by Wendy Holden
“Zak!” shrieked Cassandra. “My son has a very lively imagination,” she added hastily. As Zak still rummaged frantically in his pocket, Anna felt her apprehension grow.
“Would you like to see my scab?” asked Zak, his hand emerging from his pocket balancing a matchbox on his palm. A matchbox which, Anna noticed, bore the logo of the Hotel Eden Roc, Cap d’Antibes. With a flick of his pink thumb, Zak pushed it open to reveal a very large, very green, and very nasty-looking scab, with specks of blood and shining green mucus still attached. It looked very fresh, although, darting a quick glance at Zak’s smooth golden knees, Anna was unable to see where it had come from.
“It looks very painful,” she said. “You must have been very brave when it came off.”
“Oh, its not mine,” said Zak, faintly contemptuous. “It’s Otto Greatorex’s. And no, actually, he wasn’t at all brave. It took three of us to hold him down, but I ripped it off.” He grinned at Anna, revealing gappy white teeth set in very pink gums. Behind him, Cassandra let out a light laugh.
“Such a character already, isn’t he?” She smiled at Anna.
“You can say that again,” growled Jett, suddenly entering the room behind them, the metalwork on his boots jangling irritably. “Look what he’s done now.”
The creature straining to be released from his hairy arms was not instantly recognisable. It looked, Anna thought, rather like a very large, very bald, and very angry rat. “This,” said Jett, holding the furious animal up so it clawed wildly at the air, “is what remains of Lady Snitterton’s Bengal Blue after Zak’s had a go at it with my Remington.”
Chapter Eight
The room contained a desk, a hard chair, and a sofabed that had clearly seen better days. Judging from the cracked and peeling paintwork, it was obviously between decorating jobs as well. Anna looked round in admiration. So this was where Cassandra did her writing. This was the inner sanctum.
“What do you think?” asked Cassandra.
“Wonderfully plain,” Anna said brightly. “I imagine it’s a marvellous place to concentrate.”
“Concentrate?” Despite her permanent efforts to keep her face as expressionless and therefore wrinkle-free as possible, Cassandra could not prevent a slight frown rippling across her forehead. “Are you Buddhist or something?” she demanded, realising that, once her first, fierce instinctive opposition to anything unusual or foreign had worn off, she rather hoped so. After all, Baba Anstruther was always banging on about her wretched New Age Italian au pair, the sum total of whose duties seemed to be floating around the school gates in white, reeking of essential oils, and flirting wildly with the house husbands. Cassandra stared thoughtfully at Anna. Yes, a Buddhist would suit her very well. Very Absolutely Fabulous—and, Cassandra wondered, straining her sketchy grasp of theology to its limits, weren’t they the ones who were supposed to renounce all worldly goods? That would sort out any remaining ifs and buts over Anna’s wages very nicely.
“Oh, you’re not a Buddhist,” Cassandra said, disappointed, as Anna shook her head. “New Age then?” she hedged hopefully. “Oh well, I’ll leave you to make yourself at home,” she announced finally, a petulant note in her voice.
“You mean this is my room?” gasped Anna in horror.
“Yes, what did you think it was? A very comfortable room this is,” Cassandra said defensively, in the face of all visual evidence to the contrary. She sat on the sofabed and bounced gingerly up and down on it. A hollow rattle ensued. “One of the best addresses in Kensington.”
“I thought it was your writing room,” Anna said boldly.
Cassandra’s reptilian eyelids flickered for a moment. Better not push it too far, she realised. Time to concede a point or two; after all, she didn’t want the wretched girl leaving. Not now she’d gone to the enormous trouble of showing her all over the house. But the sooner she snapped out of the idea of being a bestselling writer, the better. Everyone knew writers didn’t look like that.
“Well, it’s not,” Cassandra said curtly. “My writing room is just off my bedroom, as it happens.”
What was the creature saying now? Where was her bathroom? Her bathroom? What did she think this was, bloody Claridges? “You use the downstairs loo,” Cassandra snapped. “And there’s a shower in the garage.”
“But…”
Closing the subject with a wave of her bejewelled hand, Cassandra led the way to the considerably warmer and smarter lower floor where she flung open a door to unleash a blaze of colour.
