Authors: Gillian White
‘Here comes the bride.’
The Hons. Tabitha and Pandora, seated at the front with Lord and Lady Ormerod, Aunt Candida, who smells of dog, and her family, turn as one to view their new stepmother as she comes to take her place with Fabian beside her.
They were given special permission from The Rudge to attend the function, and stay out two nights in spite of the fact they’d been grounded last term and are still regarded with some suspicion. The chitty was signed by Dame Claudia herself. They arrived yesterday afternoon, and Roberts is to run them back tomorrow.
‘I never thought Honesty would come.’
‘I think Estelle had something to do with that. She went mad, apparently. Told Honesty that she’d really be blotting her copybook if she went so far as to shun the wedding and did she really want to upset Fabian at such a critical time? But what’s it got to do with Estelle is what I’d like to know.’
Estelle is out of favour with Tabitha. She dragged them round Laura Ashley just before closing time desperately searching for something suitable for them both to wear. ‘Whatever I choose you’re not going to look much,’ she said, thoughtlessly, all in a rush. ‘This should have been thought of before.’
They ended up looking like milkmaids in dresses much too childish. Fabian took one look at them and asked, ‘Estelle, couldn’t you have done any better than that?’
Pan nudges Tabby. ‘She hasn’t come with much good grace though, has she? Look at her face! You’d think she’d just peed herself!’
‘She probably has, Lady Muck,’ giggles Tabby, pleased with her half-sister Honesty’s obvious distress. ‘And she’s brought that gawpy friend Laura Fallowfield with her, for support I guess. In case she faints quite away.’
‘Cowbag,’ whispers Honesty under her breath. ‘And what does she think she looks like? I once had a Victorian doll…’
‘Shush,’ says little Laura, embarrassed, and Honesty shouldn’t be wearing black even if it is straight from Paris, goodness, hardly subtle. ‘Well I think she looks amazing.’
‘Last time we were here it was that fat prat Helena. I wonder who it will be next. I was made to stand behind her and carry a little bouquet of flowers. Freesia, I think. Reminded me of having my tonsils out. To me they stank of Dettol.’
‘Don’t you think this’ll last then?’ Laura enquires with some surprise. After all, Angela seems very sweet, and fantastically pretty. Honesty ought to give her a chance.
‘I give her a year,’ says Honesty dramatically, ‘before some disaster befalls her.’
‘Divorce?’ asks Laura, mystified.
‘Or worse,’ says Honesty, ‘with a bit of luck. That one deserves all she gets.’
All the staff from Hurleston are here, bussed up early this morning from Devon and given breakfast at Brown’s Hotel. Lord and Lady Ormerod travelled with them, taking the two seats at the front and joining lustily in the singing but, needless to say, the staff are going straight home afterwards having not been invited to the reception.
Martin the hall-boy, a misleading description for one so wizened with age, sits next to Clayden the butler, both in suits hired for the occasion. Maudie Doubleday, in a lemon creation of her own which makes her complexion seem greyer and more gaunt than ever, gives him a formal nod. There was talk, once, of something between them but they’re both well past it now.
‘She looks like a dream,’ whispers Nanny Ba-ba, her handkerchief in her bag at the ready although she supposes she won’t need it this time. It’s the first that’s always the worst.
‘Too good to be true,’ says Maud.
‘It’s time Master Fabian had some luck in his personal life,’ says Nanny, uncomfortable with all this standing. ‘And perhaps he won’t need to work so hard. Perhaps we’ll see him spending more time down at Hurleston, particularly if their liaison bears fruit.’
‘Bears fruit?’ says Maud. ‘That’s an odd way to put it. Rather Garden of Eden. And anyway, you could hardly cope with the twins. I hope you’re not imagining they’ll ask you to take over the nursery again. At your age? And with your leg?’
‘I’ll be at hand to give advice,’ Nanny Ba-ba replies. ‘And I’m always at my happiest when there’s children around me.’
Maud pulls herself in. ‘Not my scene at all I’m afraid,’ she mutters, and misses Nanny’s sideways glance.
‘I didn’t think we’d be gathering here again so soon,’ says Lord Ormerod under a tartan rug, tucked well into his bathchair. They have placed his leg on a kneeler, although what a kneeler is doing in a register office God only knows. Filtered organ Muzak, kneelers and lilies, by God. Plastic probably. Perhaps some people like to come in to say a quick prayer first, an apology most likely.
