The Marrying Game (17 page)

Once again, the four of them were gathered round Wendy’s kitchen table for a post-mortem. This time, however, Max was not laughing. He looked at Rufa with a new respect.

‘If you hadn’t come in at that moment – well, you’re not going out to anything else without an armed escort, that’s all. I’d have killed him.’

‘I didn’t need an armed escort, I had Ru,’ Nancy
pointed
out, leaning over to squeeze her hand. ‘“For there is no friend like a sister/ In calm or stormy weather/ To cheer one on the tedious way/ To fetch one if one goes astray –”’

‘Don’t!’ Roshan pleaded, his large brown eyes swimming with tears. ‘If you quote any more of that, I’m finished.’

Rufa and Nancy, who had been drifting dangerously towards solemnity, started laughing. Nancy said, ‘I wish we’d had Pete with us, though. I don’t mean to protect us – I mean, wouldn’t it be great to have a picture?’

Roshan blew his nose, and gave her a watery smile. ‘The sight of him, sprawled on the floor – we didn’t know whether to leave him, or give him the kiss of life.’

Max asked, ‘What did you do with the shitbag, in the end?’

‘Before we could decide, he woke up and started sobbing.’

‘He followed us out of there like a lamb,’ Rufa said. ‘We left him in a chair under the stairs. He was sobbing so hard, we didn’t have the heart to make a fuss.’

‘All the same,’ Max said, ‘he owes Nancy one hell of an apology.’

To everyone’s surprise, the apology arrived next morning. Rufa opened the front door to find a man holding two large hand-tied bouquets of tiger lilies, for Miss Rufa and Miss Nancy Hasty. Rather charmed, in spite of herself, Rufa thanked the man, and was about to close the door when he announced that he had one more delivery. He went back to his van and returned with an immense basket of blood-red roses, decorated with great slippery bows of scarlet silk ribbon. Rufa had to push some of the stems back to get it through the front door.
Tied
to the basket’s handle was a white envelope, addressed to Mr Roshan Lal.

She and Nancy laughed at this, but Roshan was shaken. ‘Anita must have given him my name and address –’ He pulled the card from the envelope. It said, in clear round handwriting: ‘I meant it. We have to meet again.’

The three of them, crammed into Wendy’s hall beside the monstrous tower of roses, looked at each other with awe.

Roshan whispered, ‘He meant it!’

‘If you’ll excuse my French,’ Nancy said, ‘fuck this for a game of marrying.’

Rufa would not admit defeat. Their first two outings had been dismal failures, but she insisted that they had to regroup to try again. ‘We’ll just work our way down the list, until we find someone who doesn’t either despise us, or fall madly in love with Roshan.’

Wendy, back from Kidderminster, was highly impressed by the basket of roses. ‘I suppose, if Tiger is secretly gay, that would explain his terrible record with women. He’s in denial.’

‘Thank you, Dr Freud,’ Roshan said. ‘Not any more. He’s started ringing me at work – he wants me to have dinner with him. As if I would.’ The last sentence was very faintly tinged with wistfulness. He added bracingly, ‘Beast.’

The Sunday after the ball, his Style section had printed the hedonistic photographs of Nancy and Rufa. Spread across the page in glorious colour, the two of them looked – as Max said – good enough to eat. Rufa
thought
this must help. Rose had been absolutely dazzled, to the extent of ringing them on the off chance that they had some spare cash.

The sober truth, however, was that their funds were dwindling horribly fast. Rufa was wondering how she could find people to cook for. Nancy was, once again, threatening to get herself a job behind a bar. Rufa was even more against this after the publication of the pictures. The weather was cold and wet. Tufnell Park was dark and perpetually dripping.

‘This Game is like snakes and ladders,’ Nancy observed, one dispiriting morning, gazing dully out of the bedroom window at the traffic swishing past. ‘The minute we get our feet on a ladder, we slide down a huge snake, straight back to square one. We’ve got to insinuate ourselves into some more parties, while we can still afford the bus fares.’

Roshan, who felt rather guilty about rousing a target’s latent tendencies, kept them supplied with magazines. Rufa, feeling horribly poor and unconnected, was dutifully poring over
Harpers & Queen
on her bed.

Nancy said, ‘First, the target has to see us. Then he has to ask one of us out. Then he has to decide that he’s ready to get married, and be deeply enough in love to pay the Man’s debts. It might take months.’

‘Oh, God!’ Rufa gasped suddenly.

‘Well, we have to face it, darling. Rome wasn’t built in a day.’

‘Look! Look at this!’ Rufa, her face alight, leapt off her bed, and slapped Jennifer’s Diary down in front of Nancy.

Nancy stared at the page. ‘It’s Berry!’

‘Yes, it’s Berry – his father’s a lord, and just look at his
house!’
She started to laugh. ‘Ran didn’t bother to mention it, of course, or he could have saved us a lot of trouble.’ She was reading the captions of the photographs over Nancy’s shoulder. ‘Shit, he’s engaged – I forgot about that. Just our luck.’

Lord and Lady Bridgmore were pictured in their splendid drawing room, before a Robert Adam chimney piece and a large painting by Gainsborough, which looked sumptuous enough to buy up the whole of Melismate, debts and all. The occasion was a ball to celebrate their 35th wedding anniversary and the engagement of their son, the Honourable Hector Berowne. His fianceé – about whom he had been so reticent on Christmas Eve – worked at a famous Bond Street gallery, Soames and Pellew.

‘Well, well, well,’ Nancy said softly. ‘The bluebird of happiness was right in our back yard all along. I vote we move Berry straight to the top of our list.’

