Emily by Jilly Cooper Page B

say.
        ‘Good god, no. I realized very early on that I was quite incapable of supporting myself, so I married old Deidre instead; she’s a pretty full time job, but I do get the odd afternoon off while she’s sitting on committees. How about you?’
        ‘I’ve only been married seven weeks,’ I said firmly.
        ‘So disillusion hasn’t set in yet. Pretty tricky customer Rory, I admire you if you can handle him. He runs rings round poor Buster. Is he still drinking too much?’
        ‘Hardly at all,’ I said, out of the corner of my eye watching Rory go to Marina’s sidetable, and help himself to a second very large glass of whisky.
        ‘Very loyal and proper,’ said Calen. ‘I must say you really are extremely attractive, I wish you’d stop sitting with your arms folded like a rugger player so I could appreciate you properly. Promise me that if you ever decide to be unfaithful to Rory, I can have first refusal.’
        I tried to look disapproving, but after Rory’s indifference of the past few weeks, it was such heaven to be chatted up. I was sure Marina had invited Calen on purpose. But although he flirted outrageously with me all evening, I felt terribly depressed that Rory wasn’t betraying a spark of jealousy.
        ‘So nice for you to find someone of your own mental age to play with, Emily,’ was all he said afterwards.
        As the weeks passed, we often encountered Marina and Hamish at parties. Marina and Rory so studiously avoided each other that I wondered if they were meeting on the sly.
        Occasionally I saw her loathsome brother, Finn Maclean, driving round the island, obviously far too preoccupied with building his beastly hospital to waste time on parties.
        In December, Coco slipped down some steps at the castle after a boozy evening and sprained her ankle. Next day she rang up, saying she was bored, would I come over and see her. On my way I drove into Penlorren to find her some nice escapist novel from the bookshop.
        Having parked my car in the main street, I started browsing through some romances. Oh dear, the lovely things that happened to those heroines. Why didn’t Rory feel like that about me?
        Finally, I heard a cough behind me. The owner wanting to shut up shop.
        Hastily I bought the book and wandered dreamily into the main street, through the mist and rain. A man was standing by my car. There was something heroic about the way he stood, the massive breadth of the shoulders, the hair curling over the collar of his battered sheepskin coat like Michelangelo’s David.
        Instinctively, I unhitched the long lock of hair from behind my ear and let it fall seductively over my eyes. Then I realized the man was Finn Maclean, and he was blazingly angry.
        ‘Is this your car?’
        ‘Yes, at least, it’s Rory’s.’
        ‘Can’t you read?’
        He seized my arm and swung me round to face a notice on a garage door. It said, Doctor’s car, please leave free.
    ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Well, in London, people often put notices like that on their garage doors even if they’re not doctors, just to keep people away.’
        ‘This is not London,’ he snapped, and in terms of the most blistering invective, proceeded to tell me exactly what he thought of Londoners who came to live in the country, and me in particular, and didn’t I realize that people could be dying because people like me parked their cars in places like this. Finally I got fed up.
        ‘It strikes me,’ I said, ‘that while you’ve been rabbiting on and on and on about my criminal irresponsibi l ity, at least twenty more people could have died. Admittedly, a few of them may have been Chinese. In fact, if all the people who died while people like you were blowing their cool all over the islands were laid end to end…’
        ‘Don’t be fatuous,’ snapped Finn. ‘There’s obviously no point in trying to get anything through to you. You’d better move