The Rise and Fall of Becky Sharp: ‘A razor-sharp retelling of Vanity Fair’ Louise O’Neill

‘Sorry, Emmy,’ he said. ‘Is this oik bothering you?’

‘Never!’ Emmy said with another giggle that made Becky grind down on her back molars.

‘Shall we order some champagne?’ she asked Jos as she sat down. Amelia appeared to have no plans to introduce her to Dobbin the talking horse and anyway, what was the point of being introduced to him?

‘Is it table service, do you know?’ Jos asked, peering about the room.

For someone so rich, Jos was absolutely lacking in panache and suaveness and all the other qualities that Becky imagined they gave out on the first day at Eton, along with those funny top hats and tailcoats.

‘I’m parched,’ she said. ‘But if you don’t want any … Look! It is table service. There’s a waiter! Oh, he doesn’t seem to have noticed you.’

‘I’ll run after him,’ Jos promised and he was gone, his shoulders looking especially wide in his white dinner jacket. Unfortunately, the wait staff were also in white jackets which meant that on his way to the bar Jos was stopped by three different groups of people who tried to order drinks from him.

Becky settled back in her chair to watch the rich and entitled at play. Amelia was caught between George and Dobbin and over the chatter of the party and the DJ dropping slow beats, she could still be heard giggling in the same inane fashion.

Jos was at the bar now and when he turned round he was bearing aloft a huge bottle of champagne with a sparkler stuck in it so that on his journey through the club, he was given a wide berth. It was a very romantic gesture but when Jos reached their table and proudly placed the bottle in front of Becky, she heard George murmur to Dobbin, ‘God, how common.’

Becky was sure that she was meant to have heard because when she gave George a reproachful look – the faintest puckering of her forehead, a little pout – he raised his glass in what could only have been a mocking salute.

Well, Amelia was welcome to him, for all the good it would do to love a man who thought he was superior to everyone around him. No wonder he had political ambitions. Becky turned starry eyes to Jos.

‘This is the loveliest thing that anyone has ever done for me,’ she informed Jos with the adoring gaze that always made him put a finger in his shirt collar like it was suddenly choking him. ‘I know you don’t drink, but could you have one glass of champagne? For me?’

‘No carbs plus alcohol are a dreadful combination,’ Jos protested. ‘And anyway, this stuff is pure sugar.’

‘I think it’s mostly bubbles,’ Becky said as she hefted up the bottle, tilted one of the empty glass flutes on the table and expertly poured. ‘Anyway, aren’t we celebrating?’

‘Are we? What are we celebrating?’ Jos asked, as dense as the pads he strapped on when he and Becky were boxercising in the park.

‘Well, we’ve known each other three weeks,’ Becky said with a heavy-lidded glance that made Jos adjust himself when he thought she wasn’t looking.

‘Th … three weeks,’ he gulped. ‘Only three weeks? It seems longer.’

‘Doesn’t it?’ Becky agreed, holding out a glass. ‘It feels like I’ve known you all my life. Here, have just one drink so we can toast our … friendship. Though I suppose all good things come to an end.’

‘It’s coming to an end?’ Jos echoed, his brow furrowing as he took the glass in his meaty paw and manoeuvred it with some difficulty to his lips. He didn’t really have the right build for drinking from delicate champagne flutes.

‘Yes, that’s why we’re here, silly!’ Amelia said, sitting down next to them and leaning across Becky to help herself to a glass. ‘To celebrate the end of summer. I expect you’ll be going back to LA soon, Jos.’

No one had ever treated Becky with as much kindness and sweetness and without any kind of expectation, but in that moment, Becky could quite happily have throttled Amelia Sedley. She wouldn’t even have bothered to make it look like an accident.

‘I suppose,’ Jos sighed, as if the thought of going back to a place where it was sunny all the time and he had a beautiful, architect-designed house in Malibu with three different kinds of pool in its landscaped grounds, was about as appealing as a fortnight in Scunthorpe.

‘Becky’s never been to LA, have you?’ Amelia said, nudging Becky’s arm. ‘You’d love it.’

Maybe she wouldn’t kill Amelia. Not just yet. After all, Amelia was the only person who wanted Jos to make an honest woman of her as much as Becky did.

‘I’ve always wanted to go to LA,’ she said wistfully. ‘Do you know lots of famous people, Jos? I bet you do.’

