Bad Heir Day (27 page)

Cassandra had not, from the moment she had arrived in Scotland, seen any need whatsoever to drop her standards of dress. If Scottish women’s idea of style was something that didn’t show the cat hairs, that was fine by her, as long as she wasn’t expected to follow suit. Especially if the suit was tweed, a fabric hideously reminiscent of Mrs. Gosschalk. Cassandra was prepared to go as far as cashmere, but no further. Unless you were talking pashmina.

She pushed open the toilet-glass door. A fug of smoke and a deafening silence greeted her. Cassandra swallowed on catching sight of the occupants. She’d never seen such a collection of inbreds—at least, not since the last St. Midas’s sports day.

Letting the door slam loudly behind her, Cassandra crossed the thick, dusty, and hostile space between the threshold and the bar. “A glass of mineral water, please,” she commanded. From beneath brows so protruding they seemed almost to need scaffolding, the landlord shot her a suspicious look. Unbowed, Cassandra met it with a freezing stare.

“We daen’t have
mineral water
,”
he growled. “This is a pub. Nae a
health farm
.”

“
That
,”
Cassandra snapped back, “is obvious enough.” She fixed the landlord with a gimlet eye, aware that this was a trial of sorts, a test of nerve.
High Noon
,
although her current Cooper aspirations were rather more Jilly than Gary.

“No mineral water—that’s
ridiculous
.”
Cassandra’s eye did not move from mine host’s. “You’re missing out on a potential
gold mine
.
Only last week I took my son to a restaurant where there was a mineral water
menu
.
You could,” Cassandra blasted, “mix two or even
three
different waters in the
same glass
to make a
cocktail
.”

The landlord looked stonier than ever, but Cassandra did not flinch. Mine host indeed.
Mean
host, more like. She recognised this belligerent, macho, brazen-it-out stare. It reminded her of Jett, which, free association being what it is, also reminded her of Jett being so
bloody inconsiderate
as to hit number one at the precise time she had chosen to divorce him. The memory packed her backbone with ice and her voice with fire.

“Well, as you haven’t got any
mineral water
,”
she hissed, “I’ll have a
Diet Coke
.”

Somewhere in the depths beneath the bar counter, mean host detached the tab from a can with a venomous rip.

A few minutes later, as she tottered, drink in hand, across the rickety, sawdust-and-fag-strewn wooden floor, Cassandra stopped dead. The room, which had started to murmur to itself again, immediately fell silent. The ice cubes clanked belligerently together in Cassandra’s glass as she turned and hit the landlord straight between the eyes with a glare like a laser.

“This is
not
Diet Coke.” She stalked back to the bar and slammed her drink down on its sticky surface. Mine host took an involuntary step back. “
This
,”
Cassandra snarled, brandishing the glass, her face a mask of cold fury, “is
fat
Coke. Which means”—she leant over the bar, pressing her face as close to the alarmed landlord’s as she could—“that you have
knowingly
force fed me a total of
one hundred and twenty calories
I had not allowed for.
Force fed
me.
Without my say-so
,
permission
,
or go-ahead
.”
She waited, then delivered the coup de grâce. “For all you know, I could be a
diabetic
,” she roared at the by now quite openly cowering landlord. “
I could sue you
.”

She’d forgotten how good it felt to reduce a man to rubble. Ten minutes later, Cassandra sat, satisfied and reflective, in an inglenook by the pub’s rather
odd
fire which seemed to be burning strips of lawn. A rather sorry-looking blaze, on the whole. But nowhere near, Cassandra thought triumphantly, as sorry as the landlord had looked when she’d finished with him. After the magic word “sue” had been uttered, he’d showered Cassandra with every gin bottle in the house in an attempt to placate her.

Cassandra had decided to limit herself to one sip only. Just for appearance’s sake. Just to be polite. It was the least she could do. After the way she had just humiliated him, the landlord would probably have to sell up and leave, or bear the tale’s constant repetition for the next thousand years or so. Probably nothing so exciting had happened since Mel Gibson had dropped by in the thirteenth century to raise his troops.

