Beggar Bride

by Gillian White

  ‘And she doesn’t ski, either. She doesn’t like heights.’

  She never said. Perhaps that was why she seemed so nervous on the flight this morning, although she swore she was not. She turned quite white at one stage and Fabian could have sworn her teeth were clenched.

  What on earth does she do, apart from looking beautiful?

  Why doesn’t Pandora shut up and get on with her chop? Fabian can see his mother’s face closing up, soon Angela will catch the atmosphere and be ill at ease here, at Fabian’s favourite place. It is only that they are all in terror of being infiltrated by another neurotic woman like Helena. There was a violent thunderstorm at their wedding, Elfrida called it an omen, but up until then everyone remained unaware of Helena’s tortured character.

  Now they search for any sign of strangeness in Angela.

  They discuss Fabian’s choice of music for Desert Island Discs.

  ‘What would you choose, midear?’ Lady Elfrida asks.

  ‘Oh, something from Rigoletto, I think,’ says Angela with a secret, sideways smile. And through Fabian’s tension shoots an acute sexual urge. He stifles a moan of gratification.

  Throughout the rest of the day the slow-motion dance goes on.

  But Nanny Ba-ba and Angela get on like a house on fire. All is well once again. Nanny Ba-ba has a shrewd gift for summing up people, she is rarely wrong, and once she has made up her mind she never changes her opinion. And behind Ba-ba comes Maudie to back her up, so tea-time, which can be rather a formal occasion in the small drawing-room with the Jacobean curtains, proves to be an unexpected success.

  Fabian is beginning to resent the way his family seem to be vetting Angela Harper as if they’ve decided her future before he has himself. Verging on the patronising. After all, why would he want a Joan Hunter-Dunn?

  Is he becoming obsessed with this girl in the way he became obsessed with Helena? He finds himself staring at her more and more frequently, admiring the curve of her neck, the deepness of her incredible eyes, the perfect tulip-shape of her face as she sits on a cream-coloured sateen chair once owned by Queen Victoria. Small and fine-boned like an elf. Soon the hounds of age will be yapping at Fabian’s heels…

  She laughs prettily at his jokes.

  What an enchanting hostess she would be, beauty possessed, a collector’s item.

  He imagines what Angela Harper would look like naked.

  While Nanny Ba-ba and Angela politely discuss the quality of the sea water at Weston-super-Mare, Fabian, not normally a highly sexed man, imagines parting her legs with his knee.

  11

  THE TOTALLY UNEXPECTED, THE rather rushed proposal, full of denials and excuses, was made hundreds of feet in the air eye to eye with a blazing sunset.

  Ange was a bag of nerves and he was such a gentleman.

  ‘I don’t suppose you would ever consider…’

  ‘I know you might find this difficult…’

  ‘We hardly know one another…’

  ‘I wouldn’t ask you to compromise if you agreed to marry me…’

  He went on and on like a shy schoolboy asking to see her knickers.

  Rich man, poor man, beggar man…

  Oh, joy! The sense of total achievement was heady, nothing short of staggering! She had used all her wits, plotted and planned and worked this one out and for once in her life Ange had come out the winner! If only it could all end here.

  And she knew she wouldn’t have made it but for Eileen Coburn’s precious legacy, a book written in the Fifties which bore the simple title, Etiquette.

  ‘There could come a day when you need to know how to behave, Angela,’ she’d said with a sniff when she’d presented the gift. ‘Which knife and fork to use, the way to handle your napkin, the non-words those of us who know better avoid, and so forth. Manners maketh man, and woman, you remember that, and it never hurts to know these things.’

  The book, immediately discarded and never looked at since, proved to be the one boon which really saw Ange through, that, her looks and the art of mimicry she’d been blessed with since birth. Joanna Lumley was always her idol. She’d stayed up night after night while Billy raised the roof with his snores in the bedroom next door, studying Etiquette and practising her expressions in the mirror, or sitting up dead straight at her Formica-topped kitchen table.

