Beggar Bride (7 page)

A dog howls in the distance. The sound of acid jazz blasts through the paper-thin wall. There must be another rave on tonight. Why do the police never think to carry out any raids in this area? Don’t they even notice the posh cars lined up in the slip road? ‘Well, I still think it’s impossible,’ Billy murmurs, beaten and lacking the energy for anything save the sexual act. He is always ready and willing for that, stiff and male once again. There’s no point in going into the bedroom, the music sounds far louder in there. Ange and Billy make themselves comfortable on the hard Ercol sofa, knowing they only have a few minutes before poor Jacob wakes up with the row.

The gas fire pops lamely beside their contortions.

‘You’re lovely, Ange,’ says Billy with feeling.

Ange smiles. Oh yes, she knows that already. And that is the one fact she is about to gamble everything on.

‘N
O, NO, I’M SORRY,
only Fabian Ormerod will do. I am phoning in a personal capacity as a Friend of Covent Garden.’

Listed in
Who’s Who,
among his many and varied interests, is Fabian’s support of the opera and ballet, which could be his most enjoyable pursuit after riding to hounds. The City giants, Cody/Ormerod, extravagant corporate entertainers, take a box on the first Friday of every month, as they do at Glyndebourne, Wimbledon, Lord’s, Henley and Ascot. Fabian’s constant use of the box is a bone of contention between his more lowly executives who rarely get a look in, but if he knew what they muttered under their breaths Fabian wouldn’t turn a hair. This is his company. He is the pivot round which all else revolves.

Simon Chalmers is loath to disturb Sir Fabian during a working day with personal matters of any kind, Miss Hubbard is quite capable of dealing with them. But this young lady is most insistent and Simon, believing she might be an acquaintance, is reluctant to risk upsetting one of Sir Fabian’s operatic friends.

‘Could you repeat your name for me, please?’

‘Angela Harper. Miss Angela Harper. And I am in rather a rush.’

‘I am so sorry for the delay. Sir Fabian will speak to you now.’

Fabian listens, the pleasant voice on the other end floods his staid and fusty room, and he quickly takes in the dilemma. He is not a man for beating about the bush, or for treating the ladies with anything less than delightful old-world courtesy, Winchester style, a trait which always rather amused the hirsute Helena.

‘Then it would seem perfectly reasonable, Miss Harper, providing that all four seats are not taken, that you join us for
Rigoletto
one week on Friday. I will leave the arrangements in the capable hands of my secretary Miss Hubbard who will speak to you now. Good afternoon.’

It happens sometimes. A company box is oversubscribed while there’s still space in another. It pays to be generous at times like these. One never knows when one might need to ask a favour in return. But who did she say she represented? Fabian scratches his head. She didn’t. If she had, he would have remembered.

A private party perhaps. With one guest too many. Easily done if one is not careful.

Ought he to know her?

Fabian is planning to go next week, accompanied by Honesty and a friend. They will enjoy a glass of cold champagne and a smoked salmon sandwich in the interval. He will wine and dine them afterwards, something he does not enjoy—the chat of the young today is so limited—but feels obliged to do so as Honesty seems to have no suitor of her own.

Has she ever had now he comes to think of it? All her evenings out she spends with her so called girlfriends. Isn’t that rather odd? After all, she’s a perfectly pretty girl, not outstanding, perhaps, but pleasing. The poor little twins will pose a different problem entirely, unless some miracle happens and they break like butterflies from their plain brown cocoons. Fabian knows that Honesty is very aware of fortune hunters, she keeps her men at arm’s length, on the other side of a tennis court or a good grumbling belly away, beside her on a horse. Distrust. One of the drawbacks of riches today, he muses. In his occasional sleepless nights even he has been tortured by thoughts of kidnappings, children buried in the ground in exchange for a ransom. Some men of his standing take precautions against such sickening outrages, but if you start doing that, where does it end?

Bodyguards. Sniffer dogs. Processions of cars. Cameras in the lavatories. That’s no life for anyone. The minute you capitulate and let your fears overwhelm you, that’s when disasters tend to occur. No, you just have to assume that these tragedies won’t happen to you, just as long as you are sensible.

