by Wendy Holden
“Only?” teased Geri. “That’s pretty fast work considering you only met him this afternoon. And he bought Cassandra’s wretched dinner party. I call that gallantry beyond the call of duty.”
“Actually, I had met him before. He was at the wedding in Scotland.”
“Was he? I don’t remember.”
“Yes, well, your memory of that event isn’t exactly perfect, is it?” Anna prodded Geri as Orlando Gossett took the floor, Savannah and Siena each holding one of his plump red hands. Anna looked about her in surprise. She had been expecting a ghettoblaster with a few infants staggering around it. Instead, a pair of intimidatingly trendy-looking DJs presided over a console and the full complement of flashing lights; the disco was indistinguishable from a grown-up one, and a good deal better than most. Miranda’s and Thoby’s sprang particularly to Anna’s mind.
“Now,” boomed one of the DJs, “we have our first competition. Every child on to the floor, please.”
As a hundred plus parental hands pushed their little darlings forward, Cassandra looked wildly around for Zak. There he was, behind the console, busily pulling the wires out. So technically minded already, Cassandra thought proudly, clawing her way through the crowd to get to him. Within seconds, he had been propelled on to the floor. Zak may not be making his debut at the Wigmore Hall or Pinewood Studios, Cassandra thought fiercely, but here was a wonderful opportunity to display his Madame Abricot dancing skills.
“We’re going to play some music,” one of the DJs announced as Fatboy Slim began to pulsate through the room, “and you’re all going to dance like your mummy does.”
As the parents laughed and clapped, the children stood uncertainly in the strobe lights. One or two, Otto Greatorex among them, Cassandra noted furiously, started to sway to the music and move their feet from side to side. Come on, Zak, she urged silently from the sidelines. Dance, you sod.
“Like your mummies, remember.” The DJs turned the sound up until the room throbbed. Anna wondered how loud it had to be before the glass, of which there was plenty, shattered and showered down on them all.
Savannah and Siena, Cassandra saw with panic, were stepping neatly from foot to foot in perfect time, making graceful and economical movements with their arms. Kate Tressell obviously danced as perfectly as she did everything else. Cassandra derived some comfort from the fact that, beside her, Polly Rice-Brown was clearing her throat embarrassedly as Sholto stood swaying his hands from side to side, an ecstatic expression on his face. Otto Greatorex presented a similarly heart-warming sight, galumphing around determinedly off the beat, an inane grin stretching from cheek to cheek. On the sidelines behind him, Fenella looked thunderous.
“Ooh, is this how your mummies dance?” mocked the DJs. Cassandra grinned to herself. She was beginning to enjoy this. More satisfactory still was the arrival onto the floor of Milo and Ivo Hope-Stanley, who began to jerk wildly around in a sort of graceless bop that Cassandra did not at all connect with Caroline until she spotted her mortified face through the crowds. She shook with laughter. This really was hilarious.
“What on earth is Zak doing?” Geri suddenly whispered to Anna. Cassandra’s son had suddenly appeared in the midst of the now heaving dance floor, clutching a bottle of champagne he had found somewhere. He proceeded to stick it in his mouth, tip his head back and stagger around the floor, deliberately colliding with as many people as possible.
“Don’t ask,” Anna murmured, gazing from between her fingers at the rapidly clearing floor. Zak was now ripping off his shirt and waving the bottle around. As they watched in horror, he rushed up to Milo Hope-Stanley and began grinding into his pelvis, the hand not holding the bottle now clasped firmly to Milo’s behind. Milo squealed in terror and rushed to his mother on the sidelines.
“Look at Cassandra,” Anna whispered, glancing at where the strobe lights sporadically illuminated a mini-skirted, horror-transfixed figure by the edge of the dance floor.
“I can’t. I might miss something,” Geri hissed back. Miming that the bottle was empty, Zak now proceeded to strut in an unsteady circle, both hands thrusting his imaginary breasts forward, a lascivious expression on his face. “But look at Cherie Blair!”
Across the dance floor, the Prime Minister’s wife looked on in amazement as, the music fading, Zak slid to his knees by way of a finale, lay on his back, spread his legs wide apart and yelled to the assembled company, “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a shag?”
