by Wendy Holden
“This is dangerous.” Geri was pulling someone’s skean dhu out of her cleavage. “Let’s get out of here.”
Too late. The unmistakable form of Orlando Gossett, red-faced and polychromatic, was shoving its way purposefully through the heaving crowd towards their alcove like a vast tartan Sherman tank. “Would you,” he asked, addressing Geri’s cleavage, “do me the honour of partnering me for this dansh?”
Grasping Geri’s thin brown arm in his plump, pink palm, he dragged her to her feet. With no time to do more than roll her eyes, Geri tottered after him and plunged into the heaving quicksand of the crowd.
Suddenly aware that tiredness was crashing over her in huge waves, Anna decided to try once more to locate her room. Numbed by the champagne, she felt too tired to mind that Seb—no longer visible among the dancers—would almost certainly not be joining her in it. It took several goes to extract Miranda from the whirling crowd, but Anna eventually secured directions bedwards; her progress through a series of dark corridors this time sadly unimpeded by dark-eyed young men.
Unlocking the door of her room, Anna had a vague impression of high ceilings and a four-poster bed silvered with moonlight before passing out with sheer exhaustion not to mention sheer alcohol. Hours later, she woke up. It was still dark but something was scrabbling at the door. The empty mattress stretched away beside her. Could it, at last, be Seb? Struggling out of bed, falling over her clothes and shoes on the way to the door, Anna opened it to reveal, not Seb, but Miranda leaning against the lintel. The formerly radiant bride now looked distinctly the worse for wear. Her ivory wedding dress, the epitome of taste and restraint mere hours ago, was now smeared here and there with smudges and stains. Such was the devastation wrought on her once-magnificent white cathedral-length veil that, stunted, ugly, and blackened, it was now more Methodist chapel. She cast an agonised glance at Anna, muttered something about needing a lie-down, and disappeared into the gloomy nether regions of the corridor.
Next morning, at breakfast, Anna was disappointed to see that Jamie was not presiding over the chafing dishes. Instead, a couple of Australian hired helps as wide as they were tall slammed the lids cheerfully on and off dishes of scrambled eggs and mackerel with a clang reverberating round the alcohol-swollen brains of all present.
Seb’s brain—or what remained of it following what had clearly been a night of literally staggering excess—was so swollen that he was still in bed. He had appeared with the dawn, thankfully not with Brie de Benham, but inebriated beyond belief and surprisingly, unwelcomingly randy. Happily, his attempts to force his attentions on Anna were interrupted several times by his dashing to the bathroom to vomit—“drive the porcelain bus” as he called it. In the end, much to Anna’s relief, he gave up and spent the rest of the night groaning for reasons that had little to do with ecstasy.
About five chairs away down the long dining table, Thoby slumped over his breakfast looking greyer at the gills than the mackerel he was pushing resignedly round his plate. Eventually, he put his fork down, his head in his hands, and emitted what sounded oddly like a groan. The memory of Miranda despairing at her door the night before confirmed Anna’s suspicions that the wedding night had not been a brilliant success. Sympathetically, she steered her stare away from Thoby and focused on her surroundings instead.
Dampie Castle seemed to be entirely enveloped in a cloud. The windows of the dining room were long and elegant, even though the view outside bore a strong resemblance to that usually enjoyed by aeroplane passengers five minutes out of Gatwick. Nothing was visible apart from an ectoplasmic mist that pressed up against the panes and extended as far as the eye could see, which was not very far at all. The view inside, on the other hand, was pure old school patrician—long mahogany tables, towering bookcases, a vast armorial fireplace, and several patricians of indeterminate purity from Seb’s old school. Anna was just beginning to wonder whether his condition was terminal when someone suddenly slammed a plate down on the next worn Scenes of Scotland place mat and threw herself into the chair beside her.
“What a night,” said Geri, whom Anna had not seen since she disappeared to Strip the Willow with Orlando Gossett. She had spent the night hoping that was all Geri had stripped, but it appeared she had hoped in vain. Visions of large wardrobes with keys sticking out came flooding to mind.
