Celebration

Celebration

BY ROSIE THOMAS

Contents

Title Page

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Rosie Thomas

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE

Love divine, all loves excelling … sang the choir. The hot afternoon sun struck through the rose window and illuminated the little church, all along its length to the chancel steps. It rested on the bride in her froth of white tulle and silk as she turned to smile at her bridegroom, and made pink and purple diamonds on his black coat as he tucked her hand under his arm.

Two tiny bridesmaids in forget-me-not blue stooped to pick up the corners of the bride’s train and the little procession moved out of the flower-scented brilliance of the church and into the dimness of the vestry.

The bride looked down and saw her left hand clenched around the bouquet of cream and yellow roses. On the third finger shone the plain, thin circle of gold, but she hardly glanced at it. She was much more surprised to see the tense whiteness of her knuckles. Very deliberately she made herself put the flowers down and pick up the gold pen. Her left hand smoothed the paper and the vicar’s finger pointed to the place.

She wrote

‘Annabel Elizabeth’

and then paused. The stuffy little room was silent, but outside she could hear the congregation crashing into the last verse of the last hymn. With an effort she concentrated on the register again and wrote her new name.

‘Brooke’

There, it was done. But it was hideously wrong.

There was no such person as Annabel Elizabeth Brooke, and there never would be. Impatiently she shook off the vicar’s hand. He was trying to take away the pen, but she hadn’t finished. Underneath the non-person’s name she wrote, in deep black letters that scored the page,

‘this is all a terrible mistake.’

Then she turned and ran. She tore off the horrible, imprisoning white veil, twisted up the long skirts to show her pale silk stockings, and stumbled away. All the way down the chancel steps and along the nave, between the rows of gaping guests, she could hear Edward’s voice calling after her.

‘Bell! Bell! For God’s sake don’t go. Come back. Come back to me.’

Her face was wet with tears and sobs were bursting in her chest, but she would never go back. Never, never, never.

The dreamer rolled over and flung her arm up to protect herself. She opened her eyes and immediately felt that they were wet. She was panting, and the suffocating fingers of the bad dream were still trying to pull her back, but she was struggling free of it.

‘It didn’t happen,’ she told herself in her calm daytime voice. ‘It couldn’t have happened.’ But then why, why did these dreams keep coming back to haunt and terrify her? What was she so afraid of?

Bell Farrer wearily pushed back the tumble of dark brown hair from her face and looked around the room. It was daylight, but still very early. The tranquil, creamy colours of her bedroom reassured her and reminded her of the ordered efficiency of her waking life. While she was awake she had everything under control. It was only at night that her unconscious fears could billow out and smother her. In reality there was nothing to run away from and nothing to hide.

In any case, there wasn’t anyone to hide anything from.

Bell looked down at the smooth pillow beside her own damp and wrinkled one. Edward wasn’t there, of course.

They didn’t live together any more, and he understood that she would never marry him. Just as he had always understood everything except the strange, perverse fear that had driven her to give him up. Yet he knew her better than anyone else in the world, knew the secret, vulnerable Bell that seemed well hidden from the rest of her friends. If she telephoned him now, she could tell him about the stupid dream, and they would laugh about it together.

Bell reached for the receiver on the bedside table, but then her hand dropped. She must remember that she was on her own now. She was living the life of the successful career girl, the life that she had always dreamed of, and there was no place in that scheme of things for ringing up Edward every time she needed comforting after a bad dream.

Instead she pushed back the covers and padded into the kitchen to make a big pot of coffee. Half an hour later, in her thinking clothes of jeans and the scarlet sweatshirt emblazoned ‘Weehawken Majorettes’ that Edward had brought back from a business tour of America, she was at her desk. On top of a pile of notes lay Cocks et Féret, the ‘bible’ of Bordeaux, and Michael Broadbent’s The Great Vintage Wine Book. Bell opened the Broadbent and flipped through the pages to Bordeaux. Then she ran her finger down the columns looking for Château Reynard.

