The Look of Love (32 page)

‘It’s a bit chillier out here these mornings, isn’t it?’ Shirley appeared at the kitchen door, watching Bella. She was wearing a dark-blue velvet dressing gown, managing to look elegant even straight from bed. How did she do that? Bella’s hair never seemed to be as sleek as her mother’s, which fell straight into place at the first touch of a comb. On nights such as the previous unsettled one, Bella’s hair went sweatily damp, then fixed itself into mad random angles so that by the time she woke up it was sticking up all anyhow. Today her fringe had a crazy sideways kink in it and some of the back was matted like an old doormat, but it didn’t matter – this was make-up and hair day. They were all to be whizzed up to a film-set salon near Waterloo so they’d be glammed up when they returned to the house for a final dress-up and the end of the show. This time tomorrow,
she told herself, this chaos would all be over and they could all get back to some kind of normal life and no-one would be hanging around like the fashion police, sneering at the Wrong Cardigan.

‘Sorry, do shut the door if you want to,’ Bella told Shirley. ‘Are you cold in there?’

‘No, it’s OK, I’m fine. Coffee? I’m just making some.’

‘Oh tea for me, I think. I’ll come in now; I’ve finished the watering.’

She switched off the outside tap, wound the hose back on to the reel, then came back into the house and washed her hands. The terrace was shinily drenched and all the plants dripped, but the heat-promise steaminess of early May and June mornings was no longer there. It simply looked as if there’d been rain.

‘There are millions of spiderwebs but not so many snails,’ Bella commented to Shirley. ‘Is it the time of year or the dryness?’

‘Probably both. They’re a mystery, slugs and snails. I expect you can look up on Google where they go in winter. Off on cruises, like affluent pensioners, I expect.’

‘On which note, when do we get to meet Dennis?’ Bella asked. ‘Don’t you want him to meet us? I know Alex isn’t here so it’s not the full turnout, but I’m dying to check him out myself.’

Shirley raised one perfectly groomed eyebrow. ‘Do
you want to see if he’s suitable? If his intentions are properly honourable?’

‘I didn’t doubt that they are. It’s wonderful that you’ve found someone at last, for …’ Her voice trailed off. Well, it had to be for love, didn’t it? What else could it be?

‘I hope you weren’t going to say “companionship”, Bella,’ Shirley teased her. ‘Because how wrong can you be! Do you think there’s a cut-off point at which everything shuts down and that magic attraction turns into something dulled and non-physical, non-emotional, so that you express how you feel by, I don’t know, visiting National Trust houses? Making cakes?’

‘Well it might explain a few things about the WI,’ Bella quipped. Shirley didn’t look amused.

‘OK, sorry. Keep ignorant mouth shut, Bella,’ she told herself. ‘But I suppose I did assume something kind of declined with the menopause. Is that not what happens? Doesn’t it all feel more …
restful
? I’m really beginning to see the point of the word “contentment”.’

‘If anything
does
expire with the menopause,’ Shirley said tartly, ‘then you haven’t got that much mileage left in you either, my girl. I bet you hadn’t thought of it that way, had you? You and Saul – I could see from your face you were up in the air about him early yesterday, then pacing about half the night, and now you look like someone’s slapped you with a herring. Why can’t you
just get on with it? Stop waiting for everything to be so damn
perfect
. Nothing starts that way; you have to want it, make it happen.’

‘Right. Compromise, then. Yes, that would work. Let me see, I’m a woman who serially picks men with background baggage, I can only get a job if I learn how to dress better, my ex-husband is telling me I have to move house …’ Bella switched the kettle on again. Endless tea – the British way of coping with everything from a grazed knee to massacre.

‘Oh Bella, do stop sounding so defeated!’ Shirley sounded exasperated. ‘Not compromise
at all
; the opposite. Go with your instincts and stop
analysing
. You don’t seem to get it yet that time is the most precious and finite thing. Stop
wasting
it.’

‘But …’

‘No buts. You like Saul, don’t you? He likes you. So what are you looking so fraught about?’

‘The fact that he’s married – or has been married, to
Daisy
? And didn’t actually get round to mentioning it, even though they’ve both been here in the house for the past however many days it is now? I’ve just made yet another of my man mistakes. I give up.’

