Beggar Bride (23 page)

‘Honesty’s not going to like this.’

Nanny Ba-ba knits on. She will have to start on baby clothes soon. Pink or blue, she wonders? Lemon, lemon is safer. ‘Honesty should try and be a little more affable.’

‘There’s nothing Honesty won’t do when it comes to protecting her father.’

At the end of the row, Nanny Ba-ba slides the steel knitting needle through her thinning white hair. ‘Maudie, what are you suggesting? Honesty is certainly fond of Fabian but then most daughters are close to their fathers. I myself was close to mine, but sadly he died early.’

‘I saw her passing the blood money over.’ And Maudie clamps her lips up tight as a crimped pasty behind this incredible statement.

‘I beg your pardon?’ says Nanny Ba-ba, her knitting discarded on her lap. Her leg has been playing her up badly today.

By now Maudie is rigid, as if this information is being pumped out of her from somewhere below the seat of her hard-backed chair. ‘Why else would she be handing over all those notes? New ones, too. I could tell by the way she was forced to lick her finger so many times.’

‘Who to, for goodness’ sake?’

‘To that devil who calls himself Callister with all his gypsy earrings. The one who found Helena’s body, and he knows more about that than he’s saying. It was the very day after Helena’s body was discovered.
The very day after!
I ask you.’

‘You were probably mistaken.’ Nanny Ba-ba opens her knitting bag to take out a new ball of rainbow wool.

‘I know what I saw,’ says Maudie coldly.

‘Even if you did see Honesty passing money over, why should it be blood money, it was more likely payment for some job the fellow had done… Maudie, you really can be ridiculous sometimes. First it’s Ffiona and now it’s poor Fabian. What an imagination! Fancy leaping to the conclusion that Honesty was paying the man off, protecting her father. If money needed passing over why wouldn’t Fabian do it himself? So you think Fabian killed Helena, is that it? And why, pray, would he want to do that?’

‘He must have snapped,’ says Maudie vaguely. ‘We all have our limits.’

‘Count for me, Maudie,’ says Nanny Ba-ba. ‘Count the tens I call out on your fingers.’

‘I am going to write to the twins at school, and then I am going to write to Ffiona and Honesty,’ Fabian tells Angela later that day as they sit in the small drawing-room after dinner, with its carved and gilded rafters, the two Jack Russells, Gog and Magog, at their feet. He has been giving the matter some serious consideration. A letter is often the best way of imparting distressing news and Fabian does not doubt that both Ffiona and Honesty will see his new wife’s condition as somewhat distressing.

Although why this should be so still beats him.

He supposes that Honesty’s reaction will be fuelled by jealousy, and the knowledge that someone else will have to share her eventual inheritance. Of course, if the child is a boy her behaviour would be more understandable, there’s a fortune inside this house, the Louis XIV chair he is sitting on now is worth thousands, the Turner on the wall at least a million, let alone the murals on the panelling and the thick, oriental rugs, and if Hurleston were to stay in his immediate family Fabian would be reluctant to split all these magnificent heirlooms.

Ffiona’s distress, on the other hand, will be simply because she hates him and any idea that Fabian might find happiness acts as a red rag to an infuriated bull.

As far as the twins are concerned it is difficult to tell what their feelings will be, other than an understandable hurt that their mother is being replaced.

Good God, he is sick and tired of placating his miserable family, his poor, tormented relations. Here he is, sitting beside his beautiful wife who is carrying his child, and everything in the garden ought to be rosy. But no, damn it. He is hindered and handicapped, having to worry about breaking the news when really, what the hell do they matter? If only Ffiona had died along with Helena, he would have danced on that creature’s grave. But Fabian is pained rather than angry. What greedy, unpleasant people they are.

‘Why don’t you just wait and allow them to find out in due course?’ Angela asks him nervously.

‘Because it’s time I spoke to them seriously with your welfare at heart.’

‘Not the twins?’

‘Well, yes, I’m afraid the twins could do with a lesson in manners themselves. I am not having you upset, Angela, and that’s all there is to it. If Honesty and Ffiona start causing trouble then I shall stop Honesty’s allowance immediately and I shall consider changing my will.’

‘Oh, Fabian, but she’ll be so hurt and upset!’

‘That is up to her. She should have thought about that. And if she misses the point then Ffiona certainly won’t.’

