Marrying Up (18 page)

She was staring down at her water glass, wondering whether to smash it, slash her wrists and end it all now, when she felt
a hand on her shoulder and a familiar smooth voice in her ear. ‘She stiffed me too. Table 110, and so far back in the cathedral
I was practically in the bloody bus station.’

Alexa twisted round. ‘Barney!’ she said in surprise, recognising him from Florrie’s dinner party. Donkin and Spratt had stopped
talking, she saw, and were staring open-mouthed at the vision in three-piece violet linen with a large purple orchid in the
buttonhole.

‘Join the club,’ she said ruefully.

Barney’s mouth was hissing at her ear. ‘So why don’t we get together? Defeat the common enemy? You’ll be needing a place to
stay, at the very least.’

She had no choice, Alexa realised. Otherwise it was Mum and Dad’s. And there was no chance that she was going home again.
Unless the home involved had the word ‘stately’ in front of it.

At Oakeshott, the grass waved and shone in the sunshine and the trees glowed with fresh green leaves. Above, the sky was blue;
around, the air was warm and sweet with the singing of birds. But Polly was not thinking of the summer.

‘Is there a bottom to space?’ she heard Kyle asking, from what seemed a great distance away.

Polly blinked and came back down to earth. She and the children had stopped for lunch and were sitting on the grass at the
side of the trench. Kyle had left his group of friends and had come over to where Polly was sitting some distance away, hunched
over her knees, sandwiches untouched, her water bottle dangling in one hand. ‘What?’ Polly said, vaguely recalling something
about bottoms.

Kyle repeated his question.

Polly took a slug of water and pondered. Of late, as he became more interested, Kyle had been firing questions at her like
a machine gun, not just about Romans, with which she was fine, but about everything, about which she could be patchy. He was,
for all his shaven head and lack of finesse, an extraordinarily bright child. His brain never seemed to stop; something in
it was always digging away, like Napoleon the dog.

Long gone were the days when Kyle thought the ancient world was invented by George Lucas. Now, he could recite most of the
main dates in Roman history, even manage the odd sentence in
Latin. ‘Kylus sum,’ he would say, banging himself across the chest in a clenched-fist salute.

‘I’m not sure that there is a bottom to space really,’ Polly managed eventually. ‘Space is, well, infinite.’

Kyle, however, had moved on. ‘And what would happen if Jupiter fell on the earth?’

Polly stretched her eyes and tried to remember about gravitational pull. ‘Well it wouldn’t because . . .’

Kyle was opening a bag of crisps as he listened. ‘Do you believe in God?’ he asked next, stuffing handfuls of Quavers in his
mouth.

Polly felt tired. It was all rather intense for a Tuesday lunchtime. ‘Well, he is a historical figure,’ she conceded vaguely.

‘Do you believe in him or don’t you?’ Kyle was narrowing his eyes at her; his stubbly hair bristled in the sunshine. He was
evidently determined to nail the issue.

‘Well, I believe in something more powerful than myself,’ Polly said evasively, taking another sip of water.

‘But that’s not saying much, is it?’ he said dismissively.

Polly had to grin. No, it wasn’t saying very much. And, actually,

she didn’t need Kyle to point out how unimportant she was.

A week, Max had said. But a week had already gone and there was no word from him. She wasn’t seriously worried. Just puzzled.
He had given her no contact details; she didn’t even know where he was. But he had promised to get in contact, and she must
have faith that he would.

Fortunately, there was work, although possibly not for much longer. Polly, in the shallow excavation trench, looked down at
the brown soil, which had been worked over and sifted through again and again. It was pretty likely that nothing was left.
All that could be excavated had been; it had all been duly drawn, plotted, photographed and recorded. She needed to let the
county council, as well as Mrs Butcher, know that work was coming to an end. The thought of telling Mrs Butcher, let alone
Kyle, was a difficult one.

Perhaps she would put it off another week.

‘But if God created the world in six days, what about the Big Bang?’

Kyle was off again. Polly groped for the answer, even though this very morning on the
Today
programme they’d had a Christian fundamentalist and a scientist going hammer and tongs on Creationism versus Darwinism. She
racked her brains to remember what they had said.

