by Daisy Waugh
‘Wasn’t it just?’ she said, straightening a chair that didn’t need straightening. ‘Wasn’t it just?’
‘Aye. Shockin’.’
‘I didn’t think I’d ever hear myself saying it, but thank God for Maurice Morrison.’
Grey certainly wasn’t willing to go that far, so he didn’t reply. Which left Messy’s last comment floating, begging to be rescued. ‘In fact I’m beginning to wonder if I didn’t seriously misjudge him,’ she burbled, and regretted it at once. She didn’t want to talk about Maurice. Obviously. But she had to say something. She wanted to stay up saying things all night – and if she left a pause he might seize on it to announce he was going to bed.
‘Maybe so,’ he muttered, watching her.
‘Which isn’t to imply – I mean, Maurice is hardly—’
‘So,’ he interrupted. ‘What are you doing now?’
‘What? What am I doing? Oh nothing. Maybe…’ It had been a long time since she’d last been in this situation. Her confidence had taken a ferocious battering since then, and her technique (what there ever was of it, because, with that bellybutton, she’d hardly needed one before) was more than a little rusty. She lost her nerve. ‘Well, I thought I’d probably turn in.’ She faked a yawn and hated herself. ‘What time is it anyway?’ The old grandfather clock was still chiming. ‘Ah. Midnight…Still midnight, then.’
‘Aye.’
‘Amazing…It’s been – dinging – for ages…D’you think it’s broken?’
‘No,’ said Grey.
It stopped, and another painful silence descended. She’d said she was going to bed, so she should do it. Now. She should leave the room. But she looked down at the table, traced a knot in the wood with her finger, and still didn’t leave, and still came up with nothing to talk about. She traced the knot again. No inspiration. And all the while she could feel him watching her.
He could see the colour rising in blotches around the top of her neck, and he longed to say something that would make it OK. Except it wasn’t OK. Grey wasn’t OK. He was torn between wishing they had never met, and wishing they might never be separated, and with every second she stayed there she wore his defences a little lower. As he watched her, and revelled in everything he saw, he trawled for the strength to walk away, and never found it.
‘Messy,’ he said, ‘would you consider having a drink with me?’
‘Yes! I mean…Well, I mean, yes. Definitely. Why not?’
He chuckled and turned to take a couple of glasses out of the cupboard. ‘Come on, then,’ he said, as much to himself as to Messy. ‘Let’s go back in the drawing room. There’s a fire in there.’
Things ran a bit more smoothly once they’d settled in the drawing room. They sat on opposite armchairs in front of the fire, Messy knocking back what was left of the red wine, Grey, his usual gin with Angostura, and whiled away an hour or more, dissecting their hosts and fellow guests, contemplating the future – for Fiddleford, for Grey’s cooking skills, for Messy’s non-existent new book.
‘I don’t want to write about diet,’ she said. ‘It’s boring. I want to write a book called What to Do When a Safety Inspector Calls.’
He laughed. ‘Knock her out.’
‘Or I could do Recommended Diets for Fat Safety Inspectors. When They Call…So it’s in the same theme as the last book…’
‘I don’t see it sellin’, darlin’.’
‘Or alternatively I could forget about the bloody book altogether, and see if Charlie and Jo would let me spend the rest of my life taking care of their kitchen garden.’
Looking at her now, she seemed, or so it seemed to Grey, a different woman from the suspicious goliath who had stomped into Fiddleford Manor nearly a fortnight earlier. This new Messy, with her thick hair tumbling around her face, her cheeks shining from the wine, and the air and the arguments about raw chicken, was brazenly, blindingly alive. She was magnificent. ‘Messy?’ He leant towards her suddenly, sounding unusually earnest.
‘Mmm?’
But he didn’t speak.
‘Come on, Grey,’ she murmured, laughing softly, ‘…it’s not like I’m going to say no.’
Grey had been in love only once before. It was fifteen years ago, and it had been the catalyst for a lifetime of trouble ever since. She had been young, fifteen years old – unattached and underage – and for most of the time he knew her, until she miscarried, pregnant (by somebody else). They had kissed each other for the first and last time on the day that she died, a month after she had lost the child. They had been eating magic mushrooms. They were on their way home, and Grey, then aged twenty-three, had been at the wheel.