At twenty-seven, Bell Farrer was the wine and food editor of a national daily paper. She had worked her way up from being the most junior of trainee reporters. Her editor, hard-nosed Henry Stobbs with his determinedly northern antecedents and loathing of the London smart set, had taken a lot of convincing that his paper needed a wine and food writer at all. But Bell was quite out of the ordinary run, and Henry Stobbs was always good at spotting talent. Bell’s name was becoming familiar to her own generation who had money to spend and no patience with outmoded conventions. They read what she wrote, then ate at the restaurants and ordered the wine that she recommended.

They also bought her newspaper, so Henry Stobbs was happy too.

At her desk, Bell found what she was looking for and began to read a list of dates and tasting notes, frowning with concentration. Tomorrow was the start of her biggest single assignment, and there was a lot of homework to be done first. Bell had been invited to spend a few days at Château Reynard in the Haut-Médoc, to write about the making of one of the world’s greatest wines. As she thought about it, she felt a nervous churning sensation in her stomach. Baron Charles de Gillesmont, her host, had a reputation for being withdrawn and difficult, as well as very hostile to the press. Bell had been flattered and excited when the invitation arrived exclusively for her. None of her press colleagues had been invited, yet now she began to wish that she was going with the usual cheerful set of wine writers for company and camouflage. She squashed the thought at once.

‘Come on,’ she told herself impatiently. ‘This is a coup, so make the most of it. They can’t eat you, it’s only three days, and somehow you must make some copy out of it that Stobbs will approve of.’

She bent over her book again, but the phone rang beside her.

‘Hello. Tell me if this isn’t a welcome call and I’ll hang up right away.’ Bell’s face split into a smile that showed the dimples at the corners of her mouth.

‘Edward. Do you know, I dreamt about us?’

‘Oh.’ The voice was guarded, the response of someone who had been recently hurt and was quick to defend himself. Bell winced, then let the words tumble on.

‘I’m sorry, it doesn’t matter. What are you doing, this lovely Sunday?’ Outside her window she could see the summer sunshine catching the tops of the trees in Kensington Gardens.

‘Wondering if we should see each other this evening before you go off on your travels. I could come round and have a quick drink with you, then take you to Les Amoureuses. Mary and Elspeth might join us.’

‘Fine,’ said Bell, a little blankly. She remembered his voice calling after her in the dream. Don’t go. Come back to me. But she had wanted her freedom, wanted it so badly that she had hurt them both in disentangling herself. Now she was free, and she had no claims on him any more. Certainly no right to his exclusive attention. But she missed it, even more than she was willing to admit. An evening sharing him with their friends would be better than not seeing him at all and staying in alone.

‘See you about seven, then?’ He rang off.

Bell tilted backwards in her chair, chewing on the end of her pen. When she felt confident, being alone suited her.

At the best of times she was sure that she could take on the world and win, single-handed. She loved her job, and she had plenty of friends. She had planned it carefully, imagining herself getting steadily more successful, travelling and writing and meeting new people. There would be lovers along the way – yes, of course there would. But she was sure that she didn’t want a husband. Her thoughts shied away from that ominous truth. She didn’t want to think about why, not just now. It was too bound up with her guilt about her panicky retreat from Edward, and the fears that gave her those horrible dreams about weddings. And with other things, too.

Work was the thing to concentrate on. Her career was what mattered, after all. Just so long as she could keep going. Keep doing it right. Keep writing what they wanted to read.

Bell pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. She was scared today, and lonely. She hadn’t reckoned with that, when she had blindly broken away from Edward. Sometimes life was very bleak. There were empty weekends when everyone she knew seemed to have gone away for a few romantic days à deux. Parties she had to go to alone, and then escape from in a solitary taxi. And days like today, when she needed a shoulder to cry on, and then someone to tell her that of course she could confront the baron in his château and carry off the role of the calm career woman that she had imposed on herself.

