Mad Cows (18 page)

‘Ken's
father
? Jesus.' Alex tore himself away from his reflection. ‘You make it sound as though I'm about to get a telegram from the Queen.'

‘Which is why he had to resort to you, Pet. You know . . . any orifice in a storm.'

‘Hey, don't I know you?' The weather girl's predictive talents finally asserted themselves.

Alex fired a shut-up-or-die look in her direction. But what Maddy thought was the death-rattle of her relationship turned out to be the thunk! Thunk! Throb
of
a helicopter. The aristocracy streamed out of Highgrove House and on to the pleb-laden lawns, pointing ecstatically skywards, as if in anticipation of the New Messiah.

‘The McCartneys!' squealed a soap-star nearby. Despite her ‘Keep it Green. Keep it Natural' T-shirt, any more plastic surgery and she'd just have one big ear at the back of her noggin.

The psychological squall which had threatened to dampen Petronella's spirits blew away. ‘It's, like,
terribly
exciting,' she oozed to Alex. ‘Linda has opened a vegetarian food factory which uses ozone-friendly ammonia refrigerators, catalytic converters and, like, natural gas!'

‘Gosh,' said Maddy, underwhelmed. ‘A Beatle? And I thought Huon Pines were the oldest living thing on the planet.'

Petronella tugged ferociously on Alex's arm, whilst preening her appearance. ‘I feel a photographic opportunity coming on,' she gushed, adding the self-conscious justification, ‘it'll be good, you know, for the Party.'

‘Oh, well, in
that
case, don't bother,' Maddy stated. ‘I think it's time Alex considered a career change. A car-park attendant, say. Or better –
New Zealand Television
.'

Alex prised himself away from Petronella, who was busy brushing imaginary dandruff from his shoulders. ‘What's that supposed to mean?'

Maddy cauterized her feelings and binned her withered dreams once and for all. ‘Unless you help me find Jack, I'm going to the press.'

The noise Alex made sounded not unlike a hippopotamus giving birth. ‘
What?
'

‘Can you imagine how many hacks in macks there are drooling for a story like this? Does the word “Planetarium” bring you back into orbit?'

‘You'd really do an Antonia De Sancha to me? And that Bienvenida Buck cow? You'd actually put sword to paper?'

Maddy wasn't proud of herself, but she held her fertilizer-enriched ground. ‘I'm desperate, Alex. My milk's starting to dry up.'

‘Come
on
, Alexander!' Petronella yelled over her shoulder-pad, impervious to their private drama.

Alex lowered his voice to a menacing baritone. ‘I'll deny it.'

Petronella, exasperated, satisfied her convolvulus tendencies by latching on to the arm of a passing peer and manoeuvring herself into the welcoming committee. Maddy would have to tell the Compost Conspirators that she had found the hardiest lightweight climber. It wasn't the
clematis viticella
or the
aconitum volubile
. It was the
petronella
: the sort of climber which works its way into the lime mortar and wrecks the foundations.

Once she'd departed, Alex dragooned Maddy behind a piece of dense topiary. ‘Come to think
of
it,' he raged, ‘how do I know it's
my
child?'

‘Don't be rid
ic
ulous, Alex. He's you in bonsai.'

‘Over ten per cent of men in Britain are unwittingly bringing up children that are not their own. Poor buggers.'

‘All right then,' Maddy snapped, ‘let's have a really public court case with lots of DNA and find out once and for all, eh? Just like Peter Jay and his nanny.'

‘You know what I think?' he said darkly. ‘I think you got pregnant on purpose.'

‘The condom you put on fell off, as I recall,' she seethed.

‘And I'm supposed to believe . . . after all the precautions . . . we used a dutch cap every other bloody . . . just one slip up and—'

‘It's not a hundred per cent safe, you idiot. Spermatozoa can still, you know, swim up the sides—'

‘Oh, the Mark Spitz of sperm. Or maybe my spunk had been dieting, is that it?'

‘I don't think the Child Support Agency will see it quite that way.'

‘The CSA is just a charter to encourage women like you to be single mothers, secure in the knowledge that some poor bastard like me will pay your way. You go to the press and I'll bloody well sue you for entrapment! That's what I'll do.'

