The Marrying Game (49 page)

Selena had two large leather suitcases, both crammed with books. They were incredibly heavy. It took the combined muscle of Rose, Rufa, Selena and the taxi driver to heft them into the house. Rufa, jolted back into her usual energy, put the kettle on the range.

Linnet scampered into the room, shrieking with joy, and she and Selena wrestled on the floor like puppies. Once she had got her breath, Selena dug in her rucksack to produce a battered plastic bag. It contained a pink velvet handbag, ornamented with a red sequinned heart.

‘Oh, THANKS, it’s lovely, lovely –’ Linnet examined it reverently. She found some chocolate buttons inside, which made her shriek again. She hugged Selena’s legs. ‘Are you back for ever and ever?’

‘Not for ever,’ Selena said. She glanced warily at Rose. ‘For the moment.’

‘But you promise not to get married, or get a job?’

Rose and Rufa were making significant faces at each other, and Selena ducked out of their eye line. ‘I promise.’

‘Good. Do you want to watch
The Worst Witch
?’

‘No thanks. I’d like to talk to Granny.’

‘All right.’ Linnet ran off again, clutching the handbag to her bosom.

‘She’d like to talk to me!’ Rose murmured. ‘Did you hear that? She actually expressed a wish to talk to me!’

‘Do shut up, Mum,’ Rufa said. ‘Selena, have a cup of tea, and don’t take any notice.’

‘Relax, I knew she’d be sarky.’ Selena folded her long body into a chair. ‘I’m glad you’re here. I was going to ring you.’

Rose took the chair opposite. ‘I’m overjoyed to see you, darling – but what on earth is going on? Are you really moving back?’

‘If you’ll have me.’

‘Of course I’ll have you, don’t be dramatic, but what about your stupendous career?’

‘I’m not doing that any more,’ Selena said. ‘Modelling is a crap career.’ She smiled lopsidedly at Rufa. ‘I’ve decided to try for Cambridge.’

‘Seriously? Oh, God, that’s fabulous!’ The old Rufa was thoroughly back with them now. ‘I knew you couldn’t be that brainy for nothing!’

‘I’ve obviously died,’ Rose said. ‘And this is heaven. My problem teenager is giving me something to boast about, at long last.’ It was like turning back the clock, she thought fondly, to the days before dreadlocks and nose studs. For the first time in God knew how long, she was reminded of how Selena looked when she was happy. ‘So, what brought it all on?’

‘Roshan’s been nagging me for ages,’ Selena said. She reached blindly for a biscuit. ‘But it was Max, in the end. I was complaining about the people I have to work with – the photographers who think they’re God, the whining
anorexics
, the creepy women who talk about you as if you’re not there. And Max said I should just admit I didn’t belong. He said he didn’t know what point I was trying to make, but he doubted it was worth wasting my whole life for.’

Rose asked, ‘What point?’

‘I don’t know.’ Selena was uncomfortable. ‘Maybe I had to prove I wasn’t the plain one.’

Rufa laughed softly. ‘You’ve certainly done that – we’ve all been dining out on your
Vogue
cover. Tristan says you’re like an art deco statue.’

‘Who’s Tristan?’

Rufa flushed painfully. ‘I forgot, you haven’t met him. He’s Alice’s nephew. He’s staying at the farm.’

‘Oh.’

‘The Man always maintained you’d grow into a raving beauty,’ Rose said. ‘That’s why he was so strict about putting those ghastly metal things on your teeth. He even paid the bill.’

Selena gave her a rare, full smile, showing her perfect teeth. ‘I hated him at the time. But I’m obviously so grateful now.’

Rufa said, ‘You and your teeth were probably the only good investment he ever made.’

‘So go on,’ Rose urged. ‘Get back on the road to Damascus. Did you decide there and then to jack it all in?’

‘Nope,’ Selena said. ‘That was last night. I had my blinding flash this morning. I was wearing a mauve ballgown with a tulip skirt, and standing up to my knees in the Serpentine.’

‘Good God – why?’

‘For a shoot, obviously,’ Rufa said, laughing. ‘Why
else
would she be wearing a ballgown in the Serpentine?’

