Free Beggar Bride by Gillian White

solicitor?
    The fax doesn’t tell him that. Merely that his children have been dispatched to the san to await his arrival. ‘Which we presume will be some time tomorrow,’ the message goes on. It is even signed by the revered headmistress herself, the poet and thinker, Dame Claudia Purchase.
    Hell. Fabian can’t possibly get there tomorrow. The totally trustworthy Simon will have to go in his place and of course he will have to emphasise the fact that the twins are still suffering from the violent death of their mother—the extenuating circumstance, he is certain, that saved them from being sent home in disgrace immediately. That, and the knowledge that if this most sensitive information got out the school would suffer disastrous consequences. But where could the twins be getting their hands on drugs of any kind, and where is the money coming from? Fabian is most careful to ensure they are not stigmatised by having more spending power than anyone else in their peer group.
    He reminds himself that thirteen is a difficult age.
    He tells himself that the campaign to legalise such harmless substances is a sensible one and this one blight on their characters does not suggest that the twins are hovering on the edge of some criminal abyss.
    He excuses himself by reasoning that this is the behaviour of mixed up adolescents, and of course his children are confused after all they have been through in the last couple of years.
    But in all his anxious contemplations he is led back to the one fact that he cannot escape.
    He is not enough for them.
    They are uncanny and peculiar and he does not even like them.
    With a father as pressured as himself, damn it, these children, these strange little girls seriously need some kind of mother.

7
    H AH. LOOK AT THIS . Against all the odds, against astronomical odds, she’s done it.
    With efforts of titanic proportions.
    Envious glances from some of the women and interested looks from most of the men as she enters the foyer at Covent Garden feeling like a queen. Dress presented on her sixteenth birthday by Eileen Coburn—let out—pink suede jacket with ostrich feathers on hood and collar, and shoes from Lilian’s second-hand emporium in Bayswater, never worn, not a scratch on either sole, and a handbag to match which cost her a pound. Hair by David Bates and who hasn’t heard of him—she couldn’t pay, she slipped out of the salon after the cut, pretending to visit the loo.
    Haunt of the perfumed and the privileged. The superior air is exotically perfumed, the chandeliers shine and quiver on jewels and furs, clumps of people, some in orbit—quite a jump from Waterloo, the station where she stopped at the ladies to remove her mac and make last minute adjustments, turning her back on the unswept litter, the sights and sounds of the homeless. It is easy to strike up a conversation when she is looking like this, not waif-like and pathetic, her childhood appeal to the middle classes, but delicate and petite like a piece of perfect porcelain, the kind of popular item you see for sale in the Sunday Mirror magazine… a whole collection of beautiful ladies, or thimbles, or dolls, or bone china plates decorated with the glum faces of the British Royal clan.
    The more respectable papers offer Scrabble and Monopoly Boards for collectors with silver pieces in solid mahogany. Who needs them? Who buys them? And they’re certainly not cheap, either.
    Ange smiles wryly. How very predictable men are—this type of man at any rate. A yuppie past his sell-by date, an oily, asinine fellow with a waistcoat and matching bow tie made out of an old Gladstone bag, not unlike Kenneth Clarke, and fully convinced that everyone likes him.
    ‘I am Aaron Teale.’ The young man with the programme in his hand invades her space with his garlic breath, too close for comfort, unprepared to beat about the bush. He peers through two shining curtains of hair. ‘How come I haven’t seen you here before?’
    ‘Said the