She took a sip. And then another. Was there anything
quite
like that powerful shot of juniper-infused spirit ricocheting round one’s empty intestines? It was, Cassandra thought, finishing her third double in as many minutes, like the blissful reunion of lovers after many months apart. Like herself and
A Passionate Lover
,
in fact. With his
pulsating
,
throbbing
,
tumescent
,
fluorescent cock—
no,
no
,
that couldn’t be right. Perhaps
pulsating
wasn’t really the right word after all. If only she had a tyrannosaurus to look it up in. Funny how she couldn’t seem to think anymore. Again.

Plastering on her best grin, Cassandra leant over and shook the ancient, shrunken character slumped the other side of the inglenook, a white river of saliva running steadily down into his beard. “
Shcuse
me,” she boomed in a loud, shrill voice as MacLoggie lurched, terrified, back into wakefulness. Silence dropped like a stone on the rest of the bar. “Wonder if you could help me. Could you tell me…have you notished…Doesh your penis ever pulsate, throb, swell, and
tumesh
all at the shame time?”

Stretching away on all sides, the wiry russet grass made the island seem like the broad back of a massive Highland cow. Anna had been walking for hours now, higher and higher, striding furiously so the pounding of the blood in her brain would be louder than the cacophony of her thoughts. She paused, panting.

Below her, the loch opened up like a giant silver oyster; beyond, the sea stretched into misty infinity, the horizon hidden by a grey stretch of storm cloud. It was, as usual, raining. Anna sat down at the summit and peered into the distance. She could see the village from here, the odd person—very odd person probably—moving about, and wondered if what Robbie had told her the previous day was true, about the island being cut off from civilisation for the first half of the century and its inhabitants having to mate with whatever came to hand. “They screwed anything. Animal, vegetable, or mineral.” Anna had wondered aloud what mineral Nanny’s mother had screwed. Robbie’s claim that she had been a Gloucestershire Old Spot didn’t quite ring true. Had he said Lincolnshire White, though, that would have been quite different.

She twisted her lips in what was half-smile, half-grimace. Geri’s lack of sympathy made her feel both vulnerable and foolish, her despairing stride round the island seemed increasingly the self-aggrandising act of a drama queen. Lear, of course, had strode the blasted heath in a much more convincing manner, but he
had
lost a whole kingdom and he
did
have Shakespeare arguing his case, which obviously helped. He’d never had to cope with Geri telling him to pull himself together and concentrate on the business opportunities.

But, loath as Anna was to admit it, in some ways Geri was right. Nanny
was
an annoying old monster but she was hardly life-threatening, even if she undoubtedly represented a higher than usual risk of salmonella. Even more irritatingly, Geri was right about Jamie. He hadn’t deliberately lied to her, there had just been facts he hadn’t bothered to reveal. Economical with the actualité, if you liked. As well as everything else. She hadn’t felt warm since she’d got here. And there had been bottles on the drinks tray whose only known exact contemporaries were in the wreck of the
Titanic
.

And it
was
pointless to blame everything on the engagement. After all, she’d been willing enough to go along with it; she, too, as Jamie had pointed out, had had her agenda. They were quits then, in a sense. And it was probably just as well she had found out that she was about to plight her troth to a pile of old stones before she did so. The love of Jamie’s life was undoubtedly Dampie; last night, he had been wildly excited by Geri’s increasingly drunken suggestions—about the castle, of course—especially her recommendation that he try and turn Dampie into the Glastonbury of the north and promote it as a rock venue. “Imagine,” Geri had shouted up into the chilly rafters of the sitting room, which no heat had penetrated since the great summer of 1538, “you could have floating stages in the loch.” Floodlight the castle in pink and purple. Have fireworks. It would be
amazing
.”

And then there were Geri’s other suggestions. The ones she had made to Anna over the cold egg on toast. It might be possible to stay at Dampie with Jamie and just be friends. But could she really settle for so little?

As for the taking lovers proposal, well, that really
was
foolish. Only someone, like Geri, who had been on the island a mere matter of hours, could have failed to notice the howling absence of suitable partners on Skul. The bearded poet suddenly slipped into her mind;
yes, Robbie
might
have been a possibility. Witty, sensitive, poetic; she could tick all those boxes, but there was the problem of that permanent bad hair day on the end of his chin. Try as she might, Anna could never love a man with facial fungus, especially grown to that extent. It was impossible to imagine kissing him—she’d probably come out in a rash with the friction. Still, it was probably very useful for scouring pans.

