Beggar Bride (3 page)

Fabian is straight as a die, straight like his father and grandfather before him, his grandfather, Percy, landowner, gentry and stern founder of the business empire, the multinational powerhouse Fabian straddles today. No, women ought to be fragrant and gentle, ministering to men’s emotional and sexual needs, with soft hands to caress the male member, mistress of hearth and home and bedded in a straightforward manner, virtuously, in the missionary position, when willing.

In neither of his two disastrous marriages has Fabian found the kind of cultured, dainty woman he craved. No, he winces, tousled beds, hard-skinned feet and false fingernails. In spite of his indifference Fabian feels a spasm of anger. Mean, they called him indignantly, mean and arrogant and self-centred and yet unlike them he was never unfaithful. They turned into shrews at the end, although Helena’s death was unfortunate, not least for the publicity it engendered. There was no grief at either parting, merely a quiet exultation and the acquisition of female children to educate and nurture.

So, an attractive man at forty-five and he knows it, is he never to see the son he deserves?

A trace of perfume in the purified air and Ruth Hubbard bends to retrieve his coffee tray and replace it with bottled water, careful not to disturb him. Her very servitude makes her appealing. Her bosom is firm and elasticated and he wonders, briefly distracted and not for the first time, what she would do if he made a casual move to unbutton her cardigan. An unquestioning submission seems natural to Ruth and that’s nice in a woman, but merely the result of a training programmed to office routine, who can know what sort of reaction there might be to a warm hand cupped beneath that sensual, slippery elastic?

‘Right,’ says Fabian, sitting back, leaning against all his luxurious authority. ‘Time’s money. If everyone’s arrived in the boardroom let’s get cracking.’

On her way to the hairdresser’s, passing slowly through Piccadilly in her Saab convertible, who is to say whether Honesty Ormerod notices the Prince Regent Hotel towering above her in its vulgar, faded splendour? And if she does, what thoughts might pass through her pretty little head, she who is perfectly at home at the Waldorf, the Ritz, the Savoy, not to mention the dens and haunts of the beautiful so oft frequented by the paparazzi now and therefore blighted.

It is the pleasure of the privileged to call the cheap and nasty. She might well sneer at the string of coaches outside the Prince Regent, bearing the curtailed and limited masses, Japanese, Americans and Germans loaded down with cameras and tickets to the predictable theatre.

Honesty can rest easy now. Daddy made one bad mistake and he is most unlikely to repeat it, to impregnate anyone else, not on the right side of the blanket anyway. And if he did he’d be likely to sire another girl, unlike the seventeenth century, at least in this day and age the man’s part in determining the gender of his children is recognised.

Worrying enough that she’ll have to share her inheritance, let alone be pushed out by a male heir, and it’s fun to be one of the most sought after heiresses around.

Lucky old Honesty.

I wonder…

Gone are the battles of childhood, the violent memories of the past, the tension in the air when Mummy and Daddy would fight like cat and dog night after night while she would lie in her bed listening, uneasy and anxious until she was forced to get up and stand like a pale little doll in the doorway. And then, when she was six, Mummy went away and horrible Helena arrived in her place with her vile brown lipsticks, with her powerful, freckled hands which washed her hair so cruelly.

Daddy was besotted. Helena bewitched him.

Displaced. Banished from court in disfavour. From being the pampered darling, brought down after bedtime by Nanny Ba-ba and displayed by the lights of the chandelier to approving guests who marvelled at her sweetness, to the spartan lifestyle of a preparatory school where she shared her bedroom with three others and had to leave her puppy behind and then he was knocked over. Not special any more. Naturally this hardened Honesty’s childish heart, introduced a vein of steel round which to form her emerging personality. For so many years Honesty stared crossly out at the world and then came the miracle of Helena’s death and the twins’ departure for boarding school in long socks and tunics, the kind of departure that hers had been. A banishment. A kind of cold dismissal.

Not that there haven’t been likely contenders since then. Women aren’t slow to be forward when introduced to the most eligible widower in the land. Holidays on yachts and on private islands are not prizes to be sniffed at and, like contestants on a Japanese game show where they eat ants and lie in beds of ice and eels, some women are willing to do literally anything to come first, to win one of life’s biggest prizes.

