Beggar Bride

by Gillian White

  Tina is their neighbour on the other side. Battered and used and trying desperately to protect the child from the ugly oaf who refuses to leave them alone in spite of numerous court orders. She’s back in the women’s shelter now, and HE is still in there, stinking like a drain, drinking like a fish and what does he do at night which causes all that frantic banging? Throw chairs across the room?

  Oh yes, Ange has tried. No one can accuse her of not trying. She keeps the curtains drawn in an effort to pretend the world outside does not exist, but it’s no good, you can’t live in a vacuum, the rows and the violence are too intrusive, they make it quite impossible.

  ‘We could try for a swap,’ ventured Billy, home from work and exhausted and listening to Ange ranting on. ‘Stick a notice in the shop.’

  ‘Oh yeah? And who in their right mind would want to come here? The board is plastered with notices from desperate residents of Willington Gardens. And since I’ve been here nobody’s removed one. I check every day. The damn things are turning yellow.’

  ‘We could buy a van,’ Billy offered.

  ‘Huh! What with, Billy? Snot?’

  ‘I could get some real money.’

  ‘Yes. And look what happened last time.’

  Beggar man, thief. But which is worse? Billy can’t nick a driving licence without being caught. He’s already on probation, along with God knows how many others in this bleeding place. And the little kids around here are more pathetic than the grown ones with their wide eyes and their tiny chapped faces and their cheap and cheerful wellington boots. You see them in old black-and-white movies, those old Pathe News films, sitting on doorsteps in wretched, dirty courtyards wearing scratchy little hand-me-downs, just like in Oliver Twist. Well, nothing’s changed and they don’t have a cat in hell’s chance faced with this crap every day, living among the litter and vermin… yes, vermin… the council came round last week to disinfect the whole block because of the bugs, the cockroaches that live in the walls. Ange has to check his cot before she puts Jacob to sleep. Billy steps on them but Ange can’t bear to hear the crunch, and their innards spread and make such a mess. Kids these days wouldn’t last for long if they tried to sit on their doorsteps.

  If there’s a party next door Ange and Billy don’t even attempt to go to bed, and you’d soon have your nose broken if you went to complain.

  She has kept the article on Sir Fabian Ormerod although her ideas were never much more than fantasies to keep her going. Funny, even when fortune seemed to favour them Ange guessed something would happen to tarnish the texture of their new life.

  Billy comes home. ‘That’s it.’

  Ange trembles inside. ‘That’s it?’

  ‘The whole fucking lot closed down, the boss has declared himself bankrupt. He stuck a notice on the door.’ He throws down the flat keys and holds his head in his hands. ‘Should’ve known… some blokes have been working there all their lives…’

  ‘But they owe you a month! We borrowed a month in advance…’

  ‘Yep.’

  In her panic Ange starts to cry. ‘How will we pay that back?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘TALK TO ME, BILLY, TALK TO ME!’

  ‘What about?

  ‘Our fucking future! That’s what about!’

  He looks up at her with such deep sad eyes, ‘We have no fucking future, Ange, and the sooner you see that the better.’

  Now Ange hates to go out alone, but yesterday she made an excuse and went to sit in the library. She carefully went through Who’s Who and scribbled down Fabian Ormerod’s English addresses, Cadogan Square and a place called Hurleston House in Devon.

  She gazed once more at his photograph. Quite tasty in a masterful kind of way.

  Then she set off for Marks and Spencer in Oxford Street. She walked all the way. She’d no money for a bus. She limped around for half an hour, in pain, her heels were blistered, searching out the most expensive coat in the store. The air sung in her ears. Her hands itched with sweat. Courage! This was dangerous but she knew better than to look round, to cause any unwanted attention. A quick flicker of her fingers and the tag was removed, she shoved the coat into her holdall and with shoulders squared and straightened she marched towards the doors of the store, starting to run as she neared the exit. She waited to hear the shout STOP THIEF STOP. A few centuries ago and she would be risking losing a hand to the axe… and didn’t they use to hang people for stealing? How she would love a job at Marks but she’s heard you need a degree these days in order to clean the floors there.

