Marrying Up Read Online Free PDF Page A

bridesmaids, Alexa noticed, was a particularlybeautiful, particularly lissom, particularly carefree-looking blonde whose name, according to the caption, was Lady Florence
     Trevorigus-Whyske-Cleethorpe.
    She turned to the next page of
Socialite
; photographs of a society party covered the whole of the subsequent spread.
Le tout jeune Belgravia turned out in force when titled twin Teutons Princesses Dodo and Fifi von Sauerkraut-Bogenfratzel
     held their joint twenty-first in the London Dungeon
. . . Alexa looked gloomily at the pairs of bronzed aristocratic legs in couture miniskirts cavorting among the racks and
     executioner’s blocks. She noticed that the longest, bronzest and most aristocratic of all belonged to a certain Lady Florence
     Trevorigus-Whyske-Cleethorpe. Her again.
    Behind Lady Florence, evidently in hot pursuit, was a face Alexa recognised. It belonged to the son of a duke with whom she
     had been at university but upon whom she had singularly failed to make any impression. Lady Florence’s face, however, betrayed
     no interest in who might be behind her; it was an absolute, beautiful blank. Alexa felt sick with envy.
    In the small sitting room below – or the lounge, as they insisted on calling it – her parents sat transfixed by the latest
     events in working-class Manchester. There was the occasional boom of her father’s laugh in response to some particularly salty
     televisual rejoinder. ‘You tell ’er, Ken!’ chimed in her mother.
    What was the point? Alexa stared miserably up at the paper ball shade that had been yellowish ten years ago and hadn’t improved
     much with age. Far from it; it now looked more like a wasps’ nest than ever. That shade had looked down on, had lit, so much
     of her youth.
    Not just the dreaming she had done over magazines like
Socialite
, and her subsequent ambition to have one of the glossy lives contained within them, but the very real work she had put in
     to make it happen.
    As the best universities obviously attracted the best people, Alexa had slaved over her A levels. And while she had missedOxbridge, she had managed St Andrews, which had seemed more than fit for purpose. As a magnet for the upper classes, the place
     had form, and even if the biggest royal bag of all had been and gone, there were plenty of minor dukes and lords still littering
     the place.
    Taking as her maxim that of the Boy Scouts – her interest in them otherwise being absolutely zero – Alexa went prepared. Money
     carefully hoarded from Christmas and birthday presents was equally carefully invested in elocution lessons. Answering an ad
     in a local newspaper entitled ‘
Lose Your Ey Up Accent
’ proved the gateway to a paradise of long ‘a’s and the reassurance of knowing that never again could she be tripped up by
     hidden assassins such as ‘butcher’ and ‘bush’. While the lessons were kept a secret from her parents, the results could not
     be; her mother was mystified and her father openly annoyed. But it was not him, of course, that she was trying to impress.
    As well as
Socialite
, her bible, Alexa devoured every etiquette manual she could lay her hands on for pointers about gracious living, absorbing
     like blotting paper the rules concerning not holding your knife like a pen, how to avoid taking someone else’s bread roll
     by mistake and the rights and wrongs of powdering one’s nose at the table. The final piece of the jigsaw was clothes; there
     was no point speaking and acting the part if you didn’t look it, too. As designer shops were, especially after the elocution
     lessons, out of the question, Alexa devoted her energies to scouring eBay and built up a respectable collection of secondhand
     designer wear.
    ‘I hardly recognise you,’ Dad said disapprovingly, humping the luggage after her as she prepared to board the train to St
     Andrew’s. And soon, she planned, he wouldn’t recognise himself either; at university, when asked, Alexa would upgrade