by Jessie Keane
‘And widowed both times,’ Clara reminded him. ‘Not divorced.’
‘What, you want a church wedding then?’ Marcus couldn’t believe he was having this conversation. Yes, he’d wanted her for a long time. Now she was here, offering it on a plate . . . but marriage. Christ! He’d been dodging that for years.
‘No. I don’t.’ After all, this wasn’t going to be a love match, was it. She wanted his money, he wanted her business and her body. The way he made her feel . . . well, she could deal with that. She would deal with it. ‘I want an equal partnership,’ she pointed out. ‘I want that understood right from the start. Equal shares. I want just as much say as you in the way they’re run, both your clubs and mine.’
He was watching her. ‘Long engagement?’ he asked.
‘No. Short as possible.’
‘Engagement ring, though.’
‘Of course.’
‘Preferences?’
‘Diamonds.’
‘Very marketable. And easy to remount.’ He looked at her hands: no rings there at all now, except for a thin, worn gold band on her right hand. ‘What’s that then?’ he asked, curious.
‘Oh, this?’ Clara looked down. ‘My mother’s wedding ring.’
‘Yeah?’ Marcus thought of his own mother. ‘What’s she like?’
‘She’s dead.’
Marcus nodded slowly. ‘We’d better go shopping, then. Tomorrow.’
‘Yes. First thing.’
‘Where are you staying?’
‘The Ritz.’ The little flat over the decimated Heart of Oak was far too risky now.
Marcus sighed. ‘Should have guessed.’
77
‘People are saying that Fulton Sears has been pulled in for questioning by the police,’ said Marcus when he picked her up in reception next morning.
‘Really?’ asked Clara, all innocence. ‘What about?’
‘Trashing your clubs, I heard. And that hostess who died? Sal something? Her murder. And maybe Toby’s murder too.’
‘Sal Dryden. Someone must have tipped them off then,’ said Clara. ‘I suppose.’
‘Yeah.’ Marcus followed her out, then hailed a passing taxi with its yellow light aglow. ‘I wonder who.’
Diamonds truly were a girl’s best friend. The inside of Asprey was as welcoming and as sumptuous as a fabulous box of chocolates, Clara thought, and she remembered all the times she had come in here with Toby, both of them happy as children playing in a sandpit as they selected this jewel or that.
It came over her, time and again when she least expected it. The memory of Toby, lying there burned, made ugly, ruined. Someone had done that to him. She shivered and had to swallow hard and blink back tears.
‘You all right?’ Marcus asked.
Clara snapped back to the present. She was trying on a diamond solitaire ring, mounted on a platinum band, and both the jeweller and Marcus were staring at her as she stood there, saying nothing. She fastened a smile on her face.
‘It’s lovely,’ she said bracingly. ‘Took my breath away for a minute there! Yes, this one. It’s perfect.’
They had lunch at Claridges, then Marcus asked what she would like to do next.
‘Look at the Crown Jewels,’ said Clara.
‘Haven’t you had enough diamonds for one day?’
‘I never have enough diamonds,’ said Clara. ‘Haven’t you heard?’
‘I’ll book the Registry Office for next week. Friday. All right?’
‘Fine,’ said Clara. That would give her time to make her peace with Bernie so that she could have her as bridesmaid. She thought of Henry, but she kept seeing that scene at the Carmelo, Henry flailing about among the blood and the smashed wine bottles like he was enjoying himself – while he wrecked his sister’s club. Like he was finally having his revenge on her.
No, she wouldn’t be inviting Henry to her wedding.
When they got back to the hotel late in the afternoon, Clara was surprised to find she’d had an enjoyable day.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ said Marcus as he got back into the black cab and was driven away. Clara stood there on the pavement and stared after it. Her brand-new fiancé hadn’t even tried to kiss her goodbye. And why would he? This was a business deal. That was all. Then someone tapped her on the shoulder. She whirled around, her heart leaping into her mouth. It was Jan.
‘Christ, you again! What do you want?’
‘Was that Marcus Redmayne?’ asked Jan.
‘Yes. Not that it’s any of your bloody business.’
