“You’ve got to fire her,” whispered Helen, through white lips. “I can’t go on meeting her, knowing this, having seen those disgusting pictures.”

“What’s disgusting about those pictures? Kodak obviously enjoyed them. She’s got a nice body and, what’s more important, she’s not remotely ashamed of it. You could pick up a few tips from her.”

He went into his dressing room and got out his dinner jacket and a white dress shirt.

“Where are you going?” Helen asked numbly.

“Out to dinner. It’s Hilary’s dinner party, remember? You insisted I should be back on time.”

No one could dress more quickly than Rupert when he chose.

“You can’t go out to dinner after this,” Helen whispered in bewilderment.

“Why not? The drink’s free. It’s much better than staying here and listening to the hysterics that you’re about to give way to any minute. I don’t like having books thrown at me and that scent bottle’s dangerously large. Don’t you think you’d better get changed, too?” He was frowning in the mirror now, as he tied his tie.

“Aren’t you even going to apologize for you and Podge?”

Rupert flicked the bent tie expertly through the gap. “Why should I apologize for your inadequacies?”

Now he was brushing his still damp hair with silver brushes, back over the temples, and in two wings over the ears. He picked up his jacket. “Don’t bother to wait up for me. I’ll tell Ortrud, or whatever her name is this week, you’ve got a migraine.”

Helen simply couldn’t believe that he could treat an act of such magnitude so lightly. And the terrible things he had said. Was she really that awful in bed? Was it all her fault? The moment he’d gone, she threw herself down on the bed sobbing her heart out. Not for the first time she wished she hadn’t put Marcus’s nursery next to their bedroom. Within seconds there was thumping on the door and cries of “Mummy, Mummy.” Helen gritted her teeth. Where the hell was Ortrud? The thumpings grew more insistent. “Mummy, why are you crying?”

Helen put on her dark glasses and opened the door. Marcus almost fell inside. He was wearing blue and white striped pajamas and clutching a stuffed purple skunk Rupert had brought him from Aachen.

“Mummy crying,” he said doubtfully.

Helen picked him up, reveling in his newly bathed softness.

“Momma’s got a sore head.” She banged her hand against her temple, then the skunk’s head against the window. “Mummy go bang in car. That’s why she’s crying.”

Marcus seemed to accept this. Helen looked nervously for the thin trickle of mucus from his nose that always heralded an asthma attack (usually triggered off by Rupert’s presence), but there was no sign.

“Story,” said Marcus pointedly.

I can’t face it, thought Helen. “Ortrud,” she screamed down the stairs. But Ortrud, on hearing that Helen would be staying in, had pushed off to the Jolly Goat in Stroud to meet her friends.

Rupert, having vented his wrath on Helen because he felt so guilty, was not enjoying Hilary’s dinner party. Hilary, despite her arbitrary comments to Helen about even numbers, was delighted he had come alone.

“What’s the matter with her?” she asked.

“Migraine,” said Rupert tersely.

“You mean a row,” said Hilary, out of the corner of her mouth. “Have some of Crispin’s elderflower wine to cheer you up.”

Rupert looked round dismissively at the earnest women, their bulges concealed beneath ethnic smocks, and their bearded husbands looking self-conscious in dinner jackets. If it hadn’t been Hilary and Crispin’s wedding anniversary they would have refused to dress up. Everyone, except Rupert, brought presents.

Hilary put him on her right at dinner. There wasn’t even a decent-looking woman for him to flirt with or make eyes at across the table. The dinner was disgusting — smoked trout, then jugged hare, of all unbelievable things in August. With Hilary’s slovenly cooking, it was probably jugged hairs as well.

“What’s the matter? You’re not your usual dazzling self,” said Hilary in a low voice, letting her hand brush against his as she passed the red currant jelly. Rupert didn’t return the pressure.

“What’s really the matter with Helen?” she asked. “She was all right yesterday.”

“She’s all wrong now,” said Rupert. He turned to the German woman with plaits round her head on his right.

“It must be a lonely life working with horses,” she said to him.

“No,” said Rupert. “It’s very overcrowded.”

What an idiot he’d been to shit on his own doorstep. He’d have to sack Podge now, and Arcy and the other horses who were absolutely devoted to her would be upset at the height of the season. Grooms weren’t hard to find, but ones as good as Podge virtually impossible. Why the hell, too, had he ever embarked on an affair with Hilary? She revolted him now. She insisted on lingering for hours over coffee. “I hate breaking up the ambience.”

