Wicked!

by Jilly Cooper

  Janna rushed round encouraging and consoling.

  ‘First one’s always difficult. Sure this afternoon’ll be much easier. Just make certain you have a proper dinner.’

  It had been hard to settle to anything this morning, all she could think was that Emlyn had held her hand.

  PE theory lasted two hours. Feral had got top marks in the practical exam, but he couldn’t make head nor tail of this paper. So he slowly deciphered Bianca’s card.

  It was her parents’ last-year’s Christmas card, with a picture of Penscombe Peterkin gambolling in the snow with Rupert’s Jack Russells.

  Inside were printed the words ‘Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year’ and at the bottom ‘Rupert and Taggie Campbell-Black’. There was no way Rupert would ever wish him any happiness, thought Feral wearily.

  ‘Dearest Feral,’ Bianca had written. ‘This card is the right one because I want to know you next Christmas and the next and the next, for ever. Good luck, I miss you, please ring me. All love.’

  With a groan of despair Feral shoved the card in his pocket and gazed at the blank pages of the booklet in which he was supposed to write down his answers. The princess and pauper: how could he ever give Bianca the life she deserved?

  When Graffi got home from his night shift at Tesco, the dawn was already breaking and his father roaring drunk and raging mad.

  ‘How dare you let out Cardiff Nan? Day centre brought her back and fucking charged me for the loan of a dressing gown,’ and he hit Graffi across the lounge.

  109

  PE theory was followed by information technology, German listening and religious studies, leading up to the big one, English lit., on the Friday morning before half-term. For Rupert, the Thursday had been punctuated by telephone calls from skittish Bagley mothers, including the fearful Dame Hermione, saying that as they’d pledged large sums of money, they did hope to be rewarded with a party if he got a good grade. The final call at midnight had been from ghastly Stancombe, saying he hoped Rupert was going to honour his promise and roll up at Cotchester College tomorrow.

  ‘There’s a lot at stake.’

  ‘The stake should be through your fucking heart,’ howled Rupert and hung up.

  Randal turned gleefully to Anthea, stretched out naked on his bed beside him. ‘Pressure getting to his Highness.’

  ‘Good,’ said Anthea. ‘Ay hope he gets a U. He’s always been far too big for his raiding boots.’

  Rupert was so livid, he’d never sleep now. In the old days of showjumping, or when he was Minister for Sport, he could always ease the tension by pulling a groom or a groupie. Now he was mocked by an entire library of books, which he’d never read, and by Lord of the Flies reminding him how horribly he was bullying darling Taggie at the moment, by being so sulky and resentful. Thank God term would be over in a few weeks and she’d be back home with him again. But would she be bored? Had Larks whetted her appetite for more company and excitement: for bloody Pete Wainwright or that fat Welshman?

  Rupert wished he could have taken the exam at Larks instead of Cotchester College, which would be swarming with press. But when he’d dropped into Jubilee Cottage to ask Janna, she had very sweetly said his presence in the exam room would be far too distracting.

  ‘The girls would all gaze at you, and the invigilators too, enabling all the lads to cheat like mad and no one would notice. You’re still the most attractive man in the world,’ she added, blushing furiously.

  ‘Huh – doesn’t get me anywhere.’ Rupert had stalked off into the sitting room and been blown away by Graffi’s mural.

  ‘That’s so bloody good. Christ! There’s Rod Hyde and ghastly Ashton in one of his poncy mauve shirts and that asshole Bishop. What’s he called, Graffi? He must come and do one of the hunt before bloody Blair closes it down.’

  Rupert’s mood didn’t improve on the morning of the exam. Taggie and Xav had left for Larks and weren’t even there to wave him off. The forecourt of Cotchester College was swarming with press, including a grinning Venturer camera crew.

  ‘To me, Rupert’, ‘Look this way, Rupe’, ‘Over here’, they shouted, as Rupert deliberately parked his dark blue BMW in the space reserved for the Dean of the College, and, gathering up Lord of the Flies, Death of a Salesman, and Opening Lines, leapt out like a snarling tiger.

  ‘God, he’s lush,’ sighed a presenter from Sky.

  ‘What have you learnt from your studies of English lit.?’ asked the Guardian.

  ‘That the term “mature student” is an oxymoron.’

  ‘Randal Stancombe says you haven’t got a hope in hell,’ taunted the Scorpion.

