The Rise and Fall of Becky Sharp

by Sarra Manning

  Pitt hadn’t intended to marry again; not when he could shag lots of beautiful women, then end things with a heartfelt ‘I just can’t love again since Frankie’s death’ when he got bored with them. Alas, eight years ago, he’d made the mistake of shagging Rosa, the pretty daughter of the landlord of Mudbury’s only pub, The Pig’s Ear, and when the stupid girl got pregnant, said landlord had come after Pitt with his shotgun and a journalist from The Sun.

  Still, it wasn’t all bad. Pitt had always said that if he got married again, he’d choose a simple woman and Rosa, bless her, was as simple as any woman he’d found. She popped out a child every couple of years (never could remember to take her pill) and now they had at least four young children (maybe even five) running around, though neither he nor Rosa could be relied upon to feed them regularly or get them enrolled in school, hence the need for a nanny. Not that they could keep a nanny for long, being as isolated as they were, with patchy WiFi, and Rosa having very funny ideas about raising children. She’d never been the same after an immersive yoga retreat in Mykonos to relieve a bout of post-natal depression following the birth of their second child. Or was it the third? What with all the yoga, when Rosa did pop out yet more sprogs, her figure snapped right back and it also made her very bendy, so Sir Pitt managed to overlook her other shortcomings.

  The other reason that they couldn’t hold on to a nanny was that each girl objected to Pitt’s true, authentic self and his true, authentic smell. Back in the day, he’d been fighting them off but now they fought him off, and the last one had actually gagged when he’d tried to steal a kiss, and she’d then threatened to go to the papers.

  But the latest one, pretty little Becky, was shaping up quite nicely. She’d claimed not to know who he was but Pitt knew that was just the dance of courtship. And the children seemed to adore her, Pitt thought as he watched the new nanny cavort with a horde of children on the ragged lawn he could spy from his study window. What a charming picture they all made, he thought to himself indulgently.

  Like Diana frolicking with her nymphs. Little Pitt wouldn’t mind a spot of frolicking himself …

  *

  ‘If you call your brother a see you next Tuesday again, then it’s nothing but vegan food for the rest of the week, you horrible child,’ pretty little Becky shouted at Calliope Crawley. ‘At least say it in French like I taught you.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Calliope said and immediately stopped trying to throttle her younger brother. ‘Please don’t take away our chicken nuggets. I’d rather that you beat us instead.’

  ‘Don’t push me any further then,’ Becky said warningly, because the merest hint of a threat worked wonders on the brats under her tender, not really that loving, care.

  They were many little Crawleys. Becky wasn’t even sure that all of them belonged to Sir and Lady Crawley but suspected some of them came up from the village each day. Though she couldn’t imagine why, because being the offspring of the famous actor and his hippy-dippy wife was awful.

  During her childhood, Becky had known real deprivation. Many times she’d had to sleep on the floor of assorted dosshouses, council B&Bs riddled with mould and mildew, once even a crack den. There had been many times when she’d gone to bed hungry. Her clothes came from charity shops and not a week went by without her being slapped so hard by one of her parents that she saw stars. But that was nothing compared to the torture that the poor Crawley children were put through on a daily basis.

  For one thing there was no TV. Or rather, there was a TV in the drawing room but Sir Pitt was adamant that it would rot their young minds and also, he expected the children to spend most of their time outside, in the fresh air. Or the freezing cold. Or the pouring rain.

  There was no WiFi either. Or rather, there was WiFi, but hardly any signal and Lady Crawley couldn’t remember the password and Sir Pitt wouldn’t tell Becky what it was because she was meant to be schooling his children in how to find their true, authentic selves.

  Then there was the food. The little Crawleys had never once experienced the joy of a McDonalds Happy Meal. Not once. It was enough to make even Becky cry. The only chocolate they’d ever known was raw cacao. Sir Pitt was full Paleo and would only eat food that his primitive ancestors might have eaten, which involved a lot of meat and nuts and leafy vegetables. Becky didn’t know much about primitive man but she was pretty sure that he’d had a life expectancy of about twenty-five. Still, it had to be better than the radical vegan diet adopted by Lady Crawley. No wonder Mrs Tinker, the cook, was in a permanent foul mood as she tried to feed the children a balanced diet approved by both their parents.

