by Wendy Holden
“Oh, they’re not mine,” Geri said breezily. “They’re just part of my portfolio of responsibilities. But what about you? That was Zak Knight you had in the car, wasn’t it? Surely…”—her eyes widened—“surely you’re not…his latest nanny. Are you?”
“Latest?” Anna tried to keep the quaver out of her voice.
Geri glanced at her. “Got time for a coffee?”
“Probably not,” said Anna, recalling the Augean list of chores Cassandra had barked at her as she had tottered out of the door en route to A Very Important Meeting. “But it sounds like I’d better.”
***
Cassandra’s hands shook as she took her seat at the long wooden table. Despite her distracted state, she could not help noticing that it was, as usual, polished to a mirror-like perfection infinitely beyond the capabilities of Lil. Lil hadn’t even been able to polish mirrors to mirror-like perfection. Still, hopefully the new girl would do better. She certainly couldn’t do worse.
Cassandra shot a nervous look at the set and determined faces around her, each one of which, she knew, had its own agenda as well as that which, neatly printed and bound, lay before each delegate on the glossy expanse of the table. She cleared her throat, took a swig of still water from the sparkling tumbler before her, and clicked the end of the pen which had been laid at a precise diagonal across the jotting pad bearing the letters SMSPA.
“May I call the meeting to attention.” An imposing brunette with thin lips and elegantly understated makeup shuffled the sheets in her perfectly manicured hands, slipped on a pair of rimless glasses, and cast a steely glance over them and around the table. “Item one on the agenda. Funds…”
Boring boring. Why did they always have to trawl through the money bit first? The backs of her thighs, Cassandra realised, were well and truly stuck to the shining leather seat of her chair. Any movement would result in a ripping of flesh ten times more painful than the most inept bikini wax. She should have worn tights—but it was so easy to get the shade wrong and, anyway, leaving them off was an opportunity to show everyone else how unscarred, well moisturised, and, most importantly of all, thin her legs were. No hiding behind thick black opaques for her, thank you very much; it was vital at these meetings that you showed yourself off to the best possible advantage. One false outfit and you were sunk; your stock as irreversibly lowered as if your knickers had fallen down.
“…pleased to announce,” enunciated the brunette in crisp tones, “that the Association finds itself in its best financial position ever…”
Bugger Polly Rice-Brown, thought Cassandra, glaring at the speaker and wincing as her left outer thigh peeled itself away from the seat. Why leatber dining-room chairs, for God’s sake? Surely that brat of hers wasn’t still peeing everywhere? It had taken weeks to get rid of the smell of urine after Sholto Rice-Brown had stayed overnight with Zak; an occasion which Polly had had the bloody cheek to claim actually marked the start of Sholto’s loss of control over his bowels. She’d tried to blame Zak, of all people, just because during the night he’d dressed up as a ghost and pretended—not tried, as Polly had insisted—to strangle Sholto. Honestly, Cassandra silently fumed. Some people had no sense of humour, let alone any appreciation of the exceptionally imaginative child Zak was.
No, Cassandra decided, an agonising tug at the bottom of her right buttock returning her abruptly to the present. She really shouldn’t have worn quite so short a skirt; despite its being one of Enzo Boldanzo’s signature bold prints (at his signature bold prices). But the computerised wardrobe had been playing up again…
She shot a careful glance to her left. Even Shayla Reeves was wearing what looked suspiciously like Prada trousers. She’d changed her sartorial tune, Cassandra thought viciously, hoping for the hundredth time that the rumour that Shayla had bagged her Premiership footballer husband whilst working as a lap dancer was true. If it was, Shayla had certainly ratcheted herself up a class or ten since—her son was called Caspar, for Christ’s sake. Her interior-designed Notting Hill home, innocent of the merest trace of concrete lions, had recently been opened to Hello! magazine and her neatly side-parted hair had lost all trace of strip-club blonde and was now a tasteful fugue of beige and brown stripes not dissimilar to the top of a fine sideboard.
