The Rise and Fall of Becky Sharp. Sarra Manning

it down to a rancid mug of soup that Johnny had left under his bed that had attracted maggots, and they made us stay in the garden while the fumigators dealt with it.’

      ‘And it was raining,’ Amelia added timidly.

      ‘Pouring with rain,’ Becky elaborated. ‘And that’s why I’m never going to eat mushroom soup for as long as I live.’ She paused. ‘At least Johnny swore it was mushroom soup but we all had our suspicions, didn’t we?’

      ‘Did we? But what else could it have been?’ Amelia’s face was absolutely without guile as Phil and Holly hooted with laughter.

      They ended the day at a shoot and interview for Hello magazine shot in a location house in Clapham, because Mrs Sedley absolutely wasn’t going to have people tramping in and out of her house with equipment when she’d just had the parquet flooring redone. (She was also quite terrified that her choice of soft furnishings wouldn’t pass muster because she’d insisted on doing the decorating herself even though Mr Sedley had begged her to hire an interior designer.)

      The journalist was blonde and perky and cut from the same cloth as Amelia who happily reeled off her list of achievements to date. The Chelsea prep school where she graduated, being able to speak German and Mandarin (though neither of them had stuck). She’d then attended the same boarding school as the Duchess of Cambridge where she failed to excel academically but had won a trophy for tennis. Only two hardships had blighted Amelia’s life to date: her sluggish metabolism which meant that the only way she could maintain a size-ten figure was by eating twelve hundred calories a day and working out for an hour, and the three years she’d spent sleeping in a back brace to improve her posture.

      ‘Daddy and Jos always used to joke that it was because I had no backbone,’ she admitted with a nervous giggle. And of course there was the measly two weeks that Amelia had spent doing volunteer work in Niger.

      ‘Like Princess Diana,’ the journalist, Emily, noted dryly. ‘Were you worried about catching something awful like yellow fever or malaria?’

      ‘Not quite like Princess Diana. I mean, there were no landmines and we had WiFi,’ Amelia said. ‘But I did have to have a lot of jabs before I went. My arm was sore for days afterwards.’

      On the other hand, Becky’s biography was quite sparse. It was also quite hard to remember what she’d told people in the Big Brother house. Another lesson learnt: come up with a story then stick to it as if your life depended on it.

      ‘My father was an artist,’ she recalled with a misty look to her eye, because to be fair, some of his scams really had possessed quite a lot of artistry. The judge who’d sent him down had described him as ‘a curious mixture of criminal genius and petty thief with poor impulse control.’ ‘Everyone said that he was destined for greatness but he died before greatness came.’

      ‘And, I understand how hard this must be for you, but how did he die?’

      Becky cast her eyes down. ‘He had a brief but brave fight against a cruel disease.’ When she said that people always assumed that it was cancer and that she’d been at her father’s side as he was carried away by the angels. The ugly truth of the matter was that it had been cirrhosis of the liver and the only person at his side had been a prison chaplain, as Francis Henry Sharp had been serving seven years at Her Majesty’s Pleasure for five counts of fraud and one count of ABH for breaking the nose of the arresting officer.

      Next to her, Amelia snivelled a little and the journalist leaned closer. ‘And your mother died when you were still quite young?’

      Becky did her best brave face. Downcast eyes, a little half-smile, a sudden intake of breath as if she was fighting to control herself. ‘Yes, by the time I was eight, it was just Daddy and me. I’m sorry, can I have a moment?’

      ‘It’s very painful for Becky to talk about,’ Amelia whispered, taking hold of Becky’s hand as if she could loan her friend some of her own meagre courage. ‘Are you OK to carry on? Do you want some water?’

      An intern was despatched to bring Becky water. Sparkling water in a cut-glass tumbler with crushed ice and a big chunk of lime.

      Who could blame a girl for not wanting to go back to a life where there was only tap water in any receptacle that was vaguely clean?

      ‘Your mother?’ Emily prompted. ‘You said in the house that she was French.’

      ‘Mais oui, maman etait francaise. She came from a very old family, the Mortmerencys, and she was a model. No! You wouldn’t have heard of her. She did a little catwalk, but mostly fit work,’ Becky explained, though the closest her mother had come to the catwalk was draping herself over the bonnet of a Ford Fiesta at a motoring exhibition at Olympia. She had been quite pretty before the booze and the pills and the putting up with Frank Sharp had taken their toll on her. ‘Her passing was very sudden.’

      Hurling yourself in front of the 7.08 District Line train pulling into Fulham Broadway station didn’t lend itself to a long, lingering death.

      ‘Oh, Becky,’ both Amelia and Emily exclaimed.

      ‘Sorry, it’s just that it’s painful to talk about.’

      Had it been painful at the time? Becky could hardly remember. Sidonie had barely fulfilled her job description. She swung from high to low, as Mr Sharp had vacillated from sweet to mean, so from a very young age, Becky had learned to keep her head down, stay out of the line of fire, especially when her parents had fought, which they did with intense ferocity. If that was love, then you could shove it.

      ‘So, Becky, let’s switch it up, shall we?’ Emily asked.

      Becky clapped her hands together. ‘God, yes, please, let’s!’

      Where had she gone to school?

       School of hard knocks.

      Had she had many boyfriends?

       Only if you count a Bournemouth vicar who used to try to put his hand up my skirt when I was helping with the church jumble sale.

      Who were her celebrity crushes?

       What would be the point of having a crush on some distant celebrity who would be of absolutely no use to me?

      Dear, sweet Emily and her voice recorder would probably both short circuit if Becky told them a few home truths, so she settled for the current truth and put her arm around Amelia.

      ‘I’m just here for moral support. Emmy’s the star and so she’s the one you should be asking about boyfriends and crushes.’ Becky nudged Amelia who giggled obligingly.

      ‘There is someone,’ Emmy confided, because it never occurred to her that she could fudge the details, hint, or stretch, bend and pull the truth this way and that, so it hardly even resembled the truth any more. ‘I’ve known him all my life, he was at school with my brother Jos, so I’m sure he thinks I’m still the silly little girl that he always teased.’

      Such a cliché. The haughty older boy who …

      ‘… used to pull my pigtails.’

      Even Emily was starting to look as if her back teeth were aching from Amelia’s brand of simpering, saccharine sweetness.

      ‘And does this someone have a name?’ Emily asked with the weary air of a woman who had an Oxbridge degree and a childhood ambition to be a lady war correspondent, but was currently interviewing the winner (and runner-up!) of a reality TV show.

      Amelia ducked her hair. ‘George,’ she said on a gasp, as if even saying his name out loud was tempting fate. ‘His name is George.’

       Chapter 5

      ‘He’s very good looking,’ Becky whispered loudly to Amelia as they stood in the doorway of the Sedleys’ drawing room later that evening and she caught sight of the