Bad Heir Day (3 page)

“It is. All the men are gay and all the women are gorgeous. The competition’s too stiff.”

“But you look great,” Anna said. Certainly, her new friend hardly looked the shrinking violet type when it came to men. The only thing shrunken and violet about her, in fact, was the tiny lilac cashmere cardigan out of whose casually unbuttoned front a pair of tanned and generous breasts rose like the morning sun. Even in the dim light her smile was electric, emphasised by plum-coloured lipstick applied with architectural precision.

“Thanks. As the lady said, it takes a lot of money to look this cheap.” The girl grinned, smoothing a black satin skirt slit the entire length of her thigh over her slender hips. She flicked a heavily mascara’d glance around the room. “It’s nice someone appreciates it. No one else seems to.” A precision-plucked eyebrow shot peevishly upwards. “Can’t say I’m too thrilled about having schlepped all the way up here,” she added. “I only came because I was told this wedding would be thick with millionaires. But I suppose”—she lit up a cigarette—“they were right about the thick bit.”

The girl blew smoke out in two streams from her nose. “And the
women…
” She stabbed her cigarette in the direction of Strawberry, who had suddenly reappeared and was glaring at Brie and Seb smooching to “(Everything I Do) I Do It For You.” “Look at
that
.
Hair like a badger’s
arse
.”

Anna looked determinedly away from the dance floor and bulldozed a grin across her face. “Quite. I’m Anna, by the way.”

“Geri. Lead me to the drinks. If I can’t bag an heir, hair of the dog will have to do.”

“Then there was Hugh.” Geri struck the manicured pinnacle of her middle finger. “Gynaecologist. Met him at a BUPA checkup—it always pays to go private. Said I had the prettiest cervix he’d ever seen. Saved me a fortune on smear tests and breast examinations.”

“Oh?” said Anna unsteadily. Geri had located the source of the champagne bottles behind a curtain beside the blazing hearth in the hall, grabbed three, and withdrawn with them and Anna to an alcove. Endless warmish fizz plus endless highlights of Geri’s romantic history were proving a potent and anaesthetic brew. Even the sight of Seb grinding his pelvis into that of Brie de Benham was by now painless. More painless than for Seb probably, as the de Benham pelvis resembled two Cadillac fins and it could hardly have been comfortable up close. Seb, however, seemed to be rising to the occasion.

“Commitment problem,” said Geri.

“Absolutely,” said Anna, looking resignedly at Seb.

“Yes, except Hugh’s was that
I
wouldn’t commit,” said Geri, oblivious to the connection between Anna and the couple on the dance floor currently in the throes of “2-4-6-8 Motorway.”

“Wish I had now, really. But at the time, I wanted to play the field. Trouble is”—she rolled her long-lashed eyes—“if you play in the field, you come across a lot of shit. Like Guy, for example.”

“Guy?” With difficulty, Anna shifted her bovine stare from the disco.

“A very rich banker. Or
was
.
Complete ruthless shark. He was on the financial fast track until he got sacked.”

“Insider dealing?” Anna hoped she sounded worldly wise.

“Nothing quite so glamorous as that, I’m afraid. Someone in the office—everyone there hated him—changed his computer screensaver to say Fuck Off Cant. Unfortunately, Cant was the name of his immediate boss.” Geri paused and grinned. “But we did have other problems, particularly in bed. He could barely raise his eyebrows, let alone anything else.” She paused and sighed.

The disco, it suddenly dawned on Anna, had stopped. Everyone was milling about, many of them making a beeline for the cut-up wedding cake. This had suddenly arrived in their midst on plates borne by Jamie who looked on with contempt as two WAGs grabbed handfuls of icing and began to throw it at each other. Anna tried to catch his eye to throw him a sympathetic glance and perhaps experience that delicious frisson again, but, deliberately or otherwise, he failed to notice her. Wresting his wares from the WAGs, he disappeared into the crowd and was soon lost to sight. Resignedly, Anna tuned back into Geri.

“
Then
,”
Geri was saying, “there was James. Wanted sex three times a night at first.
Exhausting
.
Nightmare, in fact. Then, after we’d been together a few months it went down to twice a night. I couldn’t decide whether I was insulted or relieved. So I left him for Ivo. An academic.
Hopeless
.”

“Oh?” said Anna, interested. She’d once entertained academic ambitions herself. “Why was he hopeless?”

“Oh, not academically. He was one of the best in the world at ancient languages. He spoke fluent Aramaic which, apparently, is only of any use if you happen to meet Jesus.”

“So what happened?” asked Anna, grinning.

