By Guy D. Garcia

It appears to have been--small cough behind back of the hand--a family affair. In the pre-Reagan-Thatcher days, Britain's Ambassador to the U.S., Peter Jay, and his wife Margaret were the toast of the New York-Washington social circuit. Then came Mrs. Jay's more or less public affair with Watergate Heavyweight Carl Bernstein, subsequently chronicled with gusto by his former wife Nora Ephron, 42, in the bestselling Heartburn. Now it develops that while Ephron was turning to a novel to get satisfaction, Jay was turning elsewhere. Last week, Jane Tustian, 33, live-in nanny to the three Jay children for eleven years, publicly charged that Peter is the father of her son Nicholas, 3, and she is demanding child support. Jay, 46, has agreed to a blood test and has let it be known that even if Nicholas is not his son, he "will still wish to take a benevolent interest in his future, as he is fond of the child." Awfully diplomatic, that.

"Gentle bodybuilding. . . Passive insistence." That is not an ad slogan from Gandhi's Nonviolent Health Spa. It's the muscle-making motto of Raquel Welch, 43, who last week finished writing her entry into the bulging exercise-book market. "This was the first time I was able to say something firsthand," explains Welch, who spent a year collaborating with Husband-Photographer Andre Weinfeld, 37, on Raquel's Health and Beauty Book. "We didn't want the drill-instructor look--I think the pictures should be inspirational." Indeed. This is one time when the medium should be every bit as attractive as the message.

"We're all eccentrics. We're nine prima donnas." The New York Yankees? No, according to Justice Harry Blackmun, 75, the members of the U.S. Supreme Court. Blackmun made that and a number of other engagingly informal observations about his colleagues last week during a three-day visit to Dartmouth College. "One of us we call 'the warden's friend' because he always votes against the poor prisoner who wants to get out," he told an audience of students, faculty and the public. Another is " 'the pornographer's friend' because he's a First Amendment absolutist." In a more serious vein, Blackmun defended the controversial 1973 decision he wrote upholding the right to abortion. Said he: "Whether it stands forever or not, it at least cut a vast swath on the way toward independence for women."

"The wages of sin is death," says the Good Book, and "the gift of God is eternal life." But the wages of sin last week seemed to be the gift of Greeley. Priest-Author Andrew Greeley, 55, has long been a gadfly in the ointment of the Roman Catholic Church, and he hardly improved matters when he started writing novels (The Cardinal Sins, Thy Brother's Wife) luridly laced with most of the seven deadly ones. Now he has taken royalties from his books and pledged $1.25 million to establish a chair in Catholic studies at the University of Chicago, where he once taught in the sociology department. "Most of my life as a priest I've tried to be a bridge between church and university and failed," says Greeley. "I wrote novels as a lark, and the lark has been a success. So I'm using the money from the lark to do what I failed to do. That's marvelously ironic."

The fruitless search for the holder of the lucky ticket had become a national obsession. Last week, nine days after the winning six numbers in Canada's interprovincial lottery were announced, the country's jackpot fever finally broke as Stuart Kelly, 57, and his wife Lillian, 54, stepped forward in Toronto to claim the largest lottery prize ever won in North America, a tax-free check for $13,890,588.80 (or more than $11 million U.S.). The Kellys had spent the previous week doing "a lot of sweating" with their lawyer as they tried to figure out what to do with so much loot. By the time the couple surfaced, they had already bought a new Oldsmobile, planned on getting a new house and quit their jobs (he was a $320-a-week truck driver, she a $150-a-week dry-cleaning attendant). The rest would go to relatives, traveling and charities. Uh, Dear Mr. and Mrs. Kelly: You might be interested in learning more about this deserving writer currently employed in the scintillating but underpaid field of journalism whose byline is... --By Guy D. Garcia