The Marrying Game
Authors: Kate Saunders
Contents
About the Book
With a batty mother, a crumbling house and no education to speak of, the four Hasty girls aren’t best equipped for the modern world. And when the death of their charming but useless father leaves them nothing but mountains of debt, drastic action is called for.
Luckily the eldest, Rufa – already expert at making ends meet – has a Plan. If their sole inheritance is their ravishing good looks then she and her sisters must put all thoughts of love out of their minds and Marry Money. And so with her outrageously sexy sister Nancy she sets off to blaze a trail through London society. The Marrying Game has begun…
About the Author
Kate Saunders is a journalist and writer. She has written for
The Sunday Times
, the
Sunday Express
, the
Daily Telegraph
and
Cosmopolitan
, and has contributed to Radio 4’s
Woman’s Hour, Start the Week
and
Kaleidoscope
. She lives in London with her son.
Also by Kate Saunders
Night Shall Overtake Us
Wild Young Bohemians
Lily Josephine
Bachelor Boys
This one is for Felix
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to everyone who helped with the writing of this book, particularly to Philip Wells, for translating the Hasty family motto into medieval French, and to Felix Wells, who first dreamed up the Ressany saga. Thanks are also due to Amanda Craig, Joanna Briscoe, Charlotte Mendelssohn, Louisa Saunders, Bill Saunders and Charlotte
Saunders
.
PART ONE
Chapter One
‘THIS ONE IS
the set of Narnia books, from Roger,’ Nancy said. ‘This one is Barbie and her strangely enormous pony, which looks more like a dray-horse – that’s from Mum.’ She held the gaudy parcels up before her sister’s dazed, melancholy face. ‘And mine’s coming later. That’s at least three more presents than we thought.’
‘Four,’ Selena said, from the depths of her book. Her obsessive reading never stopped her joining in the conversation. ‘I made her some chocolate fudge, and I thought I’d put it in my painted box – she’s always fancied it. Has anyone got any spare wrapping paper?’
‘I have,’ Rufa murmured. ‘Leave it on my bed, and I’ll do it when I wrap mine.’
Lydia was smiling mistily, like sun breaking through cloud. ‘It’s going to be all right, isn’t it? I can stand anything, as long as Linnet has enough presents. You’re all wonderful – I don’t know how to thank you.’
‘You can stop her getting up at dawn,’ Nancy suggested. ‘It’s so fiendishly cold, I need at least an hour’s notice before I leave my virgin couch.’
Rufa laughed softly. ‘You’ll be lucky. Linnet told me she’s going to borrow my alarm clock and set it for five.’ She was stretched out on the sofa, exhausted and reeking of nutmeg after weeks of Christmas cooking. Her long
auburn
hair, the colour of garnets, poured over the hideous orange tweed cushions. Her three younger sisters sprawled on the floor, their long ropes of hair brushing the ashy carpet. Each had a slice of herself wedged against the fender, exposed to the tiny fire.
‘Liddy,’ Nancy said, ‘get that monstrous great bum of yours out of the way.’
‘Monstrous bum – look who’s talking.’ Lydia’s soft voice was gently steeped in complaint. ‘I need more heat than you do. I’m thinner, and my surface area is greater in relation to my volume.’ She wrestled the cork from a bottle of cheap red wine.
Selena finally raised her head from the pages of
Paradise Lost
. ‘Biscuit, anyone?’ From the darned folds of her huge jersey, she produced a packet of chocolate digestives.
‘My God,’ Nancy exclaimed. ‘Where on earth did you get those?’
‘Brian gave them to me. I think he’s sorry for us.’
Brian was the sweaty young man from the auctioneers, currently estimating the value of the ancient house and its dilapidated contents. Melismate, home of the Hasty family for nearly a thousand years, was about to go under the hammer.
Selena tore the packet open, and her sisters shot out begging hands. The appalling lack of money, further beyond a joke than it had ever been, made chocolate biscuits seem as exotic as caviare. They had been living on their mother’s meagre leek soup for several weeks, hoarding every penny for the last Christmas at Melismate.
‘That was nice of him,’ Rufa said, with her mouth full. She felt it was important to notice when people were being nice.
‘Hmmm.’ Absently, Selena turned a page.
‘He’s rather odious sometimes, but it’s not his fault we’re ruined.’
‘Don’t say “ruined” like that,’ Lydia murmured. She poured the wine into four mismatched teacups, and handed them round. ‘Every time I think about the future, I just feel sick.’
