by Jilly Cooper
Emerald had never been very keen on penises. Having seen too many hanging like purple wistaria on male models, she felt they were better hidden by figleaves. But Zac’s sprang out so joyfully, so big, smooth and strong below his taut belly, as if it couldn’t wait to give her pleasure.
Gathering her up like a doll, kissing first one lip, then another, his tongue lazily exploring her mouth, murmuring endearments, he laid her on the white counterpane. Then ripping off her knickers, he kissed her thighs above her black hold-ups, burying his face in the soft white flesh, teasing her, letting his tongue stray into every crevice. Then, just as she was quivering on the edge of orgasm, drawing away, mocking her as she begged him to go on. Now he was lying beside her, his fingers probing deeply, testing and stroking, strafing her with his thumb knuckle, until she was rigid and moaning on the brink.
‘Go on, my darling,’ then once more he withdrew his hand.
‘Please, don’t stop, go on,’ begged Emerald.
Moving down the bed, Zac put his tongue between her legs again, mumbling that, like clay, he mustn’t let her dry up.
‘Don’t make bloody jokes!’ she sobbed.
Satisfied she was wet enough, he was on top of her, driving his wonderful cock inside her, deeper and deeper, balancing on one elbow, as his left hand cupped her tiny right hip, his stroking thumb never losing touch with her clitoris.
‘Go for it, baby, go on.’
At last I know what all the fuss is about, marvelled Emerald.
Her pleasure was so intense that it was some time before she realized Zac was in the shower next door.
‘That was a-mazing,’ she called out to him.
‘A-mazing.’ A returning Zac kissed her, then, pulling his clothes onto his still wet body: ‘I’ve got to go.’
‘Can’t you stay?’
‘I’ve got a guy to meet and a very early flight.’
Emerald was in a panic: ‘When are you coming back?’
‘Sometime. I’ll call you.’ He took one of her cards from the pile on the desk.
‘Where did you get that scar?’
‘My stepfather threw a knife at me. What d’you expect from a goy?’ and he was gone.
Bastard, thought Emerald, transporting me up to heaven, then down to hell. She was also furious when she staggered out of bed to find she’d lost Raymond Belvedon’s card.
Emerald was so angry, she picked up the telephone and vented her rage on Sophy.
‘For someone who works in a sink school, it would be nice if you could occasionally leave your own sink tidy.’
She was so busy listing Sophy’s misdemeanours that it was several minutes before Sophy could get a word in edgeways.
‘For God’s sake, Emo, shut up, I had to come home in the middle of lunch. Daddy’s been fired and it appears we’ve lost all our money.’
Emerald then had the temerity to go into a rant because she hadn’t been told first.
‘I’m the elder sister. Why are you always the one people tell things to?’
Emerald drove up to Yorkshire the following morning and found things were much worse. Colonel Ian Cartwright, her father, had for the last ten years been managing director of a small, very profitable engineering business in Pikely-in-Wharfedale. As the former commanding officer of a tank regiment, Ian Cartwright had made a successful transition to the business world because he was intelligent, hard working and very straight, which appealed to his customers. This straightness, however, combined with a military brusqueness, expecting others to jump, and an inability to flatter and drink with the boys, had not endeared him to his fellow directors.
These directors had taken him aside the previous month and persuaded him that if the business were to prosper, he must tell the chairman, who owned the company, that he ought to retire, and let Ian make the major decisions.
After nights without sleep, Ian was more brusque in his ultimatum than he intended. The chairman, a vain old tosser who liked reading Chaucer out loud to Ian’s wife Patience in the evenings, was understandably outraged, and, turning furiously to the other directors, announced that Ian Cartwright wanted him out. Whereupon they denied all knowledge. Ian was sacked the following morning.
Without the back-up of his salary, Ian Cartwright admitted to his wife that he had been gambling heavily on the stock market to keep up the mortgage payments on the Fulham house which he had bought for his beloved Emerald and Sophy. Worst of all, the two sisters had not appreciated that their grand house, Pikely Hall, with its rose gardens, tennis court, swimming pool, fields and stables for their mother’s two hunters, had only ever been rented. Ian had used a wing of the house as company offices, for which the gardens were a splendid showpiece.