Honesty watches from the sidelines, easier in her mind as the years go by and Daddy’s work becomes his only obsession. These days there aren’t so many old-fashioned gentlemen types around and it’s easy for strangers to read Fabian wrongly. Coarseness disgusts him. As does satire and disparagement of the establishment in any form, so popular in general conversation these days. He is, as the song goes, an old-fashioned millionaire, whose favourite book is
Moby Dick
so it takes some time to fathom him out.

And, just like his daughter, Fabian is on the watch for fortune hunters and after the experience of Helena, who can blame him for wising up?

At the news-stand near where she pulls up to park, the vendor is calling in violent cockney, ‘Loads’a money man manipulates markets…’ Honesty sees her father’s face on the front of the
Sun
and sighs.

Not again.

The politics of envy disgust her.

What does it matter what Daddy earns? If he didn’t, someone else would. They ought to ask how many jobs he has created as a result of his sharp dealings.

At the hairdresser’s, the girl is new. Her hands are inexperienced as they manipulate Honesty’s head over the basin. She takes a while to get the water temperature right, she is clumsy with the shampoo.

‘Ouch! Steady on,’ says Honesty. ‘I am not a potato, sweetie.’

‘Sorry,’ says the girl, meekly.

Honesty cannot manoeuvre her neck into a comfortable position. ‘For goodness’ sake, why don’t we start again?’

The girl, flustered now, and eager to please in her new job, tries to help and only succeeds in putting her elbow in Honesty’s face.

‘Christ.’ Honesty sits up straight, the girl’s feebleness irritating her. ‘What the hell d’you think you’re playing at? I’ll go out of here in a brace if you’re not more careful.’

‘Excuse me. Is there a problem?’

‘There certainly is, and I’d be far happier if someone else took this cretin’s place…’

‘Certainly.’ And sleekly nudging the poor girl aside, the chief assistant takes over. Honesty lies back in comfort, enjoying the massage, the cleansing of her sensitive scalp.

I do not like thee doctor Fell

The reason why I cannot tell.

I only know and know full well

I do not like thee doctor Fell.

T
HIS SILLY CHILDHOOD DITTY
goes round and round in her head on this, her third appointment with the housing since the new year. One of her resolutions was to stop thinking and worrying because there’s nothing more frustrating than that, and to take appropriate action instead.

Appropriate action?

Can waiting like this be called action?

The man in the silver Rolls, though sitting still, a passenger, a waiting shadow, was clearly a man of extraordinary action and his eyes were full of a vital energy.

Mr Brian Fell. His name is slotted in the wooden board like the page number of a hymn.

And all these others, waiting with Ange, mostly women with whingeing brats round their feet, can their plight be compared to hers? How have they reached this desperate state because only the sodding desperate would wait like this, in this modern red-brick, uncomfortable crate—it makes her think of the dentist—in these flimsy metal-framed chairs, for hours, as if they’ve got nothing better to do?

Most would admit they have not.

And why rivet the chairs to the floor? Who would want to whip them anyway?

Unlike the dentist they don’t provide toys for the children here… probably fed up with them being vandalised or nicked. And as for magazines… there is nothing to stare at but the clock over the heavily armed reception area where bland-faced women sit like robots behind reinforced glass.

‘What time did you say?’

‘Ten.’

‘Well it’s more like bloody eleven already.’

‘Calm down, Billy, calm down.’

He’ll not be much use when they get in there, Billy never is, he resents authority. So it’s up to Ange to stress their cramped conditions, the suspect hygiene, so many kids and infections, Jacob’s frail health and her own fraught state of mind. Billy, she knows, will sit beside her glumly, answering in the sulky monosyllables designed to get bureaucracy’s back up since Adam first cheeked God back in the Garden of Eden.

Perhaps she ought to have come without him. But they like the whole family to attend. To suffer as a unit.

Look at that lot over there, the man mean and hungry, scruffy in his stained sweatshirt and broken trainers with the laces undone, the woman dowdy and grey, their horde of children out of control. He looks like a bad boy while she looks like an aged old crone, funny how despair and distress take their different tolls on the sexes, they could be mistaken for mother and son. They probably own the mangey old dog tied with rope to the door downstairs. Wherever they go Ange wouldn’t fancy that lot as neighbours. At least she and Billy have only one kid… maybe she should have had an abortion after all, as Billy originally suggested.