  But all that nearly went out of the window when she jerked and spiralled into the sky in the silver-blue helicopter piloted by the fearless Fabian. It could be his exhilaration at flying which prompted his surprising request, he was obviously in his element at the controls of one of his favourite toys. Ange had never flown before, yet she’d given the impression that flying was second nature. She was hardly on the ground, she’d bragged, because of this stressful job of hers. She left her insides behind on the heli-pad on top of the Cody/Ormerod building, and again, when they rose like a twister from the garlic-scented field at Hurleston.

  Through her mind passed Tina Turner, ‘What’s love got to do, got to do with it?’

  You’d have thought all was lost after the quizzing she was given at luncheon. Some of her reactions had been rather clumsy, like the fall from the horse when she was young, but her terror of heights was fair enough. That was perfectly true. Fabian’s family were so overwhelming, his huge mother, the blue-eyed Germanic Lady Elfrida, her great body squeezed into heavy tweed on a warmish April day, the buttons bursting apart, and his father like a little old turtle spluttering over his soup. At that point she hadn’t held out much hope, but gradually, as the day wore on, the atmosphere became lighter. Nanny Ba-ba helped of course. But God, those revolting twins! She hadn’t mentioned to Fabian their preposterous accusations of murder, they’d even been precocious enough to mention the names of two adults with similar suspicions, Murphy O’Connell and Maud Doubleday, that tall, gaunt, stiff-faced person who joined them with sweet little Nanny Ba-ba at tea. What a total contrast between those two. Murder? I ask you, but it could even be some tasteless family joke, how would Ange know, they are all peculiar enough? But it was the twins’ own mother they were talking about, for God’s sake, they’d even gone further and described her face as a glutinous mass of jellied consommé with bone floating in it when the animals had done their worst. No wonder she’d faltered over her soup. My God. So tasteless. No wonder nobody could find it in their hearts to love those two girls.

  Honesty, of course, she’d only met briefly at the opera. And that little madam had been rudeness itself.

  What a sodding family.

  ‘We could lead separate lives,’ shouted Fabian, still excusing himself for his bold announcement. ‘I’ve hardly got time to turn round and you are the same.’

  Ange looked at him and smiled. The helicopter lurched and she felt vomit flood into her mouth. She swallowed quickly. Her palms were wet, her heart knocking, vertigo and panic met somewhere in her throat. If only this was over. She had a sickening impulse to open the door and fling herself onto the fields below. Quick and painless. She’d probably be unconscious by the time she hit the ground. Get it over and done with.

  ‘What about Honesty?’ she made herself call across the controls.

  ‘What?’

  Ange shouted louder. ‘Honesty. She is rather possessive.’

  ‘I’ll handle Honesty,’ Fabian shouted back. ‘Everyone else thinks you are wonderful.’

  Why? wondered Ange, amazed, yet again, at the effect beauty can have, particularly on men. And to think she’d gone through a phase in childhood of praying to God every night to make her, not quite ugly, but plain and dumpy, round and ordinary so that she could become a nun.

  ‘I’m sorry. I rushed it. That’s the way I work. I’m an ideas man. You must be shocked to receive a proposal out of the blue from someone you hardly know.’

  ‘No,’ called Ange. ‘It’s not that. It’s just that I lead such an independent life and I’ve never considered sharing it with anyone.’

  ‘I know that,’ Fabian replied. ‘For me that’s part of
the attraction.’

  Was that all she was? An attraction? Difficult to believe that a hard-nosed financier with such enormous experience of worldly affairs could jump into such an enormous commitment on the strength of the kind of impulse that sends people into shops to overspend.

  If this is how Fabian Ormerod approached his previous marriages then no wonder they failed.

  Maybe this was not the most suitable place to discuss such weighty matters, but Fabian, having got her entrapped in straps beside him, seemed determined to press his suit. ‘You must have turned so many disappointed people down in your life.’