And of course he shouldn’t have been. Which was why he lacked the will to deny it when her parents, in their grief-filled desire for revenge, claimed Grey had been the father of the lost baby. He refused to make any comment at all. Fifteen years ago his stubborn silence had infuriated his barrister. Last year, when Grey’s handsome face was plastered all over the front pages, it had infuriated his record company and most of the nation too.
‘You know, Messy,’ he said at last, ‘there’s stuff you probably read about me…’
‘And stuff you’ve read about me—’
‘Aye, but we both know mine was different…I just want you to know that I was driving when she died, and that’s the thing I’m ashamed of. But I didn’t do what they said I did. In the papers an’ that. I’m not some fuckin’ weird pervert.’
‘Grey! For God’s sake. Of course you aren’t. Either way. I know you aren’t! I just don’t understand why you didn’t defend yourself.’
‘And bring all Emily’s past out? On top of the rest o’ the stuff her parents were dealing with? No. I didn’t have the heart.’
‘I mean with the press. Last year.’
‘It was none o’ their fuckin’ business,’ he said. ‘It was nobody’s fucking business but my own…And yours,’ he added quickly. ‘Now. I mean that. I’m tellin’ you now because if we’re goin’ to…’
‘I certainly hope so.’
He laughed. ‘Only I don’t want you to think—’
‘I don’t. Think anything,’ she said. ‘I mean right now, about that…’
Gratefully he crossed over to her and held out a hand. ‘Come on then,’ he said. She got up and for a moment or two they stood there opposite each other, close enough to hear each other’s heartbeat, to feel each other’s breath. ‘Well?’ she murmured. So close they could feel the warmth of each other’s lips. He bent to kiss her.
…and finally, without another word, they headed out into the hall, and across the hall towards the stairs—
‘Remember when you first came through that front door?’ he said, pausing at the bottom step. ‘I’ve been wanting to do this since the moment you walked in here.’
‘No!’ she said.
‘Aye an’ you knew it.’ He grinned. ‘I bet that’s why you couldn’t go on wi’ all the eatin’. You fancied me that much!’
‘And it’s why you started asking how the washing machine works. A year after you came to live here!’
‘Aye, bugger off,’ he said, kissing her again, to shut her up.
Just then the front door burst open, letting in a gust of frosty air and a six-foot female stick figure with a curtain of plastic blonde hair. She carried no luggage, except for a tiny silver clutch bag which sparkled and shimmered in the Fiddleford hall half-light, and she was wearing no overcoat. Instead, on that cold night, she wore a silver silk shirt, floaty and undone to the navel, and beneath it no bra, nor even the faintest hint of there being any necessity for one. Her long spillikin legs, encased in sparkling, shimmering skintight silver evening trousers, looked critically balanced above pencil-thin, pointed silver boots. Her face was orange – from Guy Fawkes in St Barts – and very plain in spite of everything, with a fat, round nose like a potato and a jaw like a horse.
‘Hi there,’ she boomed, her voice husky from the week’s socialising. ‘Jesus, it’s fucking fr
eezing out there! Have you noticed, guys?’ They stared at her. Confused, momentarily, and, for at least thirty seconds, too appalled to speak. She gave her head an impatient little shake. ‘Hello! Can you hear me?…Or am I invisible or something?’ At which point something obviously struck the princess as droll, because she threw back her thin, plastic head and hollered with laughter. Messy and Grey, minds lingering yet on more pleasurable matters, still couldn’t manage to speak. They stared.
Anatollatia von Schlossenerg stopped laughing as abruptly and unreasonably as she had begun. ‘Oh God, sorry,’ she said. ‘Am I interrupting something? Sorry. Oh! Bugger, it’s cold! God, I hate the fucking country, don’t you? Anyway…sorry it’s so late and all that…Got lost… I think Les is bringing up the luggage. At least I certainly hope he is! I left him grappling with some dudes down at the gate! Journalists of course! Loathe them, don’t you?’
Finally Grey said, ‘Actually, we’re just going to bed.’
‘Oh bloody hell,’ she said, ‘just my bloody luck! I’ve had to sit next to Dog-Doo-For-Brains all the way from London. Poor guy and all that, I know he probably can’t help it. But I’ve been longing for a chat with anyone fucking half human for hours! Know what I mean?’ She looked at them hopefully.
‘Sorry,’ said Messy. ‘It’s very late.’
