The Look of Love (16 page)

She glanced at the next table again. The man was still stolidly eating. The woman was still talking, but half her salad had gone. How had she managed that? She hadn’t even picked up a fork last time Bella looked. Bella was almost tempted to drop her napkin so she could see if the food had been scooped under the table.

‘Damage. You must watch for damage,’ James warned. ‘They’re notoriously careless, film crews.’

‘Carly’s mum says it’s anti-feminist to have people tell you what you should and shouldn’t wear,’ Molly chipped in as the food arrived. ‘She says it’s all a big plot by woman-hating fashion designers who make clothes that only look good on flat boy-shapes. Then they can laugh at the ridiculous dieting lengths that perfectly normal women go to trying to make themselves that shape too, so the clothes will look right.’

‘When I look at some of the so-called “clothes” that turn up over the seasons, I can see Carly’s mum might have a point,’ Shirley agreed. ‘Remember those veil things that completely obliterated the faces but left the models otherwise naked? I’m not sure pubic hair has any place on a fashion catwalk. How, exactly, was that
supposed to be translated for the high street market?’

Molly giggled. ‘Gran, you’re like
so
upfront?’

‘Appropriate choice of word there, Moll!’ Alex laughed.

‘Oh Molly, darling, don’t go all prissy now!’ Shirley poured some wine into Molly’s glass.

‘I’m not! But I think Carly’s mum’s right too.’

‘Maybe she is … and at a very bizarre level,’ Alex said, ‘the extreme demands of high-end fashion could undermine the nature of the universe because instead of evolving by way of the survival of the fittest, you get survival of the flattest, thinnest and least likely to be able to breed. Converse of Darwin. Not so much evolution of the species but the potential end of it. Just for a size zero.’

‘Good grief Alex, no wonder you got into Oxford. That’s convoluted but so clever.’ Shirley was admiring, but then turned to Bella. ‘Darling, really, I know you’re doing this so that you can write about it, but have you considered the danger of them making you look a bit of a fool? Isn’t that how so-called reality TV works, by bullying perfectly nice people a little
too
much? Because really, there’s nothing wrong with the way you put yourself together. Apart from under-accessorizing, of course. Statement jewellery – you can dramatize any plain outfit with that.’ She looked around the restaurant for an example, finding a useful one two tables away, and
pointed out her quarry to the others, raising her voice. ‘You see? Like that outfit over there.’ She was being loud, heads were turning. ‘Dull in its own way, colour-wise, but look how she’s added …’

The woman Shirley was indicating turned, sensing she was the one being discussed; she got up and immediately came over to their table. Shirley looked alarmed, as if afraid the woman had come to slap her and tell her to keep her opinions to herself.

‘Bella! Gosh! Fancy running into you here!’ Bella was thrown for a second, barely recognizing Dina, who had always expressed complete scorn for fancy clothes and make-up. Her long hair, a patchwork of greys and rust shades, was piled up in a tumbledown sexy way and clamped into place with a big tortoishell clip. She wore a simple dark emerald dress with a lacy jacket in the same colour – Ghost, Bella guessed. She had silver hoop earrings and a silver necklace set with big chunks of bronzy stone. She still wore no make-up but somehow this was fine. Her eyes were the colour of the necklace stones.

‘Dina – you look fantastic! How are you?’ Bella hoped she didn’t sound too amazed – how insulting would that be? But it was a shock – Dina was normally a voluminous skirt and baggy top sort of woman, covering a substantial body mass with as much fabric as possible while claiming she really was above caring. Now she was looking positively glamorous and potentially
another disappointment for Daisy and Dominic – Dina, of all people, seemed to have the what-to-wear thing sussed perfectly well, thank you.

‘I’m fine!’ Dina told her. ‘Looking forward to our TV style-trial. I’ve quite come round to thinking it’s a good thing. Are all of you going to be in it too?’ she said to the table at large.

‘Sorry Dina – no, this is the family. Son Alex, daughter Molly and my mother, Shirley, who was just pointing you out as an example of top accessorizing. And … er, this is James.’ How to describe him? ‘He is Molly and Alex’s father.’ Well, he was. ‘And this is Dina – one of my writer friends. She’s going to be one of the Fashion Victims with me next week.’

