Free The Man Who Made Husbands Jealous by Jilly Cooper Page B

M4.
        'Drop dead handsome,' he read out laboriously. 'And he nearly did when the bullets of Elmer's guards rang out. Frozen in his tracks, Lysander could have passed for a statue of Adonis (who's he?) in that moonlit garden!
        "I aim to be a jump jockey," says twenty-two-year-old Lysander, who should have no trouble with Beckers, if he can clear Elmer's twenty-foot electric fence without a horse.
        'Oh Christ, it goes on about me being "the youngest son of David 'Hatchet' Hawkley, headmaster of Fleetley, one of England's snootiest public schools (fees Ł12,000 a year).Perhaps Hatchet will give cheeky Lysander six of the best when they meet."
        'Jesus, Beattie is a bitch,' said Lysander furiously. 'She promised she wouldn't print any of the things I told her off the record. I'd have taken that Ferrari if I'd known. We'd better step on it before some do-gooder shows Dad The Scorpion. Thank goodness it's banned at Fleetley. Dolly's going to be livid, too. I feel seriously sick.'
        He groped for a cigarette and was soon coughing his lungs out and dropping ash and toffee papers all over Ferdie's very clean car.
        'That is the ultimate obscenity,' he said disapprovingly as they got stuck in the fast lane behind a blonde in a Porsche going just below the speed limit, so Ferdie was forced to overtake on the inside.
        'Ought to be driving funeral cars.' Lysander swung round to glare at her, then changed his mind. 'Quite pretty though. Perhaps she's just passed her test. Looks like that girl in the house next door. Did you ever bonk her?'
        Ferdie nodded gloomily. 'We had a bloody good four days while you were in Palm Beach. I even took her to San Lorenzo. Then she announced she was flying back to Australia to get married, and she'd only been practising on me.'
        Ferdie told it as a big joke, but Lysander sensed THE hurt. He longed for Ferdie to attract girls as effortlessly as he did.
        'Stupid cow,' he said crossly, then to cheer Ferdie up, as they came off the motorway, 'God, you shift this car. I've never done it this fast even at night.'
        As they approached Fleetley through the bleak winter landscape with its patches of snow and icy wind flattening the pale grass on the verges, Jack started to snuffle at the window at familiar territory and Lysander grew lower and lower.
        'I can't believe she won't be here,' he muttered, pulling Sherry's blue baseball cap further over his nose.
        He could never understand why his mother had stayed married to his stiff-upper-lipped, rigidly conventional, father. But, as a gesture of conciliation, he stopped in Fleetley Village to buy him a bottle of port and a packet of Swoop for his parrot, Simonides.
        Fleetley School had once been inhabited by dukes. Now only the iron gates flanked by rampant stone lions and the avenue of towering flat-bottomed horse-chestnuts, and the great house itself, square, yellowy-grey and Georgian, remained. All round like mushrooms had sprung up classrooms, science labs, gyms and houses for masters and boys. The great lake had been turned into a swimming pool.
        Nowhere for Arthur and Tiny to graze now, thought Lysander, gazing at the silvery-green stretches of playing field.
        'Oh no!' He gave a whimper. The stables where he and his mother had kept their horses had already been flattened to make way for the new music school towards which, Mrs Colman, his father's secretary, had helped raise Ł300,000.
        'You coming in?' he asked Ferdie.
        Ferdie shook his head: 'I've got some calls to make.'
        Although Ferdie had got straight As in four A levels, and David Hawkley had privately admitted he would be the first old boy to make a million, David had never forgiven his son's best friend for flogging booze, cigarettes and condoms on the black market to other boys.
        'I'll leave Jack with you then,' said Lysander. 'Simonides always gives