Bad Heir Day (9 page)

“Look, look,” screeched Zak, clambering over the front and then the back seat to bang on the rear window. “It’s Savannah and Siena! They’re overtaking!” As the lights changed, a shining minivan containing two leg o’ muttoned girls sped past.

“Put your foot down,
stupid
,”
Zak
ordered Anna. “Catch them
up
!” Despising herself for being intimidated by an eight-year-old, Anna allowed the speed to creep up a fraction on the dial.

“I’m going to call them.” Zak leant over the front seat, rifling through the Mulberry rucksack and eventually producing a miniature silver mobile phone. He stabbed at the keypad for a few seconds before diving into the bag again. “Bugger, I’ve forgotten their number,” he cursed. “Where’s my Air Book?”

That contact with Savannah and Siena had finally been established was confirmed a few seconds later by muffled whispering and giggling in the back. Anna swallowed and tried not to listen as “Yes…new nanny…I
know…
” floated over from the rear.

“No, you
don’t
come in with me,” Zak ordered imperiously as Anna parked beside the gates of the handsome pair of Queen Anne houses which, to judge from the boaters pouring within and the sign standing proudly without, was St. Midas’s School. “Stay
there
.”
Slamming the door behind him with shattering violence, he ran off.

Waiting for her blood pressure to subside from Dangerous to merely High, Anna sat and watched what she assumed to be a collection of St. Midas’s mothers and fathers milling about the entrance. Sartorial competition seemed stiff, if not positively cut-throat. Pashminas abounded and there seemed more racehorse legs around than at a Grand National starting line-up. The morning sunshine bounced off gleaming, well-cut hair, shining, straight white teeth, and gold and diamond rings. And that was just the men. These people, Anna realised, spent a lot longer preparing for school than their children did.

She stared through the windscreen as she conducted a gloomy résumé of life with Cassandra so far. The word
writing
had not been mentioned once, although the word
nanny
had, countless times. Feeling her spirits slump, Anna leant over and rested her forehead on the steering wheel. The view that met her was the far from uplifting one of her black-trousered thighs spread out like flattened sausages on the driving seat. She sighed heavily.

A sharp rap on the window disturbed her musings. Blearily, Anna looked up to see a grinning dark-haired girl wearing a great deal of plum-coloured lipstick. She rumbled in panic for the window button.

“
Geri
!”

“Hi, babe. Didn’t realise it was
you
I was racing down the Cromwell Road in the Bratmobile.”

“I didn’t realise you had children,” Anna said, bewildered. She stared at Geri with renewed admiration. Was there no end to her capabilities? Combining high-powered management executiveship with single motherhood and
still
finding time to put her lipstick on properly.

“Oh, they’re not mine,” Geri said breezily. “They’re just part of my portfolio of responsibilities. But what about you? That was Zak Knight you had in the car, wasn’t it? Surely…”—her eyes widened—“s
urely
you’re not…his latest nanny. Are you?”

“
Latest
?”
Anna tried to keep the quaver out of her voice.

Geri glanced at her. “Got time for a coffee?”

“Probably not,” said Anna, recalling the Augean list of chores Cassandra had barked at her as she had tottered out of the door en route to A Very Important Meeting. “But it sounds like I’d better.”

***

Cassandra’s hands shook as she took her seat at the long wooden table. Despite her distracted state, she could not help noticing that it was, as usual, polished to a mirror-like perfection infinitely beyond the capabilities of Lil. Lil hadn’t even been able to polish mirrors to mirror-like perfection. Still, hopefully the new girl would do better. She certainly couldn’t do worse.

Cassandra shot a nervous look at the set and determined faces around her, each one of which, she knew, had its own agenda as well as that which, neatly printed and bound, lay before each delegate on the glossy expanse of the table. She cleared her throat, took a swig of still water from the sparkling tumbler before her, and clicked the end of the pen which had been laid at a precise diagonal across the jotting pad bearing the letters SMSPA.

