Beggar Bride (28 page)

Christ! Greedy cow.
How can she talk this way?
A year ago, Tina would have thought one grand was some kind of miracle, fallen into her lap with such ease! And now she’s got a small fortune and for doing sod all. She could use the money as a deposit for a small house for her and Petal, or go abroad with it, America perhaps, and get a job as a nanny out there. References from the Ormerod family would be worth their weight in thousand-dollar notes. If Tina played her cards right, if she worked on her image she could get married, start a new life, the whole world would be laid at her feet and yet she and Billy are harping on about being too hasty!

‘Clever boy, Jacob! Happy birthday! Happy birthday! Daddy’s going to make some clever balloon animals now, you sit in your chair and watch!’

The pretty, fragile Petal, dressed as a fairy in blue netting, drags Jacob across the room to the nursing chair and sits there waiting, with the birthday boy on her lap. Archie is already leaping up and down in the baby bouncer, an activity he can’t get enough of as his little bow legs jerk and dance and he blows disgusting bubbles.

Billy sits cross-legged on the floor and begins to blow up some long, thin balloons, the perfect party entertainer. The fool. The joker. She wants to hit him. Take that daft look off his face. ‘And what about him?’ he turns round and asks.

‘Archie? Well, what about him?’

‘You know what he will be missing—if you decide to give this up and run away.’

‘What are you sodding on about, Billy?’

Billy stretches a red balloon, it squeaks, Ange shudders, she could never bear the sound, like chalk, or nails searing down a blackboard. Shivers go down her spine when he says, ‘I am talking about Archie’s inheritance.’

Ange cannot deny that this has crossed her mind at times, just the thought of the lifestyle her youngest child will be giving up when Billy and she return to their rightful roots. ‘But, Billy, that would mean we stay here virtually forever!’

‘Nope,’ says Billy, pulling funny faces at Jacob and twisting two balloons round one another until they hurt. Ouch they hurt, they grind on her nerves. Ange grits her teeth. ‘We would only have to stay until Archie went to boarding school, seven is the preferred age I think, and there’s no way you or anyone else is going to convince Fabian that his only son should try any other sort of education.’

Is he mad?
‘Seven?’

‘Seven, Ange. Seven. And when Archie reaches seven he won’t need a nanny any more, you can leave Fabian, but at least Archie won’t miss out on everything that’s going here.’

What? What the hell’s he on about? Desperation wells up inside her. If only he’d leave those bloody balloons alone! He twists with his hands and he twists with his words, and both are painful to Ange’s ears. ‘What? You mean leave Archie here, with Fabian?
And us go and live somewhere else?’

Billy flushes with guilty excitement as he hurries on to explain. ‘That might not be necessary. After all, Honesty’s gone back to live with Ffiona…’

‘But Honesty is an adult woman! It’s not the same at all, see.’ Ange is weary, oh so weary. None of these arguments ought to be necessary. Not between her and Billy. ‘Fabian would never allow his son to leave Hurleston and come and live with me, not in a million years! You know that, Billy,
you know that very well.
It would mean staying here for another six years, living on our nerves, never knowing when the shit was going to hit the fan and then, just like that, we would abandon him! Well, you know where you can stuff that sodding idea!’

But Tina has sided with Billy. And now, with a feigned carelessness, she sits and shakes her silly head.

The truth slices like a knife through her brain.
‘You’ve talked about this!
You have both talked behind my back and reached this decision without me!’

They’ve no need to answer. Ange can see how things stand and Tina needn’t bother to deny it. ‘You make it sound as if it’s a conspiracy,’ says Tina, so disruptive, so mischievous, ‘when it’s not. Not at all. It’s just an idea that has come to Billy and me while we’ve been chatting over these last months. We knew you’d be against it and we didn’t know how to bring it up.’

This is outrageous. ‘And this seemed like the right moment, did it?’

‘It did,’ says Billy, manoeuvring two of the wretched balloons to form the shape of a couple of horns. He is smiling. Always smiling, the barmy sod, she could convince him if Tina wasn’t here, if he’d still been on his own, and Ange gazes at him, dry-mouthed, unable even to swallow. ‘There!’ he says to Jacob, and the child claps his hands. ‘A Bambi!’

