‘All right then, ding-dong. Off we trot. Mummy will be waiting.’
∼ ∼ ∼
Alessandra was fussing with her hair.
‘Beautiful,’ said Gerald. ‘As always.’
She waved at him dismissively with a gesture of her long, tapering fingers.
‘Why do we bother spending so much time and money making ourselves look lovely for you men?’ She turned to Bella, including her, silently noting her faded jeans and hair pulled back into a hasty ponytail, then turned away again. ‘When you can’t even seem to tell the difference?’
She walked towards the kitchen.
‘Amuse yourselves, and keep out from under my feet, both of you. I’m just going to prepare a few bits for dinner. Nothing special as it’s just us.’
‘Nothing special’ turned out to be individual asparagus and gruyère tartlets followed by a layered terrine of smoked chicken and spinach with salad.
‘Any news?’ asked Alessandra to the air in general once they were safely on the home stretch of dinner, warm pears poached in port served with crème fraîche.
Are you seeing anyone? Bella sensed the silent question crawl across the starched linen tablecloth, edging its way around a china bowl of tight apricot rosebuds. Are you even trying? crept in its wake.
‘Nothing major,’ said Bella, concentrating on scooping up a wayward piece of pear, while redirecting the conversation with the practised ease of a politician. ‘The house needs some work to eradicate the damp.’ Held out her hand at waist height. ‘The plaster’s got to be hacked off up to here.’
‘Sounds expensive,’ Gerald said. ‘Do you need any help?’
‘Have you—’ Alessandra began.
‘Thanks, but I’m fine money-wise … and Seline seems to be very happy with me so far, probably because I’ve brought some juicy clients with me ready to be squeezed. She said if all goes well, we might discuss setting up as a partnership next year.’
‘But that’s wonderful. Shall we drink a toast?’
‘Of course it’s good that they appreciate your talents, but isn’t that rather risky?’ asked Alessandra. ‘Wouldn’t you be liable if the company went bankrupt?’
Bella took a drink of her wine.
‘Well, of course, it’s always good to look on the bright side,’ she said, starting to get up from the table. ‘Shall I make some coffee?’
‘Perhaps I’d better make it, Bella-dear. The percolator’s being rather temperamental.’
‘It has my sympathy,’ Bella said under her breath.
In the garden on Sunday morning, Gerald took Bella for the traditional guided tour. They stood together by his vegetable patch, pointing, assessing, as if judging it for a medal at a horticultural show.
‘It won’t be at its best for a while yet, of course. I’m planning to grow some squash this year. Your mother says they make good soup.’
‘Oh? Don’t they make an excellente soup?’
‘Behave yourself, daughter dear.’
Every time Bella mentioned or admired anything, Gerald would weave along the narrow paths between the beds with surprising grace, saying, ‘Have some, have some. Here, let me dig some up.’
It was depressing, she hadn’t done anything yet with her small plot, while Dad was doing such wonders with his large garden.
‘I’m wondering whether I should have it redesigned – make it easier to manage somehow?’ she said. ‘It’s getting out of hand already.’
‘Very sensible. I’ll have a look if you like, or get someone who actually knows what they’re doing.’
‘Of course, I’ve no idea what’s fashionable any more,’ Alessandra said, plucking a blouse from her walk-in wardrobe to offer Bella. ‘But this has always been useful.’
And it has to be better than that awful shirt.
‘It’s gorgeous,’ Bella said, stroking the slippery satin sleeve against her cheek. ‘Are you sure you don’t want it?’
‘We don’t go out as much as we used to. I’ve far more evening clothes than I can use.’
If I were your age, I’d be out dancing very night, fending off strings of suitors.
Bella held up a silk chiffon top and looked at herself in the mirror. It was delicious, red and rich as cherries.
‘The colour’s wonderful with your hair. I’ll never understand why young people seem to wear so much black all the time. Take it.’ Alessandra pulled out a matching skirt from the rail. ‘Here – I can’t get into it any more. All part of the joys of ageing.’ She patted her still slender hips.
You won’t be young for ever.
