by Wendy Holden
By the time she gained the village—not the cheerful cluster of white-painted cottages she had imagined, but a sullen, sodden huddle called, not Horrible, but Oribal—the rain was lashing down like stair rods and bouncing off the deserted—and only—street. Shivering in the bus stop, Anna looked speculatively across the road to the only establishment in the immediate vicinity featuring electric light. The low, grey-white pebbledashed building with frosted windows looked as if it might be a pub.
Though desperate for a vodka and tonic, Anna decided to give it a miss and, taking advantage of a hiatus in the deluge, walked towards a damp wooden hut with “Village Hall” in rotting letters above the door. Before it was a glass-fronted noticeboard containing a Met Office declaration that Oribal had had the most rainfall and least hours of sunshine of any place in the British Isles in the previous year. It was difficult to shake off the impression, fostered by the prominent position the notice commanded on the board, that the village was rather proud of this distinction.
Another notice offered the services of a Mrs. McLeod and her ironing board at what Anna considered to be the extremely reasonable rate of a pound per ten items, “discretion assured.” Either people round these parts wore things they didn’t want others to know about, thought Anna, or to be suspected of not doing one’s own ironing in Oribal was to be suspected of sin beyond redemption. Perhaps both.
Rather grudgingly displayed at the board’s bottom was a card advertising evening classes in flower-pressing and the bagpipes. Neither appealed to her much; having failed so far to spot a single bloom she doubted the feasibility of the former, and the idea of learning how to make the sort of ghastly row that woke her every morning similarly held few attractions. MacLoggie, on the other hand, could clearly do with a lesson or two. Perhaps she’d suggest it to Jamie when she saw him at lunchtime; the thought of which reminded her that it was probably time that she was heading back to the castle.
Just then a vibrating sensation somewhere around her lower pelvis announced that either she was having an unexpected orgasm or someone was attempting to make telephonic communication. The latter seemed most likely. Dragging the mobile out, Anna stabbed frantically at the buttons and slammed the instrument against her ear several times before finally the voice came through.
“Hi, babe.”
“Geri!” Anna shrieked in delight.
“So, life is bliss, is it? Set a date yet? I’m desperate to get my bridesmaid dress—I’ve seen just the thing in Gucci. White, tight, and with a huge slit up the side.”
“Sounds amazing,” said Anna truthfully. “We’re still sorting the date out, as it happens—no, nothing’s wrong.” Anna crossed her fingers behind her back, keen to get off the tricky subject. “So how are you? Your voice sounds funny. Deeper.”
“All that screaming at those bloody kids,” said Geri with feeling.
“What? But I thought Siena and Savannah were supposed to be angels. Wasn’t the holiday good then?”
“Absolute fucking disaster. Mostly because their cousin came with them—ghastly brat called Titus. Fought all the sodding time.”
“Oh dear.” Yet Anna felt a faint sense of relief that even a take-no-prisoners nanny like Geri was powerless in the face of a truly intractable child.
“And so bloody noisy—had a scream that could shatter glass. Could, but didn’t have to—he managed very well at that with just his hands. Looked like Kristallnacht in the kitchen when he’d been looking for something to put his pomegranate juice in.”
“What a shame. And the place looked so peaceful.” Anna remembered the snaps Geri had shown her of the magnificently well-appointed and stupendously expensive-looking palazzo that Julian Tressell had restored to its former glory after many years serving as a rural bus station.
“Was until Titus got there. Then we became the cabaret for the entire village—walking through these completely silent old squares with all the kids screaming and hitting each other with their Barbies.”
“Did Titus have a Barbie as well then?”
“’Fraid so. His parents are against sexual stereotyping. Which in my experience has one of two results. Either he becomes a complete wuss who embroiders his own bookmarks, or he turns into Attila the Hun. Titus is the latter. Obsessed with bums, willies, and toilets. Loved nothing better than watching himself pee in the bath.”
“Didn’t know Attila the Hun did that.”
