Kissing Toads

by Jemma Harvey

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  About the Author

  Praise for Jemma Harvey’s Wishful Thinking

  Also available by Jemma Harvey

  Kissing Toads

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1: Committing Sooty

  Chapter 2: The Road to Dunblair

  Chapter 3: King of the Castle

  Chapter 4: Plan and Superplan

  Chapter 5: Past Imperfect

  Chapter 6: The Basilisk Effect

  Chapter 7: Rescue Party

  Chapter 8: Petting Party

  Chapter 9: Catastrophe Castle

  Chapter 10: The Butler Did It

  Chapter 11: Laying the Ghosts

  Chapter 12: Pro-Celebrity Marriage

  About the Author

  Jemma Harvey is a freelance journalist and author of Wishful Thinking. She lives and writes in Brighton.

  Praise for Jemma Harvey’s Wishful Thinking

  ‘A fizzy, feel-good summer romp’ Woman’s Own

  Also available by Jemma Harvey

  Wishful Thinking

  KISSING TOADS

  Jemma Harvey

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781409039778

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published in the United Kingdom by Arrow Books in 2006

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright ©Jemma Harvey, 2006

  Jemma Harvey has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  ISBN 9780099469148 (from Jan 2007)

  ISBN 0099469146

  Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

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  Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire

  Chapter 1:

  Committing Sooty

  Ruth

  It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of an adequate income must be in want of a life.

  I woke up to singledom on the sort of grey November morning that would make the most carefree and cheerful person feel like hitting the Prozac. I don’t know if there are any statistics on it – probably, because there always are – but I’m sure most suicides happen in the dark months, when the days are short and gloomy and the nights seem to be taking over, and the magazines tell you the party season is under way but you haven’t been invited, and there’s nothing to look forward to but the chill, damp, endless south-of-England winter, too cold for fun yet not cold enough for snow . . . And when you add abrupt, unexpected, gut-churning, heart-aching singledom on top of that, it wasn’t surprising I lay in bed considering possible short cuts out of this world. Gas is traditional, but my cooker is electric, and I had no idea how to electrocute myself and a strong suspicion I would make a mess of it if I tried, upsetting everybody else by short-circuiting the whole building. There was always the overdose, only I wasn’t sure what of; so few pills are potentially lethal these days. Aspirin can ruin your liver without actually killing you, and apart from that all I had in the cupboard was multivitamins, birth control pills, and Imodium (death by constipation?). It was very selfish of the chemical companies, I thought, keeping people alive in this way – probably so they could make a fortune selling all the would-be suicides anti-depressants. Exploitation of a vulnerable minority; perhaps we could do a piece on it . . .

  That’s how you think, after years in TV journalism. You can’t help it. One moment you’re contemplating killing yourself, and the next it’s become an item on the show.

  The show . . .

  Thoughts of suicide faded into a grimmer reality. I would have to leave my job.

  I’d been working on Dick Ramsay: Behind the News for nearly seven years. I’d come as a bright young thing of twenty-six, starting as an assistant to the assistants and graduating to full-on assistant, and at thirty-two I knew I was almost past my professional sell-by date. There were lots of other bright young things, possibly brighter and certainly younger, queuing up to take my place in the assistant stakes. I should have been a proper producer by now, but it would have meant moving to another show, and I’d stayed and stayed – because of Kyle. Kyle Muldoon, the on-screen talent with his tough-guy exterior and caramel-soft centre, who had been half of my life, or perhaps more than half, for the past six years. I’d gone with him on some assignments and waited for his return from others, worried about him, welcomed him, sobered him or put him to bed, boosted his ego, soothed his tantrums. It hadn’t been a perfect relationship, but what is? He’d stood me up, let me down, wriggled out of weekends with my parents, got embarrassingly drunk at friends’ weddings and those few dinner parties I could persuade him to attend. It didn’t matter. I loved him.

  And now his caramel heart had melted for someone else, all in an instant, and he was out of my life for good. I couldn’t stay with the show, go on working with him – that would mean constant anguish and humiliation. I’d have to leave. Now. Under the tidal wave of my misery, imminent joblessness and career disintegration began to appear almost desirable, a necessary part of the doom that confronted me. I was single; I might as well be unemployed to complete the picture. To all intents and purposes my life was over. Time to get up, send the relevant emails, tie up the loose ends.

  I reached for the telephone, then my specs, so I could see what I was saying.

  ‘Delphi?’ I was addressing, not the Greek oracle, but my best friend, Delphinium Dacres.

  Yes, that Delphinium Dacres. The glamour girl of TV gardening shows. It’s a long story, but she really is my best friend. We grew up together.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ she said. ‘It’s before nine o’clock on a Saturday morning . . .’

  ‘Friday.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You at
work?’

  ‘No, and I’m not going to be.’

  Finally, the best-friend antennae began to twitch. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I’ve split up with Kyle.’

  ‘You do that all the time. It never lasts. If I thought it was for real, I’d be cheering.’

