Free Bad Heir Day by Wendy Holden Page A

look at her now. “And where do you live, Anna?”
    Anna watched Diana stab a baby potato with her fork. Surely Seb had told her they lived together? She shrank into silence and waited for him to take the initiative. It was up to him to explain their cohabiting arrangements to his mother. Who must, even if she didn’t know, at least suspect it.
    But the silence remained unbroken. Looking from Anna’s flushed face to Seb’s suddenly grey one, Diana raised a faintly amused eyebrow.
    “ Kensington ,”Seb burst out suddenly. “Anna lives in Kensington. Just off Ken Church Street, actually. With a writer. Anna’s her assistant.”
    Diana looked coolly at Anna. Was it Anna’s imagination, or did those narrow blue eyes hold a triumphal glitter? Diana smiled. “How fascinating .”
    ***
    “How could you?” Anna screeched at Seb after Diana, who had lingered as long as she possibly could in the obvious hope that Anna would leave first, had finally descended to her Dorchester-bound Dial-A-Cab.
    Seb shrugged, unrepentant. “Well, what was I supposed to tell her? It’s not as if we’re married, is it? Anyway, I’ve done you a favour. She owns the place, after all. If I told her you lived here, she’d probably start charging you rent.”
    “Thanks a million ,” Anna snapped, having searched in vain for some appropriately reductive retort. She tried to console herself with the thought that even Oscar Wilde would have been stumped with Seb; all the bons mots in the world, after all, failed to get Bosie to behave himself.
    “But it’s probably time you moved out anyway,” Seb muttered, not meeting her eye. Anna suddenly felt sick. Here it was then. It had finally come, the moment she had always been expecting, yet never really believed would happen. She was being given her marching orders. Like an employer dismissing an unsatisfactory servant, Seb had sacked her without batting an eyelid. There had been a steeliness to his tone which suggested attempts to plead for clemency would be useless. Not that she felt like pleading. She felt like taking the untouched hollandaise sauce and pouring it all over him. Especially when the mysterious person who refused to leave answerphone messages flickered once more into her mind.
    Retreating to the bathroom, Anna slammed the door and set the water thundering from the taps to disguise the sobbing that suddenly overwhelmed her.
    It was the humiliation. The helplessness. The sight of her naked body in the bath. The roll of flesh seemed bigger than ever; her stomach rose above the waterline like an island. An island .Anna sighed, wondering what Jamie was doing now, and suppressed the thought of what she could be doing with him, were she there too. Why the hell had she told him about Seb? What had there, after all, been to tell?
    She lay in the bath, hot and shiny with misery and sausage pink with fury. Her anger mixed with the steam rising from the foam-free water; the final insult was that Seb had, at some point during the day, used up the last of the Floris Syringa her mother had given her for her birthday. Her mother would never meet Seb now. But it was unlikely either would have relished the occasion.
    One good thing, Anna tried to persuade herself, was that if she wasn’t going to be the wife of a sewage millionaire, at least she could take the job with Cassandra. This prospect, though it lacked the platinum charge card, sports coupe, and season ticket to Champneys that went with the former career option, at least offered a large and luxurious house in one of fashionable Kensington’s most fashionable streets. Not to mention an apprenticeship with a successful writer. She’d show Seb. And his stuck-up horse of a mother. Anna permitted herself a delicious few minutes imagining their faces when she hit the bestseller lists.
    If the job was still available, that was. Anna glanced at the watch on top of her pile of clothes on the loo seat. Just past midnight. Too late to ring