Beggar Bride

by Gillian White

  ‘What about the hat then? Would you dare wear that?’

  The hat is an incredible thing, a huge circle of flowers on the carpet, and then, when you pull it, the whole thing rises like a 3-D birthday card, turning into the most enchanting summery bonnet with ribbons which tie under the chin. ‘Dare wear it? I’d have chosen it myself. I love it. You couldn’t not love it.’ Ange had dragged it on and gone to look at herself in the mirror. She took her head up and down and sideways, grinning with pleasure, preening as she did so. ‘I bet you one of those Japanese girls was planning on getting married!’

  Ange paused, racked with a guilt she didn’t expect. Something heavy pulled inside her. To come back to the hotel and discover all these marvellous purchases gone. It would break anyone’s heart.

  ‘We can’t keep all these things, we’ll have to take them back!’ She felt as mad as she sounded and Billy agreed.

  ‘You’re insane!’ Billy, stunned and puce in the face, said they’d be bound to be insured. ‘People like that. Sod it, they’ll enjoy going round again, give the buggers something to do.’

  ‘But they might not. They might not even be rich. They might have saved up all their lives for this one special blowout.’ Close to tears, Ange was insistent. ‘It’s like, if we’re too greedy, we’ll bring down bad luck,’ she said. ‘It was too easy to fleece them, Billy, can’t you understand what I mean?’

  Billy sweated. ‘After going through all that crap…’

  ‘We don’t need all this.’

  ‘Oh? So you’re planning to keep some of it, but not all, is that it? And don’t you think that’s worse?’

  ‘No.’ Ange was all jumpy, tempting fate. This feeling was hard to define, but if you used all the luck, it was gone, there might not be any more, she couldn’t bear the thought of those girls’ pretty faces getting back to that empty room, oh, how they would detest her.

  ‘Well you’ll have to sodding do it yourself,’ Billy sulked, stamping round, shaking his head. ‘You can’t go back to the bloody hotel and hope not to be seen this time! Why must you be so sodding childish? What’s it to do with, God or something?’

  ‘I’ll not go back, I’ll wheel most of this stuff and leave it outside the cop shop, they’re bound to go to the pigs when they find all this lot missing.’

  Billy was speechless, but eventually, calling her all the names he knew, he retrieved the trolley and helped her carry a whole sheetful down the blasted steps and out into the yard again.

  There was more than enough… and the dress itself!

  All Ange had to do on the day was buy a basket of flowers and carry it on her arm.

  Even with half of it handed back there were silk leggings and T-shirts, linen jackets, leather boots and a pair of flat gold shoes which were special, most still in their tissue paper and carrier bags with labels on. There were nightclothes, a couple of brand-new handbags, six dresses, four summery and casual and two more exclusive ones for evening wear. With all this stuff, and the few bits she had already accumulated, this was certainly the basis of a wardrobe any young woman of style would be proud of.

  Silk, satin…

  She’ll go through the jewellery later when she has more time.

  Lady Angela Ormerod.

  Jeez…

  Thankful to be alone at last after such an exhausting day—the luncheon reception at Brown’s didn’t finish until five o’clock—Ange is missing Jacob already. She’ll be three nights away from him this time, she warned Fabian that she’d be leaving for New York on Tuesday, she’d probably be there for at least a week, and he accepted this quite happily. But something is going to have to be done about the financial situation, and soon.

  Aunty Val is going to have to be persuaded to accept her place at the residential home and Ange is going to have to pretend to go and view some suitable contenders.

  But won’t Fabian want to know which home they choose?

  Won’t he be tempted, some time in the future, to ring and enquire about a Miss Valerie Harper, just to make sure his generosity is being put to good use? The whole enterprise is fraught with pitfalls, but Ange will have to convince him that it is best, for her aunt’s protection, that he does not know where she is—the matron could let the cat out of the bag by informing Aunty Val some man had been making enquiries—after all, Aunty Val doesn’t know any men and such information could cause her great distress.

