by Wendy Holden
Cassandra almost choked on her Bombay Sapphire. “What, you mean the detox centre? Where you dried out?”
“Sure,” breezed Jett. “The way you’re spoiling him, he’s going to end up there before he’s eighteen anyway. May as well make an advance booking now.”
Cassandra exploded. “How dare you accuse me of spoiling Zak? Can you blame me? It was almost ten years before I could have that child.”
“Only because you wouldn’t have sex for nine of them.”
Cassandra stormed out of the room and returned to her study where she stared out of the window, thinking not of her book, but of her son. Her clever, charming son, who said the sweetest things.
“It took you nine years to have me, Mummy?” he had said when she told him. “You must have been very tired.” Cassandra smiled a watery smile. Zak had such a very particular view of the world. There had been the time he had seen her getting dressed in the bathroom and rushed downstairs to tell the gathering dinner party, “Mummy’s got hair on her bottom.” Cassandra still blushed at the memory. Along with that of Zak telling the entire school gate set that “Mummy has been taken away by a policeman because of her straps.” Reassuring everyone that she was not running an S&M brothel but had merely been driving without a seatbelt had been humiliation of the first order.
At half past seven, when Anna appeared through the door with Zak, Cassandra’s grey mood had deepened to a thunderous black.
“Where the hell have you been?” she yelled.
“School run,” murmured Anna.
“Well, what school did you bloody run to?” Cassandra shouted. “Gordonstoun?”
Anna could not frame a reply. Waiting outside Zak’s endless extracurricular maths, music, judo, and dance classes, she had listened to so much radio news her mind was numb. In the interests of keeping her temper while Zak ground the fistfuls of cereal he had apparently been saving since breakfast into her hair, she had taken so many deep breaths on the way home she was practically hallucinating. She was also desperate for a pee.
“Excuse me, I must just…”
“What’s that on your head?” Cassandra resumed her disdainful interrogation as soon as Anna emerged from the lavatory.
“Cereal. Zak was shoving it in my hair all the way home.”
“I don’t know what you’re complaining about,” Cassandra retorted. “Oatbran is very good for hair. Don’t you ever read glossy magazines?” Mmmm. She raked Anna up and down with her chill glance. “Thought not.”
“The loo stinks of poo,” Zak announced loudly as he emerged from investigating it and came back into the sitting room. “Ugh!” he said, looking directly at Anna. Rage boiled within her. She’d had a pee, that was all. Little bastard.
“Darling, do you have a letter for me about some examinations?” Cassandra’s voice was pure syrup.
“I don’t think so,” Anna began.
“Not you. Zak.”
“No,” snapped Zak. “Can we have a portable video disc player for the car?” he wheedled. “Siena and Savannah have one. They only cost a thousand pounds and then you can watch pop videos in the minivan. And can we have a minivan? Everyone else has one.”
“If you pass your exams, darling,” said Cassandra tightly. She didn’t want to think about Savannah and Siena just now. “Right, this letter must be somewhere. Let’s just look in your pockets, shall we—ugh.”
Her face screwed up with revulsion as she unearthed a festering handful of paper, cloying cereal, and a substantial quantity of rotting green matter which may or may not have been more of Otto Greatorex’s scabby knee.
“I don’t know how you could allow him to go about with all this in his pockets,” Cassandra ranted at Anna as she placed it gingerly on the table. “It’s disgusting. Probably dangerous…ah, here’s the letter.” She smoothed out the chewed-up, screwed-up ball and scanned it quickly. “Oh, it’s easy peasy, darling. All you need to be able to do is draw a triangle and a circle and that sort of thing.”
She poked again at the matted mass on the table. Something shiny caught her eye. “What’s this?” Cassandra’s hand trembled as she held up what looked like a silver card. Her eyes blazed feverishly in her face. Could it possibly be…
“’Ninvitation,” Zak said casually, his attention absorbed in setting fire to a pile of post with the microphone-shaped lighter which was once again under the coffee table.
“To what?” Cassandra’s voice was trembling as well.
