Beggar Bride (11 page)

She was thinking of the telephone. When Fabian casually asked for her number she had to pretend to be vague, she told him she rarely gave it to anyone or else she’d be plagued by callers. And Aunty Val is so rude on the phone she’s a hazard to Ange’s career, that’s why they don’t have one in the house. She went, at once, to buy herself a mobile, money she’d set aside for a new dress. Finding enough money for all this is a nightmare. It is essential to appear in a different outfit for her every meeting with Fabian.

That’s when she conceived the idea of Aunty Val, so fluid a creature and so mad, she can be bent and contorted according to circumstances.

‘We?’ said Billy reproachfully. ‘It doesn’t feel as if I come into it.’

‘Don’t start that,’ said Ange, worried enough as it was. ‘I need your support in this, Billy. I depend on it. I can’t carry the weight of it alone.’

Jacob is eight months old now. He is eating rusks which he holds himself. He likes to play hide-and-seek with Ange when she pops her head out from behind a cushion and Ange and Billy worship him, Ange making up for something precious she missed out on herself.

Her make-believe crash was not so very far from the truth.

Save that Ange had no father to start with, and her mother was a passenger of a drunken driver who killed, not only his three companions, but a whole family travelling in the opposite direction. He was bowling along at sixty miles an hour, going the wrong way on a dual carriageway.

Such facts as were required were leaked to Ange by the social services over the years along with little mementoes, photographs and letters. She made a little al
bum, a scrapbook she kept in a shoebox, no bigger than an urn, which represented her mother. She’d been given her mother’s pink lady nightdress case immediately afterwards. Its numerous layers of netting and its hard little china face smelled of Tracy, or that’s the construction she put on it as she grew and the smell never faded… a pungent mixture of Devonshire violets and nail-polish remover. In the box were her mother’s jewels—bead necklaces, two glittery chokers, a thin gold chain, and a whole range of dangly earrings. ‘I wouldn’t wear them, dear, they are rather tarty,’ said foster mother Eileen Coburn. ‘Your ears’ll go septic, mark my words.’

Her ears did go septic. They wept and they bled as she had never dared to do.

Long ago, Ange had decided she was probably better off with Tracy dead, apart from the loneliness of knowing there was nowhere she truly belonged. Tracy was a child of the state, no family. Most of her life was spent in children’s homes. During her nineteen years on earth Ange has gained some unique experience, moving between the classes as easily as does a pound coin. Her homes have ranged from Thirties semis on trunk roads to bungalows in genteel suburbs, from council houses to detached homes with swing hammocks in the gardens.

Mostly they were good homes, well-heeled people striving to better themselves. Oh yes, Ange has known better days. She was coached in manners and culture. Ange was an easy child to place, well, she was so appealing.

She learned a great deal about people, their motives, what drives them.

Most people are shit.

She learned what her mother had not, she learned about survival.

She changed schools too often to do well there, or make a friend.

She never asked about a father. She assumed, quite rightly, that she didn’t have one. And there were no men in the photographs, just this rather remote girl who wore a headband, padded shoulders and bloody great wedges on her shoes. Pretty. Under the orangy make-up. But not as good-looking as Ange.

And so.

‘I did wonder…’ starts Fabian, withdrawing his arm and putting his hands together, fingertips meeting as if in prayer, ‘if you would like to come and spend a weekend with me at my house in Devonshire.’

Eureka! It’s out! He has asked her!

Wait till Billy hears about this.

Ange hesitates, frowning prettily. She hasn’t even been invited to Cadogan Square yet. For ages Hurleston has stood out like a beacon of hope and promise. For it is at Hurleston, which is entailed only to a male heir, Fabian informed her, that he has his roots. It is there that Fabian’s father and mother live, Lord and Lady Evelyn Ormerod, in the Old Granary to which they moved after their son’s ill-omened first match, as there is no lodge. ‘Um. Um. That’s nice of you, Fabian, but I’m afraid it would be a question of fitting it in. A whole weekend…’

‘Or just a day, perhaps. We could fly down on the Sunday morning.’

‘That might be more sensible,’ says Ange, hiding the parasitical designs that drive her and matter-of-factly bringing out a well-stuffed diary full of mythical appointments.

‘How would the tenth suit you?’

