Bad Heir Day (30 page)

Jett’s heart sank. “That,” he said evenly, “is the castle owner’s fiancée. Your hostess.”

“
0h
.
Well, I must say she was
very
unhelpful over doing my washing for me. Can you
believe
there’s no laundry service here? She said she always washes her knickers in the
sink
.”

“Well, that won’t be a problem for you. You don’t wear knickers. Anyway, you better get ready,” said Jett impatiently. “Dinner’s in half an hour.”

“Oh,
Wobblebottom
.”
The special voice Champagne put on for wheedling purposes set Jett’s teeth on edge even more than the maddening pet name. His bottom emphatically did
not
wobble. “You know I
never
eat in public,” she purred. “Can’t you get them to send me up a
tiny
vegetable consomme followed by a
minuscule
white truffle risotto and—oh, perhaps a
tiny
half-bottle of Krug as well? I
hate
to put anyone out, of
course
…”

For a moment, Jett flirted with the delicious idea of ordering room service from that terrifying bruiser of a cook. Better still, of getting Champagne to. “Well, come down for a drink at least. Be rude not to.”

“Oh, if I
must
.”
As Champagne rose, pouting, from the bath, water running down her breasts, hips, and pubic hair, Jett struggled to keep his erection under control. If Champagne saw it, all would be lost and he really wasn’t in the mood. Her voracious sexual appetite could have left Casanova on his knees weeping and begging for mercy.

Galling though it was to admit it, Champagne was getting too much of a handful for him. His hands, at any rate, were getting too full of her rather too much; Jett wondered, quite literally, how much longer he was going to be able to keep it up. The years between his first flush of fame and recent revival had not seen an increase in stamina to match the decrease in hair. And besides, girls seemed to be getting more difficult to satisfy; Jett had no memories of seventies chicks being as goddamn demanding as their contemporary counterparts. Girls today seemed to expect more, and Jett had never met anyone who expected as goddamn much as Champagne.

In his defence, Jett knew his decline had been less spectacular than that of the rest of the band. Talk about the Mild Ones. By Solstice’s former hell-raising standards, the pre-gig dressing-room conversations during the Wold Tour had been embarrassing. Less sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll than gardening, mortgages, and children. He was the only one even getting
divorced
,
for Christ’s goddamn sake…

Jett gazed out moodily into the impenetrable black beyond the windows. Say what you like about Cassandra—and he had, many times—at least she didn’t want five orgasms a night. Didn’t want any at all, in fact. Recalling the deep, deep, unmolested peace of the marital minimalist double bed, Jett sighed almost wistfully in the direction of the emerging stars.

“
Dah-dah
,
yah?”

Jett was jerked out of his daydream to see Champagne standing in the bathroom doorway, arms raised in triumph and wearing a pair of snakeskin pants that must have been looser on the original snake.

Champagne wriggled her shoulders. “Like my bustier? Very rock chick, yah?” She tugged out a breast to expose the tip of a nipple and pouted at him again.

Jett stared at the complex structure of underwiring and cantilevering necessary to support and contain the flowing flesh of Champagne’s cleavage. “Looks like something by Isambard Kingdom Brunel.”

“Never heard of him, darling. This is Westwood.”

Jett gritted his teeth. Champagne’s obsession with fashion had been the one flashpoint of the Back From the Dead tour. Deriding their blow-dried, tight satin, and studded leather look, Champagne had attempted to shoehorn the whole of Solstice into Prada. The Mild Ones had finally seen red. As Champagne ordered him into a leather sarong, Nigel “Animal” Gurkin, drummer, father of five, resident of Tunbridge Wells, builder of dolls’ houses out of matchsticks, and the Mildest One of all, had snapped. “We’re a heavy metal band, you know,” he had remonstrated, placing his glass of orange juice down on the table with slightly more emphasis than was strictly necessary.

