.
de Bourgh was catty about Elizabeth’s taste in bedding begonias.’
‘And I also want to know what happened to the lovely, feckless Jasmine. I realize her relationship with Teddy is a leitmotif of textbook adultery that runs parallel with your own love affair. Your audience is eager in anticipation.’
After Burgo and I became lovers, after those ten, perhaps fifteen minutes of intense physical pleasure, we lay in each other’s arms waiting for our hearts to slow and for our minds to begin working.
Then I said, ‘Dickie’s coming back any minute.’
‘I asked him to ring Simon for me, to tell him to bring the car round in half an hour. But he must have done that by now.’ There was a brief silence, during which I tried to calm my breathing and focus my eyes. Burgo said, ‘I’d better go.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll always remember the way you look now.’ He kissed me. ‘All my life.’
We pulled our clothes on quickly, not speaking. I was terribly afraid now that someone would catch us in a state of undress, though only minutes before I would not have cared if the combined teams of the Ladyfield Lawn Tennis Club and the Tideswell Tigers had crowded into the China House to cheer us on.
‘Goodbye, Roberta.’ Burgo lifted my hand to kiss it.
‘Goodbye.’
I watched him walk to the door and cross the little garden. I tried to tidy myself and the daybed. He must have met Dickie on the way. I did my best to enthuse about the new silk for the daybed to please Dickie but I don’t suppose I made much sense. I was trying to decide exactly what had happened, how it had happened and what the consequences would be. And I could not suppress a thrill of happiness. I wanted to grin with pleasure. Walking back through the garden I had forborne, with difficulty, to skip.
Dickie had politely pretended not to notice anything but had taken me into the cool, deserted drawing room and asked if I wouldn’t like a little rest after my heroic performance on court. Through the window I could see the back of Burgo’s head above the group that thronged about him on the lawn. When I insisted that I had to get back to Cutham Dickie had made me drink several cups of strong black coffee before conducting me to my car. Tipsy septuagenarians were packing their cars with tennis equipment and driving unsteadily away with two wheels in Dickie’s penstemon border. I was astonished that the world managed to go on in its ordinary insipid way.
I had flown through the countryside on a super-powered cloud, survived dinner somehow, washed up and gone upstairs at the first possible moment so that I could be alone. Naturally after drinking so much coffee I had lain awake for hours, reliving the excitement of being in Burgo’s arms, the protesting voices of sanity and prudence drowned by the singing of my effervescing blood.
The following day the weather conspired with a serious hangover to rub something of the bloom from my joy. Continuous drizzle cast a depressing grey light through all the rooms. The walls and floors seemed to sweat with damp. What was there, exactly, to be joyful about? I had had too much to drink and had made love in Dickie’s garden with his brother-in-law, a man I hardly knew and might never see again. Perhaps Burgo took it for granted that he would bed a provincial voter or two whenever he ventured out of the capital. Probably these fleeting intimacies were the perks of a politician’s life, a compensation for having to be charming to old ladies and committee bores. It could hardly matter that I always voted Labour.
He might tell his secretary to send the usual douceur of an expensive bunch of flowers, and she would know that he had once again been successful. She would be either indifferent to his behaviour or disapproving of it, but she would certainly despise me. Perhaps, the next time they were alone, Burgo would boast of his conquest to Dickie who, being a tolerant man, would smile and shake his head and mentally adjust his view of me, to my detriment. By the time Jazzy telephoned me from the Isle of Wight late the same afternoon, my mood had sunk from euphoria to bitter reproach, mostly directed towards myself.
‘Bobbie? I’ve been dying to talk to you! You’re the only person I can tell …’ Jazzy’s voice was tremulous. I pictured her face twisted with misery. ‘You’ll never guess … the most glorious thing.’ My mental picture changed – with difficulty. It had been months since she had been anything like happy. ‘He’s left her!’
I did not need to ask who he and her were. I had once glimpsed Teddy Bayliss’s wife, Lydia, at a party. She had hard eyes and a chin you could have struck a match on. Jazzy and I had invented a character for her so bad that between suffocating babies and experimenting on animals she would have had no time for Teddy’s sexual requirements or his dry-cleaning.
‘When? How? What’s happened?’
‘He says he’s not going to be dictated to by anyone. She said he had to spend more time at home with her and the children. He says the children do nothing but squabble and leave wet towels on the bathroom floor. And they play pop music and have scruffy monosyllabic friends. She’s a terrible cook and is always giving him takeaways. And she refuses to take his shirts to the laundry.’ We were almost right then, about some things. ‘And he hates her mother.’
‘Jazzy—Of course I’m not defending her, but surely there must be something more than that? I mean, isn’t that just family life? It doesn’t sound quite enough to justify ending a marriage.’
‘I thought you’d be the one person who’d understand.’ Jazzy sounded hurt. ‘I know you’re terribly anti having affairs with married men but I thought you said you’d always be on my side, whatever.’
‘Oh, I am. I am! But, Jazz, you have to be so sure that you and Teddy will be happy together.’
‘We will be. Teddy says that no one in his whole life has understood him as I do. He says it’s uncanny how alike we are, how we feel the same about everything that’s important, how we can communicate without words. Honestly, it’s true. Don’t you remember, it all began when we met at that ghastly ball and discovered we both hated Latin-American music but loved Gershwin. And then we found that our favourite film was Breakfast at Tiffany’s and our favourite place to stay was Raffles Hotel. Then we went on talking practically the whole evening, agreeing about absolutely everything. It was amazing.’
Poor darling Jazzy. So beautiful and so trusting. When I had once suggested that Teddy had simply had his eye on getting her into bed she had been wounded by my misanthropy.
‘Well, if you’re quite sure …’
‘I’m utterly, totally, completely sure. As sure as anyone in the history of the world has ever been about anything. It’s a synthingummy of minds and souls. And he says that making love to me is like eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets. Isn’t that brilliant?’
‘Perhaps it was when Sydney Smith said it.’
‘Sydney who?
‘Smith. A nineteenth-century cleric. He was describing heaven.’
‘Oh.’ A pause. ‘Of course Teddy’s so well read.’ It would have been unkind to say that the metaphor was so well known that it had become almost hackneyed. Jazzy had been to dozens of expensive schools all over the world and learned little in any of them. ‘And he says making love to Lydia is like waving an arm in a barn.’
I was repelled. ‘If you give a woman four children you can hardly complain if there’s some falling off from physical perfection.’
‘No. I agree. It was naughty of him. I’ve decided I’m not going to say mean things about her any more or even think them if I can help. I’m desperately sorry for her, actually, and I feel quite haunted by the idea that at this moment she’s going about her life unaware of the sword of Damo-what’s-it that’s about to fall. And the children … when I think of them …’ For a moment the excitement went out of Jazzy’s voice.
‘What do you mean, “unaware”?’
‘Teddy