“Zak’s room. Marvellous, don’t you think?”
Anna blinked. “It’s very, um, bright.”
“Biodegradable, non-allergic paints in serotonin-stimulating primary colours,” Cassandra announced briskly. “Very important to have a lot of brightness around—develops a child’s senses, increases intelligence. Can’t have Zak falling behind at school just because his bedroom is the wrong shade.”
“I suppose not.”
“Naturally, I’ve checked on what everyone else in Zak’s year has, just in case. Otto Greatorex,” Cassandra pronounced, as if a rotting kipper had been placed under her nose, “has a really rather ill-advised pirate theme in his nursery, while Savannah and Siena Tressell—well, of course, their father is an architect—have a trendy French thing in primary colours with lots of foam-rubber cubes and tubes everywhere. Mollie Anstruther has a giant Barbie bedroom—ghastly—and Ellie Fforbes has an appallingly vulgar fairy palace with chandeliers and a four-poster bed. Screamingly camp, but then, of course, there have always been question marks about which team her father bats for…”
“So,” said Anna, looking at the walls and choosing her words carefully, “what’s the theme here? The countryside?” Each wall crawled with animals and sprouted foliage in preternaturally bright colours. Small settlements appeared between gaps in the fat blades of grass—here sunny English villages, complete with church spires, there Eastern cities, minarets gleaming in a starry sky. It reminded Anna strongly of a pantomime set. Or perhaps a particularly cheesy birthday card.
“Well, originally it was supposed to be Narnia, as you can probably tell. I’d booked Damien Hirst to do it—he’s a friend of my architect—but he had absolutely no intention of following my designs.” Cassandra pursed her lips at the memory.
“What a shame,” Anna said. A halved and pickled Zak would have added a certain je ne sais quoi.
“The only other bedroom I really rather envied,” Cassandra said, “was Milo and Ivo Hope-Stanley’s Nantucket-style one; terribly glamorous, all tongue and groove panelling, Navajo blankets, bunks based on ships’ berths, and Stars and Stripes cushions—very Ralph Lauren. Caroline Hope-Stanley’s housekeeper used to be a stylist for World of Interiors and she knows just how to arrange it. Lil, of course, wouldn’t have had a hope. But that’s all over, thankfully.”
As if the horrors of that morning’s Telegraph hadn’t been enough, Cassandra had, just before Anna arrived, swept into the sitting room to discover Lil had failed to wipe the smoky smudges off the scented candle glasses yet again.
“If I’ve told her once…” Cassandra raged as she stormed round picking up and slamming down the black-tipped jars with the Diptyque label.
“Really gets on your wick, doesn’t it?” Jett drawled. He spoke in a lightly insouciant tone precisely calculated to cause his wife maximum annoyance. He wasn’t a musician for nothing.
Cassandra had stormed out of the room in search of the hapless domestic. She’d had enough. Something had to give. Notice, preferably.
Cassandra tsked now as she snatched down a poster of a grinning David Beckham. “Can’t bear those boy bands, can you? That’s Zak’s bathroom, by the way,” she added, gesturing at the vast white expanse visible through a door ajar at one end of the room. “Make sure you clean behind the sink pedestal. It gets filthy there for some reason.”
“Me? Clean?”
&n
bsp; “Yes, I’ve had to let Lil go, unfortunately,” Cassandra trilled. “So if you could just step in for her for the moment, that would be lovely. Oh, and there’s a pile of ironing downstairs for you—we iron all sheets and underwear here, I’m afraid—and if you could just run round with the Hoover that would be fabulous. Garden could do with a weed and I’m afraid I haven’t had time to go to Waitrose either. To make your first day as easy as possible, Mr. St. Edmunds will do the school run this afternoon as well—you can take over tomorrow morning. Lunch is at one. Roast Mediterranean vegetable terrine, I thought.”
“Lovely,” mumbled Anna, still reeling from the list of tasks.
“So if you start to cook it at about eleven, that should be fine. Right, I’ll leave you to sort yourself out.”
