Beggar Bride

by Gillian White

  The only time she and Billy get to be completely alone is in bed together during their brief stays at the Broughtons. Ange is going to have to confront him. There’s a cold distance between them at the moment, created by Ange, but she just can’t help it.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asks.

  ‘Nothing, Billy,’ says Ange, gazing at him steadily.

  ‘And don’t stare at me like that, for God’s sake, it’s unnerving. If there’s something wrong tell me, don’t just sulk.’

  Many times he has tried to hug her close, but she pushes him away without explanation. If he’s not in Tina’s arms already then he soon will be.

  No. She can’t go on like this any longer, bearing this massive burden alone. If Billy is involved then she’ll know at once, she’s certain she will, but knowing the truth, anything would be better than this.

  Thank goodness, at last Tina is paying a belated visit to Sandra Biddle. Ange went yesterday with the children and the social worker commented on her loss of weight.

  ‘Oh I’m fine, Sandra, really. But it’s surprising how much work two small children make, running around after them both, fetching and carrying.’

  ‘Doesn’t Billy help?’

  ‘Of course he does, when he’s home, but he’s quite often away for nights on end, working.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course,’ said Sandra. ‘He’s got that job on the roads hasn’t he? I must say I never thought Billy would stick at anything for so long. And how’s the new house? How have you settled in at the Broughtons?’

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Ange, hoping the social worker couldn’t see into her smile. She doesn’t feel easy in these old clothes any longer. She feels dirty and common and gauche, less able to conduct herself as she would like. Less respected.

  ‘I expect you miss Tina, don’t you. You three became quite friendly in the end.’

  What has Tina been saying? Ange hopes like hell that Tina has managed to stay discreet during her few visits to the social services department.

  They don’t spend enough time here in this little square house which, after Hurleston, makes all of them feel claustrophobic, living on top of each other like this. Ange and Tina pretend to be sisters when the neighbours come asking, and they do come, they come all the time if you let them.

  June Brightly, next door at number sixty-nine, is the worst. She believes, as do all the neighbours round here, that Billy and Ange work as caretakers at a caravan site in Devon and their job means they must be there ninety per cent of the time.

  ‘It doesn’t seem fair to me,’ said June Brightly, her sharp face concealing none of her spite. ‘There’s those who could do with a home, but the council give this one to you. You don’t need it. You can’t tell me that you lot need it.’

  Billy said, sighing, ‘It’s a job, June. We might live in, but jobs don’t last long these days, not for any poor bleeder, but you’re right, I suppose, I could give it up and come and live here on the dole, watch the box all day if that’d please you.’

  ‘Well why don’t you rent it out? It’s nothing but a worry, seeing it standing empty most of the time, a temptation to the bleeding vandals.’

  ‘It’s not your worry, June!’

  ‘Oh but it is my worry. That’s where you’re wrong. It is! We don’t want crime directed here. Most of us have just escaped from all that, and now here you are, inviting them in with open arms.’

  ‘Give over, June, look around you, there’s nothing for the buggers to take.’

  ‘Well, there’s always the squatters,’ said June, unconvinced.

  They come to the Broughtons as often as they can, but June is always waiting, and moaning on, stirring up the rest of them if she can.

  But now Tina has gone to see Sandra Biddle and Ange decides she won’t wait until bedtime, she’s got to show Billy the letters and she might as well get it over and done with.

  How good he looks these days, how strong and masculine, how much he’s changed in the past few years, shows what a little hope can do. He stands more upright, he holds his head with pride, although that little blond curl still falls down over his eye reminding her of the people they were before…

  ‘I’ve been getting these.’ Her gaze is full of alert hostility.

  ‘What are they? Who are they from?’

  ‘Look at them, Billy, read them,’ her voice raps out and she wrings her hands as she watches him.

  ‘What’s this all about?’ Billy looks up, having read only the first lines of the first letter, and the signature on the back. ‘Is this some kind of sick joke?’

  Ange swallows a blob of terror. ‘That’s what I thought at first. But look, they kept coming, they go on and on and on…’

  Billy pales, any shadow, any flicker of a smile fades from his face. ‘Shush, let me read.’

