Beggar Bride

by Gillian White

  She knows exactly what she wants. The only real problem will be how to find the rich man of the prunes.

  2

  THE MORNING EXPERIENCE OF the Hon. Sir Fabian Ormerod, financier, widower, divorcee, son of a peer of the realm and knighted in his own right, differs from Ange’s in a multitude of ways. Coffee is brought to him on a tray as soon as he presses his handy button, and his day’s appointments appear on the screen beside his gigantic bed. Already his clothes are laid out, his trousers pressed, his striped shirt aired and crisp as if returned from a laundry… Estelle’s ironing has always been impressive.

  His days are full.

  No time for painful self-reflection, no need to explore his raison d’être. Everyone needs him, everyone wants to speak with him and that is why no calls are put through to his house in Cadogan Square, tucked between embassies, they must wait till he gets to his office at ten.

  Naturally he insists on some time for himself.

  He joins his daughter, Honesty, for breakfast, a formal breakfast laid out in the dining-room, the way they did before Helena died.

  He helps himself to scrambled egg. ‘What are your plans today, darling?’ A mindless kiss on the head as he passes his daughter’s chair.

  He hardly listens as she reels off her list. Long ago, Fabian discovered, it was necessary to sift the intelligence reaching his brain, binning the vast majority of it, putting some on hold, and keeping the essentials on screen to be dealt with soonest.

  Honesty’s day can be safely binned. The hairdresser’s to get her highlights touched up. Coffee with Nisha, shopping in the Arcade, lunch with Adelle, and the afternoon playing tennis indoors at the club. What a waste of an education, but Honesty’s happy, she’s not on drugs, and surely, these days, you can’t ask for more.

  The round, creamy-faced Honesty, fresh from finishing school in France, is surely too shrewd to go wrong like so many of her Sloaney cronies. Give a little, take a little, is her favourite adage. With ease she slipped into her mother’s role after the divorce, and again, after Helena’s death. Daddy’s little helper. Helena, his second wife, was a great big brute of a woman. Later, when Honesty studied the life of Henry the Eighth at school, that poxed old monster, she compared herself dramatically with Mary, daughter of the lawful queen.

  Old-fashioned as he is, it was always obvious that Fabian would prefer a male heir to his monetary kingdom. So, with all the imperiousness of a feudal lord, he put aside his first wife, Ffiona, in order to marry Helena, late lamented, whose spirit still lingers in the house, particularly in the choice of carpets, and begat a couple more useless girls.

  Oh, Honesty knows which side her bread is buttered and drifted through her difficult phases as easy as sand through a timer. And here she is now, a survivor, draped in pearls and perched on the satin seat of a chair which would gladden the heart of the nation if it were ever presented on the Antiques Roadshow. But Fabian is not remotely interested in the value of household objects, of the originals which hang on his tasteful walls, of the dishes that are placed on his table or the jade pieces he used to collect set into niches around his home, in the days when collecting seemed to matter.

  Honesty’s monthly allowance would make Ange gasp.

  So would the size of her birthday presents… last year a Saab convertible, top of the range, with a CD player, and reeking of squeaky leather.

  Give a little, take a little.

  The giving part is easy. Well, isn’t she Daddy’s favourite daughter?

  Any challengers to her superior role are running well behind.

  Pandora and Tabitha, Helena’s daughters, the plain and stoical twins. Still at The Rudge and likely to remain there for another four years, thank God.

  Her father’s leather-bound social diary lies on the table opened flat at February 10th. ‘Remember the Farqhuars’ party tonight… they’ve taken the hall at the Natural History Museum. So you’d be better to come home first, unless you want your dress suit delivered to the office later.’

  Fabian dabs his mouth with a snow-white napkin. There are snow-white streaks in his curly black hair, and in his semi-Victorian whiskers. ‘I’ll come back,’ he says, ‘it’s simpler.’

  ‘And bear in mind that the twins are coming this weekend. Try to leave some windows open in your schedule. And by the way, will you be here, or at home?’

  His quick brown eyes are restless like a fox, eager to get on. ‘Here. I can’t be away from London at the moment.’

