Kissing Toads

by Jemma Harvey

  ‘I would wish for Death,’ she concluded, ‘though that is a Sin, but it is a small Sin beside the far greater ones I have already committed. However, I cannot leave my son while he is still a child, and with such a Father, so while Life remains to me, I will do what little I can to atone. Sometimes I pray to the Soul of Elizabeth Courtney –’ that was the first and only time she mentioned her victim by name – ‘in whatever Paradise wherein she may dwell, that she might look down on me in the Fires of Hell, and, like the Blessed Damozel, that she may shed a tear for me, a single tear, in Sorrow and Pity for the woman who has so wronged her.’

  ‘Do you think there is Forgiveness?’ I asked Ash. After reading that document, I’d picked up the habit of speaking with capital letters.

  ‘We have to hope so, don’t we?’ he responded.

  HG arranged for Elizabeth’s bones to be buried in the churchyard, though at the opposite end from the McGoogle family vault. There was a small service which we all attended, while the crew filmed from a tactful distance. Since we were all working on a gardening show, the flowers were exceptionally beautiful.

  ‘Now that the mystery is solved,’ Delphi said, justifiably pleased with herself for doing most of the solving, ‘her spirit can move on. So can Iona Craig, with luck. I mean, I didn’t like her –’ we all tended to speak of them as if we knew them personally – ‘but she was sorry for what she did, and spent years being miserable and trying to make up for it.’

  ‘What about Alasdair?’ I said. ‘I suppose we’re stuck with him.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ Delphi said generously. ‘There’s plenty of space. And like Ash said, he’s impotent and withering away.’

  ‘I don’t think that was quite how he put it . . .’

  Later on, we had a meeting, as a result of which we approached HG.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘This looks like a serious delegation. What’s the problem?’

  ‘We don’t want you to replant the maze,’ Delphi said.

  ‘Why not? That’s supposed to be the whole point.’

  ‘The mystery was the point,’ Delphi said, ‘though we didn’t know it till we got started. Now we’ve solved it. Mysteries are like skeletons: you dig them up and plant over the spot and move on. That’s what we need to do. Nigel says you learn from history; you don’t repeat it.’

  ‘You mean if I replant the maze I might find myself murdering Basilisa? A good idea, but I’ve left it too late.’

  ‘The maze wasn’t evil in itself,’ I said, ‘but it was used for an evil purpose. It was never a place for lovers to lose themselves on a sunny afternoon; it was a snare where people could be trapped and killed. Morag says if it’s replanted all the spectres will come back. She may be exaggerating – after all, we’ve laid a few to rest – but do you really want to spend the next ten years listening to her dire warnings?’

  ‘I’m accustomed,’ HG said.

  ‘Besides,’ Delphi said by way of a clincher, ‘it doesn’t fit with the rest of the garden at all. We’re going for the informal look, all wild flowers and rambling shrubs and statues peeping through clouds of May blossom. Against that background the maze will be so out of place, you’ll have to call in another gardening show to come and get rid of it.’

  I agreed with her, Russell agreed with her, even Morty agreed with her; but HG remained obdurate, clinging to his pet project like a small boy with a toffee apple. It’s bad for his teeth and he’s covered in stickiness, but he won’t give it up. We were temporarily stymied. Mini hedges were springing up in rows, looking rather silly at the moment but still suggesting the imminent arrival of Birnham Wood at High Dunsinane. Delphi tried to subvert Jules and Sandy to dig them up in the night, with the idea of blaming it on the dogs, but Sting was too well trained to be a successful suspect and Fenny had missed out on the digging gene.

  ‘Perhaps we could arrange for something really spooky to happen,’ Delphi said, ‘which would put HG off. Like . . . finding all the shovels and stuff scattered across the ground one morning, covered in blood, or . . .’

  ‘Digging up a skeleton at the heart of the maze?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, great – oh.’