If only we were, thought Jett longingly. For the money if nothing else. It was true that “Sex and Sexibility,” the first single released from the
Ass Me Anything
album, had gone straight to number one on a riptide of ironic revivalism, but the unhappy consequences for him personally were the unwelcome attentions of that slumbering lion, the Inland Revenue. Then of course there was the yawning pit called the divorce courts down which he was pouring thousands despite a settlement seeming light years away. Talk about
nisi
goddamn work if you can get it, Jett thought sourly.

Last, but by no means least, was Champagne’s conviction that, as a much-publicised, relaunched rock star in regular receipt of lavish amounts of publicity, Jett was rolling in money and it was her duty to get through as much of it as possible. His pleadings that a Solstice wold tour brought in significantly less than a Madonna-style world one completely failed to make an impact. Champagne had, Jett eventually realised, absolutely no idea of the multimillion-dollar difference between ironic and iconic.

At first he had thought she was joking when she’d asked him what she should wear to the Number Ten celebrity party this year. The thought of Champagne in Downing Street was an arresting one, especially after she had confided her belief that the Gulf War was caused by people queue-jumping at the Gulfstream factory. Even Cassandra had more of a grasp of foreign affairs than that, although she had once mortified him by insisting they stayed in the Hotel de Ville on a trip to Paris on the grounds that it was larger and more impressive than the Hôtel Crillon.

Jett sighed. He had passed from being an enthusiastic admirer of Champagne’s frontage to looking forward to seeing the back of her. What had been initially good for his cred was proving disastrous for his bank balance. A Champagne lifestyle was not all it was cracked up to be. Yes, he was definitely missing Cassandra.

***

Zak stuck his fork in his glass and clanked it loudly backwards and forwards. Tendrils of venison stew sauce unravelled from the prongs and floated slowly in the water.

“Zak darling?” Cassandra smiled vaguely and beatifically at her son. “That’s
such
a wonderful noise, but—”

“S
hut up
,”
snarled Jett as Zak, tiring of glass-banging, started instead to smash the silver cutlery hard against the polished surface of the table. In the shadows, Anna felt Nanny stiffen, yet Cassandra, most uncharacteristically, failed to fly like a wildcat to her son’s defence. She seemed very calm. Probably still drunk, thought Anna. Yet, for someone recovering from an industrial-strength hangover, Cassandra seemed in an unusually good mood. Even more amazingly, a whispered conversation with Robbie had revealed that it was something to do with Mrs. McLeod.

Anna shot an amused glance across the table to Robbie, intercepting an amused one from Geri to Jamie. Those two,
thought Anna with a twist of the lips. Obvious enough what was happening
there
.
They’d bonded over the tearooms and toilets—talk about lav at first sight. Just as well she wasn’t the jealous type. Besides, discussing books with Robbie made such a welcome change from Jamie banging on about drains.

Robbie looked so handsome in his dinner jacket, the miraculously white and crisp collar of his shirt—could she detect the skilled hand of Mrs. McLeod here?—contrasting with the high, outdoor colour of his rugged, sensual face. Looking at his eyes, shining large, amused, and amber in the candlelight, Anna felt for the first time in her life that here was a man she could trust. Except for keeping the dreaded beard at bay—his five o’clock shadow was now edging rather more towards midnight.

“Darling, what are you doing
now
?”
Cassandra’s urgent whisper suddenly cut across her thoughts.

“Willy tricks.” Zak, smirking ostentatiously, was busy pressing down hard on his leeks with a fork so the white centre shot out at a distinctly penile angle.

“Behave your goddamn self,” snapped Jett, raising an eyebrow and grinning apologetically to Cassandra.

To Anna’s amazement, Cassandra not only grinned back but, in addition, shot Jett a coy look from under her eyelashes. In Jett’s mirrored lenses, the candlelight glowed softly in reply. What
was
going on there? The expected hysterical scenes following Jett and Cassandra’s discovery of each other in the castle had not taken place. And that was
before
Champagne D’Vyne had appeared.

Champagne had arrived at the dining table forty-five minutes late. “Sorry, yah?” she trilled, tossing her long blonde hair back over her shoulders. “Had to write my column, yah?” She rolled her brilliant green eyes theatrically. “Deadlines are
such
a bore.”