Chapter Thirteen
Anna had never had a date with a laird before. Apart, that was, from a landlaird—Mr. McGrabbie, the owner of the tiny, scruffy terrace house in which she had occupied a small room during her last year at university, had practically haunted the place. He had, Anna recalled without affection, been particularly fond of appearing either early in the morning or late in the evening, hours which a cynic might assume to be timed in the hope of finding Anna in a state of undress.
A laird. It was really rather exciting. Admittedly, Seb had been an Hon, but one, despite his own wealth, relentlessly Hon The Make. Anna had not been surprised to see, the once or twice she had glimpsed the Daily Telegraph recently, that Seb had been given a racing tipsters column. Seeing that he was married to one of the paper’s leading writers, the coincidence was really no less than astonishing. What was more genuinely amazing was that, glancing at his byline picture smirking from the page, Anna felt nothing at all. Seb now seemed to have been part of someone else’s life altogether, but then again, most things BC (Before Cassandra) seemed to have been part of someone else’s life.
It had not been easy to extricate Zak from the party and get back to the house in time to get ready for her date. He was not only having the time of his life stabbing the party entertainer hard in the backside with a plastic sword, but unsurprisingly seemed in no hurry to face his mother, who had suddenly found it necessary to leave the party during his dance routine. Anna was equally unenthusiastic at the prospect of seeing Cassandra; no doubt she would in some way be to blame for the embarrassing turn the afternoon’s events had taken.
For once, united in fear, Anna and Zak entered Liv to find it silent. Neither Cassandra nor Jett was anywhere to be seen. Obviously vastly relieved, Zak shot like greased lightning up to his room whence, before too many seconds had elapsed, the unmistakable sound of Warlord Bloodlust II could be heard emanating from the direction of his Playstation. Anna, it seemed, had the house to herself. Or, more significantly, one of the bathrooms. The shower in the garage—fitful, sulky, and invariably occupied by some hideous insect or other—hardly seemed the place to prepare for a hot date with someone like Jamie. Not least because it was always freezing cold. Anna padded up the stairs silently and approached Cassandra’s bathroom with the trepidation of Hercules entering the lair of the Minotaur. Dare she?
Before she could change her mind, Anna took her ancient toilet bag and a deep breath and slid through the bathroom door, locking it behind her. Turning on the mock-Edwardian tangle of shower head and mixer tap, she smiled in delicious anticipation at the thundering, warm Niagara pouring into the familiar—and emphatically un-Edwardian—circular bath she spent much of each morning wiping and polishing. Sometimes, admittedly, with her own spit. She burrowed her toes into the thick white carpet which stretched away to the room’s distant corners and up the three stairs leading to the platform on which the bath was placed. Cassandra’s ablutions, like everything else in her life, had to be a performance.
As the bath slowly filled, Anna, undressing, stared at herself in the mirror. It gave her a distinctly mixed message, the good news being that the wretched swag of flesh had almost disappeared. Even better was the fact that, if Anna raised her arms above her head, she could even see her ribs, although this exercise also revealed the less satisfactory sight of sprouts of russet hair from her armpits. That, plus the unruly thatch between her thighs and the white and flaking expanse of her calves, was the
bad news. Christ, thought Anna, surveying with horror the auburn fuzz on her long-neglected lower limbs. I look like a Yeti.
More bad news was that the brilliant light of Cassandra’s bulb-and-gilt encircled Hollywood-style mirror only accentuated her pale, dry lips and the exhausted dark smudges under her eyes. As if, Anna thought, she’d gone ten rounds with Prince Naseem. There was no obvious solution to this. Anna’s own slim stock of makeup had run out weeks ago, and in any case it would take more than a quick slick of Boots Own Brand to reverse—much less repair—the damage she was now contemplating. It called for spackling paste, at the very least.
The bath was now ready. Stepping in, Anna sank back thankfully among the few bubbles she had dared add. Not that Cassandra was exactly short on unguents—there seemed to be enough royal jelly for a globewide celebration of the Queen Mum’s hundredth birthday. Now the excavations could begin: taking her ancient Ladyshave from her washbag, Anna took the first tentative strokes at her armpits, reflecting as she did so that, this being Saturday night, millions of other girls all over the country would be doing the same thing. Men too, very possibly. As she watched the hairs floating on the water’s surface, Anna briefly wondered what happened to all the excess fuzz removed from the arms, legs, and pubes of the nation during such preparations. Was there, somewhere underground, a compacted mass of unwanted hair, like the hugest bathroom plug clot ever seen? It was a disgusting thought.