Shirley shrugged. ‘Not necessarily a mistake. I bet you haven’t asked him about her, have you? And besides – Daisy and Dominic. I already told you, any fool can see they’re besotted with each other, even if neither of them
have quite fathomed it out yet. Why else would he put up with her? Why else would she trail him around with her when she can quite obviously do the whole job perfectly well on her own?’

‘Of course I’m going to ask him. I was giving myself some time to …’ Bella began.

‘… to fume and steam and get yourself into a stew imagining the worst,’ Shirley interrupted. ‘That’s what I mean about wasting time. Even Molly’s got the hang of this bit about men. She needed a push, but she’s gone and sorted things out with her boyfriend. You can learn a thing or two from her.’

‘Ah now, Molly – have you told her about you and Dennis getting married? I didn’t say anything to her because I thought you’d probably want it to come from you.’

‘No, I haven’t told her yet. I didn’t think it was tactful till she was a bit happier. Later today, I will. I’ll bring Dennis over as well.’

‘Oh good – but I hope he won’t mind all the upheaval here. Daisy’s decided we’ve got to have a party in the garden later, so we can be filmed being “natural” in our lovely made-over looks.’

‘Excellent – we’ll gatecrash. It’ll be fun. And Bella?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Don’t let them cut your hair too short. And don’t go any blonder either. You’d look terribly harsh. Now – I
know you’re all wound up and probably feel as if you’ve swallowed a clay boulder, but you’re looking peaky and I’m starving. Let’s have a bacon sandwich to go with this tea.’

Yes, let’s, Bella thought, switching on the grill and feeling a bit more cheerful at the thought of comfort food. And later, if it came to a tussle at the salon about her hair, she’d get the hairdresser to give Shirley a call. Even Nicky Clarke wouldn’t dare cross
her
.

‘And we get a cab back as well? I could get used to this!’ Molly said to Bella as they went into the hairdressing salon tucked away behind the South Bank complex. Molly had been very chatty in the car, completely revived after the previous misery. She’d come flying into the house looking radiant and glossy late the previous evening, as Bella was about to go to bed.

‘All on again, is it?’ Bella had guessed as Molly almost skipped across the kitchen to forage in the fridge.

‘Mmm. Yum. Yes – me and Giles. It’s all cool. And Aimee’s not pregnant. Stupid cow. She was just being jealous. You’ve got to feel sorry for her.’

‘Have you? That’s very generous.’

‘Yeah, well, sad, desperate people will do anything to get what they want. But then it can all go wrong for them.’

‘I think that’s called karma, Moll,’ Bella told her.

‘Not nice, whoever you are,’ Molly decided.

Molly, in her revived mood, was now loving the luxury of being driven to an area she’d normally get to by train. ‘It makes me feel all celebrityish,’ she said, bouncing around a bit. Well, here was one whose mood had changed overnight, Bella thought, pleased for her daughter. Lucky her, and long may her beautiful glow of happiness last.

As she went through the polished steel door into the building, Bella’s butterflies returned at the thought of facing Saul and whatever it was he would be telling her about the him-and-Daisy set-up. She tried to calm her thudding heart, thinking how much she now wished that she and Saul had had a simple, explanatory phone conversation the night before instead. What was the worst he could have said? ‘Daisy and I are together but …’ But what? They had an ‘open marriage’? Did people still have those? Or he could have said that they
weren’t
together – in which case why had he left it till now to tell her they’d ever had a connection? If they’d talked it through hours ago, she would have had a chance of feeling calm by now. How silly of her to have put the moment off – how ridiculously
flouncy
, to use a favourite word of her mother’s.

The door was still swinging shut as Saul – who must have been waiting to pounce – grabbed Bella’s arm and pulled her outside to the street again. She caught sight
of Molly’s face smiling at her through the steel door’s porthole window. Her grin was positively impish.

‘You’re abducting me,’ Bella protested to Saul. ‘I’m supposed to be having my hair and face all made over. And don’t they need you in there too?’

‘Yes, I’m abducting you,’ he agreed, holding her hand firmly and walking fast away from the building, towards the river. ‘They can start work on someone else and do you later. Not that you need it. And no, they don’t need me either for an hour. I’ve sorted it. Come on, let’s get away from here.’

Tourists thronged the South Bank; the queue for the London Eye was as long as in the holiday months of July and August, and everyone, to Bella’s eyes, looked as if they were having the most enviable stress-free time, cameras clicking, the line of people moving amiably and without impatience or complaint.

