Beggar Bride (10 page)

What a good thing he is unlikely to meet her again… a woman with so much fatal attraction.

Meanwhile the twins, poor little hapless things, are buying love. Not with aniseed balls or peppermint drops, unfortunately, but with resin and weed.

What has Fabian done to deserve this?

Simon Chalmers returned from his visit to Cambridge to report that the school, though favouring expulsion, were loath to take the option for fear of publicity.

‘They’re taking a huge risk,’ reported Simon, ‘counting on those children who bought the stuff from the twins, only two, apparently, thank God, to keep their mouths closed. And of course Tabitha and Pandora have sworn never to do such a thing again.’

‘Did they say where the money came from?’ asked Fabian, anxious to know.

‘They talked about some car boot sale in the holidays, apparently they went with Lady Elfrida herself in the Daimler, said they’d sold some of their old books and records during their time in Devon.’

‘Then we’re talking about peanuts,’ said Fabian, relieved, busily signing some last-minute letters which had to go out that evening. He wished his mother would stop involving the twins in her most extreme behaviour, and not just her mania for car boot sales. The cultivation of giant marrows, canal art, collecting rural relics and going to aqua aerobics are among her unusual hobbies.

Simon shook his neatly groomed head. How much does the man pay for those haircuts of his? He went on, ‘Nobody knows how much the stuff cost them, or indeed, where they got it from. They suggested some man in a café. Needless to say they have been grounded for the rest of this term. But as I pointed out to Dame Claudia, these people think nothing of propositioning children in playgrounds. One can’t really blame the children, too young to know what it’s all about.’

Oh, can’t one? Hum. Fabian’s not too sure about that, but at least Dame Claudia seems to be satisfied and sent her assurances that the matter would go no further. This time.

Ruth piped up. ‘And Tabitha asked Simon to remind you that it is their birthday next week. Is there anything particular you would like me to buy for them, Sir Fabian?’

‘No requests?’

‘I think, after this, they are being jolly careful to keep a lowish profile,’ smiled Simon.

‘Well then, Ruth, in that case, I leave the decision to your good judgement. Just make sure the gifts arrive in good time.’

‘Of course, Sir Fabian,’ said Ruth Hubbard, bustling out of the room, leaving that trace of perfume behind and Fabian worriedly working out exactly which part of her body it came from.

Women!

If he had only had a son.

Men are so much healthier.

Fabian’s dreams take him back to a happier time, fishing for trout with his father in waders up to his armpits and the beech trees behind them beckoning, whispering of cooler pools. Smooth pebbled. Salmon haunted. The days when he was little and allowed to play with the children of his father’s tenants. The plack plack of tennis balls, the tinkling of ice in glasses, the crack of leather on willow. And here he is, a child again, carried high on his father’s shoulders. But no, he is the father now, and on his shoulders is a black-haired boy with the innocent eyes of a faun.
He is repelled by something,
by the stench of blood in the game larder, by the delicate legs of deer and hare hanging on nails hammered into the rafters, by the heads of all the dead birds, agape, their radiant feathers stained with gore.

Fabian tries to console the child. His name is angel, Angelo, Angela. Oh God.
My son, my son.

O
NE OF EILEEN’S FAVOURITE
expressions… ‘many a slip twixt cup and lip’. Damn that dickhead Aaron Teale.

Damn him and his sodding arrogance. A plague on him and his house.

Damn Fabian’s natural courtesy, unable to insist that she stay.

People have a duty to their talents and Ange, tormented and frustrated, employed all of hers time after time in a frantic bid to reconnect with Fabian once again.

She couldn’t believe she’d been so close—
and lost it.

At times the whole thing seemed hopeless, and Billy, more beaten than ever after losing his valeting job, was far from supportive. Nevertheless, she persevered. She rang his office to ask if he’d happened to find an earring she was sure was lost on Friday night. Whoever they were, the snotty buggers, they refused to put her through, obviously considering the matter way beneath their master’s attention.

Togged up in her best she walked the pavement outside the enormous white stone office building feeling like a tart. Sometimes the building sparkled, as if it were made of marble, or some rich stone tinted with diamonds, the thousands of windows reflected rainbows. She felt very small walking by, small and hopeless, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, ignoring the disapproving glances of the doorman, waiting for the great one to appear. After four days of this she discovered that her prey wasn’t even in the country.