It was Christmas Eve. The Man was enjoying his first Christmas in heaven. The house he had left was freezing. Under the hammer, his family were being beaten to smithereens. Next day’s lunch, a supermarket chicken the size of a canary, sat in the echoing fridge, ready for cooking. Rufa had spent her last reserves of energy scrubbing and peeling the mountain of potatoes that would have to fill seven empty stomachs. Now, they had reached the point where there was nothing left to do. The pies and cakes, which would have occupied her in the days of relative plenty, did not exist this year. Their mother was downstairs, with Lydia’s little daughter. The Hasty girls had gathered, as they often did, in the old nursery.
The nursery consisted of two garrets in the sloping roof, knocked into one large room. It was as draughty as the deck of the
Cutty Sark
and crammed with lumber. Brian had valued the lumber, in its entirety, at forty pounds. He could not be expected to see that its true value went beyond money. The nursery was a millefeuille of family history; layer upon layer, like the rings of a tree.
The scrap screen, covered with yellowed pictures of cherubic children in sailor suits, was a relic of some Victorian Hasty. The formidable Silver Cross pram, now dented and lame, dated from the Man’s postwar
infancy
. The orange sofa, disfigured by a huge burn, was part of the girls’ own history. They all remembered the famous bonfire night in the 1980s, when the Man had painfully learned the difference between outdoor and indoor fireworks.
The Man was their late father. He had flown out of the world six months before, leaving the rest of them to drop to earth like so many spent rockets. The Man had been divinely handsome, dazzlingly autocratic, royally eccentric and utterly charming. He could carry a ridiculous gesture far beyond comedy, and invest it with grandeur. On his honeymoon in Antibes, he had rushed out during an argument and tried to join the Foreign Legion. He had once daubed his naked body with blue powder paint and attended a children’s fancy dress party as an Ancient Briton. The Man had loved parties, he had virtually lived at a party. He liked his house teeming with people and ringing with laughter. He had loved to lose his heart, and his wife and daughters had nursed him tenderly through his many infidelities, when that susceptible organ was sent back in pieces - somehow, even his adultery was different, and did not count as betrayal. Nobody could remember when they had started calling him the Man. He had simply been the ultimate male, the Man to crown all Men. He had surrounded himself – and them – with an atmosphere of excitement and glamour. When he died, all the colour had bled out of the world.
Rufa struggled into a sitting position to sip her wine. She had adored her father, but was beginning to admit that the Man’s highly individual morals had had a blighting effect on the romantic lives of his daughters. He had given them their fatal preference for the
ornamental
over the practical.
The problem was not that there were no men like him. On the contrary, the world positively seethed with charming eccentrics who never got up in the mornings. They were easier to catch than the flu, and always disappointing. Their charming ineffectiveness could never compare with the epic, sweet uselessness of Rufus Hasty.
Rufa’s first romantic disappointment had been a major one; so heartbreaking and humiliating that, even three years later, she wanted nothing more to do with love.
And it’s not just me, she thought – look at the others.
Lydia had come home, with her little girl, after the failure of her ludicrous marriage. Nancy was currently madly in love with the doctor’s son, who lived in a caravan at the bottom of his parents’ garden. Selena was still at school, and too young for really deep disappointment, but she already had an instinctive taste for a good-looking loser. It was only a matter of time.
Lydia said, as someone was always saying, ‘If only there was something we could do!’
Nancy helped herself to another biscuit. ‘Well, there isn’t. Unless we all marry money.’
‘We might,’ Selena pointed out.
‘What, before the auction?’ Rufa laughed. ‘We don’t even know anybody rich. Let alone anybody rich enough to pay the Man’s debts and save the house.’
Selena put down her book. ‘But it’s still a possibility.’
‘I got the only available man for miles around,’ Lydia said wistfully, ‘and just look at him. We never meet anyone.’
‘You can say that again,’ Nancy agreed. ‘This place is
like
Brigadoon – God knows what century it is out there. I must take a peek sometime, and see if they’ve repealed those awful Corn Laws.’
‘Actually –’ Rufa began. Her eyes were fixed thoughtfully on a snake’s tongue of flame that had shot out of the red embers. ‘Actually, Selena’s right. If we could meet the rich men, it ought to be perfectly possible to marry one.’
‘I’ve got a better idea,’ Nancy said disconsolately. ‘Let’s rub all the lamps, and see if a fucking genie pops out.’
‘I’d happily work for the money,’ Rufa said, ‘if I knew how to earn enough. Unfortunately, making jam, at a clear profit of sixty-two pence per jar, is never going to get us millions of pounds by the end of March.’