  Now Ange is no stranger to shoplifting. She’s done it before several times when she was little, not knowing why, not particularly in need, something to do with the craving and the fix, to do with being invigorated and scared and part of the world which seemed so alive, and she so dead inside it. For once she was not being passive and debilitated.

  She was scared yesterday, very scared, so scared that as soon as she reached the exit she threw down her bag and left without it—what would happen to Jacob, left without her, while she did time for the sake of a decent sodding coat and she doesn’t want to be this sort of mother, she wants to be the kind she always wished she’d had herself.

  How pathetic.

  Oh God, she’s a failure. Oh God, how she’d have loved a duffel coat like that, Billy would suit one, too, but Fabian Ormerod would not be impressed by a girl in a duffel coat. Not from Marks at any rate, more likely something with seventy-five per cent off from Harvey Nichols, and they’re offering that in their sale at the moment. Ange might be poor and humble but she understands about style due to Eileen Coburn’s books and vast arrays of magazines that sat on her occasional tables among the lamps, figurines and vases, and she knows, wrapped up properly, that she has a great deal to offer.

  Phew. Some people live on their nerves all the time like this.

  When she passed the Italian restaurant she hadn’t time to think. A posh couple were paying a taxi at the kerb. This must be a classy place. She pretended to read the menu on the window while peering through into the gloom. Christ—the prices were astronomical. She waited while the couple went in and followed close behind them. Some desperate, gasping part of her automatically took over. She darted in, stood for a second while her eyes acclimatised to the semi-darkness, saw the coat-stand, ripped off her mac, hung it up and brazenly grabbed the pink suede jacket. Before the waiter had time to reach her she was out of the door and along the street and down into the nearest Tube.

  Ange was exhausted. She felt she’d been through a wringer. She’d certainly been through enough for one day. She needed to get straight home to Jacob and Billy, all floating and lonely, she needed to be linked to something secure.

  She broaches the subject for the first time this evening, having hidden the jacket underneath Jacob’s piles of Pampers. If Billy clapped eyes on that he would flog it and use the cash for a deposit on a useless old wreck of a van that couldn’t be driven unaided off the forecourt. He is so impetuous. He is such a dreamer, he thinks he is a child of the earth but he’s never been anywhere near the earth in his life, except for a brief spell with the parks department at the council, mostly clearing up dog shit.

  He listens. He smiles in disbelief. He lights one fag from another.

  And then eventually Billy groans. ‘You’re kidding. You’ve got to be kidding.’

  Ange wants to smooth that long, loose curl away from his eye, it must be annoying. She wants to offer him comfort, say it will be all right. But she sits back and waits for him to clear his system first.

  ‘Either that or you’re sodding barmy. How the hell d’you think you’re going to get anywhere near him, this arsehole, this Fabian Ormerod? We hardly mix in the same circles. And if you do get near him, why for God’s sake would he want to marry you? It’s a cinch for these guys to pick up a bit of arse on the side. But marriage. Balls. There’s only one type of woman he’d marry and that would be some stuck up cow out of his own snooty circle.’ Billy grumbles
on the same vein and finishes with, ‘And anyway, you wouldn’t have anything in common.’

  ‘You’re just scared that I wouldn’t come back.’

  ‘I’m not. I don’t think you’d get near him,’ say Billy. ‘You’re worse than me. This is a load of shit. And anyway,’ he finishes, half reproachful, half triumphant, with a hostile glint in his eyes, ‘you’d have to sleep with the prick.’

  ‘D’you think I haven’t thought about that?’

  ‘Whore! And how would you get away with being away so often? What about Christmas? What about holidays? You’re just going to drift backwards and forwards between us, is that it?’

  ‘Some women do have careers these days you know, Billy. Careers that take them away from home just as much as some men. I could have had a career by now if I hadn’t shacked up with you.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ mocks Billy, full of scorn and derision. ‘So you’re going to make out you’re one of these hoity-toity career women, are you? When you don’t know the first fucking thing about it.’