“…the St. Midas’s School Parents Association,” continued Polly, “would like to take this opportunity to put on record its thanks to Caroline Hope-Stanley for her careful stewardship of our funds…”
Cassandra pursed her lips. Just what, she thought to herself, is so bloody amazing about being a good treasurer when, like Caroline Hope-Stanley, you’ve been an investment banker for ten years. She glanced over at the offending official—lightly tanned, long blonde hair, slim figure in jeans and T-shirt, the latter brilliant white to match those great pearly gates of teeth of hers. Oh-so-relaxed, except that the jeans were Versace, the T-shirt Donna Karan, and the teeth the beneficiaries of the latest American bleaching treatment. Caroline’s casual look, Cassandra estimated, cost twice as much as most people’s smartest—certainly more than Polly Rice-Brown’s, who had on what was quite obviously something from Topshop.
“…our Bolivian interests, in particular, have yielded high revenues…”
Now of course, Cassandra thought sardonically, Caroline wasn’t a banker any longer. She was one of the gym-sleek, Knightsbridge-groomed breed of New Housewives; she’d packed the City in at the age of thirty-two in order to bring up her twins Milo and Ivo. With the help of a full-time nanny, a housekeeper, and an army of cleaners and gardeners. “I simply adore being at home,” she had told more than one glossy magazine. “I now realise what I was missing out on.” Well, the sack for one thing; if Cassandra could remember rightly, Caroline’s entire team of fund managers had been made redundant the week after she’d walked off with her golden handshake, due to question marks about the ethics of some of their South American investments. Drugs had been mentioned. Bolivian interests indeed.
“…some of the fund-raising initiatives have been particularly inspired…”
Cassandra ground her teeth. She was sick of Polly Rice-Brown’s fund-raising initiatives. Ruthlessly determined to raise more in her stint as SMSPA chairman than anyone ever had before, she had already organised Himalayan treks, East to West bicycle tours of America, and blindfold bungee jumping. And, loath as Cassandra was to admit it, she had raised a great deal of money. By the end of it all, Cassandra thought sourly, St. Midas’s would be able to send up its own space probe.
“The Bring Your Child To Work Day, of course, was a big hit…”
Bringing them to work being the only way some women ever saw their children, Cassandra thought piously, reflecting on the fact that she saw as much of Zak as possible. Whether she wanted to or not. She’d heard that tale, famous among St. Midas’s mothers, of how Sholto’s final act before going to sleep was to call up his mother at the newspaper plant where she worked as a picture editor and whisper “Night night” to her on his mobile. Not to mention the poignant rumour concerning Savannah and Siena Tressell, who supposedly spent one Christmas Day feeding turkey to the television, or, more precisely, to their absent TV presenter mother’s talking head on the screen.
“For me, of course,” Polly continued, “Bring Your Child To Work Day was wonderful. Sholto was such a hit with the editor that he was actually given his own newspaper column taking a sideways look at life as an under-nine…”
Precocious brat. Cassandra had been bored to death already during the pre-meeting coffee about the National Theatre’s being Sholto’s second home these days, his forthcoming solo violin debut at the Wigmore Hall, and the sample chapters of his first novel that were already causing a stir in publishing circles.
“Aren’t you a bit worried?” she had asked.
“About what?”
“Well, all this artsy stuff. Doesn’t sound very…masculine, does it?”
“Oh
, I see what you mean. Well, that’s fine. We’re quite happy to have one of each.”
“One of each? But Sholto has a brother, doesn’t he?”
“Exactly, one of each. One gay and one straight.”
Well, what else did you expect from someone who worked on a bloody leftie paper? Cassandra thought. A tabloid, at that.
