Bad Heir Day

by Wendy Holden

  Cassandra turned and screwed up her face against the brilliant light streaming through the greige pashmina curtains, looped with studied artlessness over black iron rods.

  It did look rather warm outside. “Sod it,” she spat. “I’ve got to start all over again now. I’m going to be late. I need some help. Where’s that useless nanny? Where’s Emma?”

  “I’m ’ere,” said a northern accent in the doorway. “And I’m handing in me notice. With immediate effect.”

  Cassandra and Jett stared at the solid figure standing at the entrance to the room with two large bags in her hand. Then they stared at each other.

  “You’ve been at it a-bloody-gain, haven’t you?” Cassandra shrieked at Jett. “Trying to screw the sodding nanny. I thought as much when I caught you with her in your library last week. Showing her a few of your favorite passages, were you?”

  “Well you can bloody well talk,” Jett snapped. “Getting her to take those goddamn dresses back to the shops and saying they’re not suitable, when you knew goddamn well you’d worn them. Poor cow. Sent packing by half of goddamn Bond Street.”

  “Well, if she’d ironed the linings properly like I told her, no one would have known,” howled Cassandra, seemingly oblivious of the fact that Emma was still present and shifting from foot to sturdily shod foot. “And anyway, it’s not as if she’d ever go in those shops of her own accord. I gave her an education, asking her to take them back. She should be bloody grateful. You, on the other hand, gave her an education of a completely different sort. Why cant you keep your zip up?” Cassandra yelled. “You’re not a rock star being chased by every groupie in town anymore, you know. You’re not a rock star, full stop!”

  Jett’s eyes flashed fire. Cassandra saw she had hit him where it hurt. “You haven’t released anything for years,” she taunted. “Apart from that thing in your trousers.”

  “Well, neither has anybody goddamn else,” yelled Jett, furious. “You goddamn bitch. Solstice will be back with a bang, you’ll see. You wait till the new goddamn album’s mixed.”

  “Mixed? Mixed?” bawled Cassandra. “The only thing you know how to mix these days is bloody whisky and soda.”

  As Jett stormed out of the room, Emma stood aside, then stepped forward. “The real reason I’m leaving has nowt to do wi’ what you just said,” she said in dull Lancastrian tones, “although I’m not saying they didn’t ’elp.”

  Cassandra stared at her in contempt. Nowt indeed. Ghastly northern vowels. She probably thought elocution was what happened if you dropped a hairdryer in the bath.

  “Only summat happened this morning,” Emma added, unbowed by her employer’s freezing stare, “which made me realise I’d ’ad enough.”

  Summat. Ugh. And just look at that hair.

  “Zak were complaining about feeling awful and wanted to stay off school. He said there were summat wrong wi’ ’is insides.” Emma paused. “’E said his poop were white.”

  “Poop? Poop?” Cassandra was incandescent. “We don’t poop in this house. We poo.”

  “Course,” Emma continued flatly, her stare concentrated at a corner of the room beyond her employer, “I tried to find out what were wrong before I got you involved. Zak took me into his bathroom and pointed at his toilet…”

  “Lavatory.”

  “And there, bobbing around in the bottom of it, were these little round white thingies.”

  “Really?” Cassandra stared, intrigued at this concrete evidence—white poo, of all things—that the sun did indeed shine out of Zak’s perfect ivory bottom.

  “Well, obviously I were worried,” Emma continued, still addressing the corner of the room. “Zak were screaming ’is head off saying he were in ’orrible agony and I were just about to call t’ ambulance when summat about them white thingies struck me as funny, like.”

  “Well, of course they were funny, like,” Cassandra barked. “What’s remotely normal about white crap? Poo,” she corrected herself.

  “So I looked closer and picked one up,” Emma said.

  “Picked…one…up?” Cassandra’s face was a mass of disgusted lines. Who did she think she was? Dr. Sam bloody Ryan?

  “And it weren’t poop at all. It were,” Emma concluded with all the flat finality of the Silent Witness pathologist, “a can of tinned potatoes Zak had emptied down the toilet. Suppose ’e thought that were funny,” she added. “But I didn’t. Ta-ra.” She turned on her sensible low heel and left.