Geri sighed, “He was broke. And as far as I’m concerned, if there’s no dough, it’s no go. He could be awkward as well, which is no good either—you do it my way or hit the highway. But in the end, it was me who went. Took myself off to L.A. But now I’ve come back to London. Got offered this fantastic new job and there seemed no reason to turn it down.”

A ripple of misgiving slid coldly through Anna’s stomach. Her nose twitched suspiciously at the sweet smell of success.
A fantastic new job
.
Just as she had started to regard Geri as a soul mate, as someone doing just as badly as she was.

Further questioning was rendered impossible by a sudden commotion in the hall. As everyone began to arrange themselves into pairs, Anna realised that Scottish dancing was about to begin. She shrank back against the hard wooden settle on which they sat. She hated country dancing. There were few people she loathed more than the Dashing White Sergeant, and could imagine nothing less gay than the Gordons.

“A new job as what?” Anna had to shout to make herself heard as the fiddling struck up.

“Executive development,” Geri yelled back cheerfully, lighting up another cigarette. “Lots of travel, lots of responsibility. Lots of man management. A real challenge. I’m looking forward to it, although I must admit I was hoping to meet someone here who would save me the bother of working altogether. Anyway, enough about me. What do you do?”

“Oh, nothing much,” Anna bawled. “I’m trying to write a book, actually.” Hesitantly, then so fast that her words began to tumble over each other, she swiftly outlined her ambitions.

“That’s
brilliant
,”
screeched Geri. “Can I be in it? I’ve always wanted to be in a novel.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t got very far with it,” Anna shouted, feeling her voice beginning to break with the strain. “The trouble is, I’m not sure whether I’m any good or not. I think I need a bit of professional advice about the nuts and bolts of things.” It was as near as she planned to come to admitting that she had neither agent, publisher, nor reason to believe she could write anything more than a postcard.

On the dance floor, the stomping, clapping, and shrieking had intensified. “Ow,” yelled Geri as hairpins, shaken from their rightful positions by the frantic activity, began to fly in the direction of the oak settle. Brows streamed with perspiration, women’s breasts sprang free from their moorings. An excited-looking Seb shot by with a fetchingly rumpled Brie de Benham, their pupils the size of pinpoints.

“This is dangerous.” Geri was pulling someone’s
skean dhu
out of her cleavage. “Let’s get out of here.”

Too late. The unmistakable form of Orlando Gossett, red-faced and polychromatic, was shoving its way purposefully through the heaving crowd towards their alcove like a vast tartan Sherman tank. “Would you,” he asked, addressing Geri’s cleavage, “do me the honour of partnering me for this dansh?”

Grasping Geri’s thin brown arm in his plump, pink palm, he dragged her to her feet. With no time to do more than roll her eyes, Geri tottered after him and plunged into the heaving quicksand of the crowd.

Suddenly aware that tiredness was crashing over her in huge waves, Anna decided to try once more to locate her room. Numbed by the champagne, she felt too tired to mind that Seb—no longer visible among the dancers—would almost certainly not be joining her in it. It took several goes to extract Miranda from the whirling crowd, but Anna eventually secured directions bedwards; her progress through a series of dark corridors this time sadly unimpeded by dark-eyed young men.

Unlocking the door of her room, Anna had a vague impression of high ceilings and a four-poster bed silvered with moonlight before passing out with sheer exhaustion not to mention sheer alcohol. Hours later, she woke up. It was still dark but something was scrabbling at the door. The empty mattress stretched away beside her. Could it, at last, be Seb? Struggling out of bed, falling over her clothes and shoes on the way to the door, Anna opened it to reveal, not Seb, but Miranda leaning against the lintel. The formerly radiant bride now looked distinctly the worse for wear. Her ivory wedding dress, the epitome of taste and restraint mere hours ago, was now smeared here and there with smudges and stains. Such was the devastation wrought on her once-magnificent white cathedral-length veil that, stunted, ugly, and blackened, it was now more Methodist chapel. She cast an agonised glance at Anna, muttered something about needing a lie-down, and disappeared into the gloomy nether regions of the corridor.

Next morning, at breakfast, Anna was disappointed to see that Jamie was not presiding over the chafing dishes. Instead, a couple of Australian hired helps as wide as they were tall slammed the lids cheerfully on and off dishes of scrambled eggs and mackerel with a clang reverberating round the alcohol-swollen brains of all present.

Seb’s brain—or what remained of it following what had clearly been a night of literally staggering excess—was so swollen that he was still in bed. He had appeared with the dawn, thankfully not with Brie de Benham, but inebriated beyond belief and surprisingly, unwelcomingly randy. Happily, his attempts to force his attentions on Anna were interrupted several times by his dashing to the bathroom to vomit—“drive the porcelain bus” as he called it. In the end, much to Anna’s relief, he gave up and spent the rest of the night groaning for reasons that had little to do with ecstasy.