Jos gulped down the rest of his champagne and puffed out his chest. ‘Well, I’m very good friends with Ryan Gosling’s personal trainer.’ He didn’t even notice when Becky refilled his glass. ‘We sent him some protein balls and apparently he loved them.’

‘Wow! Ryan Gosling,’ Amelia gasped. ‘Who else?’

More stars than there were in the heavens. An Oscar-winning actress next door who was always having loud parties with no consideration for the fact that Jos got up at five to do his first workout of the day. A legendary film director lived up the hill who was obsessed with shooting coyotes and had accidentally killed two of his own bichon frises. And all manner of rap artists, hotly tipped young actors and even a couple of Real Housewives’ husbands, who all worked out at Jos’s gym.

Jos polished off most of the bottle of champagne as he got into his stride; namedropping all the celebrities he’d seen as he queued for his collagen berry lattes or hiked in the Hollywood hills.

‘You’re so well connected. I suppose you have lots of friends. Lots of very glamorous, very beautiful friends who are girls. Girlfriends,’ Becky said, with just a hint of a quiver of her bottom lip. ‘No wonder you can’t wait to go back to LA. We must seem so dull by comparison.’

‘Never. You’re the most beautiful of them all,’ Jos declared rashly and loudly so that George Wylie, who was still hanging around like a bad smell, smiled thinly. ‘They’re all stuffed full of silicon and Botox and actually they’re not friends at all because they’re very unfriendly.’

‘They sound awful,’ Amelia said but then her attention was caught by one of the M’s and with a coy flutter of her lashes at Becky, she slipped out from between them. ‘Must go and say hello to Muffin.’

‘It sounds to me as if you don’t like LA as much as everyone thinks you do,’ Becky commented. Although this was said gently, she was the daughter of Frank Sharp, con artist, hustler and trickster, so there was something hardwired into her DNA that gave her the ability to sniff out a person’s weaknesses. Once she’d identified what made them tick – the dark, secret heart of them – then of course she was going to use that knowledge for her own advantage. Anyone with any sense would do the same.

‘It’s good for the protein-ball business. I don’t think there’s a single person in the 90210 zipcode who’s eaten gluten since Obama became president but, Becky …’ Deep set within his roughly hewn face, Jos’s eyes were troubled.

Becky placed her hand on his knee. ‘You can tell me anything,’ she whispered, leaning forward so that Jos could tell all his fears and worries to her breasts. ‘I would never judge you.’

‘Oh, Becky, I’m so lonely,’ he confessed. He’d never told this sad truth to anyone. ‘Also, and I … I know you might find this hard to believe, but … but … well, I’m shy. Very shy. Always have been.’

Becky shook her head then turned her face away, then sighed, and the hand that was on Jos’s knee slid up a few centimetres, not enough to cause alarm or raise eyebrows, but Jos’s heart was thundering away as if he’d just done thirty minutes of high-impact cardio. ‘There is a way that you wouldn’t ever have to be lonely again,’ she said, leaning up to whisper in his ear so that her breasts almost brushed his chin and Jos had to close his eyes and practise mindful deep breathing. ‘And, a secret for a secret: I’m shy too. The whole reason I went on Big Brother was to build up my confidence.’ Her hand, almost of its own accord, moved up another inch or so. ‘It’s like we’re kindred spirits, isn’t it?’

‘Soulmates,’ Jos agreed and Becky’s face was still tilted up towards his own and he licked his lips nervously and … and … and …

‘For fuck’s sake!’

‘What the hell?’

Their romantic moment was cut short by a sudden dousing of cold champagne from the bottle Dobbin had attempted to pour into Jos’s empty flute.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ he muttered. ‘Didn’t want to interrupt you, thought I’d be all stealthy like, but the bottle slipped.’

‘I’m soaked!’ Becky snapped, furious both at the interruption and that she’d been taken unawares and sworn, when nice, shy, orphaned young ladies didn’t go round dropping the f-bomb. ‘You should be more careful.’

Dobbin actually dared to try and mop at her with a napkin held in his huge hands, then caught his cufflink on one of the crystals sewn on to Becky’s borrowed dress, which tore. Not enough to do much damage, to the dress at least, but enough that he apologised again, profusely, and Jos subsided back on his chair with a hopeless look, and the moment was ruined. Completely ruined.

