The Rise and Fall of Becky Sharp

by Sarra Manning

  ‘Why would I be cheered up by the ravings of a bunch of fawning sycophants?’ the dame demanded. ‘They seem to think my career began and ended in that dreadful Sunday-night soap opera.’

  ‘I’m sure they’ve written very lovely things about you,’ Briggs persisted, wishing he had his own tablets to hand. He was a slave to his beta blockers. ‘And look! Here’s a parcel. It’s all soft and squishy. I wonder what it could be?’

  ‘Who cares?’ Dame Matilda lay sprawled on her pillows for all of five seconds, then held out her hand imperiously. ‘Still, if someone’s gone to all the trouble of sending me something then I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to take a look.’

  ‘Of course it wouldn’t,’ Briggs agreed, passing over the parcel, which was wrapped in brown paper and fastened with novelty tape adorned with little red hearts.

  Inside was a misshapen, red, moulting, woollen thing that rendered Dame Matilda quite speechless.

  ‘There’s a card,’ Briggs pointed out. ‘Maybe it explains what it is. Shall I read it out?’

  Dear Dame Matilda

  I’m sure you don’t remember me, but I’m Jane, Pitt Junior’s life partner. I was at Queen’s Crawley last Christmas though sadly we didn’t get a chance to speak.

  I heard that you weren’t well so I knitted you a bedjacket. I had to guess the measurements and if it doesn’t fit or you’re thinking, ‘Yikes, who is this scary woman and what is this scary garment she’s sent me?’ (I’m still struggling a bit with figuring out sleeves) then please just send it to the nearest charity shop.

  Anyway, I hope you are feeling much better.

  Yours truly

  Jane

  PS: Pitt Junior sends his love.

  PPS: I thought you were awfully good in the Lyndon Place Christmas special.

  ‘Jane?’ queried Dame Matilda in the same way that Lady Bracknell once enquired about a handbag. ‘That lumpen creature living with Pitt Junior?’

  ‘Quite lumpen but quite sweet too,’ Briggs said. ‘I mentioned in passing that the green triangles were my favourite Quality Street and she let me weed them out of the tin.’

  ‘Jane …’ Dame Matilda said again. ‘A very plain girl. You know where you are with someone who’s never had to rely on their looks. And Pitt’s always been a good-natured boy. Can’t write for toffee, of course, but God loves a trier, don’t he?’

  ‘He does, he does,’ Briggs came in for the chorus though he wasn’t altogether sure why Mattie was suddenly so taken with two people that she’d never had any interest in before.

  ‘Yes, we’ll invite them round for lunch,’ the dame decided. She shot a confused Briggs a smile that was all teeth. ‘I’ve always said that it’s important to have your family around you.’

  Chapter 18

  Apart from his father, all his life Rawdon Crawley had been surrounded by people who thought he was wonderful.

  As a baby, his sweet nature and cherubic good looks, as if he’d been sent from central casting rather than arriving in the usual way, had melted even his notoriously cold mother’s icy heart.

  It set a pattern that had continued throughout his life. His beauty and easy charm ensnared everyone who came into contact with him, from his doting elder brother, Pitt Junior, and indulgent Aunt Matilda to schoolfriends, drama coaches, casting agents and more recently, a Victoria’s Secret model.

  Then he’d met Becky Sharp.

  ‘Nobody has ever been this mean to me,’ he told her on their first date as they walked back to the car that Christmas Eve after he’d treated his five half-siblings to a trolley dash in a toy superstore and a McDonalds Happy Meal each.

  She’d given him a sideways look. ‘Well that explains a lot,’ she said and Rawdon thought it was then that he fell in love with her. Of course, Becky insisted that it hadn’t been a first date and rolled her eyes at every Happy Meal toy he brought her, even though it was the most thoughtful and romantic gesture that Rawdon had ever managed to come up with.

  Treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen. The engagement ring he’d put on Becky’s fingers, and which she’d immediately taken off, was proof of how effective that old cliché was. Rawdon had to work like a Trojan for each smile, every vaguely kind word that Becky threw at him. When she’d first let him take her hand, it was as good as winning his first lead role. The certain liberties they’d enjoyed in her bedroom at his aunt’s house – she stopped him long before either of them could reach the dizzy heights of passion – were like stepping out onstage on opening night.