Anna returned upstairs to “her” room and closed the door. She placed her back against it and slid slowly down into a crouch. Looking hopelessly at the bare and cheerless surroundings, she felt the familiar gulping in her throat. She wondered what Seb was doing now. Still in bed probably—it was hardly half past ten, after all. Probably not alone. As tears stung her eyes and began to roll slowly down her cheeks, she closed her eyes and swallowed hard. From millionaire’s Mayfair apartment to skivvy’s boxroom, she reflected. And all in the course of one morning. You’ve come a long way, baby.
***
Anna’s first night on the sofabed was even worse than she had expected. After the endless fetching, carrying, and negotiating involved in putting Zak to bed, she had finally turned back the thin and smelly duvet, only to hear a bloodcurdling howl ricocheting wildly around the walls of the room. It took a few seconds for Anna to realise it was her own.
As the ghastly sight sank in, shock shuddered through her as if from a hairdryer dropped in the bath. There, on the grey-white sheet beneath the duvet, crouched the stark, black and hideously leggy forms of what looked like at least twenty enormous spiders. Anna hated spiders.
“Of course,” Cassandra said, appearing in the room in a baby blue pashmina bathrobe, her eyes round islands of contempt in a sea of face cream, “had you been to public school you would have instantly realised that they were the tops of tomatoes and not real spiders. It’s the oldest trick in the book, along with apple pie beds, although I understand duvets have put a stop to those. Really, I’m amazed you fell for it. Zak’s hilarious, isn’t he?”
Having been educated through a series of largely benign local state seminaries, Anna’s knowledge of public school had come mostly from Enid Blyton and Seb, neither of whom had mentioned tomato tops. They would, anyway, have failed to register on the Richter scale of prep school nastiness that Seb had suffered—being made to swim outdoors naked in the freezing cold and have Matron smack your penis with a cold spoon were among the more lurid lowlights he had mentioned to Anna. Seen from this angle, it was no surprise Seb had turned out to be the person he was. It was amazing he wasn’t worse.
“And making all that ridiculous noise as well,” Cassandra continued mercilessly. “Zak needs his sleep, even if you don’t. He, at least, has to work hard tomorrow morning. All you have to do is take him to school.”
***
“I’ve done them this morning,” Cassandra announced martyrishly next day. “But from now on, they’re your responsibility.” Collected in the hallway was a sprawling collection of extremely smart bags which looked like the personal effects of a visiting potentate. An entire suite of Louis Vuitton; a soft, buttery, buckled leather holdall; dark red crocodile Mulberry and any number of Bond Street carrier bags nestled up lovingly on the floor with the entrails of the vacuum cleaner, which Lil had evidently started to disembowel and then thought better of.
“Gosh,” said Anna admiringly. “It looks like the luggage people take on Learjets.” Some of the bags, in fact, had Learjet labels on them, albeit slightly ancient ones.
“Learjets!” Cassandra shot her a withering glance. “No one takes luggage on Learjets,” she snapped.
Anna looked puzzled, previously unaware that the celebrated jet was luggage-free. She supposed it made sense—how else, after all, did it go so fast?
“All the luggage on Learjets,” Cassandra explained, a pitying note in her voice, “is carried on and off by the cabin staff. Only tourists or the terminally unsophisticated take their own on.”
“Oh. I see.” Anna resolved to bear the tip in mind next time she flew supersonic.
“These are Zak’s school things.” As Cassandra produced a list and began performing a roll call of the contents and purpose of each bag, Anna’s jaw dropped ever nearer to what Cassandra had already told her were the individually peasant-fired Tuscan tiles on the floor of the hallway. Wonderingly, she recalled the one satchel and single gym bag which had got her through her entire formal education.
“Young Futures and Options,” barked Cassandra, pointing at a Vuitton attache case in the corner. “Operabugs and Junior Gastronauts,” she added, stabbing at another bag. There was also a fixture for extra extra tennis—“His instructor says he’s Wimbledon potential.” Cassandra chose not to reveal that what the instructor had actually said was that, yes, Zak could easily get to Wimbledon, but only if you were talking about the Tube station. There was advanced French and dinner-party Chinese—“Well, Zak may as well learn how to pass them the mangetout if the bloody Chinks are taking over the world, after all.” After being briefed about Madame Abricot’s dance class and what sounded like tuition in every single instrument of the orchestra, Anna felt almost sorry for Zak.
