The Look of Love (26 page)

What a quaint old phrase that was. Bella had first heard the term when she was a very small girl of four or five, said about her own babysitter Louise who’d become pregnant at seventeen. Shirley and Louise’s mother had been talking over tea and cake, saying that Louise had
got into trouble
and that in the old days it would have meant she’d have had to get married but
that times were different now. Bella remembered it clearly, because for a few years after that she had thought of married women as people who’d done something very wrong, for which they were condemned to punishment-by-wedding. It was quite a game, trying to guess their crimes, but it had also puzzled her enormously because when people announced they were going to get married, it always seemed to be such good news.

‘Giles has got someone
pregnant
? Bloody ’ell, what an idiot! Who?’ Bella was rather ashamed that her immediate secret reaction was relief that it wasn’t Molly. ‘Is the girl keeping the baby?’

‘Apparently.’ Shirley shrugged. ‘What a silly thing she is. Why would a girl choose to be encumbered with a child at her age? She’ll never get that time again, and nobody of seventeen has yet learned enough to be much use to a younger one. Girls today …’ she sighed. ‘They talk about babies as if the baby stage is all there is, and they’ll be forever cuddly little things that they can carry about like dollies. If instead you said to a teenager who was thinking it was a cute notion, “Would you like to have a snotty, tantrum-crazed three-year-old who’s being slow with the potty-training?” I wonder how many of them would say yes?’

‘None, I imagine, when you put it like that. Perhaps that kind of reality should be part of school
sex-education classes. Did Molly say who the girl was? Did Giles come round and tell her? She said she was asking him over. Poor Molly. Poor everyone, really.’

‘No he didn’t!’ Shirley was spreading butter on her toast in a manner that conveyed outraged fury on her granddaughter’s behalf. ‘Her friend Carly told her. She was here with her when I came in from seeing Dennis. Molly was pretty much inconsolable. She sobbed her heart out all over me after Carly had gone home.’

‘My poor Molly! I should have been here.’ Bella made tea for herself and another one to take up to Molly. The elation from the night before fizzled away. Dead butterflies, she thought, her body and brain now feeling leaden with sadness for her daughter.

‘No, Bella, it wasn’t down to you. It wouldn’t have made any difference and besides, you’re her mother. Girls don’t always want to confide in their mothers – sometimes the distance of another generation is useful.’

Bella smiled at this, remembering how often Shirley had so unsubtly tried to wheedle personal information out of her in her youth. As there really hadn’t been a lot to tell, she’d been constantly disappointed. She probably had a point about the generation thing, too.

‘Well I’m glad you were here for her, Mum. Thanks. Did you tell her you were marrying Dennis?’

‘No. It wasn’t the moment, was it? I’ll tell her soon.’

‘OK – I just wondered if she’d already known. That’s all.’

Bella felt furious with Giles for not having had the nerve to tell Molly about the baby himself, though at the same time she had to admit to herself that it wouldn’t have been easy for him. But what kind of boy simply puts his head in the sand and waits for the school gossip machine to let his girlfriend know that he’s been so spectacularly, disastrously unfaithful? And why had all those school sex-education classes been so ineffective? How difficult was the use of a simple condom? Saul had managed it perfectly well. But then he was a grown-up, with possibly many years of practice – something she didn’t really want to think about. Maybe Giles hadn’t quite, in a manner of speaking, got to grips with that particular skill.

She put a couple of croissants in the microwave and set the timer, then took Molly’s tea up to her, expecting her to be half asleep and exhausted from a disturbed night. But Molly, instead of languishing in bed as Bella had imagined, was actually up and on the landing on her way to have a shower.

‘Tea for you, Moll. And I just spoke to Gran. Are you …?’

‘I’m fine,’ Molly interrupted abruptly. ‘I’m just angry now. I’m not going to school today, either,’ she said, giving Bella a don’t-make-me challenging look. ‘I’m
going to stay here and do the clothes thing with you all. I know Daisy said we could do mine later in the day when I get back but I
really
don’t want to go and see anyone at school today, OK?’

‘All right … it’s your work schedule so you know what you can afford to miss and what you can’t. Are you sure you feel up for all this filming malarkey, though?’

Molly glowered. ‘I’m not
ill
, Mum. Just … pissed off! That Aimee, she’s such a slag. And how could Giles? He’d said he didn’t fancy her, that he’d “have to be desperate”. Turns out he already
had
been desperate when he told me that.’