“Ha bloody ha. Well, anyway, I’m thinking of suing retrospectively for mental distress. Had a long discussion about it over lunch with a gobsmackingly rich barrister who has a place out there as well. He agreed it would make an interesting test case, and said he’d be only too happy to take the brief. Except I think he had other briefs in mind.”
“But what’s wrong with that?” asked Anna. “A rich barrister with a place in Tuscany?”
“And a face like a basket of fruit. Rotten fruit, at that,” said Geri with her trademark crushing frankness. “Even I’ve got standards, sadly. But enough of me. Any gossip?”
“Gossip?” The last gossip on Skul, Anna imagined, was when Flora MacDonald dressed Bonnie Prince Charlie as a woman to help him escape. That rumour was probably still doing the rounds. “Not as such. What’s going on down there?”
“Oh, the usual. Otto Greatorex has got a place in the choir of St. Pauls and Fenella is beside herself.”
“I bet she is.”
“But not for the reasons you’d think. It’s a nightmare, apparently. She’s got choir school mother’s bottom, sitting on a hard pew for hours every week, and has Otto under her feet all the time because he’s not allowed to go out in case he gets a cold and loses his voice. But she says the worst thing is that all that time sitting in cathedrals contemplating the Almighty means she’s getting rather worried that He might actually exist.”
“Oh dear. I see.”
“Yes, the parents are rather suffering at the moment,” Geri said breezily. “The Rice-Browns are mortified because their new nanny drives around in an Audi while they make do with an old Volvo. Polly said to Kate the other day how ghastly it is when your nanny is so much richer than you are. Then Hanuki—you know, that Japanese male nanny you met? Well, he’s won the nannying equivalent of the Lottery. The Pottery, I suppose you’d call it. People have tried to poach him so often he’s on double pay, works no more than thirty-six hours a week, and gets his breakfast in bed. It’s rather gone to his head. He refuses to come anywhere near the kitchen until the dishwasher has been unloaded nor anywhere near the children until they’ve been washed and dressed.”
Dishwashers! Anna determinedly suppressed a pang of envy. Even the thought of Liv seemed suddenly tempting—it was warm, if nothing else. Downstairs, at least. “I can see now that I never quite got the hang of nannying,” she sighed. “I practically had to wash and dress Cassandra as well as Zak. Particularly after she’d been at the Bombay Sapphire.” Anna shuddered. Yes. That was what it had been like.
“Oh, that reminds me. Cassandra’s divorcing Jett.”
“No! Why?”
“Cassandra realised he was shagging her new nanny when she saw someone else had been squeezing the spots on his back.” With a sense of a cliff-hanger ending that Days of our Lives would do well to emulate, the mobile abruptly cut itself off.
As Anna put it away and prepared to return to Dampie, something caught her eye. Something typewritten, white, and tucked right into the edge of the board. “Robbie MacAskill. Poet. Creative Writing Classes Given.” Anna gazed at it in astonishment. A poet? The only man of letters she’d imagined ever braving this place was the postman—and Dr. Johnson, of course. As the rain began again, she scribbled down the number with one of the family of leaky Biros that seemed to have a member in the pocket of every coat she had ever owned.
***
Jamie was nowhere to be seen when Anna returned, sodden and demoralised, to the castle. Than
ks to her nonexistent breakfast, her stomach felt as if it were almost touching her backbone, but she resisted the temptation to seek out the kitchens for fear of encountering Nanny. She made do with some furry, age-softened Polos from the bottom of her bag and spent the afternoon blowing on her purple fingers in the bedroom and trying to write up the morning’s events in her diary. The thought of there being a poet in the area intrigued her. She determined to ask Jamie about it at dinner—it was a topic concerning the island, so hopefully she’d get a response. And then perhaps she could tackle the increasingly tricky subject of who was organising the wedding as well. Why couldn’t Jamie speak to Nanny about it? After all, he’d known her since birth. It occurred to Anna that perhaps this was precisely the reason the task had been delegated to her.
Dinner came and, more thankfully, went with Jamie, as usual, distant and absorbed in paperwork, muttering, this time, about damp proof courses. So when a window of conversational opportunity presented itself during coffee in the upstairs sitting room, Anna seized it.
