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

teaching hospital as a consultant. The family’s luxurious lifestyle is financed by his private practice in cosmetic surgery. (‘You’re a neurotic time-wasting narcissist. However, if you want to consult me privately, just lie back and open your chequebook wide.’)

To absolve his conscience for operating on people who don’t need it, Studz regularly takes unpaid leave to work on medical ships which sail around Africa, providing free surgical treatment to war victims. He talent-scouts doctors for aid organizations and is famous for advising his junior registrars to do six months’ volunteer work with Médecins Sans Frontières for the sake of their souls. He also donates his time to the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of War and is an expert adviser to the World Health Organisation. Yep, the man has already been summoned to Buckingham Palace for a halo fitting. And it was in honour of this altruistic part of his nature that Jasmine Jardine, our very own scintillating and saucy It Girl on campus, carved his name into her headboard.

Jazz had actually wanted to cancel the wedding anniversary party, as her mother had died, after a protracted battle with breast cancer, just before Christmas. However, Studz had insisted the celebration go ahead. Hannah and I hoped that this bash would be our friend’s passport out of her state of grief. To achieve this, it was our job to make sure there was no mention of the dreaded ‘C’ word.

It was 8 p.m. and I was running late. Hannah had ordered me to look chic – which for me means employing a special effects movie stunt team, since the dress code for female teachers, in case you hadn’t noticed, is flat shoes and ‘interesting’ earrings. My shambolic clothes are usually missing buttons, always trailing hems, and are often Rory’s. I base my daily fashion sense on what doesn’t need ironing. Jasmine has looks which turn heads. Mine turns stomachs. You think I’m exaggerating? Lately I’ve taken to wearing shell suits – and not because I like to put them to my ear to listen for the Atlantic, either.

When we met, Jazz used to say that I was the classic ‘girl next door’ – attractive enough to be special, but not pretty enough to be hated by other women. However, I didn’t care if I was pretty or not because, meeting Rory, I was beautiful at last. Nearly two decades later, I would have to say that I still look good from a distance . . . a distance of, say, 200 miles. So what happened?

Motherhood, that’s what. As a girl, I hated exposing my scrawny limbs. The day I got married I weighed seven and a half stone. A few years later I was in Top Shop, hyperventilating as I tried to pull a pair of size 10 jeans up over my hips. I looked in the mirror and there was my mother – all small boobs and big bum.

When did I pass nine stone? I’d meant to go to the gym after the baby was born, but who would look after him? Being at home so much in my pyjamas meant that pretty soon I was pregnant again. Now that my kids Jenny, eleven and Jamie, thirteen, are older I could go to the gym but, as a working mum, it’s amazing that I have the energy to turn on the microwave to defrost the store-bought dinner. And kids are so calorific. As you cook their tea, leftovers just get hoovered up into your mouth – sausages drenched in ketchup, buttery mashed potatoes, ice cream left melting in bowls, all so sensationally slimming. Well, you can’t waste it, can you? So you store it on your waist. Luckily I adore my mother, which is fortunate, seeing as I’ve become her!

When I was finally ready to go to the party, dressed in an M&S pre-baby trouser suit, with the trousers pinned together beneath the long-ish jacket, I noticed that my hair was moving. It seemed to be waving at me from the mirror. Oh God. Nits. An occupational hazard of teaching in a primary school. My choices were to run through the streets ringing a bell, shouting, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ and perhaps painting a big X on the door, or, a less Dickensian option, to Chernobyl my scalp with chemicals. Which I did. The only way a nit could survive in there now was in a flame-retardant wetsuit and an aqualung. I was no longer contagious, but I don’t think ‘chic’ quite covered it.

As Rory angled his beaten-up Jeep, reeking of dog piss and guinea pig poo, into an illegal parking spot half on the pavement outside Jazz and David’s Georgian Hampstead home, I looked through the bay windows and could see all sorts of chic people who didn’t have nits, boiling around the drawing room. We could hear the jumbled roar of their exclusive badinage, punctuated by men laughing smuttily. My husband did his Lamb-to-the-Slaughter look.

‘Shit. Jazz and Studz have become the Edmund Hillarys of social climbing. You know I have no head for heights, Cassie. We’d better rope ourselves together in case one of us falls.’

Jazz and Studz were what the papers called a ‘power couple’. They were plugged into the right social socket. Although it was mid-January, the Prime Minister’s personal Christmas card would still be up on the mantelpiece, next to one from Kofi Annan and, no doubt, Nelson Mandela. The most chichi card on my mantelpiece, came from the local dry cleaners to thank me for my custom.

Champagne flûte in hand, Hannah Wolfe answered the door. A quicksilver woman with dark, glassy eyes like those of a doll, she has a soft knob of a nose, a red helmet of hair, eyebrows plucked into two sceptical arches, a granulated voice and opinions as strong as her trademark espressos. She speaks three languages in the same rapid-fire South African Jewish accent and has an endearing bark of a laugh. Hannah is approaching forty, but from the wrong direction.