The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous

when they first lived here. She had two lovely kiddies and hair down her back. Then he went off with another woman.’

‘Ah. Is she called Rachel and plays the piano?’

‘That’s the one. She likes to be called Rachel Grant now.’

‘I know her,’ said Lysander in amazement. ‘She was so beautiful she made me forget to go to an interview. Gosh, she’s changed.’ Lysander added Pedigree Chum, chewsticks and carrots for the horses to his basket.

‘It’s unhinged her,’ said Eve, writing down Lysander’s purchases in a red book. ‘She’s joined the Green Party and she’s always in here complaining. None of the fruit’s organic enough. I mean, we’re not a health-food store. Then she says we’ve got the wrong washing-up liquid, the wrong toothpaste, the wrong shampoos.’ Eve’s sense of grievance boiled over. ‘I hope her hair turns green and it all falls out. She’s put off so many of my customers.’

‘What’s she doing down here?’ asked Lysander, adding the Sun and Sporting Life to the pile.

‘Come back to accompany Hermione. She’ll get a pittance for that. She keeps grumbling Jasmine Cottage is so dark. Not surprising with all those Save the Whales and the White Rhino and the Rain Forest posters in the window. She could start by saving her breath,’ added Eve putting everything into a carrier bag.

‘I’ll drop in and say hallo on the way home,’ said Lysander.

Eve followed him outside giving a finger of KitKat to the dogs and breaking up a Twix bar for Arthur and Tiny.

‘What did you think of Madam’s video?’ she asked.

‘Well, basically I’m not into opera. I can never see how they can sing so loudly and for so long when they’re supposed to be dying, and Hermione’s got a bigger ass on her than Arthur. Talking of asses, I better get mine into gear. Here comes the vicar.’

The return journey took almost as long, with more drinks and bets and a long chat with Mother Courage returning from Angel’s Reach with huge sweat circles under the armpits of Hermione’s Jean Muir which she’d bought for ?2.50 at the Nearly New stall.

‘Take your time, Sandy,’ she told Lysander. ‘Georgie’s playing and singing up in her tower like a lark. You ’aven’t been missed. ’Allo, Jack, ’allo, Maggie, going to see Debenham? Yes, I know Rachel. Always flying off the angle. Her husband was a nice fellow, used to walk along the road composing. He’d always buy you a drink. People say he defecated all the way from Russia.’

Moving on, Lysander read in the Sun about a forest fire raging through France. It had probably been started by Flora tossing her fag into the bracken and crying, ‘Encore, Rannaldini.’ He wondered what Georgie and Flora would both say if they knew with whom the other was sleeping. He was dithering whether to pop in on Rachel when Jack took matters into his own paws. Seeing Rachel’s tabby cat in the road ahead, he dropped Arthur’s lead rope and took off, followed by Maggie.

When Lysander caught up with them the cat had been chased up an ancient quince tree hanging over the wall and the dogs were yapping hysterically round the base with Rachel swiping at them with a broom and screaming: ‘Go away, you bloody animals.’

‘Don’t kill them,’ begged Lysander. ‘Here, hang on to Arthur and Tiny.’

He had grabbed Jack, when Maggie, unnerved by raised voices and any kind of violence, crapped extensively on Rachel’s lawn, producing a further tirade.

‘Are you trying to blind my children? Can’t you keep your bloody dogs on a lead? Get them out of my garden.’

‘I’m really sorry.’ Tucking Jack under his arm, grabbing the horses and calling to Maggie, Lysander backed down the path until he had shut the gate firmly between them.

‘Look, d’you remember me? Lysander Hawkley. We met in that chemist’s and went back to your house. We were having a really nice time until your husband came back.’

Slowly, painfully, Rachel seemed to lug her mind out of the horrors of the present into the far worse torments of the past.

‘Boris left me.’ Furiously she started dead-heading yellow roses.

‘I know. I’m desperately sorry.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Living at Magpie Cottage — where are your kids?’

‘A friend’s taken them, I’ve got to go over to Hermione’s. She’s got a prom next week and needs to go through the score.’

Rachel was even thinner than Georgie had been. Her face was seamed with pain, her huge eyes dark with loss. Christ, what awful things men do to women, thought Lysander. As it was Friday he’d be at a loose end tonight because Guy was due home. He’d also had a lot to drink and heard himself saying: ‘Why don’t you come over to supper after you’ve finished?’

‘No thanks.’ Rachel’s face shut like a trap. ‘Hermione’ll keep me for hours. She takes her kilo of flesh. Then I’ve got to put the kids to bed.’

‘Oh, right,’ said Lysander, relieved. ‘Some other time.’

His skin was as smooth, dark and shiny as any of the rain-forest mahogany she was trying to save. His bleached hair flopped into his eyes. He was heartbreakingly pretty.

‘You ought to put on a shirt or you’ll get skin cancer,’ snapped Rachel. ‘The ozone layer’s so thin. But I don’t expect you care about that.’

Slamming the front door, she started to cry. It was a relief to be jolted out of her dry stony grief. Lysander had stirred up so many memories. That brief afternoon when they’d been so furiously and rudely interrupted was the last time she had been totally sure of Boris’s love.

The marriage had started with such promise, after Boris caught sight of her slender bare back topped by shining piled-up brown hair as she played Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto in Moscow and had fallen so wildly in love that he could do nothing but defect. For a while, like the Gemini, they had been two glittering stars in the musical firmament: the broodingly handsome young conductor immediately snapped up by the London Met, and his equally dazzling young pianist wife.

Having shaken off the shackles of Communism, however, Boris, who already had a passion for red wine, red meat and red-blooded women, started amassing capitalist trappings: fast cars, designer clothes, CDs, tapes and electronic equipment — which was fine when he and Rachel were both working.

But with babies the trouble started. Because her mother had gone out to work Rachel had been determined to stay at home with her own children and on one income the money soon ran out.

Rachel also grew increasingly resentful at not being able to pursue her own career. As she pushed prams in the park with a green, Guardian-reading feminist, who indoctrinated her with her subversive ideas, Rachel started serving up vegetarian food and throwing Boris out of the house for smoking and drinking. Then, determined to return to work, she accepted an invitation to tour America, hoping that the totally undomesticated Boris, left at home to look after two small children and the house, would appreciate what she had to put up with.

But Boris, missing his homeland and family and fed up with Rachel’s passion for the truth, which many people called tactlessness, suddenly felt a desperate need for warmth, approval and companionship.

Thus Rachel returned from America to find he had fallen in love with Chloe the mezzo, who was beautiful, bosomy, successful and only too happy to tell Boris how marvellous he was.

Finding himself unable to give up Chloe and too straight, unlike Guy, Rannaldini and Larry, to run two women, Boris had finally resigned from his marriage. Rachel, having lost touch with the music world, was getting no concert work. A couple of earlier recitals where she had loyally played Boris’s compositions, which had meant half the audience leaving at the interval, hadn’t exactly helped her career. Hermione paid her a pittance, as did her few pupils, and she was embittered at Boris’s constant failure to keep up the maintenance payments. Her evenings were now spent festering and firing off letters on recycled paper to the prime ministers of foreign countries complaining about their treatment of the environment. At least it ensured that she occasionally got some post in return.

After smoked salmon, Moet, Mars bar ice-cream and a languorous, sweaty afternoon’s lovemaking at Magpie Cottage rather than Angel’s Reach, in case Guy or Flora, who was due home any time from backpacking, rolled up unexpectedly, Lysander was roused by the telephone. It was Rachel fulminating that Hermione had cancelled due to