Marrying Up (16 page)

‘Come on,’ she urged Florrie as she returned with the pills. ‘You must get up. We’ve got Beattie’s wedding to go to.’

As Florrie’s face clouded, Alexa’s heart thumped. Sometimes, and particularly if she was in a bad mood, her flatmate resented
her use of private family diminutives. She could be mercurial like that; it was a window that could be slammed shut at any
moment.

Today, however, it passed without comment. Florrie, it seemed, had other matters on her mind.

‘Wedding!’ she groaned. ‘I can’t. I’m not going. I’m too ill!’

‘But it’s your sister’s,’ Alexa gasped. ‘You’re a bridesmaid.’

‘So what?’ Florrie pushed out her enchanting lower lip like the adorable five-year-old she had once been, and still essentially
was. But Alexa was finding her anything but cute at the moment. Fury and fear were roaring like a furnace within her. What
if Florrie refused to go? She was more than capable of spurning, on a whim, an event on which Alexa was pinning every hope.

‘You’ll feel better once you’re up and about,’ she soothed.

‘No I won’t,’ Florrie declared stubbornly. ‘I’m not going.’

‘But who’s going to stay here and look after you all day?’ Alexa urged sweetly, dandling her flatmate’s frail hands with every
appearance of deep affection.

Florrie propped her long, slim body up on her elbows and stared at Alexa with wide violet-blue eyes in which nothing but an
engaging innocence could be seen. ‘Why, Lexie, darling,’ she beamed, her smile lighting up her face and showing a row of small,
even pearly-white teeth, ‘you, of course.’

In the event, Florrie recovered. A sharp call from Lady Annabel helped concentrate what passed for her mind. Her own impressive
stamina in drinking matters did the rest. And so, that afternoon, Alexa sat, after all, in the great aisle of Westchester
Minster awaiting the entrance of Lady Beatrice Trevorigus-Whyske-Cleethorpe, soon to be Marchioness Dymchurch.

Alexa was struck by the extent to which the scene resembled her favourite dream. The Bach cantata coming from the great organ
could barely be heard above the murmur of the crowd. The place was packed. Royalty was present, as well as the Lord High Sheriff
and assembled nobles and notables from several counties around.

Alexa had planned her outfit carefully. Her short violet silk dress, fitted at the bodice and slightly bell-shaped in the
skirt, was pure Jackie O, with its scoop neck and narrow bow just below the bust. Violet was Florrie’s family colour; the
ancestral flag showed a boar’s head against a background of just this shade of purple. It had been intended as a subliminal
message to Ed. She had swept her dark hair back into a chignon.

The air above Alexa smelt damp and cool. It was dancing with dust, which occasionally caught the slants of light from the
great stained-glass windows. Painted shields and fringed banners dangled in the gloom of the vaulting, and the walls rioted
with memorials. Some were pale and neoclassical, all urns and rippling marble drapes held by great carved tassels. Others
were dark and Tudor couples in breeches and farthingales facing each other somewhat combatively over small prie-dieus.

At the front of the Minster, near the gold-draped altar groaning under the weight of ceremonial silverware and statement arrangements
from a specially imported Knightsbridge florist, was a richly carved medieval tomb. Inside was what was left of the thirteenth-century
queen promoted from the position of king’s mistress to monarch’s wife. They had married in this very cathedral. Had Alexa
known the story, she would have been both
interested and envious. Dead she might be, but she’d got her man.

As in Alexa’s dream, the glamorous young friends of the bride and groom occupied several pews in the middle of the nave. Long-limbed
young men with artfully tousled mops, signet rings and inherited Savile Row morning suits lounged next to the girls. Everyone
was yawning ostentatiously and repeatedly, as if the obligation to be up in the late morning to attend a lavish society wedding
was as dull a one as could be imagined.

Alexa knew some of them. She had served them at din-dins or sat up all hours in nightclubs with them, admittedly in Florrie’s
slipstream. But she could not catch a single eye now. A row of county worthies sitting in gold chains and robes along the
pew in front separated her from the rest of the crowd. But Alexa had the unpleasant feeling this was not the reason why people
did not look round.

Had everyone been warned not to talk to her? Or had there been some awful mistake with the seating?

