Other People's Husbands Read online

  About the Book

  When Sara, as an art student, first met Conrad he seemed like the most glamorous man in the world. Already a famous painter, he was the sexiest thing she’d ever met. Her mother told her that she shouldn’t marry him – that the twenty-five-year age gap would tell in the end – and the end is now (apparently) approaching fast. Conrad has decided that it would be good to die before he gets seriously old, and has started behaving very strangely.

  Sara, meanwhile, teaching art at a local college, is not short of younger male company – other people’s husbands, ones she tells Conrad all about, who are just good friends. But there’s one she somehow doesn’t get round to mentioning…

  Contents

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art

  An artist is his own fault

  Art must take reality by surprise

  Paint It Black

  The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do

  Art is not what you see, but what you make others see

  Life is a lot like jazz – it’s best when you improvise

  Art is making something out of nothing and then selling it

  Desire is the very essence of man

  Love is a game that two can play and both win

  God and other artists are always a little obscure

  Colours seen by candlelight will not look the same by day

  The perfection of art is to conceal art

  Art is the most beautiful of all lies

  Lesser artists borrow. Great artists steal

  Dream as if you’ll live forever. Live as if you’ll die today

  About the Author

  Also by Judy Astley

  Copyright

  Other People’s

  Husbands

  Judy Astley

  With much love to my favourite OPH.

  A vast thank you to Katie Fforde and also to Chrissie and Peter Blake, Linda Evans, Alison Barrow and the brilliant Transworld team.

  This book is for all you Good Women who think, no, this would never happen to me. You’re probably right . . . And yet . . . Who knows?

  One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.

  (Oscar Wilde)

  Underwear. Everywhere. Mood lighting, musky scent and the brisk swish-rasp of a satin ribbon bow unfastening . . .

  ‘Sara, Sara! What about this one? Don’t you love it? I love it!’

  Sara looked at the pink lacy basque that Marie was holding in front of her, taken from the saucy-corsetry rail in the Agent Provocateur display. It was the colour of a lightly boiled prawn and in all honesty Marie’s skin tone wasn’t the best match for this crustacean shade. She was freshly spray-tanned courtesy of Tiffany at Spoils Spa and her skin had a strange greenish tinge, a little too literally ‘olive’. Sara hoped for her sake either the colour would settle over the weekend or that this was an unfortunate quirk of the Selfridges lighting. No one, after all, goes to a tanning salon and chooses the shade closest to cowpat on the colour chart.

  Sara tried to picture the basque as Marie’s lover would be viewing it. (Well, lover . . . he wasn’t quite yet but by the end of next week, according to Marie, he certainly would be – as many times over as she could get him primed.) It was an uncomfortably pornographic image and best erased from the brain, but in the interests of being helpful – which was what she was here for – Sara had a go at being objective.

  ‘Um . . . it’s definitely gorgeous, no question. I love the lace and the frilly edge bits but I’m not sure about the colour; isn’t it maybe a bit . . . girly?’

  ‘Girly? Well of course it’s girly!’ Marie squealed. ‘It’s take-no-prisoners seductive underwear, full-on shag-me kit! Which bit of “girly” isn’t appropriate here?’

  Sara hesitated, wondering if replying, ‘The fact that you’re a good many years past girlhood?’ would be cattily unkind, if true. She managed not to. Why burst Marie’s jolly bubble? And where had this negative moment whizzed in from? You didn’t have those about your closest friends . . . did you?

  ‘Sorry – I just meant, well, you know, pink. Pink is a great look if you’re under seven but after that, really, never again unless you’re out with a hen party and doing irony. What’s wrong with good old black? I know it’s a bit clichéd for a seduction scenario but don’t you think it would suit your skin tone better?’

  Marie pouted and looked at her reflection in the mirror. The basque covered about a third of her body width, even allowing for her being fully dressed. ‘If I could just squeeze into it and see . . .’ she murmured, narrowing her eyes and smiling dreamily.

