‘She’ll need it,’ Lulu muttered.
‘But we’ll be here for you after it all goes pear-shaped,’ Zizzie said. ‘What are friends for?’
I kept smiling as the Chardonnay bottle circled the table again and the last few drops fell into my glass. It was time to drop my bombshell.
‘Actually,’ I said casually, ‘he’s invited me to meet his mother tomorrow.’
‘I rang the sodding RAC an hour ago! What’s keeping the bastards?’ Toby kicked the front offside tyre and slammed his fist down on the bumper with such force that he hurt himself. He growled savagely, kicked the tyre again and licked his wounded hand.
‘They should be along any minute now,’ I soothed, telling myself that lots of men had rotten tempers when provoked. He was quite within his rights to be annoyed. ‘They must have had another emergency — a crash, or something.’
‘It’s not good enough!’ he snarled. ‘We’re late for tea already – and we have early dinner reservations at the Manor of the Four Winds. At this rate, it could be well after dark before we even get to Mother, let alone the Manor.’
‘I’m sure they’ll hold the table for us.’
‘You don’t understand,’ he muttered. ‘We’re late now. Mother will be … horribly upset.’
‘I’m sure she’ll forgive you.’ But his unease was infectious. She might forgive him — but would she ever forgive me?
‘All right, all right.’ Toby, my suave sophisticated dreamboat, was visibly unnerved and sweating. The BMW had had to be transferred to the appropriate garage and left there for major repairs. Toby was not taking it well. Unless he could find alternative transport, we could forget the Manor. We might even have to spend the night at his home. I wondered how strait-laced his dear mother was. Would she allot us a double room? Or observe the conventions by giving us separate rooms, perhaps adjoining? Or express her disapproval by putting us into rooms on different floors?
The sky was darkening from a lavender twilight into the deep indigo of impending night as the RAC man dropped us at the door of the ancestral home. It took my breath away – it was practically a palace! Could I possibly live up to becoming chatelaine of such a Stately Home?
I turned to Toby, who looked even more nervous than I felt. Except for the tremor that shook his frame, he stood frozen, staring up at the great iron-bound oak door. I smiled at him reassuringly and stepped forward.
‘Don’t ring the bell!’ He caught my hand. ‘I’ll use my key.’ But he didn’t. He hesitated, looking me up and down.
I quailed before his inspection, suddenly even more unsure of myself. Should I have worn something other than the burgundy crushed velvet trouser suit? Zizzie had been against it, voting for a classic little black dress instead. Had she been right?
But Toby wasn’t looking at my costume. His gaze went to the jewellery he had given me earlier: the ornate silver earrings and necklace, with the matching heavy solid silver cuff bracelets. He nodded approvingly.
‘Darling …’ His voice was unsteady. ‘Pay attention. This may sound strange but … if you should have any trouble with any of my family – it’s unlikely but, if you do, well – biff them on the nose with your silver cuff bracelet!’
‘Biff them …? On the nose …? Toby …’
He inserted his key in the lock and the door swung open. I had no option but to follow him into the huge baronial hall. The front door slammed shut behind us against the encroaching blackness of the night outside.
A welcoming fire blazed at the far end of the great hall in a hearth not quite big enough to roast an ox perhaps, but certainly large enough to accommodate a suckling pig.
‘Mother!’ Toby called. ‘We’re here!’
There was a stirring beyond a doorway across the room.
‘I’m terribly sorry we’re so late … couldn’t be helped. Absolute disaster with the car. Don’t worry, nothing serious, only mechanical … but we couldn’t turn back … I hope it’s still all right … I mean …’
He was babbling. I stared at him incredulously. What had happened to my smooth intrepid hero? He was sweating more profusely than ever and his five o‘clock shadow had advanced to ten o’clock. What sort of a woman was his mother to reduce him to this?
‘Coming, darling,’ a silvery voice called. A large Alsatian dog preceded the voice into the room.