  ‘Gluten-free, dairy-free, taste-free,’ she’d mutter every morning as she banged around the kitchen making a truly disgusting porridge flavoured with soy milk and whatever berries the children had foraged the day before.

  Babs Pinkerton hadn’t thought to mention it but Becky was also expected to home school the children, though she’d rarely gone to school herself. They longed to go to school, Becky longed for them to go to school too – getting the crap kicked out of them a couple of times would be the making of them.

  Not that Becky was softening. Her heart was still a hard little thing but she knew what it was like to have parents who were indifferent to anything but their own needs and desires.

  Also, she’d learned an important lesson from her stay with the Sedleys. She’d spent all her time and energy on cultivating Amelia and Jos, when if she’d made herself indispensable to Mr and Mrs Sedley too, she’d probably still be enjoying the luxury of their six-bedroom Kensington house. So, this time round, she made sure that every member of the household could barely function without her.

  It had been easy to win Rosa Crawley over. Anyone who did that much yoga and meditation and hadn’t eaten a bag of crisps in eight years was obviously desperately unhappy. Rosa had no friends because what passed for society in the back of beyond looked down on her for being a publican’s daughter, and her old friends were jealous of her new-found status and comforted themselves with the opinion that ‘Rosa’s really up herself now.’

  Also, she wasn’t very bright and Becky had always found that stupid people tended towards unhappiness, since they lacked the inner reserves to entertain themselves. Still, Rosa was clever enough that she’d actually managed to pass her driving test, though she needed someone to navigate as she always got her left and right mixed up.

  On Wednesday mornings, Becky would dump the children on Mrs Tinker and Rosa would drive them both to Portsmouth while she poured her heart out about how difficult it was to be married to a reclusive celebrity. ‘It weren’t so bad when he was in that there Hollywood half the time, but now he int, and he’s on me all the time, the randy bugger.’ She’d turn mournful eyes on Becky. ‘Rooting around like a pig going after truffles.’

  ‘Poor Rosa. You really deserve some me-time.’ This was all the encouragement Rosa needed to go off to be manipulated and palpated by a Brazilian masseur called Javier, and Becky would head off into town with Rosa’s credit card.

  But it was when Becky suggested that Rosa get an IUD fitted that their bond was well and truly cemented: no more little Crawleys crawling about ever again.

  With the children, it was easy to find out what they wanted most in the world, give it to them, then withhold it whenever they were being badly behaved bastards who should have been drowned at birth, which was quite a lot of the time.

  What they wanted most in the world was everything that their parents denied them. Becky downloaded several Disney films on to the iPad she’d liberated from Amelia Sedley, and Frozen, in particular, transfixed them as if they were witnessing the opening of the Ark of the Covenant.

  While Rosa was having her weekly massage, Becky would buy all the food that the children were usually forbidden: chicken nuggets, oven chips, Haribo and Heinz tomato ketchup. Pitt and Rosa never sat down with the children at meal times to know exactly what they were eating and Mrs Tinker would much rather shove some fish
fingers under the grill than have to spend the best part of a day soaking mung beans and activating almonds.

  Sir Pitt Crawley, on the other hand, was harder to crack; hard in the sense that he was perpetually horny.

  Queen’s Crawley was a crumbling, draughty old house with antiquated plumbing, holes in the roof and a mouse infestation. There was barely a radiator to be seen, never mind the swimming pool Becky had once imagined. As she bedded down for yet another freezing night, swaddled in tracksuit, thick socks and several musty, hairy blankets, Becky would think longingly of the Sedleys’ house and in particular, the under-floor heating. She even missed the dour, monosyllabic Mr Sedley who’d hardly seemed to notice her at all, a welcome change from Sir Pitt who would burst into her room most evenings, commanding her to turn out the light.

  ‘I’m not made of money, little Becky, my residuals barely cover the day-to-day running of the estate. You keep burning electricity like this, we’ll all become destitute.’ Then he’d run his eyes over her blanket-clad form speculatively. ‘You know, if you’re cold … in the Army Cadets at school, when we went camping we’d huddle together …’

  ‘I’m not cold,’ Becky would say every time, her jaw clenched to stop her teeth from chattering. ‘I’m positively toasty.’

