Beggar Bride (12 page)

‘Good,’ says Ange lightly. And then, ‘Oh, what lovely ponies!’

In a small paddock behind the smart pine-built stable sheds two dun-coloured horses are grazing, both with pure white manes and gentle eyes.

‘Would you like to see us ride them?’

Ange leans, cowgirl style, over the railings. Trying to relax into her role. ‘Yes, of course I would.’

‘We could saddle up Conker for you, if you like.’

‘I don’t ride.’

The twins both stare at her open-mouthed, as if she’s confessed to some terrible perversion. ‘Did you fall off?’

Ange is quick to answer. ‘Yes. I had a rather bad experience…’

‘And you didn’t get back on at once?’

‘No,’ says Ange. ‘That was my mistake. But since then I’ve never dared…’

‘Does Daddy know?’

Ange shakes her head, sees the twins smile at each other. ‘I wouldn’t think so. Why would he?’

‘Daddy is mad on riding,’ says Pan malignly. ‘And he only likes people who ride horses.’

Lord Ormerod, crippled by gout for the last five years, sits in his bathchair in the drawing-room of the Old Granary looking out the french windows with watery blue eyes. His leg rests on a beautifully embroidered Tudor sewing box, just the right height. He puts up with his painful condition with remarkable tolerance. He is not watching the garden this morning, he is watching the cricket from Australia by satellite on the television set in the corner.

His ancient spaniel lies beside him. ‘Is that a pig I can smell cooking?’

‘I think Mother did mention…’

‘She thinks she can stir my appetite by filling the house with the smell of food. Yesterday we had to put up with boiling beetroot. God knows what tomorrow will bring. I hear you’ve brought a girl with you, Fabian, m’boy?’

‘Mother’s already met her, but now she’s been hijacked by the twins.’

‘Huh, probably showing the poor thing the gravestones.’ The old man searches, with his weak eyes, for the sun. ‘Elfrida’s been telling them all she knows about sanctified bones.’ The grandfather clock ticks loudly behind him. ‘Is it time?’

‘For a gin? Yes, Father. It’s gone twelve.’

‘Help yourself then, old bean. And I’ll have one with you.’

They sit beside a fiercely crackling fire, making the room far too hot, with toasting forks set either side. If this was once a granary then any old cowshed can be transformed into a palace. Only the soft Devonshire stone on the outside, still studded with nails and horseshoes, and twisted old wooden lintels give a clue to the possibility that this building was ever anything other than a most comfortable country house, albeit in miniature, and converted so long ago that nobody can remember, not in the way that disused barns are converted by today’s cowboys. Every now and again broken bits of ancient farm implements are dug up by the gardener and are taken to the furze-pen field to join what Elfrida optimistically calls her rustic museum. The only recent addition is the chair lift that twice a day conveys the crippled Lord Ormerod and his selection of
Wisdens
from the hall downstairs up to his bedroom.

Over their drinks Evelyn and his son discuss the firm, and recent City events, the state of the pound, the Bank of England, the Chancellor’s wise men, the single market and cricket.

All are dining at the House today because of Fabian’s visitor. On such an occasion, at a quarter to one, the hall-boy, Martin, would normally arrive at the Old Granary to wheel Lord Ormerod over to time his arrival with the booming of the gong, but today his son is present so he will do it. Luncheon will be a strictly family affair, and at tea-time Nanny Barber and Maudie Doubleday will join them.

‘How is Mother?’ asks Fabian.

‘In the bloom of health, thanks to her Horlicks tablets. Still going to her classes and that appalling swimming. The woman practises some of the frightful contortions before she gets into bed. And still covering various priceless heirlooms with this damn canal art. I rescued a Victorian rosewater dish only the other day. Thrilled to have the twins with her for three weeks of course, gives all three of them a chance to conspire together.’

His father is made small and wizened by pain. Every time Fabian visits Evelyn seems to have shrunk a little bit further. Fabian sighs. Was it a mistake to invite Angela here? Is she strong enough to take it, the eccentricities of his elderly parents, the downright spitefulness of the twins? And why had he invited her, anyway? It is rare he allows his London lifestyle to spill over into his country retreat. Does he subconsciously want this relationship to develop into something more than a friendship?

