The Marrying Game (2 page)

‘Well, don’t look at me,’ Nancy said. ‘My tips barely keep me in fags as it is.’

Rufa had shaken off her exhaustion. She was looking narrowly at their faces. ‘You’re all lovely-looking girls, you know. And I’m not bad, when I don’t smell like a mince pie. Now, there’s an asset – it’s almost a shame Brian can’t put us up for auction along with the furniture.’

There was a silence, as the four of them considered the unarguable, taken-for-granted beauty that was a fact of being a Hasty. It had never occurred to them that this beauty might do more than give them first pick of the local talent. And they could not think of their looks without hearing the rapturous voice of the Man – ‘My seraglio, my genetic miracles, my peerless princesses –’

Rufa, at twenty-seven, was a Burne-Jones nymph in jeans and Timberlands. Her skin was transparently soft and white, against the royal burgundy of her splendid
hair
(all the girls had fathoms of hair, because the Man had insisted that his lambs should never be shorn). Rufa’s eyes were of a rare dark blue, that could blacken in shadow and suddenly blaze sapphire. She was as tall as the Man had been, and very thin. A woman from a model agency had ‘discovered’ her while she was in the Fifth Form at St Hildegard’s, and begged her to come to London.

The Man had laughed and laughed, at the bare idea of exposing his firstborn and favourite to the vulgar gaze of the public. It had never been mentioned again.

Nancy, at twenty-six, was a Renoir in everything but flesh. Her curves were slender, her voluptuousness spiritual rather than physical. She was a kind of alternative, X-rated version of Rufa – less gaspingly beautiful, more absolutely sexy. Nancy’s hair was decidedly red. Her large, firm breasts were the envy of her skinny sisters. Her eyes were sleepy and mocking, her lips generous and wanton. She was an orchid amongst lilies of the valley.

Twenty-four-year-old Lydia was more like their mother than the Man. Her style was delicate fragility, exquisite in the detail. She was smaller than Rufa and Nancy. Her eyes were of a lighter, brighter blue, and her billows of curly hair were golden-brown. At her best she was a Hilliard miniature, executed with the finest of fine brushwork. These days, unkempt and unplucked, she had the wistful appeal of a mossy stone angel in a secret garden.

Selena, the Man’s afterthought, was seventeen. She was very tall and lanky, but it was difficult to tell exactly what she looked like. Her hair, the same colour as Lydia’s, was worn in matted dreadlocks. She was further
disguised
by small round glasses and studs in her nose, lower lip and tongue.

Regretfully, Selena said, ‘Nobody marries for money any more.’

‘People have always married for money,’ Rufa returned, ‘and they always will. Most of our ancestors did. Nobody bothered about romance in those days.’

The others furtively exchanged significant looks. They all knew she was thinking of Jonathan, the man who had broken her heart.

‘Marriage without love is totally pointless.’ Lydia, the passive and retiring, spoke with unaccustomed authority. She was the only one of them who had ever been married. ‘It’s total agony anyway. I could only leave Ran when I stopped being in love with him.’

This time, Rufa joined in the significant looks. Lydia’s sisters did not believe she had ever stopped loving her hopeless young husband.

‘There would have been a point, if Ran had loads of money,’ Selena said.

Rufa tipped more wine into her teacup. ‘In this family, we’ve always made love far too important. It’s only ever brought us trouble.’

‘I did have Linnet because of love,’ Lydia pointed out.

‘Apart from Linnet.’ Rufa crossed her long legs, and pushed her hair impatiently over her shoulder. ‘Maybe we should think about marrying money. A hundred years ago, it would have been the sensible thing to do.’

Very unwillingly, the other three drew the real, outside world into focus.

‘I suppose I could just about marry a man I don’t love,’ Nancy said thoughtfully. ‘But I draw the line at someone I don’t fancy.’

‘I’m sure you could make the effort,’ Rufa said, ‘since you seem to fancy just about anything with a backbone.’

Nancy smiled, not displeased. ‘If I was as fussy as you are, I’d never have any fun at all.’

Rufa sighed. ‘Being fussy didn’t do me much good, did it?’

She did not often talk about this episode in her life – the one time she had been at odds with the Man. He had teased her relentlessly about the affair with Jonathan. He had entertained the family with such marvellous imitations of Jonathan that even Rufa had been forced to laugh. The seriousness of Rufa in love had alarmed him. For once in his life, the Man had found himself sharing his throne.