  ‘Stancombe’s an expert on hell,’ snarled Rupert. ‘Now, get out of my way.’

  He was about to pick the Scorpion reporter up by his lapels when he was distracted by a vast fluffy black pantomime cat padding up to him, purring loudly and rubbing itself against his thighs.

  ‘What the fuck?’ Rupert was about to punch or kick the cat away, when a deep gasping familiar voice spoke.

  ‘I’ve just come to bring you luck.’

  Rupert’s scowl widened into a huge smile, his voice cracked: ‘Oh Tag, darling, oh Tag,’ as he pulled the cat to its feet and into his arms.

  ‘Purrrr, purrrr,’ giggled the cat, tickling his face with its whiskers.

  Rupert was still laughing as he sat down. Oblivious of his fellow candidates, he got out a blue fountain pen and wrote his name and number. Then, opening the paper, he read the first question on Lord of the Flies: ‘Describe the importance of Jack in this novel.’

  ‘“This is a good island”,’ wrote Rupert, with a sigh of relief. ‘“We’ll have fun.”’

  Finishing his answer on Death of a Salesman, he had half an hour left for poetry and to explain the ways Seamus Heaney and Dannie Abse wrote about the father/son relationship in two poems, which he’d enjoyed and identified with. Heaney was sound on ploughing and he liked the Abse line about his son playing pop music and ‘dreaming of some school Juliet I don’t know’. He’d never get a chance to meet Aysha if Raschid Khan had his way.

  Thank God there wasn’t a question on that whining bitch Sylvia Plath.

  Having finished the paper, Rupert felt very flat. Cursing himself for things he should have put in, he shook off the press, and drove straight to Larks to collect Xav. Taggie would already have left to collect Bianca from Bagley.

  As he hurtled down the back roads, he noticed the cow parsley turning green and going over and the chestnut candles scattering their creamy petals. He’d been too busy to appreciate them and now he’d have to wait until next year. The baton had been taken over by hawthorn, exploding everywhere in white-hot fountains, its soapy bath-day smell competing with the reek of wild garlic, much stronger now the leaves were yellowing and decaying.

  Thank God he’d be able to concentrate full time on racing once more. A new dark brown filly called Fast was running in the first race at York. Pulling into the Larks car park, where, judging by the ‘Please Be Quiet’ sign, Eng. lit. was still going on, he switched on the little television on his dashboard.

  Next second, a white van with Star of Lahore Curry House printed on its side drew up, driven presumably by Raschid Khan. Rupert had been about to take a large swig of brandy out of his hipflask, but Khan looked the sort of evil bugger who’d report him to the police.

  Fast was dancing round the paddock looking almost too well. The bookies had her at twelve to one. Rupert was about to ring Ladbrokes, when he noticed Mr Khan, despite his air of extreme disapproval, sneaking a look at the television.

  ‘Hi,’ said Rupert.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ replied Mr Khan stiffly.

  ‘I know who you are,’ drawled Rupert. ‘You have an exceptionally clever daughter. In my experience, the more you tell teenagers not to see each other, the more they want to.’

  Mr Khan was about to close his window, when Rupert added:

  ‘The attachment is as abhorrent to me as it obviously is to you.’
Then, when Mr Khan looked astounded: ‘Do you honestly think I want Xavier, with all he is likely to inherit, to chuck himself away on a total nobody?’

  ‘A nobody?’ Quivering with fury, Mr Khan inflated like a turkey cock.

  ‘By comparison,’ said Rupert coldly.

  ‘That’s a racist remark.’

  ‘You’re the racist,’ snapped back Rupert, ‘being foul about my son, who’s much blacker than your daughter, who I gather is utterly enchanting. My wife Taggie is almost more devoted to her than Xav is.’

  ‘There is nothing more to be said. Aysha is engaged to be married.’

  ‘Right. If you’ll forgive me,’ said Rupert, punching out Ladbrokes’ number, ‘I’ve got a potentially very good horse in this race. If you want to take a chance and have a bet, the odds are excellent.’

  There was a long pause. In the dust of the car park, two robins were quarrelling over a feather. Mr Khan, unable to resist a flutter, extracted a tenner from a paperclip full of notes in his breast pocket and handed it over. ‘I will have a bet.’

