The Rise and Fall of Becky Sharp

by Sarra Manning

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘A solid-gold cigarette lighter and a couple of other bits. Mattie’s been dead not even a month,’ he said, and though Pitt had been frightened of his aunt, her sharp tongue and even sharper gaze, as if she constantly found him wanting, he was struck by her loss. And any loss always reminded him of the greater loss of his mother, which hadn’t dissipated over time but was now a dull ache in the background instead of a constant piercing pain. ‘The estate is all tied up in probate. Will be for a couple of months at least, but I want you and Rawdon to have the house in Primrose Hill,’ he added rashly. ‘Mattie would have wanted you to have the house if she hadn’t been so bloody minded about everything.’

  ‘Pitt, no …’ Becky covered her face in her hands and her shoulders shook with the force of her silent sobs. ‘It’s too much.’

  ‘It’s hardly anything. The very least I can do.’

  Becky uncovered her stricken face. ‘It’s the kindest, loveliest gesture but Rawdon and I couldn’t afford to take on a house of that size and in that condition. It’s pretty much falling down and the bits that aren’t falling down haven’t been touched since the fashion in interiors was seventies shag palace.’ She tried to laugh at her own joke but it came out as a sob. ‘You must think I’m so ungrateful.’

  ‘Not at all, but there is money. That is, there will be money for you and Rawdon too, and in the meantime, you can do whatever you need to with the house to make it somewhere that you want to live. Just send me the bills,’ Pitt said impulsively and Becky’s look of incredulity was replaced with a brilliant smile so that Pitt felt like she was the sun and he was a lowly planet happy to satellite around her all day. (The line needed work but he took a mental note to fine-tune it at a later date.)

  TATLER, JUNE

  Bystander

  Forget the latest hip nightclub or trendy bar, the hottest ticket in town is Sausage Sundays at the Primrose Hill home of London’s It couple, Rebecca and Rawdon Crawley. Billed as a ‘sausage ’n’ mash salon’, and strictly by invitation only, supermodels, royalty, politicians, pop stars and YouTubers who’d usually eschew carbs, are desperate for an invite so they can chow down on a plate of sausage and mash. Of course, the sausages are supplied by gourmet butchers, The Happy Pig, and the mash is whipped up by whichever celebrity chef is in attendance, while cocktails are provided by a featured bartender every week.

  There’s plenty of entertainment too as attendees are expected to sing for their supper. Guests spill out into the Crawleys’ sprawling back garden to sit on cushions while Zadie Smith might read an excerpt from her latest novel or Harry Styles provides an acoustic set.

  The low-key, high-glam salon is the brainchild of Rebecca Crawley, model, charity spokesperson and social influencer, though Vogue describes her as ‘simply the wittiest, prettiest woman in London.’

  ‘Sunday evenings are my least favourite time of the week, I always get that awful back-to-school feeling,’ Becky explained in a break from entertaining her guests. ‘I invited a few friends and neighbours over one Sunday, though I did the cooking and burned the sausages to charcoal, but we had such a great time that I decided to do it the next Sunday too, and it took off from there.’

  Of course, when your friends happen to be models like Cara Delevingne and Georgia May Jagger and your neighbours include Benedict Cumberbatch, Claudia Winkleman and Ed Sheeran, then having friends over for supper is always going to be a star-studded affair. And with the added draw of handsome husband Rawdon Crawley (fresh from his triumphant return to the London stage in a sell-out run of Coriolanus at the National Theatre), there is more than a healthy sprinkling of Hollywood glamour too. Last week, salon regulars were astounded to see none other than Kanye West and Kim Kardashian wolfing down some vegan artisan sausages and it’s rumoured that Beyoncé’s people have already been in touch to lock down an invite next time Queen Bey is in town.

  ‘I expected people to get bored with bangers and mash, but the other week we had to turn away two Victoria’s Secret models,’ said Becky with an embarrassed laugh. ‘I was absolutely mortified but I really couldn’t have squeezed in even one more person.’

  With a cookbook and a TV show in the works and plans to take the humble banger to pop-up sausage salons in New York and Paris, it looks like Becky will have to start employing a bouncer to turn more people away.

