by Wendy Holden
Cassandra’s dormant interest in any other subject but The Party was briefly stirred. The film-editing suite would, with luck, encourage Zak’s obvious acting ability and get his film star career off to a great start as well. Her secret dream, apart from securing The Invitation, was that Zak star as Alaric St. Felix in the blockbuster film version of Impossible Lust, the only one of her books to be optioned by a film studio and still, as it had been for the past five years, stuck in Development Hell. “Impossible Film,” Jett sneeringly called it.
To demonstrate her devotion to the project, Cassandra had come up with what she confidently expected to be the most sought-after item in the auction. Surely even Kate Tressell would be impressed with this.
“Well, thanks, everyone, for promising such wonderful things,” Polly Rice-Brown said, half an hour later. Wonderful my arse, thought Cassandra sourly. What on earth was the use of Caroline Hope-Stanley’s offer of a year’s supply of horse manure from their weekend place in Oxfordshire? “For the garden, of course,” Caroline had snapped when Cassandra had said as much. Or Polly Rice-Brown’s wildly over-generous year’s subscription to her bloody newspaper? Much as it pained Cassandra to admit it, the detox day at a health farm promised by Fenella Greatorex almost nudged the borders of reasonableness—until one reflected on the fact that Strydgel Grange was, quite apart from being firmly on the health spa B list, one of Fenella’s own PR accounts.
Cassandra’s own contribution had not quite been the one she had intended. Her original offer of an autographed boxed set of her own works was unexpectedly dismissed out of hand on the grounds that the purpose of the auction was to raise the school’s profile, not any of the mothers’ (Cassandra had dwelt bitterly but silently on Fenella Greatorex’s spa at this point). In extremis, she had had to come up with a substitute. VIP seats at the Solstice reunion concert being deemed similarly unsuitable, Cassandra had eventually been pressed into offering to cook a dinner party for eight at her home. Or rather, offering Anna to cook for it, and the cheapest way possible. Was pasta and pesto, Cassandra wondered, a socially acceptable dish?
The end of the meeting was now in sight. As the smell of coffee drifted over from the kitchen wing, Cassandra braced herself to buttonhole Kate Tressell—despite the fact that the latter’s Mao jacket had no obvious buttons on it. Leaping to her feet, the leather seat ripping from the backs of her thighs, Cassandra stumbled, eyes watering, in Kate’s wake as she headed with remarkable speed for the hallway.
“Just one thing,” Polly called, holding up a hand to the half-dissolved meeting. “Kate’s had to dash, but she wanted to suggest the auction be held at Siena and Savannah’s birthday party. She thought it would be something for the parents there to do.”
Cassandra’s heart sank. Following the rest of the herd into Polly’s Provençal-style kitchen, she wondered whether to commit hara-kiri with one of the large knives protruding from the olive-wood butchers block. The worst had happened. She had secured neither invitation nor word with Kate Tressell. Suicide seemed the only option.
Chapter Nine
About the same time as Cassandra took her seat at the highly polished conference table, two men behind the counter of a little French cafe in Kensington burst into flamboyant and flirtatious life as a curvaceous girl with long brown hair and precisely applied lipstick made her entrance. Geri, Anna saw as she followed in her wake, was clearly a regular.
“So tell me what’s going on,” Geri said, as they sat nursing cappuccinos. “Why have you departed from my carefully constructed, individually tailored personal goal-achieving plan?”
Anna’s face stayed frozen. “I haven’t,” she said evenly. “As a matter of fact I’m sticking to it like glue. I’m supposed to be Cassandra’s assistant. She’s supposed to be teaching me to write.”
Geri raised an eyebrow and lit a cigarette. “I see. When did you start?”
“Today’s my second day.”
“Which means,” Geri said, “you’ve been with her a full twenty-four hours. That puts you streets ahead of some of Cassandra’s past nannies. One lasted about ten minutes, I believe.”
“How many has she got through?” Anna’s voice had lowered to a horrified croak. Her heart thumped against her rib cage and, despite the fact she was sitting down, her knees shook uncontrollably.