  Unexpected support came from Auld Andrew, who held forth on the subject at some length in broad Scottish (or possibly braw Scottish). We didn’t understand much of what he said, but the gist was clear, involving as it did much saliva-spraying use of the local ‘ch’, much rolling of Rs in words like ‘accurrrsed’, and even the occasional hint that we were all doomed. After a confrontation with him HG did appear slightly damped, but it may have been because he needed to go and wash off the spittle.

  I rang Crusty. I wasn’t certain he appreciated how we all felt about the maze, but he said he was coming up in a day or two and assured me: ‘All be sorted out then. No need to worry,’ which sounded comforting but wasn’t.

  ‘What good can he do?’ Delphi complained. ‘No one has any influence with HG. Why don’t you try, Roo? You’re the one he kissed. Couldn’t you do it again? Ash wouldn’t mind: it’s in a good cause.’

  ‘He’d better mind,’ I said.

  The day Crusty was due, Sandy went to meet him at the airport in a purple Rolls with the numberplate GOD 1 and a pattern of pale green swirls and bubbles which made it resemble a giant lava lamp. HG must have ordered it when he was going through his junkie phase, though that still didn’t explain why he hadn’t got rid of it since. Nick, who was around at the time of Sandy’s departure, took one look at it and tottered away to roll himself an enormous spliff, claiming a car like that wasn’t something you wanted to contemplate with a clear head.

  ‘He once picked me up from school in it,’ Dorian said, blenching at the memory. ‘I was ten. I didn’t think I’d ever live it down.’

  Later that morning the car returned, disgorging Crusty and an unexpected extra, obviously invited for back-up. Jennifer Dacres.

  I was pleased to see her, Delphi was moderately pleased to see her, Russell was daunted (‘Don’t we have enough oars being shoved in already? This show is turning into a bloody trireme!’), Morty baffled. For all her expertise, he considered her a civilian who could only be a hindrance to TV professionals. Auld Andrew instantly took a shine to her, presenting her with a bouquet culled from the rose bushes which he considered his personal property and actually blushing as he did so, though it was difficult to be sure under his grizzled, wrinkled, wind-leathered exterior. HG was welcoming and promptly took her and Crusty on a tour of the work in progress, including the maze. He even gave her a guided tour inside the castle, an honour never accorded to anyone else, reportedly apologising for the horrors of the Basilisk effect. Jennie is hardly a conventional style guru, with her haphazard clothing and random jewellery, and the sun-faded hair that’s always half pinned up, half coming down, yet somehow – so Crusty told us – she contrived, merely by being there, to emphasise the tackiness of rooms like the purple gallery and the African bedroom. She has class: not the stuffy, plum-in-the-mouf kind but the kind that comes from knowing exactly who you are and where you belong without even thinking about it.

  She didn’t criticise the décor, or so I heard later. She simply remarked, ‘Poor thing, she didn’t have a clue, did she?’, thus putting the absent Basilisa in her place for all time.

  Whether her attitude was calculated or spontaneous even Delphi couldn’t tell.

  When it came to the garden, Jennie dealt with the issue at dinner in a single nonchalant sentence, tossed carelessly to HG over the pheasant confit. ‘I expect replanting the maze was your wife’s idea, wasn’t it?’ she said.

  Delphi’s eyes narrowed at this stroke of genius.

  ‘Just the sort of romantic notion people get when they don’t know about gardens,’ Jennie went on. ‘History is all very well, provided you leave it in the past. Some of these McGoogles were pretty dubious characters, if you ask me – always having feuds with rival clans and murdering their wives and so on. Not really gardening people. I gather one of t
hem planted the maze as some sort of scheme to put off getting married, then a few centuries later another one burnt it down. No point in repeating the mistake just because it’s historical.’

  Blitzed by her quiet assurance, and the assumptions she made, HG didn’t say a word.

  Nigel said: ‘We thought it would be in keeping with the traditions of the castle.’ He still hadn’t decided which side he was on.