  He sits down heavily on the sofa, and Ange sits beside him, watching his face, never daring to move her eyes from his face, watching steadily for signs of treachery, the slightest change of expression while he reads all these things, all these things she has ever been afraid or ashamed of, that happened to that strange, unknown creature that was herself as a child. Outside the windows children play, dogs are barking, an old engine is revving up and a plane banks overhead and makes for Heathrow. Billy is very silent beside her. Is he admiring his own handiwork, or is he folding up with fear inside, as she does every time she thinks about Aunty Val? The handwriting, all in black Biro, is long and loopy, a little shaky, just like an elderly person would write and the paper is always the same, pale blue Basildon Bond in lined and matching envelopes.

  Ange watches carefully as his expression gradually changes from astonishment to fear and back to astonishment again.

  He looks up briefly, and they gaze into each other’s eyes, before he goes back to reading again.

  ‘Oh God,’ he sighs, now and then. ‘Oh, bloody hell! Oh shit! Oh fuck!’ And then he goes back to, ‘Oh God.’ When he has finished, fifteen minutes later, he gives an uncontrollable shudder.

  ‘Oh Jesus, Ange! What are we going to do?’

  She shakes her head. She shrugs. She holds her hands out helplessly, ‘What can we do?’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me at once?’

  ‘I thought it might be you.’

  Billy puts his head in his hands, sinks into a kind of stupor. ‘You’re mad. Why would it be me?’ He gently takes hold of her arm and carries on in a low voice, stroking. ‘I can’t even feel angry about this, I’m just so frightened. Why would it be me, Ange? What’s happening to us?’

  Ange doesn’t care about anything else. She should have prepared him for this shock, she’s been unkind and unfair. I can trust him, oh, thank God, thank God, I can trust him. A great weight lifts from her shoulders. She knows absolutely now that Billy had nothing to do with this. He is not the most accomplished of liars, she could always see right through him and that hasn’t changed.

  ‘I thought it was you because you’re the only one who knows!’

  ‘But I never knew about half of this.’

  ‘No,’ says Ange. ‘Nobody did. But some sod has obviously considered it worth their while to do some muckraking.’

  ‘But why would they?’ asks Billy. ‘It must have cost them a fortune. What do they want you to do?’

  Ange shakes her head. This is a hopeless question, she’s gone over it too many times alone, and come up with no answers. ‘We’ll have to get out, we can’t stay at Hurleston after this. We’ll have to get the money out and stay here, nobody knows about the Broughtons.’

  Billy wipes his sweating forehead. ‘They probably do know. Why wouldn’t they know? They know everything else. We’ll have to tell Tina.’

  Ange rounds on him. ‘But what if it’s Tina?’

  ‘It couldn’t be Tina,’ says Billy with a confidence Ange doesn’t share. ‘Think about it, Ange. Just calm down and think about this. Tina’s thick as shit. Where would she hire a private detective, and why? Anyway, she’d never be able to write a
letter like this.’

  He holds Ange against him, carefully, tenderly, stroking her hair, her back, her arms, her face. ‘You poor, poor thing,’ he says, as she trustingly relaxes in his arms at last, her eyes resting on him and feeling herself slowly being restored to strength, serenity and a little self-confidence. ‘You must have been driven half mad, and all on your own. But we must tell Tina, she’s in this up to her neck like we are. We must tell her as soon as she comes in and decide what we’re all going to do.’

  ‘But we can’t go back, Billy,’ sobs Ange. ‘Please say we needn’t go back. Let’s just stay here together where we are safe.’

  Tina’s shocked reaction has more of a sting in it than Billy’s. ‘What fucker?’ ‘Who the hell?’ ‘Some sad bastard with nothing better to do.’

  Tina is frightened, but furious at the same time, tottering round the small sitting-room in a short, tight skirt, lighting fag after fag and tapping them angrily out in the ashtray half smoked. Her cheap perfume fills the air and smells as hot as her smouldering rage.

  ‘Think, Tina. Please think! Did you, at any time, tell anyone at all what we were doing?’