  You can catch a glimpse of the sausage ’n’ mash salon on Becky’s Instagram Stories and Facebook Live, every other Sunday at 6 p.m.

  Chapter 32

  Becky gazed out of the second-floor window of her bedroom (which had once been Matilda’s but someone had come in and burned lots of sage to get rid of any malevolent spirits) down at the throngs of beautiful people gathered in her garden. If they weren’t beautiful, then they were powerful and well connected, which was far more important than simply being easy on the eye.

  It was a sultry Sunday evening at the end of June and the sausage ’n’ mash salon was in full swing. The whole affair was now sponsored by a gin company who had paid for everything from a new kitchen, to the garden re-design, to the wait staff milling about with gin-based cocktails and, of course, a generous monthly stipend for Becky.

  There was a celebrity chef, whose manager had paid handsomely for the privilege, barbecuing sausages – chorizo and red onion, Old Spot pork and Bramley apple, and merguez and harissa – at a special grilling station that had been set up in the garden, because Becky had only just finished doing up the house and the smell of grilled meat clung to everything.

  Every week poor Briggs had to field calls and emails from publicists desperate to get their clients an invite. Becky had been determined to lose Briggs and Firkin, out with the old and all that, but they had refused to go.

  ‘You need me,’ Briggs had kept bleating when Becky had tried to evict him from the Louis XIV-inspired suite on the first floor where he’d lived for the last twenty or so years. ‘And I need to be needed. Without Matilda here, I just don’t know what to do with myself.’

  ‘Well, it’s about time you found out. Why should I let you stay? You practically came in your pants when Matilda called me all those vile names and threw me out,’ Becky had reminded him because Briggs was on her list and she was itching to score his name through.

  ‘I tried to stick up for you. Dear heart, you know that I adore you,’ he’d insisted, on the verge of tears. ‘You won’t even have to pay me. Mattie left me very comfortably provided for.’

  It turned out that Briggs had been left £60,000 a year for the rest of his life, and after a week Becky realised why Matilda had kept him around for so long. He was awfully good at organising things, from the building works to rustling up invites to parties and restaurant openings and first nights and any other event that Becky wanted to go to. While Rawdy was busy with his dreary Shakespeare, Briggs was also an excellent plus one. ‘A walker,’ he called it. He made sure that she always had a drink in her hand and someone fascinating to talk to and that she never, ever had to linger on the pavement waiting for a car to take her home.

  Then once they’d started the sausage and mash thing, he’d really come into his own. But to keep Briggs on his toes, and because he still had to be punished for his former crimes, she’d refused to sack Firkin.

  ‘But she stole from Mattie!’ Briggs kept reminding her. While this was quite untrue, divide and rule meant there was no harm in letting Briggs continue to think that and letting Firkin hate Briggs for casting aspersions about her good character.

  Becky’s so-called kindness also ensured the taciturn Firkin’s unswerving loyalty, even managing to crack a smile when she brought Becky breakfast in bed every morning, and with Briggs and Firkin hating each other, it meant that they didn’t turn on her. Really, everything had worked out so well, Becky thought, as she waved down at Pitt who’d been searching high and low for a glimpse of her.

  He always stayed with them when he needed to come down to London, even though he’d inherited Sir Pitt’s Chelsea hous
e, which apparently needed a lot of work done before it was habitable. Even though probate had been granted and Pitt had signed over the deeds of the house to her (because they agreed that Rawdon, bless his heart, couldn’t be trusted), it still paid to keep Pitt sweet.

  For instance, she’d invited him and Jane this evening, and later on she’d introduce Pitt to Salman Rushdie while Jane could babysit Rawdon, who was the only person in London who really didn’t want to attend an ironic bangers-and-mash salon on a Sunday evening.

  Pitt, on the other hand, was very grateful and he showed his gratitude by being very free with the Crawley family jewellery. ‘It’s just as much yours and Rawdon’s as it is mine and Jane’s,’ he’d pointed out last month when he’d handed over a pair of diamond earrings, a necklace and two dress clips. They’d agreed that they wouldn’t tell Rawdon. Becky had told Pitt exactly what had happened in Paris – under duress, of course, and with a lot of very pretty crying. Then she’d confessed her suspicions that Rawdon was gambling again, so she and Pitt had also decided that it was best that the generous monthly allowance he wanted to give them should go straight to Becky.