  Matters dipped when Fast, no doubt excited to be carrying Rupert’s dark blue and emerald green colours for the first time, took off at the start and ran halfway round the course, before her jockey could pull her up. She then lined up with the starters, set off at a cracking pace, and with Mr Khan and Rupert both yelling their heads off, lived up to her name by flying down the straight to win by six lengths.

  ‘You’ve made a hundred and twenty pounds,’ said Rupert jubilantly, ‘and I’ve just bought one fantastic horse.’

  When Xav and Aysha wandered wearily out of English lit., deliberately keeping their distance, utterly dejected at the prospect of not seeing each other for ten days, they were flabbergasted to see Rupert and Raschid Khan leaning against Rupert’s car, deep in conversation.

  ‘Xav tried to introduce marketing to my yard.’

  ‘Aysha tried to introduce food technology to my restaurant, which I would be honoured if you would visit one evening.’

  ‘How did you get on, Dad?’ asked Xav nervously.

  ‘Not bad, might have scraped a G. How about you?’

  ‘Not great, I’ve never understood that Heaney poem. Is his father senile, or is he haunted by his memory?’

  ‘Senile, if he’s anything like me. Have you met Mr Khan? Fast just won by six lengths.’ Rupert turned back to Raschid: ‘Why don’t you, your wife and Aysha come to Epsom one day next week?’

  ‘How could you schmooze up to that terrible guy?’ exploded Xav as Rupert drove over the bridge towards Penscombe. ‘He blacked Aysha’s eye last week.’

  ‘No, he didn’t, Aysha’s younger sister did that. Aysha wanted to revise and turned off EastEnders. Raschid told me,’ said Rupert smugly.

  Winding down his window, narrowly missing a jogger, Rupert chucked Sylvia Plath into the River Fleet.

  110

  Half-term wasn’t helpful. The candidates felt they deserved a break, but guilty if they eased off and lost momentum, particularly on the Monday after, when faced with two heavyweights: geography and double science. As a result of being in a confined space, everyone had colds or tummy bugs and the heat wave had kicked in. At nine-thirty it was already like an oven in the gym. Sophy was invigilating and unless she walked in the straight line required of sobriety tests, her splendid bulk sent papers flying and candidates into fits of nervous giggles.

  They were just about to start geography when Johnnie Fowler was found to be missing. Then Janna ran in saying Johnnie’s sister had rung to say at the prospect of two such gruelling exams, Johnnie had gone ‘on the booze, then on the rob’ and been arrested.

  ‘Go and bail him,’ Skunk Littlewood begged Emlyn, ‘he’s got double science this afternoon. He could get a B.’

  Emlyn found Johnnie in a cell, cross-eyed with hangover.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I got hammered, mugged an old lady for anuvver round, but I was so drunk I didn’t realize it was Graffi’s Cardiff Nan, what had escaped. It’s not funny,’ he grumbled. ‘Anyway, I don’t want bailing. Can’t I stay here and miss science, maffs, French, D and T, English, anuvver bleeding geography and German and history and more science?’

  ‘Come on,’ said Emlyn.

  Outside, he fed Johnnie black coffee and later chicken soup and dry toast and got him back in time for science.

  ‘Don’t,’ groaned Johnnie, clutching his head as the other candidates gave him a round of applause.

  Monster had had baked beans for lunch; consequently, his farts were worse than Skunk’s heat-wave armpits.

  ‘I’m going to faint,’ said Johnnie, even more so a minute later when he opened the paper, which was a brute. ‘And to fink I could be kipping in some nice cell.’

  ‘Holy shit.’ Feral screwed up his paper and walked out, bouncing his football.

  ‘Don’t give up,’ the Brigadier, who was hovering in the corridor, begged him, ‘you’ve got plenty of time and an extra half-hour for being dyslexic.’

  ‘If I stared at that paper for a hundred years, I couldn’t do a word of it, so don’t get yer hopes up, Brig, I’m going to play football.’

  Pearl unfurled another KitKat weighed down with equations. Within twenty minutes the room was almost empty; only Graffi, Aysha, Xav (because it gave him the chance to gaze at Aysha), Kitten and Pearl were left.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Graffi, ‘I need a fag and a piss.’

  ‘Hush,’ said Basket in horror.

  ‘And for you to take off those fucking, squeaking shoes.’

  ‘Nuffink on circulation, nuffink on the heart, nuffink on the solar system, or electricity or radiation,’ raged Pearl as they came blinking and utterly dispirited into the sunlight.