‘Keep your wig on. I wondered where you’d got to, and I thought, where would I find Clara? Knew it had to be a posh hotel and I’d heard you mention this one.’
‘Well done, Sherlock. What did you want to find me for?’
‘Just to tell you what I heard on the street.’
‘Which is?’
‘That Sears is being detained.’
‘I know that. Marcus told me.’
‘Yeah? Well you better hope they keep detaining the bastard, because penny to a pinch of shit he’s going to hear about your visit to the cop shop from one of his tame plods – and he ain’t going to be too happy with you when he gets out.’
78
Next day Clara went to the address off Regent Street where Bernie was staying with her friend. It was a tall, airy house divided into flats; Sasha had the top one. Clara trudged up four flights of stairs to find herself in a small and stiflingly hot attic room that must once have been servants’ quarters. There was a sweetish scent in the air; pot, she thought.
‘Oh, hi,’ said a languid brown-haired girl, opening the door to Clara. ‘Come in.’
Clara entered. The room she stepped into was shabby, dust-motes floating in the diffused light that fell from an uncleaned window. Sofas were draped with red and orange rugs that had seen better days. Indian dream-catchers dangled from the ceiling and extinguished joss-sticks lay on the mantelpiece above the boarded-up fireplace. Two closed doors led off to what must be bedrooms. She wondered if there was the luxury of a bathroom in the flat or if they had to share with the other tenants on the floors below. The thought brought back memories – not good ones.
A door opened and Bernie stepped out, wearing a knee-length white skirt – no miniskirts for Bernie – with burgundy go-go boots and a matching long-sleeved blouse. Her copper-brown hair was loose on her shoulders; she looked lovely. But her eyes when they rested on her sister were cold, and her face looked lifeless. Her lower lip looked sore from bite marks.
‘Hi, Bern,’ said Clara.
Bernie said nothing. Sasha looked between the two of them, then said awkwardly: ‘Let me give you folks a moment . . . ’ and sidled off into the room that Bernie had just vacated, closing the door behind her.
‘Can I sit down?’ asked Clara.
‘If you want,’ said Bernie, making no move to do so herself. She moved about the place restlessly, pacing, picking up ornaments, putting them down again, shooting glances at her sister all the while.
Clara went over to the rug-draped sofa and sat down. She looked up at Bernie.
‘So, what did you want?’ asked Bernie, folding her arms.
‘I’m getting married. Next Friday.’
‘What? Who to, for God’s sake?’
‘Marcus Redmayne.’
‘Doesn’t he own nightclubs?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I didn’t know you’d been dating anyone. I didn’t know you were engaged.’
‘Oh! Yes, the ring. We got engaged – officially – yesterday,’ said Clara, holding out her left hand. On it sparkled a vast white diamond.
Bernie stared at it. She didn’t move any closer. ‘You got engaged yesterday and you’re getting married next Friday. That has to be the shortest engagement on record.’
‘We saw no reason to delay.’
‘What, you’re madly in love are you?’ Bernie laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant sound.
‘Of course we are,’ said
Clara.
‘You? God, you’re really having a laugh. You don’t even understand the word love.’
Clara took a breath. Whatever she felt for Marcus Redmayne, and she wasn’t sure yet, next Friday come hell or high water she was going to marry him. And he was going to marry her . . . yes. To get her clubs. And her body. Because of course he didn’t love her. The very idea was laughable.
‘I wanted you to be my bridesmaid. If you would.’ This was a gesture of kinship, an olive branch; she didn’t need a bridesmaid, not for the Registry Office, but she wanted Bernie there with her, with all the bad blood between them forgotten.
‘Right.’ Bernie nodded. ‘Let’s see what we have here. You deliberately wrecked my relationship with a perfectly nice man who loved me, purely because he had no money. You’ve made me miserable, made me lose the man I loved. And now you pitch up here and ask me to be your bridesmaid? Christ, you’ve got a nerve.’
‘I did what I thought was best for you, Bernie. I always have. You know that. And he was a pervert or at least he pandered to perverts.’
‘I loved David. I was happy with him. Then you had to destroy it, ruin it, because it didn’t suit you. Clara, you really are a prize bitch.’