“You’re telling me,” muttered Jett. Champagne’s weekly newspaper column, in which she chronicled her dizzyingly glamorous social life and in which Jett had recently made his debut portrayed as the author’s adoring lapdog, had done his street cred almost as much damage as Champagne herself had done his bank balance.

The rest of the company exchanged looks. Along with everyone else in the Sunday newspaper-reading universe, all those present, apart, perhaps, from Jamie, were aware that Champagne did not write the society column that appeared weekly under her name. It was well known that the only person for whom Champagne’s deadlines were a bore was the unfortunate hack on the paper whose job it was to extract the column from her.

Having arrived for dinner fashionably late, Champagne soon found herself in the considerably less chic situation of facing Jett’s ex-wife across the table. “Is this some kind of
joke
?”
she had, after a freezing silence, demanded of the hapless Jamie who was doing the introductions. Stamping her metal heel so hard it drew sparks from the flagstones, Champagne treated the assembly to a display of explosions worthy of the millennium celebrations and a stream of eye-watering expletives that would have left a battleship crew gasping but left Zak in raptures.

By way of a finale, Champagne stormed off as best she could given that at Dampie storming off anywhere involved waiting in the hall for the one local taxi for up to three hours. And there was another curious thing, thought Anna. Jett had seemed almost relieved to see the back of her, even if the two engineers he had brought with him had looked rather regretful. In the end, it had been they who took Champagne off in their gaffer’s van, thus freeing up three portions in total of Nanny’s venison stew to be divided among those left behind. This had not been a blessing. The rule that each mouthful must be chewed thirty-two times could have been invented for Nanny’s cuisine. Then doubled.

“I can’t eat any more of this crap.” Zak suddenly spat out a mouthful of venison casserole on to the table. Jett immediately cuffed him across the basin cut.

“Gosh, the wind’s getting up, isn’t it?” Geri said loudly and distractingly, as Nanny smashed plates together on the pretext of collecting them. Outside, the gale was slapping itself against the windows almost as hard as Jett had just smacked his son. And, no doubt, almost as hard as Nanny would like to smack Geri.

“Nanny’ll soon fix that,” said Jamie, grabbing the chance to make amends with both hands. “She’s amazing. Full of ancient lore. Whenever there’s a storm, it always calms down after Nanny goes to the shore and throws a pudding into the sea.”

“
Pardon
?”
Cassandra, evidently glad of the excuse, put her fork down in surprise. Anna blinked. Even
she
had never heard this one.

“Ancient tradition,” Jamie added. “Feeding the waves, she calls it.”

“Eat
up
,”
Jett ordered Zak, who immediately stuck his tongue out even further.

“Tummyache,” he muttered.

“Oh, Nanny’s got a cure for that as well,” Jamie burst in eagerly. “She’ll have you hanging upside down like a shot.”

“
What
?”
Cassandra and Jett peered into the shadows where Nanny lurked with awe and interest, as if observing a strange and wonderful beast.

“That’s her cure for stomachache,” Jamie gabbled, thrilled that Nanny was receiving the respect she deserved from some quarters at least. “Hanging people upside down by the heels.”

“Really?” Cassandra looked impressed. A speculative light shone from Jett’s eye. There was an astonished silence, in which it was hard not to notice that Zak was the stillest and quietest of all.

“Will you…?” Jamie looked apologetically at Anna. The question, raised after dinner in the sitting room while Geri had gone down to the kitchen to, in her words, “put a bomb under Nanny with the coffee,” was not entirely unanticipated.

Anna had been expecting it for days, ever since she had caught Jamie kissing Geri in the ruins of the wine store. After which Geri had studiously avoided her—that had been Anna’s interpretation, at least, of the fact Geri had suddenly been rushing back and forth to London on “urgent business.”