Until, that was, he climbed into the brand new four-wheel drive—“We only got it yesterday and any damage comes straight out of your wages”—and turned the radio up to window-shattering volume. As Zak began throwing himself about on the front seat to the music, Anna inched through the Kensington High Street traffic, uncomfortably aware of the curious gaze of taxi, lorry, and double-decker bus drivers.
“Mummy’s very cross with Daddy,” shouted Zak suddenly. “There was an interview with him in the paper yesterday, about his new record. My daddy’s a very famous pop star, you know.”
“I see,” said Anna, glancing frantically between the A–Z and the back bumper of the car in front.
“The interview was supposed to be about Mummy’s book,” added Zak. “But the only bits about Mummy were her shouting at Daddy.”
“You’ve read it then?” asked Anna. She was surprised until she recalled Cassandra saying that reading and discussing the broadsheets was part of the daily curriculum at St. Midas’s.
“No, but Mummy read lots of it out very loudly at Daddy, so I heard.”
St. Midas’s seemed to be at a particularly tricky-to-get-at end of the Cromwell Road, an area inconveniently plunged into the darkness of the A–Z gutter. Panicking, Anna snapped back the book’s paper spine and stared fiercely at it for clues. It was only when other minivans, their back seats alive with squirming children in boaters, plus fours, and leg o’ mutton sleeves, drew up in the lanes either side of her that Anna realised she was on the right track.
“Look, look,” screeched Zak, clambering over the front and then the back seat to bang on the rear window. “It’s Savannah and Siena! They’re overtaking!” As the lights changed, a shining minivan containing two leg o’ muttoned girls sped past.
“Put your foot down, stupid,” Zak ordered Anna. “Catch them up!” Despising herself for being intimidated by an eight-year-old, Anna allowed the speed to creep up a fraction on the dial.
“I’m going to call them.” Zak leant over the front seat, rifling through the Mulberry rucksack and eventually producing a miniature silver mobile phone. He stabbed at the keypad for a few seconds before diving into the bag again. “Bugger, I’ve forgotten their number,” he cursed. “Where’s my Air Book?”
That contact with Savannah and Siena had finally been established was confirmed a few seconds later by muffled whispering and giggling in the back. Anna
swallowed and tried not to listen as “Yes…new nanny…I know…” floated over from the rear.
“No, you don’t come in with me,” Zak ordered imperiously as Anna parked beside the gates of the handsome pair of Queen Anne houses which, to judge from the boaters pouring within and the sign standing proudly without, was St. Midas’s School. “Stay there.” Slamming the door behind him with shattering violence, he ran off.
Waiting for her blood pressure to subside from Dangerous to merely High, Anna sat and watched what she assumed to be a collection of St. Midas’s mothers and fathers milling about the entrance. Sartorial competition seemed stiff, if not positively cut-throat. Pashminas abounded and there seemed more racehorse legs around than at a Grand National starting line-up. The morning sunshine bounced off gleaming, well-cut hair, shining, straight white teeth, and gold and diamond rings. And that was just the men. These people, Anna realised, spent a lot longer preparing for school than their children did.
She stared through the windscreen as she conducted a gloomy résumé of life with Cassandra so far. The word writing had not been mentioned once, although the word nanny had, countless times. Feeling her spirits slump, Anna leant over and rested her forehead on the steering wheel. The view that met her was the far from uplifting one of her black-trousered thighs spread out like flattened sausages on the driving seat. She sighed heavily.
A sharp rap on the window disturbed her musings. Blearily, Anna looked up to see a grinning dark-haired girl wearing a great deal of plum-coloured lipstick. She rumbled in panic for the window button.
“Geri!”
“Hi, babe. Didn’t realise it was you I was racing down the Cromwell Road in the Bratmobile.”
“I didn’t realise you had children,” Anna said, bewildered. She stared at Geri with renewed admiration. Was there no end to her capabilities? Combining high-powered management executiveship with single motherhood and still finding time to put her lipstick on properly.
