Marrying Up by Wendy Holden

bedclothes in panic. For a disoriented moment of blind-dark terror, she felt certain
     that someone, somehow, had breached the cast-iron security of the Palace Gate flat and she was about to feel the chill edge
     of a murderer’s axe in her skull. Then she realised what it really was. Her sister. Back from a night out.
    ‘Florrie,’ she growled into the pillow. ‘Bloody Florrie.’
    Beatrice wondered angrily what time it was. She’d gone to bed at midnight herself, and hours must have passed since then.
    She sat up, rolled over and fumbled for where the alarm clock was buried Through bleary eyes, she saw that it was three a.m.
     Fury seized her. Three bloody a.m.! If her sister
had
to come back at this hour, then why in God’s name couldn’t she open the front door
quietly
? But never in her life had Florrie evinced the smallest degree of concern for others. Which was infuriating enough in itself;
     what was more infuriating still was that she had always got away with it.
    Too angry now to go to sleep, Beatrice flung her legs out of bed, padded across her bedroom carpet and opened the big white-panelled
     door of her room. Down the shadowy, picture-hung corridor, she could see the sitting room at the end – brilliantly lit; Florrie
     had turned all the lights on – and Florrieherself sprawled out with her shoes on over the pale yellow sofa.
    ‘My head!’ Beatrice could hear her moaning. ‘Beattie!’ came the sudden sharp yell. ‘Omigod, I’m dying, I swear it. Get up
     and get me some Nurofen, would you, there’s a darling.’
    Beatrice winced. She hated being called Beattie; her name was bad enough without being abbreviated to sound like a cockney
     char, even if that seemed roughly the relationship she enjoyed with respect to her sister. She marched down the passage to
     the sitting room in her pyjamas and stood over her prone sibling, arms akimbo.
    ‘It’s three in the morning, for God’s sake.’
    Yet despite occupying, as she almost always did, the moral high ground, there was, Beatrice sinkingly felt, something about
     Florrie that made this seem redundant.
    It was that she was so lovely. The fact that normal rules simply didn’t apply to people who looked like her was something
     Florrie, in her sister’s view, took full advantage of. She was possessed of the kind of beauty that had people rushing up
     to give her flowers in the street, striking up conversations from the other side of the road and exiting Tube carriages and
     re-entering them just to have the pleasure of looking at her again. It was the sort that prompted streams of men to follow
     her down the pavement, and for some of them even to propose marriage. Beatrice knew this because all these things had happened,
     some more than once, at times when she had been out with her sister.
    Even now, despite the beginnings of what would doubtless be one of Florrie’s famous hangovers, her sister still appeared far
     younger than her twenty years and as pure as if the mere thought of alcohol had never so much as crossed her alabaster brow.
    One slender white arm was draped languidly over her lovely oval face with its perfect bow-shaped lips and flawless skin. Florrie’s
     beauty had an old-fashioned quality; it was easy to imagine her floating about thirties salons in shimmery column dresses,
     laughing tinklingly into martinis.
    It was so bloody unfair, Beatrice thought. By most people’s standards, she herself was very attractive, being tall and slender
     as most of the family were. But next to Florrie, she was nothing.
    She had her father’s black hair and dark complexion, while Florrie had inherited the golden beauty of their mother. But it
     wasn’t simply that she was dark and Florrie was fair. It was more subtle than that.
    Florrie spoke in a lower, huskier voice that made all the difference. Her eyebrows were spread at a better angle. Beatrice
     had gazed often enough in the mirror to know that her nose, while similar to Florrie’s,