  Sara had a closer look at the pink satin and lace item. ‘And also . . .’ She took it from Marie and felt the structure that would make a brave attempt to haul in Marie’s pillowy midlife body. ‘Isn’t it maybe a tad . . . rigid?’ Still running with the prawn motif, she imagined Angus (the putative lover) unpeeling Marie from the boned and shaped corsetry. It wouldn’t be easy. In spite of the near-permanent low-carb diet, Marie was no lightweight. It would take a fair effort to roll her around to get the thing undone.

  ‘Plus, just a suggestion, on a boringly practical level,’ Sara went on, feeling that although she was several years younger than Marie she was putting more and more of a matronly downer on things. ‘But seeing as it’s the first time you’ll be having sex with him, might it not be an idea to wear something a bit easier to slide out of? You don’t want him to get flustered by having to fumble with fastenings.’

  ‘Lot of “f” words there, sweetie.’ Marie giggled wickedly. ‘And maybe it doesn’t actually have to come off . . .’

  Sara winced, trying to delete another onslaught of mental images, and switched off the lights on the quasiporn scene in her head. Marie looked young, suddenly, she realized; almost teenage. It must be to do with how geed-up she was feeling inside – perhaps there was such a thing as pre- as well as post-orgasmic glow. All those pheromones and the extra adrenaline had to be swishing about and stirring up Marie’s remaining sludge of oestrogen. What a cocktail! If this was a side effect of anticipated illicit passion, why wasn’t everybody at it? Why wasn’t she? In fact she wasn’t at anything in that department since Conrad had gone funny and moved into the studio at the end of the garden. Over the years he’d spent many a night in there; she’d got used to him not coming back into the house after a day’s painting then finding him halfway through the next morning, crashed out on the bed on the upper level, still dressed, having worked till the early hours. But over the past couple of months he’d gradually taken more and more personal possessions in there, slept there almost nightly but turned up as usual in the house every morning as soon as the scent of toast wafted down the garden, as if occupying separate premises was a perfectly normal next stage for a long-haul couple. She hoped this wasn’t an age thing. Perhaps it really was kicking in, this massive difference of twenty-five years between them. She felt discontented and dull. It was a new feeling. During this shopping-for-shagwear trip it was quietly gatecrashing her psyche and slyly making itself at home, like the kind of headache you get when it’s an hour on from the moment you first realized you were hungry but still hadn’t got round to eating more than an unwise piece of cheap chocolate.

  Sara gave the basque back to Marie and from the next rail picked out a hanger on which swung a tiny pair of apple-green silk knickers, edged with a delicate frill of softest tulle. Oh, the bliss and promise of such brief slivers of fabric, she thought with a new deep longing. Oh, to still have a young lithe body on which this would look so right. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to buy this without your first sensibly d
ull consideration being that ribbons that tied at the sides would just look lumpy under your skirt and add inches to the hips; or thinking that with fabric this slippery you’d have to knot them pretty firmly to avoid accidental unfastening and the sudden appearance of your pants at your feet, possibly on the Tube or in the street? For these ribbons you needed youth and grace and an eager, excited man who would unfasten them with his teeth.

  You needed a man with teeth. That was something else. Conrad had developed a terror that all his were about to drop out. ‘One will go; the others will follow it. Teeth are like sheep,’ he’d stated (rather madly) when a bit of walnut had got jammed between two molars. He’d given up muesli after that, closely followed by crusty bread, apples and his favourite ginger biscuits.

  Lucky Marie, Sara thought, surprising herself. Where had that come from? She was supposed to be the staid friend, the (fairly) sensible foil to the mad folly of Marie’s secret love tryst, not heading in the direction of enviously thinking, if only . . .

  ‘You know, Sara, he’ll adore this!’ Marie insisted, still brandishing the basque. ‘Men never get this kind of thing at home – it’s the stuff of all their fantasies! And if I team it with these French knickers . . .’ She reached for another hanger and put the matched items together. ‘Perfect!’ she purred.

  ‘But Marie, how does this thing do up? Oh wow, look at all this . . . !’ Marie had turned the corset round. Sara tweaked at the complicated zigzag of lacing at the back.

  ‘This lot could terrify him!’ she laughed. ‘Poor Angus. I hope he’s not one of those all-thumbs men; he could be playing cat’s cradle with this for hours!’

