Bad Heir Day (22 page)

“I’ve
never
seen one like
that
before.”

“Glad you appreciate it. Mad Angus Angus’s lucky war axes are the pride of the Dampie collection.”

“Unlucky for some, I should imagine,” Anna observed, thinking meanly that they were probably the only thing in the Dampie collection.

“Yes, he killed fifty Englishmen in battle with those,” Jamie said proudly. “Sharp as a knife, even now. Nanny keeps them in tiptop condition.”

“Does she now?”

There was a silence.

“Very impressive suits of armour you’ve got over there in the corner,” said Anna.

“Yes. In actual fact, they’re terribly rusty and not really very valuable at all,” said Jamie. “Don’t know why I bother keeping them. Should throw them away really.”

“Oh, it’s probably worth hanging on to them,” said Anna flippantly. “You never know. You might get called up.” Oh why had she said that?

The look Jamie gave her as he opened his ledger again quelled further discussion. Now was obviously not the time to ask about the poet. Or, for that matter, the wedding. After an hour or so’s silent contemplation of sheep figures (Jamie) and a 1962 edition of the
People’s Friend
found behind a cushion and fallen on as if it were the latest
Vogue
(Anna), they went to bed.

As she undressed, Anna saw with horror that her neck, arms, shoulders, and cheeks were covered in violently red, itching spots. They looked disgusting, red at the bottom and yellow and hard on top, mini volcanoes against the whiteness of her skin. “My God, what are they?” she shrieked, showing an ankle bearing at least five of them to Jamie who, already in bed, was sitting up with plans of the castle spread all around him.

He looked up. “Midgies.” He looked down again.

“What, those tiny black flies? I can’t believe it.”

But she had lost his attention already. Still, Anna thought as her fingers ran over the hard, painful lumps, at least the midgies fancy me. There was a gap large enough to drive an articulated lorry down between Jamie and herself. It was almost as if he were trying to avoid a situation where he had to have sex with her.

But
why
?
Anna fretted. Her appearance had not changed for the worse since arriving at Dampie almost two weeks ago; on the contrary, the atrocious food and long walks through the mist had resulted in her losing yet more weight. She could feel her rib cage all day long now, not just first thing in the morning when she was flat on her back. So what was the problem? Anna had read enough “When Sex Dies” magazine stories to realise keeping the sensual spark alive in a relationship was a challenge to most couples. But even in the direst of these tales the spark hadn’t disappeared immediately, as it appeared to have done with them. Why was Jamie so much more interested in making walls than love? All she had managed to glean from him today was that he’d spent the afternoon repairing rotten fencing. Did that account for the barrier now between them?

“Look, you can tell me if there’s a problem,” she ventured gently as they lay side by side in the darkness. Like two marble sarcophagi, she thought, only without the passion and commitment that implied.

“Oh, there’s a problem all right,” Jamie said. “Several, in fact.”

“Is there?” Anna hadn’t expected such frankness. Suddenly fearful, she wondered if she was ready to be told.

“Yes. Well, for a start, the guttering’s rotten and the roof on the old guardroom is—”

“Not
that
.
Not the bloody
building
.
Us.”

“Us?” Jamie sounded surprised. “What’s the matter with us? Aren’t you happy? We’re getting married, aren’t we?”

Anna felt an odd mixture of relief and fear. “Call me paranoid,” she said, “but I can’t help noticing that you don’t seem to like having sex with me.”

Jamie was silent for a few moments. Then he said, “No. I don’t.”

***

“He said
what
?” Geri demanded.

“He said
no
,
he didn’t,” Anna shouted into the mobile the next morning, crouching unsteadily behind a rock as the wind hurled a spiteful spatter of rain in her direction. “He said that I wasn’t to worry though, it was nothing personal.”

In normal circumstances, Anna thought longingly, she and Geri would have been having this conversation in hushed whispers in the darkened corner of a wine bar, fuelled by large glasses of chilled Chardonnay. Normal circumstances, however, were now a thing of the past. As was normal anything.

“
Sounds pretty personal to me
,”
shouted Geri. “Sounds about as personal as it gets.”

“He said he’d gone off sex at school. Apparently he was bullied very badly, frequently beaten and buggered on a regular basis.”

“But I thought that was the whole
point
of public school,” Geri yelled. “That’s what every boy in St. Midas’s has to look forward to. And the girls when they get married.”

“I know. But it seems to have turned Jamie off sex for good. He says he’s still getting over the horror of having to do it when we first got to the castle.”

