by Wendy Holden
“Give me air,” she yelled at Anna as she fired up a Full Strength Ultratar. Hot tears began to flow over her foundation like lava over the cragged face of Etna. Her mascara—part of a new range called Rock Star she was celebrity test-driving for one of the few glossy magazines still aware she existed—began to run in black streams down her face.
“So I’m afraid I’ll have to be leaving rather sooner than I had planned,” Anna muttered. She genuinely felt almost apologetic. She’d seen earthquaked cities look less devastated than Cassandra at that moment. “Jamie wants me to move up to Scotland with him.”
***
Anna spent her last night in Liv hearing Cassandra and Jett screaming more violently at each other than they ever had before. Unable to sleep, she was red-eyed and exhausted when Jamie came round in the morning to pick her up in a hire car specially rented for the occasion. Doubtless he had thought, Anna realised as, embarrassed, she stuffed her one piece of luggage into the boot, that she had slightly more possessions than was the case. Or even the rucksack. “What time will we arrive at Dampie?” she asked him, over-brightly, as they headed up through Hampstead.
“Oh, about midnight, I should think.” At least, Anna thought, he knew his way there; there would be no repeat of Seb’s cold fury at her inability to tell right from left.
“We’ll be starving.”
“Don’t worry. Nanny will have left something for us to eat.”
“Nanny?” Anna shot upright in her seat. “You’ve still got a nanny? You never mentioned her before.”
“Oh, didn’t I?” Did Jamie sound over-casual? “She still lives at Dampie. She’s, um, well, sort of the housekeeper now—been in the family forever. Great old character. You’ll love her.”
There was a silence as Anna tried to suppress a sense of rising panic. She gazed out of the window, unseeing, as Golders Green flashed past.
“What’s Nanny like?” she asked, as they turned on to the M1.
“Mm?” Jamie was absorbed in indicating to move into the middle lane.
“Nanny,” repeated Anna. “Tell me about her.”
Jamie didn’t miss a beat. “Oh, Nanny. She’s wonderful. You’ll love her. Actually,” he added smoothly, “you might find her quite useful as well. Thought you could talk to her about the wedding. Organising it and all that…Nanny’s very good at organising things.”
It was a while before Anna spoke again.
“Are you very close to her?” she eventually asked, choosing her words carefully.
“Well, she looked after me after my parents died. Used to knit me scratchy jerseys.” Jamie laughed fondly as they sailed past Northampton. “Still does, as a matter of fact. Bright yellow. Keeps the fleas off, she says.”
“Fleas?”
“And always a bit tight,” Jamie continued.
“What? Gin?” Not another alcoholic, Anna hoped. Cassandra had been bad enough. But bad enough, thankfully, to still be in bed when they left.
Jamie’s shocked jerk sent the car spinning into the fast lane. Quickly, he pulled it back into the centre of the middle lane. “God, no. Nanny never drinks. She knitted the jerseys a bit tight, I mean. She’s always been a bit funny about clothes. She thinks T-shirts are very scruffy and once drew a collar and tie on a picture of me in one. I looked rather strange beside the rest of the school cross-country running team.” He grinned uncertainly at her across the handbrake. “But I’m sure you girls will have a wonderful time planning the wedding.”
Girls. Even at best, Nanny would hardly qualify as a twenty-something. Difficult to imagine giggling over the wedding dress with a white-haired pensioner, however twinkling the eyes, apple-like the cheeks, and benevolent the smile.
“Did she spoil you?” If Nanny was generous, that at least would be something. They could giggle over the lavish menu and champagne instead.
“Spoil me?” Another amazed swerve. “Oh no. Nanny was very firm. She thought running water was immoral and used to make me break the ice on the horse troughs before I could wash. Even in summer. And long after we’d stopped using horses.”
As far as Nanny was concerned, Anna quickly decided, what remaining ignorance there was bliss. She made no further enquiries and spent the rest of the journey either dozing or listening to Jamie describe the various repairs to the castle he had planned. From what he said, the place seemed to be falling apart; the weather since she had been there must have been appalling. She didn’t remember it being so bad at Thoby’s wedding. Although, come to think of it, it had been a bit cloudy.
