The Marrying Game (30 page)

‘Sorry.’ He had noticed her pain. He hurried on. ‘It’s not just the money. Pru’s loaded with money. The fact is, she and I have a bit of a history.’

‘You mean you had an affair with her.’ There was no reason why this fact should chill her blood. Rufa fought down her paranoia. ‘Well, I knew there had to be someone.’ There were a million things she wanted to ask – starting with ‘did you love her?’ – but she did not feel she had the right. ‘You’ve heard my history, after all.’

‘It happened the year after Alice died,’ Edward said sternly. ‘We both missed her. And since Prudence had just got divorced, it seemed natural. Maybe it was all too easy. I began to think I might be falling in love with her – but then it finished.’

‘Oh,’ Rufa said. Her voice was pregnant with unspoken questions.

‘She fell in love with someone else. It wouldn’t have worked out, in the long term. If you knew her, you’d know there was no way Pru could handle being the wife of either a soldier or a farmer. She wasn’t Alice, that was the thing.’ He sighed, relieved to have got the hard part over. ‘But it does mean I have to tell her properly about you. I owe her that much. Do you understand?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘I knew you would. While I’m in Paris you can start choosing wallpaper, and so forth. I think,’ Edward said carefully, ‘that we could both do with a few weeks’ grace.’ He did not want to talk about Prudence. Rufa sensed his annoyance when she asked questions. He made her feel that her curiosity was indecent. She was uncomfortably aware of Edward experiencing passion behind closed doors. She tried not to worry that the unknown woman had already taken the best of him.

Selena took her head out of her book long enough to announce that she refused to live in Edward’s cottage. ‘What am I supposed to do there? Why can’t I go to London, and stay with Wendy?’

‘I thought you’d be going back to school,’ Rufa said.

‘Bum to school. If you make me go back, I’ll burn the fucking place down.’

‘But Mrs Cutting said you were her star pupil,’ Rufa begged. ‘She said you could take your pick of universities—’

‘Watch my mouth,’ Selena said, stubbornly shooting out her studded lower lip. ‘I am not going to university.’

Rose said she was not letting Selena loose in London. ‘You’re seventeen years old, and you’ve never seen a town bigger than Stroud – you must think I’m crazy.’

‘Ru and Nancy could keep an eye on me,’ Selena said. ‘They’d make sure I don’t get knocked up, or start selling heroin.’

Nancy pointed out that she would be working five evenings a week. Rufa slightly wondered what made her so impatient to get back behind the bar at Forbes & Gunning, but was too anxious about the Selena question to probe any deeper. She had been so sure that her youngest sister would stop being difficult now that they knew Melismate had been saved.

Rufa had expected Edward to support her, but he was on Selena’s side. ‘Why shouldn’t she see something of London? Ru will be there, and you know what a fusspot she is.’

‘I am not!’

Reluctantly, Rose laughed. ‘You’re right, she’s far worse than I am. With Ru around, it’ll be just like a convent. And I must say, it’ll be nice to have a holiday from Selena. She only raises her head from that bloody book long enough to sneer at us.’

Rufa was the soul of familial duty, and agreed to return to London with both Nancy and Selena. In her heart of hearts, she did not relish the prospect. She felt she had lost the plot with Selena when she had changed from an amusing child to a sullen adolescent. She had
been
ten times worse since the Man died – if you asked her a simple question, you practically had to hold a seance to get a reply. At school, she had gone out of her way to annoy her patient and well-intentioned teachers. She had withdrawn from the other girls in her form, and was seen hanging out at the bus station with various charmless specimens of local youth.

Edward had a way of being right about things, Rufa reflected. Perhaps Selena did need the experience of London, to blast her back into the land of the living. She was ashamed of her reluctance. It was not fair to blame Selena for making her feel uneasy, when she knew the real cause of her unease was Edward himself.

If he had changed overnight, Rufa would have been alarmed. But there was surely something equally alarming about his stubborn sameness. When they were alone together, he spoke to her so lovingly (intervals of tenderness, in the unending saga of practicalities) that she felt herself becoming frighteningly dependent on him.

Yet he demanded no kisses or embraces. He was, she decided, too punctilious to let her feel sex as an obligation. He could not bear anyone to think there had been an exchange of sex for money. And perversely, as he kept his distance, Rufa began to be disturbed by how handsome he was. She found herself mesmerized by the watchful glitter of his eyes, under his black brows. She was increasingly aware of great gaps in his history, which he never offered to fill in.

He had said nothing more about his relationship with Prudence. Rufa tried not to worry about it too much. She wondered why she was so worried. It would hardly have been realistic to expect a man like Edward to live
without
sex for all those years. Perhaps, she thought, hearing about Prudence had highlighted the fact that she knew so little about him. He had devoted himself to the family at Melismate as if he had no other life. But he had another life beyond it: an unmapped continent. And since the death of the Man, she had been fighting a terrible, griping fear of the unknown.

Suppose Edward really had offered her marriage out of some quixotic sense of loyalty to the Man? He was quite capable of doing such a thing. Perhaps chivalry came easily to him, because he did not fancy her. In that case, what on earth could she give him, in exchange for all this? To put it at its lowest, if he did not fancy her, what was in it for him?

During her week at Melismate, Edward took her out to dinner, at charming old manor houses. He took her on very grown-up dates, to concerts and plays in Cheltenham and Bath, as if they had been a couple for twenty years. Rufa saw other women looking at him, and tried not to be tormented by knowing so little about him.

