The Look of Love (22 page)

‘Thank you, Daisy! Now, here we have our four blank canvases … I can see we have our work cut out here, ladies. Daisy showed me some “before” shots of you in your usual clothing choices.’ Her tinkly little laugh struck a snidely patronizing note.

Bella immediately felt aggrieved. She glanced sideways at Jules and realized she was feeling exactly the same.
Not
, surely, the most tactful start.

‘What I’d like to do,’ Esme continued brightly, ‘is begin by asking you all to say which colours you already think really suit each other, and which you think don’t do you any favours. Bella, would you like to start? As Molly’s mother, you must have an opinion on what looks good on her.’

Molly’s huge eyes were challenging her mother to
dare
criticize her clothes choices.

‘Well, she’s seventeen,’ Bella said. ‘What
doesn’t
look good?’ Molly beamed at her. ‘But … well, I always think she does look very washed out in grey. It’s a very
old
colour for her. And baby pink too, actually – she almost vanishes in it …’

‘Thanks Mum!’ Molly glowered. ‘I’ve got like
loads
of grey?’

‘And what about Dina? Is there a colour you’ve ever thought you’d like to see her in more often?’ Esme asked.

Bella thought of Dina in the restaurant the other night. It seemed like months ago but was barely a week. James had twice since asked after ‘your beautiful friend’.

‘Dark green,’ she said immediately. ‘She looks wonderful in it. It does something to her eyes.’

Bella glanced across at Saul. He was leaning against the worktop by the sink, smiling at her. Laughing, she assumed. Now he’d seen her face stripped back to nature and her hair wrapped away out of sight, would he still want to have dinner with her? Even waking up first thing in the morning, she could look better than this. Not that he was ever likely to see her in that context. Definitely not.

It was hot under the lights. Simone kept coming over with tissues to wipe dewy beads from foreheads, as Esme explained about the colours being coded down to four ‘seasons’. She draped metre-square silky swatches
of subtly shaded colour across their shoulders, and while watching each other by way of a big mirror, they were supposed to discover which tones made them look alive and bright and which made their skin tones look muddy and unwell.

‘And when Esme has finished with you, you’ll all get your personal colour swatches,’ Daisy said, dancing around with a heap of scarves, and then producing a little folder of fabric scraps to show the camera. ‘We all need to carry them whenever we go clothes shopping, isn’t that right, Esme? I
never
go anywhere without mine!’ she gushed. ‘I’m a
summer
.’

‘Exactly.’ Esme simpered at Daisy. ‘You are
such
a summer; always cool, soft and light!’

‘Yeah, right,’ Saul whispered in Bella’s direction, giving her a terrible urge to giggle.

‘This is really a load of bollocks, isn’t it?’ Dina, her shoulders heaped to chin-level with shiny fabric squares, suddenly said to Esme by way of the mirror. Then she turned to Saul. ‘Am I allowed to say “bollocks”? I’m not, am I? Sorry.’

‘Could you maybe do that bit again but say “rubbish”, this time?’ he suggested, nodding to the cameraman to keep going.

Esme stood wide-eyed and shocked by the sudden rebellion, holding up a piece of maroon cloth like a flag and glaring at Dina’s reflection. Daisy smirked in the
background, looking delighted. Bella, Molly and Jules sat silent, waiting for Esme to fire some verbal shrapnel.

‘But it
is
mad,’ Dina persisted. ‘I mean, honestly, I’m sitting here pretending I can see that petrol blue looks better on Bella than the royal blue and really, it’s not so different. And no, I’m
not
colour-blind.’

‘And we’ve got no make-up on. And we’re under all these mad lights,’ Jules joined in. ‘No one sees us like this, not in real life. So this could be all wrong.’

‘And I feel really happy wearing grey,’ Molly chipped in moodily, chewing a nail.

‘You’re far too young for grey. Try purple,’ Esme snapped. She looked furious, as if she’d like to slap them all.

‘Purple’s
goths
,’ Molly scoffed.

‘And if Jules keeps buying blue like she said she usually does, maybe it’s because she’s old enough to know which colours suit her by now?’ Bella added to the fray.

‘Don’t you
want
to improve your colour sense? You’re being terribly negative!’

Bella caught sight of Esme’s left foot, slightly raised. She was clearly
that
close to having a stampy tantrum.

‘That dress doesn’t actually suit you, you know.’ Dina looked Esme up and down. ‘That vivid blue is far too harsh. Something softer would work much better.’

