Bad Heir Day

by Wendy Holden

  “We’re just going through Mrs. McLeod’s new chapter,” Robbie explained.

  “So I heard. I thought it was wonderful,” Anna said sincerely. “Very sexy.”

  Mrs. McLeod looked traumatised. Anna stared at her carefully. What on earth could this timid creature know about breasts bursting forth like dogs let out for a run and ejaculations like fire extinguishers? Certainly it made one keenly curious about Mr. McLeod.

  “No, but I mean it,” Anna assured her, as Mrs. McLeod shook her head. “You should be proud of it. I thought it was terribly good. And for what it’s worth, I adored the bit about the fire hose.” Anna had forgotten how one could discuss the most extraordinarily intimate things under the flag of literature. Her university days had included a number of racy tutorial sessions, including a particularly graphic one on the Metaphysical poets which had certainly put the semen in seminar. She would not have imagined that could be so spectacularly eclipsed by a discussion of firefighting equipment in a church hall on a Scottish island.

  “Mrs. McLeod is very shy about her work,” Robbie said, somewhat unnecessarily. “But she shows enormous promise.”

  Anna was touched and impressed by Robbie’s determination to encourage what was possibly his only student. No wonder, with attendance like this, he had been so keen that she should come. But was that, it suddenly, miserably occurred to her, the only reason?

  “As now, being three, we constitute a crowd,” Robbie declared, gesturing Anna to one of the hard wooden chairs scattered around the bare and rather cheerless hall, “I’m going to give a reading from another work. I thought it would be valuable for Mrs. McLeod to hear how another author has handled sex.”

  Anna swallowed. Her lower bowels seemed to be in a constant state of excitement; either Nanny’s champit tatties had had a deleterious effect or, suddenly, she fancied Robbie like mad.

  She watched him as he rummaged in his battered leather briefcase and produced a bundle of paper, watched him clear his strong throat and run his deliciously clean-looking pink tongue over thick, dry lips before proceeding. She liked the way his mouth curled upwards when he spoke, as if he was constantly amused. Most of all, in profound contrast to Seb for example, she liked the way he didn’t seem to take the whole subject of sex too seriously. The main amusement Seb seemed to have got out of it, Anna recalled, was laughing at her.

  As Robbie began to read, Anna wrinkled her brow. The words sounded oddly familiar. As his voice rumbled, soft and low, never stumbling on or mispronouncing a single word, horror began to seep through her. They were her words. Robbie was reading from her diary. Uncertain what to do, blushing furiously, she gazed at the surface of the table at which she sat with Mrs. McLeod. How the hell had he got hold of it? And did he know she had written it?

  She sat in stupefied silence and listened, unsure of what else to do. Unsure of what, exactly, the etiquette was when hearing ones most intimate and private thoughts read out in public. It was a miserable experience, not least because Robbie had picked a passage dating from a particularly unhappy period of her relationship with Seb, in which Anna had reflected on her own sexual inadequacy. She had, she remembered, originally written it in a self-deprecating way, trying it out as a possible passage for future use. Listening to it now she was struck only by the pain in the words, the sadness, and the sense of humiliation and betrayal beneath the thin surface of wry humour.

  As a contrast to Mrs. McLeod’s fire extinguisher, it could not have been more profound and, as she listened, Anna felt a black tide of remembered misery welling up inside. Seb had been such a brute; listening to this rawly autobiographical account of their worst time together, Anna doubted whether her self-esteem would ever recover. No wonder, having gone through this, she had submitted meekly to Cassandra’s excesses and leapt for Jamie as a drowning man might seize a lifebelt.

  “Brute,” gasped Mrs. McLeod, blowing her nose loudly as Robbie finished reading.

  “That,” he announced, “is the work of an extremely talented writer who understands completely that comedy and tragedy are often almost the same thing.” Anna was amazed to see that Robbie’s eyes, too, were shining slightly brighter than before.

  “Who wrote it?” squeaked Mrs. McLeod timidly, dabbing at her eyes with an embroidered handkerchief.

  There was a silence. Anna, puce with embarrassment, looked stonily downwards as Robbie darted a glance at her. Was he waiting for her to admit it? She hesitated.

