Kissing Toads (36 page)

‘It was just a kiss,' HG said, looking amazingly unruffled. ‘She's a nice girl: she listens. You could learn from her.'

That was reckless provocation. ‘
Hijo de puta
!' Basilisa raged. ‘
Cabrón! Gilipollas!
Hole of the arse! I divorce you – I divorce you a thousand times – and I take
everything
! I take the island, I take the castle, I send the bulldozer to smash your precious
jardino
into a desert of earth! Always I am faithful, I am good wife, I suffer in silence when you leave me on Mande Susu, I suffer when I must live in Scotland, which is so cold and
bárbaro
. I suffer when you not let me redecorate this room, though it is so ugly – old-fashioned – boring boring. You are old man but I give you my youth, my beauty, my
fieldad
, and in return I suffer suffer!'

‘You weren't that faithful,' I said involuntarily. ‘You tried to seduce Dorian.'

For a second her anger hiccupped, then, typically, she swept on. ‘He lie, he is
estúpido
, he is
niño
, I never touch him—'

‘We'll leave Dorian out of this,' HG said, throwing me a sharp look. ‘As I know about your former personal trainer, and my major domo on the island, and Dirk McTeith last winter, that will be quite enough. I've had a PI firm collecting the evidence for some time. We should be able to settle things quietly.'

‘Never!' Basilisa shrieked. ‘You lie – they lie – you pay them to lie! I tell the judge – I tell the press – I tell
la prensa amarilla
– how you treat me like sheet, how you make me suffer. I ruin you! I tell them how you go with the
jardinera
, with this
puta
, with everyone except your
esposa
– how you are no good in bed any more, how your deek it is limp limp limp—'

‘You can't have it both ways,' HG said. ‘Either I'm impotent or I'm shagging around. The two don't go together.'

‘I say what I like!' Basilisa declared, disregarding logic. ‘I say you never go down on me, you give me no
orgasmo
, you have limp deek—'

Glancing at Ash, I essayed a smile of complicity. A smile that was supposed to say, ‘This is nothing to do with me. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Aren't they ridiculous?' On reflection, that was a lot to say with one smile, so it's hardly surprising it didn't work. Ash, like Queen Victoria, was plainly Not Amused.

‘I don't go down on you,' HG was saying crushingly, ‘because you haven't had your Brazilian redone in months. I don't like oral sex with a gorilla. It's enough to give anyone a limp deek.'

‘I think,' I whispered, sidling towards the door, ‘I'm going to bed. Er – excuse me?'

I hoped for a word with Ash, a chance to explain, though I wasn't sure what or how, but he swung on his heel and vanished.

‘
Hija de puta!
' Basilisa said to me by way of goodnight. ‘
Perra!
'

‘Don't worry,' HG said. ‘We'll talk in the morning.' And to the Basilisk: ‘
Perra
yourself. Don't blame poor Ruth because I find her sweetness and good manners a relief after years of living with a loud-mouthed slut.'

They were clearly all set for a long session. I bolted.

Upstairs, I thought of tapping on Delphi's door to tell her everything, but Alex would be there, and, anyway, she was probably asleep. She had an early start the next day.

It would have to wait.

I dived into my own room, shut the door against the world. Slowly I took off my make-up and got into bed. My brain was fizzing with a chaos of images – me and Ash dancing, Ash and Cedric, HG and the kiss, Basilisa's rage and horror, Ash, still and silent in the open doorway. I kept trying to sort out what I felt, what Ash felt, what was really going on, but every time I attempted to put a good spin on it my thoughts spun off on their own, taking me somewhere I didn't want to be. I couldn't relax, let alone sleep. I read, watched television, struggled my way through the long, dark wakefulness of the night.

Some time around five or six I went to the window and opened it, inhaling the cool dampness of the air from the loch. Faint and far off I heard the eerie moaning of the bagpipes, which was odd, because bagpipes don't usually sound eerie. They sound like a tuba with indigestion. It seemed a strange hour for someone to be practising, but no doubt it helped maintain the castle's reputation for haunting.