“S’vannah and Siena. Birthday party.”
“H-how long have you had it?”
“’Bout a week. Not going to go, though. All girls.”
Cassandra gasped, then dropped to her knees before her child. “Darling,” she breathed, her voice cracking with emotion, “you must go. It’s very important to Mummy that you go. Do it for Mummy, darling.”
“Nah,” said Zak, scowling.
“Isn’t he wonderful?” Cassandra grinned rigidly at Anna. “So independent-minded. But darling,” she addressed him again, waving a finger, “I’m afraid part of being grown up is that sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to.”
“Fuck off,” said Zak and scampered out of the room.
Chapter Ten
After the first week as Cassandra’s nanny, Anna found it hard to believe she had ever been anything else. It was impossible, as she crept, back bent, round the house, Hoover in one hand, Harry Potter in the other, to imagine the scale of her past achievements. Neither the fact that she had a university degree nor that she had had a dashing, blond heir—albeit to a sewage fortune—as a lover now seemed possible. Her utter and permanent exhaustion wiped out even the fierce pangs of longing for Seb that had, at first, lain in wait to ambush her when she was at her lowest. But before long she didn’t have the spare energy to squander on emotional indulgence. Her entire previous existence—and most sentient hours of her present one—seemed to have been annihilated by the cycle of toil and bone-tiredness otherwise known as looking after Zak, as well as all the housework. Anna had never known a building which required as much attention as Liv. Not to mention its mistress. Several times, since entering Cassandra’s service—and service in the below-stairs sense at that—Anna had felt life quite literally to be not worth Liv-ing.
She had heard, of course, that child care was drudgery—the screaming in the night, the endless demands—but she had always imagined that was the child, rather than the mother. Not in this case. After completing the school run and returning to the house, Anna’s first duty of the morning was to go up the three flights from the kitchen to Cassandra’s bedroom with a tray containing her breakfast requirements. These comprised one peeled and cored Egremont Russet apple cut into eight identical sections, one slice of dry toast (lightly golden) with the crusts removed, Earl Grey tea in a china cup and saucer served with the merest dash of milk, and a vast number of different vitamin tablets—one each from the serried ranks of bottles kept in the kitchen. So vast, indeed, was the proportion of pills consumed compared to that of food that it seemed a miracle Cassandra didn’t rattle when she moved. The gin, which swiftly followed half an hour after breakfast, may, Anna thought, possibly have had something to do with this.
Remarkably, Anna’s first attempt at serving Cassandra’s breakfast had gone without a hitch. She did not fall upstairs with the large and unwieldy tray, nor did she slip over on Cassandra’s wooden bedroom floor and throw boiling hot water over her employer, tempting though it was. Anna went back down to the kitchen feeling ridiculously relieved. Until, that was, the already-familiar screech resonated through the house. Anna raced back up, her mind juddering with ghastly possibilities. Was the toast last season’s tan rather than this season’s pale gold? Had something unspeakable crept out of the slices of Egremont Russet? She arrived in Cassandra’s bedroom to find her propped up against her pillows, her face contorted and purple with fury.
&
nbsp; “The tea,” Cassandra roared. “It’s disgusting. I can’t possibly drink such filth.”
“But it’s weak, like you asked. With a dash of…”
“It’s not stirred,” Cassandra yelled, seemingly oblivious to the teaspoon lying beside the saucer. “Deal with it, will you?”
“Perfect,” she pronounced five minutes later when Anna reappeared with a cup stirred so vigorously that, its journey up three flights of stairs notwithstanding, the milk was still swirling around like a flamenco dancer’s skirt. “You’re learning, you see.”
Anna was by now beginning to wonder if that was all she was learning. After days in the job, writing had not been mentioned once. There were, however, mitigating circumstances; as far as Anna could see, Cassandra had not written a line since she had arrived at Liv and seemed in any case to have been drunk or in a rage most of the time.
