The Rise and Fall of Becky Sharp

by Sarra Manning

  ‘You know I do,’ Jos assured Becky eagerly. ‘Every second we’re apart is tort— Ow!’ A malevolent glare from Becky shut Jos up so abruptly that he bit his tongue.

  ‘Because you haven’t seen your sister in years,’ Becky reminded him. The publicist was suddenly at her side and nervously looking at Becky’s arm as if she was wondering if she might dare take it and usher the newest UN Goodwill Ambassador over to a delegation from the World Health Forum.

  ‘I hope I’m not interrupting anything,’ she said with a cringing smile. ‘I’m going to have to whisk Ms Sharp away.’

  ‘I’m not having dinner in Pumpernickel,’ Becky called over her shoulder as they left. ‘Briggs! Book a private room in the nicest restaurant in Cologne. Make sure it has at least one Michelin star!’

  Chapter 40

  That evening, in a private room in one of only two restaurants in Cologne that had a Michelin star, Amelia and Dobbin nursed a mineral water each and tried to make polite conversation as they waited for Becky and Jos to arrive.

  There had been a time when Amelia wouldn’t have thought anything of spending half an hour in Dobbin’s company. They’d have talked about everything under the stars. Or rather they’d have talked about horses or George Wylie, as those two topics had been all Amelia ever thought about and Dobbin had only ever wanted to make her happy.

  Now George was the very last person that Amelia wanted to talk to Dobbin about. Horses didn’t have the same fascination for her either and besides, Dobbin was uncharacteristically monosyllabic. Amelia questioned him about what he’d been doing since they’d last seen each other in a hospital room a few days after Georgy was born. Where had he done his latest tour? Was it very awful? Did he feel as if he was making a difference and gosh, literally pulling orphans out of a burning building must have been very scary, but Dobbin gave her nothing to work with other than a few polite grunts.

  Amelia couldn’t imagine why he was brooding. It was a relief when her phone pinged with a message from Jos to let her know that Becky was running late – she’d had to take a phone call from her dear friend, the president of Iceland – and they’d be there as soon as possible.

  ‘Imagine Becky being dear friends with the president of Iceland,’ she remarked to Dobbin with a conspiratorial giggle, which he didn’t return. ‘Though really I don’t know why I’m surprised at anything Becky does.’

  ‘Quite,’ Dobbin said.

  ‘The only thing I’m surprised about is how pleased I am to see her again,’ Amelia persisted in the face of Dobbin’s utter lack of enthusiasm. ‘Of course, I’m under no illusions as to what she’s really like.’

  ‘Are you though, Emmy?’ Dobbin suddenly sat up from his slumped position, which would have had his old sergeant major making him do laps around the barracks as penance. ‘Because I don’t care if she is a UN Goodwill Ambassador and that she’s managed to fool the world into thinking that she’s a decent, honourable person. She hasn’t fooled me and she’s not the sort of person you should welcome back into your life.’

  ‘I’m not a child, Dobbin,’ Amelia snapped instantly, because that was now her automatic response to any man giving her his unsolicited advice. ‘And I won’t be told what I can and can’t do. You’re not my father and you’re certainly not my husband, thank God …’

  They both flushed for different reasons. Lately, when Amelia thought of George, her insides constricted and she had an odd sense of impending doom. And Dobbin was carmine of complexion because his old friend, George Wylie, now felt like his bitterest foe.

  ‘I understand why you married him,’ he said rashly, because any fool could do the maths on Georgy’s conception, ‘but I don’t understand why you stay married to him. I always looked up to George when we were younger: he was amusing and confident, everything I wasn’t. But now it pains me to see that he’s gone down the wrong path and is intent on dragging you with him.’

  ‘He’s not dragging me anywhere,’ Amelia said. She and George led two very separate lives these days. As she so often did, she asked herself why she was still married to a man with whom she no longer shared any values, and she came back to the same reason that she always did. ‘Deep down, George is a good, kind man.’

  ‘Well, that’s certainly not reflected in his voting record,’ Dobbin muttered darkly. ‘I see very little goodness and kindness there.’

