The Rise and Fall of Becky Sharp

by Sarra Manning

  As it was, Georgy woke up from where he’d been slumbering on his mama’s breast and let out an ear-piercing cry.

  ‘Sorry, so sorry, Emmy. What a clumsy oaf I am,’ Dobbin stuttered. ‘Two left feet. I’m a bloody liability … Oh, Emmy … he’s a wonder, isn’t he? What a splendid little chap you’ve made,’ he added, his voice husky with emotion.

  Amelia, who’d been about to tell Dobbin off for swearing in front of Georgy, simply smiled beatifically at him. She was exhausted and grey, her hair still sweat-tangled and limp, but Dobbin thought she’d never looked more beautiful. ‘He is rather wonderful,’ she agreed. ‘He’s already my very favourite person in the world. Are those for us?’

  As well as the flowers, Dobbin was holding a huge helium balloon with ‘It’s a boy!’ printed on it, which ordinarily he’d have considered common, as well as a plush blue elephant which was twice the size of Georgy, who’d weighed in at an impressive nine pounds and six ounces.

  Then, tenderly and carefully, when Amelia proudly showed off Georgy’s ten toes, Dobbin bent down and kissed his perfect, perfect feet, so that if it weren’t so battered, Amelia’s uterus would probably have clenched in delight. If only George had shown a fraction of Dobbin’s delight, she thought, as he straightened up and perched warily on the side of the bed.

  ‘So, that’s you and George settled then,’ he said, as though that wasn’t already the case. They were married, after all, and despite George having a lovely little flat in Victoria, he’d bought a house in Leakington, a village in his constituency, and had intimated very strongly that Amelia might like to spend most of her time down there ‘doing mum things. London is no place for a baby. All the pollution.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ she said gently, because she had come to realise – had always known, really – that Dobbin had feelings for her, which was very sweet of him, but George had always been the heir to her heart. Even when he was beastly, Amelia would always remind herself of how he’d rescued Pianoforte (who was now enjoying retirement in Leakington because the house came with fifteen acres and a stable) for her at a time when the rest of her friends and acquaintances had spurned her. ‘But you always knew that George was the only man for me.’

  Dobbin sighed, his earlier joy gone. ‘I can’t stay,’ he said heavily.

  ‘Oh, that’s a shame. I suppose visiting hours are almost over.’

  ‘I mean, I’m leaving London. Britain. Signed up for another tour.’

  And despite her assertions about George, Amelia felt an icy dread settle over her.

  ‘But I thought you were done with active duty.’ Amelia shifted the baby at her breast so she could sit up properly, wincing as she did so, while Dobbin tactfully averted his gaze from her pendulous, blue-veined breast and straining nipple. ‘Your focus is training new officers and ceremonial duties, isn’t it?’

  Dobbin placed the tips of his huge fingers on Georgy’s downy head. ‘Things change. I’m not needed here and so it’s best to go where I am needed.’

  ‘Maybe not needed, but valued and liked very much,’ Amelia protested, though it was a weak argument and her heart was so suffused with joy and love for a little being that had only existed for a few days, that already she had a little less love for the other people in her life. Even so, the thought of dear old Dobbin back on active duty, where all sorts of wrong ’uns would try to kill him, cast a dark shadow over her newfound bliss. ‘You will come back to us, won’t you, Dobbin? I’ll be furious if you don’t.’

  This time, Dobbin placed his hand on Amelia’s cheek, the backs of his fingers caressing her hot, flushed skin. ‘I’ll always come back to you, Emmy,’ he said throatily, but the baby was fussing and Amelia turned to her son, and by the time she lifted her head, Dobbin was gone.

  Chapter 34

  Only two miles away but a world apart, Becky was being carefully lowered, then sewn into an intricate black lace dress which had been hand-stitched by nuns in a cloistered convent to the west of Paris.

  When the last satin-covered pearl button had been fastened and her dressers stepped back, there wasn’t a single person in the room who was more beautiful than Rebecca Crawley. There were several models present, two of them household names, who would have sworn that they were, but they would have been wrong.

  In contrast to the finely worked black lace, Becky’s skin was alabaster white apart from the delicate flush of colour in her cheeks. Her hair, no longer at the mercy of a monthly keratin blow-dry, was a riotous, red tumble of curls and her green eyes glittered like the emerald earrings which had been Steyne’s latest gift.

