He looked sulky and aggressive, like a small boy caught stealing sweets.

‘It seems your affaire with Mrs Armstrong is more extended than you’ve admitted.’

Guy pursed his lips and looked proconsular.

‘Well, if she says it is.’

‘She does.’ Georgie moved towards the drinks table.

‘If you care to come upstairs with me, Ju Ju, and look into a suitcase under Guy-Guy’s bed, you’ll find a large folder of photographs Guy’s taken of me with nothing on. Some, I hate to tell you, with Angel’s Reach in the background.’

‘You said you never slept with her,’ Julia turned, screaming at Guy.

‘Ah, but then he told me he’d only been to bed with you once. I think you two ought to get your stories straight.’

Grabbing the Bacardi bottle Georgie turned to Guy. ‘You’re a fucking hypocrite, and I’m leaving you tomorrow. I’m going to sleep in the spare room.’

On the kitchen table, she discovered a note Mother Courage had left earlier.

‘Georgie — change in the envelope, heart in the deep freeze.’

Upstairs in the spare room, Georgie felt boiling hot. She took off her clothes and crawled under the duvet. Then she remembered that this was where Guy had slept with Julia. It was the repository of all their worst furniture, even a china Alsatian which Flora had won at the fair on Hampstead Heath at the age of eight. On the windows were ghastly curtains put up by a previous occupant, which clashed with the equally ghastly wallpaper. Would Guy have explained that this room hadn’t been done yet, or had he been too busy bonking? She gave a groan and took a huge slug of Bacardi. She’d ring the Ideal Homo and order new curtains tomorrow morning — but what was the point when she was leaving anyway? Seeing the reflection of her flushed face on the pillow, she realized the mirror on the dressing table had been adjusted so that you could see what was going on in bed. Guy’d always liked watching himself. She heard a car starting up, and, rushing to the window, saw Julia’s car lighting up the little green beacons of the poplar colonnade.

‘Whore,’ she screamed after her, and was so plastered and furious that she rushed downstairs in the nude and went completely berserk. First she smashed Julia’s puppy and then she rushed into the kitchen and started breaking glasses.

‘Stop it!’ Guy came rushing in. ‘Don’t be infantile, Julia’s a complete fantasist. It’s all lies.’

‘She knows my diary better than I do, and what about fucking Peregrine, or rather fucking your second Peregrine, you bastard?’

Georgie’s yelling face was like a tomato that had been hurled at a rock. Guy ducked as a pint mug hurtled towards him. Finally, having taken down one of Julia’s paintings, and tried to smash it over Guy’s head, ‘It’s you in the pin-stripe suit, you disgusting lech,’ Georgie raced off into the night.

In panic, Guy rang Larry who was in the middle of making love to Marigold.

‘Julia came down and dumped.’

‘Christ,’ said Larry, who when he was with Nikki, had made up several foursomes at dinner with Julia and Guy. It was all much too close to home. ‘We’re off to Jamaica in a few hours,’ he added, ‘or I’d say come on over. Are you OK?’

‘No, I’m not. Georgie’s run off bollock-naked into the night.’

‘No sweat,’ said Larry. ‘Snow’s forecast. She’ll come home when she’s cold.’

‘But what if people in the village see her?’ spluttered Guy. ‘The road goes straight past the vicarage. There’s a meeting to discuss my election to the Parish Council on Friday.’

Larry tried not to laugh.

‘I’d put your feet up, watch the boxing and have a large Scotch.’

‘I can’t. Georgie’s broken every glass in the house, and plate, too, for that matter.’

‘People who live in Cotswold-stone houses shouldn’t throw glasses,’ said Larry. ‘At least it shows she cares. Take her away for a little holiday.’

‘Guy’s mistress has come down and dumped,’ he told Marigold as he switched off the telephone and took her in his arms.

‘Guy’s got a mistress?’ said Marigold, collapsing back on her ivory silk pillows in amazement. ‘Ay can’t believe it. Gay’s not laike that. He’s so upraight. Georgie must be shattered.’

‘It’s plates that are being shattered. She’s throwing them at Guy,’ said Larry, not displeased that Guy, who was always so sanctimonious, had been caught with his hand in the sexual till.

‘Oh, poor Georgie!’ Marigold climbed back on top of her husband, then gave a shriek of anguish as she impaled herself on his upright cock: ‘Oh, may God!’

‘What’s the matter, Princess?’ said Larry in alarm. ‘Are you still sore down there?’

‘No, they’re our plates,’ wailed Marigold. ‘They were a matchin’ set, Ay lent to Georgie for the dinner party.’