“Oh dear.” Anna swallowed hard. It really didn’t bear thinking about. “Don’t think about it,” she counselled.
Geri put her fork down, her face as white as her unwarmed plate. “Well, I’m trying not to, only there are about a million bruises to remind me.”
Anna swallowed. “He wasn’t, well, violent, was he?”
Geri stared at her. “Violent? The man’s a fucking Neanderthal. He practically threw me round the floor, stamped repeatedly on my new Jimmy Choos, knocked out one of my contact lenses, and then, then, he tried to get me to sleep with him. Can you imagine?”
“No,” said Anna, even though she had.
“He couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t sleep with him though. Came over all indignant and said, ‘I haven’t got AIDS, you know.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I believe you.’”
“So how did you get rid of him?”
“Simple.” Geri probed her fish with her fork. “Told him I was going to the bathroom. I just didn’t mention I meant my bathroom in my room and I had no intention of coming down again.”
“Ah,” said Anna.
“But eventually I decided to sneak back down,” Geri confessed, looking strangely furtive. “Had rather a good time in the end…” Her voice trailed off. “Anyway,” she added briskly. “I’ve had a brilliant idea. About you.”
“About me?” Anna felt a vague sense of panic. It seemed rather early for ideas. And hadn’t Oscar Wilde said something about only dull people being brilliant at breakfast?
“Remember, management consultancy is what I do,” said Geri confidently. “I’m paid to advise people on how to run their professional lives better. And I’ve got just the solution for you.”
“You have?”
“Sure,” said Geri, abandoning the mackerel and flinging her fork down with a flourish. “What you need is an apprenticeship.”
Dickensian visions of workshops and boy sweeps loomed before Anna. “You mean long stands and striped paint?”
“Of course not. Stop being so rigid in your definitions,” commanded Geri. “The first principle of management consultancy is creative thinking. I’m talking about a particular sort of apprenticeship. A bestseller apprenticeship.”
“But where do they do those?”
“Lateral thinking,” said Geri, tapping her forehead with a fingernail which, for all the night’s traumas, remained impeccably manicured. “You need to find a writer who needs help. Be their dogsbody. Do their errands, take their post, make their life run smoothly. And in return…”
“They’ll show me how they do it,” said Anna slowly, catching the thread of thought. Her alcohol-sodden brain suddenly sparked into life like a match. “Or at the very least, I can pick up the nuts and bolts of it. Chapter construction, how one gets an agent, the different publishing houses…”
Geri nodded. “Exactly.”
“Oh Geri, that’s a fantastic idea.”
Just then, Orlando Gossett entered the room and glided swiftly towards the chafing dishes. Having piled his plate high with eggs and fish, he turned his attention to finding somewhere to sit.
“Head down,” Geri muttered, suddenly taking an intense interest in her Stirling Castle place mat.
“It’s all right,” Anna said. “He’s sitting down next to Thoby, who doesn’t look very pleased about it. But then, Thoby doesn’t look very pleased about anything. He certainly doesn’t look like a man who’s spent a night of bliss with his new bride.”
“That’s because he didn’t.” Geri blushed. “He spent it with me.”
&n
bsp; Chapter Four
“Forty-two, two twenty-eight, five fifty-seven.” Cassandra squinted at the list of clothes beside the computerised wardrobe door and entered the numbers of her chosen garments into the keypad, taking great care not to damage her nails. Tyra the manicurist had just left; the fact she cost just over double what most painters of nails and buffers of cuticles charged demanded that her handiwork be shown a certain respect. She was worth it though; did she not count Nicole Kidman, Elizabeth Hurley, and the editor of Vogue among her clients? Though the fact that they probably paid nothing explained Cassandra’s own exorbitant bills.
Still, full battle dress was essential today. Cassandra was not looking forward to the meeting with her publishers at which she would no doubt be expected to explain the whereabouts of A Passionate Lover, her long-promised but as yet unforthcoming new novel. So far, she’d pleaded writer’s block, crashing laptop, even periodic bouts of mysterious illness, but now, floating faintly but definitely into her ear was the unmistakable sound of music that had to be faced. Cassandra was unsure how exactly she would break the news that no lover, passionate or otherwise, currently lurked in her laptop, still less in the left-hand side of her brain or wherever the creative part was supposed to be.
