How to Kill Your Husband (and other handy household hints), Kathy Lette [books to read to increase intelligence .txt] 📗

I warned her that my husband Rory thinks a thwack with a tea towel is the best defence. While I, on the other hand, would prefer a SWAT response team.

But nothing would put her off. She was in Miss Marple mode.

The upside was that for an entire week I got what I’d always wanted. A wife. While I was at school teaching, Jazz cleaned my ramshackle little Kilburn terraced house. She corralled various escaped canines, shopped for food, did the laundry and cooked the most spectacular dinners. Whereas Jazz serves vintage champagne in crystal glasses, at my place you’ll be lucky to get some leftover cooking wine in a recycled jam jar with dinosaurs running around it and the label half-peeled off. The kids call my evening meals YMCA dinners – Yesterday’s Muck Cooked Again.

She also helped Jamie and Jenny with their homework – a task which sends me into a coma. While I adore my kids with a primal passion, I actually got morning sickness after they were born.

Kids are like desktop computers. You have no idea how much assembling is required until it’s at home in pieces on the study floor and you and your husband are screaming at each other about whose idea it was to get one in the first place. Parents, on the other hand, are so simple that even a kid can operate them. My kids have been running rings around me since they were born.

Anyway, the calm Jazz brought to my chaotic home was a small price to pay for a little light stalking. Or so I thought at the time . . .

At first it seemed almost a lark. As I slid into Jazz’s Hertz rental car outside my school gate after a late staff meeting, I noticed she’d dressed for the occasion in all black with a Beanie hat, and had swapped her regulation high-rise heels for some sturdy trainers. She held up her foot. ‘Lesbian shoes, sweetie. Very comfy, actually. No wonder dykes look so happy.’

‘Do you really think this is worth it, Jazz? I do have thirty English compositions to mark.’ I like teaching. Yes, I know, I’ve obviously been working with glue for way too long. And with a promotion on the cards, I really needed to put in the extra effort.

‘Do you know what they call a woman who knows where her husband is every night? A widow,’ Jazz retorted and floored the accelerator.

Winter had come violently. For the whole of January there’d been nothing but this thick, low, leaden sky. London was as cold as a giant meat locker. It had been so bleak that the entire population of Britain was online, chasing availability of last-minute flights to the Canary Islands.

We trailed Studz from his gym in Marylebone to a cabinet minister’s cocktail party, then on to a fundraising banquet for the starving of the Sudan at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

The museum mausoleums on Cromwell Road looked even grimmer beneath the clotted night sky. Jazz and I sat shivering, our faces mashed up against the side windows of the car, me correcting English homework by the glow from the cigarette lighter (‘A conjunction is the place where two railway lines meet’) and blowing smoke rings of our breath in the icy air as we ate something from a fast-food vendor; it couldn’t technically be classified as food, but at least it was hot. Just when I had become so cold I thought it was time to amputate my extremities, Studz sprang agilely down the museum’s marble steps and Jazz fired the engine.

‘Maybe he is telling the truth,’ I ventured to my friend as we tailed him towards Hampstead. ‘He’s nearly home.’ I yawned. ‘Can we call it quits now?’ I still had an hour’s marking to do. (Q: What is grammar? A: Grammar is how to talk good and stuff.) And I was desperate for a pee.

Finally even Jazz was ready to admit defeat. ‘Okay, Cass. Maybe I was over-reacting.’

We were just about to abandon the chase, when Studz hung a suicide right off Haverstock Hill and headed back down towards Camden. Our hire car juddered around the corner after him on two wheels. The upside of being female undercover agents is that you can hang onto a car seat using labia suction. After I’d recovered from this heart-stopping manoeuvre, we stooged around looking for his car, before finally spotting it idling, kerbside, outside a row of snaggle-toothed tenements decayed with age and leaning erratically.

Studz was on his mobile phone, engine still running, when a young woman in a brightly-coloured poncho strode from the fluorescent foyer of a block of council flats, phone to ear, and vaulted energetically into his passenger seat.

Jazz lurched forward, fingers gripping the dashboard as though on a white-knuckle ride at a funfair. ‘It’s Phillippa. She researches for him.’

‘Maybe he’s just got something for her to research,’ I hazarded, but anxiety was skittering through my belly. ‘If it makes you feel any better, only about seven females in the world look good in a poncho. And they’re all under nine years old – or Nomads tending their yaks.’

But Jazz was in no mood to banter. We followed unobtrusively, and in silence, as he drove Phillippa to the marital home. We watched, from two houses back, as he led the young woman inside.

It was midnight. London lay grey as a graveyard. Dark clouds sloshed across the bruised sky. The smoke of our breath steamed. A single light appeared in the master bedroom.

And, soon afterwards, it went out.

Despite the fact that we were on a covert operation, Jazz emitted a howl loud enough to be heard in one of those base camps in Antarctica. Something seemed to crack open inside her. This was open-heart surgery. There she sat sobbing, with this gaping wound. Is there a doctor in the house? Ah yes, but he was showing off his bedside manner to another woman at the precise moment that