  Delphinium disapproved of Kyle for all sorts of reasons, starting with the casual way he treated me. She thinks men are supposed to worship and obey. Most of hers do.

  ‘Cheer,’ I said. ‘This is it. For real.’

  ‘You sound awful.’ Her tone was modulating into genuine concern. ‘What’s he done?’

  ‘Got married.’

  ‘What??’

  We met in a coffee bar later that morning. By then, I’d already emailed my excuses for the day and my resignation for the future to Dick Ramsay and the producer. Somehow, it had taken the edge off my suicide plans, leaving me grey and empty and suffering. Delphinium, when she saw me, didn’t cheer. True friends don’t cheer at your distress, even if, in principle, they welcome the cause, and Delphinium is my truest friend.

  In the business, she isn’t popular; the up-and-coming ones very rarely are. They’re too hungry, too pushy, too undeserving of their fortune to go down well with those who have been elbowed out of their way or who have to submit to their professional whims. Those who make it to the top of the heap can afford to relax and be generous, earning the regard of gushing subordinates who want to curry fame and favour. But Delphinium is still on the upward ladder. She doesn’t have enemies: it’s just that most people dislike her. According to her detractors, she has a Barbie-doll body and brains to match; for the rest, she’s got big features on a small face (except for her nose, which she had reduced), peach-perfect skin and lots of three-tone streaky blonde hair. Her style of dressing varies dramatically depending on her mood: that day she was wearing four-inch platform boots, bumsqueezer cropped jeans, bumfreezer jacket trimmed with dead bunny. ‘Rabbit is okay,’ she declared at my murmur of criticism. ‘There are far too many of them eating up the countryside. Killing rabbits is eco-friendly.’ I forbore to mention that the rabbit she was wearing had probably been bred for the purpose and had never had the chance to mess up its fur running around in the wild. I felt too low to argue about serious issues.

  We were sitting at a corner table which should have been out of earshot of the café’s other clientele. Unfortunately, Delphi has a carrying voice and no concept of discretion, though she’s uninterested in any gossip that concerns those outside her social and professional circle. It’s probably one of the side effects of egotism. She ordered a regular latte with skimmed milk, no sugar, and no biscuit-on-the-side; I ordered a double espresso with extra caffeine to give me the oomph to get back to suicide.

  ‘You look terrible,’ she said. ‘Tell me everything.’

  ‘You know Kyle’s been in Eastern Europe doing that sex-trade investigation?’

  ‘Not another one?’

  ‘The producer loves them. Beautiful girls kidnapped, raped, and forced into prostitution – the public never get tired of it.’ I’m not usually this cynical – well, not quite – but, as you may have gathered, I wasn’t having a good day. ‘I was supposed to be on location with him but I had to do the follow-up on corruption in Doncaster, so they sent Judi instead.’ Judi was one of several assistant-assistants aiming to scramble past me on the ladder of success. Now, she would have a clear rung.

  So to speak.

  ‘Don’t tell me he’s married her!’ Delphi exclaimed, appalled. ‘Not Jude the Obscure!’ Delphi rarely reads a book, but she knows the titles.

  ‘Of course not. He met a girl out there – he said he had to marry her, it was the only way he could get her out of the country, protect her from the local mafia. Her father’s unemployed, in hock to the gangsters, her mother works twelve hours a day in a sweatshop. They don’t know what happened to the sister but she was last heard of in Vienna. Kyle gave me a whole sob story.’ And I’d swallowed it – whole. Kyle knew exactly how to get to his audience, and there were so many stories like that out there, true stories, stories to wring your heart. Well, my heart had been wrung, in the end.

  ‘I’ll bet he did.’ Delphi would have scowled if she hadn’t had Botox injected between her eyebrows.

  ‘He assured me the marriage was strictly cosmetic, she’d only be staying at his place for a few weeks. Then I ran into someone from the drama department who told me this girl’s an actress, a real one – she starred in some foreign film that won an award – and she wanted to come to London as a career move. So I went round to Kyle’s flat, and Tatyana came out of the bedroom wearing nothing but his shirt like someone in an old movie, and I felt so stupid, so stupid . . .’ I broke off, knuckling my mouth like a child, horrified to find myself fighting tears. Pain is bad enough; humiliation makes it infinitely worse. ‘He said he was glad I found out ’cos it saved him the trouble of telling me. He said he’s really in love with her. He said . . . sorry. Just sorry.’

  ‘Arsehole,’ Delphi said comprehensively. ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘Oh, you know. A dark Scarlett Johansson with a dash of Ingrid Bergman. Just your average Eastern European stunner.’

  ‘Yuk,’ Delphi said. ‘I hate those Slavonic types. There are hordes of them coming over here. It goes to show we have to do something about the immigration problem.’

  Delphinium has no truck with political correctness. She would happily screen out female immigrants on the grounds of youth and beauty, and the way I felt then, I almost agreed with her.

  ‘Still, they go off when they’re forty,’ she went on, trying to cheer me up. ‘One moment they’re all cheekbones and flawless skin and the next they’re wrinkled old peasants in head-scarves. It happens practically overnight.’