  Cassandra stared after her, the blood pounding in her temples. Oh Christ. She didn’t need this. Not now. Not with this meeting, not with the book problems, husband problems, and problems of every other description she had to put up with. Did no one realise she was a creative artist? Where the hell would Shakespeare have been if he’d had the kind of crap—poo—she dealt with on a day-to-day basis, white or otherwise? Boy, did she need a drink.

  Cassandra lunged with the last of her fury at the sweatpants and magenta bikini top, tearing them from their hangers as she sank to her knees. Sobbing, she crawled across the floor, her bony knees cracking painfully against the rubbed beech boards, towards the sustainable rainforest-wood bed draped with its white shahtoush duvet. “I’m sure I put one there,” she muttered, feeling around underneath until her hand closed over a hard glass object. She pulled out the gin bottle, her nose almost touching the mirrored door of the wardrobe.

  Cassandra stared at her reflection. In the harsh light of morning, her skin had all the bloom and smoothness of screwed-up tissue paper. Her hooded eyes, which in her more optimistic moments seemed Charlotte Rampling–like, today looked more like Rumpole. Cassandra reflected resentfully that, despite the fact that her face was the only well-fed thing about her, the gallons of expensive skin creams she rubbed in each night had clearly done nothing to help. Nor had last year’s lift. She looked older even than her forty years. Her heart sank. She clamped a palm to her thin lips, shuddering as she saw the snaking veins on the back of it. Perhaps she could ask for a hand-lift for Christmas… “Bugger them all,” Cassandra murmured as she unscrewed the top of the Bombay Sapphire.

  Sometimes it felt like her only friend. The only one who understood the nightmare of her marriage, the challenges of her child, and the demands of her publishers. She’d started drinking it to soothe herself, to take the pain away, to give her courage to face and, more importantly, do things. Like the book. But lately she hadn’t been able to do anything. And the only thing that made her feel better, Cassandra thought, as she put the bottle to her lips, was giving her little glass friend here a big, big kiss.

  ***

  When Jett returned to the house several hours later, he found it suspiciously silent. But then, he thought, most things seem pretty peaceful after you’ve been playing lead guitar at top screaming volume for hours on end. Boy, had he made that axe weep this afternoon. Bleed, even. Gone up to eleven and beyond. Whatever Cassandra might say, Ass Me Anything was shaping up to be a peach of an album; “Sex and Sexibility,” if released as a single, might even make it to number one. What a blast that would be—Solstice’s first chart-topper since “Bum Deal” in 1979. He’d show that bitch. Where was that bitch anyway? Hopefully recovered from that mother of all strops she’d been in this morning. But of course, it was the drink talking. Pity, thought Jett, the drink couldn’t goddamn write as well. Because, since Cassandra had been on the sauce, she could hardly manage a sentence anymore.

  There was, Jett noticed, a light downstairs in the kitchen. Had the impossible happened and Cassandra had decided to cook for a change? The usual rules of the house were that whatever nanny was currently in residence at the time fed Zak; Cassandra ate pretty much nothing and Jett was left with whatever happened to be in the fridge or on the menu of one of the local pubs. Although fancy bar food didn’t always appeal—he’d have traded all the Thai prawn sausages and celeriac and Parmesan mash in Kensington for one steak and kidney
pie—the beer certainly did. He’d been thinking of going down there later but, with Cassandra in the kitchen…he smiled to himself. At this rate he might even get a shag out of her as well.

  Jett put his nose in the air and sniffed. He couldn’t actually smell anything, but then, he reminded himself, he hadn’t for about twenty years, thanks to all that shit he’d stuffed up there. In his time he’d snorted the equivalent of an entire fleet of Gulfstreams. Ah well. That was rock and roll for you. He shook his head and smiled ruefully as he dropped jauntily down the stairs.

  His benevolent mood instantly disappeared as he entered the kitchen. “Aaargh!” screamed Jett, terror clenching his heart, which then leapt into his mouth and began to ricochet among the wisdom teeth he had never plucked up the courage to have out. “Zak!” he thundered. “Put that cat down.” He had arrived just in time to stop his eight-year-old son putting the neighbour’s Bengal Blue into the microwave. “For Christ’s sake, leave that animal alone.”

  “But Daddy, you once bit the head off a snake on stage,” protested Zak.