Yes, thought Anna, looking over the wide, low-lit, sea-girt land around her, I should definitely stick to writing books rather than trying to live them. Somewhere along the line she had, quite literally, lost the plot. Whatever spanners Fate had thrown in her works in the past, at least she had always had her writing. It had comforted her through Seb, encouraged her through Cassandra. But since becoming engaged to Jamie, it had disappeared altogether. She thought ruefully of the diary buried in the rubbish bin.

Once she was writing again—and this time she planned actually to finish the wretched thing—everything else would fall into place, even if she had doubts that that place was Dampie. But that all lay in the future. Time now to get herself back on track. She would write, she needed to write; all she required was a little prod in the right direction. A little encouragement. She looked at her watch. She’d been here
hours
.
But if she hurried, she could get to the village hall in time for Robbie MacAskill’s afternoon class.

***

“
Fuck me
.
Fuck me
.
I want you to come inside me, big boy. Fuck me
hard
.”

Anna, about to push open the door of the village hall, drew back in embarrassed astonishment. The voice was a woman’s. Soft, Scots, and urgent with lust.

“That’s
fantastic
,
Mrs. McLeod. Don’t stop.”
Robbie
.
Anna’s stomach plunged with disappointment. For some reason, possibly the beard, it had never occurred to her that there might be a woman in Robbie’s life. Yet here he was with Mrs. McLeod, going at it like a steam train. A steam iron even. It might only be—Anna glanced at her wrist—a quarter to two, but presumably on Skul one had to get ones kicks where and when one could.

“I’m
wet
,”
the voice continued. Anna felt white-hot knives of jealousy plunging into her stomach. There was, she realised, nothing like competition to make you realise you liked someone. And
what
competition. “Just
feel
how wet I am,” Mrs. McLeod panted. “I’m a
river
down here. Taste it, here, lick it off me.
Oh
,
fuck
me.
Harder
.
I want you to come
like a fire hose
.”

Well, it certainly gave a whole new meaning to ironing board cover, thought Anna. What on earth did Mrs. McLeod look like, she wondered—a wild-haired Hebridean Carmen, no doubt, full-breasted, with a lusty glint in her eye. I should go, Anna thought as the Hebridean Carmen began once again to speak.

“Panting, running her tongue round her wet lips, and staring at him through hazel eyes glazed with lust, she ripped off her shirt. Her breasts sprang out like dogs let out for a walk—”

“Hang on a minute, Mrs. McLeod. I’m not sure that’s working. The image of dogs being let out for a walk is
slightly
at odds with the rest of the passage. And I’m not too wild about that fire hose either.”

“Are ye not, Mr. MacAskill?”

“No, well, the whole point of this exercise is to read aloud to see what works and what doesn’t,” said Robbie, completely matter-of-factly. “The problem with very erotic passages often is that they can sound slightly, well,
excessive
.
The trick is to err on the side of believability. Otherwise you end up being awarded things like the
Literary Review
Bad Sex Award, which I don’t think you’d appreciate, Mrs. McLeod. Not least because you’d have to go to London to receive it, and you know what you think of England.”

“Particularly when you lie back,” Anna murmured as, grinning in relief, she pushed the door wide open.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said, “but better to come late than never to come at all. As I’m sure Mrs. McLeod would agree—” she stopped short in amazement. “
You’ve shaved your beard off
.”

He looked so much
better
,
she thought admiringly. Years
younger
.
The excavations revealed a firm jaw and a wide, full-lipped, sensual mouth in the context of which the tombstone teeth looked considerably less fearsome. Rather than a handsome face, Robbie’s was a strong and a rather heroic one. The sort that remained set in the midst of the most violent hail or blizzard. The sort you could imagine rocks bouncing off.

Robbie clamped a hand to his naked chin and grinned sheepishly. “Yes. Thought it was getting a wee bit out of control. Any longer and I’d have needed a chainsaw to do it. Used up the village shop’s entire stock of Gillettes as it was. No one’s going to be able to shave their legs for a week until the new delivery comes over from Inverness. Sorry about that, Mrs. McLeod. Oh, have you met Mrs. McLeod,
Anna
…”

Hearing his low, warm voice pronounce her name was unexpectedly delicious. Suddenly aware she was gawping at Robbie like an idiot, Anna turned to shake hands. Mrs. McLeod was not the expected hair-tossing femme fatale, thrusting of breast, flashing of eye, and bent on removing local underwear for purposes entirely other than ironing, but a small, neatly-dressed woman, the only flashing thing about whom were small mauve-rimmed glasses. The only hint of Carmen about her was her hot-rollered, home-permed hair; to Anna’s amazement, she looked well over sixty. Her prose, it would seem, was just as blue as her rinse. And, far from being an avid leg-shaver, her lower calves were covered with thick stockings. In short, Mrs. McLeod looked as if she thought a leg wax was something one did to the nether regions of a dining table. She was also blushing violently.