  Then came the interruption.

  “I shay,” demanded a loud, unsteady, shrilly patrician voice at the back of the hall, “ish thish Mishter Robbie MacAshkill’s creative writing clash? I was told I’d find him here.”

  Robbie, his eyes fixed on whatever apparition had presented itself in the doorway, nodded in astonishment. Anna froze to the spot. Those horribly familiar tones. It could not be. Surely.

  It was. “Eckshellent,” pronounced Cassandra, eyes rolling, and swaying wildly as she advanced through the hall.

  Anna leapt to her feet. The chair crashed to the floor behind her. “Cassandra. What on earth are you doing here?”

  Cassandra clomped up, gyrated wildly to keep her balance, buckled suddenly on her leopardskin heels, and collapsed on the floor.

  “I want to talk to someone about penishes.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  “Friend of yours?”

  As Cassandra lay crumpled and comatose at their feet, Robbie raised an ironic eyebrow at Anna.

  “Not exactly. I was rather hoping I’d never see her again.”

  “Well, you probably won’t from the look of her. I’d better call an ambulance.”

  “Och, there’s no need to do that,” piped up Mrs. McLeod. Anna and Robbie watched in astonishment as, with surprising strength, she dragged Cassandra’s prone body across the dusty floorboards and deftly manipulated it into an upright position against one of the radiators. Propping the lolling head up straight, she began to slap Cassandra’s cheeks. “Mr. McLeod comes home from the pub like this all the time.”

  Anna grinned to herself. This, at any rate, completely scuppered the theory that Mrs. McLeod’s sexual fantasies were autobiographical. Or at least, that they were inspired by her husband.

  Through gritted teeth, Anna offered to put Cassandra up at the castle. If nothing else, it would annoy Nanny. It was decided, however, that the rough roads up to Dampie might well finish Cassandra off altogether, and in the first instance she should go to Mrs. McLeod’s cottage, conveniently just round the corner from the village hall. Once the long, slow process of moving Cassandra was completed, Robbie was dispatched to track down Zak. Cassandra, slipping in and out of lucidity thanks to Mrs. McLeod’s face-slapping, had rather mysteriously revealed him to be in a Disco somewhere in the area.

  “But there isn’t a disco anywhere on the island,” Robbie said, puzzled.

  As they left Mrs. McLeod’s cottage—a pin-neat, shining haven of order that could not have been less suggestive of her blatantly erotic prose style—Robbie brushed against Anna. She shuddered at the charge of desire that suddenly swept through her whilst trying to tell herself that the contact might have been accidental. The cottage was, after all, so tiny that only dwarf anorexics could have negotiated each other without colliding.

  Listening to Mrs. McLeod sluicing down Cassandra in the bathroom, murmuring sympathetically as she did so, Anna tried to make sense of the afternoon’s events. Neither Cassandra’s sudden appearance, nor the means by which Robbie had got hold of her diary seemed to have any explanation whatsoever.

  ***

  “I eventually tracked him down at the police station,” Robbie reported, returning half an hour later dragging a thunderous-looking Zak who, once inside the cottage, immediately started to pick up and look at Mrs. McLeod’s large, immaculately dusted collection of ornaments.

  Anna tried, like a victim at a human rights trial
, not to flinch at the sight of her former torturer. For Zak looked more evil than ever. His prep-school-perfect basin cut looked straggly and wild, its former white-blondness noticeably darker. It occurred to Anna to wonder whether Zak’s platinum locks were in fact no more natural than his mother’s; could Cassandra have really had her son’s hair coloured to match her own? Could she really be so vain? Was the Pope Catholic?

  “What was Zak doing?” she asked.

  “Sitting in a cell. He’d tried to drive the car—called a Disco, by the way, so that explains that—but ended up smashing it into the postbox. Car’s a write-off.”

  “The postbox? So at least he hadn’t got very far then. The postbox next to the village hall, you mean?”

  “No, the one on the other side of the island.” Robbie passed a rueful palm through his hair. “The police were alerted after someone coming out of the pub saw a small boy driving a car at a speed in excess of one hundred miles per hour through the village. They would have got him sooner, only the person coming out of the pub was MacLoggie and, given his condition, his evidence was considered unsafe.”