Clara stared at her sister. Bernie was pale, she looked washed-out, jittery, exhausted. As though misery had eaten into her soul.
I did that, thought Clara, and the knowledge hurt her. She’d done what she thought was best. She always did. But now she wondered if she had made the wrong call.
No, she thought. Bernie, her much-loved sister, condemned to a poor life? No, she’d done the right thing. And sometime – not any time soon, she could see that, but sometime in the future – Bernie would meet a man who could offer her more than back streets and poverty and a seedy, disgusting living and then she would realize that Clara had been right.
‘Look,’ said Clara firmly. ‘It’s over, you and David. You’ll find someone else.’
Bernie let out a harsh laugh. ‘We don’t all have your facility for making loveless marriages, Clara. I suppose that’s what this one is, too? Like you and Frank? Like you and Toby?’
Now Clara was angry. ‘Can you honestly say they were bad matches? Can you? My marriage to Frank rescued us from the gutter. My marriage to Toby saw us nicely set up.’
‘And then it all came crashing down, didn’t it.’ Bernie was nodding, biting her lip, walking around the room while sending scathing looks at her older sister. ‘So now, with Toby barely cold in the ground, you move on to your next victim. I bet he’s rich.’
‘He is,’ said Clara.
She understood Bernie’s anger, and it was best to let her get it out of her system. She deserved to be shouted at, railed against; but soon she hoped that Bernie would accept that she had been right, and let it drop. She wanted them to go back to being the sisters they used to be, close, loving each other – as they always had before that bastard Bennett had pitched up on the scene.
‘Of course he’s rich!’ snapped Bernie. ‘You wouldn’t give him a second glance otherwise, would you? D’you still get them, Clara? The nightmares? The ones you used to get, about trying to find Mum in that big empty house? The one where you found her and the dead baby?’
Clara felt her jaw set with tension. Yes, she did. Hideous dreams, wandering and finally finding that horror, her dead mother, the dead baby, sitting by an empty grate, with the blood on the floor beside the chair.
Clara shook her head, brushed the thought of those night-time terrors aside. ‘I would like you to be my bridesmaid, Bernie. I really would.’
‘Yeah?’ Bernie stopped her pacing in front of where Clara sat and bent over, leaning in close. Her whole face was set with tightly contained rage. ‘Well, you know what, big sis? You can just go and fuck yourself.’
‘Bernie—’
‘No, I’m not listening to you any more. You did the same thing to Henry, didn’t you?You made an enemy of him, and now you’ve made an enemy of me. You’re so fucking black-and-white in everything. There are shades of grey, you know. People fall in love without worrying about wage packets. People make mistakes—’
‘What did I ever do to Henry? Except give him the best education I could afford.’
Bernie drew back. She went to the mantelpiece and leaned against it, her eyes glued to Clara. ‘We’ve been in touch, Henry and me.’
‘Have you?’
‘Yeah. Actually, we’re quite close now.’
Clara thought about Henry. The pilfering. The casual killing. The truculent, almost menacing air about him. And seeing him trashing her club alongside Sears. She stood up. ‘Well, I wish you good luck with that,’ she said.
‘What an unforgiving bitch you can be, Clara.’
Clara looked at her sister. ‘Bern. He’s no good. Never was, never will be. You know my clubs were trashed? He was there, helping that thug Sears. I saw him.’
Bernie looked taken aback. ‘Well, he couldn’t have known the clubs were yours.’
‘Oh, come off it! He was vandalizing my business, my livelihood, and he was enjoying it. So I’d say you ought to be careful, mixing with Henry. He’s not right in the head.’
79
It seemed ridiculous, really, to spend a lot on a wedding outfit, so Clara found a white mini dress in Selfridges and thought that would do. There would be no bridesmaid Bernie; no Henry, for certain, although Clara supposed that Bernie would have told him that she was getting married. There would be two witnesses – Marcus’s friend Gordon, and Clara, who had no real friends to speak of, had to fall back on dumpy little Jan.
