Bad Heir Day (17 page)

There was a crash. Waiters rushed to the scene as Anna fled in the opposite direction, leaving a trail of the glasses she had swept from the table as she leapt up. She was conscious both of Jamie’s concerned stare and the laser hatred of the bachelorette party as she rushed headlong down the tiled staircase beneath the lanterns, past the fountain, and into the sheltering space of the lavatory cubicle. Hanging over the shining enamel hole, she realised she didn’t want to be sick after all. It was exultation rushing up her throat, not half-digested couscous.

Suddenly, the mobile in her pocket buzzed. “Half-time team talk,” hissed Geri. “Decided whether you’re going to shag him or not?”

“I’m not sure,” Anna said slowly, “that I’m going to have to bother. Yet, at any rate.”

***

The next day was Sunday, yet Anna and an unusually grumpy Geri were drinking coffee together as usual. Operabugs, the junior appreciation society designed to ensure St. Midas’s pupils shone in the corporate Covent Garden boxes of the future, had been moved to Sundays, there no longer being space on the weekday timetables to give it the attention it was felt it deserved. Puccini was currently under the microscope, and “One Fine Day” was pouring out of the St. Midas’s windows into Cassandra’s rain-spattered minivan, where Geri and Anna sat like a couple of Bank Holiday coach drivers awaiting their cargo of pensioners. Their usual café being closed, they cradled plastic cups of distinctly inferior coffee from a fourth-rate builders’ café round the corner and watched the rain run down the windscreen.

“Geri,” said Anna after another silence had elapsed, “how long do I have to hold my cup like this before…”

“Omigod!” Geri, beside her, shot upright on the seat, her eyeballs large, rigid with excitement and clamped, mesmerised and unwavering, on the vast and glittering gem on Anna’s finger. “
Christ
.
It’s colossal. That’s
incredible
.
I mean, from what you said when I called you, that you weren’t going to sleep with him, I thought the whole thing was off. Was quite cross, actually.” Geri suddenly grinned at her. “After all the advice I gave you and everything…”

So that explained the grump. Anna pressed her hand. “Well, I couldn’t have done it without you. You were brilliant.”

“So, can I be bridesmaid?”

Anna smiled at her nervously. “Course you can. But the wedding date’s not set yet—I’m supposed to be moving up to Scotland with him and sorting it out from there.”

“When are you going?” Geri’s face suddenly fell. “I’ll miss you.”

“And I you.” Anna squeezed her hand.

“So what happens next?” asked Geri, her eyes darting back and forth in wonderment from Anna’s face to her finger.

Anna felt a tremor of fear course through her intestines. The wedding, certainly, was an intimidating prospect. In the back of her mind was the worry that she had not done the right thing by accepting, that she had allowed herself to be carried along on a tide of reckless romance at the expense of common sense. But it wasn’t this that had caused the tremor. Geri, Anna knew, would shoot down her doubts in a few emphatic and eloquent sentences. The fear was caused by something else altogether.

“Well,” Anna said slowly, “I suppose I’d better tell Cassandra.”

***

“Zak! ZA-AA-AAK!” Having scanned the envelope’s contents, Cassandra had bounded up the stairs two at a time, oblivious for once of the damage the Gucci spikes inflicted on the treads, and burst into his nursery to find her son slinging what looked like a dressing-gown cord over the hook on the back of the door. The vague, dreadful suspicion of what he might be up to—she, like all the other mothers, had read the reports of the Eton Strangling Game—stirred in Cassandra’s mind but there was no time for that now. Besides, everyone knew that dicing with death one way or another, be it sadistic prefects, capital punishment, or initiation rites involving everything from buggery to bogflushing, was an occupational hazard at public schools. It was part of what you paid for.

“What the hell is all this about?” she shrieked, waving the letter with the St. Midas’s crest at Zak whose spoilt face faded from pampered pink to haunted grey. He had never seen his mother so angry. He had never, for that matter, seen her angry at all.

“It says here,” Cassandra said in the low, dead voice of one forced to accept that their profoundest fears have become reality, “that you failed the mid-term exams.
How has this happened
?”
Cassandra’s voice sank to the agonised whisper of Macbeth at the point it dawns on him that life’s but a walking shadow. “It says here that you failed at
drawing
.
How
could
you? After all that
work
I put in. I spent
weeks
showing you how to do a triangle…” Tears rose in her eyes.

