The Look of Love
Authors: Judy Astley
Bella has given up on men.
Her latest boyfriend ‘forgot’ to tell her about his current wife, so she's single
again
.
And then her ex–husband turns up, wanting to sell the family home in which she and their two teenage children are happily living their lives.
Then Bella sees a chance to stay in the house and earn some money from it. She rents it out for a reality TV fashion makeover programme and it turns out that the house isn't the only thing that will benefit from a change...
THE LOOK
OF LOVE
Judy Astley
For every woman who has had that heartsink moment while trying on clothes in front of a multi-angled mirror.
ONE
‘One day, you’ll look back at this and laugh!’
At 5.30 a.m., weak with the desperate exhaustion of the unslept, Bella murmured this familiar homily to her overlit reflection in the hotel’s bathroom mirror. She was trying the words on for size, reminding herself firmly, seven floors up in New York, that this was the traditional ha-ha British way of coping with all manner of things going wrong, from granny tumbling into the wedding cake right through to full-scale bath-crashing-through-ceiling disaster. Were the annoyingly bouncy optimists who said this always right?
Bella reckoned that in this particular case, absolutely
not
. Surely it added up to something permanently
not
amusing when the highlight of a romantic weekend, a whole continent and a great big ocean away, was the bit when you raced out of the sleek boutique hotel and into
a taxi, desperate to be on the plane home? Alone, that is. Alone because the one essential ingredient to
that
kind of weekend, the so-called lover, was in another room way down the corridor, cosied up in bed with the wife he’d somehow forgotten to mention. Terrific. Dis-bloody-aster. Bella wished on Rick the kind of nightmares that would make him wake up screaming, quaking and committing himself to a lifetime of desperately miserable celibacy.
Bella was counting slow seconds to the end of the long lonely night, when she could get the hell out of this city that was wrongly supposed never to sleep. Looking at her face in the mirror (skin a disturbing shade of lemon: she had to trust that was a trick of the peculiar eco-light), she had the impression that the opposite was true – that she was the only one awake. Furiously, she scrubbed at a blob of toothpaste that had found its inevitable Sod’s Law way on to the front of her black Joseph jacket. Ha! Black! According to Rick’s wife Carole, she shouldn’t even be wearing black at all. She would now forever have doubts about at least half the contents of her wardrobe. Thanks, Carole, for that.
‘Black just piles on the years, honey,’ this pin-thin spike-nailed woman had sneered, leaning angular and elegant against the door frame of room 703, then adding, with one perfectly groomed eyebrow raised,
and slight Botox-cracking smirk of the mouth, ‘or perhaps you really
are
that old?’
Wow and ouch! How to respond to a comment like that? What to say when you were all glammed up in your slinkiest black silk strappy number, about to go out for a lush dinner with a man who had insisted, back in the UK, that he was safely long, long divorced from his wife? A wife who he’d also claimed (and goodness, how he’d lied here too, with bells on) was far more a moose than a minx. If so, there must be a whole lot of very cute mooses (meese?) out there in the good ol’ US of A. The essential stinger retort-quip that had eluded Bella at the time would surely come to her three days too late, when she was lying in the bath back at home still seething about the insult and concocting the perfect phrase she hadn’t had the instant wit to fling back. Wasn’t it always the way? Even for Bella-the-writer (novelist, journalist), never usually short on words, the perfect phrase just had to go missing when it was most needed. And in truth it was Rick, the lying, cheating, two-timing slimeball, who deserved the whiplash words the most, not his stunning, immaculate wife. Oh how very, very swiftly after he’d been hunted down had he scurried around repacking his belongings and trailing Carole down the corridor like a naughty puppy. And he hadn’t even had the grace – or possibly nerve – to look back at Bella once. Three months, she now reflected
bitterly, three months of him in determined pursuit, all that passion in London, obliterated in three swift I-win minutes in New York by this stray’s keeper, the moment he was on her home patch.
On the street way below Bella’s window the city was at last waking up. Early office workers power-walked like cheetahs on a hunger mission, utterly un-selfconscious in their sharp suits teamed unattractively with clumpy trainers and clutching skinny lattes and carb-lite pastries from the diner opposite the hotel. Bella, on the other hand, hadn’t actually slept at all and, aching with jet lag, tiredness and crushing disappointment, she longed and longed to be on the plane, snuggling into seat 16K, a professionally smiling steward asking if she’d like tea, a
Daily Telegraph
and a nice cosy blanket. Oh, the comfort of small rituals. And yet she almost hoped no-one would be
too
kind to her, for surely one word of concern, one casual, well-meant ‘And how are
we
today?’ could set the floods off and she’d be weeping blotchily all the way to the Heathrow baggage carousel.