  ‘He was good and kind when it really mattered. When everyone had turned their backs on me, George stayed true,’ Amelia insisted, and sometimes she wished that George hadn’t stood by her, because then it would be so much easier not to love him now.

  ‘That’s not quite how I remember it,’ Dobbin said, thinking back to the meeting with George’s father and his campaign manager and how they’d all unanimously agreed that Amelia Sedley should be quickly disposed of.

  ‘Well, it’s how I remember it,’ Amelia said, her hand on her foolish heart. ‘He bought back Pianoforte for me …’

  There was a clatter as Dobbin’s glass crashed to the floor, blood streaming from the wound where he’d crushed it in his big, meaty hand.

  ‘Oh, Dobbin! You haven’t changed a bit!’ Amelia said, and she tried to smile because Dobbin was still as clumsy as ever, and it was still endearing, but then she saw the stricken look on his face.

  He turned away from Amelia’s gaze. ‘How is Pianoforte?’ he asked in a choked voice.

  ‘He’s splendid,’ Amelia said with a frown. What had made Dobbin look like that, as if his world had stopped turning? And why was there suddenly such tension between them, as taut and as tight as a tourniquet? ‘Apart from little Georgy, I’ve never loved anyone or anything as much as I love that horse. Not even George, and that’s why it still means the world to me that George saved him and gave him back to me.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ Dobbin said, resting his blood-smeared hand on his forehead, and finally Amelia understood why her old friend was in such despair.

  ‘Did … did George save him?’

  ‘There was a note. I wrote a note … purportedly written by the horse, which I hoped was a piece of whimsy you might like …’ Dobbin shook his head. ‘But I thought …’

  ‘What did you think?’ Amelia’s voice was thick with tears. Not the tears that she used to be able to summon so easily. These felt as if they were being dredged up from the very depths of her soul.

  The last three years of her life – her marriage, even the existence of Georgy – were all due to a misunderstanding, a miscommunication. And all this time she’d clung to her shaky belief that George loved her.

  ‘Why would you do that, Dobbin?’ she asked, though she already knew the answer. ‘Why did you rescue Pianoforte?’

  ‘Because – because I love you.’ The words were wrenched out of him. ‘I’ve loved you since the first moment I saw you at a school open day and I thought you were the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. I’ve loved you all this time and I tried to tell you before I went away, but you didn’t care …’

  ‘Dobbin! I’d just had a baby, George’s baby!’ Amelia protested. ‘It wasn’t that I was ungrateful …’ But she had been ungrateful. She’d always known that Dobbin had a crush on her and though she’d been flattered, she’d hardly ever given either Dobbin or his feelings much thought. Worse, Amelia admitted to herself with a guilty start, she’d so often used Dobbin as a means to one end: George. Everything had always come back to George.

  ‘You were indifferent,’ Dobbin spelt out harshly and Amelia hung her head. Dobbin had every right to be harsh with her. ‘I don’t know why I thought anything would change in telling you this. My constancy and devotion mean nothing, because you’d still rather give your time and your love to people who don’t deserve it. George, that awful Sharp woman, but not me. Never me!’

  ‘You should have said something! At Cannes, when you saw how he treated me, you should have told me then,’ Amelia said because it was easier to be furious at Dobbin for his deception when really she was furious with herself for
squandering her own constancy and devotion on George Wylie.

  ‘It wouldn’t have been any use,’ Dobbin said bitterly. ‘I know what your heart is capable of: it can cling faithfully to a recollection and cherish a fancy, but it’s not worthy of the love I’ve given you. You couldn’t – you wouldn’t be able to comprehend, or even begin to return the sheer weight of the love I’d have given you, and which another woman might have been happy to have. Well, I’m done, Emmy! It ends here.’

  He scraped back his chair with such force that it toppled over but Amelia didn’t giggle at yet another display of Dobbin’s legendary clumsiness. Instead, she stood too, scared and silent and ashamed. Deeply ashamed because what Dobbin had just said was true. He had placed himself at her feet and she had trampled all over him. She didn’t want him, but she wanted him with her. She’d given him nothing over the years, but had taken everything that he had to give her.