‘It was for
Harpers & Queen
,’ Selena said. ‘The agency’s going to be furious with me – I haven’t told them yet. But I suddenly wondered what the hell I was doing there. I couldn’t see a single person I respected, or even liked. Everyone treated me as if I was made of plastic, anyway. And I knew the next job wouldn’t be any better. So I thought, fuck it. I got out of the water, stripped off the dress, got back into my jeans and went back to Wendy’s. Max was working at home today – I bought him a drink at the Clarence before I left, to say thanks.’ She was animated and confident. ‘He sends his love, by the way.’

Rufa caught some of the animation. ‘You couldn’t have done it at a better time. When did term start at St Hildy’s? Mum, you’d better ring Mrs Cutting today.’

‘I’ve done it,’ Selena said coolly. ‘She was the first person I called after I cleaned the pond-muck off my feet. She said she’d be delighted to have me back.’

‘The woman’s a masochist,’ Rose said. ‘You were an absolute torment to her – I can’t believe she’s begging for more.’

‘You just rang Mrs Cutting, and announced you were coming back?’ Rufa was impressed. ‘God, I’d never dare.’

‘You’re a wimp,’ Selena said, not unkindly. ‘You never know which rules you can break, so you obey every single one.’

‘Do I? Well, Ma Cutting was always nicer if you were clever – and I wasn’t honours-board material.’

Rose found something a little distant, a little forced about Rufa’s satisfaction. Selena returning to school was her final dream come true, so why was she not in
transports
of delight? What was wrong with her? She looked more beautiful than ever, if possible. But there was a definite and unsettling change. Rose recalled, with a sinking heart, the way Rufa had looked and behaved when in love with the frightful Jonathan. Rufa and love were a combustible mixture. Sexiness (there really was no other word) melted Rufa’s edges and lit her from within. She had never looked like this with Edward.

Rose said, ‘By the way, how’s Tristan?’

Rufa laughed. She came to life; she practically caught fire. ‘Wonderful – and working hard, at last, because the alternative is picking tomatoes. He says he’d be happy never to see another one in his life.’

‘Pity he’s at the other place,’ Rose said, seemingly offhand. ‘He’s just the right age for Selena.’

Rufa winced angrily. There were ten years between her and Selena. She saw right through her mother’s pitiful attempt at offhandedness, and was determined to surrender nothing. ‘He’s quite a bit older, actually. Nearly twenty-one.’

‘Oh, there’s not such a yawning gulf between twenty and seventeen.’ Rose left the rest of the sentence – concerning the larger gulf between just twenty and nearly twenty-eight – to reverberate silently.

‘He’s very old for his age,’ Rufa said coldly, knowing he was the exact opposite. ‘I sometimes think he’s more mature than I am.’ She stood up. ‘I must go.’

‘Wait –’ Something made Rose leap up after her. She hugged her daughter fiercely. ‘Come back soon, won’t you, darling? Please don’t leave it so long next time.’ She could not shake off a sense of having lost her. Rufa bent to kiss her without a word, and almost ran to her car.

Later, when Selena was reading a story to Linnet (she
had
always been a surprisingly patient reader-aloud), Rose poured herself a medicinal gin and tonic, and brooded. She was afraid she would have to blame herself for letting Rufa go through that sacrificial marriage. All her instincts had been against it. Had she ignored them, because they were so desperate for the money? If she had kept her eyes open, would she have seen this coming?

Oh God, she thought, please start existing, so I can believe in you and open our relationship with an urgent prayer: Please let me be wrong about Ru – but in case I’m not, please look after her.

Chapter Nine

‘SO THE BOARD
voted to extend the scholarship,’ Mrs Cutting said. ‘The
Vogue
cover probably helped. I certainly didn’t need to beg very hard.’

‘Thank you,’ Rose said fervently. ‘Thank you so much.’

The headmistress of St Hildegard’s had called at Melismate directly after the governors’ meeting, to bring Rose the news that despite Selena’s awful behaviour over the past year, her scholarship was safe. Rose was weak with relief – the way things were at the moment, she had dreaded having to beg Edward for the fees.

She had been very surprised, and rather alarmed, to find Mrs Cutting on her doorstep. Selena’s headmistress was not a formidable woman, but Rose could not shake off a memory of her own stormy schooldays. This had always coloured her relationship with the authorities at the girls’ school. In the past, she had left the business of charming them to the Man. Now, she had to fight an impulse to apologize for the state of the house, as if Mrs Cutting had summoned her out of a class to explain.

