by Jilly Cooper
3
The full moon was rising rose-coloured like the inside of a pink grapefruit. Martha’s limo was apple green, open and very long with the number plate: MARTHA 30.
‘Elmer gave it me for my thirtieth birthday. That was when he was doing everything to prise me away from my ex. Hardly the ideal gift to hide under one’s mattress!’
In her distress Martha grazed an incoming Cadillac as she stormed out of the car-park. Lysander slumped beside her, gazing at the stars, which seemed to be shooting around a lot, tunelessly singing: ‘A Groovy Kind of Love’.
Elmer’s house in the heart of smart Palm Beach was surrounded by a thick, impenetrable ficus hedge. Two scowling security guards, restraining snarling Dobermanns, gave Lysander a malevolent once-over as they opened massive electric gates.
‘Friendly fellows,’ observed Lysander as they glided through a huge shadowy garden filled with darkly dipping trees. ‘What are those dishes on those big black poles?’
‘Microwave units to pick up on any intruder. There are also sensors under the lawn. Not a rabbit or a racoon goes undetected. Inside the ficus hedge is hidden a chain-link fence topped with razor wire and an electronic intrusion detector.’
‘I’d guard someone like you,’ said Lysander.
‘Not me, himself,’ said Martha flatly. ‘Safus screens high-risk computers, Elmer’s sewn up most of the Government contracts. As only he holds the password to all the computer installations, he needs protection twenty-four hours a day. No-one breaks in here.’
Ahead, ghostly in the moonlight, rose Elmer’s pale pink fortress, so like nougat that Lysander felt he ought to take a large bite out of it to sober himself up.
‘Amazing place.’
‘Was,’ said Martha bitterly. ‘One of the oldest houses in Palm Beach stood on this site. Elmer razed it and built another. He’s not into longevity.’
Going into the living room, Lysander found himself gazing into the mouth of a cannon and ducked.
‘That thing was fired in the Civil War,’ said Martha.
‘Nearly as old as Elmer. Why the hell did you marry him?’
‘I was called in to redecorate his office. Underneath a big desk you don’t see a guy’s clay feet.’
Only marred by too many photographs of Elmer fraternizing with the famous, the room was charmingly decorated in pale golds as though Midas had idly trailed his fingers over sofas, carpets, walls and huge bunches of deeply scented yellow roses. On an easel was a half-finished portrait of Elmer looking virile. The two ponies he was riding and leading were only roughly sketched in.
‘God, you’ve flattered him,’ grumbled Lysander.
‘It’s not finished. He can’t decide which pony he wants to ride.’
‘Cut out holes; then he can ride a different one each day. Did you do that?’ Lysander turned to the waving corn field above the fireplace.
‘No, that’s by Van Gogh.’
‘Yours is better. And much better than that one.’
‘That’s Paul Klee,’ said Martha in gentle reproof. ‘It cost several million dollars.’
‘Really.’ Astounded, Lysander peered at it again. ‘Perhaps I should take up painting.’
They were interrupted by another huge Dobermann hurtling into the room, fangs bared, growling horribly.
‘Stay, Tyson,’ screamed Martha. ‘Don’t touch him.’
But Lysander went straight up to the dog, hand outstretched.
‘Hallo boy, aren’t you beautiful?’
Disarmed by such genuine admiration, Tyson, after a few dubious growls, started wagging his stubby tail and writhing his shiny solid black body against Lysander.
‘That dog is a serial killer,’ said Martha in amazement. ‘Elmer and Nancy, his ex, have endless legal tussles over him. Nancy has custody and Elmer visitation rights on weekends, but he’s always playing polo so the dog goes crazy. Now Nancy’s threatening to take it to a dog shrink in New York so that’s another two thousand dollars a month. She should pay you instead,’ she added as Tyson collapsed in an ecstatic heap at Lysander’s feet.
After a very disapproving butler had opened a bottle of Dom Perignon for them, Martha, who was still shivering uncontrollably, went off to change, leaving Lysander with the telephone. Instinctively he started to dial the number at home, then stopped with a moan of pain, remembering that the only person in the world he really wanted to talk to would never pick up a telephone again.