“Would you mind very much giving me back the, um…”

“Ring? Not at all.” Anna delved frantically in her pocket to produce the small box. It was, more than anything, a relief to hand it over. Apart from all its other unfortunate associations, the responsibility of carrying it around all the time had been onerous but she had not wanted to risk leaving anything but the box in her room. She passed the ring to Jamie not entirely convinced it would reach its next rightful recipient. The wine store roof, after all, had yet to be replaced.

“You don’t mind?”

“Of course not. You’ll be much better off with Geri.” The odd thing was, Anna believed it. Even before the wine store incident, she had caught a number of looks passing between Jamie and Geri that were of a far more incendiary nature than anything she personally remembered. Perhaps it was because they were such opposites—fiery, capable, earthy Geri, highbred, dreamy, and romantic Jamie. Although the dreamy bit might be in for a shock; Geri, Anna knew, would not stand for any shirking in bed. Jamie would be expected to stand and deliver.

“Thanks.” Jamie swiftly pocketed the ring. “I’m glad you think so. She
is
wonderful, isn’t she? So capable and full of energy.”

Anna nodded, looked around the room, and reflected that it was just as well. Her gaze fixed on the telltale black sweep of fungal damp on the wall behind the sofa.

Its disintegration was a grim reminder that at Dampie decay was not a slow, gentle, faintly melancholy process, but a vital, thrusting affair. Less a case, Anna thought, squinting at the fat black beads against the whiteness, of watching paint dry than watching it warp, bubble up, split, and eventually slide defeated off the damp walls. She shuddered. Call her spineless, but all her previous sense of abject failure had disappeared, to be replaced by the profound relief of knowing she was not spending the rest of her life in this place.

“I hope you’ll be very happy,” she told Jamie.

“I’m sure we will,” Jamie assured her, his gaze following hers to the wall. “Geri’s fantastic at DIY, you know. I’ve never seen anyone handle a grout gun like her.” His eyes shone with mixed adoration and admiration. “And she loves the traditions—all the history…”

“Yes,” said Anna. “And that’s all great. But you know you’ve got to sort out one thing. Once and for all. Otherwise it will never work.”

Jamie swallowed and dropped his gaze. “I’m going for sex counselling, if that’s what you mean…”

“Good,” said Anna. “But I didn’t mean that, actually.” As Jamie looked at the floor, Anna pressed on, suddenly feeling this was the best and ultimate service she could do her friend. After all, Geri had, in a roundabout sort of way, rescued her from an untenable situation and provided an extremely neat, if unorthodox, solution. She wanted, Anna decided, to give Geri the best wedding present possible, one that owed nothing to Jerry’s Home Store and decoupage waste paper bins.

“I mean Nanny,” she said.

***

“What will you do now?”

Anna, face buried in the thick, salty matt of Robbie’s chest hair, heard his question reverberate powerfully through his rib cage. She raised herself slowly until she was sitting up on top of him, pushing aside her tousled hair so she could see his eyes. He looked serious.

“I don’t know,” she replied truthfully. In view of where careful plotting had got her before, she had decided not to have a plan for her future. “I’m taking things as they come,” she smiled at him. Inside her, Robbie’s just-spent penis stirred enquiringly. She’d already had three orgasms, each one longer than the last. And miraculously, so far, no sign of a UTI.

Although it applied to every other encounter she had had, Johnny Rotten’s famous pronouncement that sex was “two minutes of squelching” was a glorious misrepresentation of Robbie. Unlike all who had come and gone before him, Robbie did not thrust immediately into her, dragging a host of delicate, dry, and protesting internal organs with him.

Robbie’s—surprisingly expert—method was to slowly raise her to a pitch of wet and gasping expectation, guiding her with flickering tongue and precise, circling, lust-slicked finger through hoops of quivering delight to the brink of back-arching ecstasy. Only then were her vaginal muscles allowed to clamp the great rod of his penis. Only then, as she swayed poised on the cliff of juddering delight, did Robbie finally fire into her and combine with her yelps of pleasured pain his groans of discreetly profound ecstasy.