‘Give it up,’ advised Billy. ‘Admit it, the Covent Garden thing was a lucky fluke.’

‘Leave me alone!’ snapped Ange.

‘You’re getting obsessive…’

‘I know,
I know,
but what does that bloody well matter? My diary is hardly full!’

He was right. She was obsessive. As each day passed she got worse.

She thought she might make more progress through Honesty, that snooty cow who’d ignored her so rudely at Covent Garden. She went to the gym where the girl worked out, she discovered this fact from ringing her home, but she couldn’t afford the membership fee and to get past the desk was impossible. She frequently telephoned Fabian’s home only to be told by some secretary or other that he wasn’t taking calls that evening, he was otherwise engaged, he was not available, he was out of the country, he was in a meeting, entertaining, working, not to be disturbed, on some other line.

Hopeless. He was guarded as well as an Arab sheikh. His minders were security mad.

She rooted through his dustbins at night feeling ashamed and disgusting, to see if she could discover the most miniscule, the slightest clue that might help her in her quest to suss out his whereabouts. She considered trying for a job at his company or one of his homes, until Billy reminded her rightly, ‘Stupid cow—if either of us could get a job then we wouldn’t be bothering to do this, would we?’

But the awful thing, the thing that drove her, was that Ange was almost sure he would talk to her if he knew who she was. There’d been some attraction that magical night,
she could swear there’d been something there
!

‘This is getting sick,’ said Billy, when he heard of her shameful scavengings. ‘Give it up, Ange, before you crack up completely. This is just never worth it.’

But funnily enough it was at the dustbins two weeks later that she met her Prince Charming. He nearly caught her sorting through the envelopes and papers that had slimy bits of egg all over them. She’d only just time to withdraw her hand when she heard the door open and Fabian himself, in his shirtsleeves, came down the steps carrying a couple of empty wine bottles.

She was quick enough to exclaim, ‘Oh my God, you made me jump!’ And then the corny, ‘Isn’t it Sir Fabian…?’

‘Sorry,’ he peered at her in the gloom. He was very surprised. His brown eyes opened wide. ‘Do I know…? Oh,
it’s you, Angela.
I’m so sorry, I can’t remember your surname but I do remember Covent Garden. Where on earth are you…?’

‘I was visiting a friend nearby,’ says Ange quickly, wiping her sticky hand on the back of her coat. ‘Suddenly your door burst open—and well—here we are.’

‘Here we are indeed,’ said Fabian like a dark-eyed hero from a Mills and Boon, smiling all over his rugged face.

‘I don’t drive,’ Ange tells Fabian on this, their fourth meeting since the dustbin incident.

Since then she has been forced to take even greater risks in order to finance her nerve-racking operation. She shook like a terrified child as she waited in the cubicle of the ladies’ lavatories at Dickins and Jones, waiting to pluck up courage to creep out and grab one of the tempting handbags resting on the shelf by the mirrors. Hit and run. But could she run fast enough? Taut with cunning she crept out, moved closer behind the fur-coated, bejewelled woman applying more rouge to her crinkled cheeks—and pounced.

And fled.

The woman was so absorbed in her task she couldn’t have realised her handbag was gone. There was no hue and cry as Ange scurried out of the store. Well she shouldn’t be wearing a fur coat should she?

Serves her right…

Ange was lucky. Luck is walking with Ange at the moment. There was enough money in that one handbag to pay for the jacket-fleece she is wearing, in russet-red with a black trimming, over fifty pounds at Lilian’s Bayswater emporium, so what the hell would it cost new?

It looks expensive. So do her boots, her bag and her leggings, every item paid for in sweat and fear. Since her expensive haircut it has been easy to recreate the flattering evening style if she needs it, while during the daytime, like now, with her black hair loose and sweeping her shoulders, the cut itself proclaims elegance and style.

A flock of fat, precocious pigeons waddle around their feet.

‘Because I was in the back of the car when both my parents were killed.’ She shrugs off Fabian’s horrified look. ‘Oh no,’ she assures him, ‘it wasn’t like that. I was too young to know what was happening. Saved by the baby seat and the fact that my head was so far from the roof.’

