Beggar Bride

by Gillian White

  ‘She looks like a dream,’ whispers Nanny Ba-ba, her handkerchief in her bag at the ready although she supposes she won’t need it this time. It’s the first that’s always the worst.

  ‘Too good to be true,’ says Maud.

  ‘It’s time Master Fabian had some luck in his personal life,’ says Nanny, uncomfortable with all this standing. ‘And perhaps he won’t need to work so hard. Perhaps we’ll see him spending more time down at Hurleston, particularly if their liaison bears fruit.’

  ‘Bears fruit?’ says Maud. ‘That’s an odd way to put it. Rather Garden of Eden. And anyway, you could hardly cope with the twins. I hope you’re not imagining they’ll ask you to take over the nursery again. At your age? And with your leg?’

  ‘I’ll be at hand to give advice,’ Nanny Ba-ba replies. ‘And I’m always at my happiest when there’s children around me.’

  Maud pulls herself in. ‘Not my scene at all I’m afraid,’ she mutters, and misses Nanny’s sideways glance.

  ‘I didn’t think we’d be gathering here again so soon,’ says Lord Ormerod under a tartan rug, tucked well into his bathchair. They have placed his leg on a kneeler, although what a kneeler is doing in a register office God only knows. Filtered organ Muzak, kneelers and lilies, by God. Plastic probably. Perhaps some people like to come in to say a quick prayer first, an apology most likely.

  ‘She’s a nice girl,’ says Lady Elfrida vaguely. She feels for Fabian, as any woman would feel for a son striving so hard for personal happiness. Fabian and Ffiona were married in the village church, where Helena was so recently buried. It was thought that the family plot in the grounds was a slightly archaic idea, too many regulations these days and too much work for the gardeners. The twins, also, might have found the business a little too morbid, too close to home. The last people to be buried there were Evelyn’s people, Percy and Ceci, in those days, they used to joke, the Old Granary was but a stepping stone on the way to the cemetery. But what is she doing dwelling on funerals? This should be a happy day. ‘Yes, midear, Angela’s a very nice girl, although I would have liked to know a little bit more about her. I mean, it’s so sad, there’s absolutely nobody here on her side.’ But there are no sides in this room. The spartan chairs run straight across.

  ‘You’d think the aunt might have made the effort. Considering.’

  They are staying at Cadogan Square tonight and being driven back to Devon tomorrow. If this had been a weekday Evelyn would have popped into the House for a while for a quick snort and a snooze. He always managed quite well without a home in London, but the pace these days is so much faster. A journey there and back in one day would have been far too much for the elderly couple and neither of them are keen to stay in London any longer than necessary.

  ‘I do believe Honesty is rather upset,’ says Elfrida.

  ‘If the twins can manage to keep their peckers up at a time like this, then so should she,’ says His Lordship impatiently. ‘It’s high time that young lady found a man and pulled herself together. She can’t be Daddy’s girl forever.’

  ‘Shush now,’ says Elfrida. ‘He’s starting. We must just thank the Lord that Ffiona isn’t mingling with those terribly aggressive people outside.’

  The police have moved back the crowd who now stand looking angry behind hastily constructed barriers. Under the circumstances it has been decided that the newlyweds will not stand for photographs, but wait until they reach the comparative seclusion of Brown’s. Everyone is hurriedly escorted to the waiting line-up of cars, and seen off in safety.

  Fabian takes great delight and pride in introducing his new bride to the many friends and acquaintances who have not yet met her. He savours the looks on their faces, and Angela is utterly charming.

  The last time everyone was here, in this same room, he was introducing Helena and it doesn’t seem all that long ago. Everyone was soaking wet. There’d been a violent thunderstorm. Surely the curtains are still the same, that kind of insipid candy stripe—oh yes, he remembers now, wasn’t it rather unfortunate because they matched poor Helena’s dress? She never had much sense of style, quite unlike Ffiona.