  “That’s different,” snapped Jett. “Snakes are two a penny. Have you any idea how much that sodding cat costs?”

  “But it was cold,” Zak whinged, his shiny red lower lip shooting out like a cash till.

  “Don’t talk shit.” Jett felt calmer now. The prospect had receded, at least temporarily, of having to replace Ladymiss Starshine Icypaws Clutterbucket III, the prizewinning pride and joy of Lady Snitterton next door, an animal with a longer pedigree than the Queen and certainly Lady Snitterton herself, but one which possessed a strong self-destructive streak as well as a replacement price tag of about ten thousand pounds. He drew out a chair and sat down, admiring his long legs in their tight black jeans stretched out before him, but wincing slightly as the waistband cut into his belly.

  “Where’s your mother?” he asked.

  “Upstairs,” snuffled Zak, now occupied with turning the gas hobs of the cooker on and off.

  “Stop that,” demanded Jett. “What’s she doing?”

  “Praying.”

  “Praying?” Jett was astounded. “What sort of praying?” He could think of many words to describe his wife, but devout wasn’t one of them.

  “She’s on her knees in front of the wardrobe mirror saying ‘Oh my God.’”

  Chapter Five

  Anna looked lovingly at the tiny, coloured oblong—English graduate seeks work as author’s assistant—and blew it a surreptitious kiss as she pinned it to the noticeboard of Kensington Library. “Good luck,” she whispered to it. In fact, acting on Geri’s advice, she had left as little as possible to chance. Geri had stipulated she use hot pink card, neatly and clearly printed in ink, to distinguish it from the other dog-eared and sloppily Biro’d offerings usually found on noticeboards. And the noticeboard Geri had favoured, during her impromptu post-breakfast consultancy the morning after the wedding, was that of Kensington Library.

  “Only bestseller-list regulars can afford to live there,” Geri explained, as they stood in the castle entrance hall knee-deep in bags, most of which seemed to be hers. “Guess I’d better shoot,” she added as a tense-looking Miranda appeared. “Before she shoots me. See you in London anyway. Good luck.”

  “Here’s my address.” Anna thrust it at Geri as she strode in high-heeled boots out of the Gothic arched doorway and disappeared into the mist. The roar of a powerful car engine could be heard almost immediately.

  As she turned and left the library, Anna wondered what Geri was doing now. As yet she had had no word from her, although admittedly only a few days had passed since the wedding. She was probably out of town; Anna imagined her reclining in club class on her way to troubleshoot some international management crisis or other, head to foot in tailored pinstripes, exciting the discreet interest of a few tanned and handsome businessmen with cryptic smiles. Or sweeping through town in a limo, a mobile clamped to her ear. Or moving swiftly but authoritatively through an open-plan office, a gaggle of executives rushing after her, waving papers and vying for her attention.

  Meanwhile, all Anna herself was doing was wandering vaguely down the library steps, having stuck a small pink card on the noticeboard, and wondering whether she had done the right thing. It seemed pathetic in comparison. But what, as Geri had said, could go wrong?

  Anna imagined listening raptly as Julian Barnes read aloud his latest chapter, or hovering helpfully in the shadow of Louis de Bernières’ desk lamp. Perhaps her little pink plea might even be spotted by a visiting Gore Vidal or Garrison Keillor and she would be whisked away to the land of white picket fences, clapboard, clam bakes, and American literary legend. In the meantime, she boarded the number 10 bus and was whisked away to the land of Seb slouching in front of the television and a kitchen full of empty crisp packets, crusted cereal bowls, and ringed coffee mugs.

  Staring out of the window as she juddered past Hyde Park, Anna’s thoughts wandered due north to a soft-spoken Scotsman with wide-apart eyes and rumpled hair. As they fought through the traffic of Knightsbridge, Anna was lost in her memories of Dampie. The stone-flagged hall, the vast fireplace with carved canopy, the tapestries, the stags’ heads, the ancient, misty, standing-stones-and-islands romance of it all…

  Suddenly, Anna realised she’d missed her stop and was at the bottom of Oxford Street. She’d have to walk almost all the way back up to Seb’s South Audley Street flat now. “Fuck!” she muttered.

  “No need for that sort of language,” snapped the conductor.