Sitting in the kitchen, Guy lined up all the milk bottles Mother Courage never put out on the kitchen table, so Georgie’d have something to smash when she came home.

Georgie actually burst out laughing when she saw them, then the laughter turned to tears, and although they rowed most of the night, in between sobbing on each other’s shoulders, Guy felt by morning that he had calmed Georgie down enough to go back to London.

‘I’ll call you the moment I get to London,’ he promised, but as she waved him off, Georgie felt like Demeter seeing Persephone disappear into the Underworld.

Slowly she began to piece together the horrors of the previous night. One moment she was freezing, the next boiling hot. She kept putting on and taking off jerseys. She still couldn’t get rid of the sick taste in her mouth.

Mother Courage had laid out a page from the Sunday Telegraph under the cat’s plate. As Georgie emptied a tin of Choosy on to it, she noticed a large piece by Peregrine Worsthorne about John Major.

You don’t call a child who won’t leave you alone, your second Peregrine, thought Georgie, and felt so furious she rushed into Guy’s study and put a message on the ansaphone saying: ‘Go screw yourself.

Then she put on another jersey and cleaned her teeth again. She felt she was rotting inside. Half an hour later Mother Courage came storming up the drive.

‘I’ve just had Mr Seymour on the telephone. He can’t get through. Can you ring him urgent?’

Sulkily Georgie dialled Guy at the gallery.

‘What the hell are you playing at, Panda?’ thundered Guy. ‘You’re totally over-reacting. What happens if the Press ring, or, even worse, the vicar or Lady Chisleden?’

‘I don’t care,’ screamed Georgie.

Out of the window she saw that a sudden fall of snow had covered the sweet spring promise of the primroses, and burst into tears.


22



The marriage limped on full of spats. Guy came down at midday on Good Friday looking wretched and carrying a box of glasses. ‘To replace the ones you threw at me,’ he said heavily, then, priding himself on his frugality: ‘From the Reject Shop.’

‘Why don’t you put me in the window,’ snarled Georgie.

Unable to suppress a craving for information that Guy was plainly not going to volunteer, Georgie asked if he’d seen Julia.

‘We spoke briefly on the telephone,’ said Guy, who had his back to her at the drinks table. ‘I’ve talked to Harry, and because we’ve sent out the invites and done a lot of press lobbying and advertising, we’ve decided to go ahead with her exhibition.’

‘Did Julia mention me?’ asked Georgie.

‘We didn’t discuss you,’ said Guy crushingly, pouring half an inch of whisky into one of his new glasses. ‘Harry will deal with Julia from now on. But I shall obviously have to attend the private view.’

‘Thought you’d viewed her enough in private.’

‘Don’t be petty. Julia wants us to be friends, as much as we can be. She’d like you to be there as well.’

If he says ‘to err is human, to forgive divine’, I shall scream, thought Georgie.

‘To err—’ began Guy.

‘I’m not gracing her private view,’ said Georgie flatly, ‘just because she needs a celeb to pull in the Press.’

‘That is the most horrible remark I’ve ever heard,’ said Guy. ‘It’s my gallery and I make fifty per cent out of every sale. I would have thought you would have wanted to attract the Press.’

And Georgie had promptly burst into tears and run out of the house.

As she ran down the path Guy had cut out of the wood for her, she heard the cuckoo for the first time. The angelic third floating through the trees.

‘Unpleasing to a married ear, cuckoo, cuckoo,’ sobbed Georgie.

Ahead lay Valhalla. She was tempted to dump on poor Kitty Rannaldini, who had been endlessly cuckolded and survived — just. But as Rannaldini might be there, who would be amused rather than sympathetic, she stumbled on. There had never been anything like the pain.

Wandering aimlessly she arrived home to find the BMW gone. The red sun was disappearing over the horizon, a cricket-ball hit for six — like Guy over Ju Ju. Sunsets were only bearable because the sun would rise again tomorrow. If Guy never came back, she’d die. Leaping into her ancient Golf she set out to look for him. She didn’t have to go as far as Eldercombe. There was the BMW crookedly parked in the churchyard, which in the twilight was still lit by daffodils. The church was decked for Easter. Breathing in the smell of narcissi and furniture polish, Georgie saw Guy slumped over the front pew, head bowed on clasped hands. When she touched his shoulder, his face was streaming with tears.

‘Oh, Panda,’ he sobbed, ‘I’ve made such a cock-up of my life, but I love you so much. Please don’t leave me.’