So overnight everything was wiped out. Pikely Hall had to be vacated, the Fulham house sold. The horses, to Emerald’s mother’s anguish, had to go and a three-bedroom flat, in a rather seedy part of Shepherd’s Bush, rented in London.
Ironically what most worried the family, the day Emerald arrived from London, was how she would cope with this change. The answer was with utter hysterics. She had always denigrated the solidarity and durability of Pikely Hall, a charcoal-grey pile with castellated turrets, only softened by Virginia creeper and shielded from the gales by great banks of rhododendrons, spiky monkey puzzles and towering Wellingtonias. But how impressed the other girls at boarding school had been when she’d scrawled Pikely Hall, Yorkshire on her infrequent letters home. Emerald wept and returned to London the next day.
She didn’t return to Pikely until early January, the weekend her parents moved out. Furious to be travelling by train because her beloved Golf had had to be sold, she had nipped into the Ladies at Leeds while waiting for a connecting train.
‘Baby-changing facilities’, said a large sign.
Pity I can’t change my parents, thought Emerald savagely.
Arriving at the Hall, finding Pickfords vans outside, she suddenly realized, despite the leafless trees and the moors stretching bleakly above, what a beautiful place it was. If only she’d been able to bring Zac here. He’d have been knocked out by such a splendid old place. Now he’d think she was worth nothing. Or he would if he’d bothered to ring her.
Overwhelmed by self-pity, Emerald sat on the balustrade gazing across the valley at the stubble of pines and the hairnet of stone walls keeping the exuberant khaki hills in check. Why the hell hadn’t she painted the view while she had the chance? She sobbed so violently she developed a migraine and the local GP had to be summoned to give her some Valium.
‘Does your mother get migraines?’ he asked solicitously.
‘I don’t know,’ wept Emerald, ‘being adopted I have no medical history!’
Retiring to lie down, Emerald left everyone else to pack up.
The removal vans had been deliberately booked on a Saturday so Ian Cartwright’s employees wouldn’t be there to gloat or be embarrassed. The secretaries and lower management had loved Ian, appreciating the kind heart beneath the fierce exterior.
While her parents’ rather smeary furniture disappeared into the vans, Emerald rallied and wasted her best scarlet Dior lipstick writing ‘May you rot’ on each Monday in the new 1999 diary of the treacherous incoming managing director.
While her mother’s beloved hunters, Jake and Toby, were loaded up to be driven to a new home, Emerald glued the naked body of Marilyn Monroe, cut from a poster, onto the portrait of the chairman hanging in the boardroom, so his wrinkled petulant face peered over the top. When Emerald showed this to her mother, Patience laughed for the first time in days, then found she couldn’t stop.
Having in the past spurned Sohrab, the smelly old family golden retriever, Emerald sobbed and sobbed when he was given away to a friend, because with Patience and Ian being forced out to work, it wouldn’t be fair to leave a big dog all day in a London flat.
Hordes of locals with bottles turned up to say goodbye to sweet plump Sophy and her parents. Again Emerald wept.
‘Why isn’t any
one coming to say goodbye to me? It must be because you opted to go to the grammar school, Sophy, and have more local friends. And why haven’t they mentioned my name in all the good-luck cards?’
Why the hell should they, when you played Little Lady Muck on the rare times you came up here? thought Sophy furiously.
She looked at her grey-faced, red-eyed parents as they clumsily tried to comfort a hysterical Emerald, who had not helped matters by adding her student loan and her large overdraft to her father’s other debts. Why did Emerald always have to be the centre of attention?
Arriving in Shepherd’s Bush, Patience Cartwright tried to make the best of things. Just think if they’d been kicked out of Bosnia. At least they were all together, and as Sophy’d been sweet enough to accept the tiny bedroom next to the kitchen, this meant that Emerald would be able to sleep and sculpt in the biggest bedroom overlooking the communal gardens.
Patience Cartwright was a good old girl, big boned, loud voiced, badly dressed, a dire cook, and terrible at houses, having not had to bother too hard when she was an army wife. She had tried valiantly to get on with Ian’s business colleagues and their wives, but had much preferred her horsey friends. Every night and every Sunday in Pikely church, she had prayed that Tony Blair wouldn’t abolish hunting.