Father comes right out and asks him. He too regrets the lack of an heir. ‘Is this girl I’m about to meet to be my third daughter-in-law, or is this just a passing fancy?’

Fabian shakes his head. ‘Hell, I’ve only known her a couple of months.’

‘Since when did time have anything to do with it?’

‘I have been enjoying the novelty of a bachelor life just lately.’

‘I wouldn’t know about that. I married your mother when I was a mere stripling of thirty-one.’

‘And never regretted it?’

‘Not for one second, old horse, not for one second.’

In the panelled dining-room Fabian’s haughty ancestors, the men in whiskers and hunting gear, the women with bra-less, sagging bosoms, stare down from their frames upon the dark, polished table.

But luncheon is passable, Susan in the kitchen having managed to rustle up a satisfying meal. The twins, with their carrot curls and their faces smeared with grime, keep up an almost constant chatter, most of it gossipy boarding-school conversation, which frees the adults to enjoy their food.

‘So, midear,’ Elfrida addresses the watchful young person on her immediate left, ‘you are not familiar with Devon?’

‘Not really,’ smiles Angela shyly, ‘my aunt was not a great traveller…’

‘Ah yes, your aunt, Fabian did mention… an interesting woman I believe.’

‘I think you would consider her rather dull.’

‘Oh?’

‘Well, Aunty Val does live rather like a nun.’

‘Sensible woman,’ puts in Lord Ormerod from his thronelike chair at the top of the table, working away with his toothpick.

‘So what does she think of your interesting work?’

Angela says, ‘She never expresses much interest. She never did, even when I was a child I’m afraid.’

‘Oh, how terribly sad,’ says Pandora.

The fireplace in here is so large that a dozen people could stand inside it. Every time it is lit it must burn a whole tree. The twins listen to every word, destructive and mischievous. Fabian would never have invited Angela here if he’d remembered they were on holiday. He moves the conversation on. If there’s one thing his parents can’t stand it is introspection, and sad introspection is just not acceptable in this house.

‘Did you get a chance to ride this morning?’

Angela pauses, her silver spoon half-way to her mouth. ‘I don’t ride, Fabian.’

‘She had a beastly accident,’ puts in Tabitha, that viper in the grass. ‘When she was small.’

‘It is beginning to seem as if Angela is a most unfortunate person, one way or another.’

‘And she doesn’t ski, either. She doesn’t like heights.’

She never said. Perhaps that was why she seemed so nervous on the flight this morning, although she swore she was not. She turned quite white at one stage and Fabian could have sworn her teeth were clenched.

What on earth
does
she do, apart from looking beautiful?

Why doesn’t Pandora shut up and get on with her chop? Fabian can see his mother’s face closing up, soon Angela will catch the atmosphere and be ill at ease here, at Fabian’s favourite place. It is only that they are all in terror of being infiltrated by another neurotic woman like Helena. There was a violent thunderstorm at their wedding, Elfrida called it an omen, but up until then everyone remained unaware of Helena’s tortured character.

Now they search for any sign of strangeness in Angela.

They discuss Fabian’s choice of music for
Desert Island Discs.

‘What would you choose, midear?’ Lady Elfrida asks.

‘Oh, something from
Rigoletto,
I think,’ says Angela with a secret, sideways smile. And through Fabian’s tension shoots an acute sexual urge. He stifles a moan of gratification.

Throughout the rest of the day the slow-motion dance goes on.

But Nanny Ba-ba and Angela get on like a house on fire. All is well once again. Nanny Ba-ba has a shrewd gift for summing up people, she is rarely wrong, and once she has made up her mind she never changes her opinion. And behind Ba-ba comes Maudie to back her up, so tea-time, which can be rather a formal occasion in the small drawing-room with the Jacobean curtains, proves to be an unexpected success.

Fabian is beginning to resent the way his family seem to be vetting Angela Harper as if they’ve decided her future before he has himself. Verging on the patronising. After all, why would he want a Joan Hunter-Dunn?

Is he becoming obsessed with this girl in the way he became obsessed with Helena? He finds himself staring at her more and more frequently, admiring the curve of her neck, the deepness of her incredible eyes, the perfect tulip-shape of her face as she sits on a cream-coloured sateen chair once owned by Queen Victoria. Small and fine-boned like an elf. Soon the hounds of age will be yapping at Fabian’s heels…

She laughs prettily at his jokes.