  ‘I can find out,’ says Ange lightly, ‘that’s not hard. I could be a buyer, for instance, flying all round the world.’

  ‘And what about me? How d’you think I’d feel knowing you were bonking with some old git?’

  ‘We’d be doing it for Jacob,’ says Ange, with a hard, straight look. ‘So don’t be so naive. And if I can make sacrifices, then so can you. And it’s you who’s always telling me if your heart isn’t in it then what does it matter?’

  Billy gets up and bangs around the flat, fierce and bitter, unable to find the right words, his blue eyes smarting. Nothing has meaning any more. What sort of man would stand by and allow his wife to do something like this? It is prostitution. Nothing less. He is inadequate, unable to care for his own wife and child, forced to watch their life slipping into bleaker discomfort, day after day.

  ‘Shit. There must be some other way.’

  ‘If there was we would take it.’ Ange’s smile is tight and faded. ‘We’d have taken it months ago.’

  ‘I’ll try for another job again. I swear I’ll go round there first thing in the morning.’

  Poor Billy.

  Now Ange does come towards him, she takes him in her arms. His dignity is insulted and not for the first time. ‘Billy, that’s not the answer. If you did get a job we’d just lose the benefit and we’d be no better off. Still stuck here, rats in a trap.’

  ‘I’ll ask Ron, then, there must be something going on…’ He pulls away from her, determined to reassert himself, their shared sorrows quickly seep into his own self-pity.

  ‘And get yourself in trouble again? Oh yeah, that’s all we need just now. They won’t give you any more chances, Billy, they made that quite clear last time you were up. And there’s no real money in that, not the sort of sordid little jobs Ron gets up to. We’d be back to this hand-to-mouth existence and even more frightened to answer the door.’

  He cannot think of what to say next. ‘I can’t live without you, Ange,’ he cries in turmoil. Sometimes he finds it hard to keep up with his wife. ‘You should never have come with me, you’d have been far better left on your own.’

  ‘Stop it, Billy! Stop it!’ She grips his arms and holds him tight. ‘You won’t have to live without me. I’m not planning to stay with this jerk, stupid. Just let me get that ring on my finger and I’ll be able to quit. Divorce him. Accuse him of anything, you name it, and they’ll have to give me something, buy me off. Anything rather than bad publicity. Don’t you see, these people owe something to people like us.’ She moves his tense hands to her breasts, feels the passion moving through them, split in half between the erotic and the maternal. ‘Just knowing that he’s bigamously married would be bad enough for a stuck up prat like this one. Don’t you understand that we need help, Billy, we need help to change our world?’

  A dog howls in the distance. The sound of acid jazz blasts through the paper-thin wall. There must be another rave on tonight. Why do the police never think to carry out any raids in this area? Don’t they even notice the posh cars lined up in the slip road? ‘Well, I still think it’s impossible,’ Billy murmurs, beaten and lacking the energy for anything save the sexual act. He is always ready and willing for that, stiff and male once again. There’s no point in going into the bedroom, the music sounds far louder in there. Ange and Billy make themselves comfortable on the hard Ercol sofa, knowing they only have a few minutes before poor Jacob wakes up with the row.

  The gas fire pops lamely beside their contortions.

  ‘You’re lovely, Ange,’ says Billy with feeling.

  Ange smiles. Oh yes, she knows that already. And that is the one fact she is about to gamble everything on.

  6

  ‘NO, NO, I’M SORRY, only Fabian Ormerod will do. I am phoning in a personal capacity as a Friend of Covent Garden.’

  Listed in Who’s Who, among his many and varied interests, is Fabian’s support of the opera and ballet, which could be his most enjoyable pursuit after riding to hounds. The City giants, Cody/Ormerod, extravagant corporate entertainers, take a box on the first Friday of every month, as they do at Glyndebourne, Wimbledon, Lord’s, Henley and Ascot. Fabian’s constant use of the box is a bone of contention between his more lowly executives who rarely get a look in, but if he knew what they muttered under their breaths Fabian wouldn’t turn a hair. This is his company. He is the pivot round which all else revolves.