  She wasn’t worthy of his love, and it broke her heart in a way that would have made Dobbin dare to hope, if he only knew.

  ‘You’re not going away, are you, William?’ He was finally William to her. Not Dobbin, the fool. But it was all too late.

  ‘I can’t stay. I’ve wasted enough of my life on this nonsense,’ he said, and he was gone before Amelia could even beg him to stay, brushing past Becky Sharp, who’d been stood in the doorway for quite some time. It would have been rude to interrupt the highly charged scene in front of her and besides, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been so entertained.

  Chapter 41

  Amelia wasn’t crying, which had to be some sort of miracle, but was standing there looking as if she’d been slapped around the face with a kipper.

  ‘The reason we’re so late has nothing to do with the president of Iceland and everything to do with your brother coming down wearing such a ridiculous suit, a pink-and-grey houndstooth, that I had to send him back to his room to change,’ Becky said airily, and oh yes, here were the inevitable tears, trickling down Amelia’s cheeks like raindrops. She sighed. ‘You haven’t grown up at all, have you? You’re still a very silly girl.’

  ‘Don’t, Becky,’ Amelia snapped, because she really wasn’t a silly girl at all. She was actually a very silly woman. ‘What do you know about love?’

  ‘Not a fucking thing, but I do know that if I had a man like that Dobbin, with brains and a heart, I wouldn’t even care about his huge ears and feet.’ Becky paused. ‘Or I wouldn’t care too much.’

  ‘He doesn’t love me any more and I can’t blame him!’ Amelia burst out, the tears flowing thick and fast now. ‘He’s right, I don’t deserve his love and anyway, I love George. Or I thought I did, when really it was just a silly adolescent crush that should have run its course. It’s all such a mess!’

  Amelia’s tearful soliloquy was, thankfully, interrupted by a waiter who appeared in the doorway to inform them that Mr Sedley had just collided with another gentleman and a passing sommelier carrying a bottle of red wine and that Mr Sedley was going to be further detained because he had to go back to his hotel and change again.

  ‘Oh God,’ Becky groaned. ‘Bring me a glass of champagne, and what do you want, Emmy? Though maybe not any alcohol, because it will just make you cry even more than you normally do.’

  ‘I don’t cry all the time.’ Amelia raised a tear-soaked face to the waiter who was clearly wishing that he hadn’t drawn the short straw when it came to being the bearer of bad tidings. ‘The man Mr Sedley collided with – was he very tall?’

  ‘Quite tall.’

  ‘And was he wearing—’

  ‘Very tall, very red of face with absolutely huge ears and feet, yes?’ Becky stepped in, otherwise this would take up even more time that it already had.

  ‘Yes,’ the hapless man agreed. ‘He was in a rush because he’d just ordered a car to the airport.’

  ‘The airport!’ Emmy wailed. ‘But he was meant to be staying for another day so he could attend a panel on landmines.’

  ‘What do you care?’ Becky asked, waving the man away because that champagne wasn’t going to get itself. ‘He made his feelings perfectly clear, and anyway, you just said you didn’t deserve his love.’

  Amelia tried to glare and cry at the same time, failing to do either effectively. ‘George …’ she sighed. ‘He might not have bought Pianoforte, but he still reached out to me and we were … We were intimate, it was why we were in Cannes, so he does … did love me.’

  ‘Ah, Cannes.’ It was Becky’s turn to sigh. ‘I won’t say I did it out of the goodness of my heart, because I didn’t. I did it because George had earned some payback from me, but for goodness’ sake, Emmy, I told you at the time that a man in love doesn’t behave the way he did in Cannes.’

  ‘You led him on,’ said the feminist campaigner who was always banging on about the solidarity of the sisterhood.

  ‘Believe me, I didn’t have to lead him very far.’ Becky started scrolling through her phone. ‘This was all George,’ she added, holding up the screen so that Amelia could see the note George had written on the back of a canapé menu. Becky had photographed it (because who knew when it might come in handy?) before she’d tossed it out of the back of her limo on the way to catch a private jet to Paris.

  Darling, delicious Becky

  As if you could ever imagine that Emmy means anything to me. She’s a stupid little girl while you’re all woman. As for Rawdon, he’s too dumb to appreciate what he has. Why did you have to marry him when if you’d waited, you could have had me?

