Kissing Toads

by Jemma Harvey

  He said, ‘Just one minute,’ and went into Roo’s room to pick up her phone and give some orders. I waited. When he emerged, I went to my bedroom door and walked straight in.

  They were at it. Brie was on top – Alex always liked that – and bouncing up and down like a kid on a pogo stick. She was wearing the devil-mask from the wall, holding it in position with one hand. Although the rest of her bounced, her tits didn’t: the implants kept them rigid and virtually immobile. Alex was making the groany noises he always made just before coming, so that for a second it hurt me unbearably – and then the anger rushed back, a great scorching flame of it, and I began to scream.

  ‘Get off him – get out of here – get out both of you – get out – get out – get out!’ I’d meant to come up with something more pungent, but anger, real anger, isn’t original.

  Brie stopped bouncing, shed the mask, and looked stunned – appalled – uncomfortable – and then her expression settled into a kind of vague resentment tinged with something that was almost satisfaction, an expression that told me everything I needed to know about our so-called friendship. I may not have loved her the way I loved Roo, but I’d done what I could to help her – I was the one who had brought her to Scotland – and my rage hotted up a few more degrees.

  Alex, meanwhile, looked . . . well, the only way a man can look when caught by his fiancée shagging another woman. I didn’t need to see his dick to imagine its collapse. Embarrassment fought with horror in his face and just about won. ‘Delphi!’ he cried. ‘My God, Delphi – I didn’t expect . . . I didn’t know . . . you don’t understand . . .’ It took several seconds for him to detach himself from her, and Brie, still exuding a faint sense of triumph, didn’t give him any help. ‘This isn’t the way it looks,’ he went on, defying credibility.

  ‘It isn’t?’ I retorted, slightly calmed by his panic. ‘It looks like sex, but tell me it’s something else. Miniature golf, perhaps? Tiddlywinks?’

  ‘She came on to me,’ Alex insisted desperately. ‘I was pissed, and she just threw herself – I mean, she was here in the bed when I—’

  ‘Liar!’ said Brie, groping for her clothing, which seemed to have made its way under the bed. ‘You were the one who suggested it. Go up first, you said, wait for me—’

  ‘I don’t care who did what,’ I interrupted, snatching the dress from her grasp. ‘I don’t care if it was rape!’ I meant, if Brie had raped Alex – Alex wasn’t the aggressive type. ‘You get out – both of you – now! No clothes – just as you are! NOW!’

  ‘Give me that dress!’ Brie’s air of triumph disappeared. ‘I’m not going anywhere till I—’

  ‘Delphi! You don’t mean it! I love you – we’re getting married . . .’ Alex stood up, clutching the duvet round his hips. (This can be done with a sheet but should not be attempted with a duvet. It’s overkill.)

  ‘Not any more!’ Not without a pang, I tugged off the ring and hurled it at him. ‘You can take this, but that’s all! No clothes – no bedding – you go as you are!’

  Alex scrabbled on the floor for the ring (the diamond was seriously valuable) still trying to preserve what modesty he had left with the duvet. Brie grabbed her dress and tried to wrench it from my hands. Amazingly, it didn’t rip.

  Harry’s voice rose above the furore, sounding very level and calm and, for once, exactly like a perfect butler. ‘Ladies and – er – gentleman, no fighting please. Miss de Meaux, Mr Russo – I’m afraid I have to insist that you leave. Immediately. The bedding belongs here; your clothes will follow you. There’s a car waiting outside.’

  ‘I’m not going like this!’ Brie objected. ‘How dare you! I won’t be ordered about by a servant!’

  These arrivistes are always so vulgar.

  ‘Bloody cheek,’ Alex said. ‘Look here, this is . . . is . . . a private affair, and none of your business, so—’

  ‘Everything that happens in the castle is my business,’ Harry said, ‘by authority, in case you’ve forgotten, of the owner. Now, sir, let me relieve you of that. You really can’t walk out with the bed linen, you know. It’s extremely bad manners.’

  ‘I won’t—’

  Sandy materialised in the background with Elton and Sting. On cue, one of the dogs growled.

  ‘You can’t do this,’ Brie almost begged, gazing from me to Harry to the dogs and back again.

