crossed herself. ‘I keep seeing them.’

‘They’re always single in July because the females are feeding their babies and protecting their nests,’ said Marigold. ‘Now where’s the corkscrew? We both need a noggin.’

‘He’s still seeing Julia.’ Georgie couldn’t keep off the subject. ‘I ought to get out, but I’m like a hotel coat- hanger, useless when detached from my moorings.’

‘I was like that,’ said Marigold. ‘How are you and Guy when you’re together?’

‘Terrified. We never stop apologizing like British Rail. I bitched about him so much to Annabel Hardman the other day with the answering machine on that I had to record Dire Straits over the whole tape.’

‘There.’ Marigold put a huge blue-green glass of Chardonnay in front of Georgie.

‘Thanks. Larry was so hellish to you I’d never have signed that Catchitune contract if I’d known about Nikki, but you look so stunning now. How did you ever get him back?’

‘Promise, promise not to tell?’ whispered Marigold. ‘Ay paid Laysander.’

‘You what!’