Beggar Bride by Gillian White Page A

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