  ‘Yes we can,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll tell the press . . .’

  ‘Tell ’em,’ I said. The tabloid coverage was going to be a bloodbath. There was nothing I could do to stop that.

  And, from Harry: ‘Perhaps you’d like pictures?’

  They left – naked, protesting, with Sandy and the dogs on their heels and Harry in the rear. I leaned out of the window. Naked, they got into the car. ‘Leave them in the village,’ Harry told Jules. ‘At the pub. Then you’d better come back for their clothes.’

  ‘You can’t do this!’ Alex fumed. ‘It’s – it’s – assault.’

  ‘Actually it isn’t,’ said Harry. ‘I would never hit a man with no clothes on. Be glad of that.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to the village!’ Brie declared. ‘I want to go to the airport.’

  ‘If you like,’ Harry said obligingly. ‘I’m not sure they’ll let you on the plane like that. Of course, it would make the security checks very simple . . .’

  Sandy got in the front with Jules, and they drove off.

  I went back to the bed, picked up the devil-mask. I’d always hated it. It was part of the Basilisk effect – but Basilisa had gone. I put it on the floor and stamped on it, hard. The papier mâché cracked and scrunched underfoot. I stamped on it again and again in a sudden outpouring of pent-up violence. When Harry came in with Roo, I was sitting on the edge of the bed, hugging myself. The mask was in fragments.

  Harry nudged them with his toe. ‘Feel better for that?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Go back to Ruth’s room. I’ll bring you some tea and sort out Alex’s stuff.’

  ‘Can you – can you change the bedding?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Could you throw this lot away, or put it in the back of a cupboard? I don’t want to sleep where . . .’

  ‘I’ll arrange something.’

  Back in Roo’s room, she said, ‘D’you want to take the day off work? We can manage without you, if you feel it’s too much. I’ll see to it.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, that would be silly. I have to get on, do things. I can’t just sit around. But I’ll need some time to make phone calls. Cancel stuff. You know.’

  ‘I’ll give you a hand,’ Roo said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  The worst wasn’t over, I knew that. Not by a long shot. The worst was out there, waiting to hit the news-stands. Soon, the journalists would be circling, then the feeding frenzy would begin.

  The downside of being a celebrity. For the first time ever, I almost wished I was on the Z-list.

  That day, everyone was busy laying out the maze – marking out pathways, arguing over how wide they should be, trying to decide what was an opening, what was hedge. I left them to it and sat down with the telephone, starting with my mother, who took the news in her stride and offered to call any relatives on the guest list, including Pan. (We didn’t mention my father.) Then it was the company who owned the castle in Kent, the caterers, the florist. And Maddalena.

  ‘Cara,’ she said, ‘I am so sorry. Ovviamente he was wrong for you. That Brie, she is nothing but a little puttana. All the same, it is strange how you have that sparkle, when you come yesterday. Maybe you are in love with un altro, and you don’t yet know it. You want I keep the dress for you, just in case?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I mean, there isn’t anyone. Honestly. You’d better ditch the dress. I couldn’t wear it now. Bill me.’

  ‘Non è necessario. I sell to someone else. Unless you want I burn it?’

  ‘’Course not. But . . . when you sell it . . . you won’t say it was made for me, will y
ou?’ I hated the idea of someone crowing that they’d been married in my discarded wedding dress.

  Maddalena reassured me, sounding shocked that I should suspect her of such vulgarity. ‘I do not boast of my clienti,’ she said. ‘Why should I? Everyone come to me anyway. Allora, what do we do with the bridesmaid dresses? Fortunatamente, I haven’t yet made up the one for Brie – I did not have her size. But the dress for Ruth, it is nearly ready.’

  ‘Finish it,’ I said. ‘We’ll give it to her anyway. I’ll pay. She never has any decent dresses.’ I could tell her it was completed already and would simply go in the bin if she didn’t take it.

  ‘Benissime,’ she said. ‘She will look wonderful. Always it is wise to make something good from bad situation. Do not worry, cara, all will be well. You are young and beautiful. All will be well with you. Magari, as we say in Italy.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

  ‘Like “maybe”,’ she said, ‘only more so.’

