by Jilly Cooper
‘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, Moët, 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 some mega-crisis and asking ungraciously if she and the children could come to supper after all. Lysander, who would rather have gone back to sleep or out on the bat with his Pearly Gates cronies, said: ‘Of course.’ He’d come and fetch her; only to be told: ‘What’s wrong with walking? It’s only half a mile.’
‘That was Rachel,’ sighed Lysander.
‘Isn’t she fantastically young and pretty?’ asked Georgie, jumping out of bed and scuttling into the bathroom so Lysander shouldn’t get too long a sight of her droopy bottom.
‘Used to be, but she’s got seriously fierce. Oh dear, it didn’t even seem a good idea this morning. Friday’s my worst night of the week, knowing I won’t see you until Monday.’
Following Georgie into the bathroom, he slid his arms round her waist, nuzzling at her shoulder.
‘Promise to ring me every moment you can, and try and persuade the Ace Carer to play cricket on Sunday.’ Then, turning on the taps, ‘I’d better have first bath so I can nip down to
The Apple Tree and get some supper and a video for the kids before they close.’
Suddenly Georgie realized why the mention of Rachel upset her.
‘She was coming to dinner the night she and Boris split up. That was the night Guy fed Julia in,’ she said.
‘Don’t think about Julia.’ Lysander took Georgie back in his arms, stroking her hair.
‘You won’t fall in love with her, will you?’ Georgie clung to him. One of the lovely things about Lysander was that she never had to try and be cool.
The day that had started so beautifully deteriorated. Returning from The Apple Tree, Lysander passed Rachel trailing two tired, fretful children, Vanya and Masha, aged four and three, who were only too pleased to jump into such a glamorous car and shrieked with excitement when Lysander drove at his usual reckless pace. Rachel was less amused.
‘Any speed over 55 m.p.h. wastes energy.’
She then proceeded to castigate him for not using unleaded petrol, and for not having a catalytic converter to exclude carbon monoxide.
Lysander’s hayfield of a front garden, however, temporarily cheered her up.
‘How brave of you to flout the Best-Kept Village committee and grow your lawn. Those nettles attract the peacock butterfly and the thistles are a wonderful magnet for goldfinch, and, look, kids, lots of dandelions so we can make a salad for supper.’
The inside of the cottage was less of a success. There were plates, glasses and overflowing ashtrays everywhere, and a bowl of uneaten dog food, black with flies. When Jack and Maggie rushed to meet them, both children knocked their heads together burying their faces in their mother’s skirt. Seeing Rachel wrinkling her long elegant nose at the smell of dog and game-keeper’s ferret, which always surfaced on hot days, Lysander let rip with air freshener and fly spray and got a bollocking for using aerosols.
‘This place is a bottle bank in itself,’ Rachel went on in horror.
‘I keep forgetting it’s dustbin day. Basically, the dustmen come before I get up,’ said Lysander apologetically. ‘Let’s have a drink.’
For a second, as Lysander took out some cans of Coke and a bottle of Muscadet, the children’s eyes-sloe-black like their father’s – lit up.
‘They’re not allowed Coke – sugar rots their teeth,’ said Rachel. ‘Water will do. Where are the mugs kept?’
‘In the machine. It’s just finished.’
‘But it’s only half-full,’ said Rachel, opening the door. ‘Can’t you appreciate what a waste of energy this is?’
Masha and Vanya weren’t allowed crisps either nor little chocolate nests filled with eggs.
‘I’ll have to re-educate you completely,’ sighed Rachel. ‘Those chocolate nests are at least eight hundred calories and when you think of the pesticides used on the cocoa bean. You must have some carrots and apples I can chop up.’
The fridge nearly finished her off. By not defrosting it, Lysander was completely responsible for global warming. Everything was past its sell-by date and he’d get listeria from the three half-full tins of pâté.
Getting some carrots out of the vegetable compartment she started ferociously chopping on a wooden board. Arthur, who always hung around touting for snacks when he saw people in the kitchen, frightened the life out of her by sticking his great face, half of it stained olive-green from rolling, in through the window. His wall eye lit up at the sight of the carrots. Really he was the muckiest horse.
‘Arthur’s joined the Green Party,’ giggled Lysander.
‘Must you trivialize everything? I hope to stand for the Rutminster Greens at the next election.’
‘Oh, right,’ said Lysander, ‘or rather left.’
‘Greens are not automatically left-wing.’ Rachel put a plate of carrot matchsticks in front of her unenthusiastic children.
‘Go and explore,’ Lysander told them. ‘There’s a nice pond outside.’
‘Who furnished this place?’ Rachel’s eyes roved over the ticking sofas and chairs and the bishop’s throne.
‘Marigold.’ Lysander handed Rachel a glass of Muscadet. ‘She’s getting me a microwave, thank God,’ he removed a dandy brush, a curry comb and a chewed trainer from the sofa, ‘which’ll help because I get bored and forget to eat waiting for things to heat up.’
‘Trust Marigold!’ Rachel was appalled. ‘Microwaves are not only toxic to the liver but they kill off the brain cells.’