The only changing Martha had done when she returned twenty minutes later was to put on an old olive-green cardigan with the buttons done up all wrong. Lysander was encouraged that she smelled of toothpaste, but her eyes were very red.
‘Did you get through?’ she asked.
‘I did. I rang Ferdie my flatmate in Fulham to see if my dog Jack was OK. He is, and Dolly, my girlfriend, is modelling in Paris.’ Lysander looked cast down. ‘Neither of them was remotely pleased.’
‘Hardly surprising. It’s four o’clock in the morning in Europe.’
‘That must be it,’ said Lysander, cheering up. ‘Anyway Ferdie did read out Mystic Meg – she does the horoscopes in the News of the World and she’s seriously on the crystal ball. She says Pisces will find happiness with someone with freckles.’
Martha didn’t register. Chain-smoking, she jumped every time the telephone rang, then, because the butler answered, bit her lip when it wasn’t Elmer and slumped back on the yellow and crimson striped sofa.
‘All husbands have mistresses these days like they have faxes and mobiles and they can’t think how they ever existed without them.’ The drink was really getting to her now, her soft husky voice was shrill, with the words rattling out like machine-gun fire.
‘D’you know what’s really causing the recession?’ she demanded. ‘Pandemic adultery – Tom Wolfe’s “tidal wave of concupiscence”. A guy is so busy deceiving his wife and his PA, who’s probably another mistress anyway, he can’t concentrate. How can you put your back into work when you’re sticking your dick into some bimbo all the time?’
Although his hands were busy stroking an ecstatic Tyson, Lysander found his knees edging towards Martha’s.
‘I’d never have taken up with Elmer,’ she went on hysterically, ‘if he hadn’t painted such a dire picture of his marriage; how Nancy neglected him and never slept with him. Then after Elmer and I were married Nancy dumped in Vanity Fair and I realized she’d adored him and been absolutely wiped out. She called me one evening when she was drunk, to tell me he was a clinical narcissist and I’d never satisfy him. All her friends were there this evening. They’ll be on to her first thing: “You held him for twenty-five years, Nancy, Martha couldn’t hold him for as many weeks”.’ She gave a sob.
‘What’s pandemic?’ asked Lysander.
But Martha had beaten the butler to the telephone.
‘Oh, hi.’ She was poised between tears and a screaming match. ‘I didn’t want to spoil your fun. No, no.’ She was apologetic now. ‘I wasn’t implying anything.’
Lysander could now hear Elmer yelling. Martha seemed to slump.
‘OK, right, sleep well.’ Slowly she replaced the receiver.
‘Elmer’s over the limit. He’s spending the night at the barn.’
‘Yippee.’ Lysander hugged Tyson. ‘Let’s have another bottle.’
‘And he’s got a dozen guards who could drive him home if he wanted. He’s only drunk with lust. I guess he and that tramp were bouncing around in the Jacuzzi when he called me. That would have given him a charge.’
She burst into tears.
Lysander was a shining example of the continued existence of the age of chivalry. He hadn’t read endless articles in the women’s pages about the caddish chauvinism of his sex, he had never heard of New Man or sexual harassment. His heart entirely ruled his head. Anything in distress moved him and just as he had gathered up poor, miserably disturbed, aggressively insecure Tyson, now he bounded over to Martha.
‘Don’t cry. You’re so beautiful
and he’s such a toad.’
Folding her into his warm, tender embrace, he tried to still her trembling body, smoothing away tears and mascara with his thumbs; then, when she still sobbed, comforting her in the only way he understood by kissing her smudged quivering mouth. For a second she fought him off, then, desperate for reassurance, she gradually responded to his wonderful enthusiasm.
Her skin was as smooth and silken as her shirt but, as he started undoing her buttons, she jumped away.
‘I’m too skinny. Elmer says I’m like an ironing board with two buttons sewn on to tell you which the front is.’
Lysander winced, then drew her back into his arms. ‘All the better to press my suit on.’ Then, as Martha smiled, ‘I’m going to kiss every freckle.’
‘You’ll be here for a thousand years.’
‘Wouldn’t be long enough. Let’s go upstairs.’
‘We shouldn’t.’
‘We can’t fight Mystic Meg.’