She loves them both so totally, Archie, so bouncy, rompy and ridiculous, and little Jacob, eighteen months older—funny how she always considers him as the youngest, still, and the most in need of protection. Just the vaguest fear that they might endure the kind of childhood Ange had drives her to dementia.

‘I’m so pleased with your progress just lately,’ said the lumpen Sandra Biddle on Ange’s last visit to her gloomy offices, smelling of charity cardboard boxes and pink, utilitarian polish. The biscuits they sometimes serve are those horrible pink wafers—who would buy them? ‘You do look so much better Angela, you’ve filled out, and you sound so much more contented. I am so glad things seem to be working out at Willington Gardens. No more talk of a van, then, no more ideas about taking to the road with two young children?’

‘Billy’s got work now,’ said Ange, ‘seasonal work on the roads down south and the money is making all the difference.’

‘Yes,’ said Sandra. ‘I called round to see you the other day, I was in the area, so I thought I’d take a chance. You weren’t in, unfortunately, and neither was Tina. How is Tina, by the way? I haven’t seen her for some time now.’

Ange twinges with irritation. How many times has she told Tina, just lately, to get in touch with Sandra Biddle? It’s this sort of thing that threatens to jeopardise the whole enterprise, the least she and Billy can do is help her by acting a little responsibly.

‘And Jacob? And Archie?’

‘I’m still going to the clinic with Jacob,’ Ange said, quite truthfully, she does go when she gets the chance, when she goes on one of her mythical visits to Aunty Val. ‘And they’re dead chuffed with his progress. He is just about to have his second birthday.’

‘Oh, that’s nice,’ Sandra agreed. ‘To be quite honest with you, Angela, at one time I thought that child would never thrive. And you didn’t seem to be able to cope with it at all.’

‘It was awful, apart from the money worries, and Billy being out of work, and settling in the flat, I think I was probably suffering from post-natal depression.’ She gave Sandra a positive smile. ‘And thank God that hasn’t happened this time.’

‘Well, you’ll be thrilled to hear that I’ve got some very good news for you both. The council have decided to give you one of the new houses on the Broughton estate.’

Ange frowned, hesitated too long? ‘I don’t know…’

‘Yes you do, the ones behind the Co-op and the old Regal Cinema? They’re very nice, three-bedroomed, night storage heaters, infant and junior school right next door, small shopping precinct…’

‘How wonderful! I didn’t know…’

Oh not now, not now.

‘I am always busying myself behind the scenes, you know, working away on your behalf.’

‘Tina will be disappointed, being left behind.’

‘Tina’s only got one child. And she doesn’t have a man working to pay the increased rent,’ Sandra reminded her.

‘No, of course. I can’t wait to tell Billy!’ lied Ange.

‘You’ll want to move in right away of course.’

‘Yes,’ Ange agreed, bewildered. ‘Oh yes. We certainly will.’

And so, of course, there was all that to be dealt with. Billy had to hire a ramshackle van to fit the role, they had to manhandle all their tatty belongings down the three flights of stairs while Tina minded the kids in her old flat. They told Fabian they were off to the moor for an all-day picnic and the whole thing was a mad rush, it was late before they got back to Devon, exhausted. And while the neighbours at Willington Gardens couldn’t give a toss about what anyone did, or whether they were in or out or dead or alive or hovering in limbo somewhere between the two, at the Broughtons matters were quite different. People were trying, you could tell by the few efforts some had made with their small gardens. And some doors had been painted in individual colours, an effort at self-expression, there were a few downmarket cars undergoing repairs on the road outside.

A few nosy women congregated to watch them move in or, more likely, to see what their sparse belongings looked like, to judge them. People were proud of their brand-new houses, they didn’t want any old problem family with a couple of rottweilers moving in here.

Ange and Billy were in too much of a hurry to pass the time of day and this didn’t please the neighbours. She thought she heard somebody whispering, ‘snooty cow’. As soon as the work was finished they had to go, pick Tina and the kids up, and drive all the way back to Hurleston. Ange absolutely refused to stay the night at Cadogan Square because of Murphy O’Connell’s unnerving attitude. But everyone was well aware they would have to spend some time at the Broughtons or tongues would soon start wagging.