‘But I’m a
winter
,’ Esme hissed. ‘Always have been. This shade is in my spectrum.’

‘Children!
Please
, can we get back to why we’re here?’ Daisy clapped her hands together like a teacher rounding up infants from the sand table.

‘Children?
Children
?’ Jules glared at her, pulled off both her white gown and her hairband and flung them on the sofa. ‘You see, that’s the thing with all this! Being told
this is right, this is wrong
. We
aren’t
children, Daisy!’

Jules was looking frankly menacing. Saul stepped forward, nervous that she would strangle Daisy with one of Esme’s fabric samples.

‘We’ll take a break there, I think. OK, everybody? Back in ten …’

‘So apparently I’m a “spring”.’ Bella was keeping the chat level light and bright as she drove Shirley to the police station. Her mother seemed not quite herself, and Bella assumed this was because she felt apprehensive about the coming interview.

‘Yes. I could have told you that,’ Shirley commented sharply.

‘Yes – I’m sure you could,.’ Bella agreed. ‘We weren’t very kind to poor Esme. She was only doing her job but we gave her a hard time. Saul and Daisy decided that us being stroppy made better footage than having us all meekly accepting our colour lot, so Esme had to cut
quickly to the chase and leave us bickering about whether cerise was possible on anyone at all,
ever
. And I can’t ever see me in the shade of mustard that she raved about. How can you trust a woman in orange eyeshadow?’

‘Hmm.’ Shirley seemed miles away. As well she might, thought Bella, realizing she’d overdone the distracting technique.

‘Look … are you feeling nervous about this? If they’ll allow it, do you want me to come in with you?’

‘No, no, I’ll be all right.’ Shirley was breezy again. ‘I mean, what can they say? That I’ve been a naughty girl and not to do it again? I’ll just agree with everything they say and get it over with as fast as possible.’

‘You didn’t do it though, did you. That’s what’s bugging you.’

‘I did it. But not on purpose,’ Shirley said. ‘I’m not changing my mind about admitting it, so please don’t try to make me.’

‘Wouldn’t dream of it,’ Bella muttered to herself, making a turn into the town’s car park.

The duty sergeant looked from one to the other of them when Bella told him they’d turned up for a caution, then went off to find someone to deal with them.

‘He can’t decide which of us looks guilty,’ Bella giggled.

‘It’s obviously me,’ Shirley whispered back. ‘You’re in old jeans and I’m dressed up for the occasion.’

A uniformed girl who looked barely older than Molly led Shirley away. Shirley glanced back and smiled at Bella, who then sat down to wait in the reception area, wishing the place was supplied, like a dentist’s waiting room, with magazines. Once they were out of here, she planned to take her mother to a tea room or to a pub and get her to talk about her future plans. Just possibly she was simply waiting till this little ordeal was over before getting on with her life as normal. However blasé Shirley seemed to be, having this near-conviction hanging over her must have been a worry.

Shirley was back in under ten minutes, smiling broadly as if she’d been told the root-canal work she’d dreaded wasn’t going to be necessary after all.

‘So it was OK then, was it? No horrible surprises?’ Bella asked as they left the police station. She felt glad to be out in the open. Being in that place with its posters picturing wanted suspects and warnings about gun crime, knife amnesties and the dangers of drugs was enough to unnerve even the most innocent visitor.

‘It was fine. They didn’t treat me like a demented idiot, which was a plus, but of course they had to underline how serious my crime was. I’ve promised I’ll never do it again. I just hope I don’t.’

Shirley was striding back towards the car park at a
furious pace, impressing Bella with her balance on what must have been four-inch heels. Shirley’s mid-blue footless tights impressed her too. Not many women past seventy could get away with that look, but combined with a simple slate-grey shift dress (
not
egg-shaped) and a lot of chunky silver bangles, on Shirley it was a sheer head-turner.

‘Look – shall we go and have a quick early drink somewhere?’ Bella suggested, starting to feel breathless at the pace. ‘We could talk …’

‘Oh no, darling. I haven’t got time! I have to meet someone and I don’t want to be late! We can talk in the car though, now I’ve got that over.’

They’d reached the car park and Bella quickly glanced at the Mini’s windscreen, half-expecting a parking fine even though she knew she had time left on her ticket. It would be Sod’s Law that it had fallen off the dashboard or that she’d put it there upside down. Once inside the car, with her mother suitably captive and willing to chat, she began with, ‘You seem very settled at our place.’