‘It was like a tasteful film on Channel Four,’ he used to say, smiling down the dinner table, over Rufa’s bowed auburn head. ‘Tonight, after the news, poncey London novelist rents country cottage, falls for local redhead – then rushes home to his wife, to write it all down.’

That had been more or less it, in a nutshell. At the time, three summers ago, Rufa had not known that losing her heart to Jonathan Wilby was a cliché. She had been ready to give him her body and soul – and he had not been able to cope with the intensity of his village-born beauty, nor the antics of her barking upper-class family. Rufa had never found out why Jonathan took fright so suddenly. She suspected the Man – of what, she did not know; but it was the one canker in her memories of him.

‘If you ask me,’ Nancy said, snatching the wine bottle, ‘falling in love is the only thing that makes life on earth worth living. But I’m not sure about marriage. I mean, look at Liddy.’

‘God, yes,’ Lydia sighed, ‘look at me.’

Ten years ago, the teenaged Lydia had fallen wildly in love with Randolph Verrall, who raised goats on a neighbouring smallholding, and believed that keeping a crystal in your pants drawer could increase your sexual potency. Ran’s mother lived in a ruined Scottish castle, which she had turned into a commune. His father, long dead, had left him a Georgian farmhouse, squatting on a few scrubby acres. It was here that Ran tended his goats, hosted fire-walking weekends and meditated naked.

Ran’s extraordinary dark beauty had blinded Lydia to his absurdity. Like the Man, he was an Old Etonian of the purely ornamental kind. Lydia had married him in a meadow, wearing Indian cotton and a wreath of buttercups.

As the Man had cheerfully predicted from Day One, the marriage ended in a mire of droppings and disillusion. Ran’s incompetence was spectacular. After the goats caught something and died, he had tried various methods of making money without doing too much actual work. Everything he touched reeked of doom.

Lydia was used to financial doom. It was the adultery she could not bear. Also like the Man, Ran was prodigiously unfaithful. Lydia had finally despaired of him, and crept home to Melismate. The family had been overjoyed to have her back – the Man had swapped a china footbath for two bottles of champagne, to celebrate. It meant that they had Linnet, and they all adored Lydia’s little girl.

Because Ran was the father of the blessed Linnet, and because he was an amiable soul, the sisters were fond of him. He was a loving father and a kind neighbour – but
you
could not call him an advertisement for marriage. Or, for that matter, love.

‘Falling in love,’ Rufa announced, ‘is overrated.’

Nancy shrieked at this dismissal of her
raison d’être
. ‘Oh, yes. Vastly overrated, by millions of people. But we’re all wrong. Don’t listen to us.’

‘Tim Dent is that great, is he?’

‘Tim’s fabulous,’ Nancy said staunchly. ‘You should just hear some of his poems.’

‘Seriously.’ Rufa refused to be distracted. ‘Looking for a rich husband has got to be better than shagging in a caravan.’

Nancy groaned softly. ‘So what? I might be grateful for that caravan soon. When this place is sold, we won’t have time to chase rich men. We’ll be too busy earning a crust, and finding somewhere to live.’

‘I won’t,’ Selena put in sulkily. ‘I have to live in that shitty cottage in Bangham, with Mum and Roger. She says I’ve got to finish my exams.’

‘So you have,’ Rufa said.

‘I am not going to university, OK?’

‘Shut up. Yes you are.’

Lydia was frowning anxiously. ‘Mummy said she’d always find space for Linnet, but there won’t be room for me. And I could never live apart from her, anyway. So it looks as if I’ll end up camping in Ran’s barn – with a chemical loo and that horrible girlfriend of his over in the farmhouse.’

‘That leaves you and me, Ru,’ Nancy said. ‘And I’m not as lacking in ambition as you seem to think. I have made plans for the future, you know. When the time comes, I shall do extra shifts at the pub.’

Rufa laughed. ‘That’s ambition, is it?’

‘And I’ll completely stop taking tips in the form of drink.’

The State, thankfully, recognized no difference between decayed gentility and ordinary poverty. Lydia, as a single mother with a penniless ex-husband, received some State benefits – she called them her ‘dog-tooth cheques’, because they were very small. Selena intended to go on the dole the second she left St Hildegard’s, whatever Rufa said.