Zak nodded, his eyes slits beneath his thick blond-and-honey-striped fringe.

“So why the hell
didn’t
you draw a triangle?”

“Because,” Zak said contemptuously, “they wanted me to draw a
circle
in the exam.”

Cassandra howled, smacked her head with the base of her palm, and waved the letter again. “And apparently you were asked to draw a woman.”

Zak nodded. “I
did
.”

“But you drew one
with one leg
.”

Zak sniggered. Cassandra glared at him, torn between murderous fury and blind despair. Then, most unexpectedly, an idea occurred to her. Her fury with her son evaporated as she weighed up the worth of her inspiration. It really was a good one, Cassandra thought. Rather
brilliant
,
actually. She tottered to the telephone and dialled the school’s number.

“But Mrs. Gosschalk, did Zak not tell you about my
amputation
…?”

Five minutes later, Cassandra put the phone down, her face magenta with fury. Not only had Mrs. Gosschalk not believed her—Cassandra could tell from her tone of voice, despite the sympathetic noises, although, come to think of it, they had not been
that
sympathetic—but she had mentioned The Party. Cassandra had cherished the wild hope that Zak’s behaviour at Savannah and Siena’s birthday had been brushed under the sisal—after all, it had not been mentioned since. The reason for this, it now turned out, was because the school—which took a keen interest in its pupils’ behaviour both on and off the premises—had been deliberating on what action to take. It had, Mrs. Gosschalk had just informed Cassandra, decided to hold a kangaroo court on Zak’s future at St. Midas’s, at which the entire SMSPA (apart from Cassandra) would be present. She would, Gosschalk had said, be informed of the results of its deliberations in due course. Cassandra’s blood boiled. That
bloody
Fenella Greatorex would be sitting in judgement on
her
.
A woman whose property was at best borderline where the St. Midas’s catchment area was concerned. Borderline in every other respect as well. The
humiliation
of it.

Things, Cassandra thought, could not get any worse this morning. But that was before Anna dropped her bombshell.

“
What
?” Only her spike heels, anchored firmly if ruinously in the kitchen floor, stopped Cassandra from collapsing. She glared at Anna with blazing loathing. “
What
the
fuck
did you just say?”

“Jamie says he doesn’t want to take you up on the dinner party. He just, um, wanted to make, um, a donation to St. Midas’s.” Anna, feeling the hatred burning into her like a laser, paused.

“No, not that,” Cassandra snapped. “The
other
thing you said.”

Anna swallowed. “And, um, he’s asked me to marry him.”

“Oh my
God
.
I’ve got to sit down.” Cassandra collapsed dramatically into a chair and stared at the delta of thin blue veins in the heel of her hand. Should she end it all now?

“
Give me air
,”
she yelled at Anna as she fired up a Full Strength Ultratar. Hot tears began to flow over her foundation like lava over the cragged face of Etna. Her mascara—part of a new range called Rock Star she was celebrity test-driving for one of the few glossy magazines still aware she existed—began to run in black streams down her face.

“So I’m afraid I’ll have to be leaving rather sooner than I had planned,” Anna muttered. She genuinely felt almost apologetic. She’d seen earthquaked cities look less devastated than Cassandra at that moment. “Jamie wants me to move up to Scotland with him.”

***

Anna spent her last night in Liv hearing Cassandra and Jett screaming more violently at each other than they ever had before. Unable to sleep, she was red-eyed and exhausted when Jamie came round in the morning to pick her up in a hire car specially rented for the occasion. Doubtless he had thought, Anna realised as, embarrassed, she stuffed her one piece of luggage into the boot, that she had slightly more possessions than was the case. Or even the rucksack. “What time will we arrive at Dampie?” she asked him, over-brightly, as they headed up through Hampstead.

“Oh, about midnight, I should think.” At least, Anna thought, he knew his way there; there would be no repeat of Seb’s cold fury at her inability to tell right from left.

“We’ll be starving.”

“Don’t worry. Nanny will have left something for us to eat.”

“
Nanny
?”
Anna shot upright in her seat. “You’ve still got a
nanny
?
You never mentioned
her
before.”

