Authors: Judy Astley
‘Oh come on now, Bella – everyone likes hats and cake.
And
you’ve got a big gullible romantic streak in you; you must have, to have seen marriage material in James.’
Bella let that one pass. ‘But anyway, what happened next? Did you go straight to the hotel? Did you …’ Jules leaned forward, blatantly eager for salacious detail. Bella was almost sorry to disappoint her.
‘Not quite – it was pretty early; we dropped the bags off at the hotel then he took me for a teensy bit of lunch at the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station. We just had … well, oysters, and Chablis. Flying blunts your appetite – well, it does mine anyway.’
‘It does, doesn’t it?’ Jules agreed, using a finger-end to scoop up the last toast crumbs from round the edge of Bella’s plate. ‘But only for food! So after that …
then
you went back to the hotel?’
‘Still no, in fact.’ Bella sipped her tea and thought for a moment. ‘Thinking about it now, he seemed a bit nervous by then, actually. First we got a cab and had a quick lightning tour down Madison and over to Fifth Avenue and stopped off at Barney’s because he thought it was my kind of store. He slid off and picked up a present for me while I wandered around in a bit of a daze, feeling that as I was in New York some kind of shopping was almost compulsory. But really I just wanted to have a bath and lie down in a darkened room for a while with my eyes closed. They had a pool table in the menswear department where I was vaguely looking for a present for Alex and I got playing with that because, you know, I was tired and I can shop any old time in London – it isn’t actually my idea of a
treat
. He found me there on his way back from buying fancy underwear and almost dragged me away, looking really embarrassed as if he thought I’d rip the surface of the
table or hold the wrong end of the cue or something. I suppose that was a bit of a clue. I mean, I’m really good at pool … comes of a misspent student life. In retrospect, I think the kind of man I need in my life would have put the shopping down and challenged me to a proper game, right there in the store. Rick didn’t really
do
fun, not unless it was something you had to get tickets for so he could show off that he’d got special ones, Access All Areas or a box at Covent Garden, anything that would
impress
. He’s a bit … proper.’
Jules frowned. ‘
Proper?
Are you mad? Bella, do the words “maybe he’s a tosser” mean anything to you? You’ve always been useless at picking boys. Remember that dork when we were Molly’s age – the one who pretended he was Simon Le Bon’s brother? You fell for it, no problem. Even though he had a Glasgow accent and Simon’s a bit Surrey.’
Bella laughed. ‘Yeah, yeah, you’re right! But generally, kind of on the whole … Rick was good to be with in so many ways. And he was …
there
, you know? I mean, how many available men are out there, of the right age, own teeth, own hair and …’
‘Own platinum Amex? Not that I’m saying money was an attraction …’ Jules backtracked hastily.
‘No, it wasn’t!’ Bella protested. ‘I earn my own, pay my way. Always have. Except for the house … this is still half James’s, I suppose, technically.’ She looked at the
kitchen units as if she was slightly surprised to see a full set of them still on the premises. James … she knew that if he were still in residence he’d be scrubbing every smear and fingerprint from the drawer handles. They
were
looking a bit dulled, it was true. Dulled and dated, like the rest of the kitchen. It used to be such a pretty room, very big, being part of an outsize glass extension, built twenty years ago all across the back of the house, unusual enough at the time to have featured in three home-style magazines.
The space itself still looked contemporary (dark walnut floor, pale walls, all the glass), but the units were all reclaimed pitch pine and oversized lamp-black hinges and handles which just looked … clapped out was the term that came to Bella’s mind. More than slightly embarrassed to exist in the twenty-first century. It was all far too farmhouse for south-west London, especially in a room that had twenty feet of slideable plate glass as a back wall. It had been installed in the days when stencilling was every city woman’s weekend hobby and the design statement
du jour
was country-feel strings of dried hops. The hops (looped above the Aga like leftover Christmas streamers) had gone the minute James had noticed their dust-gathering capacity, the stencilling was long since painted over, but the rest would have to be lived with till the lottery gods smiled on Bella.
‘So did you and Rick …’ Jules persisted with unashamed nosiness.