‘I couldn’t help it.’ Toby went on babbling. ‘Complete breakdown … middle of nowhere … garage overnight at least … RAC dropped us here …’
I kept watching the shadowed doorway, waiting for the Grand Entrance. Nothing happened, although Toby still hadn’t shut up. I began to get the feeling that the doorway was empty.
The Alsatian had circled me and was now advancing for full frontal confrontation, upper lip curled in a snarl — or a sneer. There was something awfully wrong about that dog.
Dog …? Or bitch …? Or … it looked more like a wolf … wolverine …?
Only … only … It was wearing a pearl necklace and earrings. Its nails were lacquered a delicate pink. I felt myself swaying.
‘Darling …’ Toby was behind me, his hands steadying me … his elongating fingernails biting into my shoulders.
‘Darling, I’d like you to meet my mother.’
Lorinda half awoke from a nightmare in which Conqueror and Lionheart, Gemma’s pugs, grown to quadruple-size with elongated teeth and slavering jaws, were chasing her, But-I and Had-Known down a dark alley, heedless of Gemma’s attempts to call them to heel.
The leader of their pack was now a wolverine with a gold lightning flash piercing her eyebrow and a shaved outline of a two-fingered salute on one flank. From between her vicious jaws hung the limp emaciated body of Roscoe and she was shaking it from side to side.
‘What’s it to you?’ she howled. ‘What’s it to you?’
They were gaining on Lorinda. She couldn’t run any faster, she couldn’t run any longer. She was tired … so tired …
Lorinda wrenched herself awake just before they caught her. She felt groggy and vaguely affronted. She had only spoken to Cressie for about ten minutes. How dare the woman intrude on her nightmares!
The reading light was still on, the book had fallen to the floor. The cats – Where were the cats?
She tossed back the covers and swung her feet to the floor. Almost immediately two accusing faces appeared in the doorway.
Stirring at last, are you? they seemed to say.
‘What time is it?’ There was a disturbing quality to the streak of daylight showing at the edge of the curtains. She wrenched them open to find her fears confirmed. The sun was definitely on the wrong side of the sky, a pale shadowy moon was becoming visible. She had slept the day away. Again.
Mrreeow! But-Known spoke briefly, but poignantly. It had been a long time since the last meal.
Yuuaaarr! Too long, Had-I agreed. They’d thought they had her better trained than that.
Guilt-stricken, as they intended, Lorinda was about to drop everything and rush to feed them when Had-I made the mistake of jumping up on the bedside table beside the clock.
‘Oh, no! Is that the time?’ Her guilt veered in another direction. She was overdue at Freddie’s.
‘You’ll have to hang on a bit longer,’ she told the cats as she rushed to shower and dress. ‘We’ll all eat at Freddie’s.’
‘Back for seconds, are you?’ Freddie greeted the cats, then transferred her attention to Lorinda. ‘You’ve had a good long sleep. Are you feeling better?’
‘Just woke up, sorry I’m late,’ Lorinda said, then Freddie’s words registered. ‘You mean they’ve been here earlier?’
‘All afternoon. Supervising. After telling me a sob story about how hungry they were.’
‘And you fed them. So that’s why they didn’t wake me! Freddie, you shouldn’t let them bother you – ’
‘No bother. Except there’ll be no giblet gravy – they got the giblets first.’
‘Oh, no! You disgraceful little wretches!
’ Lorinda scolded.
Unconcerned, they strolled towards the kitchen with a purposeful air.
‘Macho not here yet?’ Lorinda followed her hostess into the living room.
‘Madam changed her mind about going to London for the afternoon, I gather, and is now going to stay overnight. He’s waiting to drive her to the station.’
‘That’s very devoted of him; it’s only a five-minute walk.’
‘Devoted, nothing!’ Freddie snorted. ‘He wants to be sure she’s well and truly gone before he smuggles Roscoe over here for a square meal.’
‘Surely he manages to slip the poor creature something from his own plate once in a while? Cressie can’t keep tabs on him every moment.’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that. Anyway, there’s nothing to slip. I sneaked a look into his fridge when I was visiting one day and she was doing some sort of strange exercises and was safely out of the way for half an hour. There was nothing in it but three kinds of lettuce, a few other greens and a tub of cottage cheese.’