“…which of course led,” Polly was saying now, “to the piece Sholto wrote about the dilemma of how to tell his old nanny about her appalling BO winning the coveted Columnist of the Year award…”
Cassandra fumed. Her own efforts having never earned anything other than derision from the literary establishment, it was hard to accept that an eight-year-old had won such an award. With a piece about a nanny, of all things. Well, she could give them pieces about nannies until they came out of her ears. Christ knew what the St. Midas’s bunch had made of her new one. What had all the glamorous nannies everyone else seemed to employ so effortlessly thought of someone who quite obviously had never seen a full-length mirror? Or any mirror, judging by that figure. More visible panty line than the knicker department of M&S, not to mention tits like coalsacks. Cassandra glanced down complacently at her own neat little buds, still standing proud after thirty-nine years on the planet and a little help from the appropriately named Dr. Pertwee. Not forgetting Imelda, much as she’d like to. Shame Zak had brought all that up again. Especially after the pains she’d taken to keep Imelda and her family quiet about the pains Imelda had apparently suffered. As if, snorted Cassandra to herself. Girl had got a free tit job, hadn’t she? Even if one had imploded, it hadn’t cost her anything.
Still, the fact that the new girl was plumper than a Christmas goose should at least keep Jett from straying. He hated fat women. Mind you, she’d hired Emma on the grounds that she weighed a good twelve stone and look what had happened there.
Cassandra sighed at the thought of her husband. Jett was like a dog in heat at the moment. He was quite literally a pain in the arse. Whether it was the absence of Emma or an excess of testosterone generated by the incipient release of his comeback album, Cassandra was not sure. Whatever it was, it wasn’t welcome. He’d wanted her in everything from whipped cream to Nutella over the past few days and when, last night, he had asked her to crawl under the glass-topped coffee table, Cassandra had decided enough was enough. “You pervert!” she had screeched.
“But I’m only asking you to pick up my goddamn lighter,” Jett had protested. “You know I can’t bend down that low with my goddamn back problems.”
“I don’t care,” Cassandra had shrieked. “You’ve gone too far this time. You’re disgusting.”
“OK then, I’ll pick it up myself,” Jett had drawled. “And you can pay the goddamn osteopath’s bill,” he had grimaced a few minutes later, clutching his spine in one hand and flicking the tiny silver microphone lighter furiously on and off with the other as he headed through the door to spend the rest of the night in the spare bedroom. Cassandra sighed. Most men Jett’s age only wanted sex once a year—and usually not from their wives even then.
“…a vote of thanks for Kate,” Polly Rice-Brown was saying when Cassandra tuned back in. Cassandra glanced enviously down the table in the direction of Kate Tressell’s flawlessly chic porridge linen Mao jacket. Then there was the Cartier Tank on the narrow wrist, whose thinness implied steely self-control and whose tan hinted at regular trips to the second home in Tuscany. Trust Kate Tressell always to wear the right thing, as well as have the right job being the nation’s favourite current affairs anchorwoman, as respected for her brain as for her shapely bottom. She also had the right husband—happening architect Julian Tressell who combined building Britain’s most talked-about edifices—such as his famous Tressell table which sank into the floor when not in use—with presenting a successful TV programme on the history of architecture. Kate also had the right haircut, dark-blonde and expensively tousled. And the waft of discreetly delicious perfume that had just entered Cassandra’s nostrils from Kate’s direction was, no doubt, the right smell.
“How does Kate manage to be the hottest thing in broadcasting, not to mention being one of the most proactive of St. Midas’s mothers?” simpered Polly, echoing Cassandra’s boiling thoughts. “Really, she’s an example to us all…”
The rest of the table sat and listened to Polly’s encomium about how, without Kate’s determination and, more importantly, her contacts, the schools new state-of-the-art TV studio would never have got past first base. Or off the drawing board of Julian, who had designed it. The TV studio was intended not only to elevate St. Midas’s facilities for its pupils into an entirely different league to that of even its closest competitors, but also to provide a training ground for the producers and presenters of tomorrow, amongst whose ranks Kate and Julian’s daughters Savannah and Siena were obviously intended to feature.
Savannah and Siena, no doubt, would dominate the chattering classes of the future as easily as they excelled in the Kumon maths classes of today. They and their parents were easily the brightest stars in St. Midas’s mini-firmament. And it was for this reason more than any other that Cassandra had come to the meeting.