  ‘You don’t revive a tradition if it’s bad,’ Jennie said unanswerably. ‘Silly thing to do. The maze works fine at Hampton Court, with all those formal gardens – they’ve done a great job of reconstruction there – but not here in the Highlands. You want a garden that’ll blend in with the landscape: rugged rockeries, wild meadows, cascading water features – all fine. But not the maze. It’ll stand out like a sore thumb. Spanish, wasn’t she?’ Casually, she harked back to Basilisa. ‘They don’t understand gardening. Surprising, really: the Alhambra Palace has some of the most beautiful gardens in the world, though of course they were designed by the Moors. Anyhow, a maze here would look worse than that Dali sofa. Might as well do topiary in the shape of a penis.’

  Nigel, mesmerised, murmured delicately, ‘Has anyone ever . . . ?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Jennie mentioned one of the lesser royals. Well, not that lesser. ‘I said to him, there’s a time and a place for a sense of humour. This isn’t it. You make a fool of yourself on some TV game show, it’s over in a night. Topiary is for ever.’

  She made this questionable assertion with the confidence of someone who believed it, and a room full of TV people didn’t even attempt to contradict her. Delphi looked as if she was going to say something, but I caught her eye and shook my head. Jennie’s tactics were inspired.

  The next day, with HG’s rueful assent, we uprooted the mini hedges and put them on a bonfire.

  ‘’Tis a job well done,’ Morag affirmed. ‘The ghaisties can sleep in peace the noo.’

  R.I.P.

  A week later, we were leaving.

  We’d been at Dublair so long, I felt as if I too was being uprooted. We’d be back of course, later that year and again the following spring, to film the garden as it progressed towards mature gardenhood – in autumn glory, in April bloom – but it wouldn’t be the same. In retrospect, I thought muzzily, on our last drunken evening, it had been the best working experience of my life. I felt a sense of achievement, of completeness, of Angus’s champagne rising to my head. I had an ongoing boyfriend, an ongoing career. Crusty had said he wanted to work with me on another project and suggested lunch in London. Back on the lunch circuit, I thought.

  ‘I’ll really miss this place,’ I said to Ash.

  ‘I can’t offer you a castle,’ he responded. ‘I can’t offer you much of anything. My house is about to be sold – it’s too big and empty without Caitlin and Neve. I put it on the market after they left. I suppose I’ll get a flat somewhere.’

  ‘I’ve got a flat,’ I said. ‘Do you . . . do you want to stay with me for a bit?’ I felt very tentative about it, but surely, under the circumstances, I didn’t sound overeager.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Ash. ‘Let’s give it a try.’

  For a few moments, I was so happy I couldn’t speak. I didn’t dare. When I sobered up, the fear would kick in. Delphi was right: I’d always been single. Single is fine. Single is having your own space, single is not needing to adapt to anyone, not needing to put up with anyone, not needing to give way to anyone. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of an adequate income is not in want of becoming a wife. Living together: that was the plunge I’d never taken. The moment when a relationship turns from romance into reality. I might have had Kyle’s socks in my drawer and his porn mags under my bed, but he’d never been there on a full-time basis. I’d said to Ash ‘for a bit’, but we both knew what that meant. Ash was full-time. Ash was pressing my panic button. Ash was commitment.

  Ash was love.

  Love – the real one, the big one – is the scariest thing of all, because your heart is on the line. Lose all, win all. Time to roll the dice.

  (Of course, the only game at which I’ve ever gambled is Snakes and Ladders, when I played Delphi and Jennie for chocolate one Christmas. Jennie won.)

  The party grew sentimental. In due course, HG began to sing ‘Rockabye Lula’. This time, he was serenading Jennie. Presently, Nick rushed in, no doubt out of his head on something or other, claiming he had just seen a ghost in full Highland regalia. But we’d grown so used to ghosts by then no one gave a toss.

  Delphi sat stroking Fenny and saying she didn’t know how Sting would cope, guarding the castle without his support.

  Cedric danced with Young Andrew. Cheek to cheek.

  A couple of hours later as Ash and I were going up to bed, I noticed the drawing room door was half open, and there was HG, stretched on the sofa, quoting Byron.

  ‘Though the night was made for loving,

  And the day returns too soon,

  Yet we’ll go no more a-roving

  By the light of the moon.’

  I couldn’t see who he was with.