She returned to London, her victory a little curdled by the doubts. Shameful as it was, sex with Edward would have made her triumph more secure. Jonathan had been her only lover. She had no idea how to take physical possession. Somewhere at the core of herself, she was still paralysed, or frozen.

On her second morning at Wendy’s, a special messenger arrived with a large cardboard box. It was lined with damp cotton wool, and densely packed with bluebells from the little wood behind Edward’s house. They filled the kitchen with the sappy oozings from their pale stems.

There was a soggy card with them. ‘I Love You. E.’

Rufa saved this carefully, wishing she could wring the love out of it to warm away the fear.

Wendy was delighted to clear her remaining bedroom for Selena. As far as she was concerned, the youngest Hasty was the family baby for all time. If that baby had not been a lanky six-footer covered in sharp studs, Wendy would have sat her on her knee. Having Selena in the house brought out the dormant nanny in Wendy. She worried that the child was too thin, and filled her cupboards with treats she had enjoyed as a little girl. Selena, wrapped in the eternal book, silently chomped her way through packets of Jammy Dodgers and Wagon Wheels. Occasionally she stowed the current book in her rucksack, and disappeared for hours.

She never said where she was going, and Rufa worried endlessly.

Nancy said, ‘Stop fussing, Ru. You’ve already decided she’s a total dropout and no-hoper, just because she wouldn’t go to college. She’s probably met someone – and I say good luck to her.’

Rufa said, ‘Anything might happen to her. She acts tough and streetwise, but she’s only seventeen.’

In fact, Selena was leading a blameless life. Between bouts of reading and eating, she was steadily indulging her passionate and un-Hastyish craving for culture. She would not have dreamt of telling her love-fixated sisters what she was up to. They would never have understood. As far as Selena was concerned, Rufa was tiresomely obsessed with Edward and Melismate, and spent her days in a welter of paint books and swatches of fabric. Nancy was so obsessed with her job, you’d think she was
painting
the Sistine Chapel instead of pulling pints behind a bar. Neither of them, Selena decided, deserved to be told. London was wasted on them. Shuttling around the city in the warm, sooty tube, Selena worked down her list of essential places to see.

She went to Dr Johnson’s house, Keats’s house and the British Museum. She wandered around the Inns of Court and the alleys of Clerkenwell. She ate packed lunches of Wagon Wheels, and spent the money Rufa gave her in the second-hand bookshops of Charing Cross Road. She examined the Wallace Collection and the V & A. She attended a series of baroque concerts at St John’s Smith Square. It was more than blissful. Everything mattered so intensely, she felt she needed three more lifetimes to absorb it all. Her head swam with phrases and colours, scraps of poetry, ideas impatient to be formed.

Selena had always been addicted to books. After the death of the Man, the magical, bodyless realm of the mind had been her only refuge. The physical world was dark, and horribly fragile. Literature was eternity. Selena could not make Rufa see that schoolwork – or any kind of interference with her thoughts – was a monstrous intrusion. She wished they would all get off her case.

To Rufa’s slight surprise, however, Selena was markedly less surly with Roshan. He had read English at Cambridge, and dared to interrogate her about her reading. Once she realized he was not – as she poetically put it – ‘taking the piss’, Selena had the intoxicating experience of trying out her opinions. Rufa, listening to their involved discussions, blessed Roshan for coaxing Selena out of her spiky shell. She prayed he would sell
her
the idea of university. He managed, before Selena had been in London a week, to remove the studs and dreadlocks, which he despised on the grounds that they were ‘provincial’.

Without the facial armour, and with her dark blonde hair shorn close to her skull, Selena was suddenly as graceful as a swan, and looked ridiculously young. Rufa heaped her with new clothes, taking her transformation as a sign that her shattered family was finally pulling itself together. Roshan assured her that Selena was ‘seriously clever’, and she allowed herself to dream of her little sister cycling along the Backs at Cambridge.

Unfortunately for Rufa’s dreams, however, Selena found herself a career. On one of her wanderings around the National Gallery, she was caught by a ‘spotter’ from a model agency. Her long, skinny body proved to be a perfect hanger for clothes; her brittle, thin-boned face photographed like a dream. In a shockingly short space of time, she was pulled into a vortex of studios and magazine offices, photographed for
Vogue
, and dazzled by the promise of future riches.

Nancy thought it was brilliant, and proudly pinned one of Selena’s contact sheets behind the bar at Forbes & Gunning. Rufa was, very secretly, annoyed. Ten years before, as she could not help remembering, she had been ‘spotted’ herself. The Man had detested the bare idea of modelling, but there was no Man now to stop Selena doing anything. It was impossible not to be a little jealous.

‘It’s a short career,’ she told Nancy, rather sourly. ‘She’ll be over the hill by the time she’s my age.’

‘So what? She might have made an absolute pile of money by then,’ Nancy said. ‘God, the irony. There we
were
, working round the clock to marry money – and there it was all along, right in our own back yard. We could have sent Selena out to work and stayed at home.’

Rufa murmured, ‘I’m so glad I didn’t have to marry for money, in the end.’

Privately, Nancy was beginning to find Rufa’s premarital bliss a little smug. ‘Would you take Edward without it?’

‘Of course I would!’ Rufa snapped back. The snapping was automatic; Nancy was constantly picking holes. Only after she had said it did Rufa realize she was telling the truth. If Edward suddenly lost all his money she would be devastated, but she would never be able to let him go. In some way she did not quite understand, she was bound to him.