She sighed. ‘Well…That’s a fine bloody welcome, I must say. I don’t suppose you know where I’m sleeping?’
‘I don’t,’ said Grey distractedly. ‘Of course I don’t. And I’m not wakin’ up Jo and Charlie, not after what they’ve been through tonight. You’ll have to sleep on the sofa in there—’ He indicated the drawing room. ‘There’s a fire.’
‘Oh ha bloody ha-ha. Very funny,’ she said, not sure, at this stage, whether to register hilarity or rage. ‘Tell me you’re joking!’
‘Of course I’m not bloody jokin’!’ Grey snapped. He was a man, after all, who’d spent several years sleeping under bridges. ‘Wait there. I’ll see if I can find you a blanket.’
Slips account for about 86 per cent of the total slips and trips injuries. In 90 per cent of cases the floor is wet.
Table 1 indicates ways you can keep floors dry. If that is not possible the floor has to be sufficiently rough, the environment, footwear, task have to be suitable and people have to walk in an appropriate way.
Slips and trips: Summary guidance for the catering industry. Health and Safety Executive Catering Information Sheet No 6
(vi)
TARGET IDENTIFIABLE HAZARDS
Upstairs in her bedroom Jo didn’t hear Anatollatia come in, but she wasn’t asleep either. Jo didn’t sleep at all that night. Her mind raced. The twins kicked. However she lay she was uncomfortable. Meanwhile the hours ticked silently by and all she could do was listen to Charlie’s easy breathing and try not to feel resentful, not just of Charlie but of everyone. It was something, as the night crawled on, which she found increasingly difficult.
She tried breathing exercises. She tried rhythmic belly rubbing and quiet chanting: Contented Mum makes Contented Baby…just as they advised in the books; Contented Mum makes Contented Baby…Contented Mum makes Contented Baby…Nothing seemed to work. Jo hated feeling so angry. She knew perfectly well that the ideal pregnant state was one of healthful serenity. That babies who suffer second-party emotional trauma in the womb are twenty to thirty per cent more likely to exhibit dysthymic behaviours in early childhood. But she couldn’t help it. In fact the waves of violent emotion she had so carefully camouflaged ever since her pregnancy began were growing more intense every week. The more slowly her body was forced to move, the more energetically her brain seemed to whip itself into frenzy.
There was Sue-Marie Gunston, threatening to return to the house and ruin everything. There was Charlie comparing her to a bus…And then of course there was Messy. Increasingly slim-line, safety-literate Messy Monroe and her fucking GCSE in food storage. Maurice Morrison must have commented three times on Messy’s improved appearance during dinner. And Charlie was obviously incapable of not bringing her into every bloody conversation they ever had.
How in Hell was she meant to compete? When she was thirty-five weeks pregnant with twins? And how in Hell had it ever come to the point where she felt that she should compete? Whatever happened to fucking feminism? Whatever happened to women sticking together? She resented Charlie for sleeping through all her angst; for being so carelessly unpregnant. She resented Grey for—she wasn’t quite sure what. But by five a.m., the worst of her rage was focused on Messy. Who floated about the house, flirting with everyone, patronising Jo about packets of chicken, and purposely antagonising her by losing weight just as she was piling it on. Not until the dawn began to seep through her bedroom curtains did Jo’s anger finally begin to burn out.
At six o’clock in the morning, she fell asleep. Just, coincidentally, as Maurice Morrison was rising. He too had lain awake most of the night, worrying about this and that: about Sue-Marie Gunston, all the boys lying latent in the woodwork, his newly discovered loneliness…He had come to the reluctant conclusion that Gunston’s secrecy could not be relied upon, and that therefore, in spite of its many attractions, he would have to leave Fiddleford at once.
So he took his first shower of the day, very quietly, before it was properly light. He rang his chauffeur and ordered him back to Leigh Delamere service station and then, using Charlie’s name, ordered a local minicab to come and pick him up at the end of the drive. Fifteen minutes later, carrying his own matching Mulberry suitcases, dressed in a long black cashmere coat and, for anonymity, an old shooting hat he found in the boot room, Maurice Morrison slipped out by the back door. He left an effusive note of thanks on the kitchen table, together with a cheque for £1,000. Though he didn’t have the time to bid them farewell that morning, there were various reasons why Morrison wanted to leave the inhabitants of Fiddleford with a good impression. A thousand pounds, he reckoned, for a single night’s sleep, ought to do the job.
