Authors: Wendy Holden
It was their second date and, imagining it would be romantic, Anna had suggested they went to see a film. The intervening several months since her last visit to the cinema had, however, obliterated its universal laws from her mind. Such as the one dictating that, directly after she took her seat, the Person With the Biggest Head in the World would sit down slap bang in front of her. And then that the Person With the Noisiest Sweet Wrappers in the World would arrive to sit directly behind her. Thus flanked, Anna spent the whole of the film stiff with rage and frustration, or cringing with embarrassment during the sex scenes. Meanwhile Jamie, back like a ramrod beside her, didn’t as much as move his hand to take hers. The few sneaked sideways glances she dared to steal showed his profile, rigid and tight-lipped, staring stonily at the screen in front of him. The last straw had been that the film—one of the must-sees of the moment—was worse than terrible. Its cheesy plot, impossible twists, gratuitous sex, and utterly unbelievable and unsympathetic characters almost, Anna thought, made it comparable to Cassandra’s worst.
“I’m so sorry,” she gasped afterwards, as they filed down a back staircase which, like all cinema back staircases, stank of urine. “That film was
desperate
.
You must think I’m a moron.”
“Actually, I didn’t notice,” Jamie, all gallantry, reassured her. “To tell you the truth, I was thinking about the drainage.”
“The
what
?”
Had the reek of urine wafted into the cinema as well? She thought she had smelt something else unpleasant, but imagined that to be connected with the bowel movements of the Person With the Biggest Head in the World, from whose direction the smell seemed to be seeping.
“The drainage at Dampie,” Jamie explained. “It needs replacing.”
Anna sighed. “Let’s go and eat something, shall we?” she said. “There’s a Pizza Express round the corner.”
Clad in the three-piece suit he had also worn for their last date, Jamie looked slightly out of place among the tourists in their pastel polo shirts. He glanced, irritated, down the list of elaborately named pizzas, discounted them all, and asked for lasagne. Afterwards, Anna watched as he unenthusiastically pushed a hard disc of individually portioned vanilla ice-cream around his plate. “Looks like a breast implant, doesn’t it?” she grinned.
Jamie looked from her to the ice-cream. “Does it?” he asked, looking both puzzled and disgusted.
***
“It’s a disaster,” Anna wailed to Geri as soon as the other nannies had left the café the next morning. “He spent the rest of the evening talking about flashing.”
“What?” Geri’s face darkened. “You mean…
macs
and things?”
“No.” Anna permitted herself a faint smile. “The lead flashing on the roof at Dampie. Needs doing, along with everything else, apparently. He’s obsessed with that place.”
Geri sighed. “Sweetie, it could be much worse. Better that he’s obsessed with something glamorous like his ancestral home than
trains
or
football
or something. Or,” she grimaced, “DIY. I once had a boyfriend who…”
Anna cut in. She wasn’t in the mood to hear about yet another of Geri’s erstwhile swains. “Well it is DIY of a sort,” she retorted. “I’m sure if there was a Do-It-All on Skul, he’d be down there every five minutes. And, from the sound of the place, so would I. Apparently there’s one pub on the whole island and the nearest M&S is in Inverness. Imagine what the clothes must be like.”
Geri looked stern. “I don’t think you’re approaching this quite the right way,” she said sharply. “Is Jamie or is Jamie not the best chance of escape you’re ever going to have? Don’t you want to get away from Cassandra? Don’t you want to get
married
?”
“
Married
?”
Anna echoed. “I…I can’t say I’d ever actually thought about it. I mean, I hardly know him. We’ve only had two dates…”
“The trouble with
you
,”
Geri began, as Anna’s back stiffened defensively, “is that you never think far ahead enough. What’s the point of you going out with Jamie unless you’ve decided what you want from him? Where’s your game plan?
Your
problem is that you just drift along. Take life by the balls, or you’ll just end up being taken for a ride.”
Anna squirmed. She wished Geri would drop her dictatorial tone. As a matter of fact, the thought of taking Jamie by the balls
had
crossed her mind, although not quite in the way Geri meant.
“You have to visualise the end result you want,” Geri stated firmly, grinding her spoon round and round in her coffee cup. “Approach each date like a board meeting—ground you need to cover, subjects discussed, etc., and make sure you prepare for
every eventuality
.