  He would far rather be home where the heart is. He isn’t home enough for his liking for home is a comfortable medieval manor set in one thousand acres of Devonshire parkland, mostly wooded. A collection of armour in the hall keeps company with a few dead stags, a medieval dovecote is central to the enchanting gardens. Mummy and Daddy live in the Old Granary and Nanny Barber lives in the cottage. Excellent riding country. Easily reached by helicopter but far enough from the City to feel you have left your cares behind.

  Half an hour later, spot on 9.30 am, Roberts arrives at the door in the silver Rolls. Fabian picks up his fur-trimmed coat and his briefcase and bids his eldest daughter farewell; he is handed from person to person preciously, like a bucket of water to put out a fire. Rarely alone and hard to keep up with and that’s how he likes to play it. From daughter to chauffeur to doorman, from receptionist to personal assistant, bleeped notices of his important progress go before him like a page proclaiming a royal visit. The great presence. There’s a little setback this morning when Roberts misjudges the distance and bumps into a car at the lights. Fabian reads the Financial Times while his chauffeur sorts the business out. There’s a girl among the small crowd on the pavement staring in… for a second Fabian catches her eye and sees… hostility? Vitality? Or is it downright envy? She carries a baby in her arms.

  At the office he swishes through the swing door of the building, clicks across the yards of marble, passes the colonnades and then it’s up in the executive lift, up to the penthouse on the top floor, a totally self-sufficient home should one need to stay overnight.

  The serious morning papers are laid out on his enormous desk. He frowns to see the cheerier tabloids piled in a heap beside them today.

  ‘They’re at it again, I’m afraid, Sir Fabian, the politics of envy, comparing the wages of one chairman with another…’

  ‘Pitiful. And I’m splashed across the front I see.’ Not a bad picture, he muses to himself. ‘These damn privatised utilities, that’s what started this ruddy thing off.’ He is reading as he sits down, handing his coat and briefcase to Simon, fingering the Sun with disdain. ‘Hah, I see they’re comparing my pay with the managers of the London Ambulance Service this time, makes a change I suppose.’

  The dapper Simon laughs apologetically, half relaxed and half at attention in the way of those who serve the needs of the powerful. ‘They’ve asked for an interview, sir.’

  ‘Hah.’

  ‘Naturally I refused…’

  ‘Naturally. Anything else here I should know about?’

  ‘Nothing else. And here’s the brief for this morning’s meeting.’

  If only some of his miserable critics understood the kind of responsibilities that sit on Fabian’s manly shoulders. The need to censure and control. Daily he deals with not millions but billions of pounds that pass through these hallowed halls. Far easier to skim through the papers himself rather than listen to Simon’s summary for his is a quick and succinct mind. Preparing for the coming meeting he highlights the main points in yellow, crosses out the extraneous, and question marks a few paragraphs. If only other people possessed his knack of getting straight to the nub of a subject. Round and round they go, unable to see what stares them in the face, waiting to have it pointed out to them… and that’s where he comes in. But, by God, he can’t do everything.

  Between them, Simon Chalmers his personal assistant and Ruth Hubbard, his secretary, will organise a car for the twins this weekend, will contact the school, will make sure Estelle knows
and prepares for the arrival of these motherless children. The lack of a wife doesn’t bother Fabian, although he admits he sometimes envies his humbler colleagues the comfort of a woman at the end of a day, company in bed. Some men in his exalted position, several of his acquaintances in fact, will take a woman, pay for a woman, there are agencies dealing with orders as easy to get as fillet steak, but these painted harpies are not for Fabian.

  Fabian is straight as a die, straight like his father and grandfather before him, his grandfather, Percy, landowner, gentry and stern founder of the business empire, the multinational powerhouse Fabian straddles today. No, women ought to be fragrant and gentle, ministering to men’s emotional and sexual needs, with soft hands to caress the male member, mistress of hearth and home and bedded in a straightforward manner, virtuously, in the missionary position, when willing.