‘The tenth of April?’ Already Ange is worrying about stout and functional clothes. She will have to do much research in order to prepare.

‘Yes, a fortnight’s time.’

It is hard to see this man as all-powerful, a tyrant sometimes, according to the things that slip out in conversation, according to the cuttings Billy takes from the papers. Perhaps, when she visits his home, Ange will discover much more about the real Fabian, delve underneath this superior and rather aloof facade which could be misconstrued as kindly and patronising. He hasn’t even kissed her yet, or tried for a feel of her breasts, the first thing Billy did when he knew she fancied him.

Not that she’d let him if he tried.

Perhaps this is normal in the upper classes.

How is Ange to know?

Alley cats howl and prowl around the dustbins.

Billy is slipping from depression into downright hypochondria.

Instead of being thrilled to hear of her progress he thinks only of himself, abandoned with Jacob at Willington Gardens with nowhere to go but the nearby park when the sun is shining outside, and Ange will be gallivanting somewhere in Devon.

He is more of a baby than Jacob himself and drinking more than he should be.

‘It’s only for a day, Billy, sod it, I was originally asked for the whole weekend. And really, if this thing works you’re going to have to put up with much worse than this!’

‘But I’m ill,’ groans Billy, sobbing and slamming doors, ‘my eyes are hurting and I’ve got a headache and you didn’t even think to leave me enough money for fags.’

‘Tina’ll help you with Jacob if everything gets too much,’ comforts Ange, sure he is making this up. Billy does need a great deal of attention. He always has, and she hasn’t minded in the past. But this is different. He is letting her down at her time of need and she feels unusually cross with him, irritated by his long-suffering face.

Well look. His appetite is certainly not affected. He digs into the egg and chips she cooks him, he doesn’t hold back on the bread and butter or the tomato sauce.

Help me, Billy,
help me
!

She loves him, oh yes she does, her heart still quickens at the sight of him, but she will not, she cannot succumb to his depressive inertia or how the hell would they survive?

‘Billy,’ she confides, ‘something tells me it won’t be long now. Fabian likes me. He likes me in
that
way, I can feel it. I can see it in his eyes.’

‘Fuck him…’

‘Don’t you see that as soon as I’ve got that sodding ring on my finger all this will be over?’ How many times does Ange have to spell this out? ‘We’ll be made! We’ll be rich. You won’t be stuck inside this hellhole any longer. A couple of months and I’ve only got to make up some crap…’

‘That,’ sighs Billy morosely, ‘would mean going to court.’

‘I know that, but…’

‘They’d find out who you really were. Everything would come out and they’d hardly award you anything when they realised the whole thing was a scam.’

‘No, Billy, no.’ Ange sighs her irritation, and shakes her head. ‘I explained all this before! Nobody asks you anything. It’s a civil matter, not a legal one. As long as everyone’s fully convinced that I am who I say I am, who d’you think is going to go sniffing around trying to prove otherwise? If Fabian believes in me, who d’you think is suddenly going to ask themselves—
“Oh, I know, I bet that Angela Harper is really a married woman living in Willington Gardens with a child and a husband.”’

‘And there’s no need to be sarcastic,’ says Billy.

Ange cries and so does Billy. At least this weeping together seems to bring them closer. They go to bed that night and make love as if there’s going to be no tomorrow. As if they must take as much of each other as they can right now, and hold it somewhere safe.

‘I’ve just got a feeling about it, that’s all,’ says Billy, smoking a fag and stroking her hair. ‘Something is bound to go wrong. I mean, why not? It always does.’

‘D
ARLING, SHE IS EXQUISITE
. Where did you find her?’

The twins are at Hurleston for the Easter holidays, a factor Fabian overlooked when he made the arrangement with Angela. He worried as soon as he heard them suggest they took Angela down to the stables to look at their ponies.

The twins are not a trustworthy pair. They enjoy making trouble.

‘I met her at the opera, Mother. I gave her a spare seat.’

‘But who is the girl?’ Above them the faked verdigris windchimes clang loudly. Lady Elfrida and her son are relaxing in the gazebo in the Old Granary garden, an eight-sided revolving building on runners which, every morning, the burly Elfrida pushes to face the sun, and after that, on the hour every hour. In the summer the entrance will be riotous with climbing roses. Over the years rust has accumulated round the runners which has turned the operation into a difficult one. Elfrida is only just sitting back on her reclining wicker chair, stuffed with cushions, recovering from the first great vertiginous effort of the day. Fabian is perched on a stool beside her, above him is an array of startling papier mâché jungle birds. ‘And where does she hail from?’