Tyson, however, in true Dobermann fashion, refused to let Lysander out of the room until his basket had been carried up to the bedroom and he’d been settled in with strokes and Bonios which gave Martha time to undress and hide herself under the ivy-green silk sheets of the vast emerald and white striped four-poster. Books were piled high on her bedside table. On the other side there stood only a digital clock and a silver-framed photograph of Elmer and George Bush.
‘Elmer only reads balance sheets and the messages on T-shirts,’ said Martha with a sob.
‘Hush, don’t think about him.’
Still in his clothes, Lysander waded through a pampas-grass of long white carpet and gently drew back the sheets. Instantly Martha’s thin arms flew to her tiny breasts. But, like Aladdin stumbling on his cave and touching each gold bar, precious stone and rope of pearls with amazed joy and excitement, Lysander slowly examined her body, stroking her nipples and her concave belly and breathing in the remains of Diorella behind her ears and inside her wrists.
‘Christ, you’re gorgeous!’ He ran his hands up the inside of her long slender legs. ‘I freaked when I first saw these in the stands.’
Dropping his clothes on the floor, he stripped off with total unselfconsciousness and rightly so because he was glorious, with a body as white, firmly curved and inviting on those emerald-green sheets, as early morning mushrooms in a dew-drenched field. His well-developed chest with a slight down of light brown hair narrowed to the flattest stomach and more downy hair from which his cock reared up as jaunty and as confident of bringing joy as a conductor’s baton raised for action.
‘I’ve only been married five months,’ mumbled Martha. ‘We really shouldn’t.’
‘We should, too.’
‘Wouldn’t Dolly be upset?’
‘Probably, but basically I can’t help myself.’
His fake tan was turning orange, his bluey-green eyes were crossing with drink, but, as the big laughing mouth came down on hers, Martha was reduced to the same slobbering ecstasy as Tyson.
Wriggling down the bed, Lysander kissed the arch of her instep, each coral-painted toe, then slowly, slowly up the velvet thighs, feeling the increasing tension as his hands grazed her breasts and shaven armpits, never stopping caressing.
‘We really shouldn’t,’ said Martha faintly.
Reaching out Lysander turned the photograph of Elmer and George Bush to the wall.
‘We don’t need an audience.’
Then, plunging his face into her pubic hair, snuffling as appreciatively as a truffle pig, he mumbled, ‘As I was saying to Martha’s bush.’
Feeling him helpless with laughter, she had to join in, but soon her laughter turned to gasps. Only when he knew she’d come did he keep her pleasure on the boil with half a minute of slowly stabbing fingers.
‘Come inside me,’ urged Martha.
‘Just wait a sec, while I slip into something tight,’ murmured Lysander, reaching for a condom from the back pocket of his jeans. Then as joyously as an otter diving into a summer stream he plunged his cock inside her.
‘Oh wow, that was terrific,’ said Martha as they lay back afterwards, sharing a cigarette.
‘I didn’t get a Christmas bonus because I didn’t sell any houses so it’s been worth waiting till January. You are so lovely.’ Lysander kissed her hand.
‘How come you are such an incredible lover?’
‘Basically, Dolly taught me a lot. One of the advantages of having an older woman.’
‘How old is she?’ Martha snuggled against his chest.
‘Twenty-four.’
‘Ouch.’
‘But she started at fourteen, so there’s a lot of mileage. Look, I just adored sleeping with you.’
‘Me too.’ Martha found she couldn’t keep her hands off him.
Noticing polo bruises darkening his ribs, arms and thighs like the purple markings on a white violet, she wanted to kiss them all better and explore in return his wonderful body.
‘You’re a really sweet guy with the softest heart and the hardest cock.’
‘Better than the other way round.’ Lysander dropped ash on the pampas-grass. ‘I wish I was someone who could go on for hours, but I get so excited, particularly when it’s someone like you. Dolly always makes me stay awake afterwards and stroke her for ages. I find that the most difficult part.’ His voice was slurring, his eyelids drooping. ‘Let’s do it again in a minute. Will you come with me to Disneyland tomorrow? I want to get Donald Duck’s autograph.’
Martha removed the cigarette as he fell asleep.