Anna lay back fully now. The delicious and unaccustomed warmth of the water seeped into her bones. She felt sleepy. Exhausted, in fact. That light above the bath was a bit bright; Anna reached for the cord to switch it off, then, a nanosecond later, was forced to stifle a scream as the whole bath erupted around her. Powerful jets of water were pummelling her on every side—in the ribs, under the arms, in the small of the back, and, rather enjoyably, a particularly strong and focused one pouring into the space between her legs. As the delicious tension grew, Anna realised that she had stumbled across not only Cassandra’s Jacuzzi—so that was what all those tiny holes had been for—but very possibly also the source of inspiration for the racier scenes in her novels. Given that Cassandra and Jett seemed to go in for steaming rows far more than steamy sex, Anna had never really understood what had fuelled her employer’s high-octane literary raunchathons. It was now obvious it wasn’t Jett, but another jet altogether.
Anna gasped as the water drilled on, pleasurably, painfully, direct into her inner nerve centre. She’d had no idea that a bath could be so much fun. The blood pounded round her head as a slow throbbing spread through her body; simultaneously, the thudding in her brain seemed to intensify. Anna lifted her head slowly from the water. It was as she had feared. The thudding was coming from the door.
“Who’s that in my fucking bathroom?” Cassandra’s furious shriek was practically glass-shattering. Climbing reluctantly out of the bath and bracing herself, Anna reflected that at least the description was right.
***
Anna looked at Jamie over the artificial carnation. The soft glow of the food warmer flickered over his cheekbones as he smiled at her. He seemed to be finding the story of Cassandra and the bathroom extremely diverting. It was almost worth having had her eardrums practically punctured with the force of Cassandra’s wrath. Anna’s excuse that she was giving the bathroom a steam clean and her hair was wet not with shampoo and bathwater but with the sweat of her exertions had cut little ice with her employer. Until, that was, Cassandra had thrown a handful of cubes into a glass and topped it up with neat Bombay Sapphire. The resulting stupor had afforded Anna the opportunity to sneak into Cassandra’s drinks fridge and help herself to the makeup and perfume that were stored there for reasons Anna had been unable to get to the bottom of, beyond Cassandra’s snapped assertion that “All the supermodels do it.” After all, thought Anna, dragging the ice-cold tip of the eyebrow pencil painfully across her brow, one may as well be hung for a sheep as a Lancôme.
For her first date with Jamie, Anna had imagined someone with a Scottish island to their credit would have come up with something slightly smarter than the King’s Cross tandoori Jamie eventually ushered her into. Even if, as he explained, the sag aloo was to die for and it was convenient for Euston, where he was due to catch the sleeper back to Scotland later. The fact that, come midnight, Jamie would be somewhere in the region of Newcastle did at least solve the problem—raised by Geri—of whether to sleep with him on the first date. As it was, the murky-looking vegetable curries currently being deposited by the waiter on the table looked likely to scupper any plans to kiss him into the bargain. Those plans, anyway, were under constant revision. Jamie smiled a lot, especially at the bath story; he was perfectly friendly, yet Anna detected a guardedness, a tendency to withhold personal information, revealed via a veritable barrage of questions about her. It was difficult not to be flattered however—no one, after all, had ever been this interested in her before. Seb, certainly, had barely bothered to find out her surname, let alone any family details. Not that Anna had blamed him overmuch for that; there certainly wasn’t anything obviously fascinating about the fact that her civil servant father had died when she was ten, and that she had no siblings and a polite but distant relationship with her part-time librarian mother. Jamie, however, seemed riveted.
There was no time to ask him questions anyway. Having exhausted Anna’s stock of answers, Jamie spent the rest of the evening talking about Dampie, while Anna, listening patiently, tried hard to be fascinated by sheep figures, fishing statistics, and dry stone wall replacement programmes and supposed it went with the territory. Quite literally—growing up on a Scottish estate probably did spark a lifelong interest in Tudor oak settles and eighteenth-century portraiture, although growing up in her mother’s spotless semi had correspondingly failed to ignite any fascination on her part with MDF and Anaglypta. A faint tremor slid through her stomach as she realised that, in order to have any chance at all with the person sitting opposite, she was going to have to watch a great many Antiques Roadshows.
