Australia grew hotter and Lysander, missing Arthur and his dogs, and having restored the errant sheep farmer to his lovely wife, decided to fly home and surprise Georgie whom he missed most of all. He spent the twenty-four-hour flight gazing at her photograph, which had grown cracked and faded in his wallet and landed on a bitterly cold morning in the first week in December. Collecting an ecstatic Jack and Maggie, who seemed to have put on a lot of weight, from Fulham, he found Ferdie leaving for work and extremely disapproving.
‘You can’t go back to Paradise. The Press are still sniffing around. Everything’ll blow up again.’
‘I must check if Arthur and Tiny are OK. My stuff’s all at Magpie Cottage, and I’m frantic to see Georgie.’
‘Well, for God’s sake, ring first. You don’t want to bump into Guy.’
Lysander left a message on Georgie’s ansaphone, and then played Georgie’s sixties tape, which he’d nearly scrambled, all the way down. He was so tired, the drive seemed longer than the flight. He remembered how, after any time apart, his mother used to race out of the house, arms open wide, eyes wet with tears of joy, and tug him into a warm, scented embrace. If he had Georgie, Christmas wouldn’t be so bleak.
Stripped of its green leaves, Paradise was as he remembered it on his first visit. Crows cawed morosely, the stone of the houses had lost its lustre, everything was blanketed in mist. Grey and sullen, Valhalla had retreated into its trees like a murderer with a gang of retainers. The only colour came from the last saffron of the larches and the faded red of the Turkey oaks. Georgie’s soaring angels looked in need of thermal underwear.
Anxious to get into the house out of the vicious wind, Lysander parked the Ferrari across the drive and loaded himself up with a koala bear, a huge bottle of Giorgio, a pearl necklace and twelve bunches of pale pink roses he’d bought on the way. Dinsdale welcomed him and the dogs with great delight. The Rover outside, as highly polished as an elderly army officer’s shoes, looked vaguely familiar, but Lysander was in too much of a rush.
‘Georgie, it’s me,’ he yelled, letting himself into the house.
His heart was hammering with excitement, he was so dying to hold her in his arms.
‘Georgie, where are you?’
After too long a pause, she came downstairs, wrapped in a dark brown towel. She looked so terrified that Lysander thought for a ghastly second that Guy might be at home. There was a faint smell of fish. She must be cooking Charity’s cod.
She wore no make-up, except mascara smudged under her eyes, and, although her hair was tousled, she was growing her fringe out and wearing it brushed sideways off her forehead. Having gazed at a very glamorous photograph of her for two months, Lysander thought she looked much older.
‘I was having a bath,’ she stammered.
Clutching his presents, his curls flopping over his bruised eyes, his chin resting on massed pink roses, Lysander looked like some Bacchante strayed out of an all-night revel.
‘D’you want a drink?’ she said nervously.
‘No, I want you.’ Dropping the presents on the hall table which was so small that half the roses fell to the floor, he hugged her. ‘Let’s go to bed. God, I missed you.’
Looking down at her feet, bare on the flagstones, he felt weak with love. ‘You’ve got chilblains. You must wear slippers. I’ll buy you some. Chilblains means it’s going to snow. I’ll take you tobogganing. You don’t seem very pleased to see me,’ he added in bewilderment.
‘Of course I am. I wasn’t expecting you, that’s all, and Flora drives now, and — er — as she’s broken up, she might roll up at any minute. Come on, let’s have a drink.’
‘OK. You put on something warm. I’ll get a bottle.’
‘I’ll get it.’ Georgie’s eyes flickered.
But as she went towards the kitchen, there was a crash and the sound of a window being slammed. Jack bristled and barked.
‘What’s that?’ Pushing her aside, Lysander sprinted into the kitchen and froze.
For out of the banging window he could see a man in his trousers and socks, carrying his shoes and jacket and frantically buttoning up his shirt as he hotfooted across the garden round to the Rover.
Lysander couldn’t move. He would recognize that broad-shouldered, ramrod-straight back anywhere. Jumping into the Rover, David Hawkley drove off in a flurry of leaves, unaware that his son had seen him.
Lysander thought he was suffocating. On the kitchen table lay a copy of his father’s translation of Ovid. Flipping it open, he saw his father had written on the fly leaf: TO DEAREST GEORGIE, and followed by some incomprehensible Latin tag. By the recipe books he found three of his own letters unopened.
Georgie was sitting on the stairs, surrounded by pink roses, looking sulky, dead eyed, caught out, but not nearly sorry enough.
‘Tell me this is a bad dream.’
‘It’s a bad dream.’
‘How could you, Georgie?’ whispered Lysander, clutching the door for support. ‘How could you? You were so unhappy. I worked and worked to get you over Guy and I find you bonking my father — like a couple of bloody dinosaurs. He’s a geriatric, for Christ’s sake.’
‘He’s only five years older than me,’ said Georgie, flaring up.
‘He’s a bastard. Guy’s a saint by comparison. You’re revolting, Georgie. I don’t understand you.’
A combination of guilt at being caught out, or fierce protectiveness towards David, and blazing jealousy of the dead Pippa, unleashed Georgie’s legendary Irish temper.
‘Your father is the dearest man in the world, and what’s more he’s been a wonderful father to you.’
‘Bullshit,’ shouted Lysander, so loud that Maggie cringed terrified against the door, and Jack started to yap.
‘He’s incapable of love. He was diabolical to Mum.’
‘Rubbish,’ screamed Georgie. ‘Your mother was a whore. D’you know how many lovers she had when she was married to your father?’
At the top of her voice, saliva flying, face engorging and disintegrating like beetroot in the Moulinex, she proceeded to scream chapter and worse. Lysander couldn’t stop her, he’d never been quick enough for back chat. He just mouthed at her, utterly shattered, fists clenched, rigid but trembling.
‘Did you know,’ yelled Georgie finally, ‘your Uncle Alastair was her lover for years and she was having an affair with Tommy Westerham? His picture from Horse and Hound was found in her bag the day she died, galloping down the main road to plead with him not to dump her.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ whispered Lysander. ‘My father told you this to get you on his side, to poison you against me and Mum. The lying, lying bastard! I’m going to kill him when I catch up with him.’
For a second, as he grabbed Georgie’s shoulders, shaking her like a rat, his beautiful face contorted into frenzy, Georgie was terrified he was going to kill her as well.
Then he caught the reek of cod again, and recognized the smell of sex, and with his father, and threw her back against the stairs. As he stumbled out, trampling the roses underfoot and slamming the front door behind him, Georgie realized what she’d done. She tried frantically to trace David, who now would never forgive her. Nor would Lysander, who would probably kill either himself or his father.
Lysander’s only thought was to find someone who had known his parents well enough to refute Georgie’s horrific accusations. Hurtling out of Paradise with Jack and Maggie huddled together on the seat beside him, he frantically punched out numbers on his car telephone, repeatedly getting wrong people because he kept misreading his address book and misdialling. By the time he had narrowly avoided crashing into several stone walls, he had learnt that his brothers were both out of their offices, his grandmother was whooping it up at some bridge party and his mother’s sister was in the Seychelles. In despair, he decided to drive down to Brighton to see Uncle Alastair’s widow, Dinah, a tetchy old soak, who spent her life outwitting a succession of companions paid by the family to keep her off the booze. If he hurried, he might catch her while she was sober enough to make sense.