  Ange bit her lip. So that was it. He considered her a prize, sought by many, like a famous picture, a giant marrow, or a vintage car, something he could display to his friends in a low-cut dress, a dolly bird on his arm. A conquest which would certainly add gloss to his reputation. Fair enough. Lesser people aim for a line in the Guinness Book of Records or fifteen minutes of fame making fools of themselves in some awful gameshow. He’d acquired just about everything else one could ever hope for… except a suitable wife.

  ‘Let’s not be foolish enough to talk about love,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Ange, thinking of Billy and feeling, for the first time, some small sorrow for the lonely man beside her. ‘Of course not.’ She smiled as she quoted the Prince of Wales. ‘Whatever love might mean.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Fabian. ‘My sentiments entirely.’

  It was such a relief to get home and out of those uncomfortable clothes.

  Tina, next door, had brought her washing round to stand in front of their fire because she couldn’t afford the gas for her own. The flat stank of Persil.

  ‘But how d’you feel about him? That’s what I want to know. And I don’t think you are being honest with me.’

  ‘OK, Billy, I’m going to be honest. I can take him or leave him. He is just a man, but not like you, nothing like you. He is direct and determined, even in the way he walks along, with his head stuck up in the air. Superior to everyone else. His whole family is just the same. And he’s no idea of what life is like at the dark end of the street, we are definitely lesser mortals. He is never wrong, pompous, vain, pleased with himself, never listens to what anyone says, monopolises conversations. Everyone stops and listens when he talks. Yuk.’

  ‘You don’t like him.’

  ‘No, not very much.’

  ‘And yet he must be in love with you.’

  ‘I don’t think people like that really know what that means. They’re too wrapped up in themselves really to care for anyone else. Not in the way we care for each other.’

  ‘So you said yes?’

  ‘Of course I said yes.’

  ‘Let’s see your ring then?’

  ‘We’re going together to choose it next week. There used to be family rings, heirlooms I suppose, but they’ve been given out already, to Ffiona and another to Helena. Ffiona refused to give hers back and Helena’s is put by for the first twin who gets married.’

  Billy was as good as his word and had stayed up to wait for Ange’s return. She could smell lager on his breath and Jacob had been sick on his shoulder. He’d had a dreadful day, he said, worrying about her in that helicopter, worrying about what he’d do if she crashed. He’d wheeled Jacob to the park as it was a fine day, and sat there, lonely, for an hour feeding the pigeons, loath to return to the confines of the flat because there was nothing on telly. He had no money to take a bus ride to anywhere more interesting because Ange had spent it all.

  She was careful not to say too much about Fabian Ormerod’s home, or his lifestyle. No need to goad Billy into one of his terrible furies. Nor did she mention the twins’ ludicrous remarks. Billy would balk at that sort of trouble. He did ask her, however, if she managed to whip a few gold teaspoons.

  ‘That sort of behaviour would be fatal!’ she laughed, but tiredly. ‘Surely you can see that!’

  ‘It’s just that it would make such a difference,’ said Billy.

  ‘Well I know that,’ said Ange.

  ‘And you’re sure that once this is signed and sealed you can worm some worthwhile dosh out of this bastard?’

  ‘Once that ring is on my finger.’

  ‘In two weeks?’

  ‘Yep. That’s what he said. And I’m just sitting back and going along with all the arrangements.’

  ‘What about Aunty Val?’

  ‘She never leaves her house,’ grinned Ange. ‘Not even for a wedding, and certainly not at some dismal register office.’

  And that was Friday night.

  This is Monday evening.

  Panic stations.

  Would you credit it?

  It never rains but it pours etc.

  The proposal is no longer enough.

  If only she had someone to talk to.

  Tina? Could Tina be relied upon to keep her mouth shut?

  No. Tina’s got problems enough of her own.

  Now Ange is going to have to use all her wiles and charms to tempt Fabian to bed before the wedding day. All the portents are telling… she is one week late for a start, her breasts feel sore, she’s been sick two mornings, and not just the result of a helicopter ride. She and Billy should have been more careful, especially at such a delicate stage in the proceedings, but nevertheless Ange can’t stifle that little stab of joy.