‘Oh, it’s very comfortable,’ Shirley agreed. ‘It’s lovely to see so much of Molly and with all this television hoo-ha going on, we aren’t short of entertainment, are we?’

‘But … I just wondered, is there anything … er … wrong? I mean, have you decided you don’t want to live at your flat any more? Are you … I mean are you
well
?’

Shirley looked at her, amazed. ‘Of course I’m well! Why ever would you think I wasn’t? I wouldn’t be going out so much if I wasn’t, would I?’

‘Ah. Good point. Yes, you are forever sliding out to “meet friends”. Anyone in particular?’ It had briefly crossed Bella’s mind that Shirley might be consulting doctors, but her mother did have a glow and energy that illness would surely have wiped out. Maybe the most stylish woman in Walton was simply having a lot more fun strutting her Betty Jackson and DKNY stuff in a more central arena.

‘Has anyone ever told you, Bella, that you’re something of a control freak? You should be pleased I’m having a busy social life. I’m a long way from being ready for a slow existence of slippers and cats.’

‘Oh I am happy for you, honestly. It’s just that you’re not being very communicative about it, that’s all.’

‘You really want to ask me when I’m going home, don’t you?’ Shirley was way ahead. She could easily have pleaded not guilty in court, Bella thought, there’d have been no danger of a medical report finding anything blunt about her faculties.

‘Well I did wonder if you’d gone off living in your flat, if you maybe didn’t want to go back there for some reason. If you feel like moving, I can help you organize it all.’

‘When I move out of there it won’t be to live with you,
Bella, don’t worry. Being a house guest is fine, but if we lived together permanently we’d be like two cats in a box,’ Shirley said. ‘And yes, in answer to your earlier question, there is someone special I’ve been meeting, and I’m afraid I must confess I’ve been using your premises simply because getting to where this friend is based when in London is far easier from there. I probably should have told you sooner but … well a woman likes a bit of privacy, even from her own family. There’s a lot I don’t know about you too, isn’t there? Such as you no longer mention that married chap you were seeing, the “mistake” you mentioned over supper. I take it he’s now off the scene.’

‘All over, a while back. Nothing to tell. He ended up not worth talking about, trust me. But don’t change the subject; what about this friend? Is it a man?’

‘Of course it’s a man! He’s called Dennis and we met on the cruise back in July. We’re seeing a
lot
of each other and having a wonderful time.’

Bella suddenly realized that since she’d got back in the car she hadn’t been breathing properly. Oh the relief that her mother wasn’t hiding some deep, dark illness that she’d been struggling to deal with by herself but had simply been having fun, swanning around with a man friend.

‘Oh now this
is
exciting!’ She couldn’t have been more delighted for her mother – Shirley had been
solitary for many years now, since she too had given up on ‘mistakes’. ‘So you two have been seeing each other for months? How lovely for you! Do we get to meet him? Where does he live? Does he have a family as well? What’s he like?’

‘Slow down! He lives in Dorset, he has grown-up children and a couple of grandchildren and I’d love you to meet him very soon. We just wanted some non-family time for a while, just as a couple with no ties – the way you can be when you’re young and free. And then last week over tea at the Ritz, he asked me to marry him.’

Shirley had come out with that one as casually as if Dennis had asked her for the next dance, and it took a second or two for the words to sink into Bella’s brain as she pulled out abruptly into the roundabout traffic and almost collided with a BMW. She was aware of waving fists and several blasts from more than one car horn.

‘Holy f—! Er … good grief! What did you tell him?’

‘I said yes, of course!’

Oh, a day of peace – if you didn’t count the chaos of film kit all over the ground floor or getting used to the idea of your mother suddenly deciding to marry someone you’d not yet met. All the same, Bella stretched out in bed and savoured the luxury of having twenty-four hours of quiet and calm in the house. Daisy and Dominic had a long-scheduled appointment with a visiting American film star who needed the kind of fast and thorough wardrobe update that you could, frankly, only get in Europe, so they were off to Selfridges way before opening time to check through their selection of clothes, shoes and accessories to take to her hotel. ‘A piece of piss,’ Daisy had confessed as soon as the rather defeated Esme had been soothed and packed off. ‘She’s a skinny, big-gobbed sort with perfect posture and years of red-carpet practice. She’d look good in a binbag.’
Dominic had nodded slowly, watching Daisy to make sure, Bella now thought, in the light of Shirley’s view of his attachment, that she’d noticed him agreeing with her.