‘And I'll sue you for not telling me you were a married man with two children. If I'd known that I
would
never have fallen in love with you in the first frigging—'

‘And if I'd known you were a preying mantis in disguise . . . that you were going to devour your poor bloody partner after mating—' He broke off. ‘There's no winners in this, you know, Maddy,' he said in a subdued voice.

Maddy tore off a flower stem and snapped the stalk in two. ‘Yeah, but at least there'll be more than one loser.'

They looked up as the airborne eggbeater descended, drowning out Alex's reply. The propeller spun lazily, then stopped. A round of applause went up as the McCartneys' non-leather shoes touched terra firma. The crowd watched as they got into a chauffeured limousine to ferry them the ten yards from the helicopter to Highgrove for their appointment with Prince Charles on energy preservation.

Alex and Maddy careered around the hedge to find themselves suddenly smack bang in the middle of the welcoming party. Smiling convulsively, the Inequal-itarians, the Just-Landed Gentry and the Compost Conspirators mulched together to greet their popstar patrician paragons.

‘Vegetarianism isn't just a, you know, business for her . . . it's like a
mission
,' Petronella, social tendrils spiralling, was telling the Prince of Wales. The McCartneys' chicken-less Kievs and meat-less meat pies made Maddy want to gnaw her own foot off. It
made
her want to become a cannibal instantly; starting with a certain weather girl.

Prince Charles, looking frail and pale, like a seedling growing in a shoe box, smiled shyly. Despite her Republicanism, Maddy felt quite sympathetic to an heir to the throne who declared his desire to live inside a woman's knickers. This was a man who oozed sincerity from every pore – of which, Maddy noted at this close range, he had many.

‘G'day, said Maddy, extending her hand. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Alex pulling a face she had previously only associated with the passing of a kidney stone.

‘An Awe-stralian?'

‘Ah, yes,' said Alex nervously, summing up a sufficiency of relaxed
bonhomie
. ‘You recognized the dulcet tones, eh, Your Highness.'

‘I'm awf to Australia shortly,' said the heir to the throne. ‘Any message?'

‘Well, yes,' piped up Maddy, ‘you could ring my mum . . .'

Alex gave her a steely stare. ‘I think the prince was referring to a political message for the prime minister or the governor general about environmental issues. The French nuclear testing in the Pacific is, of course, off diplomatic limits.'

‘Just tell her,' said Maddy, scrawling the number on a piece of paper, ‘that a) I'm not sinking into any arms and b) you can never know
any
devil
that
well.'

18

Kiss And Sell

LATER THAT EVENING
, Maddy and Petronella found themselves marooned next to the hors-d'oeuvres on the sidelines of the Celebrity Croquet. Looking like a colony of social sea-birds, the Great and the Good stood nodding at one another on the lawn, uttering the traditional regional greeting of, ‘How's the novel?'

The two women watched Alex thwack a ball through a hoop with insouciant ease. Maddy dipped a biscuit into a mixture of red roe and sour cream. It looked, she thought morbidly, like the stuff women had hoovered out of their thighs during liposuction.

Petronella's sun-lounger creaked defensively as she lowered herself into it. ‘We're, like, going to buy a house together,' she announced suddenly.

Maddy's heart skipped a beat. Real estate was nearly
always
a foundation for marriage.
Where had she heard all this before?

‘We're doing a photo shoot for
Hello!
magazine.'

My God, thought Maddy. It really
was
serious. The bitch! She glumly siphoned up a Pimms. Maddy knew that a woman only called another woman a bitch if she was prettier, wittier, or had won the man of your dreams. Maddy's hand shook, sending tiny tidal waves from one side of the glass to the other. Ice-cubes collided with lemon slices, capsizing cucumber wedges.

They watched the croquet game in loaded silence. It was cricket, on Valium. Polo for pathetic fat gits. Maddy sucked the flesh from a cucumber slice and frisbeed the rind. She took off her sunglasses and chewed the plastic arm meditatively. She gazed forlornly at the candy-floss clouds scudding across the June sky. ‘Look,' she finally announced with quiet fortitude. ‘Think of him as toxic waste. In other words –
dump him
.'

‘Actually,' her rival goaded, ‘we're going to get married—'

‘Hey, why give yourself an experience you'll have to pay a lot of money to a therapist to get over? He'll never get married! He's got FOC . . . Fear of Commitment. Chronic!'