They didn’t use contraception then, and they still don’t. Billy just whips it out. She’d expected to die in childbirth, she’d known so little about it. She hugs little Jacob more tightly in her arms. He’s got sticky eyes this morning.

No, no, she couldn’t possibly have got rid of Jacob, even if his birth has turned them into the socially irresponsible. They gather here with the feckless poor, the parasites, the scavengers that drain society. Well, she and Billy hadn’t meant it to be like this, no, far from it.

Billy moved into Ange’s bedsit two weeks after they met in the Grapes last year. She was working in the kitchens, doing a secretarial course at night and living on Sugar Puffs, he was a waiter serving the diners, mostly businessmen with bloated bellies in for a beer, a quick ploughman’s or a pasty. He was a runaway, she a child of the state, in care since she can remember, they even used her picture on a poster once to encourage fostering nationwide.

She found it hard to believe that Billy could happily get on a train to London and abandon the home and family that were his own. Some people don’t know they are born but he’d felt suffocated, he said, and hopeless stuck down there at Weston. ‘Have you ever been there?’ he’d asked her.

‘Well, it’s the arsehole of the world. If you want a nervous breakdown go to Weston-super-Mare.’

‘How can that be, if people go there on holiday? I’m sure I’ve seen posters on stations and there’s palm trees. There’s even donkeys.’

‘Probably there since before the war.’ Billy shrugged. ‘And what people go there for Christsake? Coachloads of crusties for bingo and candy-floss in the arcades, they sit on the sand in their deckchairs with knotted handkerchiefs over their heads and vests on… still! In this day and age. Shit! While the wind whips past them and carries their litter away. And they buy the sort of tat you wouldn’t believe, sad tossers. There’s only work in the summer, in the winter it’s a desperate place. Bleak. Run down. Grey. Always raining. Nothing happens.’

‘But you ought to let your mum know…’ If Ange was his mum she would want to know, especially when he got married. There’s an innocence about him, a childishness in his eyes and his hair and the back of his neck that appeals for protection. His mother must still love him, he is like a lost dog that badly needs stroking.

‘Sod off, Ange. You know nothing about it at all.’

‘So you came here to make good? That’s funny! That’s why you don’t want to phone her, isn’t it? You don’t want to admit that it’s worse here…’

‘It’s not worse! Believe me! It’s not worse.’

‘Well, you’ve got me, I suppose…’

And he made a rueful face.

‘You’ve got me, babe,’
she sang. ‘And together we’re going places!’

‘Leave it alone, Ange.’

Oh yeah, she was kidding, but she felt something serious stirring behind the joke.

It was OK when there was just the two of them. You felt you could achieve anything, when the time was right. They sunbathed in the park, they drew on pavements partly for money and partly because it was fun, they were beating time, larking around, having a good time while they could, shutting their eyes to the mayhem and madness, that was all. Something ace would happen one day. And then she fell pregnant with Jacob… and turned needy, one of the world’s rejects, turned into one of the people here.

What’s this?

‘I just can’t believe it,’ Ange cries out with joy, jogging the lively Jacob so he stretches his little elastic legs and dances a baby jig on her knee. A roof over her head at last, the first proper home she’s had since she left her bedsit and made herself homeless. ‘I never thought…’ She grins at Billy, prettier than ever and animated by her excitement. ‘See, it was worth it. I said we had to persevere!’

You can see that Billy is thrilled as well, although he tries to be manly and keep his feelings under control.

‘Oh, Mr Fell,’ says Ange with great warmth, ‘I’m so relieved I can’t speak.’

‘Well, yes, Mrs Harper, you have been lucky, especially as you are not strictly homeless at present. One of the chosen ones… partly because of Jacob’s fragile health and the committee were influenced by Sandra Biddle, your social worker.’ Mr Fell attempts a joke, ‘You came highly recommended.’

Ange laughs with him. She would do almost anything with him this morning because she feels so grateful. He’s not half as ugly as she originally thought, a bit pock-marked, but he means well! He is not just a man doing an extremely difficult job. A flat! A two-bedroom flat, available from tomorrow if they want it.