‘Didn’t get the chance!’ Bella laughed. ‘Got to our room, which was lovely but not exactly enormous, as per usual, apparently, in New York, and he gave me the present. Er … red underwear …’
Both women grimaced and giggled. ‘I know,’ Bella said. ‘Another warning sign. It was
hugely
expensive – he’d left the Amex receipt in the bag, which I now think was accidentally on purpose, to impress me. Anyway, I just said, “Oh how lovely,” because what else could I say, but I made the excuse that my black dress needed sleek smooth underwear, not lacy stuff, though I said it in a way that made him think I’d try it out for him later. I had a shower and got all dressed up. Funny …’ She drifted off and watched a squirrel stealing from the bird feeder, hanging upside down, looking as if it was showing off. It saw her, flicked its tail at her impudently and stared at her as it munched a pawful of peanuts.
‘What? Tell me!’
‘Nothing really, except that he did seem to get more and more nervous. I couldn’t understand what was bugging him; we’ve stayed in hotels together before. There was the one in Devon with the cows outside the window and another in Dublin … But hey, over now.’ Bella got up and put her plate in the dishwasher, then rinsed her fingers under the tap, noting briefly that the
butler’s sink was looking even more crazed than usual. It probably wasn’t the only one; her post-flight skin felt like a cracked old leather sofa. ‘Maybe he had a premonition about what was coming. I got all togged up in my dress, the sheeny Joseph one, and when he opened the door for us to leave for dinner … there was the wife, leaning on the door frame with this awful “gotcha!” look on her face. I’ve always hated surprises. And skinny as she was, that was a bloody giant-sized one.’
‘Bastard.’ Jules sighed, looking deeply satisfied with the story.
‘Exactly. Bastard.’
‘Mum hates surprises,’ Alex reminded his father as they waited for their luggage to make an appearance at the Heathrow baggage carousel. ‘You should have called her before we left.’
‘Rubbish! She’ll be fine with this,’ James insisted. ‘She’ll soon get the hang of me being back in the area. I’ve missed more than enough of your and Molly’s teenage years, and there are a few outstanding things Bella and I need to touch base about. It’s great timing, the new office opening in London, and the flat I’ve rented is brand new … no-one else’s bugs and grubbiness. So all in all, it couldn’t be better. Ugh! Which is more than you can say about this place. Look at the
state of this!’ He hauled his suitcase off the carousel and on to the baggage trolley, then pulled out a perfectly folded white handkerchief from the inside pocket of his jacket and wiped a greasy smear off the case’s side. ‘Horrors!’ He shuddered. ‘The filth these bags must have been in! And all the germs too; you could catch anything …’
Alex watched as James rolled the handkerchief into a ball and stuffed it into a small polythene freezer bag that he’d pulled from his pocket. He then took an antiseptic wipe from a travel-size pack and cleaned any last trace of residual grime off his already immaculate fingers. Alex, who more than once had been late-night hungry enough to rescue a slice of thrown-away pizza from the kitchen bin, had one of many moments of wondering if James really was his father.
‘Dad … do you ever think, you know, that you’re a little bit …?’
‘A bit what?’ James looked at him, puzzled. Alex shrugged and gave up. It didn’t matter, really. The world was full of people even madder than this Mr Clean.
‘Nuffin’, Dad, no worries. Let’s go. Buses are this way.’
‘Taxi, boy, a taxi!’ James looked pained. ‘We’ve had enough public transport for today: we’ll be coughing and sneezing by Wednesday. Thank goodness for echinacea, that’s all I can say. Come on, we need to be out of here. We’ll pick up a nice bunch of roses for Bella
on the way – that’s one surprise she
will
like! Women always do!’
‘I Really Don’t Get …
Weekends in New York
’ Bella, now revived enough to think about work and revenge in the same satisfying sentence, briskly typed into her MacBook. Well, not that I exactly even had a
weekend
, she thought, waiting to see if the perfect opening paragraph would suggest itself to her instantly and inspiringly. An entire neat and complete seven-hundred-word article should, in an ideal world, transcribe itself effortlessly and elegantly on to the page. Her fingers almost went into auto-writing mode as she tried to assemble a sequence of events in such a way that would neither make her look a total fool nor really give away enough to have anyone calling up and suing her for libel. Some of her best work had come out of genuine fury, so she might as well allude to what
could
have happened, throw in some extra thoughts and get a column out of it – not to mention her fee – while it was all still fresh.