Her eyes had gone glittery with tears. Bella moved to hug her, but Molly backed away and said, ‘Don’t be nice to me, please! If I cry I’ll have a fat red nose.’ She gave Bella a small, sad smile and vanished into the bathroom.

Saul hadn’t changed his mind. Half an hour before he was due to arrive at the house, Bella’s phone buzzed with a text message.

‘
Can’t wait to see you again. Ten minutes x
’

Jules, just arriving, caught Bella grinning at the message and pounced on her.

‘Well? Tell me … how was it? Did you …?’

Bella looked at her and tried to control her smile.

‘Oh God, you
did
! Oh you lucky, lucky slut!’

‘Shh! Someone might hear!’ Bella hissed. ‘It’s early
days and we’ve got to keep it quiet while all this lot’s going on. I don’t want Daisy deciding she’s going to fit me up with some piss-take goth wedding outfit or something.’

‘
Wedding
?’ Jules exclaimed. ‘Already?’

‘No! Don’t be daft, that was just … oh you know. Just keep the last-night thing to yourself, OK Jules? Please? Look – Simone’s calling us for make-up. Catch up later?’

‘We’d better. I need info. I have a dull married life and need vicarious thrills where I can get them.’

Bella was in the sitting room with Simone the make-up artist when Saul’s car pulled up on the gravel. Daisy had arrived early, been made up and had just finished having her nail varnish retouched. She’d gone to check that Fliss wasn’t skiving in the mobile canteen out on the roadside. Bella watched her from the window, crunching delicately across the stones in her skyscraper platform sandals and stopping to talk to Saul after he’d parked his Mercedes in the driveway beside Bella’s Mini. To Bella’s newly hyped-up state of mind, the cars parked together seemed significant, portentous, like another confirmation that what had happened last night was … all right. More than all right.

Must get a grip, she thought, moving away from the window. This was ridiculous – she was feeling as hyped up as a teenager. And it was a feeling that she was mildly sad to acknowledge as new to her. How had she married
James when she’d never felt quite like that about him, not even at the beginning? She’d loved him, certainly, in a warm and tender sort of way, but mostly it had been more of a feeling of comfort and safety that she’d had with him, something to do with being cared for, having someone to care about. Home-making, nesting, children. She had no regrets that all these had been with James, in spite of how he’d come to drive her half insane in the end, but this madness that she now felt towards Saul … Was it a basis for a proper relationship or just a whopping great piece of truly physical lust that would vanish as fast as it had arrived?

She could feel her heart picking up speed as Saul approached the open front door, and she went out to meet him, wanting to see him alone for a moment before having to share him on a purely businesslike level with the rest of the crew.

‘Good morning!’ he said, smiling, taking her hand and leading her to the privacy of the leafy passageway at the side of the house. ‘Sleep well?’ He put his arm round her, pulling her close, stroking her.

‘Not too bad, considering!’ she said. ‘And you?’

‘Kept waking up and wishing you were still with me. And then I wondered if you’d have decided by this morning that it was all a horrid mistake.’

Bella laughed. ‘I thought exactly the same about you!
Do
you think that?’

He kissed her, softly. ‘What do you think?’ he whispered. ‘I haven’t had you out of my mind for a single second.’

‘OK, point taken! And same goes for me. But … Molly had a horrible boyfriend episode last night, and I don’t think she’d take too well being faced with her mother looking all loved-up and silly. So we really must stick to the professional-distance stuff that we agreed on last night.’

‘I know. It would change the whole work dynamic, so if I snap at you or boss you around in there, just think of it as a gesture of affection.’

‘It’s a deal.’ Reluctantly, Bella managed to take a tiny step away from Saul. ‘Look, we’d better go in,’ she told him. ‘I can hear Fliss shouting at someone in the garden, and the other victims will be here any minute.’

‘OK, after one more kiss …’ he said. ‘You’re just looking too irresistible.’

‘That’ll be the make-up. Simone is making us look “natural”. You wouldn’t believe how long that takes.’