  And how strange it is that their daughters have inherited these same traits from their mothers. All right, Honesty is all in black, how typical, but even so she carries it well, she’s a well-turned out young lady, a daughter to be proud of. It’s a pity debutantes don’t come out any more, a season would probably find her a man. But look at the twins, tucking into the artichoke tarts before everyone else has received their first glass of champagne. Don’t they teach them any basic good manners at The Rudge? What are they wearing? They look like a pair of nightdress cases. A mistake to go for the wedgwood blue. He should have known better than to trust Estelle to whom presentation, other than on a serving dish, is never very important.

  ‘Happy, darling?’

  ‘Oh yes, Fabian. Terribly happy!’

  The dress is just revealing enough to show the top of her breasts. He bites his lip as he remembers the session at the penthouse last Thursday night. It was Angela who instigated it, Fabian was quite prepared to pick up his papers and go, take her back to Cadogan Square for a nightcap perhaps, and then call her a taxi. She never liked to be run home, ‘in case Aunty Val thinks somebody’s calling’.

  He’d rather have waited, quite frankly, until after the marriage for that sort of thing but he could hardly turn his fiancée down when she’d offered herself to him, fresh and perfumed, naked and pink, on a plate like school blancmange. She’d slipped into bed and called to him impatiently while he was in the bathroom putting on his pyjamas.

  Unlike Ffiona, who was quite brazen right from the start, Angela’s approach was sweetly shy, she lay on her back and waited for him, encouraging him, until he was ready. No unnatural positions. No squalid mouthings. Words he never used himself, let alone expected to hear from the mouth of a lady.

  And what is more he had satisfied her, he could tell by her soft moans and cries and the way she kept calling him darling. So much for Ffiona’s accusations, and her scathing remarks about his small penis. Hah. Once was enough for Angela, while he dropped off to sleep she had to go and revive herself in the Jacuzzi afterwards.

  But this reflective mood isn’t on. Fabian must circulate.

  ‘More champagne, Henry?’

  ‘Jerry? He’s over there chatting to Mummy.’

  And as for Helena, great brood mare, riding astride him hair aflowing like some terrible Lady Godiva. At least Angela chose a dress and didn’t turn up for her wedding in a curtain with fringes.

  No, Fabian congratulates himself, at last he has chosen wisely. Nobody wants to grow old alone, to face the future without a mate—in sickness and in health—and the older you get the more the sickness part makes sense. I mean, look at Evelyn and Elfrida. How would the old man get on without a wife to fetch and carry, to put up with his little habits, to organise, to soothe away his pain?

  And to love him?

  15

  THE WEDDING ORDEAL ITSELF was of little moment compared to the raging paroxysms of terror Ange endured on her return to the Prince Regent Hotel. It took her a good week, Saturday to Saturday, fully to recover.

  How to acquire a bottom drawer? Eileen Coburn often, boringly, talked about hers.

  Ange’s plan involved her sitting for an hour, checking the time every few minutes, in the brightly lit, red-carpeted foyer, eyeing up her most likely victim, or victims, as it turned out.

  Saturday is changeover day at the Prince Regent Hotel, although the majority of their guests only stay for a night or two for a quick sprint round London on their dash through Europe. However, there are always the exceptions.

  For Ange, there was no fear of being recognised. She looked like a different person for a start, chic, superior, the kind of guest the Prince Regent is proud to see sitting in their foyer, it helps to give the place some style. The inhabitants of the top floor had never been allowed to linger here, in the pulsing heart of the hotel. It wo
uld have been considered unseemly. They would have put the punters off. And she’d never had any dealings with the staff who operated on the ground floor, it was just a G on a lift button as far as Ange was concerned.

  From the moment she set eyes on them the Japanese family looked most suitable, she could see they’d already been on a major shopping spree because of the brand-new English clothes the daughters and the wife were wearing, Aquascutum, Liberty prints, Jaeger. The three women were petite and pretty, and all about size ten, she guessed, as she watched them decide which theatres to visit during the coming week. They made their bookings at the reception and then they set off, father strutting ahead, wielding a black umbrella and top-heavy with camera equipment, on their way to some tourist location no doubt. The key the woman handed in at the desk was number thirty-three.

  ‘Never leave the hotel with your key.’ The housekeeper in charge of the top floor used to issue her orders to these most vulgar residents with a pinched nose tilted in thin disgust. ‘You never know who might pick it up,’ she could have been referring to some unspeakable disease. ‘Always drop it into the box placed on the landing so conveniently at your disposal.’