What an enchanting hostess she would be, beauty possessed, a collector’s item.

He imagines what Angela Harper would look like naked.

While Nanny Ba-ba and Angela politely discuss the quality of the sea water at Weston-super-Mare, Fabian, not normally a highly sexed man, imagines parting her legs with his knee.

T
HE TOTALLY UNEXPECTED, THE
rather rushed proposal, full of denials and excuses, was made hundreds of feet in the air eye to eye with a blazing sunset.

Ange was a bag of nerves and he was such a gentleman.

‘I don’t suppose you would ever consider…’

‘I know you might find this difficult…’

‘We hardly know one another…’

‘I wouldn’t ask you to compromise if you agreed to marry me…’

He went on and on like a shy schoolboy asking to see her knickers.

Rich man, poor man, beggar man…

Oh, joy! The sense of total achievement was heady, nothing short of staggering! She had used all her wits, plotted and planned and worked this one out and for once in her life Ange had come out the winner! If only it could all end here.

And she knew she wouldn’t have made it but for Eileen Coburn’s precious legacy, a book written in the Fifties which bore the simple title,
Etiquette.

‘There could come a day when you need to know how to behave, Angela,’ she’d said with a sniff when she’d presented the gift. ‘Which knife and fork to use, the way to handle your napkin, the non-words those of us who know better avoid, and so forth. Manners maketh man, and woman, you remember that, and it never hurts to know these things.’

The book, immediately discarded and never looked at since, proved to be the one boon which really saw Ange through, that, her looks and the art of mimicry she’d been blessed with since birth. Joanna Lumley was always her idol. She’d stayed up night after night while Billy raised the roof with his snores in the bedroom next door, studying
Etiquette
and practising her expressions in the mirror, or sitting up dead straight at her Formica-topped kitchen table.

But all that nearly went out of the window when she jerked and spiralled into the sky in the silver-blue helicopter piloted by the fearless Fabian. It could be his exhilaration at flying which prompted his surprising request, he was obviously in his element at the controls of one of his favourite toys. Ange had never flown before, yet she’d given the impression that flying was second nature. She was hardly on the ground, she’d bragged, because of this stressful job of hers. She left her insides behind on the heli-pad on top of the Cody/Ormerod building, and again, when they rose like a twister from the garlic-scented field at Hurleston.

Through her mind passed Tina Turner,
‘What’s love got to do, got to do with it?’

You’d have thought all was lost after the quizzing she was given at luncheon. Some of her reactions had been rather clumsy, like the fall from the horse when she was young, but her terror of heights was fair enough. That was perfectly true. Fabian’s family were so overwhelming, his huge mother, the blue-eyed Germanic Lady Elfrida, her great body squeezed into heavy tweed on a warmish April day, the buttons bursting apart, and his father like a little old turtle spluttering over his soup. At that point she hadn’t held out much hope, but gradually, as the day wore on, the atmosphere became lighter. Nanny Ba-ba helped of course. But God, those revolting twins! She hadn’t mentioned to Fabian their preposterous accusations of murder, they’d even been precocious enough to mention the names of two adults with similar suspicions, Murphy O’Connell and Maud Doubleday, that tall, gaunt, stiff-faced person who joined them with sweet little Nanny Ba-ba at tea. What a total contrast between those two. Murder? I ask you, but it could even be some tasteless family joke, how would Ange know, they are all peculiar enough? But it was the twins’ own mother they were talking about, for God’s sake, they’d even gone further and described her face as a glutinous mass of jellied consommé with bone floating in it when the animals had done their worst. No wonder she’d faltered over her soup. My God. So tasteless. No wonder nobody could find it in their hearts to love those two girls.

Honesty, of course, she’d only met briefly at the opera. And that little madam had been rudeness itself.

What a sodding family.

‘We could lead separate lives,’ shouted Fabian, still excusing himself for his bold announcement. ‘I’ve hardly got time to turn round and you are the same.’

Ange looked at him and smiled. The helicopter lurched and she felt vomit flood into her mouth. She swallowed quickly. Her palms were wet, her heart knocking, vertigo and panic met somewhere in her throat. If only this was over. She had a sickening impulse to open the door and fling herself onto the fields below. Quick and painless. She’d probably be unconscious by the time she hit the ground. Get it over and done with.