“He really knows how to make a girl feel good, doesn’t he?” shouted Geri. “Sure he’s not gay?”

“Well, I did wonder, of course.” Anna pictured Geri in the minivan with the entire Tressell school run’s ears out on stalks. “But I couldn’t see why he would have bothered asking me to marry him if he was. I mean, why drag me all the way up here?”

There was silence for a few minutes. “Hello? Hello?” yelled Anna in a panic. Please don’t cut me off again, she prayed.

“
Just thinking
,”
Geri bawled. “Basically, you need to awaken his interest in sex again. Take the initiative. Come up with a love strategy.”

“A
what
?”
The wind whipped by Anna’s ear, as if trying to eavesdrop on the conversation.

“
A love strategy
,”
Geri screeched. “Seduce him. Wear garters. Buy some red underwear and bonk his brains out. That
always
works.”

At this point, the phone cut out and Anna sat back on her heels on the sodden grass wondering dully where one got garters on Skul. No doubt Nanny had on more rigging than your average tea clipper, but it seemed unlikely Jamie would find it a turn-on. As for red underwear, the only possibility of that, she imagined, would be if something ran in the wash.

Cassandra slammed the front door in fury. The girl had to be
joking
.
A new Mégane coupe in a colour of her choice—
to keep
! Paid-for membership of the Harbour Club
and
the Ivy Club! Tickets for all the best shows in town! On top of this, a salary approximately
ten times
what she had ever paid a nanny before. Cassandra seethed as, from a corner of the window, she watched the girl sashaying nonchalantly away down the street, apparently confident that if Cassandra would not meet her requirements, some other family would be only too pleased to. Those tits
had
to be fake, thought Cassandra. So pneumatic-looking—you probably had to stick a pressure gauge on the nipple every four weeks to check the air.

Cassandra grimaced as a bilious intestinal twinge almost bent her double. But was it any wonder she had stomach problems? She’d been stuffing herself lately—she’d eaten a whole lettuce sandwich and a ricecake yesterday before reading the fortuitous
Daily Mail
article about how skinny women in New York kept their weight down by eating naked in front of mirrors. Seizing another ricecake, Cassandra had straightaway gone into the bathroom, stripped off, and sat with her legs apart. It certainly removed the urge to eat. The problem was, contemplating her dry patches, thread veins, incipient turkey gobble, and wrinkled labia in the mirror almost removed the urge to live as well.

Unfortunately, it didn’t bring back the urge to write. Since being dumped by its publishers,
A Passionate Lover
was currently as high and dry as a hallucinating bone. Of late, the only occasions Cassandra had ventured into her study were to rifle her gin fund to satisfy Zak’s incessant demands for money. On these visits, she had tried not to notice the dust thickening on the laptop lid. Her writer’s block had become an entire thousand-foot-thick barrier; the Great Wall of Writing China. Her agent was getting frantic.

“Try anything,” he urged, whilst privately wondering if he should dump Cassandra. Half literary London was calling her the day before yesterday’s woman; having her on his books was getting embarrassing. Not that it hadn’t always been, but at least she used to make money. Perhaps, he suggested, colonic irrigation might help unplug the flow.

Cassandra liked the idea of recharging her creative batteries with alternative therapy. Especially if it meant charging Jett’s platinum card.

“I want to feel
inspired
again,” Cassandra told a New Age therapist in Hampstead, who advised “the all-over spiritual spring clean approach. You wash yourself from the
inside
,”
he explained. Ugh, like those bristly things you put inside bottles, Cassandra shuddered. The white witch in Camden she consulted next advised flushing out the system by sticking her bottom in cold water and her feet in hot. Or was it the other way round? But sitting with her buttocks in a warm sink with her feet dangling in the loo didn’t feel very inspiring.

By the time the crystal therapist in Crouch End advised she stick crystals up her bottom, Cassandra was beginning to doubt alternative therapy could do the trick. On the other hand, the engagement ring Jett had given her could scarcely meet a more suitable fate. She’d try anything once.

Once
.
Having placed the sapphire in her sphincter, Cassandra quickly became aware that her writer’s block had suddenly changed from being a metaphoric to a literal condition. She would have sued the therapist had she not been fearful of all the publicity that would, given her celebrity status, no doubt follow. As it was, she was not entirely convinced that her regular Harley Street doctor had believed her protestations that she had fallen over in her bedroom and landed on her jewellery box. Had she not known better she would have sworn that, as she was leaving, the bellow of loud laughter following her down the corridor had definitely come from Dr. Monson’s office. From now on, she vowed, the only crystal I’m prepared to take internally is the sort with Louis Roederer on the label.