  Nobody took any notice of old mother Bottomley. No one would bother to break into any fellow residents’ rooms, what was the point? It wasn’t a matter of trust, honour among thieves or anything so noble. Anything worth more than a fiver had already been sold, and the black-and-white television sets screwed to their rusty mountings weren’t even worth that.

  On with the plan.

  Casually, ever so casually, picking up her newspaper and her bag, Ange made for the lift. On the first floor she got out, and, just as she had expected, the linen cupboard was gaping open. She followed the pleasing smell of fresh laundry and, taking her life in her hands, stalked in and took out an overall. Then, fighting for breath, with her heart knocking against her ribs, she headed for the first set of loos she came to, taking care to notice the whereabouts of the chambermaids, the little white mountains of bedding piled at intervals along the corridor, and the wide open bedroom doors.

  ‘You’d never make a good witness,’ Billy used to tell her. ‘You don’t notice anything.’ And he’d ask her to describe the youth, the old man, the toddler they had just passed. She never could. She invariably failed the test.

  But this morning she proved him wrong.

  Every detail imprinted itself on her mind.

  Ange changed in the lavatory and made herself wait through the longest five minutes of her life before it was time to set off once again.

  Lo and behold, the first chambermaids had stripped the beds in both room thirty-three and its adjoining neighbour, thirty-five. The doors were wedged open, waiting for the new linen to be dumped inside, for the cleaners to do the bathrooms, empty the ashtrays and Hoover the floors. Ange stalked in, threw a sheet onto the stripped double bed, and in less than a minute she had emptied the wardrobe, the drawers and the little dressing table, drawn the sheet around the contents and lugged the bundle onto the landing.

  Still all clear.

  Jesus Christ. By now she was close to fainting with fear.

  Dare she?

  Some dare-devil instinct drove her on. In for a penny… She plunged into the next-door room and that even larger pile of linen was out in the corridor in the blink of an eye. Ange dragged both these enormously heavy loads full of clothes—the strength came from somewhere, she’d never know where, she didn’t believe in God—and dumped them in the blue trolley labelled A5 which waited beside the service lift.

  Slowly. Casually. Then she carried on up the back stairs with which she was so familiar, gasped at the sight of the same routine, the morning chaos of mothers and children who didn’t see each other let alone a stranger, hurried to her room and waited.

  Their old room was airless and desolate, its radiator throbbing with heat although it was April. It seemed as frightened as she was as she saw herself in the seedy mirror, startled eyes, gaping mouth, chest heaving.

  She must calm down. She must.

  But what if she’d been caught on some hidden camera?

  No, no, they wouldn’t have cameras here. The guests would find out and object.

  The room was exactly the same, but why should she find this surprising? The same stale smell from the bed. The windows were stained with pigeon shit. Abandon all hope, which Billy had scratched with a match into the flaky plaster, was still there, over the rickety bed-head.

  At twelve o’clock precisely, Ange got up, straightened her hair and her features, drew in a deep breath and made for the service lift. Down in the bowels of the Prince Regent its guts spew over several miles of twisted underground passageways, brilliantly lit. It made an excellent underground shelter for visiting bigwigs during the war. The kitchens are still situated here and it was down here, in the washroom with the two industrial machines, that the top-floor residents had to come to deal with their personal laundry.

  But the main bulk of the hotel laundry goes by lorry to Staines.

  Down in the echoing loading bay, the size of an aircraft hangar and stinking of lorry exhaust fumes, the pace is always hectic. Here the trolleys sit and wait for the pick-up in neat, orderly stacks.

  A girl, also wearing a white overall, eyed Ange oddly as she scrabbled about searching for the blue trolley with the A5 label.

  ‘I’m looking for an earring,’ lied Ange, over the roar of fumes and sound.

  The girl sniffed. ‘Rather you than me. You don’t know what’s on those sheets.’

  ‘Oh, I do,’ called Ange, ‘but I’ve got no bloody choice have I?’

  ‘Well, good on you…’ The girl wandered off, leaving Ange to carve a route through the seemingly thousands of waiting trolleys.