By the time they reached Dampie, Anna realised there was a lot she didn’t remember from Thoby’s wedding. Such as the drive being a moonscape of yawning holes with the castle itself lurking glumly at the end in a cloak of swirling mist. The moss-slimed steps leading to the cracked and peeling front door had also slipped her memory. Indeed, so far was Dampie from being the Disneyland palace of light she remembered that Anna wondered if the wedding had been somewhere else altogether.
Anna gripped Jamie’s hand tightly and tried not to shudder as something unimaginably ancient opened the door and thrust a battered, kerosene-scented lantern almost in their faces. The light blazed on the brimming red rims of the creature’s rheumy eyeballs and caught the slimy stumps of its teeth. Flecks of phlegm were speared on the unshaven wastes of its chin like cuckoo-spit on grass, and a strong smell of whisky clung to the shabby layers of its clothing. It took all Anna’s self-control, never high and currently at its lowest, for her not to recoil in disgust.
“MacLoggie!” exclaimed Jamie, much to Anna’s relief. The unshaven chin had been a hint but hadn’t necessarily ruled out the possibility of this being Nanny.
“Hame safely,” the ancient retainer gasped at Jamie, apparently deeply affected, although whether by alcohol or by emotion, it was impossible to tell.
“D’ye want anything ta eat? Nanny’s left you some stovies in the kitchen.”
Jamie brightened. “Nanny’s stovies,” he informed Anna, “are a force to be reckoned with.”
Anna had no idea what stovies were, except that they sounded like something you presented to your doctor in a glass jar for examination. “Too late for me,” she muttered. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll turn in.”
“I’ll take ye up to bed then,” the ancient heap growled.
Anna swallowed, trying to stifle the almost unimaginable thought of snuggling down with such a creature. She lifted her ring finger half in protection. The diamond glimmered dully in the lamp light. But MacLoggie showed no signs of noticing it.
“Take Miss Farrier to Dr. Johnson,” said Jamie.
“Dr. Johnson?” echoed Anna. “But I feel perfectly all right. I know I was slightly carsick around Scotch Corner but I’m fine now.”
“The Dr. Johnson suite,” said Jamie. “He slept in it when he visited Dampie on his tour of the Highlands. Thought that might appeal to your literary side. He really enjoyed himself here,” Jamie added. “Wrote in his diaries that Dampie was ‘a most impressive ruin…the first sight of which weighed very solemnly on me.’”
“Oh.” It didn’t sound like a five-star recommendation to Anna.
The weak light from MacLoggie’s lantern had faded to a pinprick in the all-absorbing gloom of the back of the hall; Anna, stumbling in his wake, found a far more reliable guide to be the strong smell of whisky trailing after him, and the faint rattling of keys. Endless passages and stairways were negotiated, one spiral. As she pushed her shoulders up the claustrophobically tight and twisting stairwell, Anna had the impression the walls were pressing in and squeezing her. She wondered which of the many dark passages contained Nanny.
“Hae we are,” MacLoggie said as they finally emerged on a red-carpeted landing where a number of low, wide white doors with brass handles were set deep into their respective frames. He unlocked the door and, turning on his heel, disappear
ed into the darkness without another word. The blackness descended on Anna with the intimidating suddenness of a kidnapper’s cloak.
As she felt for the bedroom door and opened it, the chill air hit her like a fist. She fumbled and found a light switch, revealing a room vaguely similar to that she recalled occupying with Seb. This was, however, much larger and presumably much grander, so vast were its proportions, so impressive in size if possibly not in comfort the large four-poster bed which stood in the centre of it, scented slightly with mildew and mothballs. A honeymoon suite for the Addams Family, thought Anna, peering closely at a murky oil which hung between two deeply recessed windows and depicted what looked like a soldier dying in the arms of a tragic-looking woman. A spaniel apparently also breathing its last lay nearby; the picture was entitled “The Double Sacrifice.” A door in one wall of the room led to a cavernous Edwardian bathroom with a rust-scabbed container of Ajax standing on the bathside where the Crabtree and Evelyn ought to be.