  And once they were married in a quick ceremony at St Pancras Town Hall (‘Just nipping out to chase up one of Mattie’s prescriptions,’ Becky had told Briggs), with a cleaner and one of the ushers from the previous wedding as their only witnesses, the two hours they then spent in a junior suite at the Charlotte Street Hotel were better than applause. Better than a standing ovation. Better than curtain call after curtain call.

  ‘You know you’re my first,’ Becky whispered as she let him peel off her clothes – the simple white dress she’d been married in, and the positively indecent black things she was wearing underneath it. ‘Your father, Sir Pitt, he was absolutely desperate to go where you’re about to, but I wouldn’t let him. He tried, though. Had his hands all over me.’ She took Rawdon’s hand and placed it on her thigh. ‘Here. And here. Oh yes, and here.’

  Rawdon wanted to tell her that there was never a good time to talk about his father, especially not now, when she was spread naked – all pale, willowy limbs, impossibly fragile – on the bed. But when he thought about his father’s grubby hands, with blackened fingernails, sliding up the soft flesh of his new bride’s thigh, Rawdon had never been so hard, had never ached quite so much to be …

  ‘Here. And here, but oh, definitely not here,’ Becky purred and then she arched her back and cried out, as for the first time Rawdon wasn’t following in his father’s footsteps, but carving out new territory.

  And later, when his manager, his agent and his best friend shouted at him for not bothering with a pre-nup, Rawdon didn’t even care.

  Love didn’t come with contracts and clauses.

  *

  Until Rawdon Crawley, Becky had spent her life surrounded by people who treated her as a temporary hindrance.

  Nobody had ever tried to win her, to woo her, to work so hard to make her smile and think about what might please her. Even those stupid McDonalds Happy Meal toys – of course, she’d much rather have had jewellery – were the romantic gesture of a man who was ready to risk rejection and ridicule if there was an outside chance that Becky might return his feelings.

  Of course, there was also the small matter of her virginity. Which was a trifle. Barely important. There had never been any chance for Becky to be rid of it in Bournemouth, though the good vicar would have been delighted to have done the honours. Then once she was in the Big Brother house, there was absolutely no way that she was going to give it up to any of those Neanderthals, and certainly not under a duvet tent and on camera too.

  Once she’d left the house, her virginity was currency – about her only liquid asset. It would have been wasted on Jos Sedley. She might have surrendered it to Sir Pitt if the circumstances had been different, if he hadn’t been ‘married’, if he’d been more generous with his baubles, but Becky was glad that it had been Rawdon.

  He was pretty, he was on the way up and he’d do absolutely anything she asked of him. He’d given up all his bad habits because Becky had told him all about her parents – well, maybe not everything, but enough that she could say quite truthfully, ‘So you see, Rawdy, the booze and the pills and the powders, they’re a deal breaker for me. Same with the gambling. Did I ever tell you about the time that my father lost our rent money and all our other money in a poker game?’

  But the best thing about Rawdon, God help him, was his kindness. He could kill a girl with kindness, so it was just as well that Becky Sharp was made of stronger stuff when she turned up on the doorstep of Rawdon’s little pink mews h
ouse in Camden and told him that his doting aunt hadn’t taken the news of their nuptials particularly well.

  Rawdon took her in his arms and kissed away every tear that she’d managed to squeeze out during the short taxi ride over. ‘It doesn’t matter if Matilda cuts me out of her will,’ Rawdon said without even a trace of anger. ‘I have my own money.’

  Rawdon did have his own money, but what Becky hadn’t yet realised was that he wasn’t guaranteed box office yet. He also insisted on choosing interesting roles, which stretched his talent and won him critical acclaim, but critical acclaim didn’t come with a big pay cheque, and what money Rawdon had, slipped through his fingers. In the past, he’d lavished it on his friends, on partying, on gambling, but lately he’d lavished it on Becky. Furthermore, what money he did have was spare change down the back of a sofa compared to all of Matilda’s millions, but he didn’t seem at all worried about his aunt’s fire and fury.

  ‘She’ll come round,’ he told Becky as he took hold of her cases. ‘Even if she doesn’t, we’ll be fine. I’ll look after you.’