Rufa was uncertain. ‘He’s engaged, though. It looks as if we’ve missed him.’

‘I don’t care,’ Nancy said, frowning. ‘This is a chance from heaven, and I’m going to go for it.’

‘But Nance, he’s engaged!’

‘Tell me he didn’t fancy me.’

‘He fancied you like mad,’ Rufa admitted, ‘but obviously not enough to change his mind about that girl.’

‘Just watch me,’ Nancy said. ‘You’re looking at the future Lady Bridgmore.’

Chapter Ten

THE FUTURE LADY
Bridgmore, known for the time being as Polly Muir, sat at her Hepplewhite desk in her Bond Street gallery. She was a slight, neat young woman, whose pretty features might have been rather nondescript, if her presentation had not been excellent. This morning she wore a short black skirt – her legs were admirable – and a plain white silk shirt. Her long, straight blonde hair was tied back in a black velvet clip at the nape of her neck.

Understated, and then some, she always thought. When in doubt, take it off. The pursuit of understated excellence was her life’s mission. Nobody appreciated the sheer hard labour involved. Soames and Pellew mainly paid her to be pretty and posh, and she could easily combine this with her real work, which was going through her immense databank of mental lists.

Firstly, the list of those to be invited to her wedding. Polly had combed and manipulated her family history so that it could pass muster anywhere – but the fact remained that she was horribly short of suitable relations. Her great-aunt, widow of a Scottish baronet, could be flown in from Australia. The rest of that crew were hopeless, however: all twanging accents and perma-tans. She must somehow fill her side of the
church
with well-born friends. And, somehow, she would have to persuade her father not to use his usual Christian name. Nobody was called ‘Leslie’. His middle name was Alistair, and that would sit far better with the kilt.

In Polly’s life, everything had to be checked and double-checked for rightness. She spoke the language well, but not with total fluency. Was it absolutely right, for instance, to have one’s wedding list at Peter Jones? Was it right to include the amusing china dog bowl, when neither she nor Berry possessed a dog? Come to that, was it absolutely right to have a wedding list at all? Polly did not mind appearing to be grasping. People born into the English upper class were the most grasping she had ever met. It was simply that one had to be careful to grasp in the right way.

When the two russet-haired goddesses walked into the gallery, Polly was resting her mind warmly upon the cosy figure of Berry. Darling old Berry, she could not wait to be married to him, and living in the sweet Chelsea house his parents were bestowing as a wedding gift. They were darlings too. Lady Bridgmore’s dachshunds were darlings. The only non-darling in the glorious picture was Berry’s ghastly sister, Annabel; and who cared about her? In the aristocracy, sisters did not count for much.

The redheads were examining the Victorian watercolours on the panelled walls. Polly rose behind her desk, and trained her radar on them. They wore excellent clothes – Polly owned the pale blue version of the taupe jacket. Their shoes and handbags were unmistakable Prada. As an afterthought, walking towards them across the mossy, muffling carpet, she noticed that
they
were both, in a purely physical sense, beautiful.

‘Hello.’ Polly did not, of course, say, ‘May I help you?’, which smacked of the shopkeeper. She was part hostess here, and part angel-with-flaming-sword.

The girl with the redder hair (fitted taupe jacket) smiled. ‘Hello, I hope you don’t mind us having a look. We just love smudgy pictures of flowers – and you never know when I might be making my wedding list.’

Her tall, pale sister (black suit) looked alarmed, and murmured, ‘Nancy!’

‘And anyway,’ Nancy went on, ‘we couldn’t walk past when we saw the name in the window. Berry told us you worked here, and we’ve both been longing to meet you.’

Polly’s smile did not waver. Her light blue eyes were wary. ‘I’m sorry – I don’t believe we’ve –’

Nancy held out her hand. ‘Nancy Hasty. This is my sister, Rufa.’

Polly’s mental computer processed the name. These were the people who had taken care of Berry when he had that idiotic adventure on Christmas Eve. These were the well-born and romantically impoverished Hastys, who owned a tumbledown manor with a family motto over its crumbling door. She had rather hoped Berry would introduce her to the Hastys, and here they were. Dear old Berry – how like him to miss the glaring fact that the Hasty girls were stunning.

She shook their hands. Her smile stopped being conditional and became warm, making her neat, fair face very pretty. ‘Of course. How lovely to meet you at last. Now I can thank you properly for being so sweet to Berry.’

Rufa said, ‘It was a pleasure. He sent our mother some gorgeous flowers.’

‘I know,’ Polly said. ‘That was my idea.’

‘I hope your Christmas improved after that.’

‘It was heavenly, thanks. Both of us desperately needed a rest, and your part of the country is so peaceful. Are you in London for long?’

‘Well –’ Rufa seemed confused.

‘Just for a week or two,’ Nancy put in smoothly. ‘Until our money runs out. I expect Berry told you how poor we are.’

Berry had mentioned their poverty, in a way that Polly had found rather worrying. Now she had seen for herself that theirs was a Prada-shod poverty, her last doubt died.

‘I know he’d love to see you again,’ she said. ‘Look, this is wretchedly short notice – but why don’t you pop along to our opening, tomorrow night?’

Polly’s mind was working rapidly. Her employer, Jimmy Pellew, was always on at her to cheer up openings with ornamental people. Rufa and Nancy, merely by being beautiful, would lend the party glamour, and bring the smudgy watercolours out in a rash of red dots. ‘Six thirty – the usual champagne and canapés.’

‘What fun,’ Nancy said. ‘We’d love to.’