  As well as being at the peak of her pulchritude, Becky Sharp decided that, at this moment, in this room, with these people, she was at the height of her powers.

  She’d been profiled in the Sunday Times and Vogue (both the UK and US editions), she’d made the Evening Standard’s ‘Thirty Power Players Under the Age of Thirty’ list and the ‘Most Fascinating People’ lists in both Tatler and US Weekly. She’d been on Newsnight and Loose Women and had made a scene-stealing appearance on Have I Got News For You when she called Jeremy Clarkson out for a sexist remark. She had been awarded plaques, trophies and a quite hideous crystal bowl for her charity work. She had ten million followers on Instagram, roughly the same amount on Twitter and her inspirational TED talk on how she’d turned a red-carpet moment into a global brand had been watched five million times.

  There were people – mostly white, middle-aged men who wrote peevish opinion columns in the broadsheets – who asked, ‘What does Mrs Rawdon Crawley actually do?’ But as Becky said in her most liked Instagram post ever, they were just the death rattles of an almost extinct patriarchy.

  Apart from those blowhards, she was lauded, applauded, sponsored, branded and had the ear (and anything else she wanted) of one of the most influential men in the world.

  Not bad for a girl who’d come from absolutely nothing.

  Now, she was about to walk in a fashion show which was being live streamed around the world in aid of Sister4Sister, a global campaign to encourage women to encourage other women. ‘Good luck with that,’ Becky had thought when she’d first been approached.

  Each haute couture dress had been specially created by a different fashion house and worn by women who personified the campaign’s core ethos of Compassion, Independence and Strength. Though it was quite the coincidence that all of the twenty women chosen were thin, beautiful and mostly Caucasian.

  Becky was closing the show because she was the only woman who was tiny enough to fit into the black lace dress, but also because Lord Steyne had called in a few favours. ‘About time I called in a favour of my own,’ he’d said with heavy emphasis, which Becky would worry about later …

  Right now, she could only worry about negotiating a fifty-metre catwalk in dangerously high heels and a dress with an impossibly restrictive fishtail hem and a twenty-foot train, with two supermodels who had a reputation for elbowing their rivals right off the runway.

  She stood in the wings, waiting for her cue as people pulled at her hair, her dress, patted her face with powder to ensure that she couldn’t look any more perfect.

  ‘One, two, three, go!’ said the show producer and there wasn’t even time to take a deep breath when she was shoved forward.

  It was a blur of light and flashes and faces as she stepped out and she’d thought that she might be nervous, but once she was bathed in the warm glow of all that attention, all that adulation, Becky felt her heart rise and her head lift – she was right at home, where she was always destined to be. She didn’t walk so much as glide down the long white expanse of runway, the long train of her dress undulating after her.

  Over the shouting of the photographers, she could hear another sound getting louder and louder. People were clapping, cheering, their cries and the smack of their hands reaching a crescendo simply because she was young and beautiful and she could put one foot in front of the other.

  It was easy to take so much when most people w
ere happy with so little, she thought as she reached the end of the catwalk, held her pose, and allowed a small, triumphant smile to break through.

  *

  For better or for worse, he’d married her, and when Rawdon Crawley watched his wife walk down the runway, the many complicated reasons why he both loved and hated her in equal measure were all contained in her triumphant smile.

  Rawdon had never expected to play second billing when he’d plucked his half-siblings’ twenty-year-old nanny from obscurity to a life of fame and fortune. OK, there had been a couple of glitches with the whole fame and fortune thing, but before him, Becky had been nothing and now Rawdon worried that without Becky, it would be he who had nothing.

  He told himself that the potential film roles that were stacking up like the stiff invitation cards on their mantelpiece were all due to his talent, but when your wife was a close, personal friend of Lord Steyne, who happened to own the film studio behind all those film roles, talent didn’t have much to do with it.

  In the long, dark evenings of the soul when his wife was nowhere to be found and Rawdon was teetering on the brink of a comedown after hours of hoovering up white lines, he wished that he’d never met her. Before Becky, he’d been motoring along quite happily, critically acclaimed but with enough box-office draw to satisfy both his artistic temperament and his agent.