  ***

  “Fuck!” Cassandra threw down her pen and scowled at the Schnabel on the wall of her study. A present from her publishers when her fourth novel went through the five hundred thousand barrier, it only served to drive home the fact that she was getting precisely nowhere with her fifth. She flung herself theatrically back in her zebraskin chair, stretched her hands out before her, and tried to raise her spirits by examining the vast and glittering rings on her red-nailed fingers. Some people thought them vulgar, but they were wrong. If you could never be too rich or too thin—and she was hell bent on being both—you could certainly never have jewellery that was too big. She hadn’t got where she was today by being subtle.

  Cassandra reached for the small gold bell which always stood by her laptop and shook it. “Lil!” she screeched. “Lil!”

  “Yes, Mrs. Knoight?”

  A wrinkled apparition with orange-pencilled eyebrows, lips a painted purple bow, and hair the chewed yellow of a bathroom sponge poked its head round the door almost immediately. The cleaner, Cassandra realised, must have been next door attending to the latest interiors innovation, a perfume bathroom devoted entirely to scent bottles. Cleaner—that was a joke. Filthier, more like. Lil invariably left more smears behind her than she found, especially on the scented candles whose black smoky bits she never quite managed to clean off, to her employer’s intense irritation. Nor, despite Cassandra’s compiling and captioning an album of photographs of each room for her, showing exactly how each cushion, ornament, and curtain should be arranged, did the house ever look really up to scratch. But there were always lots of scratches. Cassandra groaned. She felt terrible after the party last night.

  “I’d like a large gin and tonic, Lil,” Cassandra ordered, thrusting a cigarette between her violently red lips. She always sat down to work in full makeup. After all, you never knew when a TV station might suddenly appear on her doorstep wanting to interview her, or whether a celebrity fan might pop in at a moment’s notice. Princess Diana, she’d been told, had loved her books and, as Kensington Palace was practically at the end of her garden, Cassandra had always cherished the hope…until…Tears filled her eyes. “Diet tonic,” she ordered, her hand suddenly shaking.

  As the door closed behind Lil, Cassandra sucked on her cigarette like a Hoover in those hard-to-get-at corners of the staircase—well, Lil found them hard to get at anyway—and groaned anew at
the memory of last night’s gathering. The drink had been dreadful; it had, after all, only been warm white wine for the local Neighbourhood Watch coordinator’s birthday. Admittedly, she’d had a glass or two more than was advisable—assuming any of it was advisable. It had come out of a box, for Christ’s sake. In Cassandra’s experience, the only good boxes worth opening were pale blue and marked “Tiffany & Co.”

  Still, she’d needed some rocket fuel after that wretched publishers’ meeting. It had been tough, but she’d managed to buy more time—and half a case of Bombay Sapphire on the way back to help her recover. But she’d been left in no doubt it was her last chance. She simply had to get on with this book.

  The thought of it made her feel sick. Compounding her nausea was the memory of last night’s conversation with that ghastly Fenella Greatorex at number 24 who had banged on practically all night about her son getting one of the coveted invitations to Savannah and Siena Tressell’s birthday party.

  Cassandra’s skin had almost blistered with the heat of her envy. Zak had to, she resolved, simply had to get an invitation too. Otherwise her life would not be worth living. And, hopefully, when—not if—Zak was invited, Otto Greatorex’s wouldn’t be worth living either.

  Cassandra ground her teeth. Then she’d had to listen to Fenella Greatorex crapping on about her wonderful new nanny. This was doubly infuriating considering Fenella’s new one was none other than Emma, Cassandra’s old one. Fuck Fenella, thought Cassandra; still, she’d looked a lot less smug after Cassandra had pointed out a few home truths to her. “Oh yes,” Cassandra sneered as the alcohol took hold. “You bloody well stopped at nothing to get that girl out of my house. Offering her money, cars, paid holidays, her own bathroom, the lot. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You’re nothing less than a thief.”

  That, Cassandra thought, had shown her. Only it hadn’t. Murderous rage rose within her at the memory of Fenella piously pointing out that money, cars, paid holidays, and their own bathrooms were the bare minimum of what most nannies expected anyway and the sooner Cassandra realised that, the better. “No wonder you can’t keep a nanny for more than a month,” had been Fenella’s parting shot.