  In neither of his two disastrous marriages has Fabian found the kind of cultured, dainty woman he craved. No, he winces, tousled beds, hard-skinned feet and false fingernails. In spite of his indifference Fabian feels a spasm of anger. Mean, they called him indignantly, mean and arrogant and self-centred and yet unlike them he was never unfaithful. They turned into shrews at the end, although Helena’s death was unfortunate, not least for the publicity it engendered. There was no grief at either parting, merely a quiet exultation and the acquisition of female children to educate and nurture.

  So, an attractive man at forty-five and he knows it, is he never to see the son he deserves?

  A trace of perfume in the purified air and Ruth Hubbard bends to retrieve his coffee tray and replace it with bottled water, careful not to disturb him. Her very servitude makes her appealing. Her bosom is firm and elasticated and he wonders, briefly distracted and not for the first time, what she would do if he made a casual move to unbutton her cardigan. An unquestioning submission seems natural to Ruth and that’s nice in a woman, but merely the result of a training programmed to office routine, who can know what sort of reaction there might be to a warm hand cupped beneath that sensual, slippery elastic?

  ‘Right,’ says Fabian, sitting back, leaning against all his luxurious authority. ‘Time’s money. If everyone’s arrived in the boardroom let’s get cracking.’

  On her way to the hairdresser’s, passing slowly through Piccadilly in her Saab convertible, who is to say whether Honesty Ormerod notices the Prince Regent Hotel towering above her in its vulgar, faded splendour? And if she does, what thoughts might pass through her pretty little head, she who is perfectly at home at the Waldorf, the Ritz, the Savoy, not to mention the dens and haunts of the beautiful so oft frequented by the paparazzi now and therefore blighted.

  It is the pleasure of the privileged to call the cheap and nasty. She might well sneer at the string of coaches outside the Prince Regent, bearing the curtailed and limited masses, Japanese, Americans and Germans loaded down with cameras and tickets to the predictable theatre.

  Honesty can rest easy now. Daddy made one bad mistake and he is most unlikely to repeat it, to impregnate anyone else, not on the right side of the blanket anyway. And if he did he’d be likely to sire another girl, unlike the seventeenth century, at least in this day and age the man’s part in determining the gender of his children is recognised.

  Worrying enough that she’ll have to share her inheritance, let alone be pushed out by a male heir, and it’s fun to be one of the most sought after heiresses around.

  Lucky old Honesty.

  I wonder…

  Gone are the battles of childhood, the violent memories of the past, the tension in the air when Mummy and Daddy would fight like cat and dog night after night while she would lie in her bed listening, uneasy and anxious until she was forced to get up and stand like a pale little doll in the doorway. And then, when she was six, Mummy went away and horrible Helena arrived in her place with her vile brown lipsticks, with her powerful, freckled hands which washed her hair so cruelly.

  Daddy was besotted. Helena bewitched him.

  Displaced. Banished from court in disfavour. From being the pampered darling, brought down after bedtime by Nanny Ba-ba and displayed by the lights of the chandelier to approving guests who marvelled at her sweetness, to the spartan lifestyle of a preparatory school where she shared her bedroom with three others and had to leave her puppy behind and then he was knocked over. Not special any more. Naturally this hardened Honesty’s childish heart, introduced a vein of steel round which to form her emerging personality. For so many years Honesty stared crossly out at the world and then came the miracle of Helena’s death and the twins’ departure for boarding school in long socks and tunics, the kind of departure that hers had been. A banishment. A kind of cold dismissal.

  Not that there haven’t been likely contenders since then. Women aren’t slow to be forward when introduced to the most eligible widower in the land. Holidays on yachts and on private islands are not prizes to be sniffed at and, like contestants on a Japanese game show where they eat ants and lie in beds of ice and eels, some women are willing to do literally anything to come first, to win one of life’s biggest prizes.

  Honesty watches from the sidelines, easier in her mind as the years go by and Daddy’s work becomes his only obsession. These days there aren’t so many old-fashioned gentlemen types around and it’s easy for strangers to read Fabian wrongly. Coarseness disgusts him. As does satire and disparagement of the establishment in any form, so popular in general conversation these days. He is, as the song goes, an old-fashioned millionaire, whose favourite book is Moby Dick so it takes some time to fathom him out.