  Now, he felt as if his whole life was an illusion. He lived in a house gifted to him by his brother, though by rights it should have been Rawdon’s in the first place. His career was at the whim of a man who wanted to sleep with his wife. And his wife … Rawdon couldn’t even get close to her to say hello, slide his arm around her waist, smile for the photographers so at least he might get some press from attending this celebrity-infested charity clusterfuck.

  Rawdon exchanged his empty glass of champagne for a full one as he grimly and determinedly fought his way across the huge marquee that had been erected in Hyde Park, right next to the Serpentine Gallery.

  ‘Rawdon, so lovely to see you! Wasn’t Becky wonderful? You must be so proud of her!’

  ‘Ah, it’s Mr Becky Sharp, as I live and breathe!’

  ‘Rawdon! Rawdon! Can you get Becky to call me? Been trying to reach out to her for weeks.’

  He ignored all the people who tried to talk to him, because they only wanted to talk about her. Over their heads, he could see his wife’s red curls and he imagined tangling his fingers in them until it hurt her, tipping her head back so she’d have to look him in the eye.

  ‘Without you, I’m nothing, Rawdy,’ she’d say, he decided with a grunt. Then he sniffed hard, so that the last few crumbs of coke hit the back of his throat and like a truth serum, he knew that Becky would say no such thing. ‘Without me, you’d be lucky to get a bit part in Hollyoaks, you fucking loser,’ she’d be more likely to say.

  Becky was on the move, a couple of black-clad, thickset men separating her from the hordes so she could take a moment, have a sip of champagne to ease her dry throat from all the air-kissing and ‘Darling, you’re too sweet, all I did was manage to walk without going arse over tit.’

  ‘She’s my wife,’ Rawdon hissed, as another couple of all-in-black flunkies tried to stop him from following Becky into a cordoned-off area and into the perfectly proper and polite embrace of Lord Steyne, who kissed her on both cheeks and said something that Rawdon couldn’t quite catch because he was still too far away.

  ‘It’s a wedding dress,’ he heard Becky say as he drew nearer. ‘The wedding dress always closes the show.’

  ‘Looks more like widow’s weeds,’ Steyne laughed. ‘Which is appropriate.’

  For five heart-pounding, fist-clenching seconds, Rawdon was set to storm over and punch Steyne so hard that it knocked his head clean off his frail, geriatric neck.

  ‘I don’t want Rawdy dead,’ Becky said thoughtfully. She looked at Steyne from under her lashes in a way that Rawdon knew only too well. ‘He’s very good-looking. He’s much better-looking than you. He has a lot more hair than you too.’

  Steyne laughed again and Rawdon turned away, disgusted, down-hearted, dejected. He pushed his way back through the crowd so he could get out, breathe fresh air that wasn’t polluted by expensive perfume and hypocrisy.

  An hour later, he sat at a table in a Park Lane casino and tried to decide if Becky was a sociopath or a psychopath. Or if he should feel sorry for his hard-hearted wife who could never be happy with what she had but was always searching for her next mark, her next conquest, her next … victim.

  ‘Place your bets.’

  Rawdon came to with a start. The pile of chips he’d started with had almost gone though he couldn’t remember losing them. He’d been mesmerised by the spin of the roulette wheel and distracted by thoughts of Becky and how she’d never really been his, not even when she was lying in his arms.

  ‘Sir? Do you want to place a bet?’ Rawdon blinked bleary eyes at the croupier.

  ‘Yeah. I want to place a bet.’ With unsteady hands, he pushed his little pile of chips forward. ‘Put it all on twenty-three.’

  The twenty-third of January was her birthday and she’d currently spent twenty-three years on this earth. They’d been married twenty-three months. (It was actually thirty-three months, but Rawdon had done so many lines of coke by now, he could be forgiven for getting his dates muddled up.)

  If she’d ever loved him, even a little, then twenty-three would come up.

  ‘No more bets.’

  The croupier spun the wheel. The breath hitched in Rawdon’s throat as he watched the ball clatter.

  He clung to the faint hope that she had loved him once, before they’d gone to Paris and everything had been ruined. No, he’d ruined everything.