Nancy, who had achieved neither A levels nor university, did her bit for the family finances by working as a barmaid in the village pub. It was called the Hasty Arms, and when the Man heard that she had got herself a job there, he had not known whether to laugh or cry. His own coat of arms decorated the creaking pub sign, with its family motto,
Evite La Pesne
. The Man said this meant ‘Avoid Fatigue’, and it was not appropriate to find a genuine, Norman-blooded Hasty pulling pints and calling time. He had been rather touchy about the quality of the family blood – all the more so since he had married out of his class to produce his genetic miracles. Nancy had won him round, however, by giving him free drinks – and reminding him how much they needed the cash. The Man had said oh well, he always hoped to have a daughter called to the bar.

Nancy enjoyed her work. She was good at it, and had no ambitions beyond persuading the landlord to drum up more trade with a karaoke machine. You could be sure of congenial company in a pub – as Nancy had always pointed out to the Man, ‘I’d be in there anyway, so I might as well get paid for it.’ There were endless opportunities to fall in love. Nancy had been desperately in love any number of times. She said her heart was a
mass
of cracks, where it had been broken and glued together. Rufa, who suspected that her favourite sister was the cleverest of all of them, sometimes wished she had done something a little more elevated with her life. When she expressed this regret, Nancy replied, ‘What, for instance? There aren’t that many openings for a good-natured rural slut. I’d only be on the dole.’

Rufa had never been on the dole. She had the family’s only A levels (English, Latin, History of Art), and would have gone to university, if the Man had not been so vehemently against it. With tears dripping from his heavenly eyes, he had begged Rufa never to leave him. He needed all his people around him at all times.

Staying at Melismate, however, had not dimmed Rufa’s natural capacity for earning money. By some genetic quirk, the daughter who most resembled the Man brimmed with energy and enterprise. A freakish little piece of her DNA urged her towards normality, like a compass needle yearning for the North. She was the only sister to have taken and passed a driving test. She had spent her hoarded savings on an old blue Volvo – and the Man had been very cross when he realized there had been such a sum of ready money in the family.

In the fruit season, Rufa made tons of excellent jam, and drove around the Cotswolds selling it to tourist shops. For the past six weeks she had been making mincemeat, and little crocks of brandy butter, decorated with pretty labels she had drawn herself (hiding the brandy from her relations had been harder than splitting the atom). She also cooked for local dinner parties, and did fancy knitting for a London designer. The sums of money were small, and won with back-breaking toil, but they helped.

‘I must admit,’ the Man had once said, ‘your middle-class antics do keep the wolf from the door.’

The Man’s teasing about work had been relentless. Though very funny, it had been an expression of opposition or hostility. He had found it too hilarious when a Norman-blooded Hasty cooked for people who could not trace their ancestors back to William Rufus.

He had accepted Nancy’s bar-work by turning it into a joke, but Rufa was different. He bracketed her with his dead mother, who had been the most beautiful debutante of her generation. He could stand knuckle-headed locals calling Nancy ‘love’ and demanding vodka and Red Bull, yet he hated Rufa taking orders from the neighbouring gentry. The Man had not considered himself a snob. He had defined snobs as people unreasonably obsessed with keeping their houses and families clean. In his book, only those who remembered the gutter cared about hygiene, and he did not need to prove his gentility with any outward show. The Man had followed a long line of handsome, russet-headed forebears to Eton, and inherited a house that was listed Grade One. It had taken him years to realize this did not entitle him to any special protection.

Rufa, deeply as she had loved the Man, was under no such illusion. Firmly, unwillingly slotted into the real world, she was the Little Dorrit of the family, slaving to finance a fantasy she could not share. Sometimes she envied Lydia and Selena, for their ability to float through the world without truly seeing it.

Nancy, whose refusal to be upper-class had a certain stubborn energy, was another matter. It was to Nancy Rufa addressed herself now.

‘All right, look at the available choices. You could go
on
working as a barmaid, and living in Tim’s caravan – knowing that Mum, Roger and Selena are crammed into a nasty cottage next to a garden centre. Knowing also that Liddy and Linnet have to doss down in Ran’s barn – next door to that strumpet from the bookshop, who’s forever nibbling his ear in public.’ Rufa paused, to subdue the rising indignation in her voice. ‘Or you could take a mad stab at marrying money, bearing in mind that it’ll mean a lot of hard work, and a fair amount of behaving like a lady.’