Studying the form. Sires and dams. Family and bloodlines and stock are still important factors in Elfrida’s summing up of the people she meets, particularly the people that form relationships with her children and their children. She herself hails from good Prussian stock. Luckily her daughter, the Hon. Candida, made a very successful marriage and leads a happy country life with her Range Rovers and her deerhounds near Bath, such a beautiful city. She has far more to be concerned about, however, over her handsome son Fabian, whose first two marriages went so disastrously wrong, and she’ll always feel herself to blame for poor Ffiona. After all, Elfrida did encourage the match. Only Nanny Barber, retired and living in a cottage in the grounds with her seamstress friend, Maud Doubleday, had uttered words of caution way back at that time.

Not that there’s any suggestion of Fabian popping the question to this slip of a girl. Half his age. Young enough to be his daughter. But it is interesting that this is the first woman he has brought home since that ghastly, messy business with Helena, now nearly three years ago.

‘She has no background, Mother,’ says Fabian, apologetically. ‘Not that I know of. In fact, her life has been rather sad.’

‘She doesn’t look sad to me, my dear. She looks on top of the world.’

‘She’s a buyer…’

‘A buyer of what?’

‘A buyer of lingerie.’

‘What? D’you mean knickers and vests?’

‘I suppose so, Mother, yes. She’s what you might call a globe-trotter.’

‘Which reminds me,’ says Elfrida, heaving herself from the depths of the wicker with a crackle. ‘I must tell Susan to boil that pig’s head for a good twelve hours. Last time the wretched child made a real hash of it and yet she came with references as long as your arm.’ Elfrida turns back at the entrance. ‘Swivel us round a fraction, dear boy. Country cooking, not all this foreign nonsense, that’s what I told the agency. And do come inside and say hello to your father before lunch.’

‘Our mother was murdered, of course,’ the twins chatter amiably on the short journey through the courtyard down to the stable block beyond.

They are dressed identically in blue jeans, green parkas and green wellington boots. Beside them Angela looks gorgeous in tight leather trousers, ankle boots and a sky-blue duffel coat. They watch her tripping carefully between the piles of dung. ‘Sorry?’ To their great satisfaction Angela Harper looks suitably shocked.

‘Yes, you’ve only got to ask Maudie, she knows all about it. She lives with Daddy’s Ba-ba in the cottage they call Halcyon Fields.’

‘Halcyon Fields? That sounds like a private nursing home.’

‘Well yes, it is, in a way, but it was originally named after the kingfisher in the lake.’ Their Jack Russell terriers, Gog and Magog, cavort around at the children’s feet. ‘Ba-ba and Maudie are dreadfully old. There’s a nurse who visits every day to treat Ba-ba’s leg. Ulcers,’ says Tabitha with a grimace. ‘They smell if you don’t watch them. Ba-ba showed us once. Ugh. Like Henry the Eighth. I’d rather have my leg off than go round with those ugly things, like fungus, growing on it. Wouldn’t you, Pan?’

But Pan’s more interested in the murder. ‘It was either Daddy or Honesty, and the police couldn’t discover which. They both had motives, you see, but they also had alibis.’

Angela laughs brittlely. ‘It sounds as if you’ve been making up stories!’

Pan shakes her crazy mop of red hair. ‘Oh no, you only have to ask Maudie, and Murphy O’Connell, he knows.’

Ange attempts to change the subject. It is so beautiful here. Green and gold and wooded and traced with streams which meander down to the river below, a Jersey herd contentedly grazing, vegetables lined up and peeping through the dark soil in the high-walled vegetable garden. What a place for children to grow up, what a sense of history. How could anyone bear to leave it? This makes London seem like a nightmare.

‘It must be wonderful here in the winter. All these slopes, for sledging in the snow.’

‘D’you like Daddy, Angela?’

She has only known them for minutes but already she senses some malevolent trap. ‘I think your father is very nice.’

Tabby grins. She throws a stick for Gog, who scampers after it in delight. ‘He likes you. We can tell, can’t we, Pan?’