  It was funny the difference a year made, Becky reflected as she turned away from the window. A year ago they were on their uppers and now Rawdon was a hot property once again and she was the toast of London.

  Becky looked at herself in the cheval mirror. The salon invite said ‘Sunday casual’, which sometimes meant she wore a tiny pair of shorts with trainers and a faded seventies rock-band T-shirt, but tonight she was wearing a floaty chiffon vintage Celia Birtwell dress and a pair of flip-flops. She planned to drift through her guests like an elusive butterfly, never lingering too long, disappearing in the middle of a conversation with a vague smile. Sometimes you had to leave people wanting more …

  Her gameplan for the evening was interrupted by a sharp knock on the door, which opened before Becky had a chance to answer the summons.

  ‘Briggs! We’ve talked about this,’ she snapped, when he poked his head around the door.

  ‘I know, but I have a party of six people who have to come in,’ he garbled. ‘Security are having none of it because they’re not on the list.’

  Having security on the door really didn’t go with the ad hoc, free-form vibe of the salon but Camden Council had got very sniffy and had even tried to make them apply for some kind of licence, and had only been mollified by the promise of two burly bouncers. Anyway, without security, anyone might walk in off the street. Like this party of six, for instance.

  ‘You know the rules; if they’re not on the list, then they’re not coming in,’ Becky sing-songed, as she twirled in front of the mirror. There was a slip that went under the dress, which she’d discarded so that if anyone wanted to look hard enough, they’d be rewarded with a glimpse of her nipples.

  ‘You wouldn’t say that if you knew who was getting very cross on your doorstep,’ Briggs said, his voice getting shriller with each syllable. ‘You have to come down and sort it out. The bouncers won’t listen to me.’

  ‘It had better be someone very important,’ Becky grumbled. Then when Briggs gave a wordless, desperate moan she stopped zhuzhuing her hair and tore herself away from her own very pleasing reflection. ‘Royalty at least. Though if it’s either of those beasts from St James’s Palace, they can fuck right off. I don’t care if they are princesses by blood, they’re still practically D-list.’

  ‘It’s hard to imagine they’re royalty when the bucktoothed one has such thick ankles,’ Briggs sniped in a whisper as he followed Becky down the stairs. When he wasn’t having conniptions, he was full of amusing, acidic asides, another reason why Becky was quite happy to keep him around. ‘Or is it the other one, with the googly eyes?’

  ‘Sending that pair packing would be my finest moment,’ Becky decided but when she got to the front door, there were no sartorially challenged princesses to be seen. Just an old man in a blue-and-white striped seersucker suit with two younger men and three bland, blonde women, all teeth, tans and tits. ‘You dragged me down two flights of stairs for this?’ she hissed at Briggs, not caring if her voice carried.

  ‘It’s Lord Steyne,’ Briggs hissed back, a fine film of sweat coating his face. ‘The Lord Steyne.’

  How many other Lord Steynes were there? None. The Hackney-born media mogul was in a class of his own. Tom Steyne had started his career in the post room of the Daily Herald when he was fourteen. Had got his first scoop at sixteen when he’d happened upon a victim of the Krays bleeding to death outside The Hat and Fan pub in Mile End and, instead of calling the police, had taken down the man’s dying words to be splashed across the front page the next morning. At twenty, he was editor of the failing Daily Witness, the youngest newspaper editor Fleet Street had ever known.

  By twenty-five, he owned the Daily Witness and a dozen regional papers and now, some fifty years later, he pretty much ran Britain and America with his newspapers and his movie studios and his TV channels. If Steyne decided that the UK was going to Brexit, then Brexit it would. If he wanted a narcissistic, yellow-haired, orange-skinned reality-TV star in the White House, then the American voters were there to do his bidding.

  With a friend like Lord Steyne, the world was yours for the taking.

  ‘You’re not on the list,’ Becky said, tapping the clipboard that one of the bouncers was holding. ‘If you’re not on the list, then you’re not coming in.’

