Beggar Bride (33 page)

‘I thought it was you because you’re the only one who knows!’

‘But I never knew about half of this.’

‘No,’ says Ange. ‘Nobody did. But some sod has obviously considered it worth their while to do some muckraking.’

‘But why would they?’ asks Billy. ‘It must have cost them a fortune. What do they want you to do?’

Ange shakes her head. This is a hopeless question, she’s gone over it too many times alone, and come up with no answers. ‘We’ll have to get out, we can’t stay at Hurleston after this. We’ll have to get the money out and stay here, nobody knows about the Broughtons.’

Billy wipes his sweating forehead. ‘They probably do know. Why wouldn’t they know? They know everything else. We’ll have to tell Tina.’

Ange rounds on him.
‘But what if it’s Tina?’

‘It couldn’t be Tina,’ says Billy with a confidence Ange doesn’t share. ‘Think about it, Ange. Just calm down and think about this. Tina’s thick as shit. Where would she hire a private detective, and why? Anyway, she’d never be able to write a letter like this.’

He holds Ange against him, carefully, tenderly, stroking her hair, her back, her arms, her face. ‘You poor, poor thing,’ he says, as she trustingly relaxes in his arms at last, her eyes resting on him and feeling herself slowly being restored to strength, serenity and a little self-confidence. ‘You must have been driven half mad, and all on your own. But we must tell Tina, she’s in this up to her neck like we are. We must tell her as soon as she comes in and decide what we’re all going to do.’

‘But we can’t go back, Billy,’ sobs Ange. ‘Please say we needn’t go back. Let’s just stay here together where we are safe.’

Tina’s shocked reaction has more of a sting in it than Billy’s. ‘What fucker?’ ‘Who the hell?’ ‘Some sad bastard with nothing better to do.’

Tina is frightened, but furious at the same time, tottering round the small sitting-room in a short, tight skirt, lighting fag after fag and tapping them angrily out in the ashtray half smoked. Her cheap perfume fills the air and smells as hot as her smouldering rage.

‘Think, Tina.
Please think!
Did you, at any time, tell anyone at all what we were doing?’

‘Huh! So it’s me, is it?’
Tina folds her spiky arms and bits of fluff are hobbling out like burrs on her cheap angora sweater. ‘Typical! I get the blame! What d’you take me for, for Christsake? Who the hell would I tell anyway? Ed, perhaps? Oh yeah, yeah, that’s a good idea.’

‘Stop it, Tina,’ Ange retorts. ‘This isn’t getting us anywhere. These are questions we have all had to put to ourselves. Did we, by accident, ever let anything slip?’

‘Of course we didn’t,’ snaps Tina crossly, her bright red mouth forming a sullen pout into which she pushes another cigarette. ‘We’re all risking life and limb by doing this, we’d all get years if we were caught. We’d all lose our kids…’

‘I know, I know,’ Ange sighs. ‘It just doesn’t add up.’

‘It has to be that bitch Ffiona,’ says Tina, pouring herself another rum and black, offering the bottle to Ange and Billy who both shake their heads. Billy’s on lager anyway. ‘When you think about it, it must be Ffiona and that snotty daughter of hers. And the reason she’d be doing it would be to get revenge.’

‘On
me?
asks Ange. ‘I thought it was Fabian she detested.’

‘By the sounds of it she detests anyone who happens to be doing better than her. She fucked up, and she wants to see everyone else fucking up. She is sending you these letters to drive you insane, or just because she’s enjoying it.’

‘She’s gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to uncover some of these facts.’ Billy still finds the letters hard to believe.

‘She’s nothing else to do all day,’ says Tina, sounding convincing. ‘Think how all those man-hating cronies of hers would enjoy sitting round of an evening in their handknits, rat-arsed on cheap wine, composing the next one. I can almost hear the bitches cackling now.’

‘You mustn’t believe half of what Honesty tells you,’ warns Billy.

‘Hell, I don’t need to,’ Tina replies. ‘It just can’t be anyone else, that’s all. And you did have that worrying conversation with Honesty earlier on, Ange. I remember. You thought, back then, you told us you thought that cow knew something.’

They can talk about this for as long as they like going round and round, getting more and more tipsy and confused as the night wears on, but the real question remains—
what the fuck are they going to do about it?