  ‘I thought it were easy,’ said Kitten and got punched in the face by Pearl.

  Over at Bagley earlier, Mr Fussy hung round the sports hall, hurrying in his students, ‘Don’t be late, don’t be late,’ hell-bent on smashing Theo’s record of getting everyone through.

  Milly, practising a yoga relaxation technique Poppet had urged on her, was nearly asleep. Jade made another mental note not to thrust her fingers through her hair and reveal the tiny transmitter in her ear.

  Lando was at the back, murmuring, ‘Define a quark, define a quark. It’s the sound that an upper-class duck makes,’ and laughing at his own joke so much, he was furiously hushed by Boffin. From where Lando was sitting, he could admire the splendid swell of Primrose’s left breast. Cosmo, having finished his paper, was reading The Secret History.

  When it came to the two-hour maths exam the following day, Xav was determined not to let Pittsy down. Ex-alkies should stick together.

  ‘If Mrs Rock borrowed £2,000 at ten per cent compound interest and paid it back together with total interest after two years, what would be her total repayment?’ read Xav.

  ‘£2,420’, he wrote a minute later.

  Over at Bagley, the Philippine gremlin whispered £2,420 in Jade’s ear, in answer to the same question. Jack Waterlane, utterly defeated by the same paper, was relieved to receive a text message on his smuggled-in mobile, saying Kylie Rose had gone into labour.

  When in doubt, take the easier option. As Jack ran out of the exam hall, Biffo, who was invigilating, leapt down from his chair and chased after him. The best way of stopping Biffo following him, decided Jack, was to take Biffo’s car. Although he was only sixteen, Jack had been driving tractors round his father’s estate since he was ten and, leaving a furiously windmilling Biffo, set off at ninety miles an hour for the hospital.

  Kylie Rose’s face when he walked into the maternity ward made everything worthwhile.

  ‘I thought you’ – groan – ‘was in the middle of a maffs paper,’ progressed to, ‘Oh’ – groan – ‘of course I’ll marry you.’

  Chantal spent the rest of the labour crying with joy.

  Lord Waterlane, when he rolled up some hours later, was in a towering rage. On the other hand, Jack’s mother, Sharon, who
insisted on referring to herself as Lady Shar, had once been a nightclub hostess and a hell of a goer. David had always suffered from nostalgie de la boue and found Chantal, who was only thirty, extremely pretty and, after all, Kylie had given birth to a boy.

  ‘We’re going to call him Ganymede David,’ she told her future father-in-law proudly.

  The first English paper, which also contained literature questions, was on 10 June. Dora, knowing this was a crucially important subject to Paris, had finally tracked down five four-leafed clovers and, with Patience’s help, had glued them on a card. ‘Dear Paris,’ she had written inside, ‘Good luck in English and all your other exams, you’ll do brilliantly. Love, Dora’.

  Her timing, admittedly, was lousy. A thoroughly strung-up Paris, flanked by Junior, Lando and Jack, was just going into the exam when Dora had rushed up, thrusting the card into his hand. Paris glanced down.

  ‘What the fuck?’

  ‘Please open it.’

  Paris gazed at her in disbelief.

  ‘Just fuck off, can’t you see I’m busy? Get out of my life and leave me alone.’

  Dora cried great rasping sobs all round the pitches, missing French. Artie Deverell, who’d picked up on the exchange, dispatched Bianca, not the ideal person, who found Dora sitting on a log sobbing into Cadbury’s shoulder.

  ‘Good thing Labradors like water,’ observed Bianca.

  Dora went on crying.

  ‘Paris is heartless, Dor. Even when he was crazy about me, he couldn’t show it. It’s his upbringing; he doesn’t know how to express love, he hasn’t had any practice. He’s got a slice of ice in his heart.’

  ‘Put not your trust in Arctic Princes,’ sobbed Dora.

  Jade Stancombe, in the evening, was more brutal. ‘You were like an autograph-hunter interrupting Tiger Woods as he teed up at the eighteenth hole. Paris just tore up your card and chucked it in the bin. Stop making a fool of yourself; he’s out of your league.’

  In the sports hall earlier, Paris dispatched Housman and Hood’s rosy view of childhood: ‘Lands of Lost Content’. Poets all seemed to have had wondrous childhoods and gloomy, insecure old ages.