‘And you could do with some decent things. With your looks, it’s such a waste not to make the most of yourself.’
Why don’t you try harder? You won’t catch a man if you don’t.
With the blouse and skirt on, Bella felt different – unfamiliarly elegant, graceful, grown-up. The skirt swirled softly about her legs as she walked up and down the bedroom. The voluminous sleeves of the top were translucent, semi-revealing, more alluring than bare flesh.
‘That’s really very glamorous on you,’ said Alessandra, assessing. ‘Lovely for a special occasion. Or if someone takes you out to dinner?’
‘Women don’t get taken out to dinner any more.’ Bella ignored the implied question. ‘We all pay our own way nowadays, I think you’ll find.’
‘Oh. Well, yes. I just meant …’ Alessandra gave a small laugh. ‘It needs high heels, of course,’ looking down at Bella’s weekend boots.
Don’t you want anyone to notice you?
‘I do have some smart shoes, you know – just because I don’t—’
‘No. Well, of course, we can’t expect you to waste your best things on us.’ She turned and left the room.
Alone in her parents’ bedroom, Bella faced herself in the mirror. Her reflection looked back, coolly appraising. The cherry top and skirt seemed suddenly ridiculous, absurdly glamorous, too obviously not her own – like a little girl all got up in her mummy’s high heels and feather boa. Who would be fooled by it into thinking she was really beautiful? They would know she was a fraud, a cuckoo in the nest, trying to acquire something she could never have. She tugged at the zip, jamming it in the fabric before pulling it free, and reached for her jeans.
‘Don’t forget your house-warming present,’ Gerald said as she was marshalling her things by the front door. ‘Have you space on the back seat?’
‘Gerald-dear, can you manage it, please?’
She didn’t need to unwrap it to see what it was. There were two bits: one large and heavy piece that was evidently some kind of lamp base, and one awkward-looking shade. Even without seeing it, Bella could tell it wouldn’t look right in her house. It was too large and, knowing her mother, too grand. Chances were the base would have exotic birds painted on it or tasteful flowers. It was bound to have been expensive. She could have had some decent new towels for the money. Or a couple of seriously good saucepans.
‘Gosh, how wonderful,’ she said. ‘How exciting to have a proper present.’
‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ Alessandra stood poised behind it proprietorially. It was evidently of her choosing.
‘But it looks so well protected as it is. I’d better transport it wrapped, I think. Then I can have it to look forward to when I get home.’
‘Of course.’ Alessandra smoothed back a wisp of hair and folded her arms. ‘Well, safe journey then.’ She hovered forward, printed a bird-like kiss on Bella’s cheek.
Gerald handed her an envelope once she was in the car.
‘Not a big fat cheque, I’m afraid. Something for the garden.’
‘Looks a bit flat for a cherry tree.’
‘Be off with you.’ He bent down to kiss her goodbye. ‘The receipt for the other present’s in there too, in case you want to exchange it for whatever we should have got you in the first place. Feel free to invite us to your house-warming. If you’re not too embarrassed by your crumbly old parents. We’ll come early and l
end a hand.’
‘Don’t be daft, Dads.’
No chance, she thought. She could imagine it now.
Her sitting room. Friends standing and talking, doing the buffet balancing act with plates and glasses and napkins. Carefully manoeuvring themselves around the still-stacked boxes. The Arrival of the Parents, like the Entrance of Cleopatra into Rome, with much fussing and removing of scarves and gloves and coats and saying they’d left such-and-such behind then realizing they hadn’t, and where might one find the …? Her father worrying about the car, fretting like an old man, surely something could be done about the parking problem? And Alessandra sweeping into the kitchen, eyes flicking over the photograph of Bella and Patrick still in place on the pinboard, and saying how absolutely sweet the kitchen is – how convenient to have everything so close to hand – how much easier to manage – and gesturing at the drapes where they pooled deliberately onto the floor – of course, there was always so much to do in a new house, wasn’t there – never enough time for hemming curtains and all those dreary little jobs – oh and bare boards with rugs in the bedroom – Bella should have said – they’d have been quite happy to help out with the cost of a carpet – more than happy – or was that the thing to have nowadays? It was so easy to lose touch with what was in.