  ‘Would you like some help with anything today?’ A willowy, pretty girl, no more than twenty and dressed in a short black overall, gave the two women her best professional smile although her eyes had a chill professional glint, as if her true vocation was colonic irrigation rather than corsetry.

  Why do they always say today? Sara wondered. Which other day would be an option?

  ‘I shall try it on,’ Marie said. ‘Maybe with a few others.’

  ‘Oh! Is it for you?’ the assistant said, her eyes widening.

  Sara could see the poor girl was finding it impossible to cover an incredulous jaw-drop moment.

  ‘Well of course it’s for me! Who else?’ Marie snapped. She shook her newly honey-streaked hair back and glared. The girl took a step back, alarmed.

  Sara giggled. What must they look like, these two up-from-the-suburbs women (respectable teachers in the Adult Education sector), collecting heaps of frothy underwear and discussing the practicalities of undressing for illicit sex? Only the day before, Marie had been sitting in Sara’s kitchen asking her if she could spare some foxgloves for the church flowers, and now look: any minute she’d be asking about nipple tassels and technique tips for the successful twirling thereof. Sara could imagine her at the college a week from now, setting a homework project for her Writing for Pleasure class on the subject of ‘Next to the Skin’, to be interpreted as and how.

  The assistant’s smile returned, though warily. ‘Sorry – I just . . . um . . . wondered . . . about sizes. This one’s a Small . . .’ She had a speculative glance up and down Marie’s body. ‘I’ll see what I can find . . .’And she raced off to check her stock.

  ‘You see? This is what he’ll love,’ Marie hissed. ‘The contrast between the outside nice-lady Jaeger-classics me, and my inner Madame Fifi.’

  ‘But he won’t know about your inner Fifi till half your clothes are off,’ Sara pointed out. She was being a party-pooper here and she knew it. She felt bad-tempered and envious, and all the more cross because this feeling had ambushed her from nowhere. She didn’t do cheating. It hadn’t crossed her mind, she’d never given it a thought – other than a mild fancy for Keith Richards – which suddenly seemed to show a lamentable lack of imagination for a woman still in her mid-forties. She had male friends, separate from the ones that were ‘joint’ with Conrad, but only ones that were unquestionably hands-off. They included gay Will who she went to see films with, during which he’d moan about the latest appalling domestic habit of his partner. She sometimes had a lunchtime drink at the pub on the Green with Stuart who taught car maintenance at the Adult College and who dropped off vegetables from his allotment at the house on a weekly basis. He had drunkenly sworn at the college Christmas party that he’d die happy if she’d let him spank her with whippy willow twigs over a fallen tree in the park. Her sex life had been virtuously in-marriage with Conrad for over a quarter of a century, and had resulted in two daughters and a recent grandson.

  The word ‘matriarch’ slid into her mind as she flicked through the fishnet-stockings display, and she pictured herself years down the line as an old lady with a cloud of white hair, presiding over a large family lunch, surrounded by grandchildren, great-grandchildren, sundry partners and in-laws. She gave herself the deep black outfit of a Mediterranean widow (accessorized with a few diamonds), for Conrad would surely be long dead, being so very many years older than her. Would she be the treasured Queen Mother type of dowager, or a dour battleaxe? Battleaxe would be fun for her, less for the rest of her progeny. Her natural inclination was to be generous and friendly, so she hadn’t clocked up the requisite half a lifetime of forthright outspokenness for old troutdom. It would also be hard to be a grumpy trout without Conrad around to back her up.

  ‘You might think it’s all right now while you’re young but it’ll tell, one day, that twenty-five-year age gap. You mark my words,’ her mother had doomily cursed, like the bad fairy at the Sleeping Beauty’s christening, when Sara had announced she would be moving in with her college’s visiting-celebrity lecturer. As it happened, Conrad’s energy level had, until recently, shown few signs of flagging. He’d claimed Sara kept him young, and in all but the years-lived sense he was, being one of those active and beautiful older men. He was not the average golf-and-gardening pensioner, more the Leonard Cohen, Willie Nelson and Robert Redford type. Here and now in this dark and sultry shop-within-a-shop, Sara had her first-ever rebellious suspicion that in spite of everything, perhaps he was somehow making her old.