  I remember I woke around three or four in the morning to hear, faint and far off, the eerie music of the bagpipes.

  I never found out who was playing.

  We were back in London. Back in what is called, by some extraordinary error of judgement, the Real World. Mountains are real: they have stood since the Earth first emerged from the melting pot of prehistory. Lochs are real: they were made when the first rains fell. A castle, bits of which have stood for a thousand years, has at least a claim on reality. But the world of the modern media, with its ten-seconds attention span, its fifteen-minute fame, its here-today, gone-tomorrow philosophy for jobs, lovers, friends – how close to reality is that? Yet this was my world.

  ‘The world is what you make it,’ Ash said. ‘The moment of the yew tree and the moment of the rose are of an equal duration.’

  I don’t know where he got that from.

  He went back to his house to sort out his things and I settled down to deal with my post, my unpaid bills, my answering machine. I played my messages in reverse order. The most recent was from Delphi.

  ‘Watch out. It says in TVTalk that Tatyana’s dumped Kyle for some guy she met in Shakespeare. It’s only a matter of time . . .’

  The next one was from Kyle.

  He came round that evening, looking unshaven and crumpled and frayed around the edges.

  ‘I’ve treated you badly,’ he said. ‘I probably always will. But you’re the one. You’re my girl – for good.’

  That was Kyle. Never excuse, never apologise, never give an inch. Every man for himself, and every woman for any man. Devil take the hindmost.

  I’d been planning to tell him I was with someone, someone wonderful, I was in love, I was blissfully happy. I’d dreamed of rubbing his nose in it, of kicking him when he was down, the way he’d kicked me. But suddenly, it didn’t matter any more.

  Anyway, that isn’t my style.

  ‘Have a drink,’ I said. ‘You know, I’m not your girl. I never was. I’m just a girl. One of a long list.’

  ‘What did you want – a virgin?’

  ‘No. What do you want? If you need a friend, that’s fine. If you need a shag, I’m sorry.’

  ‘I need love—’

  ‘To get love, you have to give it,’ I said. ‘You don’t know how.’

  Delphinium

  I was back in London. For some reason, it reminded me of a line from a nursery rhyme: ‘Home again, home again, jiggetty-jig’. I don’t know why that stuck in my head; I’m not a nursery-rhyme person. There was something unsettling about it, maybe because it sounded so cosy. Part of a routine. Home again, home again . . . Was that my life: routine? My glamorous, successful, enviable life of TV stardom and celebrity parties? Alex was history, a skeleton long tidied up and filed away. Time to get out and meet a new guy. (Fenny didn’t like being left alone in the evenings, but I harden
ed my heart. He had to learn.) According to my spies, Alex and Brie were still – just – a couple, though the scandal sheets were on the case, tracking them from club to club, from row to row. HG’s split with the Basilisk had given my reputation a bit of vital spit-and-polish, but I needed to be seen with another man as soon as possible – someone upmarket and incredibly desirable.

  With my phone back on, my entire social circle was on the line, wanting the inside story on me and HG. I was airy, I was casual, I was actually quite truthful. ‘Honestly, darling, nothing happened. It’s all just a fabrication by the papers. Yes, Alex had always been a bit jealous, but there was no reason – none at all.’ The more I denied any relationship, the more credence everyone gave to the gossip. A photographer snapped me walking past Mothercare on my way to a lunch date and promptly started a rumour I was pregnant. I bought a killer cocktail dress from Maddalena and went to a string of summer parties, frequently thrown by people I didn’t know who invited me in the hope that I’d bring HG. I was the cool guest on the social circuit, my presence required at book launches and birthday bashes, first nights and last nights, premiers and promos. Men queued to chat me up, always asking, sooner or later, about my fling with a rock icon. It was like that song in the twenties: ‘I danced with the man Who danced with the girl Who danced with the Prince of Wales’. They all wanted to shag the girl who’d shagged Hot God. And then, presumably, there would be girls who’d queue to shag them, because they’d shagged me, and I’d . . . and so on.

  Perhaps that was why I didn’t fancy any of them.