Free Marrying Up by Wendy Holden

began eagerly, but the line had gone dead.
    Almost immediately, the door of the flat opened and the woman at the centre of the drama appeared. Florrie looked absurdly
     young, fresh and pretty in a white dress and black ballerina flats, which, Beatrice recognised crossly, were once again her
     own. Her bag’s mine too, Beatrice thought indignantly, recognising the seventies plum patchwork suede tote she had bought
     in a junk shop in a moment of madness. Florrie, somehow, made it look like new-season Bottega Veneta.
    ‘I didn’t expect you back so early,’ Beatrice said cautiously.
    Florrie smiled, shook her blond hair, tossed the bag to the carpet and sank down on the sofa. ‘I started to feel a bit rotten,’
     she announced cheerfully.
    ‘Was it the food?’ Beatrice had no idea what one ate at lunches with party-going German princes. Perhaps piles of sauerkraut
     to keep the strength up.
    ‘No, it was him,’ Florrie declared. ‘He said my legs were like a foal’s and my eyes were pools and my hands were like a dancer’s
     and my neck like the stem of a flower . . .’ She yawned. ‘It was ghastly. I felt that he was trying to chop me up and bury
     all the pieces.’
    ‘Oh dear,’ said Beatrice, reflecting sardonically that it must be nice to be complimented so routinely that you literally
     got sick of it.
    ‘Oh deer, you mean.’ Florrie giggled. ‘Because he compared me to a beautiful doe as well, starting shyly at the approach of
     the huntsman or some such crap. It makes me rather long for Igor. He never said
anything
nice to me, the poppet. I’m rather wondering if we should get back together.’ She pushed herself up off the sofa.
    It was, Beatrice thought, difficult not to admire the way Florrie shrugged off trouble like a duck did water. To watch her
     trippingabout the flat like Tinkerbell, one would never suspect that her fledgling romance with a prince of the blood had died a brutal
     and public death in the newspapers that very day. On the other hand, she reflected, it proved she had been right to assume
     that Florrie did not care two hoots about her royal relationship.
    The telephone rang.
    ‘Will you get it for me, darling?’ Florrie sang. ‘It might be one of those horrid papers and I don’t want to talk to them.
     I’ll only say something silly and get myself into even worse trouble.’ She giggled, gathered up Beatrice’s bag and flounced
     out of the room.
    As she passed, Beatrice’s nostrils caught a delicious floral scent. This, too, had the ring of familiarity. The bottle of
     Joy Ned had given her for her last birthday, possibly?
    Annoyed, Beatrice picked up the receiver.
    ‘Florrie?’ boomed the voice on the other end. ‘What the devil . . .?’
    ‘It’s Beatrice, Papa,’ Beatrice said hastily.
    ‘
Give me Florrie!
’ The lord roared painfully into the tender inside of her ear. He was as angry as she had ever heard him, and that was saying
     something. Beatrice had heard him angry a lot.
    ‘Hang on, Papa. Florrie!
Flor-ree!
’ Beatrice laid the receiver on the thick carpet and rushed down the corridor to her sister’s room. ‘
Florrie!
Papa wants you.’
    ‘Tell him I’m out,’ Florrie pleaded, looking what was for her that most unusual of all things – scared. Of all the people
     in the world, their father held the distinction of having some small impact on his daughter; not least because he was the
     conduit through which her money flowed.
    Beatrice returned reluctantly to the phone. ‘Sorry, Papa. Thought it was her, but it was Maria, the cleaner.’
    ‘Is it true?’ Sir George demanded.
    ‘About Maria?’
    ‘Grrrr! Is it true what I read in the papers? Florrie’s buggered it up with HRH?’
    Beatrice confirmed that it was.
    ‘It’s a bloody disaster,’ Lord Whyske ranted.
    Beatrice, for whom it was just the opposite, bit her lip.
    ‘I’ve had enough!’ His Lordship boomed. ‘It’s time that girl was taught a lesson. I’m cutting off her