4
Elmer Winterton’s evening had deteriorated. Bonny, having consumed too much champagne and sucking pig, had suddenly lurched out of the Jacuzzi and for want of a bowl had thrown up in Elmer’s fish-tank. Whereupon his piranhas had swarmed up to the surface and eaten the lot which had turned Elmer’s stomach. Feeling a longing for his shy slender wife, he had been prevented from going straight home by Bonny passing out. Not trusting his guards at the barn not to blab he was reduced to driving her thirty miles home himself.
None of his guards in the gate house felt like telling Elmer he had a houseguest. It was only after he had noticed a T-shirt warning him: Sex is Evil on his bedroom carpet that he glanced up and found his number one player and his wife as enchantingly entwined as Cupid and Psyche.
For the second time in twenty-four hours, Lysander was roused from sleep. But Elmer, red and roaring, was a considerably less attractive alarm clock than the twins.
‘I don’t employ you on my team to hump my wife,’ he howled.
‘Didn’t secure her very well, you fat ape,’ howled back Lysander. ‘How can you chase disgusting slags like that when you’ve got something so beautiful at home?’
That Lysander was right didn’t improve Elmer’s temper. Gathering up a bowl from a table by the door, he was about to hurl it at Lysander.
‘Not the Ming, Elmer,’ wailed Martha.
Elmer paused, which gave Lysander time to wriggle over Martha, scoop up her pale pink silk knickers as a fig leaf, and shoot round the bed out of the room just as a glass bottle of Jolie Madame missing him by inches, smashed against the dragged green wall.
‘Not out,’ squealed Lysander, belting across the landing and down the stairs three steps at a time to find the front door quadrupally locked, whichever way he pulled and tugged it. For an agonizing second he was reminded how his father used to bolt the great oak door at home and his mother used to steal down the back stairs to let him in through the kitchen. Then he jumped out of his totally unprotected skin as shots rang out, shattering the chandelier in the hall. Grabbing a bronze of Elmer astride a polo pony from the hall table, like a weightlifter on a second surge of strength, he hurled it at the window. But the bullet-proof glass didn’t even dent. Instead, like a mass castration of howler monkeys, an ear-splitting alarm blasted the house.
‘Oh, shut up.’ Lysander clutched his head, then jumped as steel shutters clanged like guillotines across the windows and the outside doo
rs.
Frantically checking the ground floor, he found every exit blocked and himself back in the hall.
‘Try and escape, you son of a bitch,’ bellowed Elmer, reappearing on the landing.
As Lysander ducked behind a large fern, bullets buried themselves in the panelling behind him. Diving for a side door, he raced up some stairs. Behind him he could hear shouting and dogs baying; he was going to be ripped apart. Bolting round the circular landing, deterring an approaching Dobermann by hurling a cheese plant, he shot into Martha’s bedroom.
‘Dum, di di, dum di, dum di dum di.’
Giggling hysterically, gasping out the James Bond tune, Lysander snaked under the green silk sheet, pulling a pillow over his head.
‘Gemme out of here.’
In answer, half-crying, half-laughing, Martha ripped off the sheet, shoved a swipe card into his hands, then, sliding open a wardrobe, dived through a dense forest of dresses to a secret door at the back.
‘Through here,’ she hissed. ‘At the bottom of the stairs, turn right. At the end of the passage next to the Samuel Palmer of hay making by a full moon, you’ll find a little door. Put my swipe card in the slot then dial this number, thirty (for my age, remember), forty-nine (for Elmer’s). Hurry, for God’s sake. Elmer won’t take any prisoners.’
‘Thanks for everything.’ Leaning back through the forests of scented taffetas and silks for a last kiss, Lysander raced down the stairs and found the painting. The full moon was honey gold not grapefruit pink this time. And there was the little door.
His hands were trembling so badly it took three goes to slot in the swipe card. Now, what was the number? His brain froze. Martha’s age? He punched up a three then a nought, but what was Elmer’s? About a hundred. The frenzied growling grew closer; any second they’d realize he’d escaped this way. Elmer? Elmer? Would the thirty be still working or would it run out like a half-rung telephone number? That was it. He punched a four and a nine. Nothing happened. Perhaps he’d put the card in back to front or upside down.