“May I call the meeting to attention.” An imposing brunette with thin lips and elegantly understated makeup shuffled the sheets in her perfectly manicured hands, slipped on a pair of rimless glasses, and cast a steely glance over them and around the table. “Item one on the agenda. Funds…”

Boring
boring
.
Why did they always have to trawl through the money bit first? The backs of her thighs, Cassandra realised, were well and truly stuck to the shining leather seat of her chair. Any movement would result in a ripping of flesh ten times more painful than the most inept bikini wax. She should have worn tights—but it was so easy to get the shade wrong and, anyway, leaving them off was an opportunity to show everyone else how unscarred, well moisturised, and, most importantly of all,
thin
her legs were. No hiding behind thick black opaques for her, thank you very much; it was vital at these meetings that you showed yourself off to the best possible advantage. One false outfit and you were sunk; your stock as irreversibly lowered as if your knickers had fallen down.

“…pleased to announce,” enunciated the brunette in crisp tones, “that the Association finds itself in its best financial position
ever
…”

Bugger Polly Rice-Brown, thought Cassandra, glaring at the speaker and wincing as her left outer thigh peeled itself away from the seat. Why
leatber
dining-room chairs, for God’s sake? Surely that brat of hers wasn’t
still
peeing everywhere? It had taken weeks to get rid of the smell of urine after Sholto Rice-Brown had stayed overnight with Zak; an occasion which Polly had had the
bloody
cheek to claim actually marked the
start
of Sholto’s loss of control over his bowels. She’d tried to blame Zak, of all people, just because during the night he’d dressed up as a ghost and pretended—not
tried
,
as Polly had insisted—to strangle Sholto. Honestly, Cassandra silently fumed. Some people had no sense of
humour
,
let alone any appreciation of the exceptionally
imaginative
child Zak was.

No, Cassandra decided, an agonising tug at the bottom of her right buttock returning her abruptly to the present. She really shouldn’t have worn quite so short a skirt; despite its being one of Enzo Boldanzo’s signature bold prints (at his signature bold prices). But the computerised wardrobe had been playing up again…

She shot a careful glance to her left. Even Shayla Reeves was wearing what looked suspiciously like Prada trousers.
She’d
changed her sartorial tune, Cassandra thought viciously, hoping for the hundredth time that the rumour that Shayla had bagged her Premiership footballer husband whilst working as a lap dancer was true. If it was, Shayla had certainly ratcheted herself up a class or ten since—her son was called Caspar, for Christ’s sake. Her interior-designed Notting Hill home, innocent of the merest trace of concrete lions, had recently been opened to
Hello!
magazine and her neatly side-parted hair had lost all trace of strip-club blonde and was now a tasteful fugue of beige and brown stripes not dissimilar to the top of a fine sideboard.

“…the St. Midas’s School Parents Association,” continued Polly, “would like to take this opportunity to put on record its thanks to Caroline Hope-Stanley for her careful stewardship of our funds…”

Cassandra pursed her lips. Just
what
,
she thought to herself, is so bloody
amazing
about being a good treasurer when, like Caroline Hope-Stanley, you’ve been an investment banker for
ten years
.
She glanced over at the offending official—lightly tanned, long blonde hair, slim figure in jeans and T-shirt, the latter brilliant white to match those great pearly gates of teeth of hers. Oh-so-relaxed, except that the jeans were Versace, the T-shirt Donna Karan, and the teeth the beneficiaries of the latest American bleaching treatment. Caroline’s casual look, Cassandra estimated, cost twice as much as most people’s smartest—certainly more than Polly Rice-Brown’s, who had on what was quite obviously something from Topshop.

“…our Bolivian interests, in particular, have yielded high revenues…”

Now
of course, Cassandra thought sardonically, Caroline wasn’t a banker any longer. She was one of the gym-sleek, Knightsbridge-groomed breed of New Housewives; she’d packed the City in at the age of thirty-two in order to bring up her twins Milo and Ivo.
With
the help of a full-time nanny, a housekeeper, and an army of cleaners and gardeners. “I simply adore being at home,” she had told more than one glossy magazine. “I now realise what I was missing out on.” Well, the sack for one thing; if Cassandra could remember rightly, Caroline’s entire team of fund managers had been made redundant the week after she’d walked off with her golden handshake, due to question marks about the ethics of some of their South American investments. Drugs had been mentioned. Bolivian interests
indeed
.