Anna returned to the bedroom, knelt in the recessed window and squinted out through the diamond panes. One was missing, and the draught shot through Anna’s thin Ghost dress—a good luck present from Geri—like a bullet. She shivered, hoping it was the only Ghost in residence.
A hideous and heavy mahogany piece of furniture, seeking to combine the functions of desk, dressing table, and decorative object and failing singularly at all three, stood against the faded floral paper of one wall. Anna debated whether to put her underwear in it, but having taken one sniff at the damp and dusty interior, decided not to. The flat, wide drawer just below the mirror in the centre would, however, be the perfect place for her diary. After she had written today’s entry, of course. Fishing the small exercise book out of the front pocket of her bag, Anna crouched on the end of the bed and scribbled her account of leaving the vibrancy and crowds of London—never had she thought of them with such attention before—for a land where both the warmth and the light seemed permanently switched off. She shivered as she scribbled, noting at the end of her entry that she seemed to be further from writing a novel than ever. But perhaps the silence and space of the castle might prove an inspiration. After all, hadn’t Dr. Johnson stayed here?
Anna unpacked quickly and thrust her clothes into the dank and icy wardrobe. After finally screwing up the courage to get between the sheets—just as cold and old-smelling as anticipated, and very possibly the very same the eminent lexicographer had slept in—Anna lay and waited for Jamie. As the fatigue of the journey overcame her, she drifted in and out of dreams where she was being chased up an endless and ever-shrinking spiral staircase by a large, bewigged, and whisky-scented creature who may have been Dr. Johnson. Or Nanny.
Chapter Fourteen
The doctor put his pen down on his desk, sighed, and looked at Cassandra.
“Mrs. Knight. Is there anything in Zachary’s past, any experience he may have had, that could have left a deep and abiding impression on him?”
“Certainly not,” snapped Cassandra. “Zak’s very resilient. Nothing ever makes an impression on him.”
“Yes,” said the child psychologist. “That’s roughly what I’d heard from Mrs. Gosschalk.” He sighed, picked up his pen again, and tapped it on the desk. Mont Blanc, Cassandra noticed crossly. And the desk was antique. Bound to be with the fees she was paying him.
“Children are very sensitive, you know. It could have been something minor.”
“Zak’s never met a miner. I try and keep him away from that sort of person.” Cassandra narrowed her eyes and hoped the psychologist—all too obviously that sort of person himself—would get her drift. Large, red-faced, and florid, with a distinctly regional accent; it was ludicrous. What on earth could a creature like this tell her about Zak?
“So, no trigger that you can think of?”
“Well, he does have a number of guns piled under his bed.”
“He does, Mrs. Knight?”
“All toy ones, of course. Almost all, at any rate.”
Still, she had had no choice but to come, such had been the verdict of the St. Midas’s parents in that bloody extraordinary general meeting held after Zak’s performance at the Tressell birthday party. Cassandra boiled inside at the memory of that wretched Fenella Greatorex, now risen to chairman of the SMSPA, telephoning her afterwards and telling her in a voice saturated with sugary condescension that, given his obvious degree of mental disturbance, Zak needed to be referred to a child psychologist, on the basis of whose report Zak’s future at St. Midas’s would finally be assessed. Stay of execution, then. But executions there would be, Cassandra was determined. Eventually.
“Never mind, darling,” Cassandra had reassured her son. “What goes around, comes around, and when you’re head of MI5, you can have them all stabbed to death with poisoned umbrellas.” Zak’s eyes had lit up; Cassandra had tried not to notice when, several hours later, she spotted him looking with interest at the furled inhabitants of the Jade Jagger umbrella stand in the corner of the hall.
Great though the relief that Zak could—at least temporarily—stay at the school had been, the expense of fulfilling the conditions had been greater. Cassandra had been amazed to discover the waiting list for a child psychologist was almost as long as that for a Hermés Kelly bag. She’d virtually had to found a whole ward before she could leapfrog it. But it was unthinkable that Zak lose his place at St. Midas’s.
“So.” The psychologist looked up at Cassandra from his notes. “As far as you are concerned, Zachary’s childhood has passed entirely without any violent or emotionally upsetting incident?”
“Yes.”
“Sure?”