  “I see.”

  “When they caught up with Zak, he was apparently sitting in the front seat listening to a woman talking dirty on a cassette recorder. Turned up full blast.”

  “Ugh.” Anna tried not to remember the knicker-sniffing incident on her second day at Liv.

  “How did you get him out of the police station?”

  “They didn’t seem too sad to see the back of him. They’ll want a word with Cassandra when she comes round. Fortunately—for him at least—Zak’s too young to have a criminal record.”

  “A record?” Zak’s voice was scornful. “As if I’d want one anyway. No one has vinyl these days.”

  “Shut up,” Robbie snapped at him. There was a smash as one of Mrs. McLeod’s china shepherdesses collided with the tiles of the fireplace.

  “I want to be a policeman,” Zak announced defiantly, making no move to pick up the pieces. “I want to put people in prison.”

  ***

  Driving back to the castle in Robbie’s rattling old Land Rover, Anna tried to stop her thighs shooting across the metal seat and cannoning into Robbie’s every time they rounded a corner, which was often, sudden, and hair-raising. Either Robbie was a very bad driver, Anna thought, as her legs slammed into his rock-hard thighs, or…

  “Hope Mrs. McLeod can cope with both Cassandra and Zak,” she remarked, looking out of the Land Rover’s broken window across the camouflage-coloured landscape. “But she did insist she’d have them until Cassandra gets…um…better.”

  “Mrs. M’s a tough old bird,” Robbie said. “We’ll pick them both up tomorrow in any case. She probably wants them for material. Maybe her next chapter has a child in it.”

  “Talking of material”—Anna turned her head away to disguise the deepening vermilion of her face and unenthusiastically regarded the sodden, rendered walls of Dampie Castle as they jerked into view across the windscreen—“How did you get hold of my diary?”

  “Oh, so you’re admitting it was yours?” Robbie threw her an amused glance as the Land Rover plunged up the Dampie drive. “I wasn’t sure if you wanted to. As it happens, I found it in the castle dustbin only this morning.”

  “Dustbin?” She remembered putting it there, of course, but what was Robbie doing rummaging in the castle refuse? Poetry paid badly, she was sure, but all the same…

  “Yes. One of my jobs is to collect the local rubbish. You don’t think I make a living being a poet, do you? Or through my creative writing classes, although I must admit that if I were a literary agent I’d probably be retiring on Mrs. McLeod.”

  “Are you really a poet?” Suddenly, the idea of a dustman who gave creative writing classes and was a poet into the bargain struck Anna as rather strange.

  There was a silence. Robbie looked at her with a set face, then looked hastily back at the windscreen as the Land Rover lurched over another pothole. Then, to her relief, he laughed.

  “No, of course I’m not a poet,” he confessed easily. “As a matter of fact, I’m a novelist. Trying to be, at any rate. I’m writing a comic murder mystery set on a Scottish island.”

  “Oh.” Was anything on Skul, Anna wondered, what it seemed?

  “I’m here researching my characters, and being a poet was the only thing I could think of that wouldn’t attract too much suspicion. Islands like this are packed with hawk-eyed old bards with beards. I managed the beard, as you saw, only I never felt it was quite me.”

  “It wasn’t. It was a personality in its own right.” Anna furrowed her brow. “But I don’t understand why you felt you had to give creative writing classes.”

  “They were supposed to help convince people I was a poet. I never expected people to actually come to them. When, one night, the village hall door opened and Mrs. McLeod trotted in, I almost fell over with shock. When I heard what she’d brought with her, I almost died of it. Having said that, I think she’ll have a great future as an erotic novelist once she’s got a bit more, er, front.” As his glance flickered, possibly involuntarily, towards her breasts, Anna’s stomach lurched, in perfect synchronity with the Land Rover, in excitement.

  There was a silence, punctuated only by the grinding of the Land Rover’s engine.

  “Yes. My character research has been rather more, er, interesting than I imagined.” Their eyes met, briefly, before Robbie’s swung suddenly back to the windscreen just in time to stop them smashing into a tree.