  Will Fabian accept such flimsy excuses for being kept in the dark?

  Can Ange persuade him to pay the fees directly into her new account rather than to the home, lest Aunty Val should find out?

  She’ll be able to describe it all right, that won’t be a problem. Billy always turns on to watch Waiting For God. Oh how she misses him. How she misses them both.

  16

  TO THE MANOR BORN?

  It is a blessing that Ange is in New York because poor Juliet Worthington at the Cody/Ormerod PR department is deluged by feature writers, magazine editors and, God forbid, certain notorious hacks from the popular press, all demanding more information about the new Lady Ormerod.

  ‘Please, Sir Fabian, surely there must be something more you can give us? If we don’t tell these wretched people they’ll make up their own scenarios, we’ve seen it all before and there’s not a lot anyone can do about it.’

  ‘I have told you all I know, Juliet,’ says Fabian. ‘Angela is a private person, very young, no past I’m afraid, no family anyone would have heard of, and she is not, and never will be, available.’

  ‘So I’ll have to tell the man from Hello…?

  ‘Yes,’ said Fabian firmly, ‘I’m afraid you will.’

  ‘He is most insistent.’

  ‘And so am I.’

  Having failed at the horse’s mouth certain disappointed reporters dig up Sir Fabian’s other living wife, Ffiona, in her house at St John’s Wood. Wasn’t there some scandal about her at one time…?

  ‘Frankly, I feel sorry for the woman,’ says Ffiona, posing for the cameras on her front step in an overwashed jumper full of holes and baggy, outdated Aladdin pants having come late to feminism. She smokes cigarette after cigarette quickly and nervously, accepting her lights from the reporters. There is a distinctly noticeable current of anger running through her remarks. ‘Knowing what I know.’

  ‘What does that mean, darling?’

  ‘This way, Ffiona!’

  ‘Give us a smile, dear, that’s lovely.’

  You only have to compare Ffiona to her carefully groomed daughter, Honesty, to know how far she has gone to seed. Her nails, not long any more, are still painted but chipped and badly bitten. Her hair, once shiny and blonde and lovely, is now cut short to her head, tufted, and dyed platinum. Her eyebrows, once so delicately arched, now grow where they will, and meet across her button nose. ‘Marrying Fabian is beginning to get like finding the tomb of Tutankhamun. There’s a curse…’

  The reporters scribble madly on. This is what they like to hear on a silly Sunday afternoon.

  She taps her cigarette with a nervous violence against the railing. ‘I mean, look what happened to poor Helena and of course, everyone knows that my reputation was ruined.’

  Ah yes, that was it. A scandal, Ffiona’s listeners are greedily gulping everything down. Wasn’t Ffiona caught coming out of some hideous basement glory-hole, some devious dive with a reputation for sado-masochism? And didn’t she swear she had been set up, exposed by her enemies and wasn’t her awful story dragged through the courts at the time? Bad enough for a man to behave in that way, let alone a woman. Her shocking behaviour, revealed to all and sundry, adversely affected her alimony, so much so that she’d spent a fortune trying for a second hearing, almost bankrupting herself, so the neighbours say, what with that and her frantic spending.

  Her little daughter, aged six, was torn from the very arms of her mother.

  And Helena’s death?

  Ffiona isn’t slow to come forward. ‘There was so much gossip when Helena died it is hard t
o remember which was truth and which was fantasy,’ she comments, and yes, of course they can quote her on that. ‘Fabian’s becoming another Henry the Eighth, when he is fed up with his wives, when they fail to give him an heir he just dumps them. But at least I managed to live,’ and she looks pointedly at the small, littered garden, ‘if you can call this sort of existence living.’

  ‘But Ffiona, luvvie, the man has only lost two wives, hardly the six…’

  ‘I don’t care. It’s the principle that counts. You just wait and see,’ says Ffiona intriguingly. ‘You might just want to come back and talk to me again when this marriage comes to grief.’