The sitting room stretched the entire length of the second floor of the castle. Outside the three long deep-silled windows along one wall, the sulky grey of day had sunk into the coma of night. Inside the cavernous chamber, a few inadequate lamps made it gloomier still. There were a few gilt-framed and watery Highland scenes on the walls, a number of small, padded chairs, a couple of battered sofas, and a rather experienced-looking china tea set on a side table. The most arresting item in the room was a large portrait opposite her chair. Suddenly it became obvious what her opening gambit should be.
“Is that the Angus tartan?” she asked, wondering if she should be wearing eclipse glasses to view the blazing yellow and orange of the kilt being worn by the large, hostile-looking bearded gentleman with the extremely red face who was the subject of the portrait canvas. Despite the considerable degree of age and fading, the tartan glowed as retina-fryingly brightly as the day it was first painted.
“Absolutely. Yes. That’s Mad Angus Angus wearing it.” Jamie, as predicted, looked up eagerly from his books. As in Burn, thought Anna. She looked at the picture again. “Why was he mad?” she asked.
Jamie’s head shot up again. “He had what would probably be called an anger management problem today.”
“Oh, I see. Mad as in cross.” That figured. The very portrait looked ready to explode with rage. “The tartan’s very, um, yellow.” There was no polite way of saying it was the most hideous pattern she had ever seen—yellow, orange, and brown shot through with bilious green.
“Oh. Yes.” Jamie was now happily back on track. “Yellow, yes. There’s rather a funny story connected with that. The family motto is Hold Fast. Unfortunately, for many years that did not extend to the colours of the tartan. Ran horribly in the wash.”
Anna decided to change the subject, but did not feel confident enough yet to tackle The Subject.
“Gosh, that’s huge,” she remarked presently.
“Magnificent, isn’t it?” Jamie said proudly.
“I’ve never seen one like that before.”
“Glad you appreciate it. Mad Angus Angus’s lucky war axes are the pride of the Dampie collection.”
“Unlucky for some, I should imagine,” Anna observed, thinking meanly that they were probably the only thing in the Dampie collection.
“Yes, he killed fifty Englishmen in battle with those,” Jamie said proudly. “Sharp as a knife, even now. Nanny keeps them in tiptop condition.”
“Does she now?”
There was a silence.
“Very impressive suits of armour you’ve got over there in the corner,” said Anna.
“Yes. In actual fact, they’re terribly rusty and not really very valuable at all,” said Jamie. “Don’t know why I bother keeping them. Should throw them away really.”
“Oh, it’s probably worth hanging on to them,” said Anna flippantly. “You never know. You might get called up.” Oh why had she said that?
The look Jamie gave her as he opened his ledger again quelled further discussion. Now was obviously not the time to ask about the poet. Or, for that matter, the wedding. After an hour or so’s silent contemplation of sheep figures (Jamie) and a 1962 edition of the People’s Friend found behind a cushion and fallen on as if it were the latest Vogue (Anna), they went to bed.
As she undressed, Anna saw with horror that her neck, arms, shoulders, and cheeks were covered in violently red, itching spots. They looked disgusting, red at the bottom and yellow and hard on top, mini volcanoes against the whiteness of her skin. “My God, what are they?” she shrieked, showing an ankle bearing at least five of them to Jamie who, already in bed, was sitting up with plans of the castle spread all around him.
He looked up. “Midgies.” He looked down again.
“What, those tiny black flies? I can’t believe it.”
But she had lost his attention already. Still, Anna thought as her fingers ran over the hard, painful lumps, at least the midgies fancy me. There was a gap large enough to drive an articulated lorry down between Jamie and herself. It was almost as if he were trying to avoid a situation where he had to have sex with her.