  “Especially if you go through their rubbish,” said Anna. “I suppose that was part of your research as well.”

  “Oh yes. There’s a pivotal scene in my book where the maverick detective—”

  “Unhappily divorced?”

  “Yes, and with a drink problem of course.”

  “Of course. Smokes too much? Loves classical music?”

  “Absolutely. Anyway, in this pivotal scene he’s going through the dustbins in search of the murder weapon, so of course I had to know what the average islander puts out for the rubbish. You wouldn’t believe some of the things I found.”

  “Like my diary.”

  “Yes. I hope you didn’t mind me looking at it, but once I’d started reading it, I couldn’t stop. It was so well written…”

  Anna blushed again. It occurred to her that, although she knew next to nothing about Robbie, he was now familiar with her entire recent history. The humiliation of life with Seb, the near slavery of life with Cassandra, the boredom and disappointment of life with Jamie, he knew it all. Leaning very close to her, close enough for her to smell his aftershave and the faint mint of his breath, Robbie said softly, “You’re not very lucky in love, are you?”

  Anna shook her head. Until now, she thought, crossing her fingers behind her back. She was just closing her eyes and parting her lips when, with impeccable timing, Robbie’s mobile rang. Damn.

  After several minutes’ terse conversation, Robbie snapped the mobile away. “That was Mrs. McLeod. She wants me to come and get Zak at once. Apparently he’s sprayed the fire extinguisher all over her wooden floor. Mr. McLeod’s just come in from the pub and gone flying.”

  ***

  Cassandra hadn’t felt so dreadful in years. Someone, somewhere was plunging red-hot needles into her brain. When, oh when would she remember cheap alcohol disagreed with her? One never felt like this on Bombay Sapphire. Possibly because one could only afford one bottle of that at a time.

  She narrowed her eyes as she took in her surroundings. Where the hell was she? Some poky, ghastly little bedroom, by the looks of it. Was it a nightmare? Must be. But only in the very worst of nightmares, thought Cassandra, cringing with disgust as her toenails scraped against the fabric, did people have aquamarine nylon sheets on their beds. Or wear baby pink bed jackets with ribbons, she thought, tearing frantically at her throat. Exhau
sted with the effort, she lay back and tried to make sense of the fuzzy images of herself rolling past the back of her eyes.

  Dancing on the tables in some appalling pub—now that bit was obviously a nightmare. So difficult to work out what had really happened and what hadn’t, but such, Cassandra thought, was the burden of the creative imagination. Some muscular man folding her tenderly into his arms—nothing remotely surprising about that. She could have sworn that somewhere along the line, that wretched ex-nanny of hers Anna, had been in the room as well—that must have been a nightmare too, even though she fully intended to drop in on her for at least a week’s stay. A hideous thought suddenly struck Cassandra—perhaps this poky, chilly, ugly little room actually was in the castle. If so, she’d request a transfer to the master bedroom without delay.

  What time was it? Cassandra raised herself on one elbow and peered at the bedside table, where she was gratified to see a number of her own paperbacks piled up. She was less delighted when her vision focused enough to reveal the plastic jackets and typewritten numbered labels of the public library—although this one said mobile library. Cassandra had not previously been aware one could borrow mobiles from a library. So that was what she’d been paying her bloody taxes for all these years. Ridiculous.

  And what was this? Cassandra reached out and grabbed a handful of paper by the bed. Typewritten. Story by the looks of it. Someone had left it, perhaps by mistake. Anna, no doubt; she was so obsessed with writing she probably carried manuscripts round in her knickers. Well, Cassandra thought viciously, there’d certainly be plenty of room.

  She may as well give it the once over; if nothing else it would send her back to sleep. Yawning, Cassandra pressed the papers close to her nose and began to read.

  Five minutes later, she was sitting bolt upright, her hangover forgotten. This stuff was sensational. As she read on, Cassandra felt awe seeping slowly through her; either that, or she’d wet herself with excitement. She hated to admit it—in fact, she never had before—but there could be no doubt whatsoever that she was in the presence of a great writing talent. Someone who could knock herself, Jilly, Danielle, and even dear departed Dame Catherine into a cocked beach bag.