You’ve slept with him, of course?”
Anna recoiled, shocked. She felt her face flood a sizzling, mortified red. “Well, as a matter of fact, I haven’t,” she muttered. “There haven’t really been any opportunities.”
Geri was gazing at her in amazement.
What do you mean
,
there haven’t been opportunities
?
said her eyes.
You’ve been alone with him for two whole evenings
.
What do you think back rows of cinemas are for
?
People have sex in taxis
,
you know
.
What do you need
?
A four-poster bed and full set of love toys
?
In the event, however, Geri confined herself to an emphatic “Why not?”
“It’s just that,” Anna stammered, blushing ever more furiously and tearing the last corner of her croissant fanatically into pieces, “I’m not very good at sex, you see. Seb told his friends…um,” Anna flinched at the memory, “that I was like a corpse in bed.”
Geri’s eyes flashed fire. “Well, take it from me, sweetie, that there are some men out there who think having a corpse in bed is
very sexy
indeed.”
Anna sighed. She did not feel up to confessing that the corpse in question was a dog’s. And what was Geri suggesting anyway—that she target necrophiliacs?
“Look, don’t worry about all that,” Geri ordered. “I’ve got an idea. When did you say your next date was?”
Anna sighed, more deeply this time. “I didn’t. There isn’t one.”
***
Anna drove home, wondering if Geri was right. Part of her thought that perhaps she
didn’t
control her own destiny enough. Part of her thought she’d got into enough trouble already by allowing Geri to, but given that Seb had practically thrown her out, working for Cassandra had been a good idea at the time.
That, of course, had turned out to be an utter dead end. But perhaps if she had insisted more…As Geri was fond of saying, a tad defensively, “It
was a
good idea. It
might
have worked.” But now it hadn’t, Anna felt powerless to do anything about it. She was too exhausted, for one thing. Having the self-esteem of a lugworm didn’t help either.
Perhaps Jamie was the answer to all her prayers. She was strongly attracted to him, but it was very early days and she hadn’t thought—hadn’t dared think—of him as a potential husband and saviour. But was that symptomatic of her general lack of direction? Perhaps a great opportunity was staring her in the face—although she had noticed Jamie seemed reluctant to look her in the eyes
for too long.
Anna bit a nail on one hand as she absently steered the minivan with the other. Her heart sank as she contemplated last night’s date. What exactly had gone wrong? The dreadful film with the faint, seeping smell of fart from the stalls in front? The painful scares over the pizza later, when the conversation had dried up to such an extent they had been reduced to discussing the number of regional Pizza Express branches listed on the back of the menu? The way he had, after stabbing quickly at her cheek with his lips in farewell, shrugged his broad shoulders as if to apologise for wasting both their time? It seemed, Anna thought, vaguely conscious of having jumped a red light, as if it was less a case of what had gone wrong. More what had gone right.
Her heart sank still further when she entered Liv to find Cassandra lurking in the hallway. Her eyes
were blazing with fury—or possibly alcohol; the difference, after all, was minuscule.
“Hello, Cassandra,” Anna ventured. She’d better try and make the best of it now. After all, she’d blown her one good chance of escape. As Cassandra raked her up and down with her glittering gaze, Anna instantly felt all wrong, despite the fact that her employer was the one wearing a bathrobe and had obviously only just got up.
“Message for you,” she spat, stabbing at a piece of paper by the telephone. Anna tried to walk as composedly as she could in Cassandra’s direction. After all, it might only be the bank manager, thwarted by Anna’s persistent inability to address her financial problems by mail. Unlikely. There was only one person in Anna’s life that Cassandra would be sufficiently interested in to take a message from. Anna picked up the paper. The name, written in wildly veering handwriting—no wonder Cassandra used a laptop—was not the one she had been expecting.
“
Johnny
?”
she repeated, puzzled.
“Your…er…
admirer
,”
Cassandra snarled. “Just called about a minute ago. Wanted your address.”
“My
address
?”
But Jamie had picked her up from Liv only last night. “Here, you mean?”