  ‘Jesus, she’s bitter,’ says one reporter to the other. ‘We can’t write that. We’d be laid wide open…’

  ‘I think that was Ffiona’s trouble,’ mutters his companion coarsely. ‘She was laid wide open once too often.’

  And Ffiona isn’t the only one to see herself in print.

  There’s another ‘inside informant’, closer to home, and Fabian suspects Murphy O’Connell, a man who’d sell his own grandmother for fifty quid. ‘Mean?’ goes the quote. ‘Mean? He is meaner than the Windsors. His staff work all hours for peanuts, at the wedding they were even expected to put their own hands in their pockets to hire their suits because of that old miser. And he might be just about the richest man in Britain but his children are kept to a pound a week, less than folks who struggle on social security, they manage to give their kiddies more than that skinflint. And you ask me why that man’s wealthy, hell, he’d grudge every penny given to a beggar. It was certainly convenient for the Ormerod family that Helena died when she did, so there wasn’t another costly divorce to fight.’

  It is all terribly unfair and quite untrue.

  Fabian immediately instructs Juliet Worthington to release to the press just how much money Cody/Ormerod donate annually to various charitable causes.

  But shit sticks.

  Fabian is used to this sort of thing, it irritates him, of course, but it no longer hurts him. He is just very relieved that his new wife is out of the country. By the time she returns they’ll be pulling somebody else to pieces. And at last the focus has moved onto him and off the innocent Angela.

  And maybe Ffiona will feel better after her little airing.

  Doesn’t she realise what an appalling image she creates of herself every time she vents her spleen in this way? She calls Fabian’s private investigators ‘enemies’ as if they were acting out of personal spite and not taking part in a perfectly above-board business arrangement.

  And it was only necessary to take these steps when Fabian’s legal representative, his Winchester friend, Jerry Boothroyd, heard how much she was trying to take him for. A staggering amount! Half the family fortune! When she’d been behaving like a bitch on heat, humping and grinding with half the workers on the estate let alone what she got up to with her seedy London cronies.

  After his experiences with Ffiona, Fabian was certainly much more cautious about any monetary arrangements he might make.

  But not cautious enough.

  Helena, also, called him mean.

  But she wasn’t interested in spending all her money on her passions and her men, like Ffiona. No, but horribly bogus all the same, that woman wormed her way into his affections and once that ring was on her finger she was scheming, funding various specious movements, hopelessly investing in these new green companies, she even paid for and set up a commune in the Hebrides until the islanders kicked up such a fuss they had them moved off.

  She bought a stretch of land in Wales and invited all and sundry to come and live on it in home-made benders woven from new and vulnerable saplings. Ruined the land, of course. Chopped down the trees for firewood. Everything they grew was organic, they failed to put anything back in the soil except for their own filthy manure and oil from their frequent sump-changes. The planners soon put paid to that on health grounds, but no sooner was Fabian’s back turned than she sponsored a fantastically expensive pop concert-cum-riot, a three-day event which caused so much trouble in the surrounding area that the compensation claim which was finally laid at Fabian’s door was outrageous.

  Time and time again he found himself and his horse pulled up by a group of Helena’s hairy hunt saboteurs, often, to his embarrassment, it was Helena herself and once she’d had the gall to throw herself down in front of his horse.

  She could have caused his favourite hunter irreparable damage.

  The press had had a field day over that as you can well imagine, and everything looked even more sordid in cold print.

  So, although he finds it slightly irritating, Fabian admires Angela’s ferociously defended independence. ‘But I must know where you are staying in New York,’ he told her, ‘in case I need to contact you. And who knows, I might surprise you and join you one evening.’

  ‘Listen, that is exactly what I don’t want,’ Angela said. ‘This is my work, and I have made it successful against all the odds. It’s a hard world to break into, Fabian, and I don’t want the sort of diversions I have seen other women having to cope with, women who, in the end, have had to bow down to husband and family and give everything up.’

  She would not even allow Fabian’s secretary, Ruth Hubbard, to organise her tickets or help with the travelling arrangements.