She sighed. Sitting here feeling sorry for herself wasn’t going to help her to do what had to be done at Château Reynard.

She turned to her work again, her determination doubled.

She worked hard for the rest of the day, keeping her attention fixed on the pages in front of her. At last she felt that she had boned up on all the background she could possibly need. She gave a decisive nod and fanned out her sheaf of notes, then snapped them together into a neat pile and clipped them to her list of questions. She would need those to act as a prompt in case she dried up in her first interview with the baron.

Bell looked at her watch. An hour before Edward was due to arrive. Plenty of time to change and then do some packing. Les Amoureuses was a newish supper club with a tiny dance floor, and good French food. It would be hot and crowded. Bell put on a pale lilac round-necked shirt and a pair of narrow-legged trousers in exactly the same shade. On top went a loose violet linen jacket. She brushed out her hair until it made a glossy frame for her high-cheekboned face, and stroked a careful glow of amethyst shadow on to her eyelids. She was ready. Bell pulled a workmanlike canvas bag out of her cupboard and turned back to the wardrobe. Her job meant a lot of travelling, and she was beginning to feel that her clothes would be a credit to any magazine feature on capsule wardrobes. Plans for a few days’ stay in a Bordeaux château with a baron for company required a little more thought than usual.

Moving quickly, she laid out her travelling-wine-writer’s outfits – mostly carefully chosen separates in soft shades, but all spiced with other bits and pieces in her favourite colours, periwinkle blue and violet. Last of all she pulled out a well-loved evening blazer, the grey and violet stripes shot through with multi-coloured threads and lines of gold. Bell knew that it suited her and she smiled with satisfaction as she smoothed the lapels. She was getting used, these days, to her reputation preceding her when she went to interview people. But she was feminine enough to enjoy their surprise – especially the surprise of middle-aged Frenchmen – when they actually saw her. She was so much younger and better-looking than they expected.

She shook the folds out of her blazer and held it up against herself with a little surge of excitement. Perhaps this trip would be fun after all. The blazer was the last item. Bell was noticing with satisfaction that the little collection would fit easily into the canvas bag when the doorbell rang. Edward didn’t have his own keys any more.

She opened the door and stood there smiling at him, framed in the doorway like a picture.

Just as he always did, Edward thought how striking she was. Not beautiful exactly, more interesting than that. She was almost as tall as he was, and thin enough to look rangy. Tonight her hair was loose, waving frivolously around her narrow face. Her eyes were an extraordinary blue-green mixture that changed with the light. Aquamarine.

‘Come in,’ she said softly. ‘It’s lovely to see you.’

He kissed her briefly on the cheek and followed her into the familiar room. They had furnished it together, bidding for the furniture at auctions and picking up the other things in country junk-shops. In one corner a palm tree flourished luxuriously in a green and gold jardinière. He stared at it, trying to dam up the memories that came flooding back.

‘What would you like to drink?’ Bell repeated.

‘Oh … white wine?’ he said, vaguely. His eyes went to the windows, to the familiar jumble of rooftops and chimney stacks and the greenness of the park beyond. Bell put a cold glass in his hand.

‘Sancerre,’ she said. ‘Tell me what you think of it.’

They had been together all through Bell’s steady climb up the ladder towards the success she had set her heart on. He had shared the special bottles and the celebration meals, advising her and encouraging her.

Their eyes met at last, and she smiled awkwardly at him.

‘Edward, I …’ but he put his hand to her lips to stop her saying any more.

Instead he guided her to the rocking chair in front of one of the windows, and sat down beside her. They sat in silence, staring out at the view, exactly as they had done hundreds of times before. Her fingers wound and knotted themselves in his hair.

‘I feel so … sad today,’ she said at last. ‘I keep remembering all the things we used to do together. How hopeful and excited we were. What a waste.’ Her voice was full of bitterness.

‘No, not a waste. You learnt something about yourself. I discovered a lot too. You were right, Bell.’ He was talking quickly, urgently, trying to convince himself as well as her. ‘You couldn’t have married me, and we wouldn’t have made each other happy. Not in the end.’