She learned, for her part, a handful of facts about Jamie’s background. Her eyes pricked, his terse and dispassionate delivery notwithstanding, on being told how, after his parents died in an aircrash when he was fifteen, the young Jamie had divided his time between school and the Dampie estate.
Despite his obvious reluctance to talk about it, Anna managed to gather that, due to some complication in his father’s will, he had only inherited the estate fairly recently and even now the process was not complete. Something about the right personnel not being in place.
“And do you like the countryside?” Anna nodded, her cheeks bulging with onion bhaji, and wondered why he always managed to ask her a question when her mouth was full. He still hadn’t shown the slightest inclination to flirt with her, and Anna was beginning to wonder sadly, after the endless questions about old houses in rural locations, if getting the right personnel was the point of the evening and he was merely sounding her out as a potential housekeeper. After all, he knew she was a dab hand with a duster and could manage basic meals. She had hardly held back on her descriptions of life with Cassandra. And there was no doubt that Jamie was far more interested in the domestic details of her day than her ambition to be a writer. She hadn’t even told him about the existence of the diary, whose entries seemed daily to get longer and more clogged with telling detail. It seemed to be occupying the same role in her life as the bottle did in Cassandra’s—as a comforter. She was a diaryholic.
The miserable conviction that Jamie wasn’t remotely romantically interested in her grew as the waiter replaced their plates (hers empty, his full) with the extremely modest bill (he paid it), and the complimentary After Eights (he left them). By the time they both stood up to leave—he still banging on about the reroofing needed at Dampie—she felt the distance between them to roughly resemble that between Land’s End and John O’Groats. That’s it then, she thought, looking her longing last on his rangy frame
as she followed it out defeatedly into the rain-slicked, greasy street. Another one bites the dust. The inimitable Farrier line in charm and conversation had reeled in yet another willing victim. Not.
It was with astonishment that she heard him mutter, as he pecked her distantly on the cheek, that he would like to see her again. She spent the whole journey back in the taxi in a state of cautious bliss only slightly punctured by the discovery, when dismounting at Liv, that Jamie hadn’t paid for it as she had assumed. Honestly, she thought, handing over her last ten-pound note, I’d have got the bus home had I known. The fact that Cassandra hadn’t paid her beyond the first week, and not in full even then, desperately needed addressing. Still, what did that matter? thought Anna, letting herself quietly back into the house, skipping silently up to her sofabedroom, taking her pen, and opening her diary. I’m through to the second interview.
***
Cassandra, naturally, seized upon the fact of Anna’s having a suitor with a bitchy glee. “Aren’t you going to get changed, then?” she enquired nastily as, early one evening, Anna gingerly descended the green glass staircase.
“Actually, I’m ready.” Having done her best to sponge the marks off her faithful black Joseph trousers, Anna felt reasonably respectable in the white cotton shirt she had slipped in among that afternoon’s Everest of ironing. The suspicious way Cassandra was looking at it suggested she might well deduct the three minutes not spent ironing Zak’s underpants out of her wages, a further half of which had, after much hand-twistingly embarrassed enquiry, just materialised. This had almost created more problems than it solved—Anna had been torn between paying off some of her student loans and investing in new makeup. Torn, that was, until Geri had intervened and, rolling her eyes, steered her firmly off to the Ruby and Millie cosmetics counter at Boots.
“Didn’t realise you had another job as a waitress,” Cassandra remarked spitefully before drifting back into the sitting room. As Anna, prompted by the taxi honking outside, left the house, she heard the unmistakable clink of the Bombay Sapphire bottle; crossing the road to the throbbing black car, she was conscious of Cassandra’s laser stare penetrating the sitting-room window. So far Cassandra, despite her hints and questions, had not met Jamie and Anna intended to keep it that way. Thankfully, even her basilisk gaze could not penetrate the gloomy depths of the back of the taxi. Jamie, inside, was practically invisible.