‘My liver came out waving a white flag years ago,’ said Lysander draining half his glass, ‘and I’ve never had a brain cell to kill. Hallo, kids, I’ve got you a good video.’
Again the children’s faces lit up, then faded as their mother said she didn’t allow them to watch television, then getting some 100 rolls and egg boxes out of her basket urged them to make a castle.
‘Want to watch television,’ grumbled Vanya.
‘Well, you can’t. I’ll start you off,’ said Rachel, getting out a bottle of glue. ‘This place is a tip. Don’t you ever clean it?’
‘Mother Courage comes once a week but we seem to spend our time gossiping. She says she doesn’t like to move things, so she doesn’t.’
There was a pause. It was terribly hot.
‘Perhaps you’d like a swim in the river,’ suggested Lysander. ‘I wouldn’t mind one.’
‘Polluted,’ snapped Rachel.
‘Well, we’d better have some supper.’
‘Oh God,’ Rachel clutched her head. ‘White baps are the worst thing you could give them, and haven’t you realized beef burgers are made from the pancreas, lungs and testicles of animals?’
Lysander looked at her meditatively. Easygoing to a fault, he was about to tell her he could see exactly why Boris had walked out. Then he caught sight of Masha and Vanya. They were like children on newsreels, so often photographed beside bomb craters and the dusty rubble of houses in foreign wars, children displaced because they’d been fought over.
‘There are plenty of eggs,’ he said gently. ‘Your mother can make us something she considers suitable for supper and we can play football with Jack, and then I’ll give you a ride on Arthur.’
This was a huge success. Jack could dribble a ball for hours and Arthur loved children. Sent to wash their hands before supper, Masha and Vanya came out shrieking with giggles.
‘Rachel, Rachel, come and see the willies.’
Storming into the downstairs lavatory, Rachel found the artistic fruits of Lysander’s drunken despair after the church fête when he had taken a can of red paint and sprayed cocks, balls and a vast nude lady with enormous tits and crossed eyes over the walls and then written I LOVE GORGY in huge letters.
‘Oh God, I forgot about that!’ Lysander tried not to laugh with the children.
‘Not only are you damaging the ozone layer and adding to global warming,’ stormed Rachel, ‘but you’re ejecting tiny particles of toxic paint into the environment.’
‘And you make the worst scrambled egg I’ve ever tasted,’ Lysander wanted to tell her as he emptied half a bottle of tomato ketchup, Rannaldini fashion, over the loose, tasteless mass. The only way Rachel used salt was to rub it into people’s wounds.
The dandelion salad was even more disgusting. Lysander found the only answer was to drink as much as possible and even Rachel mellowed a bit after two glasses and allowed the children to watch a Donald Duck video.
‘I identified with Donald like mad,’ Lysander told Rachel as he loaded the machine. ‘When I was a child no-one could understand what I said, like him.’
But Rachel was gazing across at Valhalla.
‘There’s that bastard Rannaldini’s place. He was the one who wrecked our marriage, persuading Boris it was de rigueur to have something on the side. He introduced Boris to Chloe.’
‘How does she get on with the children?’
‘Chloe? They adore her. Not surprising. She’s filthy rich and fills them up with sweets and junk food and battery-operated toys every time they visit her and Boris. How can they ever learn to reject con
sumerism with that going on? And she lets them watch television all day.’
‘They’re sweet children.’
‘I know. I just go crackers not being able to practise.’
To distract Rachel from the fact that both Jack and Maggie had climbed on to the children’s laps, Lysander took her outside. The sun was setting; tobacco plants and stocks, fighting a losing battle with nettles, scented the evening. Owls were hooting in the wood. Not daring to risk mosquito spray, Lysander lit a cigarette.
After a long pause, Rachel stammered: ‘I’m sorry. I’ve been bloody all evening. I’ve had to nag and nag Boris for maintenance. This morning a cheque arrived for the right money but signed by Chloe. It’s so humiliating but I can’t afford to tear it up.’
Lysander was shocked. ‘You poor thing. I’ll give you the money, then you can. I’m quite flush at the moment.’
But Rachel was too proud. ‘I’ve got teaching jobs, and Hermione pays when she’s around. God, she’s awful! She never opens her mouth except for dollars and all her conversation is about money.’
‘What’s the point of those balls outside her house?’
‘Self-aggrandizement,’ said Rachel sourly. ‘Rannaldini has griffins, Georgie Maguire has angels, Marigold has lions. Now Hermione has balls – probably Bob’s. She emasculates him enough.’
‘He’s a seriously nice guy,’ said Lysander. ‘Good cricketer, too.’
‘He’s the most attractive man in Paradise,’ said Rachel.
She looks beautiful again now, thought Lysander, with her sad foxy face warmed by the falling sun and her beautiful fox’s ankles beneath that shapeless dress.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I discovered what Hermione’s mega-crisis was.’
‘How?’
‘From Gretel, her hairy-legged nanny.’
‘Why on earth should she shave her legs?’
‘No reason at all, but if she wants me to be her Hansel, she better start waxing. Anyway, she told me that Rannaldini is making this film called Fidelio – should be called Infidelio – about some woman called Nora who dresses up as a boy and springs her husband from jug.’