She nodded, hoping that he was right and grateful for his generosity.

‘It would be sadder still if we didn’t miss each other at all,’ he reminded her.

‘All those years.’

Four years, to be exact, before she had felt the terror of commitment closing around her. Four years before she had realized that if she didn’t escape now she never would. A long time to get used to having somebody so close. Long enough to become dependent on him. Almost too long.

‘Do you remember,’ Edward said into the silence that had fallen, ‘the first time that we came into this room? We’d only known each other a few weeks, but we were quite sure that we wanted to live together. Happily ever after.’

Bell laughed, remembering. ‘I loved you desperately. I couldn’t believe that I could be so lucky. As soon as we got the keys we dashed up here with an armful of books, that potted palm …’

‘… and I grabbed you and we made love on the bare floorboards.’ Bell leant her head back against the cushions and closed her eyes.

‘I know we’re only remembering the good things, but it was wonderful. All those Sundays when we stayed in bed until lunchtime …’

‘… and then had kippers and a bottle of Chablis …’

‘… and then went out for a walk in the park …’

‘… and then out to see a film and have a pizza.’

‘It wasn’t always a pizza. Sometimes a curry.’

They had met at a party, an ordinary, crowded party in someone’s flat with beer spilt on the floor and a girl in a long skirt crying on the stairs. Edward was in his first year out of Oxford, bored with his job and irritable with the confines of London. He was, without realizing it, very lonely. Then he saw Bell.

She was stretched out in an armchair with an untouched glass of murky red wine in her hand. Edward could see that she wasn’t listening to the man who was perched on the arm of her chair, although he was leaning over her and shouting above the blare of the music. Even in the dim light Edward noticed her intense blue-green eyes, fixed far beyond the tawdry party.

Bell felt even more cut off than Edward. She was just back from a year in France, and was, she told herself, buckling down to real life. It was just that real life seemed to add up to nothing more than a very junior job in the subs’ room of a newspaper. She knew that she was lucky to have even that, and saw clearly that to get a better job she had to do this one as well as she could, but she still felt impatient and restless.

She sighed in the sagging armchair and rotated the sticky glass gently in her fingers. Her eyes flickered over the man, still talking, still straddling the arm of her chair. At twenty-two Bell knew surprisingly little about men, but she knew enough to recognize that this one was planning to sleep with her. She frowned at the thought, knowing that she would fend him off by pretending to be coolly surprised. It always worked. Inside she was puzzled, nearly always shy and unsure of herself, but she was getting better and better at hiding it. The more she played up her natural reserve, the more people mistook it for calm confidence.

That was easy, but it wasn’t at all easy to escape from behind her own defences. She wasn’t really aloof or cold, even though people often thought she was. It was just that as far as love was concerned, even demonstrative affection, she was not even in the beginners’ class.

Bell’s mother had died when she was eleven years old, leaving her in the care of her father. She had no brothers or sisters, and her father was too shattered by his own grief to help his bewildered child.

She had had a solitary, bookish adolescence. When she was sixteen her childish gawkiness had disappeared almost overnight, but by then she was too used to being alone to know what to do with the young men who started to swarm around her. She kept them at bay, politely but definitely, and stuck to her books. She had enjoyed university and had emerged with an excellent degree and several very close friends. But she had never been in love. She had no idea how it happened to other people.

Bell thought, afterwards, that it was in answer to her unspoken question how, that Edward pushed his way across the room and stood in front of her. She saw a man with a quick smile, brown eyes and silky, almost feminine hair pushed back from his forehead. He was nodding at her glass.

‘Can I try and find you a glass of something else?’

She stood up and put the tumbler down carefully on the mantelpiece. Staring straight into Edward’s eyes, she answered, ‘I don’t think there is anything …’

‘In that case,’ he said decisively, ‘I shall have to take you away from here.’ He took her hand and guided her across the room. Bell heard the stream of anxious talk from the armchair stop in mid-sentence.