  In spite of her nightly rejection of his advances, Sir Pitt was slowly falling under her spell. Like most actors, he loved to talk. Or rather he loved to talk at Becky and he was convinced that she loved to help him write his memoirs.

  By now, Sir Pitt had quite forgotten that he’d seen Becky’s true, authentic self that first night. He much preferred her cow-eyed, mouth slightly parted, as she made sure his Dictaphone was recording as he orated about his transcendent performance in the Scottish play and ‘Did I ever tell you about the time I nearly worked with Scorsese? I didn’t? Oh, good! You’ll like this story, Becky, is that thing recording?’ And Becky much preferred to spend her evenings in Pitt’s study where there was a roaring fire even though sometimes he came and sat right next to her on a cracked leather Chesterfield and begged her to stroke Little Pitt. But when Sir Pitt had his back to her as he paced about the room and performed, there were all sorts of interesting pieces of paper in full view, from bank statements and credit-card bills to the Post-it note with the WiFi password scrawled on it.

  Becky had arrived at Queen’s Crawley halfway through September and by November, the children adored her almost as much as they feared her. Lady Crawley treated Becky as a trusted confidante, Mrs Tinker regarded her as an ally and Sir Pitt wanted nothing more than ‘to become better acquainted, my dear’, so he’d started to wash more regularly.

  It wasn’t the bright lights and the riches that Becky craved, but she was biding her time. Waiting. Sir Pitt was only semi-retired and he was still a famous actor. Sooner or later, he’d have to take another job, if only to pay the colossal tax bill that Becky had come across, and it wouldn’t be such a leap for Becky to make the move from nanny to PA. To swap nursery for film set where she could forge all sorts of useful friendships. Or maybe Rawdon Crawley might visit, Pitt’s youngest son from his first marriage, who Becky had on a google alert. He had brooding good looks and a successful film career, which was sure to become even more successful once he stopped gambling, drinking and partying hard with the young Hollywood set. He just needed the love of a good woman to steer him right.

  In the meantime, the days passed in a quiet kind of monotony until Becky thought she might go mad with the boredom of it all. And just when she was trying desperately to come up with an exit strategy because she was twenty and she was wasting her best days and all her best assets in muddy Mudbury, Dame Matilda Crawley came to stay for Christmas.

  Chapter 12

  On a freezing-cold December afternoon, the Pitt Crawley branch of the Crawleys lined up outside Queen’s Crawley to greet their imperious matriarch. As an ancient Rolls Royce, driven sedately by a beloved factotum named Briggs – an exquisitely turned-out, plump gay man of a certain age – came to a graceful stop directly opposite the steps that led up to the house, nobody moved, apart from a few shivers from the waiting Crawley offspring. After a suitably dramatic pause, Briggs alighted and, with some ceremony, opened a rear door.

  A slight figure dressed all in black took the hand Briggs offered, stepped out of the car, and cast a baleful glance over the assembled company as she sighed loudly.

  ‘Pitt, good of you to make the acquaintance of soap and water,’ Dame Matilda Crawley said as her younger brother stepped forward. ‘Really, I’m honoured. And the second wife is still around, I see,’ she added, sweeping a disapproving eye over Rosa, who visibly wilted. Then she turned her attention on the children.

  Calliope, the eldest, stepped forward. ‘Bonjour, ma chère tante,’ she parroted in a passable French accent, as Becky had made it clear that if any of them screwed this up, there’d be no iPad, no Haribo, no fucking tomato ketchup, until well into the New Year.

  ‘C’est très gentil de vous voir encore,’ trilled the next in line, Orion, and one by one the children, five of them in all, spoke a line of French to greet their venerable aunt.

  ‘Oh! Oh! Incroyable,’ Dame Crawley said and she and Briggs shared a delighted smile. ‘Such a transformation. Last time I was here, you were all practically feral.’

  ‘The ringworm,’ Briggs recalled faintly with a little shudder as Matilda Crawley’s eye fell on Becky. She raised an enquiring eyebrow.