Night after night, when she had finished writing up her own diary, Anna would flick, uncomprehending, through the pages of Cassandra’s novels, borrowed from the bookcase downstairs that held nothing else, and wonder what the secret was that lay locked behind those tight-set lines of type. How could such bilge have sold in its hundreds of thousands of copies? Perhaps, some time soon, Cassandra would have sobered up or simmered down enough to tell her.
Her days having been spent largely at Cassandra’s tyrannical beck and call, Anna’s nights, on the sofabed which managed, like an anorexic with cellulite, to be thin and lumpy at the same time, were usually rent with screams from the floor below. Cassandra’s violent rows with Jett seemed at their most ear-splitting between midnight and morning, and generally accompanied by the sound of smashing glass or crockery. The day Anna had started, she had been subjected to a lecture on the great care that had to be taken when cleaning the perfume bathroom; seven days later, Cassandra seemed to have destroyed every piece in it by herself and quite deliberately.
Anna chose not to think about the psychological damage the nightly battles were having on Zak; although it seemed unlikely that anything could make him viler than he was now. She had spent several days trying to remember who he reminded her of—and then, having done so, wished she hadn’t. With his blond basin cut, defiant expression, and turn-of-the-century school clothes, Zak bore a disturbing resemblance to a photograph of the infant Hitler she had once discovered in one of Seb’s—admittedly also disturbing—many books on the subject of the Führer.
Having made this connection, Anna immediately dropped all pretence that it was from a sense of despair and powerlessness due to his parents’ behaviour that Zak ordered her about, laughed at her clothes, and, after she had served his cereal, threw it on the floor because he preferred his Bran Flakes dry and his milk flavoured with strawberry syrup and served in a separate glass. The child was obviously even more of a tyrant than his mother—and was beginning to exhibit some of his father’s personality traits into the bargain. On the second day of her employment, Anna had crawled up to her room at bedtime to find him standing over the rucksack which still served her as an underwear respository, sniffing hard at a pair of her knickers.
After he had swaggered back downstairs, and she had reached for her diary to confide the episode to the battered exercise book, Anna noticed it seemed to be at the back of the drawer rather than the front of it. Had Cassandra been reading it? Anna profoundly hoped not; the first impressions of Liv and its inhabitants recorded there were far from flattering. However, the next day Cassandra seemed no more poisonous than usual, and if it had been Zak she was safe anyway as, despite the thousands upon thousands being stumped up for his education, he still had difficulty pronouncing words of more than two syllables. If the grand plans his mother had for him didn’t come off, Anna thought, he would still be on course for a brilliant career as a breakfast TV presenter.
One reason at least that Zak’s parents rowed mostly at night seemed to be that Jett, thankfully, was rarely around during the day. The few glimpses she got of Cassandra’s husband—with his long, patchy, pube-like hair, balloon-like stomach, limbs as wrinkled as left-over sausages abandoned overnight on a dying barbecue, and the unmistakable smell of armpit which seemed to fill the house whenever he was around—made Anna profoundly glad she had so far not had to suffer any of his attentions. Let alone the sort of attentions Alice had reported during the post-school-run morning coffee sessions in the cafe.
Yet one night Anna had woken and thought she had seen—in the bright light from the streetlamps afforded by the room’s lack of curtain—the handle of the door slowly turning. Dragging herself up from the sofabed, she had quickly rammed the chair from the desk under the handle. Was it her imagination, or did the sound of retreating soft footsteps, and perhaps the faintest of rattles—as of the many chains, bracelets, and rings Jett liked to festoon his wrinkled self with—then drift to her strained and anxious ears? During the day, as far as a thankful Anna could work out, Jett was apparently too busy preparing for a tour with his geriatric rock band and finishing a new album to pay much attention to her. At least, that was the official version of what he was up to. There came a day, not long into Anna’s employment, which illuminated some of his other activities.
It had quickly become a source of great irritation to Anna that Cassandra expected her to take painstakingly accurate telephone messages on which the date, time, and person were clearly marked, while evidently feeling no compunction whatsoever to return the compliment herself.