  She was addressing all six of them but her gaze kept returning to Lord Steyne who was watching her with a slight smile. He was old, like proper old. Liver-spotted old. Stooped old. Completely-bald old. The two men he was with, his sons, were strapping and tall and had all the arrogance that a life of privilege brings, but it was Steyne who radiated real power, like a fierce gravitational pull. So it didn’t matter that he was old old, when he had a metric fuckton of charisma.

  ‘Are you sure we’re not on the list, sweetheart?’ he asked Becky. ‘Because if we’re not then I’ll have to sack all six of my assistants.’

  Becky shook her head. ‘Sucks to be one of your six assistants then,’ she said even as Briggs moaned faintly somewhere behind her. Steyne barked out a laugh.

  ‘I’ll send you a picture tomorrow of them carrying their possessions out of the building in cardboard boxes,’ he promised and it had been a long, long time since she’d met anyone who knew how to play this game. Mattie had, of course, but she was gone. Maybe Rawdon in the first few weeks, but he’d just been playing a part. Tom Steyne was the real deal.

  ‘Still, I’d hate to be personally responsible for a bump in the unemployment figures,’ Becky demurred and she stepped aside. ‘You can come in … just this once.’

  The sons and the blondes swept past her with tight smiles, a couple of murmured thank-yous, but Steyne stopped in front of her. Even though she was wearing flats, they were practically eye to eye.

  ‘And to whom do I owe the pleasure?’ he asked. Despite the wealth and the peerage, he’d made absolutely no attempt to lose the East End accent, which roughened his words.

  He knew exactly who she was. Men like Steyne made it their business to know everything.

  ‘There hasn’t been any pleasure, has there? Not yet. And I’m Becky Sharp,’ she said. ‘Or Mrs Rebecca Crawley, if you prefer.’

  ‘Mrs Crawley it is, then,’ Steyne said and he didn’t tell her his name because he knew he didn’t have to. Then he gave her a perfunctory smile and proceeded to walk into her house as if he owned it, lock, stock and barrel.

  *

  Steyne sent flowers the next day. White, tightly furled roses with a card that read, ‘To the most beautiful woman in London.’

  Becky put him on the list for the next salon, with no plus five this time. Not even a plus one, in case he fancied bringing along his third wife, a Ukrainian woman half his age with a fierce reputation that was all her own.

  Of course, he turned up. And of course Becky ignored him, until right at the end of the evening when she came to perch
on the arm of the garden sofa he was sitting on, with a little circle of acolytes (among them a newspaper editor, an Oscar-nominated film director and the owner of a chain of very successful high-street fashion boutiques) gathered around him.

  ‘Are we having fun?’ she asked and everyone assured her that yes, they were having fun, the sausage and mash had been beyond compare (‘better than me old Ma used to make,’ said the film director, because he liked to play up his Irish heritage, even though his old Ma’s family owned most of County Kildare) and they couldn’t wait for the next salon.

  Then when they went back to their own conversations, Steyne’s hand grazed Becky’s hip. ‘Have dinner with me.’ He didn’t make it a question or a suggestion. ‘Just the two of us.’

  ‘That would be lovely, but I don’t think so,’ Becky said, rising from her perch and walking off without looking back.

  The next day, there were more white roses.

  And Steyne was at the next salon and so it went on, this game of theirs, until she agreed to have dinner with him. It wasn’t a hole-in-the-corner dinner either, because Steyne was no George Wylie. He did what he wanted, when he wanted, with whom he wanted and anyway, the formidable Lady Steyne was in Kiev visiting family and Rawdon was away filming for a week on the Irish director’s new film. He’d only be in it for five minutes but apparently it would be a pivotal, career-defining five minutes.

  ‘That’s what Declan said, anyway,’ Becky explained to Steyne as they sat at the best table in a newly opened restaurant, which had once been a Shoreditch police station and had a three-month waiting list.

  ‘You can thank me afterwards,’ Steyne said, as he put on his glasses to look at the wine menu, even though he always ordered the most expensive bottle of champagne for whatever woman he was with, while he had a beer.

  ‘Thank you for what? Dinner? Like those teenage boyfriends that expected me to give them a blow job for a cheeky Nando’s?’ Becky asked, though she’d never had a teenage boyfriend, but she wanted to see how Steyne would react.