Molly, Dina and Bella were on the purple sofa watching Jules being filmed coming in to join them from the garden, cheerfully unaware that the camera outside had been focused on her behind for the past five minutes while she walked across the lawn with Daisy. Daisy was today wearing a near-demure yellow flower-sprigged
mini tea dress – ‘Topshop!’ she’d announced in a triumphant squeal – with gold and grey herringbone leggings that had cost about twenty-seven times as much as the frock. And ‘No, not leggings, they’re
treggings
,’ she’d corrected a mystified Dina, who had said that leggings looked rather on the hot side for the weather. Dina had turned to Bella and mouthed ‘
treggings?
’ at her, still none the wiser. Back in the kitchen, Daisy addressed the camera and the three on the sofa at the same time, standing next to Jules (who was reaching into the cupboard for biscuits) and patting at bits of her clothing now and then. ‘Every style guru, every fashion magazine in the nation will, at some point, tell you there are jeans to suit every woman,’ she began, tweaking Jules’s back pocket. ‘This is actually a big, fat, lie.’ (Three sharp prods to her derrière – Jules dropped a HobNob into the sink.) ‘They will try to tempt you with skinny, boot-cut, flares, low-rise, high-waist and other little gimmicky tricks to convince you that there is no butt shape that can’t be enhanced by the right tight denim. But there are many, many women out there who shouldn’t be seen in the stuff,
ever
. And Jules here is one of them!’ She stopped for a moment to take a breath and to explain that at this point, the shots of Jules’s bum would fill the screen.

‘Oh thanks for that!’ Jules laughed. ‘I thought you said you weren’t going to make total twats of us all?’

‘Please don’t say “twat” on camera, Jules,’ Saul reminded her, grinning. ‘We’ll put an edit in there. OK, carry on.’

‘I’m not making you look bad, I promise.’ Daisy beamed. ‘Just wait … you’ll thank me in the end, sweetie, trust me.’

‘If you say so!’ Jules surrendered, and Daisy continued to the camera, ‘Of course if Jules had a job on a remote hill farm where no one could see her arse – oops, sorry darling!’ she smirked at Saul, ‘bottom – as she bent to get the eggs out of a chicken coop, or could watch her walking across the moorland with a bucket of oats for a pony, then fine. Here in urban Britain, anyone whose bum is this close to the ground should avoid – no – run
very very
fast from the time-honoured rodeo look. And don’t, as Jules has done here, think you can get away with wearing a long and baggy top to cover the sins beneath.’ She made as if to raise the hem of Jules’s long, pale-blue and white Empire-line top, but backed away with professional speed when Jules gave her a don’t-you-dare look. Instead, Daisy pulled the fabric tighter, gathering it up in a handful behind Jules’s back to make her point: ‘Because, as you can see here, the waistband, the fly and the belt loops on all jeans are really pretty bulky. They
add
. Jules looks just about passable if she keeps completely still, sucks in her flesh and stands up permanently straight like a soldier on parade,
but whoever does? The minute she moves, all the cluttery fabric trims beneath just bulk out more.’

‘Well thanks for that, Daisy!’ Jules responded remarkably cheerfully. ‘So what do I wear instead?
Everyone
wears jeans!’

‘Not me, darling,’ Daisy told her. ‘In spite of being slim and with far longer legs for my height than you’d expect, I
eschew
denim for its inflexibility, not to mention the fact that it’s cold in winter and too hot in summer and it can smell nasty when damp. Jules, you need smooth and sleek if you’re going to wear trousers; side fastenings, not front; and no pockets, though I’d maybe allow some flattish side ones, just big enough to slide a credit card in. No other details whatsoever. Trust me. In a moment, when you’re trying things on, you’ll see exactly what I mean. Inches will fall off.’

‘Right, cut there!’ Saul said. ‘That’s pretty good, Daisy. If typically rude …’

‘Honest, thank you very much, I prefer to call it honest. It’s what I’m being paid for,’ Daisy cut in swiftly.

‘OK, honest if you must, yet deep down helpful. That was an excellent piece of cutting to the chase.’

‘Thank you, darling. Just doing my job.’ She smirked at him, blowing him a kiss.

Bella was apparently allowed to wear jeans, but only boot-cut and in darkest blue or black. Molly, who had cheered up enormously, was pleased (but surely not
surprised) to be told she could wear the skinniest and skimpiest with impunity, but Dina was, like Jules, considered the Wrong Shape. This didn’t faze her at all for, as she put it, she ‘wouldn’t be seen dead in jeans’ and had turned up that day in a long stiff denim skirt which Daisy had said looked like an awning on the front of an old ironmongers. Dina hadn’t seemed to mind this, either. ‘It’s all right, I don’t possess any denim. I picked it up at a charity shop just for today. It can go straight back again now. I washed it before wearing it, of course.’