Just over there was Lady Tara Shropshire, one of Florrie’s closest friends and a frequent visitor to the flat. Yet she kept
her bony brown back in its flame-red silk strappy dress firmly turned. Alexa, staring at those skinny Cadillac shoulder blades,
could hear her inane gabble from here. ‘Former hedgie . . . works in funding for Bollywood films . . . she’s got some pet
ferrets and she’s had this little palace built for them, so sweet . . . Jenson Button . . . Boujis . . . Keith Richards . . .’

Ed Whyske, meanwhile, was five rows in front of her, his head turning animatedly to the side as he joked with the girl beside
him. Lady Camilla Fish, Alexa recognised with a swoop of misery.

Alexa glared at the back of the Fish head, adorned with a simple circlet of daisies that made her own much-sprayed chignon
feel suddenly silly and stiff. She glared at the celebrated tattoo of the Fish family crest, which
Vogue
had recently described as ‘witty’, on Camilla’s elegant bicep. The other bicep, Alexa had
read in a
Tatler
profile, sported a line of Hindu script meaning ‘All titles, all wealth, they are nothing’.

‘Nothing!’ Alexa thought heatedly. Easy enough to say when, like Camilla, your father owned half of Hampshire! Camilla Fish,
who was more than merely grand and rich, but also effortlessly cool. She was one of those willowy, alternative aristocrats,
the sort that appeared on the front of the
Daily Telegraph
in Glastonbury week looking mud-spattered but beautiful in tiny shorts and Hunter wellies and hanging on to Kate Moss’s arm.

And now she was next to Ed! How, Alexa asked herself in panic, could she compete? On any level? Camilla Fish was long-legged,
long-throated, long-haired and equipped with the longest of aristocratic lineages. Her cheekbones were as high as her social
position and she had the type of breasts that supported themselves (the only part of her that did).

Alexa felt as if she would explode with frustration. There was not the slightest doubt in her mind that Ed and Camilla were
purposely placed there, right next to each other. Just as she was placed here, next to no one. Well, there was a person there,
but she was obviously no one, a fat woman with red cheeks and an unflattering yellow outfit. She looked, Alexa thought, like
a pig in a suit.

Yes, there had obviously been some mistake. And that mistake, Alexa guessed bitterly, was to assume that Lady Annabel would
place her with the social lions and not the inconsequentials at the back. Alexa had seen Lady Annabel pass earlier; she hadn’t
favoured her with so much as a glance. Her toned arm had been lightly threaded through that of her estranged husband, with
whom hostilities had evidently ceased for the service, in much the same way as the two sides in the First World War had played
football on Christmas Day. Alexa had noted the manic pride in Lady Annabel’s tanned face as she stalked by in high pink stilettos
perfectly matching the rose-coloured sleeveless shift dress that ended bang on the knee. The only positive thing
to emerge from her humiliation was that Barney van Hoosier did not appear to be present to witness her humiliation.

Now came the rattle of ancestral carriage wheels, the jingle of polished harness, the clip-clop of proud, high-stepping horses.

‘I think the bride’s here!’ Next to her, the fat woman shifted eagerly in her seat and looked excitedly round. Alexa clenched
her fingers over the clutch bag that matched her violet dress. The sight of Beatrice coming down the aisle would, she knew,
make her want to throw up. She fixed her eyes in despair on the vast cathedral organ with its Victorian-Gothic-patterned pipes,
ranged above the carved stone choir screen that was Gothic from the first time round.

She felt the fat woman next door’s spare tyres ripple with excitement as the future Marchioness passed the end of the pew.
‘Oooh, doesn’t she look lovely.’

‘Gorgeous,’ Alexa snarled, thinking it was amazing what diamonds could do. Beatrice, who was perfectly acceptable-looking
anyway, was elevated to goddess level by the wall of solid carbon otherwise known as the Dymchurch tiara, beneath whose blaze
her features appeared in a wildly flattering glow.

Alexa raised her chin and squinted towards the distant altar end. She could just about see the Marquess of Dymchurch, the
future husband, staring up the aisle, an expression of characteristic blankness on his strangely flat face.

And now here came the bridesmaids; four of them, all daughters of the nobility. Florrie was the tallest and noblest. As she
passed the end of the pew, pure perfection in her close-fitting white satin dress, Alexa was unable to believe this was the
same girl who had been poleaxed by a hangover only a few short hours before.

As she came down the aisle, Florrie was giggling and waving to acquaintances as if she were in a nightclub rather than the
nave of a cathedral. She was pointing at her head, grinning and turning her eyes up, presumably to convey the severity of
the hangover. Spotting Alexa, she even made being-sick gestures, but
these were swiftly replaced by a look of puzzlement. ‘What on earth are you doing sitting
there
?’ she demanded deafeningly. ‘You’re in the
public
bit with the oiks.’