“Well,” grinned Geri cheerfully, “you’re the seventh this year, at a conservative estimate. I expect Cassandra just forgot to tell you about the others.”
Anna was silent. It was all very well for high-powered career girl Geri to think her predicament the most enormous joke.
“But the good news,” Geri continued, “is that you’re in a brilliant position.”
“I am?”
“Yes. All us nannies are.”
“You’re a nanny?” Anna gawped at Geri in amazement. “But what was all that about management consultancy and executive responsibility? I thought you were the head of Unilever at the very least. A captain of industry.”
Geri took a bite from her croissant and grinned at Anna as she chewed. Her other hand still held the cigarette.
“But I am,” she said. “We both are. We’re valuable commodities in one of the most highly sought-after sectors of the economy. That of childcare provision.”
Anna snorted. “You are joking? I feel about as valuable and sought-after as yesterday’s copy of the Sun.”
“Don’t you see? It’s a complete seller’s market,” Geri continued enthusiastically. “Play your cards right and you have the pick of who you work for, you can practically write your own salary cheque, you get glamorous holidays thrown in and get paid for going on them, you don’t pay tax or National Insurance, there are no overheads whatsoever, and there are plenty of perks. I, for instance, have a company car.”
Anna stared. “A company car?”
“Sure. You have to see the families you work for as companies. Some of which perform well, others not so well. Your job is to help them improve their performance.”
“Performance?” gasped Anna, to whom the idea of the family as a unit floated on the stock exchange of life was an altogether new one. “But how on earth do you measure it?”
Geri gave a short laugh. “Let me count the ways,” she grinned. “Like any company, through the achievements of its individual members and of the group as a whole. For children, there is a practically endless list of fields in which they are expected to compete and excel. Some of their timetables are more crammed than their parents’…”
Anna suddenly remembered the list of Zak’s after-school lessons.
“Academic performance, for example,” Geri continued. “The competition among parents even before the school stage is incredible. I’ve worked for people whose nursery floors are covered with rough sisal matting so the child will be discouraged from crawling and learn to walk more quickly.”
“No!”
“Oh yes. Some of my past employers set up entire pay structures incorporating performance-related bonuses if the baby learned to talk by a certain date. At the moment, for instance, I have to make sure Savannah and Siena can talk about current affairs at their parents’ power Sunday lunches. So every night we watch the six o’clock news and discuss it afterwards.”
Anna was speechless. Geri, meanwhile, was anything but.
“The key,” she said, stuffing in the last of the croissant, “is to identify your role in the corporate organisation and then exploit it. If you don’t believe me, ask the others. They’ve just come in.”
A laughing group were ordering at the counter. Anna recognised them as the same glamorous creatures she had seen milling about outside the gates of the school; a dark girl dressed entirely in white, a lanky man in a tight T-shirt, and two blondes—a rangy, bobbed one who sported loafers and cashmere, and a larger sporty-looking one. “You see that blonde with the bob?” Geri whispered. “That’s Alice. Worked for Cassandr
a about three months ago.” As a roar of laughter suddenly convulsed the group, Anna’s heart fell out of her bottom and hit the stripped wood floor. The sick feeling in her stomach, she told herself sternly, must be due to her lack of breakfast.
“Hey, guys. Over here.” As the group began to look about them for seats, Geri waved frantically. “Come and meet the new recruit.”
Chairs borrowed from neighbouring tables were scraped across wooden floorboards as people shoved, exclaimed, giggled, and shuffled into position. In the end, everyone was squashed round the tiny marble table, which the waiter then attempted to pile with cappuccinos and croissants.
“This is Anna,” Geri announced. “She’s Zak Knight’s new nanny.” A collective gasp followed, then a silence interrupted by a giggle, followed by a snort which, much to Anna’s annoyance and intense embarrassment, soon achieved fullblown laugh status. Alice, Anna noted, was laughing hardest of all.
“Well, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?” she sniffed, mopping a streaming eye. “Otherwise you’d cry.” She stopped as she caught Anna’s baleful glare.