  ‘Huh! So it’s me, is it?’ Tina folds her spiky arms and bits of fluff are hobbling out like burrs on her cheap angora sweater. ‘Typical! I get the blame! What d’you take me for, for Christsake? Who the hell would I tell anyway? Ed, perhaps? Oh yeah, yeah, that’s a good idea.’

  ‘Stop it, Tina,’ Ange retorts. ‘This isn’t getting us anywhere. These are questions we have all had to put to ourselves. Did we, by accident, ever let anything slip?’

  ‘Of course we didn’t,’ snaps Tina crossly, her bright red mouth forming a sullen pout into which she pushes another cigarette. ‘We’re all risking life and limb by doing this, we’d all get years if we were caught. We’d all lose our kids…’

  ‘I know, I know,’ Ange sighs. ‘It just doesn’t add up.’

  ‘It has to be that bitch Ffiona,’ says Tina, pouring herself another rum and black, offering the bottle to Ange and Billy who both shake their heads. Billy’s on lager anyway. ‘When you think about it, it must be Ffiona and that snotty daughter of hers. And the reason she’d be doing it would be to get revenge.’

  ‘On me? asks Ange. ‘I thought it was Fabian she detested.’

  ‘By the sounds of it she detests anyone who happens to be doing better than her. She fucked up, and she wants to see everyone else fucking up. She is sending you these letters to drive you insane, or just because she’s enjoying it.’

  ‘She’s gone to a hell of a lot of trouble to uncover some of these facts.’ Billy still finds the letters hard to believe.

  ‘She’s nothing else to do all day,’ says Tina, sounding convincing. ‘Think how all those man-hating cronies of hers would enjoy sitting round of an evening in their handknits, rat-arsed on cheap wine, composing the next one. I can almost hear the bitches cackling now.’

  ‘You mustn’t believe half of what Honesty tells you,’ warns Billy.

  ‘Hell, I don’t need to,’ Tina replies. ‘It just can’t be anyone else, that’s all. And you did have that worrying conversation with Honesty earlier on, Ange. I remember. You thought, back then, you told us you thought that cow knew something.’

  They can talk about this for as long as they like going round and round, getting more and more tipsy and confused as the night wears on, but the real question remains—what the fuck are they going to do about it?

  Is it back to Hurleston on Friday as planned, or do they make a dash for it, dump the Range Rover, buy an old van for cash and disappear with the money? They’ve got far more than they bargained for, if they stay on they’ll only be being greedy. With the money that’s accumulated in the four different building societies, all three of them would be secure for life.

  ‘But we’d never know the answer,’ says Ange.

  ‘We don’t want to know,’ says Billy, ‘or I don’t at any rate.’

  ‘I don’t want to go back,’ says Tina, hugging herself. ‘I want out. Now.’

  But by the end of the night, by the time they are ready to fall into bed, they have decided they must return, if only for the weekend, if only to make quite certain there is nothing at Hurleston which might give any clues as to their whereabouts, and there are some bits and pieces which they are going to need… passports, for instance, birth certificates, vaccination and medical cards, the kind of personal photographs and documents, the paraphernalia everyone needs to survive in the world.

  And most important of all there’s the building society books hidden away in the Gladstone bag.

  But now Ange has shared her horrible secret, much of the terror has left her. She feels almost secure once again, thank God Billy and Tina are no longer insisting on staying at Hurleston until Archie is seven and then abandoning the child to some chilling, public school regime which might turn him into a little man long before his time, strong and hard and hidden, calculating and ruthless, like Fabian.

  30

  FIRST IT’S A RABID nympho, then a boiler-suited virago and now Fabian seems to be stuck with a woman more like a child, romping in the grounds, baby-talking, clapping her hands and smelling of the nursery, and if he didn’t know she was almost completely disinterested in sex he would have to suspect her of having it off with the handyman-driver.

  How can a man so successful in the international banking world, an acknowledged expert in the derivatives market, make such catastrophic blunders when it comes to his women?

  How the hell does he do it?