Cassandra’s eyes narrowed. She shrugged. “No idea,” she drawled. “He called this morning as well, now I come to think of it. Zak took the message. I heard him telling whoever it was that you didn’t live here anymore.
Such
a sense of humour, that boy.” She swept off, grinning, into the sitting room and Anna, still standing stunned in the hall, heard the familiar clink of bottles. Cassandra reappeared unsteadily in the sitting-room doorway. “To Romance,” she announced theatrically, raising her tumbler in the air.
***
It was two evenings later. Anna, taking the small flight of steps to the left of the garden as instructed, found herself facing a neat little door painted a glowing lavender blue. She pressed the small gold bell and waited.
“Geri! It’s gorgeous.” Anna stepped under the recessed spotlights beaming down into the smart, white-painted hallway. “Is all this really yours?”
Geri nodded nonchalantly. “It’s the granny flat. Only both Kate and Julian have such rich mothers that they don’t need it. So now it’s the nanny flat.” Walking down the hall, Anna glimpsed both a shining white bathroom and a roomy bedroom with powder blue bedding piled on a white iron bedstead before Geri showed her into a small, neat sitting room with big squashy sofas. The faint scent of lavender drifted over from a scented candle on an oak coffee table whose sturdy little legs nestled into a fat sheepskin rug. On another side table sat the state-of-the-art answerphone, next to a charging-up mobile.
“I can’t believe it,” Anna gasped, noting the low lighting and the fashionable slatted wooden blinds at the big windows, and recalling her own stark boxroom with its bare bulb and curtainless, bird-spattered panes. She sank gratefully into the sofa’s comforting embrace. It seemed like—indeed, it had been—ages since she had sat on anything so luxurious. Cassandra’s chrome tractor-seat kitchen stools, for all their stylishness, were about as comfortable and supportive as their owner.
“Drink?” At the back of the room, below a large, spotless, frameless mirror, Geri was rummaging in an antique-looking box with brass fittings. “Birthday present from Savannah and Siena,” she said, seeing Anna looking at it. “An eighteenth-century tea chest, although I like to keep something a bit stronger than Earl Grey in it. And boy, do I need a drink today. G and T?”
“I’d rather have vodka, if you have it.” Gin and tonic, formerly one of Anna’s favourites, was now too reminiscent of Cassandra. “Why do
you
need a drink? What’s up?” Geri rarely, if ever, seemed stressed.
“Slight turbulence at the high tea table.” Lighting a Marlboro, Geri blew smoke from her nostrils like the con trail from a plane. “Savannah finished everything on her plate. Kate went
ballistic
!”
“What’s wrong with that? Isn’t that what children are supposed to do?” Apart, she thought, from Zak, who took the view that eating anything she had cooked was tantamount to expressing affection for her and invented excuses not to, ranging from “it looks like dogshit” to “it’s got bugs.” Anna had come to derive an intense comfort from this—there was always the hope he might die from malnutrition.
“They’re only ever supposed to eat half of everything,” Geri explained. “Kate’s strict instructions. If they eat everything on their plate they only get half as much at their next meal. She’s terrified they’re going to grow up fat. She won’t let them have any sweets and once even tried to convince them that sugar was salt so they wouldn’t develop a sweet tooth. Needless to say, as soon as they’re away from the house they’re
desperate
for chocolate.”
She inhaled deeply and blew smoke out of her nose again. “Anyway, enough of that. The main thing is, he’s called you again.”
Anna grinned. Kicking her shoes off, she hugged her knees excitedly on the sofa. “Not exactly. I called him.”
Geri frowned. “That’s not in the Rules,” she said. “The man should always call you. Treat him mean and…”
“I
know
.
But I didn’t have much choice. Zak told him I’d left the country. Thank
God
for one four seven one. I managed to get Jamie’s number just before Cassandra staggered out of the sitting room again and caught me.”
“Good thinking.” Geri looked at her approvingly. “So, down to business. How much time do we have before you’re meeting him?”
“Two hours. Pasha at nine.”
“
Pasha
?
Hope he’s paying.”
“My treat,” Anna said firmly. “After all, I made the call. And he paid for the pizza.”
“Big fucking deal,” said Geri, looking considerably less approving. “So, let’s get to work. This way to the bedroom.”
***