Alexa, recognising her chance, leant forward. ‘Yes. I know. I think there’s been a mistake.’

Florrie’s enormous violet-blue eyes widened. ‘But Mummy did all the cathedral seating herself,’ she exclaimed, before adding
with a shrug, ‘Oh well, never mind. Who cares anyway?’

After the service, Alexa, the pig in the suit and the others at the rear of the Minster had to wait for those at the front
to exit first. Very possibly, she realised, this was another part of Lady Annabel’s strategy: allowing all eligible men to
be snapped up by other, more socially elevated single women before the likes of Alexa were released from their pens with the
rest of the common herd.

When she finally emerged, blinking, into the heat and brightness of midday, the cobbled parvis in front of the Minster could
barely be seen beneath the mass of moving pastel, nodding fascinators and tanned flesh, punctuated by flashes of expensive
jewellery as the wedding guests exclaimed excitedly at each other and exchanged handshakes and air kisses.

As hanging about on the sidelines was obviously social suicide, Alexa dived into the crowd. She needed to make friends, fast.
Apart from anything else, Florrie was elsewhere being a bridesmaid, and it was not at all clear how Alexa would get to the
wedding breakfast. It was some distance away, at Willoughby Hall, and no one had offered her a lift so far.

And would it be worth it anyway? If Lady Annabel had seated her at the back of the Minster for the wedding, there were no
prizes for guessing where she would be at the wedding breakfast. On table one hundred million, right by the door, with all
the
bores, misfits and commoners Florrie’s mother had been reluctant to ruin any other tables with.

Alexa tried to pull herself together. There was no point in being negative. She had to look for opportunities. Create some,
if necessary.

‘Peregrine!’ She hailed the first person she recognised; a tall young man in tails who seemed to be having trouble standing
on his own feet. The Marquess of Dymchurch’s younger brother had been one of the groomsmen, making a hopeless hash of handing
out hymn books and service sheets at the cathedral door. His long face was flushed and spotty, he wore very dark round sunglasses
– as indeed he had throughout the service – and his hair stood aloft in dryish brown spikes. ‘Couldn’t bag a ride off you
up to Willoughby, could I?’ Alexa purred with an ingratiating smile.

Peregrine looked startled. He twisted his fat red lips. ‘Well, thing is, I’ve sort of got rather a full car. Taking twenty
guys already.’

‘Surely there’s room for a little one,’ Alexa wheedled. Her situation was desperate. If she couldn’t get a lift, she would
have to catch the bus. Her ever-delicate finances, strained in the extreme now she was full-time life assistant to Florrie,
would not even cover the cost of a taxi.

Tension filled the sunny air. Alexa could see the beginnings of a sweat breaking out on Peregrine’s bald pink forehead.

She decided to force the issue. She turned a piteous look on him. ‘I’ve got
such
a painful ankle. Twisted it on these wretched cobbles!’ She shook her head in just enough mock despair to allow a strand
or two from her chignon to pull away from its rigidly hairsprayed fellows and fall winsomely over her face. ‘I’d be
so
grateful if you could fit me in too.’

Behind his sunglasses, Peregrine’s face was evidently panicked. ‘Er . . .’ he stuttered.

Alexa was smiling brilliantly. ‘So kind of you. You can’t imagine how sore my ankle is.’

Peregrine’s expression had something about it of the rabbit caught in the headlights. He sensed he was in the grip of a higher
power, but had no idea how to remove himself from its influence.

Alexa now had complete command of the situation. ‘I simply can’t walk another step.’ She sighed, performing an apparently
agonised hop forward. Quick as a flash, she had grabbed his arm and now hung there like a limpet.

As there was obviously no shaking her off, either literally or metaphorically, Peregrine Dymchurch now accepted the inevitable.
‘You’d better come this way,’ he grunted, dragging her in the direction of a large sand-coloured vintage motorcar with huge
headlights, spare wheel on the back and a folded-down hood. It was parked at the edge of the cobbled area and was already
full of lissom girls and young men with cigarettes at the corner of their mouths struggling with champagne corks.
Pop!
went one of the bottles. There was a roar of approval, followed by shrieks as the bottle’s contents gushed on to the antique
leather seats.