James was looking at Dina in quite an odd way, Bella thought. His eyes were wide and staring and his mouth was unattractively half open. Any moment now, he’d be dribbling. Was he all right?

‘The wind will change and you’ll be stuck like that,’ she heard Shirley murmur to him.

‘Hmm? What?’ He jumped, startled back to earth.

‘Well, it’s really good to meet you all,’ Dina said. ‘I’m over there, with my brother, so I’d better get back to him. I’ll see you next week, Bella. Oh, and …’ She leaned close to James and picked up a fork. ‘Couldn’t help noticing, there’s a small mark on that. You might want to send it back.’

‘Thank you
so much
!’ James beamed, taking the fork from her, using his napkin rather than touching it.

‘Now that,’ he said, when Dina had gone back to her seat, ‘is what I call a woman.’ He sighed, looking quite flushed. ‘Does anyone want pudding? Molly? Don’t hold back anyone, this is all on me.’

‘Good grief,’ Shirley whispered to Molly, ‘to my enormous surprise, it looks like I owe you a pound.’

Daisy was twirling round and round in Bella’s kitchen, arms out like a child playing windmills. The sleeves of her yellow kimono top (over a purple satin tulip skirt, over orange lace leggings, scarlet killer heels, a combination which shouldn’t have worked but just
did
) billowed and flapped. ‘Oh now this is a
gorgeous
space! I’ve seen smaller village halls!’ She abruptly stopped twirling, adding very quickly, ‘As a child, I mean. Ballet class and Brownies, that sort of thing. Haven’t been near a village hall in years. Obviously.’ She shivered slightly, as if the very idea of being more than five miles beyond Notting Hill was too hideous to contemplate.

Bella tried to imagine Daisy at a ballet class: she’d have been sure to have perfectly colour-co-ordinated ribbons rather than the usual random what’s-available ones sewn on the hem of her character skirt, and to have
been the one girl in the class whose wrapover cardigan was cashmere.

‘So – this room will be just the thing, with a bit more gussying up!’ Daisy continued. ‘And how clever of you, Bella, to resist having an island unit in here! Most people would have, wouldn’t they? And you’d have lost some of that wonderful open feeling!’ Bella didn’t tell her that the lack of an island crammed with artfully hidden kitchen gadgets was down to her and James running out of renovation money at the time it was all built. But Daisy was right – it would have spoiled the space.

Daisy strutted around, touching surfaces, peering into cupboards, pulling back even further the already open folding doors to the garden. Bella didn’t mind at all – the kitchen no longer felt entirely hers; with Daisy, Dominic, Saul and Fliss here, this had become a workplace, their set. The more comfortable and at home they all felt in it, the more relaxed they would be and the easier this palaver would be for everyone. And it did look good. Saul had taken Bella’s huge naive Caribbean painting of a market in Grenada from its usual place in the hallway and hung it on the coral wall. With the turquoise sea in the painting’s background reflecting the glass on the opposite wall, it somehow pulled the room’s new look together. She knew it would never return to its original position.

‘There’s usually a sofa in here too, and dangerously overfilled bookshelves and a couple of tables for magazines and stuff over there …’ She pointed to the wall opposite the long row of units. ‘They’ve all been taken away. Saul thought we should keep the dining table, though.’ Saul was now in the garden, talking to Fliss about bringing in more plants to obscure the fence and the neighbours’ washing line.

‘Yes … possibly move it to the wall, though, when we actually start … it’s very big. And so
many
chairs,’ Dominic drawled. Bella felt immediately defensive about her chairs, as if she were a woman herding her very large family on to a crowded bus and sensing a vibe that she should have been more careful not to conceive so frequently. But these were only chairs. Twelve simple upholstered Ikea dining chairs, each covered in either cream or turquoise fabric. She told herself firmly that if she were to start being sentimental about those, she might as well give up on this makeover malarkey right now. She was going to need a very thick skin.

‘Well I don’t provide seating for twelve on an everyday basis, Dominic, but there’ll be a lot of us here this morning; your other victims – or should I call them “clients” – are all coming,’ Bella told him, feeling she was explaining herself to a hyper-critical ten-year-old. ‘I pulled out both extension leaves on the table and brought extra chairs from the cellar so we can use this
like a boardroom table. Is this OK? Or did you want something less formal? Maybe use the garden more? What’s the plan?’

