Heavenly jockeys, splitting trousers and plenty of Pinot Grigio – Imogen Lycett Green enjoys a breathless lunch in the Cotswolds with Jilly Cooper
Two hours earlier she had rushed, panting, into the Crown Inn in Frampton Mansell. ‘I am SO SORRY I am late!’ she said, falling into the fire-smoky bar wearing leggings, knee-length brown boots, a white shirt and a belt that looks like a piece of horse tack. Sexy is the only word for it. Her instantly recognisable helmet/halo of thick grey hair frames her round, rosy-cheeked face. She is wearing a silver brooch of a galloping racehorse.
‘How are you?’ she says to the young barman. ‘I’m good,’ he replies. Jilly is thrilled. ‘I love the way the younger generation say I’m good. It’s such a misnomer. I’m sure you’ll be behaving badly the minute you get home.’ He blushes and lopes off to fetch the Pinot Grigio. Jilly is flustered from managing a conference call that morning with the American producers of a mini-series of one of her books. Her rescue greyhound Feather had run back from the woods and appeared squeaking and scraping with his paws at the window in the middle of the call. ‘They’d say, now what about the dialogue, and he’d go, scrape, scrape.’ Jilly has a tendency to explain her life as a series of embarrassing moments (like splitting the au pair’s trousers that she had borrowed without asking). She is habitually apologetic.
‘I can’t cook,’ she says. ‘No, no I’m hopeless. My father, who was so glamorous, he worked in the war office and he would finish his lunch and get up, and the subalterns in the mess would look at their watches and say, ‘One minute, 33 seconds today.’ He would eat anything. Dog biscuits. I love food, but I don’t grumble in restaurants a lot. Do you?’ She talks in quick, breathless rushes of enthusiasm. Things are ‘transfixing with interest’ (her long-married friend became a lesbian), ‘heaven’ (jockeys) or ‘bankrupting’ (school fees). When the wine arrives she is delighted. ‘First drink I’ve had in three days. I’m trying to pace myself.’
Jilly is working on a new novel about flat racing. ‘Only I’ve got writer’s block. So I’m watching lots of racing on the telly and making notes.’ The familiar cast members will reappear. ‘I don’t want Rupert to stray,’ says Jilly of her famous protagonist Rupert Campbell-Black, enduring lothario turned doting husband. ‘Do you? But I think he might. I don’t see why he hasn’t, because he was always so lecherous.’
She tries to concentrate on the menu. ‘I love fishcakes. Why are they always GARDEN peas? Where else are they going to come from?’ There aren’t any fishcakes so we order lamb: the barman comes back with the food and Jilly
asks him mischievously if he’s still good. We have another glass of Pinot Grigio. ‘Wine. I like a lot of it but I don’t worry about the label,’ she says.
The lamb left over from lunch is wrapped in tin foil for Feather and I find myself giving Jilly a lift back to her house in Bisley, Gloucestershire. As I drive her home we get lost wiggling through one perfect Cotswold village after another. She giggles: ‘I had a boyfriend once who said no fuckable woman can ever read a map.’
Finally, we find her mellow stone chantry perched on the hillside looking over a winding valley. Jilly Cooper has lived here with Leo for 30 years. He now has Parkinson’s disease and they live with round-the-clock helpers. ‘He’s wonderful. But it’s difficult. It breaks your heart.’ Looking after a sick partner is a lonely business, and an expensive one. Her novels bring in the bacon. ‘There’s where I write,’ she says, pointing across the lawn to a stone folly with windows looking over the valley. ‘It’s absolute heaven.’
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