But his greatest skill of all was that he managed to do it all without making her feel for one second self-conscious. Merely conscious of the fact that he found every inch of her, every ridge of cellulite, every careless bruise, every soft white swell of excess flesh, every split nail quite literally delicious. He had an earthiness about him, an unbounded, unabashed joy in the carnal. Oh, the blessed, sweet relief of being in the hands of someone
normal
.
A pleb, rather than a Seb.

***

“Will you come and live with me?” he suddenly asked her, clamping both strong, warm hands around her waist. Anna luxuriated both in the question and the feeling of strength and security. It was tempting. And she knew there was only one answer. No.

“I’d love to. I really would,” she mumbled. “But I just couldn’t stay here, I’m afraid.” Before coming to Dampie, Anna had never really considered herself a city girl. Now, however, even the thought of the Circle Line with signal failure filled her with eye-misting nostalgia.

Robbie pushed both hands through his thick hair. At the sight of the abundant bush in his armpits, Anna felt the familiar, dizzying plunge in her pelvis.
Oh God
.
Was she making the right decision?

“Of course we wouldn’t stay here,” Robbie muttered, sitting up and sucking at her nipples. “We’ll go back to London and write.”

“But where will we live? I haven’t got a flat. Or any money.”

“Don’t worry about that. I have. Rather nice one in Belgravia.” Beneath her, he was grinding gently up and down. Anna gasped as the red waves began to rise in her once again.

“
Belgravia
?” she murmured into his salt-tang hair as he pulled her head down to kiss her. She winced as the Brillo Pad brush of his bristle scraped hot and rasping against her cheek.

“Family flat. But only I ever use it.”

Anna spat out Robbie’s tongue and looked at him in dismay. This had a horribly familiar ring to it. She shot a suspicious look at his naked little finger. At least
that
didn’t.

“Family flat? So your father is…?”

“An earl.” Robbie looked at her shamefacedly. “I’m awfully sorry. I didn’t want to tell you. I gathered from your diary that you weren’t too keen on the aristocracy.”

“So you are?” Anna gazed at him stonily.

“The Honorable Robbie Persimmon-MacAskill. But don’t hold it against me. I’m all right really, I promise you.”

Anna looked searchingly at him. Then she grinned as she felt his penis, formerly growing limp with despair, begin to swell within her once more. “Talk about an ingrowing heir,” she whispered.

“So will you move in with me?” Robbie gazed anxiously at her.

Anna’s breasts bounced wildly as her shoulders shook with laughter. It was
too
ridiculous. The penniless poet had turned out to be yet another scion of the privileged classes. “I guess I’m Hon for it,” she spluttered, grinding herself down on him once more. “Get to it, big boy,” she shouted joyfully. “
I want you to come inside me like a fire extinguisher
.”

***

“Will you come back to me?”

Jett saw the windscreen plunging towards him as Cassandra, shocked at the question, jerked her foot suddenly down on the accelerator. The car plunged forward almost into the back of a swaying beige Volvo with a sticker in the back window proclaiming “It’s Hard to Sit Down When You’ve Been to Harrow.” Cassandra stared at it and said nothing. For possibly the first time in her life, she seemed to be choosing her words carefully.

“I’ve missed you,” Jett persisted. It was true. Without Cassandra exploding every five minutes, his life had seemed flat and without drama. He had not realised until now what his marriage had meant to him, how addicted he had become to their screaming rows and steaming exchanges of vicious insults. How addicted to the wonders of W8 as well, as many weeks of crummy tour hotels, student digs, and B&Bs had helped remind him. The horrors of a bed and breakfast in Peterborough run by a couple called Ken and Flora and called Kenora still had him waking sweating in the night.

Nylon
sheets. As slippery and electric as an eel. Jett had not realised until skidding up and down that Peterborough single bed, how large lying down each night in Provençal lavender-scented sheets of Irish linen had previously loomed in his life. And who was to say, if they persisted in going through with this stupid and expensive divorce, that both he and Cassandra wouldn’t be condemned to nylon sheets forever. Catching their toenails for the rest of their lives, sliding around on seas of tequila sunrise orange, aquamarine, and bright purple. Breathing their last on sheets alive with static.