‘I wouldn’t get to talk to you alone in there with all the others around, so this was the only solution,’ Saul continued, still walking so fast Bella almost had to break into a trot to keep up. He was squeezing her hand tight, as if scared she’d run off.

A group of chattering Japanese tourists, each one pecking at a phone and oblivious to anyone in their path, separated them for a moment.

‘Not that in this crowd you could really count it as “alone”. Whoever said you can be more alone in a city
than anywhere else had never done the South Bank on a warm autumn day. OK, come on,’ he said, setting off again towards the landing stage, towing her along with him. ‘I’ve had an idea.’

They were just in time. The safety barrier was about to go up before the ferry left. Saul quickly sidestepped the operator and he and Bella jumped on board.

‘Where is this thing going?’ Bella giggled as they raced through the cabin where the more cautious trippers were sitting with their guidebooks and their maps, past the bar and to a row of empty seats out in the open in the stern, like schoolchildren bagging the back seats on a bus.

‘I haven’t a clue,’ Saul told her. ‘I don’t care if it’s going all the way to the Thames Barrier and across to bloody France. I just wanted to get you to myself without you sliding out of range.’

‘Before you start,’ she interrupted, ‘can I just ask the only thing I really need to know?’

He hesitated. ‘I can’t stop you. But I’d prefer to get everything in the right order.’

They were passing Tate Modern and then the Globe Theatre – the latter looking tiny by comparison, like something cute built for dolls. ‘Wait, first I just want to know … are you and Daisy still married?’

‘No,’ he replied immediately. ‘Not for a long, long time. And it wasn’t really what you’d call a marriage.’

Bella bit back a very tart ‘And what
would
you call it then?’ and instead said carefully, ‘Look, I do understand some of it, in a way. It was something my mother said about after a partner you really, truly loved has died. About how you’d want to try to have that experience again, because it had been so wonderful and you want it back. It even sort of explains Paul McCartney and Heather Mills, a bit.’

‘Well, a
little
bit!’ Saul laughed, and then looked more serious. ‘But it wasn’t like that, not even slightly. That’s why I wanted you just to listen and not have me tell it all out of sequence. Daisy and I weren’t married after Lucy. That’s the thing. Daisy was
before
Lucy. About a hundred years ago – or that’s how it feels.’

The boat, having gone under Tower Bridge and out of the Pool of London regulations, suddenly picked up speed. Jets of water, spritzed up from the engine, blew back over Bella’s hair. She took no notice but felt slightly shivery from the cold spray. Saul put his arm round her and she relaxed against him, snuggling close. Because, as her mother had reminded her,
why not
?

‘
Before
Lucy?’ She was seriously confused now. ‘How come before? And I know you don’t want me interrupting, but why on earth didn’t you tell me all this before? You knew from what I said about Rick that I really can’t be doing with secrets and lies. An ex-wife, honestly explained, I’d have been fine with. Even Daisy.’

‘
Even
Daisy?’ Saul looked disbelieving.

‘Yes of course, even Daisy. But go on, why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I didn’t say anything because Daisy asked me not to. It’s as simple as that. I’d promised her I wouldn’t mention it to anyone on the show, way before we started the
Fashion Victims
filming.’

‘But why? That’s a pretty unfair demand in this case, isn’t it?’

‘As it turned out, yes. But then I’m not in the habit of falling for people when I’m working. Or at all. Ever. Thing is – Daisy’s incredibly ambitious and clawed her way up from nowhere to get where she is now. She absolutely loathes the idea that anyone would think she was getting work on the who-you-know basis, and this is a very small industry. Everybody knows each other. Nobody trusts husband-and-wife teams – even long-divorced ones – there’s always that suspicion that one of the two isn’t as up to the job as a carefully chosen outsider would be. She’s also incredibly private about her personal life. I mean, how much have you actually learned about her during this programme? Absolutely nothing, that’s what. She keeps it all inside. I bet she gave Fliss hell when she let it slip that Daisy was her mother.’

Bella smiled. ‘She wasn’t exactly thrilled, that’s true.’ True? Daisy had looked as if she could have slapped
poor Fliss at the time. ‘Though if
you
hadn’t already mentioned that Fliss was your stepdaughter, I still wouldn’t have been any the wiser.’