Bad Heir Day

by Wendy Holden

  “Would you mind very much giving me back the, um…”

  “Ring? Not at all.” Anna delved frantically in her pocket to produce the small box. It was, more than anything, a relief to hand it over. Apart from all its other unfortunate associations, the responsibility of carrying it around all the time had been onerous but she had not wanted to risk leaving anything but the box in her room. She passed the ring to Jamie not entirely convinced it would reach its next rightful recipient. The wine store roof, after all, had yet to be replaced.

  “You don’t mind?”

  “Of course not. You’ll be much better off with Geri.” The odd thing was, Anna believed it. Even before the wine store incident, she had caught a number of looks passing between Jamie and Geri that were of a far more incendiary nature than anything she personally remembered. Perhaps it was because they were such opposites—fiery, capable, earthy Geri, highbred, dreamy, and romantic Jamie. Although the dreamy bit might be in for a shock; Geri, Anna knew, would not stand for any shirking in bed. Jamie would be expected to stand and deliver.

  “Thanks.” Jamie swiftly pocketed the ring. “I’m glad you think so. She is wonderful, isn’t she? So capable and full of energy.”

  Anna nodded, looked around the room, and reflected that it was just as well. Her gaze fixed on the telltale black sweep of fungal damp on the wall behind the sofa.

  Its disintegration was a grim reminder that at Dampie decay was not a slow, gentle, faintly melancholy process, but a vital, thrusting affair. Less a case, Anna thought, squinting at the fat black beads against the whiteness, of watching paint dry than watching it warp, bubble up, split, and eventually slide defeated off the damp walls. She shuddered. Call her spineless, but all her previous sense of abject failure had disappeared, to be replaced by the profound relief of knowing she was not spending the rest of her life in this place.

  “I hope you’ll be very happy,” she told Jamie.

  “I’m sure we will,” Jamie assured her, his gaze following hers to the wall. “Geri’s fantastic at DIY, you know. I’ve never seen anyone handle a grout gun like her.” His eyes shone with mixed adoration and admiration. “And she loves the traditions—all the history…”

  “Yes,” said Anna. “And that’s all great. But you know you’ve got to sort out one thing. Once and for all. Otherwise it will never work.”

  Jamie swallowed and dropped his gaze. “I’m going for sex counselling, if that’s what you mean…”

  “Good,” said Anna. “But I didn’t mean that, actually.” As Jamie looked at the floor, Anna pressed on, suddenly feeling this was the best and ultimate service she could do her friend. After all, Geri had, in a roundabout sort of way, rescued her from an untenable situation and provided an extremely neat, if unorthodox, solution. She wanted, Anna decided, to give Geri the best wedding present possible, one that owed nothing to Jerry’s Home Store and decoupage waste paper bins.

  “I mean Nanny,” she said.

  ***

  “What will you do now?”

  Anna, face buried in the thick, salty matt of Robbie’s chest hair, heard his question reverberate powerfully through his rib cage. She raised herself slowly until she was sitting up on top of him, pushing aside her tousled hair so she could see his eyes. He looked serious.

  “I don’t know,” she replied truthfully. In view of where careful plotting had got her before, she had decided not to have a plan for her future. “I’m taking things as they come,” she smiled at him. Inside her, Robbie’s just-spent penis stirred enquiringly. She’d already had three orgasms, each one longer than the last. And miraculously, so far, no sign of a UTI.

  Although it applied to every other encounter she had had, Johnny Rotten’s famous pronouncement that sex was “two minutes of squelching” was a glorious misrepresentation of Robbie. Unlike all who had come and gone before him, Robbie did not thrust immediately into her, dragging a host of delicate, dry, and protesting internal organs with him.

  Robbie’s—surprisingly expert—method was to slowly raise her to a pitch of wet and gasping expectation, guiding her with flickering tongue and precise, circling, lust-slicked finger through hoops of quivering delight to the brink of back-arching ecstasy. Only then were her vaginal muscles allowed to clamp the great rod of his penis. Only then, as she swayed poised on the cliff of juddering delight, did Robbie finally fire into her and combine with her yelps of pleasured pain his groans of discreetly profound ecstasy.

  But his greatest skill of all was that he managed to do it all without making her feel for one second self-conscious. Merely conscious of the fact that he found every inch of her, every ridge of cellulite, every careless bruise, every soft white swell of excess flesh, every split nail quite literally delicious. He had an earthiness about him, an unbounded, unabashed joy in the carnal. Oh, the blessed, sweet relief of being in the hands of someone normal. A pleb, rather than a Seb.