Is it back to Hurleston on Friday as planned, or do they make a dash for it, dump the Range Rover, buy an old van for cash and disappear with the money? They’ve got far more than they bargained for, if they stay on they’ll only be being greedy. With the money that’s accumulated in the four different building societies, all three of them would be secure for life.

‘But we’d never know the answer,’ says Ange.

‘We don’t want to know,’ says Billy, ‘or I don’t at any rate.’

‘I don’t want to go back,’ says Tina, hugging herself. ‘I want out.
Now.’

But by the end of the night, by the time they are ready to fall into bed, they have decided they must return, if only for the weekend, if only to make quite certain there is nothing at Hurleston which might give any clues as to their whereabouts, and there are some bits and pieces which they are going to need… passports, for instance, birth certificates, vaccination and medical cards, the kind of personal photographs and documents, the paraphernalia everyone needs to survive in the world.

And most important of all there’s the building society books hidden away in the Gladstone bag.

But now Ange has shared her horrible secret, much of the terror has left her. She feels almost secure once again, thank God Billy and Tina are no longer insisting on staying at Hurleston until Archie is seven and then abandoning the child to some chilling, public school regime which might turn him into a little man long before his time, strong and hard and hidden, calculating and ruthless, like Fabian.

F
IRST IT’S A RABID
nympho, then a boiler-suited virago and now Fabian seems to be stuck with a woman more like a child, romping in the grounds, baby-talking, clapping her hands and smelling of the nursery, and if he didn’t know she was almost completely disinterested in sex he would have to suspect her of having it off with the handyman-driver.

How can a man so successful in the international banking world, an acknowledged expert in the derivatives market, make such catastrophic blunders when it comes to his women?

How the hell does he do it?

Angela was good company at first, a young woman who admired him and he has to admit his ego was certainly boosted with a beauty like Angela on his arm. But gradually matters have gone downhill. If she’s not jumping down his throat over some little issue she seems to be avoiding him.
Watching him?
Fabian bemoans his fate to his friend and legal adviser, Jerry Boothroyd, as they sit in a New York hotel sipping ice-cold gins, waiting for the rest of the dining party.

‘Perhaps,’ says Jerry, leaning forward confidentially and allowing his rounded stomach to rest on the edge of the leather seat, ‘you expect too much. Whereas I…’

‘Martha is a wonderful woman,’ says Fabian.

‘Yes,’ Jerry sits back and his unhappy chair groans its relief. ‘Yes, she’s a love, there’s no doubting that. And the boys. I’m a lucky man, Fabian.’ As Jerry further relaxes, once again his stomach acts as an ashtray for wedges of Havana cigar ash. And Martha Boothroyd doesn’t just sit around and ask to be looked after, oh no, she’s come into her own just recently, with no qualifications other than a certificate from the Lucie Clayton cordon-bleu course she took thirty years ago, she plays a highly lucrative role sitting on three Government quangos.

His boys have only just returned from a month-long holiday sailing with friends on Fabian’s island, Indigo. They are healthy, outgoing chaps, never a moment’s trouble, but then Fabian’s daughter, Honesty, is a decent enough sort of girl. And now he has begat a son. The man should be over the moon, not sitting there opposite with a face like a suicidal bloodhound.

‘And I’ve also got a feeling that Angela is turning into a neurotic. She’s pale. And thin. Nervy—you know what I mean. Some women do get like that.’

‘It normally happens to jumpy little women, in my experience.’

It is strange for these two friends to be sitting here discussing personal issues like this, normally there’s more scintillating stuff to absorb them, like money, shooting, racing, shares, takeovers, politics, and both of them look slightly uneasy. But this has to be said, and Fabian can confide in nobody else. His parents seem quite delighted with Angela, and often have Archie over for tea—just for an hour of course, children are so exhausting—with Nanny Tree in attendance.

Even Honesty manages to get along with Angela when she has to nowadays, and the twins are rude to her in the same way they are rude to everyone else.

‘She’s changed,’ moans Fabian, sinking into a morose silence, watching the glittering personalities crossing the hotel foyer with their entourages and their cartloads of luggage. ‘And since she gave up work she never goes anywhere, she never sees anyone but her old mad aunt, we don’t entertain any more and she shows no interest in accompanying me on my travels.’

‘She is very young, Fabian old boy, and perhaps she’s a bit overwhelmed by it all, marriage, motherhood, a whole new way of life, I mean to say, old chap, she didn’t come out of the top drawer did she?’

‘We don’t know which drawer she came out of,’ Fabian admits, ‘we still don’t know anything about her. She’s very close, Jerry.’