A PASSIONATE LOVER, screamed the poster pinned on the wall opposite her desk in bold letters of searing red. They were a searing reminder to Cassandra that her publishers had seen fit to start a poster campaign before seeing a single word of the novel it described. The apparent rationale was that if they proceeded as if the book existed, it might, through sheer force of corporate effort, actually materialise. “Love, lust, and betrayal—with a twist in the tail,” declared the poster. “The new Number One bestseller from the author of The Sins of the Father, Impossible Lust, Guilty, and Obsessions,” it went on in smaller letters running across the illustration of a tousle-haired Pierce Brosnan smoulderer in a frilled shirt who could pout and suck his cheeks in at the same time. Cassandra stared at him with loathing.
Love, lust, and betrayal—with a twist in the tail. Well, thought Cassandra bitterly, the publishers certainly had a head start on her. She hadn’t even begun to think about the plot, let alone start trying to write it. And as for Number One bestseller, well, despite the publishers’ best efforts—and often their worst and most underhand ones into the bargain—that was in the lap of the gods. It certainly wasn’t, at this precise moment, in her laptop.
Forcing this uncomfortable and inconvenient fact from her mind, she stared at the electronic display beside the wardrobe door as it processed the numbers she had punched in. The figures were rippling like the destination boards used to do at Waterloo in those thankfully long-ago days when public transport and Cassandra were not the strangers they were now. She tapped her foot as impatiently as she could, given that each tap sank into inches-thick cream carpet.
What had gone wrong? Why had the inspiring spark, so reliable for so long, recently failed to spring into anything approximating a flame? “Everything I’m writing is shit,” a panicked Cassandra had yelled at her editor recently. Harriet’s lack of surprise, indeed the unspoken implication that that was entirely expected, did little to improve Cassandra’s mood. But if shit it were, she thought indignantly, it was successful. Four bestsellers under her belt in as many years, spawning three mini-series and one talking book read by Joanna Lumley. But lately…Cassandra swallowed. The thought of the flint-faced executives she would shortly face around the boardroom table make her heart sink.
She could no longer think of plots. The personalities of her characters vacillated as wildly as their gender, hair colour, and motivation; her development and consistency skills had gone, although, she thought, reddening, many of her reviewers had questioned the existence of those skills in the first place. Bastards. But far, far worse than the worst reviews (and there had been plenty of those and she never forgot the names and one day the score would be settled) was the fact that Cassandra couldn’t seem to write sex scenes anymore.
Sex scenes had been Cassandra’s stock in trade. Or stocking trade, as more than one razor-witted reviewer had pointed out in the past. Along with the smirking observation, following revelations that Cassandra was celebrated among the commuting classes for her ability to produce erections on the Circle Line at seven in the morning, that “here was a writer at the peak of her powers.” But for the moment, those powers had deserted her—Cassandra doubted now she’d be able to produce an erection among a gang of footballers being lapdanced in Stringfellow’s. Chronicling the most basic sexual encounter seemed beyond her; the springy breasts with their dark aureoles of nipple consistently failed to spring to mind. Likewise, the piston-like penises, so reliable of old, resolutely refused to come.
Cassandra was at a loss to explain, to Harriet or anybody else, why this should suddenly be the case. It was not, after all, as if her own sex life had suddenly slowed down to a splutter or that she had lost interest. She had never been interested in the first place. When push came to shove—and she rued every day that it did—Cassandra hated sex, at least, when she was sober. Her husband Jett, unfortunately, did not share her views and continued to press for his conjugal rights, although, admittedly, his requirements had gone down from a daily service to a Sunday one. Cassandra supposed she should be thankful for small mercies, even though there was nothing small or merciful about Jett at full throttle. The only point to sex, as far as she was concerned, was children. And after Zak’s birth, eight years ago, Cassandra had dropped even the pretence that she was interested.