Apologies were, in any case, no longer called for. Selena – radiantly and unrecognizably virtuous – had shown her headmistress and her mother into the
drawing
room. This room made Rose uncomfortable. For the past ten years it had been a bare box, without carpets, curtains or furniture, flooded with a permanently wintry white light. They had never used it, and it made Rose feel like a stranger, in a strange house. The Man would not have recognized it.

It had been a long-standing ambition of Rufa’s to give Melismate the drawing room she felt it deserved. During the great restoration, she had installed curtains of thick Indian silk, mended various tattered Persian rugs and lined the alcoves with books. She had cleaned and reframed the unsaleable family portraits, and badly painted Hasty ancestors gazed down from the walls: an eighteenth-century Hasty, amateurishly daubed on wood like a pub sign; a late-Victorian Hasty apparently depicted in several shades of gravy; a 1930s Hasty in coarse pastels. Rufa had picked her way through the heaps of decay, panning for anything with one glint of rescuable quality. She had bought an enormous Knole sofa and two armchairs, which now stood before the fireplace. To Rose’s amazement, Selena had built and lit a small log fire, to ward off the chill of autumn. The room was still chilly, however, and their voices echoed.

Rose thought Mrs Cutting looked far more at home in the new drawing room than she did. She was a handsome woman in her fifties, with a tidy cap of straight brown hair. She wore a soft blue shirt under a Fair Isle waistcoat, and black shoes with high heels. Rose, in her usual baggy sweater and balding corduroys, felt rebuked (‘Rose Darrow, you are a disgrace to this school!’). She had just stepped out of her wellingtons when Mrs Cutting arrived, and she was annoyed to notice now that her big toe was poking through a hole in one sock. She
covered
it discreetly with her other foot.

‘You’ve been wonderfully kind and miraculously patient,’ she said. ‘I really don’t think she’ll blow it this time. I can’t get her to tell me exactly what she got up to in London, but she’s so much happier since she came back.’

‘I wanted to keep faith with her,’ Mrs Cutting said seriously. ‘It was perfectly obvious why she was so difficult last year. It was her response to the loss of her father.’

Rose sighed, suddenly acutely lonely for the Man – so not here, so left out of all their plans. ‘I did my best, but I found it impossible to reach her. The silences were awful – worse than the rudeness. I sometimes thought she wanted to retreat into herself until she disappeared.’

‘Mrs Hasty, I’m not saying any of it was your fault. I know you’ve all had a hellish time.’

‘Do call me Rose.’

Mrs Cutting smiled again. ‘Why should I, when you refuse to call me Theresa?’

‘Give me time,’ Rose said, smiling back gratefully. ‘I’m still half expecting you to tell me she’s been caught smoking in class again.’

Both women laughed. Mrs Cutting said, ‘Selena and I have been through all that, and come to a very good understanding. She’s focused and motivated, and I’ll be astonished if I can’t get her into Cambridge. She’s one of the ablest girls I’ve ever taught.’

The door opened. Selena herself came in, carrying a tray of tea. She set it down on the antique chest on the hearthrug, and Rose tried to look as if this sort of thing happened all the time. Selena had made real tea, in a teapot, and unwrapped the new cups and saucers Rufa
had
bought at Heal’s. Gravely, she poured the tea. Rose watched her, with the eyes of a stranger – this poised, graceful and entirely presentable teenager. It astonished her to see her daughters remaking themselves. The Man would not have recognized the green shoots that were springing from the ruins of his family.

‘I’ll go now, if you don’t mind,’ Selena said to Mrs Cutting. ‘I promised I’d read to Linnet.’

‘Of course I don’t mind. What are you reading?’

‘
The Phoenix and the Carpet
.’

‘Ah, Nesbit, how splendid – you really do have excellent taste. Is she enjoying it?’

‘Adoring it.’

‘Well, don’t let me stop you. See you in school on Monday.’ When the unrecognizable paragon had left the room, Mrs Cutting turned back to Rose. ‘Do you know who she reminds me of, now those frightful studs have gone? I’m constantly remembering Rufa at the same age.’