  Angela was good company at first, a young woman who admired him and he has to admit his ego was certainly boosted with a beauty like Angela on his arm. But gradually matters have gone downhill. If she’s not jumping down his throat over some little issue she seems to be avoiding him. Watching him? Fabian bemoans his fate to his friend and legal adviser, Jerry Boothroyd, as they sit in a New York hotel sipping ice-cold gins, waiting for the rest of the dining party.

  ‘Perhaps,’ says Jerry, leaning forward confidentially and allowing his rounded stomach to rest on the edge of the leather seat, ‘you expect too much. Whereas I…’

  ‘Martha is a wonderful woman,’ says Fabian.

  ‘Yes,’ Jerry sits back and his unhappy chair groans its relief. ‘Yes, she’s a love, there’s no doubting that. And the boys. I’m a lucky man, Fabian.’ As Jerry further relaxes, once again his stomach acts as an ashtray for wedges of Havana cigar ash. And Martha Boothroyd doesn’t just sit around and ask to be looked after, oh no, she’s come into her own just recently, with no qualifications other than a certificate from the Lucie Clayton cordon-bleu course she took thirty years ago, she plays a highly lucrative role sitting on three Government quangos.

  His boys have only just returned from a month-long holiday sailing with friends on Fabian’s island, Indigo. They are healthy, outgoing chaps, never a moment’s trouble, but then Fabian’s daughter, Honesty, is a decent enough sort of girl. And now he has begat a son. The man should be over the moon, not sitting there opposite with a face like a suicidal bloodhound.

  ‘And I’ve also got a feeling that Angela is turning into a neurotic. She’s pale. And thin. Nervy—you know what I mean. Some women do get like that.’

  ‘It normally happens to jumpy little women, in my experience.’

  It is strange for these two friends to be sitting here discussing personal issues like this, normally there’s more scintillating stuff to absorb them, like money, shooting, racing, shares, takeovers, politics, and both of them look slightly uneasy. But this has to be said, and Fabian can confide in nobody else. His parents seem quite delighted with Angela, and often have Archie over for tea—just for an hour of course, children are so exhausting—with Nanny Tree in attendance.

  Even Honesty manages to get along with Angela when she has to nowadays, and the twins are rude to her in the same way they are rude to everyone else.

  ‘She’s changed,’ moans Fabian, sinking into a morose silence, watching the
glittering personalities crossing the hotel foyer with their entourages and their cartloads of luggage. ‘And since she gave up work she never goes anywhere, she never sees anyone but her old mad aunt, we don’t entertain any more and she shows no interest in accompanying me on my travels.’

  ‘She is very young, Fabian old boy, and perhaps she’s a bit overwhelmed by it all, marriage, motherhood, a whole new way of life, I mean to say, old chap, she didn’t come out of the top drawer did she?’

  ‘We don’t know which drawer she came out of,’ Fabian admits, ‘we still don’t know anything about her. She’s very close, Jerry.’

  ‘But a beautiful girl…’

  ‘Oh yes, she certainly is beautiful, I’m not denying that. But her interests and her conversation are as limited as poor Honesty’s. I mean, Jerry, she even watches these so-called soaps on the television. She gets together with that damn nanny and you’d think they were old friends and I can’t begin to understand her taste in music.’

  ‘It’s that generation, old boy, I’m afraid. They’re all the same. Perhaps it is us who are stuffy. You might just have to sit back and put up with it, after all, she did give you a son.’

  ‘Yes, and a fine one too,’ says Fabian, thinking proudly of little three-year-old Archie whose name went down for Winchester on the day that he was born. Perhaps his assistant, Simon Chalmers, had been right, when he suggested they do some checking before Fabian’s marriage. But Fabian, the bloody fool, hadn’t wanted to build a new relationship on mistrust, and Angela, apart from being enchanting, was a simple person with no grand pretensions, so what did it matter where she came from?

  Whoosh.

  We must leave Fabian and Gerry behind. This side of the Atlantic again, and Ffiona is stunned to open her door and be confronted by Angela waiting on the doorstep holding two pints of silver top milk. She recognises the woman from the wedding pictures in the papers which she pored over back at the time, trying to find some waspish comment which might bring some modicum of relief. All she could think of was, well, if you look like that it means you can’t have a brain in your head.