  And, just like his daughter, Fabian is on the watch for fortune hunters and after the experience of Helena, who can blame him for wising up?

  At the news-stand near where she pulls up to park, the vendor is calling in violent cockney, ‘Loads’a money man manipulates markets…’ Honesty sees her father’s face on the front of the Sun and sighs.

  Not again.

  The politics of envy disgust her.

  What does it matter what Daddy earns? If he didn’t, someone else would. They ought to ask how many jobs he has created as a result of his sharp dealings.

  At the hairdresser’s, the girl is new. Her hands are inexperienced as they manipulate Honesty’s head over the basin. She takes a while to get the water temperature right, she is clumsy with the shampoo.

  ‘Ouch! Steady on,’ says Honesty. ‘I am not a potato, sweetie.’

  ‘Sorry,’ says the girl, meekly.

  Honesty cannot manoeuvre her neck into a comfortable position. ‘For goodness’ sake, why don’t we start again?’

  The girl, flustered now, and eager to please in her new job, tries to help and only succeeds in putting her elbow in Honesty’s face.

  ‘Christ.’ Honesty sits up straight, the girl’s feebleness irritating her. ‘What the hell d’you think you’re playing at? I’ll go out of here in a brace if you’re not more careful.’

  ‘Excuse me. Is there a problem?’

  ‘There certainly is, and I’d be far happier if someone else took this cretin’s place…’

  ‘Certainly.’ And sleekly nudging the poor girl aside, the chief assistant takes over. Honesty lies back in comfort, enjoying the massage, the cleansing of her sensitive scalp.

  3

  I do not like thee doctor Fell

  The reason why I cannot tell.

  I only know and know full well

  I do not like thee doctor Fell.

  THIS SILLY CHILDHOOD DITTY goes round and round in her head on this, her third appointment with the housing since the new year. One of her resolutions was to stop thinking and worrying because there’s nothing more frustrating than that, and to take appropriate action instead.

  Appropriate action?

  Can waiting like this be called action?

  The man in the silver Rolls, though sitting still, a passenger, a waiting shadow, was clearly a man of extraordinary action and his eyes were full of a vital energy.

  Mr Brian Fell.
His name is slotted in the wooden board like the page number of a hymn.

  And all these others, waiting with Ange, mostly women with whingeing brats round their feet, can their plight be compared to hers? How have they reached this desperate state because only the sodding desperate would wait like this, in this modern red-brick, uncomfortable crate—it makes her think of the dentist—in these flimsy metal-framed chairs, for hours, as if they’ve got nothing better to do?

  Most would admit they have not.

  And why rivet the chairs to the floor? Who would want to whip them anyway?

  Unlike the dentist they don’t provide toys for the children here… probably fed up with them being vandalised or nicked. And as for magazines… there is nothing to stare at but the clock over the heavily armed reception area where bland-faced women sit like robots behind reinforced glass.

  ‘What time did you say?’

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘Well it’s more like bloody eleven already.’

  ‘Calm down, Billy, calm down.’

  He’ll not be much use when they get in there, Billy never is, he resents authority. So it’s up to Ange to stress their cramped conditions, the suspect hygiene, so many kids and infections, Jacob’s frail health and her own fraught state of mind. Billy, she knows, will sit beside her glumly, answering in the sulky monosyllables designed to get bureaucracy’s back up since Adam first cheeked God back in the Garden of Eden.

  Perhaps she ought to have come without him. But they like the whole family to attend. To suffer as a unit.

  Look at that lot over there, the man mean and hungry, scruffy in his stained sweatshirt and broken trainers with the laces undone, the woman dowdy and grey, their horde of children out of control. He looks like a bad boy while she looks like an aged old crone, funny how despair and distress take their different tolls on the sexes, they could be mistaken for mother and son. They probably own the mangey old dog tied with rope to the door downstairs. Wherever they go Ange wouldn’t fancy that lot as neighbours. At least she and Billy have only one kid… maybe she should have had an abortion after all, as Billy originally suggested.