  ***

  “Will you come and live with me?” he suddenly asked her, clamping both strong, warm hands around her waist. Anna luxuriated both in the question and the feeling of strength and security. It was tempting. And she knew there was only one answer. No.

  “I’d love to. I really would,” she mumbled. “But I just couldn’t stay here, I’m afraid.” Before coming to Dampie, Anna had never really considered herself a city girl. Now, however, even the thought of the Circle Line with signal failure filled her with eye-misting nostalgia.

  Robbie pushed both hands through his thick hair. At the sight of the abundant bush in his armpits, Anna felt the familiar, dizzying plunge in her pelvis. Oh God. Was she making the right decision?

  “Of course we wouldn’t stay here,” Robbie muttered, sitting up and sucking at her nipples. “We’ll go back to London and write.”

  “But where will we live? I haven’t got a flat. Or any money.”

  “Don’t worry about that. I have. Rather nice one in Belgravia.” Beneath her, he was grinding gently up and down. Anna gasped as the red waves began to rise in her once again.

  “Belgravia?” she murmured into his salt-tang hair as he pulled her head down to kiss her. She winced as the Brillo Pad brush of his bristle scraped hot and rasping against her cheek.

  “Family flat. But only I ever use it.”

  Anna spat out Robbie’s tongue and looked at him in dismay. This had a horribly familiar ring to it. She shot a suspicious look at his naked little finger. At least that didn’t.

  “Family flat? So your father is…?”

  “An earl.” Robbie looked at her shamefacedly. “I’m awfully sorry. I didn’t want to tell you. I gathered from your diary that you weren’t too keen on the aristocracy.”

  “So you are?” Anna gazed at him stonily.

  “The Honorable Robbie Persimmon-MacAskill. But don’t hold it against me. I’m all right really, I promise you.”

  Anna looked searchingly at him. Then she grinned as she felt his penis, formerly growing limp with despair, begin to swell within her once more. “Talk about an ingrowing heir,” she whispered.

  “So will you move in with me?” Robbie gazed anxiously at her.

  Anna’s breasts bounced wildly as her shoulders shook with laughter. It was too ridiculous. The penniless poet had turned out to be yet another scion of the privileged classes. “I guess I’m Hon for it,” she spluttered, grinding herself down on him once more. “Get to it, big boy,” she shouted joyfully. “I want you to come inside me like a fire extinguisher.”

  ***

  “Will you come back to me?”

  Jett saw the windscreen plunging towards him as Cassandra, shocked at the question, jerked her foot suddenly down on the accelerator. The car plunged forward almost into the back of a swaying beige Volvo with a sticker in the back window proclaiming “It’s Hard to Sit Down When You’ve Been to Harrow.” Cassandra stared at it and said nothing. For possibly the first time
in her life, she seemed to be choosing her words carefully.

  “I’ve missed you,” Jett persisted. It was true. Without Cassandra exploding every five minutes, his life had seemed flat and without drama. He had not realised until now what his marriage had meant to him, how addicted he had become to their screaming rows and steaming exchanges of vicious insults. How addicted to the wonders of W8 as well, as many weeks of crummy tour hotels, student digs, and B&Bs had helped remind him. The horrors of a bed and breakfast in Peterborough run by a couple called Ken and Flora and called Kenora still had him waking sweating in the night.

  Nylon sheets. As slippery and electric as an eel. Jett had not realised until skidding up and down that Peterborough single bed, how large lying down each night in Provençal lavender-scented sheets of Irish linen had previously loomed in his life. And who was to say, if they persisted in going through with this stupid and expensive divorce, that both he and Cassandra wouldn’t be condemned to nylon sheets forever. Catching their toenails for the rest of their lives, sliding around on seas of tequila sunrise orange, aquamarine, and bright purple. Breathing their last on sheets alive with static.

  “We suit each other, you and I,” he added persuasively. Funny how a master lyricist like himself, from whom choice phrases usually flowed like the cleansing swirl down a lavatory, found it so hard to express himself in real-life situations. Cassandra was the same—celebrated author and yet unable to utter a word about what was really important. Mind you, Jett thought, nothing new there.

  “Come on, Sandra,” he urged. “You know I’ve got a bit more dough now after the tour. And there have been a million orders for Spawn of Satan already and it’s only been goddamn released today. I can keep you in the manner to which you used to be accustomed.”