  Twenty-three had to come up, because for a few sweet months, Becky had loved him and he’d loved her too.

  The ball spun closer to twenty-three to taunt Rawdon, to tease him. As the wheel started to slow, his vision became blurred but then, as the ball rattled between twenty-three and the ten that was next to it, it became crystal clear. Then just as the wheel stopped, the ball gave a quicksilver leap and landed on five.

  ‘Fuck this!’

  In accordance with gambling law, alcoholic drinks weren’t served on the casino floor, but Rawdon picked up his glass containing the dregs of the Coca-Cola he’d been drinking and flung it across the room.

  ‘Fuck it all!’

  There was a scream as the glass glanced off the back of someone’s chair then shattered.

  ‘Sir! I’m going to have to ask you to leave,’ the croupier said, her fingers scrabbling for the panic button under the table, but already suited security men were hurrying from all directions, Rawdon their target.

  He dived across the table to grab a handful of chips and throw them high in the air so they rained down like hailstones, until a hand suddenly wedged into his armpit. ‘Let’s not have any trouble, sir!’

  ‘There’s already trouble,’ Rawdon snarled. ‘I’m choking on trouble.’ With his free arm he tried to take a swing at the man, who captured his flailing limb with an insulting ease so he could pin both of Rawdon’s arms behind his back.

  Rawdon wasn’t going down without a fight. He bucked and he kicked as two more goons arrived to force him down to the floor. They carried him off like that, through a set of doors marked ‘private’, then down a flight of stairs, his forehead smacking against concrete as they descended.

  And throughout it all, Rawdon cried like a baby.

  At the police station, he was booked in, fingerprinted and photographed. They asked him if he wanted a lawyer but all Rawdon wanted was his one phone call.

  It went straight to voicemail. ‘This is Becky. I’m so sorry I can’t take your call. Leave a message and I absolutely promise to get straight back to you.’

  ‘It’s me. I still love you. I wish I didn’t. I wish I never had. Also, I’ve been arrested. I’m at Charing Cross Police Station. Can you call me back, Becky? Please.’

  But Rawdon
knew better than anyone that Becky’s promises never amounted to anything but a handful of dust. Even once he’d sobered up, Rawdon kept banging on his cell door to ask the custody sergeant if his wife had rung. But she never did.

  He was in court the next afternoon, still in his dinner jacket and blood-stained white shirt with cuts on his face and two black eyes, much to the delight of the pack of photographers waiting for him as he exited the police van.

  Rawdon stated his name then pleaded guilty to criminal damage and common assault, because he was guilty. Guilty of so many other things that weren’t even on his charge street. His bail was set at £10,000 and when they got back to the police station, he called Becky again, though she couldn’t have failed to see his battered face plastered all over social media. Not to mention the front covers of all the daily papers, because of course a couple of casino employees had tipped off the press, so they’d been there to see him escorted off the premises in handcuffs.

  ‘Never mind, my son,’ said the custody sergeant. ‘We’ll put you in a cell, get you a cup of tea and some toast, and I bet by the time you’re finished, the missus will have called back.’

  ‘Do you think?’ Rawdon asked. He couldn’t stop his traitorous heart giving a thud of hope, though he’d kept telling himself all the way through his long, sleepless night that he never wanted to see or speak to Becky Sharp ever again.

  ‘I’ve been married for thirty years. She’s angry with you for being such a silly bugger – got to give her time to come round.’

  Rawdon had just taken his last bite of toast when the custody sergeant lifted up the hatch in the cell door. ‘I’m sorry, mate. Your good lady did call but she says she’s not well and she can’t do anything to help you right now.’

  ‘Yeah, of course, she did,’ Rawdon said, sinking back down on the rubber mattress, because he’d been a fool to expect anything else from her.

  ‘Anyone else you know who might have a spare ten thousand tucked away?’

  *

  ‘Oh, Rawdon, your poor, poor face,’ Jane said, four hours later as she spirited Rawdon into the back of a cab. Luckily, she’d been in town anyway buying new school clothes for the five Crawley children who were no longer feral, thanks to regular meals, enrolment at the local primary school, ten hours’ sleep a night and the love of a good woman. ‘Does it hurt very much? Should we take you to a doctor?’