  Together we would have been magnificent, unstoppable, so at least let us have this one night.

  I ache to possess you.

  Your Gorgeous George xxx

  ‘Judging by the date of the birth announcement, you must have already been pregnant when George was aching to possess me,’ Becky said with a grateful smile at a new waiter who’d been persuaded to bring her a glass of champagne.

  ‘Georgy …’ Amelia moaned faintly. ‘I have to think of little Georgy.’

  ‘Because big George is such a hands-on parent, is he?’ Never had Becky so eagerly awaited the arrival of Jos Sedley because this conversation with Amelia was torturous. In fact, waterboarding had to be preferable to this. ‘Oh, Emmy, we both know what you really want, so can we just stop all the amateur dramatics and tedious soul-searching?’

  ‘I’m sorry if my pain and confusion is boring you,’ Amelia sniffed, but she couldn’t help but take the bait. ‘What do I want, then? I wish you’d tell me because I’m sure I don’t know.’

  Becky leaned back in her chair and took a long sip of her drink. ‘You want to race out of the restaurant just as a cab will inevitably pull up, and before its passengers can get out, you’ll have already jumped in so you can scream, “To the airport!” Although by now you’re a good half an hour behind old Dobbin – all the better, so that when you do get there, you can see that his flight is about to depart and you jump the barriers and there’s police and guards running after you – though maybe they might just shoot you in the back because we are living in times of heightened security – and then you jump on to one of those airport buggies and you get to the gate just as Dobbin goes through and you call out his name and then …’

  Becky took another long, long, loooonnnnggggg sip of her drink.

  Amelia was in a torment. ‘And then … and then what?’ she begged.

  ‘He turns around and sees you. He wants to be angry with you, wants to flounce away and cut off his huge nose to spite his big, red face, but he’s loved you for so many years that he doesn’t know how not to love you. And you’ve made this big, romantic gesture so maybe, just maybe, you do love him a fraction as much as he loves you, and even though he has important work to do – more orphans to drag out of burning buildings, no doubt – he has to take this chance. By now, you’re thinking that you’ve blown it because Dobbin is just standing there with a gormless look on his face. You say his name again, falteringly, sadly, and he springs to life, fighting h
is way through the people still trying to board, falling over bits of hand luggage for comic effect …’

  ‘Becky!’ Amelia admonished. ‘Don’t be mean. Then what happens?’

  ‘You run over to him, he holds out his arms and you jump into them and you kiss …’

  ‘And everyone claps and cheers and I say that I’ve loved him, that I’ve always loved him …’

  ‘And then the police arrive and they arrest you for half a dozen crimes relating to terrorism and they send you off to Guantanamo Bay, never to be seen again,’ Becky said with some relish.

  ‘They closed Guantanamo Bay,’ Amelia said, but her eyes were sparkling and full of hope. ‘Oh! It’s so romantic, like something out of a film. If I go now, I’d only be about fifteen minutes behind Dobbin.’ She was already gathering up bag and pashmina shawl. ‘I have to give it a shot. I have to show Dobbin that I do deserve his love.’

  She was already halfway out of the room so Becky could finally yawn, then had to snap her mouth shut as Amelia’s head popped round the door. ‘But what about George’s political career? He’s tipped to be Prime Minister one day.’

  ‘Ha! I very much doubt that,’ Becky said. She’d just taken on a PA who’d been a junior researcher for the MP who had the office next door to George at Westminster. She’d had plenty to say about Gorgeous George and his extra-curricular activities with half the research staff of the House of Commons. Becky already had a lunch booked in with Laura Steyne, who owed her a huge favour now that she was running her father’s empire. ‘Go on! You only get one chance at love!’

  ‘Becky, you’re the best,’ Amelia yelped and she was gone.

  Becky Sharp smiled to herself. ‘I know.’

  THE DAILY GLOBE

  EXCLUSIVE!

  DISGRACED MP GEORGE WYLIE RESIGNS!

  Scotland Yard launch an investigation as five more women accuse him of sexual harassment