From briefly dwelling on the favourite subject of her son, that most gifted, charming, and beautiful of children, Cassandra’s mind flitted to the rather less comfortable subject of Emma the nanny. Now there was a pressure, coping with the latest in that endless line of troublesome girls. Five in the last twelve months, Cassandra seethed to herself. Did staying power and commitment mean nothing anymore? Given what she had to put up with in her domestic life, was it any wonder that her storylines were about as sexy as an orthopaedic shoe?
They were all the same, these ridiculous girls; at least, they all said the same things about Zak. Emma had proved particularly unresponsive to Cassandra’s standard line of nanny rebuttal, the argument that a child as brilliant as Zak was bound to be difficult from time to time, gifted children always were. And of course he was occasionally—very occasionally—disobedient. The respect of a child like Zak had to be earned. Cassandra decided not to dwell on Emma’s mutinous expression the last time she had tried this tack, still less the pointed way she had turned her back and marched out of the room. She decided instead to concentrate on the matter in hand, which was the meeting and what to wear for it. It was eight o’clock, a blearily early hour for Cassandra to be up, and she was due in the boardroom at nine.
Forty-two, two twenty-eight, and five fifty-seven. It had been a difficult decision, but in the end, Cassandra was sure she had trodden the sartorial line between professionalism and plunging cleavage with consummate skill. Forty-two was the classic black YSL trouser suit with the big black buttons. Two twenty-eight was her new purple Prada shirt, and five fifty-seven her favourite pair of black elastic Manolo boots.
Boots? Was it, Cassandra thought, suddenly panicking, the weather for boots? She looked quickly at a second liquid crystal display beneath the keypad, which helpfully showed the temperature outside so you could pick your clothes to suit: 5°C. Christ, it was practically freezing. Amazing weather for June, but then, this was England, she supposed. She’d need a coat too, obviously. It could be the furs first outing since Gstaad in February. Cassandra scanned the list. Seven hundred and four was the silver-mink ankle-length. If that didn’t wow them, nothing would.
There was a grinding sound, a faint rattle, then the door of the wardrobe slid back. Cassandra blinked as it revealed a pair of orange towelling sweatpants, a bright yellow jacket with shoulder pads of Thames Barrier proportions, and a bikini top in magenta satin.
As Cassandra stared, aghast, a pair of olive-green Wellington boots hove into view along the conveyor belt at the bottom. “Jett!” she exploded. “Jett!”
“Whazzamatter?” A man in a red satin Chinese bathrobe far too small for him appeared in the doorway between the dressing room and the bedroom. His figure, with its round, protruding belly and long, skinny legs, was reminiscent of a lollipop. “Whazzup?” he asked, rubbing his eyes and yawning.
“This fucking computerised wardrobe you gave me,” Cassandra almost spat.
“I didn’t realise it fucked as well.” Jett lounged against the doorjamb, his heavily bagged eyes narrowed in amusement. “The miracles of modern science. I’d have kept it for myself if I’d known.”
“Don’t be so bloody facetious, Jett,” Cassandra snarled. “This wardrobe is shit.” Losing her temper altogether, she slammed her clenched fists repeatedly against her sides with impotent rage, irrespective of Tyra’s recent careful and costly efforts. “How the fuck am I supposed to wear this lot to meet my publishers?” She gestured furiously at the ensemble before her.
“Looks all right to me,” Jett yawned, loping over and tweaking the bikini top. “Looks quite rock ’n’ roll, actually.”
“Rock ’n’ roll my arse,” hissed Cassandra.
“No, rock ’n’ roll your goddamn tits.” Jett thrust out a hairy, ring-festooned hand to grab Cassandra’s breasts, half revealed by her flapping Janet Reger peignoir. Twisting deftly out of Jett’s way, Cassandra heard the unmistakable crunch of her neck muscles going. Damn. Another fifty quid to the osteopath.
“This stupid sodding wardrobe’s suggesting I wear nothing but this disgusting thing”—she tugged the yellow jacket—“outside when the temperature’s more or less zero.”
“Zero?” echoed Jett. “It’s goddamn baking out there. Just look out of the window.”