“Who was that?” she demanded one afternoon standing, arms folded, a foot away from the telephone after Anna, who had rushed right down from the top of the house to answer it, had completed taking down the message. “And come downstairs less heavily. Those treads aren’t meant to take people who weigh over ten stone.”
“It was the Earl of Wessex.”
A brilliant smile irradiated Cassandra’s face. She punched the air in triumph, her grin unwavering even when she sent the Alexander Calder mobile into an unscheduled flat spin.
“Dearest Edward! So like him to call in person. So unaffected! Such a shame we couldn’t make it to his and dear Soph’s wedding…”
Naturally you were asked, Anna thought sardonically.
“But I should have known they’d have us round for dinner just as soon as they could. After all, old friends are like gold. When do they want us?”
“Now,” said Anna.
“Now?” Cassandra blinked rapidly. “You’ve obviously got the message wrong,” she rapped out. “People like that book one for dinner at least six weeks in advance. What do you mean, now?”
“The Earl of Wessex in Golborne Road would like you to get there straightaway and fetch Mr. St. Edmunds who is apparently”—Anna struggled with her features—“drunk and disorderly.”
Anna grinned as Cassandra tore, cursing, out of the door. She did not, however, have the last laugh for long.
Returning from the school run one morning, Anna opened the door at the end of the hall and instantly knew something was wrong. This was partly because the door had collided with something hard, hairy, and very strong-smelling. She yelped as the door opened fully to reveal a pair of naked hairy buttocks capering in the direction of the staircase. Unable to tear her horrified gaze away, she watched as they turned at the end to reveal a leopardskin thong. Above the beachball waistline, a collection of animal teeth threaded on leather nestled in the patchy spaces of a thin-haired chest. Behind purple mirrored shades, his eyes were invisible. A heavily beringed hand held an enormous joint.
Jett was evidently far too high to feel embarrassed. On the contrary, he seemed glad of an audience. He inhaled deeply then breathed out, wiggling the roll-up between his huge teeth and flashing a crazed, Jack Nicholson grin at her. Anna recoiled from the smell. She had never liked cannabis; it reminded her of dates with charmless students in search of easy sex who, having tried and failed to get her drunk on college lager, brought out the cigarette paper and lighters in the ho
pe she would abandon her inhibiting senses. The only abandon that ever ensued was the contents of Anna’s stomach—invariably a kebab from the shop on the corner which was her escort’s idea of dinner for two.
“Just rehearsing my stage routine.” Jett strutted back up the hall waggling his hips from side to side and pumping his arm in the air. The fanlight flashed in his mirrored sunglasses. “First gig in a fortnight.”
“Oh really?” Anna gasped, wondering how she could beat a polite retreat. “Where? Wembley Arena?”
“You must be joking. Mandela Hall, Surbiton University, mate,” Jett said, rotating his arm Pete Townshend style, until, hitting it on the banister, he yelped in agony and rubbed it hard. “We’re going straight to the goddamn people this time. No messing about in massive goddamn impersonal stadiums where no one can see you.” His voice held a hint of wistfulness. “That’s where it all went tits-up last time. Got too far away from our fan base. This time we’re taking everything that will goddamn have us…um, I mean, no chances. Playing small halls and small audiences. Back to our goddamn roots.”
“I see,” Anna said, still wondering how she could get away. Suddenly, Jett shot out his undamaged hand and grasped her wrist so hard, his rings cut into her flesh.
“C’mon. C’mon. I wanna show you something.” She hoped, as he dragged her down the corridor, that it wasn’t the contents of his thong.
“Wow,” said Anna, a few minutes later. “It’s incredible.”
“Not bad, huh?” agreed Jett proudly.
Anna gazed in amazement at the rows of handsome leather-bound volumes filling every wall of Jett’s library. He had hardly struck her as the literary type; more the sort to think Vanity Fair was a glossy magazine and Shelley a shoe shop selling platformed soles and silver Dr. Martens. This, however, was not the only reason the library was an anomaly; the style, classic Hammer Horror Gothic right down to the red velvet curtains and leaded windows, was utterly at odds with the aspirational minimalism of the rest of the house.