Come early and lend a hand? Thanks, but no thanks.
Bella gave a peremptory toot as she drove out of the gate. In the rear-view mirror she saw her father’s arm raised high, as if signalling from a desert island to a distant ship, her mother’s hand tentatively lifted, stretching out for something she couldn’t hope to reach.
6
‘Why not do an evening class – that way, you’ll meet people and learn something at the same time!’ Bella had been leafing through a women’s magazine in the loo at work. The advice was always the same; whenever someone wrote in saying they wanted to meet people, the answer was predictably of the get-out-and-join-clubs variety. But did you ever meet likely men at an evening class? Bella sounded out Viv and Nick later while at their place for supper. Nick decreed it a rational approach (Viv: ‘Rational? Oh, well, that’s the main thing, of course,’) and asked what subject she planned to take: carpentry or car maintenance? Bella had rather fancied stained glass or patchwork; she whimpered at Viv, who would have none of it.
‘Look, do you bloody want to meet men or don’t you? Go to patchwork classes if you want, but don’t come running to me afterwards whingeing that the best bet in the class is a forty-seven-year-old midwife because at least she’s got hair on her chin.’
‘That’d do. I want to meet more people, otherwise I feel like I’m just a visitor here.’
They sat round the dining-table eating garlic and ginger prawns with stir-fried noodles, trying not to laugh at Nick and his attempts to use chopsticks. He dropped a prawn for the third time as he was trying to raise it to his lips.
‘The suspense is killing me, Nick. Have a fork.’ Viv half-turned towards Bella and gnashed her teeth silently. ‘He does this every time.’
‘No, no. I’m getting the hang of it now.’ The prawn teetered dangerously as three pairs of eyes watched its unsteady course from bowl to mouth.
‘You won’t get a gold star anyway, you know.’ Bella’s chopsticks threatened to snatch the prawn away deftly.
The prawn fell with a soft plumpf into its nest of noodles. Nick went into the kitchen and started clattering about.
‘There’s no point anyway. Even if I met someone, I never think I know how to do relationships. I can do the going out to dinner bit and the having lots of sex bit, then I get lost. There must be some secret formula that I don’t know about,’ said Bella. ‘Can’t you give me your top ten tips or something? You seem to have it sussed.’
‘Viv, have you hidden the forks with the blue handles?’ from the kitchen. ‘I don’t like the other ones for Chinese.’
‘Yeah, that’s right. We’re completely perfect.’ Viv shook her head and bellowed back. ‘In the second drawer – where they usually are.’
‘No magic formula?’
‘What, like my Scottish granny’s drop scones? If there is, no-one told me and, God knows, no-one bothered to tell Nick. I mean, Nick thinks mutual support means leaning on each other after a heavy session at the Tickled Trout. I haven’t a clue. Yes, I have. I s’pose talking’s the main thing – when you want to and when you don’t want to so that neither of you sits around seething for weeks over some piddly little problem that suddenly explodes into door-slamming, crockery-hurling and suitcase-packing. Oh, yeah – and a little love doesn’t go amiss. Gets you through the –’ she raised her voice, ‘ALL TOO FREQUENT CRAPPY BITS.’
Bella stuck out her lower lip.
‘Is that it then, guv?’
‘I still can’t see them.’ A plaintive note had crept into Nick’s voice.
‘No. You need huge dollops of luck as well.’ Viv got up and marched through to the kitchen. ‘Not that second drawer, this second drawer. And,’ she continued, ‘you need to be able to wade through all the pigs and creeps and mummy’s boys to find yourself a nice, only averagely neurotic male who can’t even find a fork in his own kitchen but who is at least prepared to have a proper go at all this stuff, too.’
‘I might as well end it all now.’ Bella stabbed at her stomach with her chopstick.
‘Wait till next week. Then it’s Nick’s turn to do the floor.’