‘And Macho puts up with that?’ Lorinda was horrified. ‘What kind of hold does she have over him?’
‘I don’t know, but I hope he’s enjoying it. The old Macho would be out getting the barbecue ready for summer by now. Oh, I’m so glad you’re back. We’ve tried to talk to him – but he might listen to you!’
‘And he might not. If he’s so besotted with that – ’
The back door slammed. They exchanged glances and waited. Hesitant footsteps advanced across the kitchen floor.
‘In here, Macho,’ Freddie called.
‘I knocked.’ Macho appeared in the doorway. ‘But there wasn’t any answer and the door was unlocked.’
‘We didn’t hear you,’ Freddie said cheerfully. ‘Sit down and have a drink.’
‘Right.’ Macho lowered himself into the armchair awkwardly, trying not to disturb the sleeping cat cradled in his arms. ‘Thanks.’ He managed to free one hand to snatch frantically at the drink.
‘Poor old Roscoe looks out for the count.’ Tactfully, Freddie ignored the desperation with which Macho gulped at his drink.
‘He’s asleep,’ Macho said unnecessarily. ‘I don’t know whether he’s depressed or just too weak to move. He sleeps a lot now …’ he added. ‘So do I.’
‘Very tiring, having a house guest,’ Freddie said drily. ‘Especially a long-term one.’
Macho closed his eyes, leaned back, and remained silent. Freddie shrugged at Lorinda.
Roscoe, however, was reviving. First, his whiskers twitched, then his nose, as the aroma of roasting chicken reached it. His eyes opened cautiously and he looked around, visibly relaxing to find himself among friends.
Erreow? he enquired tentatively.
In answer, Had-I and But-Known bounded in from the kitchen. He brightened still more and leaped down from Macho’s lap to join them.
‘Et tu, Brutus?’ Macho asked bitterly.
‘Oh, come now,’ Freddie chided. ‘You’ve brought it on yourself, you know.’
‘Have I?’ He regarded her bleakly. ‘A lot you know about it.’
‘She knows more than I do,’ Lorinda said. ‘Macho, what’s happened? What on earth have you …’ She faltered as he turned his baleful gaze on her.
‘Diss Me and Die!’ he snarled.
‘I’m sorry.’ Lorinda recoiled. ‘I didn’t mean to – ’
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘My new book Diss Me and Die! They don’t want it.’
‘What?’
‘That editorial conference I had to go to just after you left. It wasn’t an editorial conference – it was an ambush!’ The words spilled out of Macho, as though he could no longer restrain himself.
‘That new editor said Macho Magee was passé. He objected to the fact that, although there were five killings in the book, not one was an evisceration. He said I’d lost the opportunity for at least three searing pages there, with each stroke of the knife being described in intimate detail.’
‘Is that what they want now?’ Freddie leaned back against the cushions. ‘I think I feel faint.’
‘He mentioned torture, too. Either before the evisceration or during it – in which the victim should be alive until the last moment, so that she could realize the full horror of what was happening to her.’
‘Her?’ Lorinda echoed.
‘Her,’ Macho said firmly. ‘In fact, he complained because two of the victims were men. He said I’d lose reader sympathy that way. Everyone knew that the only proper victim these days was a beautiful blonde, leggy, busty, twenty-something who was too stupid to recognize a raving psychopath when he was drooling down her décolletage.’
‘Sounds like their picture of the ideal author, too,’ Freddie murmured weakly.
‘I said I didn’t do evisceration.’ Macho continued his tale of woe. ‘And he said that was blindingly obvious and that was why Macho Magee had fallen so far behind the times. He suggested that I go home and have a real good think about what he’d said and perhaps come back to him with a meatier story. Oh, and a lot more sex scenes.’ Macho seemed on the verge of tears. ‘Preferably kinky.’
‘Abominable!’ Lorinda sympathized, wondering whether she should pass on to him a selection of the paperbacks she had brought home. Would they help him – or just depress him further?