‘So you have no memory of it at all?’ asks Fabian, sitting on the seat beside her in the park under the budding chestnut tree soon to be alight with blossom, something he hasn’t had time to do since his carefree student days. How wonderful that a girl like her should agree to a meeting like this. The litter offends his craving for tidiness. The dozing tramps with their carrier bags stir his dread of poverty. The wandering queers he finds distasteful. Vaguely he watches a game of football taking place on the vast green sward in front of them.

A sharp whistle blows.

‘No memory. But a reaction. Every time I get into a car I tremble. A panic attack, they say. So you see, I try to travel by train or bus, sometimes I have to take a taxi. But all in all it works very well.’

Lies, lies, lies.

Fabian sits with a protective arm round her shoulder. He turns to look at her and her black silky hair. Is that a little frown on his craggy, determined face? Could he be searching for mental instability, because Helena, like the gay men loitering, took some time to ‘out’?

‘So that’s why you went to live with your aunt?’

‘Crazy old biddy.’ Ange makes herself smile fondly. ‘But devoted to me.’

‘She sounds quite a character.’

‘Mad as a hatter, and getting worse as she gets older.’

‘Can’t bear the phone?’

‘Can’t bear the phone,’ Ange confirms, ‘so I have to carry one on me because of my work. Can’t bear visitors. Can’t leave the house. Can’t stand television, she relies for company and information totally on the radio, or wireless.’ She turns to Fabian and smiles. ‘Aunty Val is an eccentric recluse, she always was very odd and that’s why I spent so many school holidays staying with other children.’

‘It must have been hard for you,’ says Fabian gently.

‘Oh no, I don’t hold with that,’ Ange is quick to reply. ‘It’s too easy, these days, for weak people to blame all their problems on their childhood.’

‘My sentiments entirely,’ says Fabian with a burst of pleasure. So far, incredibly, they seem to agree on almost every contentious issue. This woman has a mind of her own.

Perhaps, she too, enjoys
Moby Dick.

This independent beauty sitting beside him has no need to lean on a man, like Ffiona, like Helena, although the latter would have denied it. Angela Harper would be sure to refuse any help he might offer. She’s a gentle, sensitive, discreet kind of person.

This knowledge pleases him.

He doesn’t know what she is after, but it’s certainly not money.

His mother, Elfrida, so quick with her warnings, could hardly cast Angela as a money-grubbing hussy.

‘Watch out, my boy,’ she often warns him, plagued, like Honesty, by the notion, ‘for fortune hunters with greedy designs.’

The afternoon air is very still. The buses carry their colour past the railings but here where they sit, the clatter and clang of the hectic world seems like a film going by on a screen. Ange bends to pat a passing golden retriever.

‘So when are you going to bed with him? Has he asked you?’ sulked Billy.

‘No he sodding well has not,’ snorted Ange. ‘He is not that sort of man.’

‘I don’t know if I can stand it. The thought keeps me awake some nights…’

‘Listen here, matey. None of your macho possession theories here, we’re way past all that, you and I. If I wasn’t doing this I can tell you one thing, I’d be out there on the game with the others and then you would have something to whine on about. At least this way I’m unlikely to bring anything home.’

‘The guy’s probably a user.’

Ange gave a tired smile. ‘Not very likely.’

Billy tried a different tack. ‘So what about the money? You can’t go on getting more and more and wasting it on clothes and make-up. Something’s got to give soon or you are going to fall right in the shit.’

‘I know, Billy, I know.’

‘And then what’s going to happen?’

Ange can’t answer. Life at forty-nine Willington Gardens is certainly not improving. Tina and Petal, next door, are back, the harassing Ed having been thrown out by the law and a new set of locks put on the door by the council. ‘Some good that’ll do,’ Tina told Billy. ‘Last time, the bastard used an axe to get in.’

Most of Billy’s days follow the same routine, boredom, dullness and sterility. An outing with Jacob if it’s not raining, to the shop for baccy and a paper and back. Watching morning telly. Sleeping in the afternoon. Tea and then more telly followed by bed. Sometimes the week throws out a challenge and he has to visit the job centre.

All this while Ange fusses at herself, concentrating more and more on her quest. ‘It’s the little details that’ll catch us out, Billy, not so much the big ones and we’ve got to think and plan ahead so I’m not caught out by something we have overlooked.’