‘She’s a nice girl,’ says Lady Elfrida vaguely. She feels for Fabian, as any woman would feel for a son striving so hard for personal happiness. Fabian and Ffiona were married in the village church, where Helena was so recently buried. It was thought that the family plot in the grounds was a slightly archaic idea, too many regulations these days and too much work for the gardeners. The twins, also, might have found the business a little too morbid, too close to home. The last people to be buried there were Evelyn’s people, Percy and Ceci, in those days, they used to joke, the Old Granary was but a stepping stone on the way to the cemetery. But what is she doing dwelling on funerals? This should be a happy day. ‘Yes, midear, Angela’s a very nice girl, although I would have liked to know a little bit more about her. I mean, it’s so sad, there’s absolutely nobody here on her side.’ But there are no sides in this room. The spartan chairs run straight across.
‘You’d think the aunt might have made the effort. Considering.’
They are staying at Cadogan Square tonight and being driven back to Devon tomorrow. If this had been a weekday Evelyn would have popped into the House for a while for a quick snort and a snooze. He always managed quite well without a home in London, but the pace these days is so much faster. A journey there and back in one day would have been far too much for the elderly couple and neither of them are keen to stay in London any longer than necessary.
‘I do believe Honesty is rather upset,’ says Elfrida.
‘If the twins can manage to keep their peckers up at a time like this, then so should she,’ says His Lordship impatiently. ‘It’s high time that young lady found a man and pulled herself together. She can’t be Daddy’s girl forever.’
‘Shush now,’ says Elfrida. ‘He’s starting. We must just thank the Lord that Ffiona isn’t mingling with those terribly aggressive people outside.’
The police have moved back the crowd who now stand looking angry behind hastily constructed barriers. Under the circumstances it has been decided that the newlyweds will not stand for photographs, but wait until they reach the comparative seclusion of Brown’s. Everyone is hurriedly escorted to the waiting line-up of cars, and seen off in safety.
Fabian takes great delight and pride in introducing his new bride to the many friends and acquaintances who have not yet met her. He savours the looks on their faces, and Angela is utterly charming.
The last time everyone was here, in this same room, he was introducing Helena and it doesn’t seem all that long ago. Everyone was soaking wet. There’d been a violent thunderstorm. Surely the curtains are still the same, that kind of insipid candy stripe—oh yes, he remembers now, wasn’t it rather unfortunate because they matched poor Helena’s dress? She never had much sense of style, quite unlike Ffiona.
And how strange it is that their daughters have inherited these same traits from their mothers. All right, Honesty is all in black, how typical, but even so she carries it well, she’s a well-turned out young lady, a daughter to be proud of. It’s a pity debutantes don’t come out any more, a season would probably find her a man. But look at the twins, tucking into the artichoke tarts before everyone else has received their first glass of champagne. Don’t they teach them any basic good manners at The Rudge? What are they wearing? They look like a pair of nightdress cases. A mistake to go for the wedgwood blue. He should have known better than to trust Estelle to whom presentation, other than on a serving dish, is never very important.
‘Happy, darling?’
‘Oh yes, Fabian. Terribly happy!’
The dress is just revealing enough to show the top of her breasts. He bites his lip as he remembers the session at the penthouse last Thursday night. It was Angela who instigated it, Fabian was quite prepared to pick up his papers and go, take her back to Cadogan Square for a nightcap perhaps, and then call her a taxi. She never liked to be run home, ‘in case Aunty Val thinks somebody’s calling’.
He’d rather have waited, quite frankly, until after the marriage for that sort of thing but he could hardly turn his fiancée down when she’d offered herself to him, fresh and perfumed, naked and pink, on a plate like school blancmange. She’d slipped into bed and called to him impatiently while he was in the bathroom putting on his pyjamas.
Unlike Ffiona, who was quite brazen right from the start, Angela’s approach was sweetly shy, she lay on her back and waited for him, encouraging him, until he was ready. No unnatural positions. No squalid mouthings. Words he never used himself, let alone expected to hear from the mouth of a lady.
And what is more he had satisfied her, he could tell by her soft moans and cries and the way she kept calling him darling. So much for Ffiona’s accusations, and her scathing remarks about his small penis. Hah. Once was enough for Angela, while he dropped off to sleep she had to go and revive herself in the Jacuzzi afterwards.