“…some of the fund-raising initiatives have been particularly inspired…”

Cassandra ground her teeth. She was sick of Polly Rice-Brown’s fund-raising initiatives. Ruthlessly determined to raise more in her stint as SMSPA chairman than anyone ever had before, she had already organised Himalayan treks, East to West bicycle tours of America, and blindfold bungee jumping. And, loath as Cassandra was to admit it, she
had
raised a great deal of money. By the end of it all, Cassandra thought sourly, St. Midas’s would be able to send up its own space probe.

“The Bring Your Child To Work Day, of course, was a big hit…”

Bringing them to work being the only way
some
women ever saw their children, Cassandra thought piously, reflecting on the fact that she saw as much of Zak as possible. Whether she wanted to or not. She’d heard that tale, famous among St. Midas’s mothers, of how Sholto’s final act before going to sleep was to call up his mother at the newspaper plant where she worked as a picture editor and whisper “Night night” to her on his mobile. Not to mention the poignant rumour concerning Savannah and Siena Tressell, who supposedly spent one Christmas Day feeding turkey to the television, or, more precisely, to their absent TV presenter mother’s talking head on the screen.

“For me, of course,” Polly continued, “Bring Your Child To Work Day was wonderful. Sholto was such a hit with the editor that he was actually given his own newspaper column taking a sideways look at life as an under-nine…”

Precocious
brat
.
Cassandra had been bored to death already during the pre-meeting coffee about the National Theatre’s being Sholto’s second home these days, his forthcoming solo violin debut at the Wigmore Hall, and the sample chapters of his first novel that were already causing a stir in publishing circles.

“Aren’t you a bit worried?” she had asked.

“About what?”

“Well, all this artsy stuff. Doesn’t sound very…
masculine
,
does it?”

“Oh, I see what you mean. Well, that’s fine. We’re quite happy to have one of each.”

“One of each? But Sholto has a brother, doesn’t he?”

“Exactly, one of
each
.
One gay and one straight.”

Well, what else did you expect from someone who worked on a bloody
leftie
paper? Cassandra thought. A
tabloid
,
at that.

“…which of course led,” Polly was saying now, “to the piece Sholto wrote about the dilemma of how to tell his old nanny about her appalling BO winning the coveted Columnist of the Year award…”

Cassandra fumed. Her own efforts having never earned anything other than derision from the literary establishment, it was hard to accept that an eight-year-old had won such an award. With a piece about a
nanny
,
of all things. Well, she could give them pieces about nannies until they came out of her
ears
.
Christ
knew what the St. Midas’s bunch had made of
her
new one. What had all the glamorous nannies everyone else seemed to employ so effortlessly thought of someone who quite obviously had never seen a full-length mirror? Or
any
mirror, judging by that
figure
.
More visible panty line than the knicker department of M&S, not to mention tits like
coalsacks
.
Cassandra glanced down complacently at her own neat little buds, still standing proud after thirty-nine years on the planet and a little help from the appropriately named Dr. Pertwee. Not forgetting Imelda, much as she’d like to. Shame Zak had brought all
that
up again. Especially after the pains she’d taken to keep Imelda and her family quiet about the pains Imelda had apparently suffered. As if, snorted Cassandra to herself. Girl had got a free tit job, hadn’t she? Even if one
had
imploded, it hadn’t
cost
her anything.

Still, the fact that the new girl was plumper than a Christmas goose should at least keep Jett from straying. He
hated
fat women. Mind you, she’d hired Emma on the grounds that she weighed a good twelve stone and look what had happened there.

Cassandra sighed at the thought of her husband. Jett was like a dog in heat at the moment. He was quite
literally
a pain in the arse. Whether it was the absence of Emma or an excess of testosterone generated by the incipient release of his comeback album, Cassandra was not sure. Whatever it was, it wasn’t welcome. He’d wanted her in everything from whipped cream to Nutella over the past few days and when, last night, he had asked her to crawl under the glass-topped coffee table, Cassandra had decided enough was enough. “You pervert!” she had screeched.