‘What does Mrs Butcher say?’ she hazarded, eventually.

‘She says that God created the Big Bang.’

‘Ah.’ Polly smiled. As neat a way of getting round it as any other. She rose to her feet. ‘Back to work, everyone.’

Of course, there was no work left to do now really. She paced slowly over to her own area of the trench, crouched down and
poked the soil. It was a part that had been examined many times before. Yet something – sentimentality? – was urging her to
have one last look. She probed away gently with her trowel, following the progress of the tool with her fingers and thinking
of Max. The soil gave way easily. Down and down went her questing trowel; deeper it bit, deeper than previously. She knew
nothing was down there, but it was soothing somehow, this peaceful, effortless exploration, feeling the sun on her back, aware
of the children chattering and bickering in the background.

What was that? Polly was jolted from her reverie. The edge of the trowel had struck something. She felt her fingers make contact
with a smooth object. She stopped digging and felt with sure, gentle but feverish fingers the small expanse of what had been
exposed and which now gleamed grey in the sunshine.

Hardly daring to breathe, she picked up her trowel again and began gently to move the earth around it away. One never expected
to find them; the last time had been a complete surprise as well . . .

Polly glanced up at the children, all frowning over graph paper as they plotted their finds. They were occupied, absorbed.
She
bent her head; her hair flopped into her eyes. She shook it aside and set to work.

A few minutes later, alerted by some instinct, Kyle looked up. He saw Polly’s crouching figure and realised she was, even
for her, very absorbed.

Kyle narrowed his eyes. Was she gazing into space again? Her attention didn’t seem to be on them any more. He knew there was
something wrong; they all did, and Poppy said it was
definitely
because Miss Stevenson was in love with that good-looking man with the dark hair whose dog had dug up the bone that time,
and who hadn’t been back for ages. ‘Rubbish,’ Kyle had said robustly, only to have Poppy snap that it was true and that
she
knew about these things and
he
didn’t.

Poppy, who knew nothing about the Big Bang, or gravitational pull. Let alone about the Pubic Wars; it was Pubic, wasn’t it?

Kyle still felt disappointed that the dog’s bone hadn’t turned out to be a whole skeleton, but even more disappointed in Miss
Stevenson. How silly to be in love. He had thought better of her. He himself was never going to be in love, obviously. But
if he ever
had
to, it would be with someone like Miss Stevenson, with her soft hair and the gentle eyes that looked at you in such a kind
and friendly way. He felt annoyed with the dark-haired man. How dare he upset Miss Stevenson?

Polly was still working at the soil. His quick, perceptive eye noticed that her movements were unusually swift; there was
something excited about them. Had she found something?

Kyle’s instinct, never long dormant, to bring noise where there was silence, chaos where there was order, excitement where
there was calm, was mixed with a genuine curiosity about what was happening and propelled him to her side.

He stared in amazement at the earth in front of her.

‘Miss!
Mi-iss!
’ The noise exploded in Polly’s ear like a trumpet blast. ‘
Miss!
’ Kyle shrieked. ‘You’ve dug up a skull!’

The road Barney lived on marked the border between an undesirable west London postcode and its more desirable immediate neighbour.
The house containing his flat was on the desirable side but did not get the sun in the morning. Or any other time of day,
Alexa now knew. It was small, dark, smelly and faced directly on to a sink estate.

Strictly socially speaking, this did not matter; the W11 postcode for invitation purposes was the crucial factor. Few of Barney’s
friends – when he had had them – had ever visited in person.

The flat was entered through a battered front door, whose central panel bore several unsteadily mounted bells of different
sizes and vintages, pertaining to the apartments above Barney’s. In the few short weeks she had lived in close proximity to
them, Alexa had had to get used to the reggae DJ who lived on the top floor and the floor-pounding fitness instructor who
lived directly above.

The instructor was at it already, Alexa thought, hearing the usual regular thudding of trainered feet on the flimsy ceiling.
She lay on her back and watched the swaying lightshade. It was not a question of if, rather of when the floor would give way
and the muscle-bound Greek who lived above dropped into her midst accompanied by shattered floorboards and plaster dust.

