Rannaldini didn’t really like Georgie and Guy, decided Kitty. That’s why he had been subtly punishing her since the Bagley Hall concert, finding fault with everything, making her feel even more unsure of herself.

‘I don’t think one can beat the Backs at Cambridge,’ Hermione was now saying.

Glancing down the table, Guy noticed Kitty’s eyes were as red as her dress. Rannaldini’s work, he thought grimly.

‘Poor Kitty’s having to put up with the backs of Paradise,’ he said reprovingly. ‘Turn round and talk to her, Meredith.’

‘Sorry, love,’ the Ideal Homo swung round. ‘When’s your sexy husband going to let me loose on the Valhalla dungeons?’

Kitty blushed scarlet, but thought once again, how sweet Guy was.

‘I don’t know how you put up with it,’ she could now hear Hermione telling him, in her idea of an undertone, ‘being dragged into the limelight in a pop song, when you’re such a man of substance. I would never expose Bob to such publicity. My family is sacred.’

‘I agree,’ said Julia, leaving all her pastry and lighting a cigarette, at which Hermione looked pained, until the pudding of guava-and-mango ice-cream with kiwi-fruit purée reduced her almost to orgasm. Guy, however, was incensed that a bottle of Barsac had gone missing.

‘Flora whipped it,’ confessed Georgie. ‘It’s a good thing she’s going back to Bagley Hall next month to dry out. Whoops, sorry, Miss Bottomley.’

Ben pursed his red lips and said he thoroughly disapproved of teenage drinking. Miss Bottomley’s mouth was too full of guava and mango for her to do anything but nod in frenzied agreement.

‘Oh, Flora’s sixteen, going on a hundred,’ sighed Georgie to Rannaldini. ‘I get so worried about AIDS. I sat her down last week and said: “We must have a good talk about sex”.’

The room fell silent.

‘A good talk about sex, because I was worried,’ went on Georgie, ‘and Flora put her pretty head on one side, and said: “Oh, poor Mum, are you having trouble with Dad?”’

Georgie laughed so loudly at the sheer impossibility of such a thing that everyone joined in. But it was one of the few light moments of the evening. Georgie was dying to get into another heart-to-thumping-heart with Rannaldini, but, without a waitress, she seemed to spend her whole time leaping up to remove plates and filling glasses.

It was a relief finally to whisk the ladies off upstairs. On the way Miss Bottomley shot into the downstairs 100.

‘I’ll use this one.’ Julie disappeared into another loo on the landing, whereupon Hermione vanished into Georgie’s bathroom.

‘Three old ladies got stuck in the lavatory. I wish Hermione would stay there.’ Georgie collapsed on to her bed between Marigold and Kitty. ‘Now we’re alone, how are you?’ she asked.

‘Wonderful,’ said Marigold, fluffing on face-powder with a red brush. ‘Larry’s faynally given Nikki the push and Pelham Crescent, it cost over a million, can you imagine? But he’s bein’ magic to me. He bought me these.’ She turned her head to show off ruby earrings big as strawberries. ‘And he’s going to buy me a flat in London, and take me on a second honeymoon in Jamaica.’

‘Lucky you,’ said Georgie petulantly, thinking of herself nailed to the desk for months to come.

‘I’m so pleased for you, Marigold,’ said Kitty, who didn’t feel there was much point in repairing her face.

‘How’s Lysander?’ asked Georgie.

‘Never off the telephone, the sweetie-pay. He’s raydin’ in a point-to-point in Cheshire this weekend, and wants me to go. Ay must say, I’m sorely tempted.’

When they went downstairs, Larry, who normally liked nothing better than to cap other men’s achievements over a large glass of brandy, had already joined the ladies.

‘What recession?’ he was saying to Sabine Bottomley. ‘If you’re liquid, it’s bonanza time. You can pick up companies, like shopping in Oxford Street.’

‘Fed up with talking about wife avoidance?’ Marigold asked him teasingly.

‘Not at all. Rannaldini, Bob and Meredith all wanted to know what Guy had done to those quails. Not my board-game.’ He sat down on the arm of Marigold’s chair. ‘This is, though.’ He took her hand, then added to Georgie, ‘Don’t she look great? See the earrings I bought her?’

‘They’re lovely.’

‘How’s the album going?’

‘Good,’ said Georgie truthfully. ‘I wrote a song today.’

Looking at the big red scented candle flickering on a side table, she suddenly found the answer for her lyric: ‘Swept by tempests, drenched by rain, I’ll come burning back again.’

‘Could we play one of your old albums, Georgie?’ asked Kitty, as Der Rosenkavalier finally ended.