She’d write about how so many people (OK, mostly women) treat the three-day transatlantic dash as a huge thrill, so glamorous, so full, full, full of shopping and shows and shoes and (if you’re luckier than she was) shagging, and yet really there wasn’t much, frock/shoe/bag-wise, that you couldn’t get in Selfridges; the jet lag
was vile and the rushing around exhausting, and in the time between handing over your credit card and the monthly statement dropping on to the doormat, something
calamitous
would have happened to the exchange rate. She would write that to be cost-effective you have to fly cattle class among the hen parties, and you need to overcome any fear of plummeting to earth from 37,000 feet above the Atlantic while watching – on a titchy, badly lit screen – a movie you’ve seen only the week before. You get a stomach upset from inflight food and a hangover before you land and …
Oh God, I do moan on, don’t I? Bella thought as she typed the flow of vitriol. But that was what this job required: for her to deconstruct those things that most folks took for granted as being universally wonderful. She’d covered so many things in her ‘I Really Don’t Get …’ column over the past year: skiing (scary, cold, and yes your bum DOES look big in that), George Clooney (the thinking woman’s estate agent), giant shopping malls (hideous, manipulative, soporific air con), farmers’ markets (tomatoes at about 50p EACH? And what kind of farm grows falafels?) and elaborate pubic topiary decorated with Swarovski crystals. She’d had a lot of emails about that one … too many of which invited her to sample the process in premises alone with the kind of strange man her mother had warned her about.
A fast hour passed while Bella tapped away at the Mac, getting up enough speed and momentum for the piece to be written almost as stream of consciousness. It was now past midday but there was no sign of Molly, who was still upstairs in her room, either sleeping or sulking. With teenagers, it was often hard to tell the difference. The night before, Bella had been too exhausted to have the mother-and-daughter conversation that needed to be had about entertaining boys in the household beds, and now, still enfeebled by travel and trauma, she was quite glad that the teen need for long hours of shut-eye meant the inevitable confrontation was a bit delayed.
It was probably one of her best ‘I Really Don’t Get’ pieces. The spontaneity of it had given her a sharp and elegant turn of phrase. Feeling rather pleased with herself, Bella checked through for accurate spelling, grammar and blips of punctuation, sent a quick email to the features editor, attached her work and pressed send, now very much revived. She would take the rest of the day off, do the kind of satisfyingly large supermarket shop that would give her the illusion of being a Proper Domestic Woman. She might, she thought, even make a batch of bread – or was that taking the domestic thing too far? Or maybe roast a luscious lemony chicken and do some Molly-bonding. Perhaps invite Giles too? She liked Molly’s boyfriend, and he’d had many a supper in
the house with them in the past few months … but somehow all she could see in her head when she thought of him was his slim naked body, those broad but bony shoulders leaning against
her
pillows, in
her
bed. No, maybe he was best absent from their house today. It would be early pasta, a Molly chat which would be more sympathetic and friendly than the girl was probably anticipating. Then Bella would try to catch up on sleep, maybe watch
Frock Shock
on her bedroom TV, find out if the makeover-guru couple had any suggestions for women like her who’d blithely yet wrongly always assumed they looked pretty hot in black.
She had another quick look at the emails, checking for any acknowledgement from her editor that the piece had arrived safely. Charlotte usually said a quick hello and thanks. And yes, there was one. Bella clicked on the message and was surprised to see it was a lot longer than the usual ‘Hi, thanks for that!’ sentence.
‘
Bella, hello … we’ve just crossed in the ether. Thanks so much for sending in your latest piece – wonderful, as ever, and I think we’ll just about be able to squeeze it in
…’
What? ‘Squeeze it in?’ Bella swallowed and sat down to concentrate properly, having a horrible gut feeling that the rest of the email wasn’t going to make comfortable reading. She skimmed through quickly, eyes half shut, taking in the key phrases … ‘
Revamping the “Week
Moment” page’, ‘Updating the layout’, ‘Guest contributors’, ‘Keeping it fresh
’ and the final insult, ‘
Valued your input
’. Fired. Well, not exactly – was it more or less hurtful that she wasn’t actually being sacked but her column reduced to one week in four? Would it have been better to be properly sacked and leave it looking possible that she’d jumped rather than been pushed? She’d think about that later. For now, it was tough enough that a good regular monthly cheque – so rare and so precious in the freelance journalism world – was to be reduced by 75 per cent. And she knew why.