  Magari. It sounded to me like she was hedging her bets.

  Finally, I contacted Vanessa and Anna Maria (she had the spare key to Alex’s place) with instructions to go round to the mews and remove anything which was, or might be, mine. This included all female clothing, all jewellery, half a crate of Bolly, my post, Fenny’s basket, food bowl, and other canine accessories, and the new megascreen TV, which I’d paid for. Also the limited edition Hockney print which I’d given Alex for his last birthday, all the good CDs, any book with words of more than two syllables . . .

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Vanessa said. ‘I get the picture. Anna Maria and I can take care of it.’

  Back at work, everyone was extra nice to me – in their way. Nigel was patronisingly kind, Morty avuncular, Russell bracing. (‘You’re well rid of him. Do we have to cut him and Brie from the scenes, as well as Basilisa? The end result is going to look like a patchwork quilt with holes in it.’) The camera crew, who sometimes took the piss – ‘Show us your good side, Delphi!’, ‘Bit more cleavage’ etc. – refrained. HG, who was around a lot to follow the progress of the maze, said to me, ‘Both of us in the shit, huh?’

  I’d almost forgotten about his divorce (we weren’t really cutting Basilisa from the historical scenes: too complicated). The thought of the double scandal hanging over Dunblair made me blench.

  ‘The press’ll go berserk,’ I said, visualising waves of paparazzi assaulting the perimeter wall with grappling hooks and rope ladders. Still, they might decide the two stories were connected and couple my name with HG, which would at least salvage my public pride, even if it didn’t heal my damaged heart.

  ‘This is a castle,’ HG said. ‘We can stand a long siege.’

  ‘Unless war breaks out or there’s another royal divorce, we may have to,’ Russell said. ‘On second thoughts, scratch out the war. It’d never make the tabloids.’

  Later in the day, I had to switch my mobile off since someone (probably Brie) had leaked the number to a contact at the Daily Mail. She and Basilisa were presumably signing up with Max Clifford even now. By evening, reports were coming in from the village of a massive influx of journalists wielding tape recorders, mikes, hand-held movie cameras and so on. Apparently, every resident was giving interviews about Basilisa’s unpopularity, if not her mating habits. They knew little about Brie and Alex but, according to Angus (our man on the inside), most decided to improvise, embellishing our night in the pub until Brie was alleged to have done a striptease while Alex tried to seduce at least a dozen local lasses. Meanwhile, Jules and Sandy got creative, patrolling the estate armed with paint guns, which they fired at anything resembling a telescopic lens. As a result, two red deer wound up a good deal redder, and several perfectly harmless birds turned into robins.

  I recalled the good publicity of the rescue – it seemed a lifetime ago – and stiffened my upper lip in anticipation of the next day’s papers. I’d never had a really bad press. But I’d risen too fast and too far; the new series, and my wedding, had been too widely hyped; the vultures were out there, or possibly it was the sharks, circling their prey, sharpening their teeth and their talons, doing whatever it is sharks and vultures do before they zoom in and pounce. However you saw them, I was going to be dinner.

  ‘It’ll be awful,’ I told Roo. ‘They’ll make me look like a bitch or a loser or both, and then it’ll be the turn of the female columnists, dripping venom and being sorry for me, all in the same paragraph. I think it’s time I committed sooty. Oh God, I’m single! I hadn’t realised . . . I’ve never been single. When Ben Garvin left there was David Tennison, waiting in the wings. But now I’ve got no one. What am I going to do?’

  ‘Get off with Nigel?’ Roo suggested.

  ‘Definitely not funny.’

  On my way to my room to change I stopped in the entrance hall. There was the picture of Elizabeth Courtney, so positioned that a shaft of light from an upper window fell directly on her face. It struck me suddenly that it must have been moved; previously it had hung right above the stairs, in shadow unless the electric light was on. Now, someone had shifted it a little to the left, so the evening sun lit up the portrait with a sort of golden softness. I wondered who had moved it – it must have been difficult: its new location wasn’t easily accessible – and why. I must ask Harry.