  ‘Just the nanny,’ Pitt said, taking his sister’s arm to lead her away. One might try to shag the help, but one didn’t want one’s elder sister to know that, so it was best to keep help and sister far, far apart.

  ‘Stop manhandling me, Pitt, you know I have osteoporosis,’ Matilda snapped, tugging her arm free and giving Becky a once-over far more comprehensively than Sir Pitt ever had. ‘Have you actually managed to teach these brats some French? They used to barely be able to speak English.’

  ‘Becky’s a wonder,’ gasped Rosa, then shrank back when Briggs glared at her.

  It was up to Pitt to reluctantly make the introductions. ‘Mattie, this is Becky Sharp, who came to us by way of Babs Pinkerton. Becky, this is my dear sister, Dame Matilda Crawley.’

  ‘Babs Pinkerton! Hah! That old lush,’ Matilda snorted.

  ‘Runs on gin,’ Briggs added, sotto voce.

  ‘Becky Sharp,’ the dame continued, as Becky stood there and tried to look demure in the plain grey dress and white pinny that Mrs Tinker had told her to wear to get in Matilda’s good graces. ‘Becky Sharp. Briggs, where do we know Becky Sharp from?’

  Briggs stepped forward to peer intently at Becky, who looked Briggs in the eye and pinned on a pleasant smile even as she waited for the truth to come out. Briggs had the whiff of backstage about him so had no doubt encountered her father in various Soho drinking dens and might remember a pre-pubescent Becky turning up to fetch him home or ask for some fifty-pence pieces for the meter.

  ‘It’s her,’ Briggs announced with some satisfaction. ‘You know, Mattie. That girl from Big Brother.’ He leaned forward again. ‘We had a tenner on you to win.’

  ‘So it is!’ Matilda said gleefully. ‘How thrilling! What on earth are you doing running around after these appalling children? Probably running away from my brother’s wandering hands too. No! Don’t tell me now.’ She linked arms with Becky. Despite the froideur of her grande dame demeanour, she was frail and bird-like to the touch. There were still echoes of her famous refined beauty in the jut of her cheekbones, the mischievous smile that curved her lips, but she was an old lady (some fifteen years older than Pitt) who’d already overcome two bouts of cancer and her heart fluttered alarmingly if she drank too much champagne. ‘It’s far too cold to stand around outside, though I expect it’s not much warmer inside. You shall sit next to me at dinner and keep me entertained with tales of the Big Brother house. I’m dying to know what Gav was really like.’

  *

  The Crawleys wouldn’t have been much of an acting d
ynasty if its only paid-up members of Equity were Sir Pitt and the annoyingly absent Rawdon. It pained Sir Pitt, more than he’d ever admit even to himself, that his own sister, Matilda, had one more Oscar than him, two more Olivier awards and had been awarded her dameship long, long before he’d been made a knight of the realm. As she never failed to remind him.

  A starlet in the sixties, with a talent for picking good roles and even better lovers, in the seventies she’d metamorphosed into a serious actress and had done three seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company. People still talked of her Lady Macbeth in hushed, reverent tones. In the eighties, she’d done a big glitzy Hollywood primetime soap opera. She’d done Merchant Ivory films, she’d done art house. Her performance as Rose Kovick in a revival of Gypsy had gone down in legend, as had her three husbands, each one richer than the last. Now, Dame Matilda was a happily widowed national treasure and ensconced in a Sunday-night period drama where she played the indomitable matriarch of a titled family. Her own family, she found sadly wanting.

  ‘They’re all waiting for me to die,’ Dame Matilda explained to Becky later that night at dinner. ‘I married well, all three of them, I invested well and I have no children. That’s why Pitt’s so intent on sucking up to me. Wants to tap me for funds.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Pitt declared stoutly, on Matilda’s left. ‘We’re family. You know I adore you.’

  ‘Adores my loot, more like,’ Matilda said with a sniff. ‘Not that he’ll spend it on something useful like a new boiler. Those radiators are positively antique, aren’t they, Becky?’

  ‘I don’t actually have a radiator in my room,’ Becky said while Pitt’s attention was diverted by Rosa who was staring at the dishes on the table with horror. ‘Thank God for hot-water bottles.’