Miss you.’
The next call was from a jubilant Flora, who’d passed her driving test. Clever little duck, thought Georgie fondly, but it was going to complicate things having her rolling up unannounced at any time of day. The third call was from Sabine Bottomley saying Flora wasn’t working. The fourth was from Guy again saying he missed her and would she ring him back.
Perhaps I’m imagining things, Georgie felt suddenly happier. Then she went into the bathroom and saw Guy’s organic toothpaste.
Craving truth, she dialled Rachel’s number. If she was at home there was no need to worry. She was about to ring off when the telephone was picked up. Hell, thought Georgie, I’ll have to ask her to something now.
‘Hallo, Rachel.’
‘No, it’s Gretel. I’m just feeding the cat.’
‘When’s Rachel coming back?’
‘Tomorrow, she’s abroad.’
Georgie slammed down the telephone, hands shaking, heart pounding, body drenched in sweat. She was out of the house in ten minutes. Then the telephone started ringing and ringing.
42
The other man whose mind was very much on the late Pippa Hawkley on that heavy, thundery, suffocatingly close afternoon was her husband, David. Putting a bunch of tiger lilies, flowers as beautiful and exotic as Pippa herself, on her grave, he had prayed she was resting more in peace than he was in life. A year on he was still wracked by anguish and confusion. Despite overt offers from Mrs Colman and half the mothers who came to discuss their sons, he had remained celibate. But a couple of porn magazines, confiscated from a boy that morning and shoved in his desk drawer to burn later, had reminded him what he was missing. Glancing at the wanton, knowing girls with their tangled hair, hillocks of breast and buttock, and pink, glistening lips, he felt as parched sexually as the dusty dried-up pitches outside his window.
Slamming the desk drawer shut, he grimly turned to Catullus. A kindly letter from his publisher earlier in the week reminded him that his translation should have been delivered in January.
An earlier translator had written: ‘
‘How can I forget someone I have loved for ever?’ wrote David Hawkley. Catullus might have written the poem specially for him. He was roused from his sad dreams by a knock on the door. It was ‘Mustard’ with a vase of bronze chrysanthemums.
‘Thank you,’ said David, thinking how Pippa had loathed chrysanthemums.
‘Mrs Harefield’s favourite flowers,’ said Mustard reverently, who was the most awful star-fucker. ‘You haven’t forgotten she and her son Cosmo are due in five minutes?’
David had not. He even looked forward to Hermione’s visit. Her exquisite voice had comforted him through many a long night of insomnia. Strange that even in the blackest despair, one searched for love.
Hermione was searching for a public school for little Cosmo. Having witnessed the dreadful rudeness of Flora and Natasha, she had no intention of subjecting her Wunderkind to the co-educational anarchy of Bagley Hall. Fleetley had been top of her list because of its high academic record and David Hawkley’s reputation as a disciplinarian.
Having been ushered into his study by a fawning Mustard, Hermione decided it would be extremely exciting to be disciplined by ‘Hatchet’ Hawkley, and that he was decidedly attractive in a brilliant, implacable High Tory way. Rannaldini had been neglecting her again. He never answered her calls. Hermione was consequently casting around for a new beau. This stern handsome widower would fit the bill perfectly — and might even allow little Cosmo in cheap.
One look at Cosmo, who was bursting out of his sailor suit like Tom Kitten, with his sailor hat atop his flowing black curls, and his evil black eyes rolling in search of diversion, convinced David that this vile child must never enter his school.
‘Most of our boys are put down at birth,’ he said truthfully, then less so, ‘I’m afraid we’re booked solid until AD 2000.’
‘Come, come,’ said Hermione skittishly. ‘I know that powerful headmasters can always waive the rule for friends, and I know you and I are going to be very special friends.’
David knew no such thing as little Cosmo proceeded to lay waste to his office, overturning files, putting sticky fingers on first editions, scattering sweet papers, and finally pulling a penknife on Hesiod, the school cat, who was sleeping peacefully in a patch of sunlight. When chided fondly by his mother, Cosmo ordered her to piss off.
‘Cosmo,’ went on Hermione, ‘is severely gifted, so he needs to be stretched.’
On the rack preferably, thought David, wondering how a woman so beautiful and so gloriously talented could be quite so awful.
As little Cosmo was now applying his penknife to the big oak table, David suggested a look round the school.
‘That would be fun, wouldn’t it, Cosmo?’
Cosmo said it wouldn’t, and raising his mother’s skirt, asked her why she wasn’t wearing any knickers. Hermione was undeterred.
In the music room, where the choir was rehearsing ‘How Lovely Are Thy Dwellings’, she leapt up on the stage and sang along for a page or two, before telling the cringing music master he looked just like Paul Newman.
‘You will be teaching my Cosmo.’ She drew her wunderkind forward. ‘Music is Cosmo’s life.’
‘Your flies are undone,’ said little Cosmo loudly.
Instantly the hands of both headmaster and music master flew to their zips.
‘April fool,’ said little Cosmo, giving a maniacal cackle.
‘Little Cosmo has such a sense of humour,’ said a beaming Hermione.
Back in David’s study, Mustard was waiting to pour.
‘Camomile tea and honey or Earl Grey, Mrs Harefield?’
‘How very caring,’ Hermione clapped her hands. ‘And flapjacks, too, my favourite. You
She turned to David. ‘You were going to show me your Oxbridge results, Headmaster.’
Mustard had just gone to find the file, when little Cosmo let out another maniacal cackle. Having discovered the porn magazines in David Hawkley’s top drawer, he was now leering at the colossal breasts of a blonde in thigh boots and a cowboy hat.
‘Confiscated at lunchtime,’ spluttered David, snatching back the magazine, as Cosmo gave him a pull-the- other-leg smile.
‘Mrs Colman,’ yelled David, ‘could you amuse Cosmo for a minute or two?’
‘Ah sons, sons,’ sighed Hermione, leaning forward in her pink Chanel suit to reveal a bosom just as splendid as the blonde in the porn mag.
‘It must be difficult, with your exacting career, to spend enough time with Cosmo,’ observed David.
‘Quality time, I give him quality time,’ murmured Hermione. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you — are you any relation of Lysander Hawkley?’
‘My youngest son,’ said David warily.
‘You must be so proud,’ said Hermione, who actually disliked Lysander intensely. ‘I haven’t discovered what Lysander does, but such a good-looking, clearly gifted boy. He gets all that from you, of course, but he’s lucky to have such a generous father.’