She’d already been through some of this the day before, when the director and the lighting crew had arrived to do some measurements and some mysterious technical murmurings about light values. Her role then had been easy – point them at the kettle, put out the blueberry muffins she’d made, show them where the tea and coffee were and keep out of the way.

‘It’s fine.’ Saul came back in and reassured her. ‘Today is about the programme content, not the scenery. Fliss will measure everyone, Daisy will talk generally about the overall programme structure and then to each of you one at a time about personal style preferences and how what you wear has to fit into your lives and then … Bella, if Daisy and Fliss do you first, I was wondering – would you like to come with me to the prop house to pick out a whopping great sofa? I thought that seeing as it’s your house you should at least get a say in what we have in here. Owner’s privilege? And you already heard most of what Daisy and Dominic have lined up format-wise when you met them before. I’m thinking something like a horseshoe shape, something as off the wall as possible.’

‘Puce,’ Fliss said. ‘I like puce. You should get that.’ She was looking very organized today, very tidy in a black
pencil skirt and her hair up in a topknot, as if she was taking her PA look direct from a 1940s film. Bella watched her carefully unpacking a stylish scarlet satchel and lining up pens, a tape measure and a heap of notebooks in different colours on the table.

‘She has a thing for stationery,’ Saul murmured to Bella. Bella was instantly reminded of her own schooldays, that first day of term with a new pencil case, sharp pencils, a scuff-free eraser. Even now, on her desk in her little upstairs office, she had most of the contents of Paperchase, bought on many a whim and the certainty that she might need them some time. All the same, not many grown women have a need for a box full of coloured pencils.

‘So what do you think about coming to the prop house? Have you got time?’ Saul asked her quietly. ‘I could do with your input, frankly.’

‘You’re talking about me, aren’t you?’ Fliss suddenly said, glaring at Saul. ‘It’s about the sofa thing, isn’t it?’

‘I’m talking about
a
sofa, yes. But not about you.’

‘You’re going to tell her, aren’t you? Go on, I know you’re dying to. Humiliate me if you want, I don’t care.’

‘Fliss, Fliss, I wouldn’t do that.’

‘It’s OK – I know I’m only the
work experience
. What do I know?’ She stalked out of the room and Bella heard the door of the downstairs loo being slammed hard.

‘Wow – what was that about?’

‘Ah … well it was quite funny really – though it seems not so to Fliss.’ Saul led Bella out to the garden and they sat together on the bench. ‘Fliss had a run-in with me over props. I should have known better; she’s already made it clear that clothes are her only real interest. I told her she could go on her own to look at sofas and she came back all excited and said she’d hired two. She then showed me the photos on her phone … they were lime green and inflatable. I tried to be positive and pointed out these would be a brilliant choice if no one was actually going to sit on them. But plastic squeaks with every move – it would be like putting everyone on whoopee cushions. Her second choice was cane, which would have been OK if we were doing the show in the garden, so I had to turn that down too, though I told her I might just hire them anyway, put them out on the terrace, depending on how much room the guy from
Green Piece
leaves us after he’s brought the plants to tart up the garden. She said I didn’t have to, there was no need to patronize her.’

Bella said, ‘But you weren’t, were you? You liked the cane ones!’

‘Ah yes, but it was all too late. I’d made the mistake of laughing when I saw the blow-up sofas she’d chosen and she went right off on one, immediately.’

Bella laughed. ‘Oh, I can see she would. Molly would
be exactly the same. You hurt her feelings and her pride!’

Saul scratched his head. ‘Well, I don’t have much experience of girls like her. Mostly the twenty-something pointy-shoed girlies in this business are all hyper-efficient and terrifyingly grown-up. But with Fliss, one minute she’s wanting to be taken
really seriously
because she’s an
adult
and the next she’s sulking like a fourteen-year-old.’

Privately, Bella considered this might be something to do with the stepfather/stepdaughter situation. She was longing to ask about his home life, but this wasn’t the moment. Faintly in the background, she could hear the doorbell. The rest of the troops had arrived.

‘And it’s yes,’ she said to him quickly before they both got caught up with the others. ‘Yes, I’d love to come and look at sofas with you.’

‘I don’t suppose you’ve had a chance to tell your family about us yet?’ Dennis asked Shirley as they left Tate Modern and walked hand in hand along the riverbank towards the Globe theatre.