‘Bad luck!’ said a silky voice and Becky looked up to see George Wylie standing over her, with a smug expression that made her curl her hands into fists, her nails digging into her palms so hard that she’d still have little half-moon marks the next day.

It was a lost cause after that. Jos drowned his sorrows not just with champagne but with whisky chasers, even though Dobbin warned him that he shouldn’t mix grape with grain.

‘I’ll drink what I bloody well like,’ he bellowed belligerently, swaying back from the bar with yet another round. Becky felt her heart sink, knowing only too well that how a man behaved when he was hammered revealed his true nature.

‘I’m going to find Emmy.’ She extricated herself from Jos’s clutches: he had also become very handsy, trying to touch what he wouldn’t dare go near when he was sober.

By the time Becky returned with a predictably agitated Amelia in tow, a large crowd had gathered around Jos who’d attempted to run after Becky but had slipped in the spilt champagne and toppled over on to his back.

He pitched one way then another like an upended turtle while the crowd of braying posh types roared their approval and held up their next-gen iPhones to record the moment for posterity.

‘Up you get, fatso!’ cried one young wag.

‘I’m not fat, I’m big boned and heavily muscled,’ Jos panted to even more hoots and jeers.

‘We have to help him,’ Amelia cried but Becky held her back. That was a sure way to end up in a video that could well go viral by the next morning.

‘We can’t manage him on our own,’ she pointed out reasonably. ‘Where’s your George?’

George Wylie, of course, had slunk off at the first sign of trouble, as he didn’t want to end up in a viral clip any more than Becky did, so it was left to Dobbin to valiantly step in and hoist Jos to his feet, to a helpful commentary from the peanut gallery.

‘Heave! Heave! Heave ho!’ they shouted as Jos was finally levered upright so that he could then lurch unsteadily against their table and send all the glassware flying.

‘More champagne!’ Jos shouted, trying to click his fingers to summon a waiter and almost blinding poor Dobbin. ‘Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends!’

‘Jos, I am cutting you off!’ Dobbin said very sternly, clamping his arm round Jos’s shoulders and steering him out of the club, with Amelia and Becky bringing up the rear.

Becky would much rather have stayed. She was sure she’d spotted a couple of young royals at the bar, but Amelia was crying. Much as the missed opportunity stung, she had no option but to leave with their sad, humiliated little party.

Once they were in the club foyer, George joined them. ‘There you are!’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’

‘You couldn’t have been looking very hard, then, as you were at our table until poor Jos fell over and then you disappeared,’ Becky pointed out.

Amelia stopped crying for long enough to gaze damply and disappointedly at George. ‘You didn’t do that, did you?’

‘Of course I didn’t. Your little friend must be confused,’ he said firmly as if nothing could be further from the truth. ‘Fell over, did he? But no bones broken? Well, let’s get him and you girls home.’

Then he took Jos’s other side and the three men lumbered out of the club like some mythical three-headed beast, only to run into a pack of paparazzi who sprang into action in the hope that one of them might be a rat-arsed young royal.

The popping flashbulbs had a disastrous effect on Jos’s centre of gravity. Or it might have been because George took one look at the cameras and abruptly let Jos go so he could slither back into the shadows. He was a prospective Member of Parliament, after all.

It was left to Amelia to take up the slack and help Dobbin to support the considerable weight of her brother, to the delight of the smudges. Two posh boys weren’t worth the effort but a Big Brother winner might do for a page-seven lead.

Then the drunk young Hooray lurched around towards the pretty redhead who’d come second in Big Brother, trailing a few steps behind as if she had nothing to do with the unfortunate trio in front of her, and he broke free of his captors so he could take her in a very enthusiastic embrace. This could be a front-page story after all.

NEW BALLS PLEASE!

Big Brother Becky Caught In Clinch With Protein-Ball Millionaire!

Friends say he wants to put a ring on it!

She might have only come second in this year’s Big Brother, but beautiful Becky Sharp, 20, looked like a winner last night as she was caught canoodling with Jos Sedley, 33, brother of Amelia Sedley, who snatched the title from her best friend.

Jos, the brains behind a health-and-fitness lifestyle brand which makes a successful range of protein balls, divides his time between London and LA. But judging by the way he locked lips with Becky, to the delight of the crowd, he’s thinking of making London his permanent base.