‘Bell? You’re not going, are you?’

‘Yes,’ she whispered, not loudly enough for even Edward to hear. ‘I think I am going.’

Out on the shabby landing they stood side by side, staring into the kitchen where a beer barrel was dripping on to a carpet of newspapers. An array of green and brown wine bottles stood in a litter of French bread and cheese. Their eyes met, and they smiled at each other.

‘Have you got a coat?’

‘On the bed, in there.’

The bedroom door was locked now and he retrieved it from the pile that had been flung out on to the landing floor. They picked their way down the stairs, past the girl in the long skirt, and out into the street. To Edward, for the very first time, the thick London air smelt clean and invigorating.

He took Bell out to dinner and then back to the door of her flat.

He saw her every day for a week before he kissed her, and it was a month before he felt he was even beginning to know her. Every time he saw her he was surprised by the way her beauty unfolded. At first he had seen her simply as an attractive girl with unusual eyes, but gradually he noticed the luxuriance of her dark hair, the fragility of her long neck and the bloom of her skin, and the vulnerability of her mouth.

Her face kept changing.

For Bell they were weeks of enlightenment. Slowly she discovered that Edward could be trusted not to disappoint her. He was never dull, never at a loss. To her delight she found that if he wasn’t beside her he was a step ahead, waiting for her to catch up. She found that she could be herself with him, as with no one else. She began to show him aspects of herself that she had buried deeply years ago, when she was a little girl convinced that her mother had been taken away from her to punish her own wickedness. Not even her closest friends knew about her spurts of temper, or her bleak fits of pessimism. Bell stopped hiding them from Edward, and her feelings for him quickened when she saw that he accepted her faults as gratefully as her merits.

The habits of years fell away as she accepted the rhythm of life with him. She began to think in the plural after what felt like a lifetime of solitude.

One evening, Edward brought her home as he always did. They had been to see a film, and then for a meal at the tiny restaurant around the corner. Bell had watched the candlelight making black shadows in the hollows of his face as he talked and she had realized, with a little shock, that she knew the contours of it as well as she knew her own face. She was faintly surprised when she remembered that she was still keeping part of herself from someone so well-loved.

In the deserted flat Edward took Bell in his arms to kiss her goodnight.

‘Don’t go,’ she had said, in a small clear voice. ‘I’m sorry it’s taken so long, but I’m ready now.’

There was no need to say any more. Edward put his hand on the catch of her bedroom door and it swung open. They stepped into the dim warmth of her room. With infinite tenderness he took off her clothes and knelt beside her.

‘Are you quite sure?’

Her eyes were luminous as she answered, ‘Quite sure. I love you, Edward.’

He had been astounded by the depth of her passion. It was as if she had flung herself blindly into an uncharted sea, and found that she could swim like a fish.

They had been very happy, Bell recalled. Until their need for each other had become claustrophobic to her, threatening rather than secure. Until she had begun to have dreams about being trapped underwater, or about failing to rescue him from burning tenements. Or about jilting him. She remembered her early-morning dream, the feel of her billowing wedding dress gathered up in her fists to leave her free to run, and her mouth went dry.

It had been painful, and it still was, but she had done the right thing. She wished that there had never been any nagging sense of something missing, so that she could have been happy with Edward for ever. But it was not to be, and now even in her loneliest moments she delighted in her freedom. It had been hard to win, this independence, and now she had it it felt like a prize.

Suddenly she felt a suffocating wave of affectionate tenderness for him. She bent forward and wrapped her arms around his hunched shoulders, rubbing her cheek against his hair.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘It’s helped, sitting here remembering all the good things. It seems less of a … waste. And it’s made the bad bits easier to contemplate.’ Edward stood up and pulled Bell to her feet. The wine bottle was empty, and she knew that it was time to go and meet their friends. He raised his eyebrows and she nodded, half smiling.