  The assistant came back clutching an armful of complicated underwear and looked nervous as Marie bounced excitedly away with her into the curtained fitting room, trailing a selection of frills, lace and ribbons. Sara sat on a purple velvet chair and waited, flicking through a catalogue in which too-skinny, long-legged women pouted and smouldered, looking sulky and a trifle bored, posed with leather paddles, jewel-handled whips and, for reasons possibly only fathomable to the photo shoot’s stylist, a lot of tiny fluffy dogs. Sexy it really wasn’t, though the clothes were undeniably gorgeous. How would it feel, she idly wondered, to wander round Sainsbury’s knowing that under some very unremarkable day-to-day clothes you wore knickers that this brochure coyly described as ‘ouverte’? Would the check-out girl think you were loopy for standing there with a dopey look of amused knowingness on your face? Probably. As you pushed your trolleyload away, she’d catch the eye of her companion on the adjacent till, tap her head with a finger and comment, ‘Hormones, Maureen,’ in a whisper just loud enough for you to catch.

  ‘Owwwwwww!’ came from behind the padded-silk curtain, followed by ‘Ooomph!’ After a few silent moments, Marie’s face emerged and she hissed, ‘Sara! Over here! Come and tell me what you think!’

  ‘Do I have to?’ Sara laughed, changing places with the assistant, who scuttled out of the lilac-satin-lined cubicle with grateful haste.

  ‘Well?’ Marie stood with her hands on her hips, peering curiously at her own reflection as if there was something she couldn’t quite understand about it. The corset had done its job – Marie’s loose, well-spread middle was hauled in and tamed and the laces at the back were firmly knotted. Her breasts threatened to spill over the top and her cleavage was a mighty canyon. The effect was, Sara thought, pretty magnificent. The lighting was better in here, too – the hint of olive had softened and Marie�
��s skin glowed a sun-smoothed pinky-brown.

  ‘I look ridiculous, don’t I?’ Marie sniffed, her eyes filling. ‘What the fuck do I think I’m playing at?’

  ‘Actually, I think you look completely amazing,’ Sara told her truthfully, giving her an affectionate squeeze.

  ‘That salesgirl thinks I’m a total idiot. I bet she thinks sex should be illegal for anyone over thirty. I half want to say to her, “You wait, girl, it doesn’t just go away, you know,” ‘ Marie said, casually using a pair of black satin knickers to wipe a spilled tear from her face. She realized what she’d done, met Sara’s eye in the mirror and the two of them broke into laughter, which immediately turned into the kind of full-scale schoolgirl hysteria that threatened to be completely unstoppable.

  ‘Oh quick, Sara! Loosen this damn thing!’ Marie gasped through the hilarity. ‘I can’t breathe!’

  ‘I can’t – she’s knotted it!’ Sara said, fumbling with the ties. ‘Heavens, do you think Scarlett O’Hara had this trouble?’

  ‘All right for her, wasn’t it?’ Marie puffed. ‘She had a well-practised servant to lace her in and out of her stays . . .’

  ‘Yep. That’s the answer – you need the faithful Mamie, squeezing you down to a sixteen-inch waist.’ Sara tugged at the cords, at last finding a tiny bit of give in a knot.

  Marie shrieked, ‘Sixteen! My waist was born bigger than that!’

  ‘Well, this sort of settles it, surely?’ Sara said, as at last Marie’s flesh tumbled free, already livid-lined and pinched from its confinement. ‘I mean, how would you get the thing on to go and meet Angus if you don’t have someone to do your laces up? You can hardly ask Mike. That would go beyond a husband’s marital duty, wouldn’t it? To help his wife dress in porn-star underwear to meet her lover.. . ?’

  ‘He’d be very good at it, though,’ Marie mused as she put her own comfy black bra on again. ‘But it would take him hours, because he’d want to get each bit of the lacing perfectly even. He’d probably use a spirit level. No, I’m buying this. It’s got hooks as well. Maybe I can put it on backwards, do them up then swivel it round and get in properly. But even if I can’t, even if I just look at it now and then in the drawer, I’m having it. It’ll remind me. Whatever goes right or wrong with Angus on Tuesday, I’ll want something to make me smile.’