Marrying Up (6 page)

‘Got some news for you,’ Dad announced, tipping more ketchup on his pie. Alexa’s stomach twisted in disgust. She
hated
ketchup.

‘What news?’ she asked haughtily, sitting down and deploring the absence of a napkin. Unless he was about to announce the
acquisition of a penthouse in Mayfair, or the takeover of the publishers that owned
Socialite
, nothing he could say could possibly interest her.

‘Need a job, don’t you?’ Dad demanded. ‘Well, they’ve got vacancies at Tesco.’

Alexa felt as if she had been shot. She doubted a more shocking thing had ever been said to her in the course of her entire
life; Atticus’s death and Reinhardt’s father included. She choked, even though she had not eaten anything. ‘
Tesco!
’ she managed after a glass of water.

‘Yes,’ Dad said, fixing her with an oddly piercing stare. ‘Tesco. They treat their staff well. Perfectly good career.’

It was crucial not to panic. Playing for time, Alexa slid her shaking knife into the enormous lump of greasy pork pie that
lay on her plate. ‘I’m not sure Tesco’s quite me,’ she said, dropping her voice to a frail whisper and looking appealingly
at her mother. ‘I’m university-educated,’ she added, choosing her words carefully.

Her father’s face reddened. ‘That’s not what I’ve heard,’ he said shortly, forking in another lump of pie and chewing violently.
‘That university of yours rang us just now. Small matter of unsettled fees.’ His eyes glinted into hers from beneath his gathered
brows.

Alexa quickly dropped her gaze.

‘What
did
you spend your money on, eh?’ Dad slammed the ketchup bottle down vehemently. ‘Not your course, by the sound of it. You haven’t
even passed, they said.’

Alexa stared at the jelly – its clear amber colour so ironically reminiscent of a yellow diamond – between the pork pie crust
and the lumpy pink meat. Tired, frustrated and, rarely for her, slightly frightened, she was tempted to throw herself on her
parents’ mercy. But was honesty really the best policy? Telling her father the truth – that the money had gone on cases of
champagne for cocktail parties and bespoke tweed suits for shooting weekends – was unlikely to calm him down.

She therefore took the only other course open to her. Shoving aside the plate of pie, she buried her head in her arms and
wept hysterically. After a few seconds, after which she calculated her eyes would be piteously red and bloodshot, she looked
up and directed her anguished gaze at her mother. ‘I didn’t want to tell you about the breakdown,’ she heaved between sobs.

Her mother responded magnificently. ‘Breakdown! Oh,
love
!’ she said, reaching clumsily for her daughter’s hand, her voice so warm with sympathy and concern that Alexa almost felt
guilty.

‘Breakdown?’ Dad echoed suspiciously. Although the heat, Alexa noted with relief, seemed to have gone from his fury.

Alexa propped herself on her elbows, pushed back her hair dramatically and placed her hands over her face. ‘I just couldn’t
cope,’ she sobbed into her palms. ‘I needed the money for the medicine. The therapy sessions. The, um, doctors.’

Neither of her parents said anything, although their silence took different forms. Alexa, an expert in social temperature,
felt the loving and concerned warmth from her mother’s side of the table meeting, over the ketchup bottle, the chill blast
of suspicion and disbelief from her father’s. There was clearly more work to do.

She stood up, still sobbing, and threw Dad an impassioned and accusing glance. ‘It was hell!’ she cried dramatically. ‘You’ve
got no idea. You can’t even begin to imagine what I’ve been through!’

As she fled through the sliding door of the kitchen, she reflected that her parting shot had the advantage of being true,
at least. The rest, of course, could be disproved by one single phone call to her tutor.

In her bedroom, Alexa buried her ears in her nylon pillows, expecting a storm of fury to break downstairs. Yet the house remained
calm. After some minutes had passed, there was a knock at the door and her mother came in.

‘Hello, love,’ Mum said gently.

Alexa, edging away at this dangerous display of maternal closeness, winced inwardly at Mum’s brown nylon trousers, lemon cotton
blouse and the worn grey towelling slippers that completed the outfit. How
could
this woman be her mother? It was many years since she had finally, regretfully, abandoned her childhood fantasies about being
a princess who’d been swapped at birth. But occasions like this brought it all back.

Her mother, as usual, was clutching the local freesheet. Was it
bloody welded to her or something? It was even open at one of the coach tour ads.

