Celebration

‘I’ll go and get my things.’

Edward watched her go. In an automatic gesture she stretched out her fingers as she passed to feel the dampness of the earth in the potted palm. Instantly the memory came back to him. He smelt the dust and her perfume, saw himself lying in her arms and felt the drooping palm fronds brushing his skin. Suddenly he longed to take hold of her again, to feel the softness of her against him one more time. She was standing in the doorway again, turning up the collar of her jacket.

‘Let’s go and eat,’ he said, in a voice made rough with desire. She heard it at once, and her eyes jumped to the palm. How well we know each other, he thought.

‘Yes,’ she said softly. ‘I think we should.’ She took his arm and the door closed behind them with a neat click.

Every table in Les Amoureuses was taken, and the bar and dance floor were packed. Edward and Bell peered through the smoky atmosphere, trying to see some faces in the crowd.

‘Table in the corner,’ Edward mouthed at her and they squirmed past the crammed tables. Three people looked up as they arrived, large blonde Mary and little dark Elspeth with half-moon glasses, and Marcus who was Edward’s best friend. He had straw-coloured hair and a rubbery, mobile face.

‘Oh good, the fun people. Bell, darling, how chic you look. Now, press yourselves in where you can and I’ll see if I can conjure up some glasses.’

Edward kissed the two girls and they sat down. It was, thought Bell, going to be an evening exactly like hundreds of others.

Odd that life was such a combination of the frightening and the absolutely, routinely predictable.

‘… going well in the world of high finance?’ asked Mary.

‘Oh, just the same as always,’ Edward answered, evasively. He worked, very successfully, in a City merchant bank, but considered it something to be hushed up as far as possible.

‘Bell’s the only one who ever does anything interesting. You should see her diary. Bordeaux tomorrow, next week California.’

‘California?’ Mary and Elspeth looked at her with such open envy that Bell felt herself blushing.

‘All thanks to Marcus,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m going to stay with a friend of his, researching a series for the paper on West Coast life. Wine, food, people. I suggested it ages ago to Stobbs and he liked the idea, then came up with a budget that would have kept me alive in San Francisco for about twenty-five minutes. So Marcus suggested his rich friend who lives in the Napa Valley. He responded with true Californian hospitality, and I can afford to go after all. I’ve never been to the West Coast, and I’m longing to see it. It’ll be hard work, too,’ she finished defensively.

‘Work?’ Mary was derisive. ‘Who is this friend, Marcus? Got any others to spare?’

Marcus finished his mouthful deliberately and then flattened his features to produce a wide, toothy American smile.

‘He’s always glad to offer a bed to an English chick. Specially one with an ass like yours, Mare.’

Bell said, ‘Marcus, you didn’t tell me that.’

Marcus winked at her. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll like him. He’s larger than life in every respect. Maverick, almost certainly a con-man. You could fill all your articles with him alone.’

‘Anyway, Bell,’ Mary put in, ‘who could be better equipped to deal with someone like that than you? Just give him your ice-maiden act.’

Into the little silence that fell around the table, Edward said, ‘Shall we have a dance, Bell? I think there’s a spare foot of space on the floor.’

‘And pardon me, too,’ said Marcus. ‘I’m going to the boys’ room.’

The two women were left alone at the table. Mary lit one of Marcus’s cigarettes and blew the smoke out on a long breath. She was watching Edward and Bell dancing, forced close together by the press of other dancers.

‘I think she’ll regret it in the end,’ she said.

‘What?’ Elspeth sounded resigned.

‘Edward, of course. He’s still in love with her, poor sap. And Bell Farrer is going the right way to end up with nobody. One of those lonely, successful women with nothing to talk about but her work. Why does she bother? Edward’s going to be very rich one of these days.’

‘Mary,’ Elspeth protested, ‘Bell wouldn’t have cared about the money. She’s just not like that. Don’t you think it’s possible that she just couldn’t love him as much as he needed? Whereas you could, of course.’

Mary chose to ignore the stab.

‘Entirely 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 the liver, of course. Bell looked down at her empty glass. It was ironic that she should be making her living now by writing about drink. She toyed with the idea of pouring herself another brandy, but it was easy to decide not to do it. No. Whatever else might happen to her, she didn’t think that was going to be her particular problem. It was enough to have watched it happen to her father.

‘Well now.’ Bell looked at her white face in the mirror. ‘While you are thinking about this, why not try to be totally honest?

‘Is it that you are scared of Edward being hurt like that one day if you disappear? You’re trying to protect him, in your heavy-handed way?

‘Well, yes …

‘Or are you really much more frightened of it happening to you? No commitment, therefore no risk?

‘Yes.’

Bell folded her arms on the dressing-table in front of her, laid her head on them and cried.

If someone else had told her her own story she would have dismissed it as too neat and pat. Incapable of loving, of marrying, because of her parents’ tragedy? Cool and collected outside in self-protection, but a guilty mess inside? Surely human beings were more complex than that?

‘This one isn’t,’ said Bell, through the sobs.

At last the storm subsided. She snatched up a handful of tissues from the box in front of her and blew her nose. A red-eyed spectre confronted her in the mirror.

‘What you really need,’ she addressed herself again, ‘is to look a complete fright tomorrow. That will give just the important, extra edge of confidence. Come on, Bell. What’s past is past, and the only thing that you can do now is carry on. At least you seem to understand yourself quite well.’

She put her tongue out at herself and caught the answering grin. That’s better.

She leant over and stuffed her passport and tickets into one of the pockets of her squashy leather handbag. Then she zipped and buckled the canvas holdall and stood the two bags side by side next to the door.

Notebooks, traveller’s cheques, file, tape recorder … she counted off in her head. All there.

She was ready to go, whatever might lie ahead.

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