“We suit each other, you and I,” he added persuasively. Funny how a master lyricist like himself, from whom choice phrases usually flowed like the cleansing swirl down a lavatory, found it so hard to express himself in real-life situations. Cassandra was the same—celebrated author and yet unable to utter a word about what was really important. Mind you, Jett thought, nothing new there.

“Come on, Sandra,” he urged. “You know I’ve got a bit more dough now after the tour. And there have been a million orders for
Spawn of Satan
already and it’s only been goddamn released today. I can keep you in the manner to which you used to be accustomed.”

“Actually,” Cassandra said regally, drawing herself up at the wheel, “now I’ve hammered out the deal with Mrs. McLeod, I’ll be quite nicely off myself, thank you. We’ve got the summer paperback market stitched up well into the millennium.” She beamed through the windscreen. Getting Mrs. McLeod to write her books had been an infinitely more satisfactory arrangement than bothering to do it herself. Far better to become a brand and just slap her name on whatever McLeod produced. Her writer’s block may have lifted slightly, but not enough, she knew, to power her through another six-hundred-page Torremolinos beach special, and certainly not at the speed McLeod could write. The old bag could leave a jet ski lagging behind. How
clever
she had been to find her. How
inspired
of her to turn up at that ridiculous, rustic creative writing class. Suddenly, Cassandra’s satisfied smirk twisted into an unbecoming scowl. “Though if anyone’s been stitched up it’s
me
,”
she added bitterly. “That
bastard
Robbie MacAskill got McLeod a shit hot agent and she’s getting a straight fifty percent cut. Bloody cheek. After all, it’s
my
name the books go out under.
My
reputation at stake.”

“Well, she
is
doing all the work, isn’t she?” Whoa, Jett warned himself, seeing Cassandra’s furious face. You’re almost there. Don’t fuck it up now. “But yes, I quite see your point,” he added hurriedly. “Your reputation, absolutely.”

Cassandra’s stony profile softened, although how seemed a miracle, given the amount of plastic surgery it had undergone.

“Come on, Sandra,” Jett wheedled. “You know you’ve got a soft spot for me.”

“I’ve certainly got a spot for you,” said Cassandra levelly. “And don’t call me Sandra. You know I hate it.” Her lips tightened. Cassandra loathed being reminded of her real name.

“Aw, baby. You know you’re the only one for me.” Jett’s voice began to take on a desperate tone as the outer darkness of rootless drifting and grubby groupies beckoned. As the image of Champagne D’Vyne raised itself terrifyingly before him, he cringed inwardly. The day she had walked out of his life had been better than jamming with Hendrix. Not that he
had
jammed with Hendrix. But he had once judged an organic lemon curd competition with Paul McCartney.

“But what about Zak?” demanded Cassandra suddenly. “You were so horrible to the poor darling before.”

Behind them, Zak was too busy carving up the cream leather of the hired Rover’s back seat to listen. He sat back to admire his handiwork. “SHAMPAIN.”
What
a woman. He almost regretted now finding her phone number and writing it in every service station telephone box they stopped at with the words “FOR FREE SEX FONE” scrawled above it. He sniffed loudly. That funny white powder he had found on the top of the loo in Champagne’s bathroom after she had gone had really made his nose run.

“Listen to him,” Cassandra declared dramatically. “He’s
terrified
.
And there’s the problem of his school as well. We can’t live in London—no one will, um, rise to the challenge of him. Every London prep school I tried”—Cassandra’s voice rose—“said there was a basic problem with home discipline and they couldn’t help until that had been rectified.”

“Which means a good nanny,” said Jett.

“Exactly.” Cassandra pressed her foot down in helpless fury. The back of the Volvo loomed large again. Even if she took Jett back and—miracle of miracles—they managed to find a good nanny, the old problems were bound to start again. She sighed. It was a vicious circle. Good day school meant good nanny which meant Jett trying to jump on them which meant goodbye nanny which would now mean goodbye school as well. Talk about a Catch-22.