I left the window open a crack since the room felt airless and overheated, and went back to bed. Curiously lulled by the gentle wailing of an instrument played by the Scots in battle to terrorise the enemy, I finally fell asleep.

Chapter 9:

Catastrophe Castle

The next day, Roo came to breakfast in her glasses, in a vain attempt to hide the black smudges under her eyes. Since Harry (and HG) had routed my father, I was avoiding a tête-à-tête with him, so I didn't go downstairs until she was up. Alex, as usual, was still sleeping.

‘What happened last night after I left?' I demanded. ‘You seemed to be getting very friendly with Ash.' He's not her type at all, besides being gay, but it really worried me.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘That wasn't the problem,' and out came the whole story about HG, and the kiss, and the showdown with Basilisa.

‘Fantastic!' I said gleefully. ‘You've actually sparked off what will be
the
celebrity divorce of the year! You'll be famous, in all the papers—'

‘I don't want to be famous and in all the papers, and I didn't spark it off. I was a . . . a symptom, not a cause. From the sound of things, HG's been planning it for months, possibly years. I assume he hoped to get through the TV series first, that's all.'

‘I wish I'd been there,' I sighed, wistfully. ‘That
would
be the night I go to bed early and miss all the fun.'

‘If you'd been there,' Roo pointed out, ‘HG wouldn't have kissed me.'

‘I suppose not. What was it like? Is he a good kisser?' I was a little bit green, but only a little. After all, I'm marrying Alex.

(Let's not think about Harry.)

‘I think so,' Roo said, evidently reluctant to tell, if not to kiss. ‘It was . . . nice. Not earth-shaking, but sort of pleasant. The thing is, you can't help being distracted by who you're kissing.'

‘I know,' I said. ‘Robbie Williams kissed me once, at the fag-end of a party. Same thing. Except HG is older, and an icon.' I added, generously, ‘I've never kissed an icon.'

Roo gave a sudden tired grin. ‘You can do it in any Russian church.'

‘Are you going to be all right?' I pursued. ‘I mean, left here with Basilisa on the warpath. She'll be out for your blood, and you're not as good in fights as me. I wish I wasn't going to London. Only there's the dress, and I said I'd see Mummy . . .'

‘I'll be fine. I don't need my hand held, honestly.'

The others started trickling in, all looking more or less hungover, followed by Harry with reinforcements of coffee and scrambled eggs. Everyone except Roo and I pounced on them. Word had obviously not yet got around about the scene the previous night, so I didn't mention it. Gossip would begin percolating soon enough.

‘Does anyone in the castle play the bagpipes?' Roo asked Harry.

‘Dougal McDougall. Why?'

‘I thought I heard him practising, really early in the morning. Filling in for the phantom with a quick skirl along the battlements.'

‘I doubt it,' Harry said. ‘He overdid the Scotch last night. He was out for the count. You must have dreamed it.'

Roo looked startled, and only remembered when it was too late to ask what was going on with me and Harry.

‘Nothing,' I said. ‘I have to go now.' I was damned if I was going to admit to being kissed by the butler when she'd been kissed by Hot God. It was all the wrong way round, I decided. I mean, I do generous, but I don't go looking for humiliation.

Outside, Sandy was loading my bags into a silver Porsche. For once, I wasn't taking much – an overnight bag and some clothes I was bored of and wanted to leave at the mews. I hugged Roo very tight, feeling a weird flash of panic, I didn't know why.

‘Take care. Don't work too hard. Stay out of Basilisa's way – she's going to be like a tigress on the prowl. What did you say she called you?'

‘I'm not sure,' Roo said. ‘It was in Spanish.'

I got into the car and we drove off at breakneck speed, since I was, of course, late. As the castle and lake disappeared I had another odd rush of anxiety, like a presage of disaster.

‘You will look after Roo, won't you?' I said to Sandy. ‘She's – um – fallen out with your mistress. Your future ex-mistress, to be precise.'

Sandy digested this. ‘Future ex,' he repeated. ‘Know that for a fact, do you?'

‘Pretty much.'

‘Good. It's been a long time coming. Don't you worry about your friend. She's a good girl. We'll see she's okay.'