‘Really? You want me to be a witness at your wedding?’ Jan had beamed all over her face when Clara asked her. And Clara felt mean then. She had asked Jan out of necessity, but Jan’s delight at the invitation made her realize that she saw this as something special.
‘What shall I wear?’ Jan wondered instantly.
‘A dress? A hat? Anything you like,’ said Clara.
‘What are you going to wear?’
‘This,’ said Clara, and there in her room at the Ritz she showed Jan her purchase.
‘Oh! Well, that’s nice.’
Clara looked at her. ‘You think so.’
‘Well, if it’s only a simple do . . . ’
Clara pursed her lips. She could tell Jan was underwhelmed with the dress. But actually she liked it. It was Empire-line, low-cut at the neck and with big bell chiffon sleeves and a deep ruby-red sash ribbon under the bust that tied at the back. The red suited her, suited her dark hair. Teamed with white sandals and a quickly purchased bouquet made up of dyed red feathers, it looked perfectly presentable.
She felt hurt by Bernie’s rejection and uneasy at the renewed closeness between Bernie and Henry, like there were things going on that were under her radar, kept secret, tucked away. And Bernie leaping to Henry’s defence as she did made her feel that somehow Bernie was condoning what Henry had done that night at Sears’s side – and that wounded her.
The wedding party – her and Jan, Marcus and his goofy mate Gordon – pitched up at Chelsea Registry Office at eleven on the following Friday, sandwiched between a ten-thirty raucous wedding party with a bride in an elaborate gown, and an eleven-thirty West Indian gathering with big hats and huge happy smiles.
This is a bit different, she thought, as she and Marcus stood soberly before the Registrar with their two witnesses and said the words that would join them together as man and wife. They both knew the score. Well, Marcus knew part of it, at least. And the rest would become clear to him as time went on.
‘You may kiss the bride,’ said the Registrar at last, and it was over. Marcus leaned in and Clara waited. Then he kissed her on the cheek.
‘Woohoo!’ shouted Jan, throwing confetti when they were outside on the steps. She stuffed a handful of it down Clara’s dress.
‘Don’t bloody do that,’ snapped Clara, but Jan only smiled.
They hadn’t even hired a photographer. All four of them piled into Gor
don’s car and went off to a restaurant for the ‘wedding breakfast’, which was a stilted affair because Gordon wasn’t much for social talk and Jan couldn’t open her mouth without effing and blinding like a trooper on a route march. The more she swore, the more Gordon seemed to sink into himself, shutting up like a clam.
Feeling tired by late afternoon, Clara went back with Marcus to the flat over his biggest club, the Calypso.
‘There’s going to be a party downstairs tonight,’ he told her when finally they were alone.
Clara looked at him in surprise. ‘What? You didn’t tell me.’
‘I’m telling you now. I told Jan before she left, Gordon’s going to pick her up and bring her back at eight.’
Clara didn’t want a party. They hadn’t even booked a honeymoon. Remembering the disastrous Venice trip with Toby, she wasn’t too sorry about that either. Clara sat down on the couch in the comfortable living room, feeling somehow deflated. She looked down at the diamond ring on her left hand, which now had a matching platinum band beside it.
Married again.
Suddenly she felt more than tired. She felt exhausted, drained of life.
‘Drink?’ Marcus offered, going over to the drinks cabinet.
‘Thanks. Gin and tonic.’
He fixed a whisky and soda for himself and brought the drinks back over, placing them on the side table.
‘Well, here we are then,’ he said, fixing her with that dark unnerving gaze of his. ‘So when were you going to tell me that it was you who shopped Sears to the Bill?’
Clara took up her glass and gulped down her drink. She’d expected him to find out quickly, but not this quickly.
‘Later,’ she said.
‘Yeah, when I was committed. Gordon told me just before the ceremony started.’
‘So why didn’t you pull out?’
‘As I told you – I want your clubs.’ He took up his glass and drained it. ‘You’re a devious cow. I ought to kick you straight up the cunt for pulling a stunt like that.’
Clara shrugged. ‘You married me to stop anyone else getting my clubs. I think that’s pretty devious, too.’
‘Sears is going to want your backside on a toasting fork for this,’ he pointed out.
