possible. I don’t think Bell is capable of loving anyone except herself. She couldn’t possibly be so cool and efficient and successful if she didn’t devote all her attention to number one.’
Elspeth laughed. ‘I know what you mean, but I think you’re being a bit hard on her. Everyone likes her, after all, except perhaps you.’
‘Oh, I like her too. I just don’t believe in her. She’s too good to be true, that’s all.’
‘You’re jealous.’
The other girl stubbed out her cigarette and turned to stare at her friend. ‘Of course I’m jealous. That’s just the point. However likeable she may be, if everyone she knows is jealous of her she’ll end up alone and unhappy. You have to be vulnerable to get human sympathy, and do you think Bell is vulnerable?’ There was no answer, and they both looked across at the knot of dancers. Neither of them had ever seen Bell crying, or ill, or apparently unsure of herself. No one had, for years, except Edward.
And now she didn’t have Edward any more.
Bell would have laughed, unbelieving, if she could have heard their conversation. She let herself lean against Edward, feeling the familiar contours of their bodies fitting together. It felt very secure. Temptingly secure.
Yet tomorrow she had to go to France and face up to the intimidating French baron, alone. Not only face up to him, but impress him enough to make him talk about his Château as he’d never talked to any other journalist. She didn’t want to go, but she couldn’t stay where she was either.
Bell knew that she was in a mess. It would have amused her if she could have known that anyone envied her at that moment.
The evening came to an end at last. They all stood outside the door of the club, hugging each other affectionately. The two women and Marcus wished her bon voyage.
‘If we don’t see you before, send us a postcard from San Francisco,’ said Elspeth. ‘Have a wonderful time.’
‘Give my love to Valentine,’ Marcus called. ‘’Byeeee.’
Edward slammed the door of his battered car and reversed recklessly down the street before glancing at Bell.
‘Cheer up,’ he advised her. ‘You are quite lucky, you know.’ She bit her lip. Guilty of self-pity, as well.
He left her at the door of her flat and drove away with a cheerful wave and his habitual three toots on the horn.
Bell let herself in and wandered into her bedroom. Her packing was done, and she wasn’t sleepy yet. A nightcap, perhaps. She sloshed a measure of brandy into Edward’s empty wine glass that was still standing on the coffee table, then went over to her dressing-table to look at the open diary.
The square for the next day read ‘10 a.m. Wigmore & Welch. Plane 12.30’. That meant a wine-tasting first at an old-established firm of merchants, always worth a visit, and straight from there to the airport. The next three days were crossed through with neat diagonals and the words ‘Ch. Reynard’. The second of those days was to be her twenty-eighth birthday.
The realization made Bell smile ruefully and she sat down to examine her face in the mirror. Not too many lines, yet, and the ones that she could see were all laughter lines. Automatically she picked up her hairbrush and began to stroke rhythmically at her hair. The one hundred nightly strokes was a habit left over from childhood and she clung to it obstinately, as a link with her dead mother.
In one of Bell’s last memories of her she was standing at her side with the identical blue-green eyes fixed on her own in the mirror.
‘A hundred times, Bell,’ she was saying, ‘and your hair will shine like silk.’
That was it, of course.
The thing she was really frightened of, and the thing she wouldn’t let herself think about. Except at times like now, when she was alone with a brandy glass in her hand and the memories were too vivid to suppress. She had seen it all through the agonizingly clear eyes of childhood. Her mother had died, and she had watched her father disintegrate. Day after day, year after year, defencelessly turning into a wreck of what he had once been.
Bell didn’t think she was remembering her very early years with any particular romantic distortion. Her parents had very obviously been deeply in love. They had been quite satisfied with their single child. Bell had the impression that her father didn’t want her mother to share out her love any further. He wanted the lion’s share of it for himself.
Selfish of him, probably, but he had suffered enough for that.
There had been very good times, early on. Her father was a successful stockbroker in those days, comfortably off. There had been a pretty house in Sussex, French holidays, birthday parties for Bell and the company of her witty, beautiful mother.
Joy Farrer had probably never been very strong. Bell remembered the thinness of her arms when they hugged her, and the bony ridges of her chest when she laid her head against it. Sometimes she had been mysteriously ill, but Bell remembered those days only as brief shadows.
Then, with brutal suddenness, she was gone.
One night when Bell went to bed she was there, reminding her not to skimp on the one hundred strokes with the hairbrush. In the morning she had disappeared. The house was full of whispers and strange, serious faces. Her father’s study door was locked.
It was several days before they told her she was dead, but she had really known it from the moment when she woke up on the first morning. The house had smelled dead. Something in it had shrivelled up and vanished overnight. A housekeeper arrived, but Bell did her crying alone. The sense of loss suffocated her, and at night she would try to stifle herself with her pillow to shut out the misery. She was convinced, in her logical, childish mind, that her mother’s death was her own, Bell’s, fault.
She had rarely seen her father in those first months. She learned from an aunt, years later, that he had taken to going out all night and driving his car round the Sussex lanes. Round and round, going nowhere. With a bottle of whisky on the seat beside him. By the time he was convicted of drunken driving Bell was away at boarding school and knew nothing about it. He simply stopped coming to pick her up from school at half-terms and holidays, and she travelled on the little local train instead. All she did know was that he was getting thinner, and an unfamiliar smell emanated from the well-cut grey suits that were now too large, creased, and slightly stained.
Her once-handsome, assured father was turning into a grey-haired stranger who behaved peculiarly.
It was in the middle of the summer holidays when she was fourteen that Bell realized that her father was an alcoholic. She found the plastic sack of empty whisky bottles in the garage when she was looking for the turpentine. She had been trying to brighten up the dingy kitchen with a coat of white paint.
That was the day Bell grew up.
She understood, in a single flash, how badly he had crumbled after the death of his wife. At the same moment she accepted another weight on to her burden of guilt. If only she could have compensated him in some way. If only she had been older, or more interesting to him. If only her mother and father hadn’t loved each other quite so much, and she herself had been more lovable. If only.
Her father had died when she was seventeen. Cirrhosis of