  If he had a little more brain, I might make something of him, Becky thought to herself as she followed Rawdon up the stairs and into the little galleried bedroom.

  Yet what Rawdon lacked, he made up for by having his own people. Who naturally became Becky’s people. Agent, publicist and two whole marketing teams from the film he’d just wrapped and the film he was about to start shooting.

  None of them were exactly pleased about the news that the devastatingly handsome actor that they’d positioned as a brooding and sexually potent hell-raiser was now a happily married man. But it was a done deal and as Rawdon’s agent, Mike Cutt, said grimly when they all met for a council of war at the film company’s offices in Greek Street, ‘We’ll just have to make the best of it.’

  Becky gazed out of the window of the conference room, situated in a luxury office suite right in the middle of her old stomping grounds. Across the road had been the building where she’d once lived in two damp rooms with her parents on the third floor. They’d shared a bathroom with two Eastern European girls who’d worked out of the two rooms on the other side of the hall, and the men who’d come to visit them at all hours of the day and night. Just twenty metres and a whole world away from where she now sat in air-conditioned splendour …

  ‘… And we won’t announce anything to the press for now, just a few well-placed rumours to a couple of trusted sources. Then we’ll go official on the red carpet at the film premiere,’ said Rawdon’s publicist, a gum-snapping man in dark glasses called Knuckles, who was incapable of sitting still and was nervously pacing the room. ‘Gotta love a bit of synergy, right?’

  ‘We also won’t mention Big Brother,’ Mike Cutt said firmly. ‘We’ll pretend that it never existed. Fake news.’

  ‘Yeah, totally. I mean, we’re living in the post-fact era. You really can fool all of the people most of the time,’ one of the marketeers noted, while everyone nodded sagely. ‘We’ll focus on her being young, beautiful …’ She peered at Becky with an assessing gaze. ‘A blank slate. We can do what we want with her. A bit of modelling, a couple of brand ambassadorships, really build her up as a social influencer.’

  ‘Don’t talk about Becky like she’s not even here,’ Rawdon said, taking her hand, but Becky shushed him.

  After all, she was a blank slate and all these people were gathered here with the sole purpose of making her somebody. Her heart pounded, in a way that no man had ever made it pound. To be lifted up, after years of having to claw her own way through … Besides, every hustler needed a side-hustle, especially if Mattie did make good on her promise to excommunicate Rawdon.

  ‘And we’ll have all the social media up and running before the premiere.’ Knuckles came to a halt and took off his shades so Becky could see his perplexed expression. ‘But I don’t get it. How can you not have a social media footprint?’

  ‘She’s not even on Facebook,’ Rawdon said proudly as if Becky’s need not to leave a trail – another life lesson learned from her father – was just another adorable quirk of this beguiling creature that he couldn’t quite believe he’d married.

  But seriously, what would be the point of Becky tweeting about what she had for breakfast? Why would she want to connect with old school friends on Facebook when she’d stopped going to school by the time she was thirteen? Anyway, the fewer ties she had, the less need there was to crush any fools who had the nerve to say that they used to know her.

  ‘Let’s just do Instagram,’ one of the marketing team was saying now. ‘But we’ll do Instagram really well.’

  ‘We’ll smash Instagram. Totally own it,’ someone else said with great feeling. ‘We’ll create her own custom hashtag.’

  ‘Instagram won’t even know what to do with itself,’ Knuckles yelped and he punched the air, and it seemed as if they were done here.

  Operation Crush Instagram started a week later. Clothes were called in, hair and make-up were booked, a quirky apartment carved out of an old grain warehouse in Kings Cross was hired, and an up-and-coming fashion photographer spent two days shooting Becky for the Instagram account that she now had.