But this reflective mood isn’t on. Fabian must circulate.
‘More champagne, Henry?’
‘Jerry? He’s over there chatting to Mummy.’
And as for Helena, great brood mare, riding astride him hair aflowing like some terrible Lady Godiva. At least Angela chose a dress and didn’t turn up for her wedding in a curtain with fringes.
No, Fabian congratulates himself, at last he has chosen wisely. Nobody wants to grow old alone, to face the future without a mate—in sickness and in health—and the older you get the more the sickness part makes sense. I mean, look at Evelyn and Elfrida. How would the old man get on without a wife to fetch and carry, to put up with his little habits, to organise, to soothe away his pain?
And to love him?
T
HE WEDDING ORDEAL ITSELF
was of little moment compared to the raging paroxysms of terror Ange endured on her return to the Prince Regent Hotel. It took her a good week, Saturday to Saturday, fully to recover.
How to acquire a bottom drawer? Eileen Coburn often, boringly, talked about hers.
Ange’s plan involved her sitting for an hour, checking the time every few minutes, in the brightly lit, red-carpeted foyer, eyeing up her most likely victim, or victims, as it turned out.
Saturday is changeover day at the Prince Regent Hotel, although the majority of their guests only stay for a night or two for a quick sprint round London on their dash through Europe. However, there are always the exceptions.
For Ange, there was no fear of being recognised. She looked like a different person for a start, chic, superior, the kind of guest the Prince Regent is proud to see sitting in their foyer, it helps to give the place some style. The inhabitants of the top floor had never been allowed to linger here, in the pulsing heart of the hotel. It would have been considered unseemly. They would have put the punters off. And she’d never had any dealings with the staff who operated on the ground floor, it was just a G on a lift button as far as Ange was concerned.
From the moment she set eyes on them the Japanese family looked most suitable, she could see they’d already been on a major shopping spree because of the brand-new English clothes the daughters and the wife were wearing, Aquascutum, Liberty prints, Jaeger. The three women were petite and pretty, and all about size ten, she guessed, as she watched them decide which theatres to visit during the coming week. They made their bookings at the reception and then they set off, father strutting ahead, wielding a black umbrella and top-heavy with camera equipment, on their way to some tourist location no doubt. The key the woman handed in at the desk was number thirty-three.
‘Never leave the hotel with your key.’ The housekeeper in charge of the top floor used to issue her orders to these most vulgar residents with a pinched nose tilted in thin disgust. ‘You never know who might pick it up,’ she could have been referring to some unspeakable disease. ‘Always drop it into the box placed on the landing so conveniently at your disposal.’
Nobody took any notice of old mother Bottomley. No one would bother to break into any fellow residents’ rooms, what was the point? It wasn’t a matter of trust, honour among thieves or anything so noble. Anything worth more than a fiver had already been sold, and the black-and-white television sets screwed to their rusty mountings weren’t even worth that.
On with the plan.
Casually, ever so casually, picking up her newspaper and her bag, Ange made for the lift. On the first floor she got out, and, just as she had expected, the linen cupboard was gaping open. She followed the pleasing smell of fresh laundry and, taking her life in her hands, stalked in and took out an overall. Then, fighting for breath, with her heart knocking against her ribs, she headed for the first set of loos she came to, taking care to notice the whereabouts of the chambermaids, the little white mountains of bedding piled at intervals along the corridor, and the wide open bedroom doors.
‘You’d never make a good witness,’ Billy used to tell her. ‘You don’t notice anything.’ And he’d ask her to describe the youth, the old man, the toddler they had just passed. She never could. She invariably failed the test.
But this morning she proved him wrong.
Every detail imprinted itself on her mind.
Ange changed in the lavatory and made herself wait through the longest five minutes of her life before it was time to set off once again.
Lo and behold, the first chambermaids had stripped the beds in both room thirty-three and its adjoining neighbour, thirty-five. The doors were wedged open, waiting for the new linen to be dumped inside, for the cleaners to do the bathrooms, empty the ashtrays and Hoover the floors. Ange stalked in, threw a sheet onto the stripped double bed, and in less than a minute she had emptied the wardrobe, the drawers and the little dressing table, drawn the sheet around the contents and lugged the bundle onto the landing.