All his staff are carefully screened. They come with excellent references. Take Estelle, his cook and housekeeper, for example, and a jolly soul. To look at her you wouldn’t credit it, but Estelle has cooked for queens and princes, in castles, palaces, and manor houses up and down the land. A few of the classier recipe books bear her name. Her choice of partner might be unfortunate, Murphy O’Connell is not the most savoury of characters, but it takes all sorts and he’s useful round the place to change plugs and carry suitcases. He used to be a driver until he lost his licence. They came with the house when he bought it which was a stroke of luck. The daytime staff are also carefully picked. They leave at five-thirty, unless there’s some social event taking place. But Fabian doesn’t like a packed London house… there has to be some privacy in family life and he doesn’t mind putting the odd piece of coal on the fire himself, there are servants enough to worry about when he goes down to Hurleston and every one of them sincerely believes they are underpaid. He considers himself a benign employer.

A likeable man. So much easier to keep staff happy when you haven’t got a wife home all day to cause trouble.

‘So, Sir Fabian,’ enquires Miss Hubbard, hurrying through the last bits and pieces at the end of another long day. ‘Can you confirm to me that there are only three seats required by your party at Covent Garden on Friday?’

‘I can indeed confirm that, Ruth.’

‘In that case I will leave the spare ticket at reception downstairs as Miss Harper requested. I did say I would post it to her but she seemed to think it would be easier…’

‘Fine, Ruth, fine.’

Fabian stretches his legs. He’ll shave when he gets home, and shower, he needs freshening up before he dines at the club with his old friend Jerry Boothroyd—another good reason for being without a wife. Freedom. Freedom to make up your mind at the last minute. Freedom to dine with who you like. Freedom to choose your own time and place, and wear what you damn well please.

But he is remembering the interfering Ffiona. Helena, that ghastly creature, gave him rather too much freedom for his liking. There is a limit, damn it, otherwise freedom swiftly becomes neglect. She was never in. Never home. Always about some blasted tomfoolery, digging her nose in where it wasn’t wanted, upsetting the neighbours with her anti-blood sports campaigning, with her organic crop demands, her noisy windmills and her humane farming nonsense. Hah, what a damn fool he was. But, by Jove, that’s a mistake he won’t make again in a hurry.

There is no getting away from the past even when you’re relaxing comfortably with a friend in the buttoned-brown-leather-and-smoky, manly environment of the club. No women allowed in here yet, thank God, none of that nonsense.

‘They have asked me,’ says Fabian, glancing at Jeremy to gauge his reaction, ‘to go on
Desert Island Discs.’

‘That’s very flattering,’ says the portly Jerry. ‘I didn’t know you were such a popular personality.’

‘Contentious,’ says Fabian, toying with his duck. ‘Not popular. Infamous rather than famous thanks to the spite of the media. I’m not at all sure that I am a suitable subject. I suppose there are those who would be fascinated to know what music one of the most highly paid men in England would choose. The great mysterious sum of my existence wrapped up in eight records.’ He picks up his wine and stares glassily through it. ‘Success? It makes me feel old, Jerry. Old and spent. I don’t know if I’m ready to sum up anything at this stage of my life.’

‘Forty-five isn’t old. You’re still in your prime, old man. You’ll have to plump for something classy,’ says Jerry, a blob of apple sauce standing out vividly on his puce chin. ‘Either that or shock ’em with the hokey-cokey or some more ribald ditty. It’s when they start asking if you’ve any regrets that you really have to keep an eye open for the grim reaper.’ A good number of Jeremy’s peas have found their way to the pristine cloth. He considers them sightlessly. ‘Is there anything? D’you already have regrets?’

‘Who doesn’t?’ asks Fabian, conscious of his past stretching back and back. He and Jerry were at Winchester together. ‘If you’re honest. And I hope I will never be braggart enough to croon with such insensitivity,
I did it my way.’
Fabian gives a rueful smile as he regards his best friend. Jeremy went in for the law and is now a respected and lucrative barrister, head of chambers, married for twenty years to a woman who he obviously still adores, three sons to carry on his name, to take fly-fishing on the Dee, to vie with on the Italian slopes, share his love of yachts.

‘But you’re certainly not a new man.’ Jerry raises his glass as if in belated congratulations.

‘Far from it. Although Helena would have preferred me to be.’

‘But not Ffiona?’

‘Oh no. Ffiona was the old-fashioned type. No pampering was ever sufficient for the sweet and fluffy Ffiona. She liked her men to be dominant.’