But why? Anna fretted. Her appearance had not changed for the worse since arriving at Dampie almost two weeks ago; on the contrary, the atrocious food and long walks through the mist had resulted in her losing yet more weight. She could feel her rib cage all day long now, not just first thing in the morning when she was flat on her back. So what was the problem? Anna had read enough “When Sex Dies” magazine stories to realise keeping the sensual spark alive in a relationship was a challenge to most couples. But even in the direst of these tales the spark hadn’t disappeared immediately, as it appeared to have done with them. Why was Jamie so much more interested in making walls than love? All she had managed to glean from him today was that he’d spent the afternoon repairing rotten fencing. Did that account for the barrier now between them?
“Look, you can tell me if there’s a problem,” she ventured gently as they lay side by side in the darkness. Like two marble sarcophagi, she thought, only without the passion and commitment that implied.
“Oh, there’s a problem all right,” Jamie said. “Several, in fact.”
“Is there?” Anna hadn’t expected such frankness. Suddenly fearful, she wondered if she was ready to be told.
“Yes. Well, for a start, the guttering’s rotten and the roof on the old guardroom is—”
“Not that. Not the bloody building. Us.”
“Us?” Jamie sounded surprised. “What’s the matter with us? Aren’t you happy? We’re getting married, aren’t we?”
Anna felt an odd mixture of relief and fear. “Call me paranoid,” she said, “but I can’t help noticing that you don’t seem to like having sex with me.”
Jamie was silent for a few moments. Then he said, “No. I don’t.”
***
“He said what?” Geri demanded.
“He said no, he didn’t,” Anna shouted into the mobile the next morning, crouching unsteadily behind a rock as the wind hurled a spiteful spatter of rain in her direction. “He said that I wasn’t to worry though, it was nothing personal.”
In normal circumstances, Anna thought longingly, she and Geri would have been having this conversation in hushed whispers in the darkened corner of a wine bar, fuelled by large glasses of chilled Chardonnay. Normal circumstances, however, were now a thing of the past. As was normal anything.
“Sounds pretty personal to me,” shouted Geri. “Sounds about as personal as it gets.”
“He said he’d gone off sex at school. Apparently he was bullied very badly, frequently beaten and buggered on a regular basis.”
“But I thought that was the whole point of public school,” Geri yelled. “That’s what every boy in St. Midas’s has to look forward to. And the girls when they get married.”
“
I know. But it seems to have turned Jamie off sex for good. He says he’s still getting over the horror of having to do it when we first got to the castle.”
“He really knows how to make a girl feel good, doesn’t he?” shouted Geri. “Sure he’s not gay?”
“Well, I did wonder, of course.” Anna pictured Geri in the minivan with the entire Tressell school run’s ears out on stalks. “But I couldn’t see why he would have bothered asking me to marry him if he was. I mean, why drag me all the way up here?”
There was silence for a few minutes. “Hello? Hello?” yelled Anna in a panic. Please don’t cut me off again, she prayed.
“Just thinking,” Geri bawled. “Basically, you need to awaken his interest in sex again. Take the initiative. Come up with a love strategy.”
“A what?” The wind whipped by Anna’s ear, as if trying to eavesdrop on the conversation.
“A love strategy,” Geri screeched. “Seduce him. Wear garters. Buy some red underwear and bonk his brains out. That always works.”
At this point, the phone cut out and Anna sat back on her heels on the sodden grass wondering dully where one got garters on Skul. No doubt Nanny had on more rigging than your average tea clipper, but it seemed unlikely Jamie would find it a turn-on. As for red underwear, the only possibility of that, she imagined, would be if something ran in the wash.
Chapter Seventeen
Cassandra slammed the front door in fury. The girl had to be joking. A new Mégane coupe in a colour of her choice—to keep! Paid-for membership of the Harbour Club and the Ivy Club! Tickets for all the best shows in town! On top of this, a salary approximately ten times what she had ever paid a nanny before. Cassandra seethed as, from a corner of the window, she watched the girl sashaying nonchalantly away down the street, apparently confident that if Cassandra would not meet her requirements, some other family would be only too pleased to. Those tits had to be fake, thought Cassandra. So pneumatic-looking—you probably had to stick a pressure gauge on the nipple every four weeks to check the air.