  Not that she believes for a minute that she’ll still be with Fabian after eight months have gone by. But the legal process could still be in progress, and the last thing she wants is for anyone to suggest she was pregnant when she married him.

  No, this child, if child it be, must be seen to be his.

  She ought to view this as a useful bonus, after all, Fabian will have to pay for its keep and what about the entailment requiring a male to inherit Hurleston?

  Muddy waters indeed. How will that affect matters now?

  And Billy will have to know. Billy will have to know first so that he sees that he is the father.

  ‘There’s a problem.’ Ange chooses her time with care. Billy is settling down with a six-pack about to watch live football. He eases off his shoes with a groan. There’s a new packet of fags on the coffee table. Jacob is happily kicking on the rug. Billy has wrapped a West Ham scarf round his tummy. For Billy, this is a little bit of heaven.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I said there is a problem. Only a small one.’

  ‘What the hell are you on about?’

  ‘Me and Fabian.’

  ‘Huh. I should have known. What else do we talk about just lately?’

  ‘I think, I’m not sure, but I think I am pregnant.’

  ‘Mine?’ is his first alarmed reaction.

  ‘Of course it’s yours. Who else’s?’

  ‘It could be his. I’ve only your word…’

  ‘Oh Billy, shut up. You know sodding well it’s yours. If I’d been with Fabian I’d have told you, after all, it’s going to happen one day. I don’t want him to counter-claim for non-consummation or something. No big deal. Don’t be like this.’ Ange is close to tears. She never expected this cold reaction. ‘I’m talking about our child.’

  ‘Well that’s fucked it.’

  He invents trouble so he can be destroyed by it, again and again. How typical that he should only look on the negative side.

  ‘Of course it hasn’t.’ And the damn football has just started, just when she needs Billy’s full attention.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Well, we’ll just have to pretend it’s his.’

  ‘Fabian’s? For God’s sake, Ange! Get real.’

  This is not the time to explain about Fabian’s entailed estates. Oh, she’s had it up to here with this. She wants to get herself over there and tip the ashtray over his head but she grits her teeth instead. This business might be painful for Billy, she understands that, of course, but it’s not easy for her, either. Right from the start, when she first put the idea forward, Billy has behaved like a selfish prick.

  She’d lov
e to see what his mother is like.

  Time and time again Ange has suggested they go and visit his mother and father at their house in Weston-super-Mare. ‘Now we’ve got Jacob. Now we’re married. They’d be thrilled to see you, Billy, I’m certain they would.’

  ‘Don’t talk about things you know nothing about,’ is his only response.

  ‘But Jacob has the right to know about his roots.’

  ‘He’d be better off not knowing.’

  ‘But why, Billy? What the hell’s the matter with them? They can’t be monsters.’

  ‘Of course they’re not monsters. They are just very uptight, boring people. And they wouldn’t like you. They’d think there was something wrong with you because you look like you do.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t they like me? I don’t know how you can talk this way about the people who brought you up. You might see them differently now. Now you’re a father with responsibilities of your own. Your mother must be tearing her hair out with worry. Listen, why don’t you just give them a call and tell them you are alive. There’s even a confidential number you can ring, and they’ll let them know for you, see.’

  ‘Leave it out, Ange.’

  But she’d looked at Jacob wistfully, knowing how great it would be for him to have a granny and grandad, someone to send presents on his birthday, and maybe they could go down for a seaside holiday next year when he’s toddling. They could buy sandcastle flags, he could stick them in the sand. You see other families…

  Now if this new baby truly belonged to Fabian Ormerod, think what a different start in life it would have. Not just a family, but a family tree going back to the Norman Conquest. Not just a home, but several homes, one in London, one in Devon, a small island off St Lucia—Fabian showed her the photographs, a villa covered with flowers and little thatched huts on the beach. Not just a mother and father but grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, all rich and influential. People of education and culture.

  And if she divorces Fabian immediately after as planned, could she give up her child in order that it receive such benefits—as Ffiona possibly gave up Honesty in her own best interests? Or would she, loving it too much, deprive it of all these privileges and bring it back home to Billy?