  ‘Tatyana’s twenty-two.’

  ‘Bugger.’

  There was a despondent silence. At least, it was despondent on my part; Delphi was obviously thinking.

  ‘You’ve got to be positive,’ she announced. ‘It’s a good thing for you: you’ll realise that in the end. He was always messing you around – cancelling dates or rolling up at two in the morning pissed out of his brain. He never took you out for intimate dinners or sent you flowers or—’

  ‘He sent me flowers on my last birthday!’

  ‘That was only because he forgot to buy you a present. Anyway, they were chrysanthemums. There’s nothing romantic about chrysanthemums. They’re the kind of flowers you send your grandmother. Don’t interrupt. The point is, you’ve got to move on. Find yourself a nice guy who’ll adore you and make a fuss of you. It’s a pain you’ll still be seeing Kyle at work—’

  ‘No I won’t,’ I said. ‘I’ve quit.’

  ‘Quit? How quit?’

  ‘I sent my resignation in by email this morning. I can’t go on working with Kyle. It would kill me.’ I suppose I was exaggerating, but not much.

  ‘You can’t do that! This is your job. Worse still, it’s your career. If anyone has to leave, it should be him. He’s behaved like an utter bastard, and now you’re committing sooty—’

  ‘Sooty?’

  ‘Like those Indian women. Throwing yourself on a bonfire and turning into a heap of black ash. Sooty.’

  ‘Okay . . .’

  ‘I’m not saying you shouldn’t make a change – it would be a great idea, you need to move up as well as on – but you never leave a job until you’ve got another one lined up. It’s like with men. Sort out the new one before you ditch the old. Roo, darling, sometimes you’re . . . you’re deliberately hopeless.’

  My name is Ruth – Ruth Harker – but Delphinium’s called me Roo since childhood, hence the Winnie-the-Pooh spelling. A lot of people pick it up from her.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘No job, no man. Total sooty.’

  ‘We have to do something,’ Delphi said. ‘We don’t want people to think you’re suicidal.’

  ‘I am suicidal.’

  ‘Yes, but we don’t want people to thi
nk so. We have to do something quickly.’

  My heart quailed – a curious verb, when you come to think of it, since a quail is a small game bird with fiddly little bones that make eating it awkward. Of course, quails are very shy, prone to hide from people with shotguns, which would explain the verb. Anyway, my heart contemplated Delphi, thinking as if it were a small bird looking down the twin barrels of a twelve-bore, and scurried out of sight into the undergrowth.

  When we were children, it was always Delphi who thought of things. It was Delphi who thought of dosing the au pair with a cocktail made from brandy, vodka, cointreau, aquavite and a dozen pounded-up aspirin so she would fall asleep and we could run away to Hollywood. Fortunately, Ilse tipped it down the sink after one sip. It was Delphi who disguised her pony by painting it with black spots so we could be highwaymen and hold up the Master of the Hunt’s vintage Jaguar. My dad’s income didn’t run to ponies, but I was allowed to ride pillion. It was Delphi, aged twelve, who went into the local jeweller’s and asked to look at diamond engagement rings, in order to steal one for her elopement with Ben Garvin. Ben was seventeen at the time and only hazily aware of her existence, though he came to notice her a good deal more later on. Delphi the child lived in a world of glamorous make-believe, devoid of scruple and out of touch with reality; whenever she thought of something, it was always the precursor to trouble, usually involving me. I checked trains and planes to Hollywood, fell off the back of the pony in mid-hold-up, distracted the shop assistant in the jeweller’s with a sudden attack of stomach cramp. I was both terrified at being dragged into adventure and ecstatic because I was able to help. Delphi was my playmate, my soulmate, closer than a sister, if I had had a sister – twin cherries on a single stem and all that. Bonds forged in the furnace of childhood never wear out.

  The problem was, as an adult Delphi hadn’t changed much. She wanted to be a star, beautiful and rich and successful, and at thirty-four she had made it. But she still existed on a slightly different plane from everyone else, believing she could bend the universe around her, push and pummel events into the shape she desired. The scary part was that sometimes it worked. Failures and disasters were brushed aside; her ebullient mind bounced on to the next project, the next objective, with a sort of resilient optimism I could never match. Occasionally, I suspected the bounces soared over deep gulfs of subconscious trauma – like when she was ten, and her father left, or nineteen, when Ben finally walked out of her life – but the gulfs remained unplumbed, even with me. For Delphi, tragedy was a lost earring, or arriving at a party to find Carol Vorderman was wearing the same dress (‘I mean, Carol Vorderman – sooo embarrassing. I could have laughed it off if only it had been Liz or Paris . . .’). But she always entered into my very different tragedies with an enthusiasm that was both comforting and panic-making. If she was a Barbie, she was Bossy Barbie, Benevolent Barbie, Jane-Austen’s-Emma Barbie. And unlike Emma Wodehouse, no goofing and no gaffes disturbed her faith in her own omniscience and enterprise.