Devastated not to be able to have her own children, she felt humbly privileged to have been able to adopt Emerald and Sophy, but when Emerald turned out so difficult, she had blamed herself for being a bad mother. Patience was not, however, deficient in guts. Having only worked hitherto on charity committees, she found a job in a local pub. The landlord had felt so sorry for her. At the age of fifty-eight, she seemed unlikely to raid the till and her ringing voice would come in useful at closing time.
Ian, who had kept going during the move, running it like a military operation – even the removal vans were his tanks – went to pieces when he reached London. Sitting for hours, he gazed into space, twisting his signet ring round and round. Demoralized by endless interviews which came to nothing, he finally took a job as a minicab driver, and had started getting fearful headaches, ostensibly from familiarizing himself with London streets, but actually because he was drinking heavily.
Sophy was wonderful and helped out with her teacher’s wages. Emerald was hell, bemoaning her lot more than ever. It was OK for Sophy escaping into the excitement and bustle of the classroom, but she (Emerald) had nothing to distract her from this nightmare.
She knew she ought to be pushing for commissions, hawking her portfolio round galleries. She still hadn’t been to see Raymond Belvedon. But how could she sculpt without her beautiful studio, and what would Zac, who had dominated her dreams since October, say when he saw her living in such a grotty flat?
Matters reached a head on a cold Saturday evening in March, just before Mothering Sunday. Ian Cartwright was gazing unseeingly at a half-finished Daily Telegraph crossword. His wife Patience was cooking supper, using a cheap-cut recipe for middle neck with swedes and parsnips which she had found in the Big Issue and which was filling the flat with a disgusting smell of stewed sheep.
Sophy, hoping to spoil her dinner by eating her way through a bar of Toblerone, was writing reports in the sitting room. Her papers littered the only part of the threadbare Persian carpet which wasn’t covered with dark ugly furniture her parents couldn’t afford to store.
Unashamedly plump, cheerfully referring to herself as Cellulite City, Sophy had a sweet face, lovely skin, soft blond ringlets and a merry heart beating beneath a splendid bosom. She was also a colossal trimmer. To avoid being duffed up, she always told the fearsome parents at her rough school that even the most delinquent of their children were ‘real sweethearts doing brilliantly’.
‘Jason has made a real contribution to the class’, she was now writing in her clear round hand about the school dunce.
Jason’s bricklayer dad was not the only father who after school had sidled up and asked Sophy for a date.
Sophy cheerfully slagged off Emerald behind her back, but always gave in to her face to avoid the screaming fits which so distressed their parents. Now it seemed she was too late, as a quivering Emerald flung open the sitting-room door, scattering papers.
‘How dare you shrink my black drawstring flares! I was about to handwash them and you’ve put them on a hot wash. Now they’re two inches above my ankles. They’re the first pair of trousers I’ve bought in years, so I could save on tights, and you’ve gone and wrecked them.’
‘That’s enough, darling,’ reproved her father, ‘Sophy was only trying to help.’
‘You always stick up for her,’ Emerald turned on her father, shouting so loudly she didn’t hear the clanking of the ancient lift.
It was Patience, her grey hair on end, her big face red and shiny, who, hoping to escape the storm by putting the rubbish outside, discovered a man on the doorstep. He was wearing a leather jacket, a dark grey cashmere polo neck to match his sleek flecked hair, and those black army trousers which needed such long arms to reach the pockets. He had a mahogany ski tan, strange unblinking catlike yellow eyes and smelled of the most delicious aftershave. He was so good looking, Patience was about to direct him one floor up to the charming gay actors, who to her delight had asked her if she’d mind catsitting occasionally. Then the man said in a wonderfully deep husky voice, ‘I guess I’ve come to the wrong apartment. I’m looking for Emerald Cartwright.’
‘Oh no, you haven’t,’ cried Patience joyfully, thinking this ravishing stranger, if anything, would lift Emerald’s spirits. ‘Come in, I’m her mother.’
