Bad Heir Day by Wendy Holden Read Free Book Online Page B

ought to be ashamed of yourself. You’re nothing less than a thief.”
    That ,Cassandra thought, had shown her. Only it hadn’t. Murderous rage rose within her at the memory of Fenella piously pointing out that money, cars, paid holidays, and their own bathrooms were the bare minimum of what most nannies expected anyway and the sooner Cassandra realised that, the better. “No wonder you can’t keep a nanny for more than a month,” had been Fenella’s parting shot.
    Wheeling round on her chair, Cassandra stabbed her cigarette out in her Matthew Williamson ashtray and seethed. A month !She’d kept at least two nannies for six weeks ;Isabel, that fat one from Wales, had lasted two months until that unfortunate business with the flower vase. Cassandra stuck by her guns, even now. That bunch of flowers had been unspeakably vulgar. Carnations ,for Christ’s sake. She’d been firm and unyielding. Isabel’s boyfriend may have had every right to give her carnations but Isabel had no right—no right whatsoever— to expect to display them in Cassandra’s house. She couldn’t quite believe Isabel considered it a resigning issue, but so be it if she did. Cassandra permitted herself a slight sigh of regret. Isabel had been the best of a bad bunch—quite literally, in the case of those carnations—particularly because she had been so reassuringly plump and therefore Jett-proof. Her husband was not a big fat fan, unless you counted the beef dripping sessions he occasionally indulged in to keep in touch with his working-class roots.
    At the thought of Jett, a chill suddenly swept through Cassandra. Was she meant to be doing the school run this morning? She scrambled to her feet in panic. Anyone delivering the children late got an automatic black mark in the headmistress’s book, and Cassandra had few lives left with Mrs. Gosschalk as it was. Last term she had been publicly humiliated when her car had been one of those named and shamed in the school magazine for parking on double yellow lines with the hazards on at dropping-off time. Still, at least she hadn’t been on that dreadful list taking to task those mothers who turned up at the school gates in jeans ,which had appeared in the same issue.
    “Did Mr. St. Edmunds take Master Zak to school?” Cassandra demanded as Lil returned with a large cut-glass tumbler. The ice cubes crashed and shook together as Cassandra lifted it to her lips.
    “Yars,” rasped the cleaner in a voice so gravelly it sounded as if her oesophagus had been pebbledashed.
    Cassandra was relieved and slightly amazed to hear that her husband had managed to perform at least one parental duty. For, despite the staff crises in which he had most certainly had a hand—in the case of Emma, Cassandra chose not to dwell on exactly where that hand had been—Jett was scarcely displaying Dunkirk spirit at the moment. More bunker mentality as he disappeared for days on end into a studio whose precise location had never been satisfactorily pinpointed.
    Cassandra frowned hard at the screen of her laptop. It was a magnificent machine, customised in her trademark zebraskin, with a matching carrycase and special supersensitive keys designed not to break Tyra’s nails. When she switched it on, an encouraging electro-musical burst of “Diamonds Are Forever” greeted her, while each time she completed five hundred words, a little pink cartoon figure appeared at the corner of the screen to blow her a kiss. It corrected the spelling for her, it suggested alternative words for her, it could do practically everything except write for her, something Cassandra profoundly regretted. Still, it did its level best to encourage her—its Screensaver swirled with the affirming messages “Just Do It” and “Go For It” in about a hundred different typefaces, which, in her present mood, Cassandra found more irritating than motivating. The very fact she was sitting there staring at “Just Do It” meant she wasn’t doing it.