“Let me introduce everyone,” Geri interrupted hastily. “This,” she said, gesturing at the large blonde girl who, Anna saw with interest, had a perfectly round face the colour of strong tea, “is Trace. Works for a journalist called Polly Rice-Brown. Cassandra knows her. Zak tried to kill her son once.”
“Wish she bladdy hed,” pronounced Trace in broad Australian tones. “Wouldda sived me doin’ it. Liddle bastard.”
“Oh, come on, Trace, you know you don’t mean that,” interjected the lanky youth who, besides his rangy figure, had big lips, high cheekbones, a heavy Eastern European accent, and subscribed to that variety of sexiness known as brooding. “You love Sholto,” he continued in the same flat monotone. “You just won’t admit it.”
Trace grinned. “Well, I suppose I im fond of the liddle bastard really. When I think what I could have inded up with…” She flicked a small-eyed glance at Anna.
“This is Slobodan,” Geri intervened, introducing the lanky youth. “He looks after the children of someone called Caroline Hope-Stanley, another of the St. Midas’s mothers.”
“You’re a nanny?” Anna exclaimed. “But you’re a man.”
Everyone laughed. Slobodan winked at her.
“Male nannies are terribly trendy at the moment,” Geri explained. “Particularly exotic ones. One of the St. Midas’s mothers has a rather dishy Japanese bloke called Hanuki, who was the first male Norlander. Slob’s from Bosnia. Lots of the mothers are starting to want men to look after their children—they’re more athletic and brilliant at games.”
“Yes, Caroline loves my games.” Slobodan narrowed his eyes and grinned. He shifted in his seat, drawing attention to the very tight jeans straining across his crotch, and pushed back his floppy dark hair with both strong, tanned forearms.
“Slob’s a terrible flirt,” Geri said, rather unnecessarily. “The St. Midas’s mothers love him, despite the fact he insists on pickled fish sandwiches for breakfast. The Hope-Stanleys’ stock has shot through the roof since he came on the scene—they get invited to everything so everyone can flirt with Slob. He’s probably been through most of the mothers by now. And a few of the fathers as well.”
“Ees not true, Geri,” Slobodan protested, grinning. He winked at Anna. “Not all. Not yet.”
He might be about as subtle as Benny Hill, Anna thought, smiling back, but he was very attractive. However, judging by the challenging way the dark-haired waif next to him was looking at her, she wasn’t the only one who thought so.
“I’m Allegra,” the girl breathed in an Italian accent of X-rated sexiness. “How do you do?” She over-pronounced the “H,” Anna noticed, in a way that made her large lips pout even further forward.
“Allegra’s even trendier than Slob,” Geri supplied. “She’s one of London’s first New Age nannies. She smears her children with oil and makes them take baths with lots of dirt and leaves in them.”
“Oh, Geri,” protested Allegra, pushing her lips out like drawers. “You know the hoils are hessential hoils, for the calming of the bambini, and they are sage baths with horris root, to promote ’appiness.”
“Allegra ees very good at massages as well,” Slobodan added, grinning. Anna smiled back, feeling slightly better. It was, she decided, like being in a nanny version of Friends.
“And this is Alice.” Geri waved at the girl with the blonde bob, whose face, Anna thought, was as long, flat, and pale as a new wooden spoon. “As I explained, she used to work for Cassandra and now works for someone called Shayla, whose husband’s a footballer. Now you’ve met everyone. I’ve just been telling Anna that being a nanny’s the best job in the world,” Geri added, to general murmurs of assent. “That we’ve got our employers round our little fingers. Trace has, in any case. Almost didn’t take her latest job because of the skiing—”
Anna nodded, feeling it was about time she said something. “Skiing’s not my strong point either,” she told Trace, who looked astonished.
Geri stepped in, grinning. “Trace loves skiing,” she explained. “The problem was that the Rice-Browns wanted to take her to Val D’Isère with them and Trace never skis anywhere but Aspen.”
Trace nodded triumphantly as she took a large mouthful of pain au raisin. “They daren’t even take a holiday without checking with me whether it’s somewhere I want to go to and that the dates are convenient for me,” she assured Anna through a bad case of tumble-drier mouth. “I was saying to Polly only yesterday, do we have to go to Barbados agin? Why not splish out and try the Maldives? So thit’s where we’re going.”