About five chairs away down the long dining table, Thoby slumped over his breakfast looking greyer at the gills than the mackerel he was pushing resignedly round his plate. Eventually, he put his fork down, his head in his hands, and emitted what sounded oddly like a groan. The memory of Miranda despairing at her door the night before confirmed Anna’s suspicions that the wedding night had not been a brilliant success. Sympathetically, she steered her stare away from Thoby and focused on her surroundings instead.

Dampie Castle seemed to be entirely enveloped in a cloud. The windows of the dining room were long and elegant, even though the view outside bore a strong resemblance to that usually enjoyed by aeroplane passengers five minutes out of Gatwick. Nothing was visible apart from an ectoplasmic mist that pressed up against the panes and extended as far as the eye could see, which was not very far at all. The view inside, on the other hand, was pure old school patrician—long mahogany tables, towering bookcases, a vast armorial fireplace, and several patricians of indeterminate purity from Seb’s old school. Anna was just beginning to wonder whether his condition was terminal when someone suddenly slammed a plate down on the next worn Scenes of Scotland place mat and threw herself into the chair beside her.

“What a night,” said Geri, whom Anna had not seen since she disappeared to Strip the Willow with Orlando Gossett. She had spent the night hoping that was all Geri had stripped, but it appeared she had hoped in vain. Visions of large wardrobes with keys sticking out came flooding to mind.

“Oh dear.” Anna swallowed hard. It really didn’t bear thinking about. “Don’t think about it,” she counselled.

Geri put her fork down, her face as white as her unwarmed plate. “Well, I’m trying not to, only there are about a million bruises to remind me.”

Anna swallowed. “He wasn’t, well,
violent
,
was he?”

Geri stared at her. “
Violent
?
The man’s a fucking Neanderthal. He practically threw me round the floor, stamped repeatedly on my new Jimmy Choos, knocked out one of my contact lenses, and then,
then
,
he tried to get me to
sleep
with him. Can you imagine?”

“No,” said Anna, even though she had.

“He couldn’t understand why I
wouldn’t
sleep with him though. Came over all indignant and said, ‘I haven’t got AIDS, you know.’ ‘Don’t
worry
,’ I said. ‘I
believe
you.’”

“So how did you get rid of him?”

“Simple.” Geri probed her fish with her fork. “Told him I was going to the bathroom. I just didn’t mention I meant
my
bathroom in
my
room and I had no intention of coming down again.”

“Ah,” said Anna.

“But eventually I decided to sneak back down,” Geri confessed, looking strangely furtive. “Had rather a good time in the end…” Her voice trailed off. “Anyway,” she added briskly. “I’ve had a brilliant idea. About you.”

“About
me
?”
Anna felt a vague sense of panic. It seemed rather early for ideas. And hadn’t Oscar Wilde said something about only dull people being brilliant at breakfast?

“Remember, management consultancy is what I do,” said Geri confidently. “I’m paid to advise people on how to run their professional lives better. And I’ve got just the solution for you.”

“You have?”

“Sure,” said Geri, abandoning the mackerel and flinging her fork down with a flourish. “What you need is an apprenticeship.”

Dickensian visions of workshops and boy sweeps loomed before Anna. “You mean long stands and striped paint?”

“Of course not. Stop being so rigid in your definitions,” commanded Geri. “The first principle of management consultancy is creative thinking. I’m talking about a particular sort of apprenticeship. A
bestseller
apprenticeship.”

“But where do they do those?”

“Lateral thinking,” said Geri, tapping her forehead with a fingernail which, for all the night’s traumas, remained impeccably manicured. “You need to find a writer who needs help. Be their dogsbody. Do their errands, take their post, make their life run smoothly. And in return…”

“They’ll show me how they do it,” said Anna slowly, catching the thread of thought. Her alcohol-sodden brain suddenly sparked into life like a match. “Or at the very least, I can pick up the nuts and bolts of it. Chapter construction, how one gets an agent, the different publishing houses…”

Geri nodded. “Exactly.”

“Oh Geri, that’s a
fantastic
idea.”

Just then, Orlando Gossett entered the room and glided swiftly towards the chafing dishes. Having piled his plate high with eggs and fish, he turned his attention to finding somewhere to sit.

“Head down,” Geri muttered, suddenly taking an intense interest in her Stirling Castle place mat.

“It’s all right,” Anna said. “He’s sitting down next to Thoby, who doesn’t look very pleased about it. But then, Thoby doesn’t look very pleased about anything. He certainly doesn’t look like a man who’s spent a night of bliss with his new bride.”

“That’s because he didn’t.” Geri blushed. “He spent it with me.”