Emily by Jilly Cooper Page A

myself, then I found I couldn’t. Emily - the fishwife.
        That crack about being lousy in bed had gone home too. I wrote off to London for a sexy black cut-out nightie, and a book on how to undress in front of your husband. It showed you how to swing your bra round like a football rattle, and slide your pants off in one go.
        I tried it on Rory one evening, but he merely raisedhis eyebrows and asked me if I’d been at the gin. As the weeks passed, he didn’t lay a finger on me. I was desperately unhappy and cried a great deal when he wasn’t around. I kept telling myself that when he’d assembled enough canvases for the exhibition we’d be like a couple of love birds, but I didn’t really believe it.
        I spent most of my time corrupting Walter Scott. Rory was a great believer that dogs should be treated like dogs and kept outside. I kept bringing him in and feeding him in between meals and cuddling him - I needed a few allies.
        Gradually Walter invaded the house. He started off sleeping in the kitchen, then moved to the foot of the stairs, then to the landing outside our bedroom. At dawn he would steal in and try to climb on our bed. Invariably Rory, who was a light sleeper, would wake up and throw him out.
        ‘Walter Scott suffers from being an only dog,’ he was fond of saying.
        ‘Blood is thicker than Walter,’ I said.
        ‘Nothing is thicker than Walter,’ said Rory.

CHAPTER TWELVE
        
        IN November, later than expected, Coco and Buster came back.
        Buster brought his new private plane, which he landed perilously on the sward outside the castle, terrifying the life out of the islanders and the local sheep, and nearly depositing himself, three labradors, gun cases, rod boxes and several hundred tons of pigskin luggage, in the sea.
        ‘Pity,’ said Rory. ‘Never mind, there’ll be plenty of other opportunities. In the old days he used to come up by train from Euston and take the dogs to lamp-posts as the train waited interminably at Crewe.’
        Coco arrived in rip-roaring form and swept Rory and me into a round of gaiety, meeting people on the island and the mainland. It was a frightful strain trying to keep up the appearance that I was blissfully happy.
        A few days later, Marina and Hamish asked us back to dinner. I was amazed and irritated to discover she was a very good cook, and had decorated Hamish’s huge, stark house with a wild elegance I could never achieve in a million years of poring over House and Garden.
        The drawing-room had grey silk walls and flame-red curtains, and I felt sure, had been chosen to compliment Marina’s colouring.
        ‘Oh it’s lovely,’ I said wistfully, ‘you ought to go into interior decorating.’
        ‘Emily’s an inferior decorator,’ said Rory.
        In my attempt to make our bedroom more feminine, I’d started painting it but had got bored in the middle. The colour, too, was disastrous. It looked all right on the chart but once on the wall turned out an appalling E-K directory pink.
        I felt very overdressed that evening, too. Trying to compete with Marina, I’d put on a see-through blouse and a long skirt. Marina of course was wearing jeans.
        There was another couple to dinner - Deidre and Calen Macdonald. She was a commanding, big-boned woman with a ringing voice. He had a handsome, dissipated face, roving grey eyes, and had obviously married her for her money. He turned out to be a shootingfriend of Buster’s and made an absolute dead set at me.
        ‘I can’t claim to be a gentleman, but I’ve always preferred blondes,’ he said cornering me on the sofa as soon as we were introduced, ‘and you really are gorgeous.’
        The intensity with which he gazed at my see-through blouse threw me off balance - I folded my arms firmly to cover up what I could. 4 ‘Er - do you do anything for a living,’ I said, casting around for something to