Anna stared.
“Trace gets poached more often than anyone else,” Geri explained. “The Rice-Browns are desperate to keep her, but she’ll go eventually. She gets great offers, all the time. Fighting off half the royal family at the moment, aren’t you, Trace?”
“Not that that’s saying anything,” Alice chimed in. “I worked for some royals once and they were ghastly. Mean as mouseshit. Wrote the dates on the lightbulbs, for Christ’s sake. Rock stars are the best ones—at least I used to think so before, um…” Her voice faded into a cough as she avoided Anna’s gaze and pretended to splutter on her Marlboro. Anna blushed anew.
“But we’re all very jealous of Allegra,” Geri said hastily. “She’s worked for loads of celebrities, from Tom and Katie to Richard and Judy. She’s supposed to be writing a kids-and-tell book about it all, in fact.” Allegra pouted and raised an eyebrow. “But she’s got such a cushy number anyway,” Geri added. “Her family, the Anstruthers, are so anxious not to lose her, they’ve given her a Saab convertible and her own apartment with a Jacuzzi bath. She’s got them by the balls, haven’t you, darling? Quite literally, if all that stuff about you and Oliver Anstruther is true.”
Slobodan sucked his cheeks in thunderously, while Allegra smiled lazily. “Si, and I’ve already had offer of upgrade to Porsche Boxter from someone else.”
Anna was fascinated. She had never thought of nannies as ruthless executives before. Less Mary Poppins, more Gordon Gekko. The only things Poppins about Geri, Anna noticed, as they all stood up to leave, were the top few silver buttons of the short-skirted blue dress straining to hold back the brown tide of cleavage. That was Poppins out all over.
“Is that a uniform?” Anna asked pointedly as everyone started to drift out of the cafe. After all Geri’s self-determinist big talk, the clothes of subservience seemed something of a comedown. “Don’t you mind having to wear one?”
Geri threw back her shoulders, thrusting out her impressive bosom yet further. “Mind?” she barked, slipping on a navy blue coat with distinct NHS overtones. “Far from it. I insisted on it, as a matter of fact. Best professional tool I’ve got. You look the part, no one argues with you when you’re in one, and”—she lowered her voice—“men love them.”
“Uh?” Anna was lost again.
Geri flashed her a sly smile. “Let’s just say that at my current employer there are benefits I’m planning to avail myself of when the market situation is right.” She paused and grinned. “I’m having some very interesting discussions with the CEO at the moment.”
Anna frowned. “You mean the father?”
Geri nodded. “He’s an architect and works a lot from home.” She paused and gave Anna the benefit of her dazzling smile. “You might say the situation’s building up nicely.”
***
Cassandra roared through Kensington crashing her gears and grinding her teeth. The SMSPA meeting had been a nightmare, and not only because of the non-materialisation of the party invitation. As she was leaving, Cassandra had overheard Fenella Greatorex mention that St. Midas’s was holding aptitude tests at the end of the week; when questioned, she had turned those huge cow’s eyes on Cassandra and said, yes, absolutely, and hadn’t Cassandra got a letter about it?
Back at Liv, Cassandra hunted high and low for the letter. Nothing. Bugger all in Zak’s room, or in the wretched nanny’s room, although there was a diary in one of the drawers that looked quite interesting, she’d come back to that later. She spent the rest of the afternoon with A Passionate Lover but, somehow, it failed to gel. Three double gins later it seemed to be gelling less. But that was only because the thought of The Tests was dominating everything. If Zak failed, his entire educational future would implode. Her dreams of him breezing through Common Entrance into whatever senior school topped the league tables at the time would have to be forgotten, along with those of Zak’s Cambridge First and his being a Blue in everything from jousting to Footlights.
“I don’t know what you’re worrying about,” Jett said when Cassandra came down for yet another gin and a consultation with him on the matter. “No point him going to university anyway. He can go to Clouds House like I did.”