  She found what she wanted. Her two precious bundles were underneath. She had to heave a dozen other, smaller bundles, off the top before she reached them. She dug them out, repacked the trolley…

  She glanced at her watch.

  Where is he? Oh God, where is he? Don’t let me down now, Billy, for Christ’s sake.

  His familiar voice was like a balm. ‘Two bags for Victoria.’

  He looked very small, he sounded small so she could hardly hear him, but Billy had seen her and was making his way towards her pushing a luggage trolley sporting a metal flag which said Victoria Station.

  Not bothering with a greeting, far too frazzled for that, together they adhered to the plan and lugged the two bundles onto the luggage trolley and made for the exit.

  This was always going to be the most hazardous part.

  ‘Did you say Victoria, mate?’ asked one of the loading clerks, Bic behind his ear.

  ‘Two bags,’ puffed Billy, sweating.

  ‘That’s not bags. That’s laundry.’

  Ange came up behind. ‘It’s not. It’s curtains for cleaning,’ she said, with disinterest. ‘Old mother Bottomley sent them down.’

  The flustered clerk checked his dockets. ‘I haven’t got anything here, I know nothing about this.’

  ‘Please yourself then, mate,’ said Billy, pretending to wander off. ‘I just do as I’m told.’

  ‘It’s curtains,’ said Ange, again. ‘You can see, they’re bigger than the laundry ones.’ She hoped like hell all this would be worth it. She’d have to cross her legs soon, she was going to wet herself in a minute.

  ‘Well who’s going to sign?’ asked the clerk, trying to deal with a delivery of frozen fish at the same time.

  ‘I’ll bloody sign,’ said Billy, ‘if it’ll make you any happier.’

  Billy signed and the man turned to concentrate on more important business. And so it was in this way, like two ants carrying a couple of sugar lumps, that Ange and Billy pushed the station luggage trolley all the way to Willington Gardens, the worst part by far being dragging them up the stairs to the flat.

  Coach, carriage, wheelbarrow, muckcart. No one batted an eyelid.

  When they had finally finished, Billy pushed the trolley out
onto the street again, and hid it among some handy restaurant dustbins.

  It has been worthwhile, exceptionally so. The wedding is over and Ange thanks her lucky stars once again as she carefully hangs her new clothes and puts them in the wardrobes at Cadogan Square. One chest of drawers is already full—well—if you spread everything out as extravagantly as you can.

  That dreadful Murphy O’Connell had come out to help her when she drew up with her booty in eight heavy-duty dustbin bags.

  ‘No cases then, Your Ladyship?’ His mean little eyes looked at her sharply.

  ‘I find black bags far easier,’ said Ange, ‘cases do take up so much unnecessary space.’

  ‘You’ll not find space a problem here, milady,’ said Murphy, that sinister little dwarf of a man, and she felt the emphasis on that last word was unnecessarily challenging.

  But no, she mustn’t become paranoid, it is just O’Connell’s muttering accent that makes him sound so insolent. His wife, Estelle, is the most friendly, charming person, she makes up for her husband, her effervescence and her largeness help to blot him out.

  There are little white bags of pot-pourri in every drawer, and even the lining paper has a scented fragrance.

  The Japanese family have done Ange proud. During their stay in London all three women were extremely busy. They were avid but selective shoppers. Neither she nor Billy could believe it when they pulled out the dress. ‘It’s a fucking wedding dress,’ he’d said, drawing hard on his fag in excitement. She’d had to keep him away from the bundles, he was likely to step on the fabric, or mark it, she made him watch while she laid everything out, one by one, on the back of the Ercol sofa.

  ‘It certainly could be a wedding dress…’

  ‘It is a frigging wedding dress. Look at the roses round the hem. You wouldn’t have roses round the hem if you didn’t want to get married in it.’

  ‘It could be just a very smart dress which happens to be in ivory.’ In fact the dress was a specially designed and terribly expensive item for a Japanese fancy-dress ball one of the girls was due to attend on her return back home. She was going as an English summer. But Ange loved the princess line which made her look like Little Miss Muffet, and the neat kid boots which matched it.