Her mantelpiece—in infuriating contrast to Fenella Greatorex’s—still being inexplicably innocent of an invitation to Savannah and Siena’s birthday party, Cassandra had decided to screw her courage to the sticking place and force Kate Tressell to invite Zak. After all, the children certainly got on; Savannah and Siena were almost unique among St. Midas’s pupils for not having been the victims of some of Zak’s more hilarious pranks. And there had been so many of those high-spirited expressions of Zak’s boundless humour and creativity—Cassandra had only to raise her eyes and recall the time Zak had shut Milo Hope-Stanley in the garage overnight. Or when he had helped himself to the foie gras in Fenella Greatorex’s fridge that was intended for a client-clinching dinner party. Then he had been sick all over the sisal. She quickly lowered her eyes again.
Zak had never done anything remotely like this to Savannah and Siena, although preventing him had, Cassandra thought ruefully, taken more persuasion than Jane Austen. So why, why, why had she not been granted dropping-off and picking-up rights to the birthday party? Cassandra clutched her fists so hard under the table that her knuckles turned white. Zak simply had to be there. After the appearance of Cherie Blair and the First Kids at last year’s celebration had prompted a rash of newspaper articles about Power Children’s Parties, the Tressell bash had become the most talked-about children’s event since the Pied Piper hit Hamelin.
Cassandra hardly noticed the meeting moving on. Her mind was locked on to the party like a barnacle on the hull of a boat. She felt panic rising; had she not, for the past month at least, tried to impress on Zak that if he didn’t get an invitation, there would be hell to pay? And there had been plenty to pay already—Zak had been connected to the Internet on the grounds that last year’s summons had been sent out by e-mail. Cassandra had heard that this year’s was some sort of smart card pass. Surely the invitation, whatever form it took, would come soon? She looked desperately at Kate’s smiling face as she acknowledged the applause for her efforts. How on earth could she introduce the subject? Perhaps over a cup of coffee afterwards? But what would she say?
Kate’s minimal makeup made Cassandra wonder anew if she’d needed quite so much lipstick on herself. But then, some of the mothers coming to these parents’ meetings hired makeup artists for the occasion. And why not? St. Midas’s, after all, was not any old school. It was a power prep of the first order. Which was why securing an invitation to its most sought-after event was so vital. Cassandra felt sick. She couldn’t go home empty-handed. If Zak wasn’t asked, they’d have to change schools; there would be nothing else for it, the shame would be too much to bear. But Zak had already changed schools so often due to what Cassandra could only put down to the lack of imagination of the head teachers, there were precious few left for him to go to—l
anding a place at St. Midas’s had been a miracle of the first order. But even so, and without losing her sense of proportion too much, the rest of Zak’s life depended on this party.
She swallowed hard and tried to refocus on the matter in hand. The meeting had by now moved on from the much-anticipated joys of the about-to-open studio—“Can you imagine, a mini Question Time? We could make a pilot and try and get the Beeb to squeeze it in between Blue Peter and the six o’clock news…”—to the next item on the agenda. Some group of bleeding hearts, Cassandra noted with scorn, were suggesting that St. Midas’s set up an outreach link with London’s underprivileged—“Holiday work with the homeless so that the children would gain some understanding of those considerably worse off than themselves,” as the movement’s main spokeswoman put it. Cassandra listened with contempt. Who in God’s name wanted to understand anyone worse off? The whole point of St. Midas’s was to meet as many rich and useful people as possible. But the bitter core of her loathing was reserved, not for these ludicrous sentiments, but the fact that their mouthpiece was that bloody Fenella Greatorex. Whose son had been invited to The Party.
“I mean, it’s the homeless I just can’t bear to see,” Fenella sighed.
“Oh, absolutely,” burst out Cassandra. “I mean, if they have to lie around all over the pavements, why can’t they do it in nicer sleeping bags? Those disgusting blue flowery ones are so unstylish. They really ought to have more consideration.”
A frozen silence followed. Cassandra smirked to herself. That put the bleeding heart lefties in their place once and for all. The shocked expressions round the table reminded her of the time, several meetings ago, when she had admitted to spending Zak’s child benefit on Chateau Lafite.
“Um, well,” Polly Rice-Brown said, after a plethora of throat clearing. “Perhaps we could think about that while we move on to the next item, the Promises auction. Which, hopefully, will get the fund-raising for our next project, the film-editing suite, off to a great start.”