‘Wait till Rannaldini goes,’ said Hermione.

Georgie gritted her teeth.

To gain the ascendancy before he left, Larry bought three of Julia’s paintings, and actually wrote Guy a large cheque. Bob, egged on by the Most Beautiful Voice in the World, put down a deposit on one of the smaller ones. Rannaldini bought the most erotic and said he’d talk to Guy about money later. Proudly Guy went round putting red stickers on them. Julia was in heaven. She didn’t say much, but her skin flushed faintly like the crimsoning on the underside of a wood anemone.

Larry and Marigold left immediately afterwards. They were followed by Rannaldini, who was flying to Milan first thing to do The Barber of Seville at La Scala.

Just for a second, as he and Georgie were alone in the hall together, he took her hands.

‘I’d love to talk to you sometime about Flora’s career,’ she heard herself stammering.

‘Of course,’ said Rannaldini. ‘Let us have lunch, and then we will have a chance to talk about ourselves.’

She felt he was just about to kiss her when Kitty came out, saying what a lovely evening it had been, and that Georgie and Guy must come over to Valhalla next time Rannaldini was home.

Georgie had the feeling that, with the departure of his boss, Bob would have liked to stay on and unwind, but that, for the same reason, Hermione felt the evening had lost all point, and dragged him away.

‘Look after Julia,’ Guy called out briskly to Georgie. ‘I’m taking Ben and Meredith round the house.’

Georgie was a little alarmed about what grand redecorating schemes Meredith might lure him into, but it was bliss to kick off her shoes, throw another of their own logs on the fire, and relax with a bottle of Kümmel and Julia.

‘How beautiful both Marigold and Hermione are,’ said Julia. ‘I’d so love to paint either of them.’

Feeling slightly deflated Julia didn’t want to paint her, Georgie suggested Julia approached them through Larry and Bob.

‘They both obviously love your work, and Larry’s on such a high with Marigold at the moment, he’d commission anything. I do hope it lasts.’ Georgie collapsed on the floor so she was level with Dinsdale on the sofa. ‘Larry’s been such a shit to her. I’m sorry I was so uptight this evening, but two couples cancelled at the last moment because their marriages had gone up the spout.’

Julia had chewed off her lipstick and her eyeliner had smudged beneath the fox-brown eyes, but her skin was unlined in the candle-light, and the scorpion glinted evilly between her breasts as though it might plunge its sting into the soft white flesh at any moment. She must be Scorpio, that most passionate and complicated of signs, thought Georgie.

‘I’m so lucky to be married to Guy,’ she went on hazily. ‘I used to be very wild when we were first married,’ and a bit now, she thought, luxuriating at the prospect of lunch with Rannaldini. ‘I think Guy feels so much safer now I’m tucked away in the country. Even when I used to go into the West End from Hampstead, he used to police my every move.’

Dinsdale, half-asleep, grunted with pleasure as Georgie scratched his back.

‘Guy’s been so wonderful about my career,’ she went on. ‘So happy to bask in any reflected glory, but he’s going to get glory himself soon — not just your exhibition which I’m sure will be terrific — but because of Rock Star. I know The Scorpion’s a rag, but they’ve nominated Guy Hubby of the Year, and if he wins, he gets ten thousand pounds. I expect Guy will insist on it going to charity, but it means he’ll be a star in his own right. It’s lovely that people have started recognizing him in the street and asking him for his autograph.’

Julia’s eyes seemed to get bigger and bigger.

‘It’s so sad when marriages break up. You hang on to your Ben,’ urged Georgie, then thought, I don’t think she should at all, he’s ghastly, I must be pissed. As she refilled their glasses, she noticed an adorable china puppy tangled in blue ribbon clambering out of a flowered bowl among the ornaments on a side table.

‘How lovely! Victorian,’ she examined it, ‘I wonder where that came from.’

‘Geraldine and the girls from the gallery gave it to me as a moving-in present,’ said a returning Guy smoothly. ‘I kept forgetting to bring it home.’

‘The puppy’s exactly like Dinsdale,’ said Georgie enchanted. ‘How clever of Geraldine.’

Saying they must go, Ben bore off Julia and Meredith whom they were going to drop off on the way.

‘Nice, aren’t they?’ said Guy, gathering up glasses.

‘Juliet’s lovely,’ said Georgie. ‘Not sure about him though.’

‘She’s called Julia,’ said Guy, ‘and Ben’s a genius.’


20



The next morning Guy and Georgie were woken ridiculously early by the telephone.

‘Leave it,’ mumbled Guy.

‘Someone might have died.’

‘Well, I wish they’d die later in the day.’