Rupert grew increasingly restless as the dwindling candlelight flickered on the shiny unpainted faces. The woman on Rupert’s right went off to the loo. Crispin was out of the room making more coffee, no doubt caffeine-free. Hilary’s lugubrious paintings glared down from the walls. Hilary could bear it no longer.

“Helen’s found out about us, hasn’t she?”

Rupert’s eyes narrowed. “Who?”

“Us, you and me of course.”

Rupert laughed. “No, about someone else, actually.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Helen found out I was knocking off someone else.”

“A long time ago?”

“No, ten days ago.”

Hilary gasped. “You bastard. You rotten bastard,” she hissed. “You’re deliberately winding me up. I don’t believe you.”

“What are you two looking so secretive about?” Crispin appeared at their side. “Sorry I was so long, dear, I was changing Kate. More coffee, Rupert?”

Rupert looked at Crispin’s hands. He bet he hadn’t washed them. “No thanks.” He got to his feet. “I must go. Been a lovely evening, but I got up at four o’clock this morning and I don’t like to leave Helen too long.”

He never minded in the past, said Hilary to herself furiously.

“Why don’t you ring up? She’s probably fast asleep. Pity to break up the party.”

“What party?” said Rupert, so only she could hear him. “Our particular party is over, my darling.”

“What happened to your Porsche?” asked Crispin, watching Rupert curl his long legs into Helen’s Mini.

“Helen had a prang yesterday.” Then he was gone.

He was home by a quarter to twelve. Ortrud’s light was on, so was Podge’s, over the stables. Probably the whole household knew he’d gone out after a screaming match with Helen. He wandered down to the stables. It was still impossibly hot. A full moon upstaged the crowded stars. The horses were moving restlessly. Arcturus came to the half-door. Rupert gave him a carrot he’d pinched from Hilary’s crudités dish on the way out.

“Wish I was a stallion like you,” he said.

Arcy rolled his eyes and took a nip at Rupert, who cuffed him on the nose.

“One day, when you’re famous,” he told the horse, “you’ll be encouraged to fuck any mare you like. Why can’t I?”

Rupert knew Podge would be waiting up for him, but he went straight back to the house. He didn’t fancy sleeping in the spare room. It was supposed to be haunted and he wasn’t tight enough not to mind.

After finally settling Marcus, Helen had had a bath, bathed her eyes, washed her hair, and put on the plunging, black silk, Janet Reger nightgown Rupert had given her for Christmas, but which she had never worn because she had no cleavage. Now she lay in the big bed without the light on, with the moonlight pouring in through the windows. As Rupert tiptoed past the door she called out to him. He entered cautiously, waiting for abuse, his hair gleaming as silvery as one of his hairbrushes.

“I’m sorry,” she said in a choked voice. “It’s all my fault.”

Rupert, completely wrong-footed, was unbelievably touched.

“I understand exactly why you went for Podge,” she went on. “I’m hopeless in bed. It’s just my upbringing that makes me so dreadfully inhibited, but I love you so so much. I can’t bear the thought of losing you. I’ll try and make as many overtures as Rossini.” She was trying to make a joke, but her voice cracked. Rupert sat down, pulling her against him.

“No, it’s my fault,” he said, stroking her bare arms. “I’ll get rid of Podge tomorrow. I’ll pay her off, so you never have to see her again. I suppose it’s my upbringing, too. Fidelity wasn’t the family’s strong point, but I love you.”

“I’ll go and buy black sexy underwear, like Janey’s, and read sex books and learn how to drive a man to the ultimate of desire.”

“You do already. Have I ever not wanted you? I just got tired of trying to fuck someone who didn’t want me.”

That night Tabitha was conceived.


29


Gradually Billy’s and Janey’s cottage got into shape. And although Billy drew the line for a time at a swimming pool or a tennis court, the place seemed to have every other luxury.

“If I have a fantastic season and you write your arse off, we should be straight by the end of next year, give or take a few bottles of Bell’s,” Billy told Janey when they moved in in October. But he never expected the bills to be quite so astronomical. Having no wedding presents, he and Janey had to buy everything from a garlic crusher to a dishwasher. Billy’s mother was very rich and could have helped out. But she didn’t like Janey, who described her as an old boot with a tweed bum, or, in kinder moments, as “the Emperor Vespasian in drag.” Mrs. Lloyd-Foxe had the big nose and thick gray curls that look better on a man. She thought Janey was tarty and agreed with Helen that Janey wrote very over-the-