How to Kill Your Husband (and other handy household hints) by Kathy Lette (top 10 novels to read TXT) 📗

No doubt this was why Hannah had the fat taken from her buttocks and injected into her lips because ‘kissing ass’ was part of her job.

I wished Rory was with me for support, but he hated modern art. He refused to come and look at dead sharks in formaldehyde. He felt that a dead shark was not an objet d’art, but a mouldy fish finger.

Unaccustomed to wearing pointy high heels, I minced painfully around the party, looking for Jazz. ‘The work speaks to the inner beast, yes?’ a man in a dress asked me. Help! I had to find Jazz and fast, if only because I was the only guest not fluent in designese.

Jazz was sitting on the stairs in a funereal cocktail dress, her long hair loose, nursing a glass of chardonnay and pretending to smoke a cigarette for HRT patch camouflage.

‘Sorry I’m late, darl. What happened? Did you have a mammogram? How was it?’ I perched on the stair below her.

‘Well, they squash your tits into a blender until your brain erupts through your ears, but it’s no worse, painwise, than your average divorce.’

A comment like that should be stepped around as carefully as a dozing anaconda. ‘But what did the doctor find? What did she say?’

‘She found a lump, which looked malignant. I had the biopsy straight away, because of my history,’ she said flatly. ‘Results in a week.’

‘Oh God. It’s bound to be nothing, Jazz. It’s probably just a cyst.’ I sounded calm but my heart was thudding against my Wonderbra. ‘Did Studz go with you?’

‘No. He had another lump in mind. That lump of land in the bloated midriff of Europe solely interested in the pursuit of Michelin starred extramarital affairs, otherwise known as France.’

She’d obviously had plenty of time to work on that line in the hospital. I squeezed her leg sympathetically. ‘I would have gone with you for the mammogram, love.’

She shrugged. ‘Silly me. I thought he’d realize at the last minute that his wife is more important than a meeting at UNESCO. It’s no wonder I’ve contracted cancer really. Except for playing with asbestos, there’s no greater health hazard than an unhappy marriage.’

I was groping for a reply when Hannah swanned past. She was blending into the background, as usual, in an orange velvet dress and a turquoise turban. ‘Oh, there you are, you two!’ She rested one Jimmy Choo on the bottom stair and looked us up and down. ‘Cassandra, how little you must think of yourself to buy shmatte like that when I keep offering you my cast-offs,’ she said. Hannah’s motto is If the dress fits, buy it in at least four colours. ‘Where’s Studz?’

‘Addressing UNESCO. Allegedly. He’s coming straight here from Waterloo Station.’

‘That man will work himself to death.’

Jazz shrugged one delicate, bare shoulder. ‘Oh well. We’ve all got to die sometime.’

I gave Hannah a ‘shut up’ look.

‘What?’ she mouthed at me. ‘What did I say?’ But she was looking up at us with such rumpled perplexity that Jazz just burst out laughing.

‘I’ve had a lumpectomy,’ she announced. ‘And I’m divorcing my husband.’

If Hannah could have raised a brow, I’m sure she would have, but being Botoxed, all we got was a tiny flutter of lashes to show her distress.

‘A lump? Fuck. Well, do you really think you should be smoking?’ Hannah snatched the cigarette Jazz was pretending to puff and put it in an ashtray. ‘And Divorce? You can’t possibly divorce. What about Josh? What kind of role model will that make you?’

Jazz defiantly lit up another fag. ‘Being a role model for your teenagers takes all the fun out of middle age, don’t you think?’

Hannah placed her perfectly painted hands on her Atkins-dieted hips. ‘My parents divorced when I was in Kindergarten, but anyway, enough about why I bit my nails till they bled until I was, oh, twenty-fucking-seven.’

‘Look, sweetie,’ Jazz amended, ‘I didn’t believe in divorce either – until I got married.’

‘Anyone can divorce. Lasting is the hard thing,’ Hannah lectured. ‘I’m sure Studz is just having a little midlife crisis, dah-ling. Can’t you keep an open mind until he gets over it?’

‘My mind hasn’t been open, it’s been vacant. I’ve had enough of the small humiliations, Hannah,’ Jazz explained, her voice a miserable whisper. ‘I think, therefore I’m divorced.’

‘Speaking of which . . .’ I nodded in the direction of the door. Jazz’s dashingly handsome husband had just swept into the gallery, briefcase and black leather coat in hand. He glittered. He shone. He outblazed the chandeliers. The room was full of models thin as skittles. And it was Dr Studlands who bowled them over. Women were leaping onto him as though he were the last helicopter out of Saigon.

For a moment Jazz put on her Madame Defarge face, as she watched, gimlet-eyed, from the sidelines. Then her expression cracked and she abruptly turned her back. ‘I’m so sick of watching my husband parade around like some Medieval King taking his pick of fertile maidens.’

Hannah’s ring-encrusted hand was on her arm, reassuringly. ‘When do you get the biopsy results?’

‘End of the week.’

‘Let’s deal with that before you undergo any marital chemo,’ I suggested kindly. ‘Okay?’

‘Yes. Don’t do anything till then, dah-ling. We need to talk it through,’ Hannah advised.

So talk we did. We talked so much our lips lost weight. It was like facial aerobics. The Talkins Diet.

We talked in the loo queue at a West End theatre with its usual combination of 250 desperate women and two backed-up toilets.

‘But why divorce?’ Hannah was putting on red lipstick expertly without the aid of a mirror.

‘Because, sadly, the use of the hemlock-poisoned chalice seems to have died out in modern marriage,’ Jazz said facetiously.

‘Does his infidelity really matter when you have so much else?’ Hannah wanted to know.

It struck me as extraordinary that wives consider a husband staying faithful a far greater achievement than, say, a cure for whooping cough.

‘Pascal predicts a return to nineteenth-century values. Fidelité et séduction, he calls it,’ she continued. ‘Pleasing and charming