The end finally came when the Tufnell Park thalassotherapist told her not to “sweat the small stuff.” Cassandra had indignantly pointed out that she didn’t sweat
any
stuff, thank you, she’d had the botox injections to close up any glands of
that
nature, and swept out. She decided to return to the Bombay Sapphire.

Bloody nannies,
she thought, sloshing another measure furiously into her glass. Her thoughts returned to the Mégane-coupé-demanding one she’d just seen. Bloody
cheek
.
And there’d been plenty of
that
on show as well—Ivana, or whatever her name was, had been wearing a miniskirt practically up to her
pubes
.

Cassandra sighed. As if the Nanny Question wasn’t enough, there was the continued and worsening matter of finding a school that would take Zak. It was hardly surprising she hadn’t written a sentence for weeks. Every ounce of her literary ability was currently employed in restricting to a few scant paragraphs the wonders of her son in letters to boarding school headmasters.

The clang of the letterbox alerted her to the arrival of the post. Cassandra ground her teeth as she opened the usual fistful of rejection letters from schools. Until a thought occurred to her. Why not educate Zak at home? Much cheaper, for a start. And talking of starts, there was no time like the present. She tripped up the stairs to his room.

***

“Oh,
Mum
.”

“
Mama
.
Come on, darling.”

“Only if you buy me a mini CD player.”

“Yes, all right then, darling. Come on. Let’s count up to ten in French.”

Around two hours was the approximate time it took Cassandra—and Zak—to realise that she had forgotten every French phrase she had ever learnt, with the notable exception of
haute couture
.
Switching subjects to maths, she realised she had never, in the first place, grasped the principles of long division. Similarly, the only geographical fact she was in possession of was that a by-product of the Australian sheep industry was lanolin for lipstick and the sort of moisturisers that gave you a hairy face. Even Cassandra realised that this probably wasn’t going to get Zak very far.

Finding a boarding school was of the utmost urgency. For Zak was beginning to get out of hand in other ways as well. Only last week he had threatened to sue her retrospectively over his unsatisfactory Christmas presents and there had been ugly scenes just yesterday when the tooth fairy had left only ten pounds and not the twenty pounds Zak had apparently been expecting. Adore him as she did, it was beginning to dawn on Cassandra that the costs of keeping him at home were astronomical, psychologically as well as financially.

***

Anna’s love strategy had not got off to the most brilliant of starts. Taking the initiative, as Geri had suggested, she had arrayed herself in her best underwear, used the last of her Chanel No. 5, fanned her hair out across the pillow in approved bra-model-ad fashion, put a candle by the bedside—and waited. And waited. And waited. And, eventually, fell asleep.

She woke to find the candle out and Jamie snoring gently beside her.
Damn
.
She’d missed the opportunity. Take the initiative, she urged herself.

Taking a deep breath, Anna stole a hand across the customary foot of uninhabited sheet that separated her from her husband-to-be. As usual, Jamie was wearing thick flannel pyjamas, but she deftly circumnavigated the folds and ties to slip her hand through the gap in his bottoms. Running her hand swiftly over the bristle of his pubic hair she at last gained what she was seeking: his warm, soft, sleeping penis. To her astonishment, it was rigid. More than that, it was as thick and as hard as an oak.

A thrill ran through Anna as she lay on her back in the darkness. Had her underwear had the desired effect after all? Smiling, she circled the warm, wet, and rubbery tip of his penis with her finger. She stroked his hot, swollen, bristly balls and was gratified to hear the steady breathing interrupted by a faint but distinct groan of pleasure. As she increased the pressure of her fingers, the groans increased. Without giving herself time to worry about the consequences, Anna slid down under the covers and pushed her face straight into his salt-scented pubic hair.

His penis was almost too big for her mouth; it seemed the approximate size and solidity of a cricket bat handle as she began inexpertly to circumnavigate it with her lips and tongue. Still, as she was buried beneath the covers, Jamie would be unable to hear any slurping sounds and anyway, from the still louder moans of pleasure she could hear from above the blankets, she was having roughly the effect she was intending. As matters quite literally seemed about to come to a head, Anna pulled herself up, over, and on to her fiancé’s body. Wet with excitement herself, she slid him inside her just as he came.