‘It’s been a whirlwind romance,’ a close friend of the couple reports. ‘They might only have known each other a few weeks but they’re already talking about marriage.’

Three people who would be delighted to hear wedding bells are Big Brother winner Amelia, 22, who regards Becky as a sister, and her parents Charles and Caroline Sedley, who invited Becky to live with them in their Chelsea townhouse worth £15 million, and have apparently given the young couple their blessing.

‘They adore Becky as if she was their own daughter,’ said a source close to the Sedleys. ‘Caroline is already planning the engagement party.’

It will be quite the rags-to-riches story for Becky. She entered the Big Brother house a penniless orphan who’d been working as a care assistant and may now be walking down the aisle with Jos, who is a millionaire in his own right and also inherited millions from his maternal grandfather.

Who said fairy tales never come true?

Chapter 8

‘This is bad. This is very, very bad.’ Jos Sedley groaned the next morning from his horizontal position on the sofa in Dobbin’s Ladbroke Grove flat. ‘It’s the worst.’

Dobbin and George didn’t know if he was talking about his hangover (he’d spent most of the night throwing up and now his face was the colour and texture of elephant hide) or the front page of the Sun. Though the front pages of the Daily Mirror, the Daily Star, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express had all gone with similar stories.

‘It’s not so bad, Jos,’ Dobbin said stoutly, because while his patience was infinite he couldn’t stand malingerers. Especially when the malingering was self-inflicted. ‘You’ll feel much better with a pot of tea and some toast inside you.’

‘No caffeine. No carbs!’

‘It’s a pity you didn’t stick to no alcohol last night,’ George said cheerfully. He threw a copy of the Daily Mirror at Jos’s head. ‘What a gigantic idiot you are! I have absolutely no sympathy for you.’

‘Steady on,’ Dobbin murmured, but George was not to be swayed.

‘I saw you last night,’ he reminded Jos, tapping the other man’s pounding head with the now rolled-up newspaper. ‘Even caught some of the tender things you were murmuring at each other. No wonder she went to the papers and told them that your intentions were honourable!’

‘Rebecca would never go to the papers,’ Dobbin said because surely no friend of dear, sweet Emmy would act in such an underhand way. It simply wasn’t how things were done.

‘I’d bet money on it,’ George insisted. ‘Girls like that, you don’t need to promise them marriage to get their knickers off, Sedley. You just buy them a bottle of something bubbly, shag them, then put them in an Uber and send them on their way.’

Later, as George and Dobbin strolled through Holland Park on their way to Kensington, Dobbin wondered aloud if George hadn’t been too harsh on their friend.

‘Not harsh enough,’ George said without a shred of pity. ‘I did him a huge favour. He spends far too much time pumping iron and guzzling protein shakes, not that it’s made him any more attractive to the opposite sex. If it had, then he might have a bit more experience, might know when he’s being taken for a ride by some jumped-up little tart with ideas far above her station.’

Dobbin didn’t reply at first and they walked through the sun-dappled paths of the park in silence. It was a glorious September morning, the sky impossibly blue, the leaves fluttering in a slight breeze as dogs chased each other round and round in circles, barking joyfully. Mothers, but mostly nannies, clutched hold of toddlers intent on feeding the ducks and not waiting their turn for the swings. On the lush, green grass couples lounged and a group of taut young men and women contorted themselves on yoga mats.

Surely, if Becky Sharp had gone to the papers in order to force a shy young millionaire’s hand, she’d have asked them to photograph she and Jos as they exercised together? When they’d both looked their best in flattering black workout clothes, the photos playful and flirty. Not when they were falling out of a nightclub, Becky in a torn dress, Jos lumbering and drunk.

It was almost as if the photos of last night were the work of someone who’d disappeared at a crucial point during the night. Someone well versed in the art of spin, working, as they did, in politics. But why would someone be so invested in tearing apart two young souls who each believed they’d found their match?

Captain Dobbin certainly wouldn’t have ever imagined that George Wylie, his friend since they were tiny boys starting prep school together in knee-length shorts, red blazers and adorable little caps, might act in such an underhand, cavalier fashion.

True, George had been a member of the infamous Rakehell drinking club at Oxford, which Dobbin had never been invited to join, but George had always kept his hands and nose clean. He was more likely to be trouble-adjacent than in the thick of it.