  Elizabeth looked very warm and alive in that sunset glow. Too real to be just a picture. Too vital, too modern, to have lived and died in the fusty Victorian age, wearing whalebone corsets and embroidering samplers and doing the other things women did in those days to pass the time. She didn’t look to me like a natural embroiderer, not her. And once again I felt her there, not just the portrait but the person, as close as my own thoughts. She’d never been betrayed and left in solitary singledom, she’d been wealthy and sought-after and beloved – but in that moment she seemed as near to me as a friend, an intimate, understanding presence. Trying to comfort me, trying to say something – but was it something about me or something about her? She’d been sought-after and beloved, until she vanished into the lost maze, never to be seen again. The maze we were reconstructing – the maze that would soon be as large as life and twice as expensive. I shivered, though not at the cost.

  The dread of my dream in the gallery had faded, and so had the vivid impression it had left behind, but if it really was an echo from the past – Elizabeth’s past – the two conspirators had hated her, hated her happiness and her bright energy . . . Or had they? I concentrated, struggling to remember them – Iona Craig and another. I’d sensed evil in the atmosphere, but not hate; I couldn’t be sure but I thought the killing had been, from their point of view, an ugly necessity, part of a ruthless plan with an unknown object. There had been passion in Iona’s face – the dark side of love. Whatever drove her, it wasn’t revenge.

  But we were talking dreams here. Dreams and ghosts. Nothing tangible.

  The facts were that Archie McGoogle, my prime suspect, had an unbreakable alibi: he was suppressing natives at the time, on another continent. Iona’s lover, if she had one, must have been a local lad, but how he fitted in or who he was I couldn’t guess.

  Suddenly I wondered who would have inherited the castle if Archie hadn’t returned. Perhaps there was a bastard son of Alasdair’s father waiting to emerge from obscurity, only for some reason he kept quiet. Perhaps Iona was pregnant by Alasdair, and that made it imperative for Elizabeth to be removed. Only she must have lost the baby, and then . . .

  Too many perhapses. And Elizabeth’s spirit at my shoulder, telling me something I couldn’t hear.

  I went slowly upstairs to change for dinner.

  Ruth

  There wasn’t much I could do for Delphi, but I phoned Crusty to warn him that a wave of dubious publicity was about to sweep the board in the gutter press. An innocuous series on gardening was going to be elevated to top TV scandal, whether we liked it or not. I expected Crusty to be appalled; after all, he was an old-fashioned English gentleman to whom the public washing of dirty linen must be d
eeply distasteful. I’d forgotten two things: he was also a successful producer, and it wasn’t his linen. He took the news of the debacle philosophically – so philosophically that I realised during the course of our conversation that he, at least, had never lost sight of the ball.

  ‘Good thing about HG,’ he said. ‘Never thought Basilisa was really his type. Thing is your type changes as you get older, but it can take you a while to find out. Delphinium okay?’

  ‘She will be,’ I said.

  ‘Didn’t really know Russo. More money than brains, I always thought. Bit of a lightweight but no harm in him. Oh well, she’ll get over it. Plenty more like that around. She mixed up with HG?’

  ‘No, but I’m sure that’s what the papers will say.’

  ‘Inevitable,’ Crusty agreed. ‘She’s pretty; he’s a superstar. Tabloids’ll have them both engaged by the end of the week. Won’t hurt. We’ve got Russo, the model and the Basilisk all on film for the programme, right?’

  ‘Yes. In the historical bits.’

  ‘Pity we can’t bring the show out this week. We’d have better ratings than Big Brother. Latest I’ve heard, we’re in the schedules next autumn. Have to see if we can manage a little nugget for the press then, won’t we? Something to nudge their memory.’

  ‘Umm . . .’

  ‘Nothing for you to worry about. Keep everyone focused on the garden: that’s the main thing. The press – that’s just sound and fury. Blow over in a few days. Unless . . . nothing else likely to crawl out of the woodwork, I suppose?’

  I reviewed the line-up: Morty, Nigel, Russell . . . None of them had a spouse on location. ‘No,’ I said. ‘There are no more couples available for divorce at the moment.’

  ‘There you are, then. You’re in Dunblair: paparazzi may be on the doorstep, but the doorstep’s well outside. HG’s people will keep them at a distance: they’re used to it. Ignore the headlines. Should be all out of scandals by now.’