“We’re just going through Mrs. McLeod’s new chapter,” Robbie explained.

“So I heard. I thought it was wonderful,” Anna said sincerely. “
Very
sexy.”

Mrs. McLeod looked traumatised. Anna stared at her carefully. What on earth could this timid creature know about breasts bursting forth like dogs let out for a run and ejaculations like fire extinguishers? Certainly it made one keenly curious about
Mr
.
McLeod.

“No, but I mean it,” Anna assured her, as Mrs. McLeod shook her head. “You should be proud of it. I thought it was terribly good. And for what it’s worth, I
adored
the bit about the fire hose.” Anna had forgotten how one could discuss the most extraordinarily intimate things under the flag of literature. Her university days had included a number of racy tutorial sessions, including a particularly graphic one on the Metaphysical poets which had certainly put the semen in seminar. She would not have imagined that could be so spectacularly eclipsed by a discussion of firefighting equipment in a church hall on a Scottish island.

“Mrs. McLeod is very shy about her work,” Robbie said, somewhat unnecessarily. “But she shows enormous promise.”

Anna was touched and impressed by Robbie’s determination to encourage what was possibly his only student. No wonder, with attendance like this, he had been so keen that she should come. But was that, it suddenly, miserably occurred to her, the
only
reason?

“As now, being three, we constitute a crowd,” Robbie declared, gesturing Anna to one of the hard wooden chairs scattered around the bare and rather cheerless hall, “I’m going to give a reading from another work. I thought it would be valuable for Mrs. McLeod to hear how another author has handled sex.”

Anna swallowed. Her lower bowels seemed to be in a constant state of excitement; either Nanny’s champit tatties had had a deleterious effect or, suddenly, she fancied Robbie like mad.

She watched him as he rummaged in his battered leather briefcase and produced a bundle of paper, watched him clear his strong throat and run his deliciously clean-looking pink tongue over thick, dry lips before proceeding. She liked the way his mouth curled upwards when he spoke, as if he was constantly amused. Most of all, in profound contrast to Seb for example, she liked the way he didn’t seem to take the whole subject of sex too seriously. The main amusement Seb seemed to have got out of it, Anna recalled, was laughing at
her
.

As Robbie began to read, Anna wrinkled her brow. The words sounded oddly familiar. As his voice rumbled, soft and low, never stumbling on or mispronouncing a single word, horror began to seep through her.
They were her words
.
Robbie was reading
from her diary
.
Uncertain what to do, blushing furiously, she gazed at the surface of the table at which she sat with Mrs. McLeod.
How the hell had he got hold of it
?
And did he know she had written it
?

She sat in stupefied silence and listened, unsure of what else to do. Unsure of what, exactly, the etiquette was when hearing ones most intimate and private thoughts read out in public. It was a miserable experience, not least because Robbie had picked a passage dating from a particularly unhappy period of her relationship with Seb, in which Anna had reflected on her own sexual inadequacy. She had, she remembered, originally written it in a self-deprecating way, trying it out as a possible passage for future use. Listening to it now she was struck only by the pain in the words, the sadness, and the sense of humiliation and betrayal beneath the thin surface of wry humour.

As a contrast to Mrs. McLeod’s fire extinguisher, it could not have been more profound and, as she listened, Anna felt a black tide of remembered misery welling up inside. Seb had been
such
a brute; listening to this rawly autobiographical account of their worst time together, Anna doubted whether her self-esteem would ever recover. No wonder, having gone through this, she had submitted meekly to Cassandra’s excesses and leapt for Jamie as a drowning man might seize a lifebelt.

“
Brute
,”
gasped Mrs. McLeod, blowing her nose loudly as Robbie finished reading.

“That,” he announced, “is the work of an extremely talented writer who understands completely that comedy and tragedy are often almost the same thing.” Anna was amazed to see that Robbie’s eyes, too, were shining slightly brighter than before.