I got to the airport just in time, raced through the check-in and boarded in first class. The flight was efficiently brief. In London, I took a taxi into town, dumped my bags at the mews, and met my mother for a late lunch at the Ivy.

Mummy is magnificently unaware of all London restaurants except the ones that were there when she was young. The Ivy may be the ultimate celebrity hangout where you eat to be seen, but to her it's just a place with nice food where she and my father (or whoever) used to go thirty years ago. She ordered onion tart because she always does, and rack of lamb. Mummy doesn't do diets.

She's wide rather than fat, broad-shouldered and broad-hipped, supple from much bending. Earth-mother tits, arms like a gladiator. Her face has a gardener's tan, her grey-fair hair is always pinned up in an untidy fashion with a crooked butterfly clip. As she was in London, she'd honoured the occasion with a daub of make-up: face powder that was too pale, mascara that was too dark, lipstick that didn't fit her mouth. She wore a loose dress and jacket which coordinated mostly by accident and the embroidered pashmina I'd given her four or five years ago. In addition, she had odd earrings, one necklace set with garnets and another with a yellow sapphire pendant, and an assortment of rings which had survived decades of grubbing in flowerbeds. I'd tried occasionally to smarten her up, since she's good-looking in an older, country-mum, don't-give-a-damn sort of way, but although she would conscientiously wear anything I gave her (
vide
the pashmina) it never made any difference to the overall impression.

She brought my father into the conversation casually, without hesitation or awkwardness. Instead of the husband who'd deserted her and her children, leaving his own parents to offer the financial support he should have supplied, he might have been a rather tiresome distant relative who had turned up out of the blue to make a nuisance of himself. A relative with a blood-is-thicker-than-water claim on her which she acknowledged out of duty or mere habit.

‘He phoned me,' she said, ‘after he left Dunblair. He doesn't change, you know. He expected me to sympathise because his daughters had rejected him. Said Pan was an ugly overgrown brat with no manners – what
did
she say to him? – and either I'd played him false or made a real mess of her upbringing. I said I was afraid it was the second option; it's tough being a single parent. So he went on about how hard it had been for him, after Véronique died. Poor sod, he obviously adored Natalie, and she must have played him like a fish, till she chucked him back in the pond for good.'

‘How can you be sorry for him?' I said. It was a question I'd never asked before.

She smiled. ‘Look at him now, getting older and not liking it, lonely and sad, chasing his own tail trying to find someone to love him. It's a pathetic picture. Poor old Roddy. He was so charming once – till I saw beneath the surface. Charm, the real thing, comes from the heart; his was only skin-deep. He's weak, superficial, not too bright. I used to worry you might turn out like him, though you're a lot smarter, but fortunately you've got less charm, more depth. Glad about that.'

‘Thanks,' I said tartly. Mummy's never been one to lavish praise on her daughters.

‘I'm your mother; I'm not here to massage your ego. You're pretty successful these days – you can find plenty of people to do that.'

‘Did – father – say I'd rejected him too?' I resumed.

‘Not precisely, but he's decided it was your fault he had to leave Dunblair. I gather you fell out with the Spanish woman – HG's latest wife. Not surprised: John says she's a nightmare. Basilisa the Basilisk. Roddy went on and on about how he'd really hit it off with HG, how matey they were getting, how your tactlessness messed up everything. Said he was thinking of having a chat with the papers about you – apparently he's been approached by a couple of hacks – but I turned him off the idea.'

‘How?'

‘Pointed out he'd upset HG, might lay himself open to legal action. Also said the press had been in touch with me. He didn't like that at all.'

‘
Have
they?' I asked, shocked.

‘Of course not, but they might have been. Anyway, there are two sides to the story and he knows it. He's almost sure I wouldn't sell mine – but not quite. He manages to like himself most of the time without too much effort, but there are moments when an inkling of the truth gets through. He can't deal with that. The possibility of being confronted with himself in the national press really scares him.' She took a mouthful of Pomerol. ‘Still, we don't want to go there. Once the mud-slinging starts, everyone gets dirty. It wouldn't do you any good, in the public eye or in private. He's your father, after all. You have to put up with him.'