“
Aaaargggh
.
Uuugghh. Headmaster! Headmaster!
What’s going on
?”
Jamie, wide awake now, was thrashing around wildly in terror. For a few seconds, Anna held on as if to a bucking bronco, hoping for an orgasm, but she realised she might as well hope for a miracle as the engorged muscle inside her shrank to the proportions she was more familiar with.

“
What’s happening
?”
The night being blacker than the inside of a Highland cow, it was impossible for Anna to see Jamie’s expression but his voice still held traces of genuine fear.

“Oh, nothing,” said Anna bitterly. She swallowed hard to keep down the choking in her throat. The love strategy had been a dismal failure. Everything about coming to Dampie had been a dismal failure.
She
was a dismal failure.

***

As soon as, after breakfast, Jamie had headed off muttering something about drains, Anna had gone outside with the mobile and called Geri.

“He was definitely thinking about someone. Another woman.”

“Doubt it,” said Geri. “He was probably fantasising about a lovely stretch of releaded roof.”

“Can’t you come up?
Please
?”
Only Geri, Anna was certain, was capable of sorting out the mess she had got herself in.

“Mmm. As it happens, this is a good time. Savannah and Siena are off to Opera Camp for a week and I could do with a change of scene. What are the men like up there? I rather fancy getting my hands on something big, hairy, and Highland.”

“Well, there’s plenty of that about,” Anna said. No need to tell Geri she meant cattle.

“
Fantastic
.
I’m
desperate
.
I’ve even started doing yoga classes,” Geri continued, “hoping I’d get the chance to do the lotus position with some supple young sex god. But everyone in my class is either pregnant, gay, or has nasty toenails.” Geri sighed. “So here I am with this lovely flexible pelvis and no one to flex it on.”

“Poor you.” Anna tried to sound as if she wasn’t smiling. Funny how Geri could cheer her up even in the most wretched of circumstances. “But at least you must be full of inner calm.”

“Funnily enough, I’ve never felt so ratty as I have since starting yoga classes. But that’s probably a lot to do with the nasty toenails. We’re always being told we need to keep our anuses soft as well, which as you can imagine makes for some rather ripe results. Which tend to interfere with one’s contemplation of the immortal.”

“But at least it explains levitation,” Anna said. “There’s plenty of fresh air up here, anyway.”

“Right. That’s settled then. I’ll come up on the plane. After all this jetting around with the family I’ve got enough air miles to practically get to Pluto.”

“Oh Geri,” Anna breathed in relief. “That would be fantastic. I’ll go straightaway and get Nanny to sort out a room for you. The best one the castle has, promise.”

“Well, that’s not saying a lot.”

Re-entering the castle, Anna firmly squashed the qualms of marrow-freezing fear that the thought of an encounter with Nanny provoked. She marched with as authoritative a step as she could muster down the stairs, back down the corridor, and into the stone-flagged kitchen beyond. Nanny was nowhere to be seen.

From an open door leading to an outhouse, the vague murmur of voices could be heard. Loud and vaguely obscene noises seemed to be punctuating the conversation. As she crept nearer it sounded, to Anna’s quailing ears, horribly like naked flesh being slapped.

“Do ye think she’s worked it out yet?” The man’s voice, Anna realised, was MacLoggie’s. Slap. Squelch.

“Nae idea,” Nanny said in her slow, deliberate monotone. “She’s nae too bright, ye know.” Slap.

Anna stood frozen to the spot. She would have been in any case, given the plunging temperatures of the kitchen passage, but the realisation that they were talking about her sent an additional chill down the cord of her spine.

MacLoggie snorted. “Surely even someone
that
stupid must have realised by now,” he drawled in a contemptuous tone accentuated by his Scots accent. “After all, why else would someone as bonny as him want to marry someone like
her
?”

Nanny snorted. Anna flamed with indignation.
That
was rich, coming from MacLoggie, who even in a good light looked as if he’d been pile-driven into a brick wall. As for Nanny, the only good light was no light at all. She looked as if her idea of sartorial effort was to shave the hairs off her moles.

“All because the old laird put that clause in saying the young maister had to have a
wife
before he could properly inherit,” MacLoggie observed laconically.
Slap slap slap
.

Anna breathed in deeply and slowly. Her knees had gone weak, and something seemed to have stopped her moving. Something else, however, was slipping slowly into place. Was this the reason Jamie wanted to marry her?

“Well, ye canna blame the old laird for wanting to make sure there’d be an heir,” Nanny pronounced. A strange flubbery noise like the breaking of wind accompanied her remark.