‘But why should you care?’ Dobbin asked, then cursed under his breath as two small dogs came barrelling through his legs and almost upended him. ‘If she makes Jos happy, then that’s a good thing, isn’t it?’

‘You know why I care, you fool. I’m going to marry Amelia,’ George stated calmly. The shock was so great that Dobbin stumbled over his own size-fourteen feet and had to grab hold of a lamppost to stop himself falling to his knees.

‘I didn’t actually,’ Dobbin managed to say, gasping out the words though his throat had closed up, his heart had stopped beating, his world suddenly turned ashen and grey. ‘I thought you were seeing that little blonde researcher, Polly Somebody.’

‘Well, obviously, I’m not going to marry Amelia any time soon,’ George said with an impatient edge. ‘At the moment, she bursts into tears if you even look at her funny. And she’s twenty-two – no one gets married that young, it’s unspeakably common.’

‘I hadn’t thought about it like that,’ Dobbin choked out, because all he had thought about was how Amelia Sedley – beautiful, sweet, kind little Emmy – was perfect in every way. Far too perfect for the likes of him and, for as long as Dobbin had known Amelia, she’d fancied herself in love with George … ‘So, you’re not seeing that Polly Somebody, then?’

‘I haven’t taken a vow of chastity until Amelia acquires some backbone and a little sophistication,’ George snapped.

Being friends with George wasn’t always easy and at this particular moment, it was especially hard because Dobbin wished that he was in uniform and fully kitted out so he could Taser the living daylights out of his dear friend.

‘These girls,’ continued George, ‘the junior researchers and the likes, the Pollies and Bellas, they’re all gagging for it but they’re fabulously discreet so as not to jeopardise their own careers, so it’s win/win really.’

Dobbin glanced over at George. The dark curls framing that exquisitely patrician face, the beautifully cut grey suit, which clung to his lean frame. On this sunny day, there was something of the night about him.

‘I still don’t see what any of this has to do with Jos Sedley and Amelia’s friend,’ he said and George came to a halt, all the better to roll his eyes.

‘Must I spell it out? I’m going to marry Amelia, I’m really quite fond of her and she should shape up quite nicely, but the family’s not exactly top drawer.’

‘Then again, they’re not exactly bottom of the ladder,’ Dobbin pointed out, because he liked to think that he was egalitarian in his outlook. Though he himself came from a distinguished military family, his father was only the third son of an earl, so he’d pretty much had to make his own way in life.

‘Dobbin, I’m the heir to a baronetcy,’ George said, even though everyone knew that the Wylies had bought the baronetcy. ‘The Sedleys might be rich but they come from very humble stock and there is absolutely no way that I can have a sister-in-law who’s a nothing. A nobody. The sooner she scuttles back to whatever hole she crawled out of, the better. Like I said to Sedley, it’s just as well she was holding out for marriage because otherwise, she’s the sort to either make an incriminating sex tape or get knocked up – either way, she’d have had his balls in a vice and his millions in her bank account.’

‘I suppose you know best,’ Dobbin said dubiously. ‘Though do you always have to see the worst in people?’

George grinned, though Dobbin hadn’t meant it as a compliment. ‘I’m sure Miss Sharp will need some consoling. She might even let you go where Jos didn’t manage to break ground. Why don’t you come with me as I give her the bad news?’

Dobbin declined: the bad news that George was about to deliver so gleefully was sure to make Amelia cry, and to see Amelia cry would break his heart. Though it wasn’t true that she cried all the time. Whenever he saw Amelia, she always looked delighted; a smile on her face that had to be the reason that the sun came up and flowers grew and birds tweeted.

Chapter 9

The Sedley house was in an uproar that morning. Mrs Sedley had cast one look at the Daily Mail and her heart had started to beat so furiously that she thought she might be having a stroke. She wasn’t but she’d had to take to her bed with one of her heads, hissing to Amelia as she went, ‘I want that girl out of the house by the end of the day, Emmy.’

Becky was already packing or, rather, she’d told Amelia that she was packing. ‘I can’t stay here,’ she said to Amelia after Mrs Sedley had been tucked up with two Valium and a hot-water bottle. ‘What must your poor parents think of me? What must Jos think of me? You do know that it wasn’t me who went to the papers?’