‘So you went on from there to the launch party,’ Freddie deduced. ‘Or did you stop for a drink along the way?’
‘What if I did?’ Macho was hostile. ‘What do you care?’
‘I don’t,’ Freddie assured him. ‘It’s entirely understandable. So, you arrived at the party … and you ran into Cressie?’
‘Literally. She collided with me when I was about three steps inside the door. Her drink went all over me – luckily, it was white wine – and I realized her eyes were so blinded by tears that she couldn’t see where she was going. I led her out into the garden where she could compose herself.’
Over his head, Lorinda and Freddie exchanged glances. Sir Lancelot to the rescue of the maiden in distress! How like Macho to pick the wrong maiden – and be stuck with her.
‘Dare I ask,’ Freddie ventured, ‘what had upset her so?’
‘It took a while before she could bring herself to tell me; Macho admitted. ‘But then we discovered we had more in common than you might think. She’d run into trouble with her latest book, too, and had had a harrowing editorial session only that afternoon. He’d told her the Chick Lit genre was becoming old hat and her new book didn’t have enough zoom in it. Worse, he said it was understandable because she was six years older now than she was when her first book was published and, naturally, she had slipped away from the cutting edge. She hadn’t introduced one new perversion in the last two books. He then mentioned that the newer, younger female writers coming along were also a lot more photogenic than she now was and he was diverting most of her former advertising budget to them.’
‘No wonder she was upset,’ Lorinda said.
‘Devastated. It cheered her a bit when I told her about my editorial conference – and then we discovered we were talking about the same editor. We began comparing notes on him and plotting hypothetical revenge.’
‘You’re sure it was hypothetical?’ Freddie wouldn’t put anything past Cressie.
‘By then, other people were coming out into the garden and the caterers were following with trays of drinks.’ Macho wrinkled his forehead. ‘The evening begins to get a bit blurred round about then. One drink led to another and … we were getting along so well …’
‘And so you wound up back here,’ Freddie said.
‘Eventually …’ Macho frowned uneasily. ‘It seems to me that we went to several other places first, but I can’t remember … Did I mention that we’d had quite a bit to drink?’
‘We get the picture,’ Freddie assured him.
‘I wish I did.’ Macho was still frowning. ‘It comes back to me in bits and pieces, like a light flashing on and off in an almost empty room, where all the
action is going on behind your back and you can almost-but-not-quite hear it.’
‘Boy, you really tied one on!’ Freddie was impressed.
‘You should have seen Cressie.’ Macho smiled weakly. ‘One bit I do remember is that she decided we should go to that editor’s home and throw rocks through his windows. I was so far gone, it seemed like a good idea to me. But, when we got there, it turned out to be a block of flats and he lived on the twelfth floor.’
‘So you gave up and came home,’ Freddie prompted.
‘Not right away, I think.’ Macho shifted uneasily. ‘It seems to me that Cressie said something about another drink. It was well after hours by then, but she was a member of a private club that was open all night. I think we went there. Sort of a dark seedy district – and the club wasn’t much better. Then it all goes blank again.’ Macho was increasingly unhappy. ‘I wish I could remember. I’m afraid … maybe we went to a couple of other places after that …’ He trailed off and looked at them miserably.
‘What’s the matter, Macho?’ Lorinda had the feeling that there was more to come – if he could bring himself to tell them.
‘I wish I knew.’ He turned to her apologetically ‘If only there weren’t so many blanks. And, I think, right at the end, I remember Cressie grabbing my arm and shouting, “Let’s get out of here!”, punctuated by loud music and shouting and laughing and a lot of crashing. But I’ve had nightmares almost every night since then and they all end that way and I can’t tell whether it really happened or I just think it did because I’ve heard it so often in my dream.’
‘Have you talked to Cressie about this?’ Lorinda exchanged worried glances with Freddie; neither of them liked the sound of that. ‘What does she say?’
‘She can’t remember anything, either. She wonders whether somebody put something in our drinks somewhere along the way. There are a lot of strange substances around these days.’
Please Do Feed the Cat Page 3