  Simon Chalmers is loath to disturb Sir Fabian during a working day with personal matters of any kind, Miss Hubbard is quite capable of dealing with them. But this young lady is most insistent and Simon, believing she might be an acquaintance, is reluctant to risk upsetting one of Sir Fabian’s operatic friends.

  ‘Could you repeat your name for me, please?’

  ‘Angela Harper. Miss Angela Harper. And I am in rather a rush.’

  ‘I am so sorry for the delay. Sir Fabian will speak to you now.’

  Fabian listens, the pleasant voice on the other end floods his staid and fusty room, and he quickly takes in the dilemma. He is not a man for beating about the bush, or for treating the ladies with anything less than delightful old-world courtesy, Winchester style, a trait which always rather amused the hirsute Helena.

  ‘Then it would seem perfectly reasonable, Miss Harper, providing that all four seats are not taken, that you join us for Rigoletto one week on Friday. I will leave the arrangements in the capable hands of my secretary Miss Hubbard who will speak to you now. Good afternoon.’

  It happens sometimes. A company box is oversubscribed while there’s still space in another. It pays to be generous at times like these. One never knows when one might need to ask a favour in return. But who did she say she represented? Fabian scratches his head. She didn’t. If she had, he would have remembered.

  A private party perhaps. With one guest too many. Easily done if one is not careful.

  Ought he to know her?

  Fabian is planning to go next week, accompanied by Honesty and a friend. They will enjoy a glass of cold champagne and a smoked salmon sandwich in the interval. He will wine and dine them afterwards, something he does not enjoy—the chat of the young today is so limited—but feels obliged to do so as Honesty seems to have no suitor of her own.

  Has she ever had now he comes to think of it? All her evenings out she spends with her so called girlfriends. Isn’t that rather odd? After all, she’s a perfectly pretty girl, not outstanding, perhaps, but pleasing. The poor little twins will pose a different problem entirely, unless some miracle happens and they break like butterflies from their plain brown cocoons. Fabian knows that Honesty is very aware of fortune hunters, she keeps her men at arm’s length, on the other side of a tennis court or a good grumbling belly away, beside her on a horse. Distrust. One of the drawbacks of riches today, he muses. In his occasional sleepless nights even he has been tortured by thoughts of kidnappings, children buried in the ground in exchange for a ransom. Some men of his standing take precautions against s
uch sickening outrages, but if you start doing that, where does it end?

  Bodyguards. Sniffer dogs. Processions of cars. Cameras in the lavatories. That’s no life for anyone. The minute you capitulate and let your fears overwhelm you, that’s when disasters tend to occur. No, you just have to assume that these tragedies won’t happen to you, just as long as you are sensible.

  All his staff are carefully screened. They come with excellent references. Take Estelle, his cook and housekeeper, for example, and a jolly soul. To look at her you wouldn’t credit it, but Estelle has cooked for queens and princes, in castles, palaces, and manor houses up and down the land. A few of the classier recipe books bear her name. Her choice of partner might be unfortunate, Murphy O’Connell is not the most savoury of characters, but it takes all sorts and he’s useful round the place to change plugs and carry suitcases. He used to be a driver until he lost his licence. They came with the house when he bought it which was a stroke of luck. The daytime staff are also carefully picked. They leave at five-thirty, unless there’s some social event taking place. But Fabian doesn’t like a packed London house… there has to be some privacy in family life and he doesn’t mind putting the odd piece of coal on the fire himself, there are servants enough to worry about when he goes down to Hurleston and every one of them sincerely believes they are underpaid. He considers himself a benign employer.

  A likeable man. So much easier to keep staff happy when you haven’t got a wife home all day to cause trouble.

  ‘So, Sir Fabian,’ enquires Miss Hubbard, hurrying through the last bits and pieces at the end of another long day. ‘Can you confirm to me that there are only three seats required by your party at Covent Garden on Friday?’

  ‘I can indeed confirm that, Ruth.’

  ‘In that case I will leave the spare ticket at reception downstairs as Miss Harper requested. I did say I would post it to her but she seemed to think it would be easier…’