Five thirty. The phone rang and a morning-eager voice told Bella her cab was outside and that she was to Have A Safe Trip, Now. Thank goodness – time to get out of here. Bella took one last look round the small but perfectly formed hotel room to check for left-behind items. She hoped the room maid would find a happier
home for the scarlet lace underwear that she’d left lying on the bed – tissue-wrapped, unworn, labels still on – which Rick had planned to see on Bella. She should have seen the warning light with that particular little gift … should have listened to her doubts about Rick being the kind of man who considered red underwear sexy. Red just …
isn’t
, was Bella’s opinion, or at least not on anyone who is no longer a girl of twenty. On anyone who came firmly under the heading of ‘woman’, it either looked plain trashy or as if it was being worn with a joky Santa seduction in mind. Even worse, the knickers were thong-style. Bella didn’t
do
thongs as – regrettably – Rick already knew well. She’d be willing to bet serious money that Rick’s wife didn’t wear them either. Nice to think the two of them had something in common.
Bella wrestled with the handle of her blue leather Bric case (bought specially for this weekend – could she send Rick the bill?) and towed it after her into the corridor. Now, which room was Rick and Carole’s? She tried to remember, as she walked towards the lift … oh yes, 712. Definitely. Almost definitely. Worth a guess anyway. She stopped outside it, kicked the room door viciously and repeatedly, thumping the trusty Bric against it for good measure, and yelled, ‘Have a crap life, you lousy rotten bastard!’ Then walked on as calmly as she could and pressed the elevator call button. As she
stepped into the lift, she caught sight of the door of 712 opening. A small, bald old man in purple satin pyjamas peered, blinking, into the corridor, staring at her with a puzzled and decidedly half-asleep expression. As well he might. He certainly wasn’t Rick. And he
definitely
wasn’t Carole. Damn, Bella thought, giving the poor man a feeble, apologetic wave. Can’t even get the parting gesture right.
‘I dunno, it just feels a bit like … wrong?’ Giles shrugged. Molly gazed at him, trying to guess where ‘wrong’ came into this. OK, it was Sunday. And maybe this was more of a Saturday-night sort of event – but Giles wasn’t a churchgoer, so the idea of being scrutinized by God wasn’t likely to be the problem. She couldn’t help thinking Giles looked a bit like a lopsided shop dummy in oversized clothes. He was quite skinny but had lovely straight wide shoulders and they looked weird scrunched up like that, as if someone had snapped them and tried to fold them away, untidily. His hands were so firmly wedged in the pockets of his jeans that Molly was convinced he was keeping them safe from her, perhaps fearing that if she took hold of him, pulled him on to the bed, he would surely just die or dissolve into gloop or something. And there she’d been, thinking that the bed-thing was
exactly
what he wanted. He’d
said
he did. Hardly ever stopped saying it. What
was not to believe? They’d planned this together, hours of whispering down the phone, texting, emailing, getting all geed up – it wasn’t just some instant crazy plan she’d suddenly come up with.
Molly sighed lightly and prettily but felt like punching a big jagged hole through the huge mottled old mirror that had leaned against her mother’s bedroom wall for so long that the carpet behind it was now a darker shade of blue and fluffier than in the rest of the room. What was the point of a boyfriend with a conscience? Conscience hadn’t exactly been part of the scene all those times Giles had been trying – and failing – to persuade her to have sex with him under heaps of coats at parties, or in the ferns on the common, or that night at his place in the garage, in the back of the Range Rover when his mum had suddenly climbed in with the car keys and driven off to get petrol, without a clue that Giles and Molly were on the back seats, trying not to sneeze or giggle under the hairy, smelly blanket the dogs usually lay on.
She’d had this evening so perfectly organized;
everything
was working so far. She was one of the last in her school year group to offload her virginity and she wanted it to be a night to cherish, not a night to shudder about years later over bottles of wine in one of those ‘how bad was it for you?’ competitive conversations that she’d overheard shrieky women having in
the pub. Mum was off in New York with that creepy, smiley American having whatever passed for a good time among Old People (details best not thought about). Alex was in Scotland visiting Dad. Her alibi plea – ‘I
can’t
miss Carly’s party! It’s the last one of the holidays!’ – had, after a bit of a struggle (‘A party on a Sunday? Strange day …’ her mum had reasonably quibbled) and some convincing wailing, been accepted all round. Right now Bella would probably be picturing her innocently giggling on Carly’s bed with lots of their classmates, in a scene like the sleepover from
High School Musical
, all trying on make-up and dancing around to popcorn music, drinking innocent Coke, getting ready for their so-fun evening. Yeah, right – like they were twelve or something.
Instead, Molly had slid back home from Carly’s with Giles, creeping in over the back fence and keeping only the security lights on so as not to alert Jules from across the road who’d been coming in to feed the cat. She was now wondering why this boy she’d been seeing for four months and who claimed she’d been doing him serious damage by making him stay on the safe side of her underwear, had suddenly gone all reluctant on her. Perhaps a bit more vodka would help. Or not. She didn’t know how much had the wrong kind of effect on boys. So far tonight they hadn’t drunk much of it – neither of them liked it much with Tropicana orange
and there wasn’t anything else in the fridge apart from some milk that could have been there ages. You wouldn’t want to risk sniffing at it. Why was her mum such a useless shopper?
Molly came up close to Giles and whispered into his long soft hair. It smelled of Bedhead serum, sweet, delicious. ‘Don’t you love me any more?’