“Oh, didn’t I?” Did Jamie sound over-casual? “She still lives at Dampie. She’s, um, well, sort of the housekeeper now—been in the family forever.
Great
old character. You’ll
love
her.”

There was a silence as Anna tried to suppress a sense of rising panic. She gazed out of the window, unseeing, as Golders Green flashed past.

“What’s Nanny like?” she asked, as they turned on to the M1.

“Mm?” Jamie was absorbed in indicating to move into the middle lane.

“
Nanny
,” repeated Anna. “Tell me about her.”

Jamie didn’t miss a beat. “Oh, Nanny. She’s wonderful. You’ll love her. Actually,” he added smoothly, “you might find her quite useful as well. Thought you could talk to her about the wedding. Organising it and all that…Nanny’s very good at organising things.”

It was a while before Anna spoke again.

“Are you very close to her?” she eventually asked, choosing her words carefully.

“Well, she looked after me after my parents died. Used to knit me scratchy jerseys.” Jamie laughed fondly as they sailed past Northampton. “Still does, as a matter of fact. Bright yellow. Keeps the fleas off, she says.”

“
Fleas
?”

“And always a bit tight,” Jamie continued.

“What? Gin?” Not another alcoholic, Anna hoped. Cassandra had been bad enough. But bad enough, thankfully, to still be in bed when they left.

Jamie’s shocked jerk sent the car spinning into the fast lane. Quickly, he pulled it back into the centre of the middle lane. “God, no. Nanny never drinks. She knitted the jerseys a bit tight, I mean. She’s always been a bit funny about clothes. She thinks T-shirts are very scruffy and once drew a collar and tie on a picture of me in one. I looked rather strange beside the rest of the school cross-country running team.” He grinned uncertainly at her across the handbrake. “But I’m sure you girls will have a wonderful time planning the wedding.”

Girls
.
Even at best, Nanny would hardly qualify as a twenty-something. Difficult to imagine giggling over the wedding dress with a white-haired pensioner, however twinkling the eyes, apple-like the cheeks, and benevolent the smile.

“Did she spoil you?” If Nanny was generous, that at least would be something. They could giggle over the lavish menu and champagne instead.

“S
poil me
?”
Another amazed swerve. “Oh no. Nanny was
very
firm. She thought running water was immoral and used to make me break the ice on the horse troughs before I could wash. Even in summer. And long after we’d stopped using horses.”

As far as Nanny was concerned, Anna quickly decided, what remaining ignorance there was bliss. She made no further enquiries and spent the rest of the journey either dozing or listening to Jamie describe the various repairs to the castle he had planned. From what he said, the place seemed to be falling apart; the weather since she had been there must have been appalling. She didn’t remember it being so bad at Thoby’s wedding. Although, come to think of it, it had been a bit cloudy.

By the time they reached Dampie, Anna realised there was a lot she didn’t remember from Thoby’s wedding. Such as the drive being a moonscape of yawning holes with the castle itself lurking glumly at the end in a cloak of swirling mist. The moss-slimed steps leading to the cracked and peeling front door had also slipped her memory. Indeed, so far was Dampie from being the Disneyland palace of light she remembered that Anna wondered if the wedding had been somewhere else altogether.

Anna gripped Jamie’s hand tightly and tried not to shudder as something unimaginably ancient opened the door and thrust a battered, kerosene-scented lantern almost in their faces. The light blazed on the brimming red rims of the creature’s rheumy eyeballs and caught the slimy stumps of its teeth. Flecks of phlegm were speared on the unshaven wastes of its chin like cuckoo-spit on grass, and a strong smell of whisky clung to the shabby layers of its clothing. It took all Anna’s self-control, never high and currently at its lowest, for her not to recoil in disgust.

“MacLoggie!” exclaimed Jamie, much to Anna’s relief. The unshaven chin had been a hint but hadn’t necessarily ruled out the possibility of this being Nanny.

“Hame safely,” the ancient retainer gasped at Jamie, apparently deeply affected, although whether by alcohol or by emotion, it was impossible to tell.

“D’ye want anything ta eat? Nanny’s left you some stovies in the kitchen.”

Jamie brightened. “Nanny’s stovies,” he informed Anna, “are a force to be reckoned with.”