  “Actually,” Cassandra said regally, drawing herself up at the wheel, “now I’ve hammered out the deal with Mrs. McLeod, I’ll be quite nicely off myself, thank you. We’ve got the summer paperback market stitched up well into the millennium.” She beamed through the windscreen. Getting Mrs. McLeod to write her books had been an infinitely more satisfactory arrangement than bothering to do it herself. Far better to become a brand and just slap her name on whatever McLeod produced. Her writer’s block may have lifted slightly, but not enough, she knew, to power her through another six-hundred-page Torremolinos beach special, and certainly not at the speed McLeod could write. The old bag could leave a jet ski lagging behind. How clever she had been to find her. How inspired of her to turn up at that ridiculous, rustic creative writing class. Suddenly, Cassandra’s satisfied smirk twisted into an unbecoming scowl. “Though if anyone’s been stitched up it’s me,” she added bitterly. “That bastard Robbie MacAskill got McLeod a shit hot agent and she’s getting a straight fifty percent cut. Bloody cheek. After all, it’s my name the books go out under. My reputation at stake.”

  “Well, she is doing all the work, isn’t she?” Whoa, Jett warned himself, seeing Cassandra’s furious face. You’re almost there. Don’t fuck it up now. “But yes, I quite see your point,” he added hurriedly. “Your reputation, absolutely.”

  Cassandra’s stony profile softened, although how seemed a miracle, given the amount of plastic surgery it had undergone.

  “Come on, Sandra,” Jett wheedled. “You know you’ve got a soft spot for me.”

  “I’ve certainly got a spot for you,” said Cassandra levelly. “And don’t call me Sandra. You know I hate it.” Her lips tightened. Cassandra loathed being reminded of her real name.

  “Aw, baby. You know you’re the only one for me.” Jett’s voice began to take on a desperate tone as the outer darkness of rootless drifting and grubby groupies beckoned. As the image of Champagne D’Vyne raised itself terrifyingly before him, he cringed inwardly. The day she had walked out of his life had been better than jamming with Hendrix. Not that he had jammed with Hendrix. But he had once judged an organic lemon curd competition with Paul McCartney.

  “But what about Zak?” demanded Cassandra suddenly. “You were so horrible to the poor darling before.”

  Behind them, Zak was too busy carving up the cream leather of the hired Rover’s back seat to listen. He sat back to admire his handiwork. “SHAMPAIN.” What a woman. He almost regretted now finding her phone number and writing it in every service station telephone box they stopped at with the words “FOR FREE SEX FONE” scrawled above it. He sniffed loudly. That funny white powder he had found on the top of the loo in Champagne’s bathroom after she had gone had really made his nose run.

  “Listen to him,” Cassandra declared dramatically. “He’s terrified. And there’s the problem of his school as well. We can’t live in London—no one will, um, rise to the challenge of him. Every London prep school I tried”—Cassandra’s voice rose—“said there was a basic problem with home discipline and they couldn’t help until that had been rectified.”

  “Which means a good nanny,” said Jett.

  “Exactly.” Cassandra pressed her foot down in helpless fury. The back of the Volvo loomed large again. Even if she took Jett back and—miracle of miracles—they managed to find a good nanny, the old problems were bound to start again. She sighed. It was a vicious circle. Good day school meant good nanny which meant Jett trying to jump on them which meant goodbye nanny which would now mean goodbye school as well. Talk about a Catch-22.

  What she wanted was someone who could control Zak to the standards of the strictest schools whilst being completely without charm for Jett. What we need, she thought, is a battleaxe. A nanny of the old school. Of the old everything. Damn. She could have sworn she’d met one of those lately…

  What we need, thought Jett, is someone who will be as firm as a goddamn Gucci heel with that brat. Someone who will put the fear of God into him and give the goddamn little sod the hard time he deserves. Christ, but his memory was bad. He was sure he had seen the fear of God in Zak’s eyes recently, but goddamn it if he could remember where. He had a vague memory of someone very big and frightening looming out of the shadows…

  “Do you think,” Cassandra said suddenly to Jett, “that we could somehow persuade—”

  “That old nanny of Jamie Angus’s?” finished Jett. They looked at each other in wild—and in Cassandra’s case reflected—surmise.

  In the back, Zak, who had suddenly tuned into the conversation, yelped in terror.

  “Don’t worry, darling,” Cassandra beamed, turning round. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  About the Author

  Krestine Havemann

  Wendy Holden was a journalist for the Sunday Times, Tatler, and the Mail on Sunday before becoming a full-time author. She has now published nine novels, all top-ten bestsellers in the UK, and she is married with two young children. Her novels include Beautiful People, Farm Fatale, Simply Divine, Gossip Hound, The Wives of Bath, The School for Husbands, Azur Like It, and Filthy Rich.