To economize at weekends, Patience tried to wear out really old clothes. Underneath a holey brown tank top, she was sporting an orange flower-patterned shirt with a long pointed collar, a tweed knee-length gardening skirt, purple legwarmers and bedroom slippers.
Apologizing for dropping by, he’d lost Emerald’s phone number, Zac said he’d found a skip outside the house in Fulham and bags of cement in the front garden.
‘A guy knocking through rooms gave me this address and sent you his best.’
‘How kind,’ brayed Patience. ‘Such a sweet couple, one always minds less if people are nice . . . Emo’s in the drawing room. Emo!’
A door slammed, rattling even Zac’s strong, excellent white teeth, and a fury in a navy-blue camisole top and French knickers erupted into the hall.
‘You must have shrunk my flares, Mum.’
Then as if a dimmer switch had been turned up and the sound turned down, light flooded Emerald’s face and the screaming faded to a stammering whisper.
‘Zac – how lovely to see you, what are you doing here? This is my mother.’
God, why did Patience have to look quite so grotesque?
Emerald had been turning out her room. Underwear littered the unmade bed, so she pulled on a red silk dressing gown and reluctantly led Zac into the overcrowded sitting room.
Sophy, who was lying on the carpet, gathering up her scattered reports, looked up.
‘Jesus!’ she gasped in wonder.
Zac grinned. ‘Not quite.’
As Emerald introduced them, Zac half-mockingly clicked his heels together.
‘Colonel Cartwright. Sophy.’
For the first time, Emerald noticed the trace of a German accent. Her father, whose own father had died in a POW camp, clocked it too, and rose unsteadily to his feet.
‘How d’you do,’ he said stiffly.
‘Zac’s a journalist from New York, Daddy, we met at Rupert Campbell-Black’s open day,’ said Emerald, rushing round, plumping cushions, gathering up Toblerone paper, and emptying ashtrays. Oh Christ, there was an empty glass hidden under her father’s chair.
‘What would you like to drink? Red, white or whisky?’ she asked.
Removing Emerald’s tapestry, Zac sat down on the sofa, saying he’d like a Scotch and soda.
‘I’ll get it,’ said Patience, fleeing.
Emerald had forgotten Zac’s ability not to fill silences, l
etting others stumble into inanities.
‘Did Mercury ever do your piece on Rupert?’ she mumbled.
‘It’s scheduled for May.’
He was beautiful, but not awfully cosy, decided Sophy.
‘What are you working on?’ he asked her.
‘Reports. I’m a teacher. Where did you go?’
‘The Hebrew School in New York, then the University of New Hampshire.’
Emerald’s father, Zac decided, was a basket case, gazing into space, food stains all over his green cardigan, his hand shaking as he checked his flies. He was also plastered.
‘I’ll go and help Mummy with the drinks,’ said Emerald, running out of the room in despair.
She found Patience gazing at an empty cupboard. There had been a bottle of red and half-full bottle of whisky that morning.
‘Bloody Daddy must have drunk it,’ hissed Emerald.
‘Don’t say anything,’ pleaded Patience, ‘he’ll only deny it.’
‘There isn’t a drop in the house. Have you got any money?’
‘Not enough,’ sighed Patience.
Back in the drawing room, Ian and Zac were spikily discussing England’s collapse in the Melbourne Test.
‘Stewart’s only bat who showed any gumption,’ Ian was complaining. ‘Fairbrother was a waste of space. Hick made a duck.’
‘Hussain might make a good captain,’ said Zac idly.
‘Hussain?’ exploded the colonel. ‘Can’t have a black captaining England!’ Then, seeing Zac’s raised eyebrow: ‘Man was out first ball.’
Zac looked at Ian in amusement.
‘I think you’ll find it was the second.’
‘Didn’t know you people knew so much about cricket.’
‘Jews, you mean?’ said Zac politely.
‘No, no.’ Ian’s face flushed an even darker red. ‘Americans.’
Sophy, sorry for her father but trying not to laugh, was relieved when her mother and Emerald returned.
Scenting trouble, Patience said, ‘I do hope you’ll stay and take pot luck, Zac.’
Behind her mother, Emerald was frantically shaking her head.