‘What do you think of this, Allison, love?’ Mum asked brightly, holding the page closer for Alexa to see.

Alexa, wincing at the use of her real name, stared at the newsprint a few inches from her face. What was she supposed to be
looking at? Her eyes were running up and down the columns, but beside the half-page ad for Vernon’s Bus Trips, she could see
nothing but a report about the local Women’s Institute enjoying a knitting demonstration.

Her mother angled the paper away, and her thick forefinger, a forefinger that for as long as Alexa could remember had been
plunged in washing-up bowls, grappling with peelers, hanging out washing or stirring mugs of instant coffee, now stabbed repeatedly
at the bus tour ad. ‘You can go all sorts of places. Scotland, Wales, even Dutch bulb fields.’

‘Very nice,’ Alexa said acidly. Coach tours, how unbelievably dreary. How unbelievably cheap and miserable and provincial.
The ad was inviting readers to book Christmas trips already, for something called a Turkey and Tinsel Tour. She felt almost
physically nauseous.

‘They’re nice coaches these days,’ Mum was saying. ‘Got lovely toilets and everything.’

Toilets! Alexa shuddered with horror.
No one
said toilet. Or lounge. Or pardon.

‘Pardon?’ Mum said, looking at her.

‘I didn’t say anything,’ Alexa muttered.

‘No, but you made a funny noise. Anyway, love, come on. Which one do you fancy?’ Her mother’s face was bright beside the newspaper.

‘
Fancy?
’ Alexa’s brain, normally so quick, was struggling to understand.

‘I thought it’d be just the thing to cheer you up. You and me could go on one, I thought. There’s a Lincolnshire Cheese Weekend
. . .’

Her mother was suggesting she went on a
coach tour
?

‘A Whisky and Haggis Tour of Scotland . . .’ Mum went on cheerfully.

The words fell on Alexa’s amazed ears like cymbals on a stone floor. Lincolnshire
Cheese
Weekend? When she had stayed at Lincolnshire’s finest stately homes? Whisky and Haggis Tour of Scotland? When her previous
experience of Caledonia was baronial piles with stalking, fishing, shooting and maids who packed up your clothes in tissue
paper?

There was a painful sensation in her heart; was it breaking, or was this organ failure?

‘Or there’s Choirs and Steam Trains – that’s a three-day tour of Wales,’ Mum continued blithely.

Alexa was gasping for air.
Wales!
The only thing about Wales she cared about was the Prince of it.

‘I can’t,’ she managed in strangled tones. ‘I’m going to . . . to . . . to . . .
London
! Tomorrow!’

Mum looked amazed. ‘You what, love?
London?
’

She made it sound like Mars, Alexa thought contemptuously. ‘Yes. London. I’ve got a job interview there,’ she snapped, adding,
in a wheedling voice, ‘Although I’m going to need you to lend me the train fare.’

Once Mum, stunned, had reeled back downstairs, Alexa snatched up the latest copy of
Socialite
from the top of the pile by her bed.

She had almost forgotten what optimism felt like. But now all her old determination came roaring back. Working at
Socialite
, she would meet more influential people in a week than she had managed in three years at university. Once she had installed
herself, she could spin the web in which she intended to catch a very grand fly indeed.

She flicked to the magazine’s party pages. She was not the only one catching a grand fly, by the looks of it. Leading London
socialite Lady Florence Trevorigus-Whyske-Cleethorpe seemed to have been promoted.

Frotton Park’s celebrated annual charity polo competition got off to a dramatic start when the Hon. Fizzy Slutt slid out of
the saddle after scoring. Fortunately billionheir fiancé James Hugh-Fortune was on hand to mop Fizzy’s fevered brow, as was
best friend Lady Florrie Trevorigus-Whyske-Cleethorpe, who, as is increasingly the case these days, had HRH in tow.

Had the ubiquitous, all-conquering Lady Florrie managed to attain official royal girlfriend status?

The front door of the flat slammed shatteringly. Lady Beatrice Trevorigus-Whyske-Cleethorpe, deep in the pillows and even
deeper in dreams, reared up from under the bedclothes in panic. For a disoriented moment of blind-dark terror, she felt certain
that someone, somehow, had breached the cast-iron security of the Palace Gate flat and she was about to feel the chill edge
of a murderer’s axe in her skull. Then she realised what it really was. Her sister. Back from a night out.