“Well, there was a slight scene on the Ghost Train at Chessington when he was about six years old, but I never managed to find out whether it was Zak or his father who burst into tears during the ride.”
“Mmm.” The psychologist raised an eyebrow. “Is that all?”
“And I suppose I was a bit cross with him when he only came second in the hundred metres sprint at the school sports day last year. But I was entitled to my view—after all, I’d won the mothers’ race only after months of intensive daily training with a former Olympic athlete. I felt Zak was rather letting the side down.”
“Ah.” The psychologist brightened. “Now we’re getting somewhere. You must beware of ambitious parent syndrome, Mrs. Knight.”
“Tell me about it,” Cassandra sighed dramatically. “The parents at St. Midas’s are so pushy it’s embarrassing. One of them is talking about getting his child selected for Labour at the age of twelve. He says if William Pitt can do it, so can Mungo, although I suppose William Pitt must be at another school somewhere. I don’t think he’s at St. Midas’s.”
The psychologist’s eyes boggled slightly. He rippled his fingers repeatedly on the desktop as if playing an overture. “Zachary, Mrs. Knight, is a child. Not a racehorse.”
It was Cassandra’s turn to stare. “Dr. Leake,” she said, flaring her nostrils, “I find it hard to believe that I am paying good money—and rather a lot of it at that—to be told my son is not a racehorse. Do you think I wouldn’t have noticed when he was born?”
“You misinterpret my meaning, Mrs. Knight. What I am trying to say is that parenting is not a competition. Pushing him too hard can result in burnout syndrome. You don’t want him to win cups at eight only to drop out at sixteen.”
“No, of course not. I want him to win cups at sixteen as well.”
The psychologist sighed. “Mrs. Knight. Like many parents you are over-anxious that your child should be a success. You are perhaps expecting too much of him. Parents who want their children to be MPs at ludicrously early ages are not really doing them any favours.”
“I agree. The very least they should expect is Prime Minister. Aim high, that’s what I say.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Knight. I think that’s quite enough for one afternoon.”
&nbs
p; Put him in his place, Cassandra thought triumphantly as she drove home. How dare anyone suggest Zak was anything other than an angel?
“I mean, really,” she declared to Jett on arriving back at Liv. “How could anyone possibly take any of this seriously? Just because Zak’s a chip off his father’s old performing block and has a powerful stage presence. What’s happened to everyone’s sense of humour…?” Her voice tailed off as, having finished flinging off her pashmina and checking her makeup in the hall mirror, she turned and caught Jett’s expression. It was one of unbounded fury.
“Yes, well, the little bastard’s done more than demonstrate stage presence,” snarled Jett. “He’s been demonstrating some of the goddamn props as well.” He shook a fist at the ceiling from where lengths of wire dangled like beheaded flower stems.
Zak, it emerged, had discovered a broadsword from the forthcoming Solstice stage show under the chaise longue in Jett’s study and, with the aid of judiciously-placed chairs and tables, had immediately set about hacking every ceiling light in the house from its flex on the pretext that he was playing at pirates.
“Well, quite right too,” yelled Cassandra, determined to defend her son. “Everyone knows ceiling roses are hopelessly passé. Zak’s just taken the first step on the road to uplighters.”
“Trust you to take his side,” roared Jett. “You let him get away with goddamn murder—almost literally in the case of Otto Greatorex. Gave his goddamn arm so many Chinese burns yesterday he nearly burst into goddamn flames. What sort of example are you setting him?”
“You fucking hypocrite!” shrieked Cassandra. “If we’re talking examples, just hang on in there while I get the lawyer on conference call. What about you and that Yugoslavian slapper?”
“Ethnic Albanian, actually,” huffed Jett. “She lost her entire family in the Kosovo war.”
“And then she came here and got screwed by you. I wonder which was worse.”
Svetlana, the East European nanny, had seemed manna from heaven the day, almost a week after Anna had left, that Cassandra had spotted her ad in the local freesheet. She had been irresistible to Cassandra because she was cheap; to Jett she had been merely irresistible. Just as Zak could not pass over the opportunity to call her Sweaty instead of the approved diminutive of Sveti, Jett could not pass over the opportunity of making a pass.