‘– and, like, have a family.'

Maddy dropped her liposuction-on-rye. ‘You aren't getting this, are you?' She perched on the end of
Petronella
's sun-lounger. ‘Sex for him is like taking a crap. And
you're
his toilet.'

Petronella struggled up out of the lounger and practically pirouetted on her perfectly pedicured pink-painted toes. Her abrupt departure sent Maddy toppling. ‘I don't have to sit here and listen to this any—'

‘We were in love. I don't think I'll ever be that in love again,' Maddy reluctantly confessed from her improvisatorially prone position. ‘Six months and a pregnancy test later, he ditched me.'

Petronella stalked off on to the billiard-table-green lawn; her pert buttocks swinging with metronomic precision.

‘IS
THIS
THE MAN WHOSE NAME YOU WANT YOUR BABY TO SEE ON THE CHILD MAINTENANCE CHEQUES EVERY MONTH!!?' Maddy called out after her, untangling herself from the metal chair legs and scraping roe off her toe.

The eyeballs of the celebrity-croquet players left their sockets and scuttled across the lawn towards Maddy. Alex swiftly followed.

As far as Maddy could figure it, psychiatry was a terrible waste of couches. Despite the hampers of emotional dirty linen collected over the decades, Maddy liked to think of herself as fairly shrink-proof. There had to be something amiss in a business where the customer is always wrong. Edwina Phelps had convinced her of this.

As Alex frog-marched her through the Highgrove car park, she deduced that you could tell more about people by what they
drove
. Bentleys said ‘smug ponce'. Four-wheeled Land Cruisers said ‘pretentious wanker'. Alfas said ‘
rich
, pretentious wanker'. Ferraris, Maseratis and Lamborghinis? Well, they were obviously tax-dogem cars. But nothing spoke quite so loudly as the red Porsche into which Alex brusquely directed her.

‘Well, what do you know. A meno-porsche. What does the number-plate read?' she mocked. ‘Midlife crisis?'

Alex thrust himself behind the wheel in a self-righteous frump of indignation. He remained deep in thought as they ate the exhaust fumes of Petronella's elongated pink sports car down the M40. Maddy wasn't sure what
that
said exactly, – except perhaps ‘small clitoris'.

Alex kept up this Marcel Marceau approach until the lazy summer dusk slunk into dark, when he swerved abruptly off the motorway at an obscure exit. He pulled up in the shadow of the service area at a garage. Listening to the engine ticking as it cooled, Maddy watched him cross into the café. It was a cheery little place. The waterlogged buildings wore wigs of green algae. The whole allotment was scattered with the locust husks of burnt-out cars and charred bed frames. He returned, slid into the car and handed her a beer. It was warm.

‘He who controls the past, controls the future,' Alex said enigmatically, leaning back in the driver's seat. ‘George Orwell.' He swivelled to face her, crossing a tanned ankle over one knee. ‘So – what do you think the papers are going to say? Cad? Love Rat? Philanderer?'

Looking at him by the strobing headlamps of passing cars, Maddy noticed an unexpectedly smug expression had replaced the drowned-corpse countenance.

‘Cockroach, more like it.' She took off the bottle cap with her teeth. ‘There should be a special test for men like you, where you're lured into a dark kitchen, the lights are snapped on and we see that instinctive dash under the bloody fridge.'

Alex laced his fingers and propped them behind his head. ‘What a sad, put-upon little creature you must be, Maddy,' he said sardonically. Maddy couldn't quite decipher his mood. ‘All
you
did was ensnare somebody else's husband, trick him into paternity, then blackmail him with exposure threats. Perhaps my friends in the press will be interested in my side of the story?' he continued, shamelessly. ‘Innocent family man—'

‘Innocent!' Maddy spluttered as the Heineken went up her nose. ‘You make Stalin look like, I dunno—'

‘—manipulated by a cunning Sexual Career Woman—'

‘—John Denver. Career? What a career? You promised me a job but—'

‘What you don't realize is the monumental irrelevance of your proposed revelations. The public palate has become jaded with cheap denigration and sensationalism.'

‘Oh yeah? Suppose you were a lousy, low-down, loud-mouthed mongrel and suppose you were a
politician
– but, oh, hey, I'm being repetitious . . .'