The Rise and Fall of Becky Sharp. Sarra Manning

campaigns with his many millions of pounds, but for now, Amelia held very little interest for him. George watched her visibly droop in the face of his casual indifference. She was easily one of the silliest girls he had ever met so he was quite happy to bide his time. He’d wait for Amelia to finish university and have her heart broken by someone who’d make George seem like quite the white knight when he finally made his move.

      Her friend, on the other hand, wasn’t the sort of girl a man waited for. She was strictly right here, right now, don’t let the door catch you on your pretty little arse when you leave. George would swear on a thousand bibles that he didn’t watch reality TV but he’d somehow seen enough of Big Brother to get the measure of Amelia’s new friend.

      The calculating glint in her downcast eyes. The steely determination behind that quivering bottom lip. Though she had a cracking pair of tits, he’d say that for her.

      George smiled to himself, and, catching sight of his reflection in the mirrored wall behind the bar, couldn’t help but admire the jut of his own cheekbones. As he did, he caught the gaze of Amelia’s little friend, who had her eye fixed keenly on him. As if it were she who had his measure and not the other way round.

      ‘So what do you think of George?’ whispered Emmy, noticing Becky’s intent focus on her one true love.

      ‘You can do much better than him,’ Becky said to Amelia who immediately gasped in disbelief that anyone could find fault with George Wylie.

      ‘I couldn’t,’ Amelia declared. ‘He’s so handsome.’

      Handsome was pushing it. George had a pale, interesting face, which reflected centuries of good breeding with the odd exotic import to keep the family line free of hereditary disease. His patrician features looked better in profile, though his body was sleek and supple, especially compared to Jos Sedley who had now lumbered over to George to reminisce about their time together at Eton.

      ‘Not that handsome,’ Becky said flatly, because she’d seen the dismissive way he looked at Amelia. It wasn’t with the tenderness of a man who’d treat her like the precious bauble that her family had raised her to be. There was no good reason for George to be so careless with Amelia’s affection when it was so unselfishly given. ‘Oh, don’t pout at me, Emmy! You should be pleased that the sight of Gorgeous George leaves me cold. You don’t have to worry that I’d steal him out from under your nose.’

      ‘I know that you would never do that!’ Amelia’s misguided belief in the goodness of Becky’s heart was interrupted by a Chelsea show pony who shouldered Becky out of the way so she could fall on Amelia.

      ‘Emmy! Oh my God! So glad you’re back from slumming it with the chavs!’ she cried and that was the cue for a whole pack of them – all with indentikit buttery, long limbs and sleek, shiny hair – to surround Amelia and squeal at a pitch that had every dog in the neighbourhood in a frenzy.

      Becky had no choice but to step to the side or be mown down by a sharpened elbow or this season’s must-have heel.

      ‘How could you have kissed that awful Gav? He dropped his aitches more often than he dropped his trousers.’

      ‘You wouldn’t think they’d let people like that in the Marines.’

      ‘Was it very awful? The food looked terrible. And all that prosecco. Didn’t even give you decent bubbles.’

      ‘And as for that Becca girl. Common as the proverbial. What did she really say in that swimming pool? Go on! You can tell us.’

      Amelia cast agonised glances between her Made in Chelsea crew and her new, common-as-the-proverbial BFF.

      As it was a special occasion, Becky took pity on her. ‘It’s Becky, actually, and what I said in that swimming pool was, “If you chat shit about me again, I’ll wipe you off the face of the earth, bitch,”’ she recalled with the same menace that had made Leanne fall off the swan inflatable in fear.

      The posh girls all took a synchronised step back, which was the first sensible thing they’d done.

      ‘Joke. That was a joke.’ Becky laughed lightly and stepped back into the circle so she could take a proprietorial hold of Emmy’s arm. ‘As if I would say something like that! And I wouldn’t say I was common. I mean, I don’t drop my aitches.’

      ‘You’re Bohemian,’ Amelia squeaked. ‘Becky’s parents were very artsy.’ The girls all sniffed: ‘Bohemian’ was secret code for ‘working class’. ‘Anyway, Becky, I want you to meet everyone. I know they’re going to love you as much as I do.’

      It was doubtful that Minty, Muffin, Molly, Milly and Maddy would ever find it in their cold, solid-platinum hearts to love her. They each leaned in gingerly to kiss the air above Becky’s cheek as if she were covered in grime and smelt of body spray from Poundland, when actually she was freshly showered and doused in Mrs Sedley’s bottle of Coco by Chanel, which was far too young a scent for someone thundering through her fifties.

      Becky might have been wearing another of Amelia’s old dresses and a pair of shoes with loo roll stuffed into the toes because they were a size too large, her pale skin unloved by the Mediterranean sun, but she refused to lower her eyes away from their collective, condemning gaze.

      She was just as pretty as them, if not prettier. Besides, her beauty hadn’t been helped along by the attentions of a favoured plastic surgeon in Harley Street who’d given them all the same nose. Becky’s beauty had flourished in the harshest conditions, like a winter primrose fighting its way through frost to flower. Who knows what she might she have been with the advantages that these girls took for granted?

      The Montessori nursery, the nannies, the private schools and personal tutors. The wholesome food, free of additives and E numbers, grown on the country estate or purchased by the housekeeper from London’s finest grocers. The tennis and ballet lessons. The holidays on exotic beaches and snowy ski slopes. The trips to art galleries and the theatre, Glyndebourne for the opera, Ascot for the racing.

      If Becky had been born into that kind of privilege, there was no telling what she might have become.

      ‘You all look so glamorous,’ Becky said at last, so grateful to Jemima Pinkerton for ironing out her vowels so they were a lot less cockney and a bit more cut-glass. ‘I bet you’ve all been lounging somewhere lovely while poor Emmy and I were holed up in Elstree.’

      ‘Saint Tropez,’ Miffy admitted and Becky widened her eyes.

      ‘When my mother was alive, we used to summer in Cap d’Antibes. She was French, one of the Mortmerency family,’ she said a little wistfully. ‘We’d stay at La Belle Plage.’

      It was the truth. Kind of. If you squinted at it and were already severely short-sighted. Her parents had met in Cap d’Antibes. Her mother and her mother’s mother had been chambermaids at La Belle Plage while her grandfather, pushing sixty, had never been promoted past busboy.

      Her father had rolled into town one summer with a card-counting scam that had him thrown out of every casino within a fifty-mile radius. He also had three of his ribs broken and a mild concussion when he was roughed up by some casino heavies in the alleyway at the back of La Belle Plage, which was where Becky’s mother first laid eyes on him when she was rifling through one of the bins to find a pair of diamond earrings that she’d earlier thrown from a fifth-floor window.

      It wasn’t so much love at first sight as like recognising like. ‘A girl after my own heart,’ her father would say when he was the good kind of drunk, pulling Sidonie on to his lap so he could kiss the top of her head.

      When he was the bad kind of drunk, Sidonie was the one most likely to end up with broken bones and a mild concussion but still, it hadn’t all been bad.

      There had been that one summer when the Sharps had slummed it on the Cap d’Antibes, staying on a nearby campsite and getting all gussied up to visit the family elders at La Belle Plage. Becky could remember being taken to the kitchens and treated like a visiting royal dignitary. There’d been