‘But a beautiful girl…’

‘Oh yes, she certainly is beautiful, I’m not denying that. But her interests and her conversation are as limited as poor Honesty’s. I mean, Jerry, she even watches these so-called soaps on the television. She gets together with that damn nanny and you’d think they were old friends and I can’t begin to understand her taste in music.’

‘It’s that generation, old boy, I’m afraid. They’re all the same. Perhaps it is us who are stuffy. You might just have to sit back and put up with it, after all, she did give you a son.’

‘Yes, and a fine one too,’ says Fabian, thinking proudly of little three-year-old Archie whose name went down for Winchester on the day that he was born. Perhaps his assistant, Simon Chalmers, had been right, when he suggested they do some checking before Fabian’s marriage. But Fabian, the bloody fool, hadn’t wanted to build a new relationship on mistrust, and Angela, apart from being enchanting, was a simple person with no grand pretensions, so what did it matter where she came from?

Whoosh.

We must leave Fabian and Gerry behind. This side of the Atlantic again, and Ffiona is stunned to open her door and be confronted by Angela waiting on the doorstep holding two pints of silver top milk. She recognises the woman from the wedding pictures in the papers which she pored over back at the time, trying to find some waspish comment which might bring some modicum of relief. All she could think of was, well, if you look like that it means you can’t have a brain in your head.

‘Ffiona?’

‘You better come in.’

You can tell she finds the state of Ffiona’s unkempt house distasteful, and Ffiona has to admit that the smell of stale smoke and old booze combined outstrips the solitary, smouldering joss stick.

‘Won’t you sit down… oh, sorry, wait a minute, I’ll move the tray.’ Ffiona gives a snort of a laugh, irritated at how inadequate she must seem in front of her glamorous visitor. ‘I had a few people round last night,’ she says over-defensively, ‘and of course I can’t afford a woman to come and clean up after me.’

‘No, I understand that,’ says Angela. Her handbag must have cost an arm and a leg. But then she’s lucky, she’s got her own money, hasn’t she, she can spend it on whatever she likes, she is not dependent on Fabian as Ffiona was.

‘Tea, coffee, something stronger?’ But Angela must have noticed on her way through the kitchen that the only tea on offer is peppermint and the only coffee decaff. There’s really no need for her to put that patronising look on her face. The kitchen might not look clean, but it is, somewhere, underneath. Even Honesty had a go at it a couple of weeks ago, she couldn’t stand to see it that way any longer.

‘If you don’t make more of an effort than this you’re going to have to call in the council to have the whole house fumigated,’ her daughter chastised.

‘Rubbish,’ snorted Ffiona, ‘you little prig.’

‘And you’re never sober these days, Mummy. Your liver must be absolutely shot.’

‘Mind your own business, you’re hardly ever here, anyway, so what right have you to come criticising? Now you’ve managed to creep round Angela they can’t keep you away from Hurleston. It’s time you grew out of horses, darling, there’s something rather unpleasant about women your age astride, and still hanging around the Pony Club.’

Honesty gazed round Ffiona’s kitchen with rude disapproval. ‘It’s quite a miracle, Mummy, that you haven’t already poisoned yourself.’

To Ffiona’s mild distress things haven’t worked out as well as she’d hoped between them. Ffiona enjoyed telling her friends that her daughter had chosen, she had eventually chosen to come home at last, to leave Fabian and be with the parent who really loved her, who had always cared, who had suffered her only child to be ripped from her arms at the tender age of six. To be fair, Ffiona herself had conveniently forgotten that Fabian had actually requested that Honesty live with her mother, back in the early days, he thought the child would be happier there than at boarding school in spite of her so called immoral way of life. But Ffiona had been far too busy fighting the divorce settlement, falling hopelessly in love, travelling the world… there’d been no room in her life for a daughter. And she couldn’t get over, even now she finds it repugnant to contemplate, the base means to which Fabian and his henchmen resorted in order to set her up. Sending that message from a drunken old friend supposedly ‘in trouble’, getting her to visit that hideous Soho sex den, positioning a photographer outside the door to catch her when she realised her mistake and hastened out. Oh God, she’d been so naive! The publicity was horrid. All her friends turned against her. They’d even bribed a little receptionist to say she was a regular caller, and none of the other clients cared to reveal themselves, none chose to stand up in court and swear Ffiona had never been there before.