‘Florrie,’ she growled into the pillow. ‘Bloody Florrie.’

Beatrice wondered angrily what time it was. She’d gone to bed at midnight herself, and hours must have passed since then.

She sat up, rolled over and fumbled for where the alarm clock was buried Through bleary eyes, she saw that it was three a.m.
Fury seized her. Three bloody a.m.! If her sister
had
to come back at this hour, then why in God’s name couldn’t she open the front door
quietly
? But never in her life had Florrie evinced the smallest degree of concern for others. Which was infuriating enough in itself;
what was more infuriating still was that she had always got away with it.

Too angry now to go to sleep, Beatrice flung her legs out of bed, padded across her bedroom carpet and opened the big white-panelled
door of her room. Down the shadowy, picture-hung corridor, she could see the sitting room at the end – brilliantly lit; Florrie
had turned all the lights on – and Florrie
herself sprawled out with her shoes on over the pale yellow sofa.

‘My head!’ Beatrice could hear her moaning. ‘Beattie!’ came the sudden sharp yell. ‘Omigod, I’m dying, I swear it. Get up
and get me some Nurofen, would you, there’s a darling.’

Beatrice winced. She hated being called Beattie; her name was bad enough without being abbreviated to sound like a cockney
char, even if that seemed roughly the relationship she enjoyed with respect to her sister. She marched down the passage to
the sitting room in her pyjamas and stood over her prone sibling, arms akimbo.

‘It’s three in the morning, for God’s sake.’

Yet despite occupying, as she almost always did, the moral high ground, there was, Beatrice sinkingly felt, something about
Florrie that made this seem redundant.

It was that she was so lovely. The fact that normal rules simply didn’t apply to people who looked like her was something
Florrie, in her sister’s view, took full advantage of. She was possessed of the kind of beauty that had people rushing up
to give her flowers in the street, striking up conversations from the other side of the road and exiting Tube carriages and
re-entering them just to have the pleasure of looking at her again. It was the sort that prompted streams of men to follow
her down the pavement, and for some of them even to propose marriage. Beatrice knew this because all these things had happened,
some more than once, at times when she had been out with her sister.

Even now, despite the beginnings of what would doubtless be one of Florrie’s famous hangovers, her sister still appeared far
younger than her twenty years and as pure as if the mere thought of alcohol had never so much as crossed her alabaster brow.

One slender white arm was draped languidly over her lovely oval face with its perfect bow-shaped lips and flawless skin. Florrie’s
beauty had an old-fashioned quality; it was easy to imagine her floating about thirties salons in shimmery column dresses,
laughing tinklingly into martinis.

It was so bloody unfair, Beatrice thought. By most people’s standards, she herself was very attractive, being tall and slender
as most of the family were. But next to Florrie, she was nothing.

She had her father’s black hair and dark complexion, while Florrie had inherited the golden beauty of their mother. But it
wasn’t simply that she was dark and Florrie was fair. It was more subtle than that.

Florrie spoke in a lower, huskier voice that made all the difference. Her eyebrows were spread at a better angle. Beatrice
had gazed often enough in the mirror to know that her nose, while similar to Florrie’s, was longer, lacking absolutely her
sister’s delicious retroussé. Her mouth was also thinner and flatter than Florrie’s pert, peachy pout. More elongated here,
more squashed there; in some ways the same, but ultimately absolutely not. Her face was like Florrie’s – but reflected in
a hall of mirrors.

Florrie’s great big eyes – violet-blue to her own dark brown – were closed. Her long pale-blond hair was pulled back, revealing
neat little ears adorned with, Beatrice noticed with a stab of fury, a pearl earring that looked suspiciously like one of
her own. And which, more to the point, she had already refused to lend Florrie some days ago. Draped carelessly over the sofa,
Florrie’s long, slender body with its elegant small breasts looked longer, slenderer and paler than ever in a minidress of
some thick, pale, pearly material. Beatrice recognised the Valentino that Igor, the oligarch’s son, had recently presented
Florrie with. There was a big orange stain on the front of it that looked like ketchup.

Pale high-heeled sandals, one of which had smeared mud on the cushions and one of which had its strap broken, hung off long,
delicate white feet. The sandals were hers too, Beatrice saw, outraged. Her new ones. She hadn’t even worn them yet.