Would you credit it? If it’s not one thing it’s another.

But Tina MUST keep in touch with Sandra Biddle. That is essential, whatever they all decide. Ange loathes visiting the social worker, she always has, even as a child, even when she felt Sandra to be her only friend in the world, although the woman means well she is a living symbol of Ange’s past, of her old hopeless helplessness.

They can’t continue the discussion because the twins arrive just in time to catch the end of the party tricks. This so often happens, they’re all together, feeling safe, and then they are infiltrated by the enemy and suddenly everyone has to shut down and pretend to be somebody else. The whole atmosphere changes, and it’s as noticeable as the temperature dropping by ten degrees. It almost makes you shiver. Sometimes it gets hard to remember who you actually are.

Billy looks across at Ange and winks reassuringly. He is right, she supposes, watching the children playing together, there is no sign from either Tabitha or Pandora that anything is even slightly amiss and they join in the party spirit, Pandora sits with Jacob on her knee showing him pictures in a new
Mother Goose,
a German version to encourage languages, a gift from Archie’s grandmother.

And then, right out of the blue, ‘It’s really funny how alike Jacob and Archie are,’ says Tabby. ‘When you look at them, I mean, and they’re not even vaguely related.’

‘Oh? Do you think so?’ says Ange, heart thumping while she tries for her most careless attitude. ‘That’s probably because they are both very dark, and they’ve got the same kind of eyes. Haven’t you, pet?’

‘Well,’ and Tabby, that wretched child, is not going to let her interesting observation pass so easily. ‘If Archie was a bit bigger you would almost think they were twins, like us. I mean, if you dressed them in the same clothes, don’t you think, Angela?’

I
T’S OK. IT’S OK.
Ange need not have worried, not on that score anyway. Tabitha and Pandora have too much excitement going on in their lives at the moment without giving much thought to whether two boring, smelly babies are look-alikes or not. They all look the same anyway and Tabitha forgot the remark as soon as she’d made it.

No, what is making this holiday so memorable are the nightly orgies the twins have discovered going on in the hippy compound. They’ve seen Honesty having sex with Callister before, well, almost, they knew that that’s what was going on underneath the rustling bracken. They’re not daft. But they’ve never come here by night before, only ever visited once since Helena’s death, actually, and then they approached a converted ambulance in order to buy some pot. The dopey-looking resident obliged, no questions asked, in exchange for a stolen twenty-pound note. They’d thought they were onto something profitable, but their first efforts attracted the beady eye of Miss Davidson-Wills and for a minute there they thought their time at The Rudge was up.

They hoped they would be expelled but no such luck.

It is amazing what you can get away with when your mother has just died—or passed on, as Estelle prefers to put it.

That the settlement in the glade is permanent is manifested in various ways. The loos, for a start, are more like the Elsans in a camping field approved by the Caravan Club, emptied regularly and kept clean and fresh. There’s a Heath-Robinson kind of pulley which means you don’t have to get your feet wet when taking water from the river and the communal cookhouse and meeting room is a rustic timber shed, surprisingly stout and effective, with a large Calor gas cooker within. Picnic tables and benches have been hewn from the trunks of beech trees, and at night the lantern light shines through the wooden walls of the building in long, thin stripes, as if the structure is a parcel tied around with golden ribbons.

It is in here that the sinister Callister, lover of Honesty and leader of the sect, holds his satanic meetings. The twins would never have known this had they not set forth in search of clues, following in Honesty’s nocturnal footsteps one midsummer night when the moon was full.

It is all pretty obvious. Honesty has settled her differences with Angela solely so that she can come here more often. She needs to come to Hurleston, not for the kind of hard riding her grandmother talks about but because she is wildly in love with the Brute, but he couldn’t give a damn about her because he screws anyone…

How jealous poor Honesty must be.

On the night in question they heard her leaving the house, and her footsteps on the gravel beneath their bedroom window. Still wearing their nighties they followed her into the woods, giggling and whispering as they went because, in moonlight, the woods were even more dark and forbidding. The trees twisted and reached out to them with sinewy arms and fingers.

‘Bloody hell. She’s going all the way to the camp,’ groaned Tabby.

‘We should have put shoes on,’ said Pan. ‘Ouch, this hurts.’