‘Shame about all that business,’ says Jerry, clearing his throat. ‘Not on, quite frankly, not on at all.’

Fabian might jest, but he deeply regrets the failures of his two marriages—his marriage to Helena had certainly failed before her tragic death. Surely all men, whatever they might say, would prefer a loving home with a wife waiting, caring, ministering to one’s needs. Elfrida and Evelyn, his own parents, struck lucky, so why hasn’t he? Ffiona was the obvious choice, too obvious, maybe? Too stereotyped to be realistic, a product of Cheltenham and Switzerland, a country girl, a dim-witted child with the velvet and peach complexion of an English rose. He had known her all his life and she was adored by Elfrida.

‘Darling Fabian, you can’t go wrong. Don’t be a bloody fool, dear boy. Grab her while she’s available.’

It was only later that he discovered her love of horses had nothing to do with the beasts themselves but was more concerned with the grooms, and any other low life she might find flinging piles of dung at the stables. In the end, even watching her gyrate on a saddle Fabian found unnerving.

‘You’re so bloody boring in bed.’ She had stung him once, to the core, in that high-pitched bleating voice of hers, with an accusation he has never forgotten and never quite recovered from. ‘It’s like sleeping with an old bull seal. Flap flap. On, off, grunt, snore. And must you wear those appalling pyjamas?’

He was shocked. Hell. She should know. She was the one with all the experience. That lamentable, evil-tongued crone, rampant, uncontrollable!

And then she bore him a daughter. The announcement went in
The Times,
of course, and all the relevant periodicals. ‘I am calling her Honesty,’ Ffiona declared, touching up her nails in the most expensive clinic in London, ‘so that one result of this marriage of ours can be regarded as a virtue.’

Shopping and fucking. Hell, surely Ffiona herself must have coined that expression and by some fluke of extraordinary luck Honesty does not seem to have inherited Ffiona’s remarkable sex drive.

To the contrary.

Although she does spend money like water but Fabian is more than contented with this as long as her lust can be satisfied in the various boutiques and parlours off the Brompton Road. What a blessing he’d followed Elfrida’s advice and shipped her off to boarding school pretty pronto before she could fall under the influence of Helena. His mother is a wise and wily old bird. No, he sighs while contemplating his brandy. He cannot linger long tonight, chewing the cud with old Jerry. His is a punishing schedule and he flies to Geneva in the morning. No, in spite of her mother, Honesty is, and always has been, the perfect daughter.

Oh dear, oh dear.

The message he finds on his bedroom fax is nothing short of alarming. The Rudge must consider this matter pretty damn serious for it to merit the use of such a contemporary method of communication. He had no idea they possessed such a thing. And at this hour! It has gone midnight.

‘Supplying illegal material’ in The Rudge’s language, unable to bring themselves to use the tasteless word, must mean drugs, damn it! This is unbelievable! Fabian rips the paper from the machine in order to study it more closely. Bewildered, he sits on the edge of his giant bed and reads while his feet automatically search the deep-piled carpet for his slippers. Pandora and Tabitha have been discovered supplying illegal material to children in Rubens House, which, as he must know, is a most serious offence and in ordinary circumstances would merit immediate expulsion. Hah, thank God, so they must be talking about cannabis or marijuana, nothing more serious than that, substances referred to as pollen and northern lights by their wretched mother who smoked both quite flagrantly and suffered with a permanent cold from sniffing cocaine. But has the school informed the police? Does he need a solicitor?

The fax doesn’t tell him that. Merely that his children have been dispatched to the san to await his arrival. ‘Which we presume will be some time tomorrow,’ the message goes on. It is even signed by the revered headmistress herself, the poet and thinker, Dame Claudia Purchase.

Hell. Fabian can’t possibly get there tomorrow. The totally trustworthy Simon will have to go in his place and of course he will have to emphasise the fact that the twins are still suffering from the violent death of their mother—the extenuating circumstance, he is certain, that saved them from being sent home in disgrace immediately. That, and the knowledge that if this most sensitive information got out the school would suffer disastrous consequences. But where could the twins be getting their hands on drugs of any kind, and where is the money coming from? Fabian is most careful to ensure they are not stigmatised by having more spending power than anyone else in their peer group.