  Staring adoringly at the rails and rails of clothes in a walk-in wardrobe that didn’t belong to her. #LifeOfBecky #FashionInsider

  Cuddling up to a pug puppy that belonged to the up-and-coming fashion photographer’s assistant. #LifeofBecky #Puglife

  She and Rawdon posing candidly on a battered leather chesterfield sofa, his head in her lap, her fingers in his hair. #LifeOfBecky #YoungLove #PowerCouple

  Buying armfuls of flowers at Columbia Road Market. #LifeOfBecky #BloomingLovely

  Shooting her own reflection in the mirror on her own newly acquired next-gen, state-of-the-art smartphone as she had her hair permanently tamed with a keratin treatment because Rawdon’s team said that loose waves sent a more media-friendly message than riotous curls. #LifeofBecky #FashionInsider #HairStory

  Leaping over puddles in Regent’s Park in wellies and a flouncy polka-dot dress just off the Paris runway. #LifeOf Becky #YesToTheDress #FashionInsider

  And so it went on and on. As well as the Instagram takeover and a crash course in hashtags, there was media training, meet-and-greets with fashion and beauty publicists, and she and Rawdon welcoming a team from Hello into their ‘beautiful home’. Again, the industrial-chic Kings Cross apartment Rawdon’s agent had hired for the week, where they gave an exclusive about their romance, wedding and married life. The piece would run the day after they walked down the red carpet at Rawdon’s premiere.

  ‘I’m so sorry about all this,’ Rawdon said on the day of the premiere, as they sat in the back of their limo in a long queue of other limos, waiting to be dropped off at the agreed spot at the bottom of the red carpet. ‘All the phoney social media and publicity bullshit. I have to do it because it’s good for my career but I never expected you to get dragged into it too.’

  Becky was perched right at the very edge of the seat, her spine rigid, because her dress was so tight that she could really only walk in it. Luckily, they didn’t even need to sit and watch the film, but could go straight to the after party. She couldn’t turn her head either because it might destroy the carefully tousled red waves, which had taken hours and a vast array of products and tools to achieve. ‘It’s all right, Rawdy,’ she said, reaching out blindly with her hand to pat where she thought his leg might be. ‘This is all about you. You’re the star, I’m just in a supporting role.’

  ‘No, you’re my leading lady,’ Rawdon insisted and he really was very sweet.

  ‘Everyone’s here to see you,’ she insisted as the car rolled slowly forwards. ‘Nobody will be interested in taking my picture. Just you wait and see.’

  AND THE BRIDE WORE … SAFETY PINS!

  Rawdon Crawley shows off his beautiful young wife on the red carpet

  (And his beautiful young wife shows a whole lot of flesh!)

  Hollywood heart-throb Rawdon Crawley is a
hell-raiser no more. At the premiere of his new film, Sentimental and Otherwise, he proudly showed off his beautiful new wife, Rebecca, and his new role as devoted husband.

  The son of Sir Pitt Crawley couldn’t take his eyes off his glamorous bride, and who could blame him when Rebecca, 20, was flaunting her curves in a daring designer dress of slashed white lace held together with Swarovski-encrusted safety pins.

  ‘She’s absolutely gorgeous, isn’t she?’ Rawdon, 31, announced as he presented sexy Rebecca to his adoring fans and assembled photographers.

  Not much is known about the woman who stole Rawdon’s heart, but his publicist, Rory ‘Knuckles’ McGee, said that Rebecca was a family friend and that love bloomed for the glamorous couple after they spent Christmas together. ‘They had a very quiet, very private wedding ceremony, which was all about their love for each other rather than turning such a special occasion into a media circus.’

  It’s not known if Rawdon’s famous father, Sir Pitt, attended and his equally famous aunt, Dame Matilda Crawley, recently killed off in Lyndon Place, has been recovering from a bout of ill health. But McGee insisted that the Crawley family is delighted that Rawdon is putting his bad-boy ways behind him, ‘and it’s all down to the love of a good woman.’

  It’s certainly proving to be quite the year for Rawdon who’s shooting back-to-back films in London. First up is a murder mystery, Who Played on the Piano?, then a WW2 spy drama, The Girl I Left Behind Me, which is good news for his blushing bride.

  ‘We can’t bear to be parted,’ revealed radiant Rebecca, whose stunning slender legs were showcased in a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes also decorated with Swarovski crystals. ‘We’re still very much in the honeymoon phase.’

  The lovebirds haven’t yet had an official honeymoon but handsome Rawdon and Rebecca, whose Instagram profile describes her as an ‘influencer and fashion insider’, couldn’t keep their hands off each other, even on the red carpet!