‘But you’ll antagonise them forever.’

‘That cannot be helped,’ says Fabian firmly. His face is flushed. His hand is broad and firm. ‘Now don’t you worry, Angela.’ He reaches forward and pats her small hand. ‘You leave everything to me. Anyone would think you and I had no right to be so happy.’

A
LOWER SUNLIGHT NOW
, as summer gives over to autumn, sweeping along dead leaves and old twigs with her skirts as she goes, and Ange’s life begins to form a pattern, most of it scurrying backwards and forwards between Willington Gardens and Cadogan Square.

Getting fatter.

But then, out of the blue,
‘You’ve told her, Billy?
I can’t believe it, even you couldn’t be so sodding stupid. Tell me you’re joking, go on, you only said that for a laugh!’

‘Oh, Ange…’

‘Don’t sodding well oh Ange me,
what d’you really think this is then, some kind of game we’re playing and we can just pick up our bats and balls when we’ve had enough and go home to Mummy and Daddy? What sort of dickhead are you, anyway? Here I am, living on my wits, living a lie, trying to remember a thousand things while you sit here waiting for the money to roll in, grumbling about how bored you are and how lonely you are and how bloody badly done to you are.’

‘I knew you’d be like this.’

‘Well then, shit, if you knew I’d be like this why the bloody hell did you do it? You sad sod.’

Billy hangs his head as well he might. ‘It just seemed the only thing to do. I wish I hadn’t told you now.’ He lifts his head to face her and a blond curl tumbles appealingly over his eye. ‘I needn’t have told you, Ange, I could have kept it quiet and you’d never have known.’

‘Oh, big deal.’

Ange flops onto the sofa, arms spread over the back and head hanging forward in the pose of a tortured martyr. This is too much. This might as well be the end and they haven’t saved a damn penny, well, certainly not enough to do any real good. The bloody prat. She can’t even look at him she is so furious. They don’t even know Tina, they only met her when they moved here in February and then they were only on nodding terms for weeks. They heard her crying, they heard Petal’s screams and they heard the
bumps and bangs coming from next door, but Tina and Ed were strangers, best kept at arm’s length. And now this.

‘You should have kept your big mouth shut.’

‘I know, I know, I know I should.’

‘Well, what did she say?’

‘She thought it was bleeding great.’

‘Bleeding great. I see.’ Ange repeats it like a robot. ‘Bleeding great. Fine. So you tell me, Billy, where do we go from here?’

‘I don’t know what you mean, Ange.’

And after all she’s been through.

Ange never really believed she’d get anywhere near this far. Her plan, so glittering, so far-fetched, so ludicrous according to Billy, was the result of total desperation, like tunnelling out of a trap through soft, desert sand. At any time she expects the whole thing to cave in and choke her. But since it seems to be working Ange has no alternative but to be swept along with it, half hoping—and she only admits this to herself—that something will go wrong so she can creep back to Billy again and stop being brave.

But Billy is making no attempt to be brave. Yes, it must be really nice having someone to share all his troubles with, someone to moan on at about Ange and how long the whole process is taking when he’d thought it would take a couple of months at the most. But can Tina be trusted, for God’s sake? She’s the sort of person you can’t help liking she’s so willing, and open, and trusting, and she’s a victim, openly declared, so she’s got no false pride or silly values to get round. The only thing they really share, apart from the same address, is the same social worker.

‘And you told her about the money, too, I suppose?’

‘I told her everything, Ange, and I’m sorry.’

‘So she knows I’m pregnant?’

Billy looked her up and down, too insolently, she thought. ‘Everyone can see that.’

Yes, she supposes they can. She’d hardly shown at all when she had Jacob except in the last month and then she’d thought she’d burst. This baby is going to be different, she can feel the difference inside her in the way that it moves, such strong, gusty rolls and punches, sometimes it feels that she’s got a living puppy inside her.

‘The Ormerods are renowned for their large babies,’ Elfrida told her confidently, when giving her another bottle of Horlicks tablets by which she swears. Ange smiled weakly. Little did she know. But the conditions, this time, are quite different. Although she’s a nervous wreck and getting worse every day, she eats well, she’s warm and cared for, she sleeps on comfortable beds. Ange is a hundred times fitter than she was when she was carrying poor little Jacob.

He is still not growing as he ought to be.