Leafing through the booklet of adult education courses from the library while she was supposed to be working, Bella thought she could do with lessons just to make sense of the brochure. Was there some logical reason for the range of subjects, prices, and locations to be encrypted in quite such a complex way? She was tempted to leave it till September. Maybe she’d have more energy for deciphering it after the summer and she could start afresh with the new academic year. But, knowing her, she would have forgotten all about it by then. For her, the saying ‘Why procrastinate today when you can do it tomorrow and have it to look forward to?’ was not a joke but a perfectly valid philosophy of life. She should definitely do it NOW. Her sole achievement in the last two days seemed to be making a lemon cake, hardly top priority, and hemming her bedroom curtains. She had even cheated by adding ‘Hem bedroom curtains’ retrospectively to the epic List, soon to be available as a ten-volume boxed set, just so she could relish the rare satisfaction of being able to cross something off.
She waded back through the brochure again – perhaps she should do it by location? Just choose the one she could be bothered to get to and pick a subject at random. Or choose blind? She shut her eyes, flicked open the brochure and stabbed the page. Learning to Draw and Paint. Most amusing. Probably the only subject on offer that she didn’t need because she could already do it. Well, used to be able to do it. Her early dreams of being a painter seemed like an embarrassing first crush, a piece of folly best forgotten.
There ought to be some kind of evening class that you could take for all the really tricky stuff. What was the point of worrying about Intermediate Spreadsheets or Creative Machine Embroidery when you really needed Having a Relationship – Complete Beginners or Getting Your Act Together, Level I? Surely Advanced Cake Decorating was, well, the icing on the cake? You had to have a cake first and that meant getting all the ingredients in the right proportions and then mixing them so they all melded together properly. The analogy was beginning to become entwined in itself and was also tugging her mind towards thoughts of lunch.
She picked up her bag and nipped out to the sandwich shop. The classes would have to guide you through slowly, of course, so that you progressed gradually from, say, Lesson 1: The First Phone Call to Lesson 2: The First Dinner, then Removing Clothing Without Fumbling, Zen and the Art of Putting on a Condom, Meeting His Parents, Dealing with Sulks (Novices), and Walking Out: How To Say I Need More Space When You Really Want To Say Piss Off.
* * *
Car Maintenance/Complete Beginners was due to start on Tuesday evening at half-six. Bella dashed h
ome after work to pick up her car. It wouldn’t start. Ha-ha, ha-ha. Very droll, she thought, slapping the dashboard. How cheering to witness that God obviously did have a sense of irony after all. And, of course, she panicked, and kept revving it, and gave it too much gas and everything else she knew she wasn’t supposed to do, and the engine flooded. She tried giving it the nice cop/nasty cop treatment, alternating between ‘Come on, you’re a great little car, you’d like a little outing wouldn’t you? Let’s go,’ while lunging in her seat to demonstrate the concept of forward motion, and ‘You bastard – one last chance then I’m trading you in for a scooter.’
She turned off the engine and sat there for a few minutes. Marvellous. Another element in her life that didn’t work. The evening-class thing was a stupid idea anyway, she’d obviously never meet anyone like this; she probably had mildew between her legs by now. Why couldn’t she simply accept the fact that she was a sad, pathetic spinster who would never have a man or children, and throw herself into helping starving refugees or victims of unpleasant wallpaper by going round the world on a tricycle or doing a sponsored walk to Llandudno in flip-flops?
One last try. It started. Of course. Glanced at her watch – it might still be worth it; she could still enrol at least. By the time she got there, and found a parking space, the lesson was half-gone. She found the room and, wisely as it turned out, peered through a pane in the door before plunging in.
A group of about a dozen people were clustered around what she assumed must be a car engine. They suddenly parted to let a fiftyish man in blue overalls get to the centre. As they moved aside, they turned in Bella’s direction. All except two of them were women. The two that weren’t huddled close together and looked very awkward; one had ginger hair that stuck up all over his head as if he’d just had a shock; the other had such bad acne, you could have used his face to map out constellations; neither could have been a minute over seventeen. She pressed herself back against the wall like a B-movie spy. A narrow escape. Hell, who wanted to learn about engines anyway? That was what mechanics were for.
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