Alexa’s bedroom was the first door in the grubby hallway.
Because it had a high ceiling and the floor space was little larger than the mattress serving as a bed, it looked like a shoebox
turned on its end. On the wall opposite the door was a tiny blocked-up fireplace, its mantelpiece festooned with dusty Bollinger
bottles with grubby candles stuck in the necks. Next to the grimy window was a small wooden wardrobe on whose ill-fitting,
permanently open door Barney’s black tie outfit hung, swathed in dry-cleaner’s plastic and ever ready on a wooden coathanger.
Ever ready, but these days hardly ever used.

The room had been Barney’s, but now he slept on the sitting room sofa. This gave Alexa’s room, grim as it was, a context.
It was small, noisy, comfortless and damp, but at least it was private. She should be grateful.

Alexa got up and found her host in the tiny sitting room.

‘Good morning!’ Barney trilled. ‘Marvellous day, isn’t it?’ He was so positive, he made her feel listless by comparison. He
was like an engine that was always switched on. His energy seemed to throb through the room.

He was ensconced in one of the few pieces of furniture: a very tatty winged armchair with a standard lamp beside it, its shade
skew-whiff. He wore pyjamas of shiny pale pink cotton, trimmed with dark blue piping. Over this was a silk paisley dressing
gown, and there were burgundy velvet slippers on his plump little feet. Barney always dressed as if he was breakfasting at
Brideshead rather than opposite one of the capital’s most notorious council estates.

He, too, had apparently only just got up; the habits of a night owl, he claimed, were hard to break. Although the invitations
to white-tie balls or to play poker all night in exclusive Mayfair clubs had dried up, Barney kept the same hours.

He now spent them on Facebook, and with enormous benefit to them both; Alexa had found her page exhaustively updated with
awe-inspiring views of Scotland and distant glimpses of baronial towers; the on-site claim being that, due to a family emergency,
this was where she had been spending the summer.

Barney was not online now, however. He was reading a newspaper, his brow furrowed in apparent deep concentration. Beside him
on the floor was an elegant white and gold cup and saucer. None of his china matched; purloined as it was from various stately
homes and grand hotels, his plates, cups, dishes and ashtrays name-checked palaces of gracious living a world away from the
battered kitchen cupboards in which they sat. Reaching up to get a cup down, Alexa would feel taunted.

She padded barefoot over the dirty grey carpet to the small square dining table at which no dinner parties were ever held
and lifted up the coffee pot. Her eye fell on a white piece of paper unfolded near the pot: Barney’s annual membership renewal
letter from the London Library.

‘It costs a
fortune
!’ Alexa picked up the bill in astonishment.

Barney looked up mildly. ‘But it’s very social. You see influential people in the lift all the time.’

Alexa remarked that hundreds of pounds a year was a high price to pay for this privilege; indeed, it was possible that the
influencer concerned would privately appear in any lift Barney cared to nominate for less.

‘That may well be true,’ Barney concurred. ‘But I can’t start removing myself from society.’

Alexa pulled out a chair from under the small table and cursed as a pile of magazines slipped off the seat and landed on her
foot. Barney’s flat was not only cramped and dark, it was squalid and full of rubbish. It needed cleaning, although Alexa
had no intention of obliging. Nothing would more eloquently advertise the end of her hopes of advancement than getting on
her knees on the bathroom floor and scrubbing out the toilet bowl.

A great wave of misery swept over her. ‘Oh, Barney,’ she groaned. ‘What are we going to do? It’s social death!’

Barney looked up from his newspaper. His small mouth was turned upwards in a beam. ‘Precisely, my dear Alexa. That’s just
what it is.’

‘Social death?’ she repeated. Then why did he look so happy about it?

‘Yes! I’m taking you to a memorial service!’

There was a silence.

‘You’re taking me to a
memorial
service?’ Alexa managed.

‘Lord Bedstead’s died,’ Barney announced cheerfully. ‘It’s a great opportunity for you.’

‘I may be desperate,’ Alexa muttered, ‘but necrophilia’s not my thing.’

She had heard of Lord Bedstead; not his real name, but a reference to his sexual prowess. Which could have had possibilities
had not the peer in question not been several decades older than her and with a penchant for Brazilian cross-dressers. And
dead, into the bargain.