The Rise and Fall of Becky Sharp. Sarra Manning

couldn’t be happier for Emmy,’ Becky said, as she’d been saying at regular intervals to whoever drifted into her orbit. ‘It really couldn’t have happened to a lovelier person.’

      ‘Bet she has a trust fund the size of the Guatemalan national debt. What does she need the prize money for?’ Barbara wondered. ‘It shouldn’t be allowed.’

      ‘Too fucking right.’

      Their eyes met. Pupil and master, though for the first time Babs Pinkerton couldn’t tell which was which.

      ‘I promised your poor, dear old Pa that I’d look after you like you were my own,’ she’d said when she’d shown up at the council-run children’s home in Tower Hamlets where Becky had been assigned a bed and a case worker, after six different foster placements had returned her to sender.

      Compared to the horrors of the home, Babs Pinkerton was definitely the lesser of two evils, but she was still fairly evil. Becky had known Babs all her life. The Sharp family had lived in a series of rooms in Soho, usually reached through a street door with a tatty handmade sign – ‘Model 2nd floor’ – invariably pinned to it. Her father didn’t have far to stagger to The Coach and Horses, and when that shut, on to The Colony Rooms, where he’d often take a snifter with Babs.

      Sometimes he’d think it amusing to bring Becky along so she could mimic the regulars. More often she’d be sent by her mother to bring her father home or ask for five quid to feed the meter and buy a can of beans. Babs Pinkerton was like an honorary aunt, or so she claimed as she sat with Frank Sharp, a large gin and tonic always within reach, and always dressed in pink because that was her thing, as if she was a frilly, feminine, frivolous little thing when actually she was a shark in lipstick. In a show of affection, she’d pinch Becky’s cheek, her fingers hard and unforgiving, and it was a point of pride to Becky never to make a sound.

      So when Babs turned up in Tower Hamlets, Becky didn’t hope for the best. Just expected the worst.

      For the first two weeks or so, the worst wasn’t that bad. Despite spending so long in The Colony Rooms each night that the next day she seeped noxious gin fumes through her pores, Babs did have a roster of clients in work, albeit strictly D-list. Comedians still hankering after their glory days in the seventies when they could get a primetime slot on Saturday-night TV telling mother-in-law jokes and making racist jibes. Superannuated dollybirds hoping to resurrect their careers with a slot on Celebrity Masterchef or in a gritty TV drama on Channel 4. More recently, Babs had started to mine a lucrative seam of reality-TV contestants determined to cling on to their fifteen minutes of fame like it was the last lifebelt on the Titanic.

      Babs had done well enough for herself that she had a house in a little mews in Paddington where she installed Becky in a spare room along with boxes of glossy ten-by-fours of former clients and left her alone every day with ten quid to buy herself snacks and a big TV with all the satellite channels.

      Becky knew it couldn’t last because nothing ever did.

      The worst, when it came, was far worse than Becky had ever imagined: Babs shipped her off to Bournemouth to act as a companion to her ageing aunt, Jemima Pinkerton, once the queen of British soaps, and now a septuagenarian with atrial defibrillation, two artificial hips and a recent dementia diagnosis.

      ‘I’ve been so worried about poor Auntie Jemima,’ Babs told Becky as they travelled down to poor Auntie Jemima’s well-appointed bungalow in the exclusive enclave of Southbourne, under the guise of a little daytrip to the seaside. ‘She hasn’t got a soul in the world – fame is a fickle, heartless bitch. And then I thought, well, poor, dear Becky doesn’t have a soul in the world either. You’ll be the granddaughter she never had.’

      ‘You want me to spend my days wiping the shitty arse of some senile old has-been?’ Becky had spluttered.

      ‘She’s not senile. Not yet. Just a bit forgetful, and the years might not have been kind – neither was her third husband, an absolute brute – but Jemima’s a sweetheart …’

      ‘I don’t care if she’s the queen of fucking everything,’ Becky had interrupted. ‘I’m not doing it.’

      Then Babs had taken Becky’s cheek between thumb and forefinger as she’d used to do, and this time when she finally let go, she’d left a bruise. ‘Listen to me, you ungrateful little wretch, you’ll do this or we’ll turn round and I’ll take you to the nearest police station so I can turn you in for stealing three pieces out of my jewellery box and four blank cheques.’

      ‘They’re not worth anything. Just glass and paste,’ Becky muttered, but she subsided.

      ‘Also, once you’re sixteen you can claim a carer’s allowance, which is something because it’s not like I could even get you a walk-on in a crisps commercial,’ Babs had pointed out because in those days, Becky had been small, wan and her perfectly pert breasts had yet to put in an appearance. It also explained why Babs had left her to rot in care when Frank Sharp had first been sent down four years ago. At nearly sixteen, Becky was useful in a way that she hadn’t been when she was nearly twelve. ‘Besides, you owe me for two weeks bed and board, plus your expenses. Take you months to work off that debt.’

      It had taken months, but by then Becky and Jemima Pinkerton were firm friends. Jemima trusted Becky implicitly (‘You might as well have my pin number, because God knows, I won’t be able to remember it before too long’) and Becky made herself indispensable to the old lady. After all, you didn’t bite the hand that fed you and in her way, Becky supposed that she was quite fond of Jemima.

      Certainly, Becky had learned more from Jemima than she’d ever learned on the infrequent occasions when she’d somehow found herself in a classroom. Becky had listened transfixed to all of Jemima’s stories. From her ingénue days as a contracted player at Gainsborough Studios, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene that had earned her the title Bond Girl, through stints as a series regular on cop shows and medical dramas, a short season with the Royal Shakespeare Company and a dry spell (‘drier than the bloody Sahara in a heatwave’) that had lasted five years and had seen Jemima working the Christian Dior counter at Harvey Nicks. Then fame had beckoned again as the matriarch of an East End gangland family in a new soap opera, which had put a sizeable sum in Jemima’s pension pot and had led to all kinds of lucrative voiceover work.

      Yet it wasn’t life treading the boards or working on a big sound stage at Shepperton that had enthralled Becky. On the contrary, that seemed to involve a lot of hanging about and knitting, and she wasn’t ever going to be the type to knit one purl one. No lessons to be learned there.

      But Becky was fascinated by Jemima’s tales of the casting couch, amorous directors and handsy casting agents; of ambitious starlets nobbling the competition with a tube of greasepaint carelessly left on the dressing-room stairs; of young juvenile male leads seeing to the needs of rich, older ladies; and of that other, shadow world of gangsters and dealers, kingmakers and hookers … Well, all of human life was there.

      Again, it couldn’t last for ever. But it lasted long enough. Besides, her father had always said that the longer the con, the bigger the reward. Nearly four and a half years, by which time Becky had blossomed like a dewy young rose, petals slowly unfurling. And Jemima, bless her, had withered. Her limbs clawed with arthritis and her mind slowly eaten away by the ravages of time.

      In the end, Jemima had gone in her sleep. The ink was barely dry on the death certificate (natural causes) before Babs Pinkerton descended in a cerise power suit (‘Auntie Jemima wouldn’t have wanted me to wear black’) clutching a will that predated the newer will that Jemima had drawn up from a will-making kit that Becky had purchased in WHSmith.

      ‘It will never stand up in a court of law,’ Babs had said, when Becky had presented her with the evidence that she, Becky Sharp, loyal companion to Jemima Pinkerton during her twilight years, was the late and much-loved actress’s sole heir and beneficiary. ‘Everyone knew that Jemima’s mind was so addled that she didn’t know her arse from her elbow, God rest her soul.’

      It had got nasty enough, even without Becky daring to