He walked quickly through the rose garden along the side of the house, constructing his usual plots and counterplots along the way, and yet was still able to register the incredible sculpture-work in the garden’s central fountain (broken, he had no doubt). It would all be so different when the place was his, he thought happily. He gave an involuntary skip of pleasure. Maurice Morrison loved possessions, but he had so many already. The trick, these days, was in discovering something he truly wanted, and didn’t yet have…And Fiddleford Manor, he had realised in one of numerous flashes of clarity last night, fitted the bill exactly. It was perfect; a perfect new project. He would put a gym in the old stable yard, he thought. And convert the cellar, if there was one (and he assumed there was) into a vast indoor swimming facility. And of course there would have to be some sort of conference room at the back for tax purposes…
It was turning into another beautiful, crisp autumn day. As he passed beneath Messy Monroe’s empty bedroom he paused to blow a theatrical farewell kiss.
‘A bientôt!’ he whispered.
…Because in the lonely spirals and blinding flashes which had shaped so much of Maurice’s thinking last night, Messy Monroe had also featured very heavily. Messy Monroe and the role she might play in his new, friend-filled Fiddleford existence…He had grand plans for her. She would certainly be hearing from him again.
She was intelligent, he thought (but not too intelligent); potentially ravishing, and with none of that awful strident confidence other women had. Of course he would try to discourage a second book, but the occasional little pep talks to the Socially Excluded (re bodies etc) would allow her to maintain a show of independence without requiring her to stray too far either from their new country house, or from his £9.6 million Hampstead home. Which she could certainly redecorate if she liked.
At thirty-one, she was perhaps a year or two older than he would have initially chosen. But even Maurice Morrison couldn’t have everything. And as the British Government’s most newly appointed Minister, what
he required was not, unfortunately, a teenybopper with perfectly rounded breasts – or even (God forbid) a full-lipped, finely chiselled, downy-cheeked—. No, what he required was a softly cerebral sort of a wife, who could look intelligent for the cameras. That Messy was also a single mother, and of an exceptionally pretty (and vaguely ethnic-looking) young girl, could only work in his favour. Besides which, of course, Messy was a delightful woman, and clearly at something of a loose end. He had no doubt she would make their little wedding look enchanting.
But not just yet. Not this morning. Maybe this evening he would call her from London and then send some sort of trinket down: books probably. Would go down better than jewellery. And then in a few days he would drop in with the helicopter (always impressive, even with book readers). He might make some sort of declaration there and then, if possible – which it tended to be, when Maurice set his mind to something. At any rate he needed to get the thing wrapped up and public within a week – or two, max – if it was to serve its purpose…
But right now dawn was breaking and he wanted to be well clear of the house before the new working day began, so that should Gunston’s tongue feel tempted to wag Morrison would be in a position to refute everything at once, either from the doorstep of his Hampstead home, or – better still – from the bedside of the dying Albanian. After which, with Gunston being such an ugly and charmless woman, the media would be disinclined to give her silly claims much more of an airing. And the entire silly subject would very quickly be dismissed.
He hurried on towards the gates and the end of the drive, choosing instinctively the less direct, more camouflaged route, across parkland. Just in case. Maurice’s years in the spotlight had taught him that even here at a media refuge (or perhaps especially here; the previous twelve hours had hardly left him with much faith in the operation) there was always a danger of photographers.
He passed the cedar tree without bothering to appreciate it this time; actually he was picturing that first introduction between the Morrison Bride and the stupendous, mesmerising Mrs TB, who was no doubt fascinated by the social implications surrounding self-esteem, body image and so on and forth. Or she certainly ought to be, with an arse like that; oops. Where had that come from? He giggled mischievously. And with a carefree swing of the Mulberry suitcases he strode out from the last knot of rhododendrons, into the final bend of the drive. He froze. Twenty yards in front of him was the gate. Thirty yards in front of him was the minicab, its engine running, waiting to transport him back to civilisation, and between the two – what looked like a major glitch. One…two…three reporters clustered around the remote control intercom, buzzing it aggressively, waiting, buzzing it again. And behind the reporters, two photographers; all five, apparently, too stupid to notice he was standing right in front of them.