She’d gone with Fabian to see Sir Clement Brownjohn, a stooping, doddery, white-haired old man in an office like a hotel with thick carpets and plants and receptionists who looked like models straight out of
Vogue.
Fabian and Sir Clement shook hands over her as if they were a couple of farmers clinching a deal at market and she was the fatted calf. She came out with vitamins and supplements rattling around in her handbag and Fabian half carried her across the pavement and into the Rolls.

‘I’m not ill, Fabian,’ she protested with a laugh.

‘No, not ill, but so very precious,’ he told her.

Ange refused the scan.

‘You’re very silly, darling,’ said Fabian. ‘What if the child is handicapped?’

She nearly told him to shut up, he sounded so like Billy.

‘It won’t be handicapped,’ she told him, with a little friendly punch, ‘and that’s not why you want me to have a scan. You just want to see if it’s a boy or a girl!’

‘That’s not true.’

But it was. ‘What will you feel if it’s another girl?’ Ange asked him. ‘Tell me honestly.’

‘I’d love it anyway, whatever it was,’ he said, but Ange didn’t believe him. She’d like it to be a girl. If it was a girl she’d call it Daisy, but Fabian hadn’t bothered to discuss girls’ names.

Neither Honesty nor Ffiona replied to Fabian’s letter, but the twins sent a congratulations card, more appropriate for a new job than a new child. Had they meant it that way, or was Ange seeing things that weren’t really there? Fabian seemed pleased to get it anyway, and the summer holidays passed without mishap. Elfrida took charge of the twins and, because Fabian was terribly busy and travelling a good deal, he and Ange only managed to go to Devon on a couple of long weekends.

She is getting more used to the helicopter although she still hates it. She turned down the lessons Fabian offered to give her.

Honesty, they were told, had spent most of the summer there, riding and walking on her own. ‘She must miss her father terribly,’ Elfrida confided to Ange. ‘I do wish she’d stop all this silly nonsense.’

‘I expect she will in the end,’ said Ange. Hopefully.

Tina defends him, unnecessarily in Ange’s point of view, and to her great annoyance.

‘I don’t think you realise, Ange, how hard this is for Billy. I mean, imagine if he was spending most nights in bed with another woman. You’d go barmy. And I think what he has allowed you to do is brill.’

‘What he’s allowed me to do?
Tina, is that really what you just said? You’ve got a fucking nerve. You make it sound as if I was desperate to get into bed with this old tosser, as if I’m having a real rave while Billy sits here on his own and suffers.’

‘Well he does, most nights,’ says Tina frankly. ‘So can you blame him for off-loading some of it onto me? It’s very hard to make friends with anyone, Ange, if you’re not being honest and his lies, trying to protect you, were going way over the top.’

Billy was always rather poor at inventions. ‘Why does nobody think about me? I can’t even smoke,’ cries Ange, ‘for God’s sake.’

What’s this bloody self-righteousness crap of a sudden? Tina’s hair is black, dyed black, so it’s matt with hardly any sheen and her black eyebrows are pencilled in like seagulls against a very white sky. With her exaggerated hour-glass figure, bandy-legged and tottering along on spindly heels, Tina looks like the tart she used to be when Ed kept her on the game and pocketed most of the proceeds. She never wears any colour but black, she puts Petal in black, too, very odd, it gives the child a weird foreign look as if she’s an alien in time and place. She likes to think she is gothic. Tina started her lingerie parties to try and make some money for herself but Ed barged in and ruined all that as he always did. She took him back. Whatever he did she took him back.

‘The poor bugger’s even got to make out his own baby is somebody else’s!’

Ah, dear, dear, poor Billy. Poor Billy, who goes on a spree every week if she’ll let him, saying he needs this and that, and he shouldn’t be taking Jacob with him to the football, either. He is sitting back, listening to Tina’s defence, loving every minute of it, women fighting over him.

‘So who have you told then, Tina?’ Ange eyes her steadily, blowing smoke directly and spitefully into her neighbour’s eyes.

‘Sod off,’ says Tina, turning dismissively away.

Ange places her hands on her hips. ‘Listen, I mean this. I want to know who you’ve told.’

‘You’re not going to believe me whatever I tell you.’

‘Try me,’ says Ange.

‘Well who the hell would I tell, for christsakes,’ asks Tina, ‘who do I see, where do I go? And what business is it of mine?’