  Fabian insisted. ‘But surely a phone number…’

  ‘I don’t always know where I am going to be, and I don’t want the responsibility of having always to let you know from one day to the next. Don’t you see, it would cramp my style! I haven’t got layers of assistants to protect me from interference, like you have. I have to get myself from place to place and it’s as much as I can cope with without worrying about you. Don’t you understand?’

  Fabian laughed fondly with her.

  Angela had been equally stubborn about Aunty Val. ‘I don’t want your support for my family, Fabian.’

  ‘Look, Angela, paying for poor Aunty Val has a selfish motive behind it. I don’t want you worrying day and night about that old lady left all alone in that great Hampstead house.’

  ‘She would never forgive me if I sold it over her head.’

  ‘I’m not suggesting you sell it for one moment. Keep the house, if that is what you want. But do let me pay the residential expenses.’

  She said she’d think about this, and that maybe, just maybe, she would put the proposal to Aunty Val on her return from the States.

  So Fabian could do no more. He had to leave it there. Angela is so hysterically fond of that woman, and protective of her. But he supposes that is natural, their relationship must have been very intense, just the two of them in that house, and Angela growing up with only her aunt to care for her.

  Fabian still basks in the happy afterglow of his marriage, dazzled by Angela’s beauty.

  He has not known Angela long but already he misses her, coming home to a house that seems strangely dreary now whereas, before, he had never considered it so. Honesty still goes round silent and sulking, creeping about like a dying fly in spite of the encouraging talks he has had with her.

  ‘You are quite clearly not happy here any longer, darling. Would you like me to buy you a flat in London, somewhere in Knightsbridge, somewhere you can share with your friends and live a more independent life? As I’ve said before, I’d be quite happy to do so.’ If only the girl would take a leaf out of Angela’s book.

  ‘Turn me out again, is that it, Daddy? Like you did when I was six years old and became a nuisance to you and Helena.’

  Fabian regarded his daughter levelly, long overtired of the struggle to please this obstinate child. Vexed, he well remembers the trauma they’d had at the time. She may have been six, and beautifully behaved up until then, but when Helena arrived the child appeared to know every trick in the book. She refused all food Estelle offered her, she pretended to sleepwalk at night, she poured water onto Helena’s side of the bed, she was offhand with her. She could have gone to stay with her mother but Ffiona w
as always gallivanting off abroad at that time so any arrangements in that direction proved difficult. The only answer had been boarding school.

  ‘I’m not bothering to reply to that, Honesty. You are nearly twenty years old. I am just not having Angela upset by your bad temper and this childish refusal to accept her.’

  ‘What are you going to do, Daddy? Throw me out then?’ Honesty planted her feet where she stood by his chair so she looked immovable and solid.

  ‘Darling, of course I am not going to throw you out. You are welcome to stay here, naturally. But only if you take that look off your face and begin to behave in a civilised manner. So far you haven’t made the smallest effort to be nice.’

  There were tears in her wide blue eyes. ‘I have helped you, Daddy, tried to be a companion to you, acted as hostess lots of times, tried to be the kind of loyal and dutiful daughter I thought you wanted and now you just push me aside and treat me as if I am nothing again.’

  Fabian was wrong, he knew he was wrong, but he couldn’t contain his indignation. She has this unfortunate trait of fawning, just like her mother did when she couldn’t get her own way. ‘Perhaps you have tried too hard, Honesty. Perhaps, for your own sake, it’s time you learned to be yourself. Going away might make this easier.’

  Now Honesty did cry, noisily and wetly, and Fabian loathes tears. ‘She’s got to you already, Daddy. She’s turned you against me already and after all this I’ll never, never forgive her!’

  Now he longed to strangle her. ‘Honesty,’ Fabian tried, ‘listening to you anyone’d think you’d had a hard and cruel life. Angela has not said a word about you, about any member of my family! She likes you all as far as I know, and she’s certainly not the type of person…’

  ‘How do you know that, Daddy? You’ve only just met her!’