The Look of Love (5 page)

It was about fifteen minutes later that Shirley left the store. She went by way of the shoe department on the ground floor to have a quick look at the first of the season’s boots that were just coming in. She didn’t really need any – her black Prada sale ones would probably see her out and she’d picked up some perfect brown suede pull-ons in Tesco, of all places, the winter before, breaking her own rule about cheap clothing because they were such a plain, classic, comfortable style. As she walked out of the store and into the town’s mall, she was wondering whether green tights and her necklace of large emerald-coloured stones would go well with the new dress and her mushroom-coloured Gina shoes. An alarm beeped behind her as she went. Probably, she thought vaguely, another customer wanting, as she had, to see what something looked like in better light. They really should do something about that … Or that bunch of teenagers, joshing about and shouting … had they stolen something?

‘Excuse me … would you come this way with me please?’

Shirley, at the top of the escalator, felt as if the man standing too close to her was some kind of octopus. His arms were everywhere, blocking off her escape as she tried to sidestep him. She considered screaming, half guessing she was being mugged by someone with
excellent manners, but this was a smart, suited young man in his mid-thirties. He carried a walkie-talkie which crackled and muttered in his hand.

‘OK, fish landed. Coming in,’ he murmured into it now as he put a firm hand under Shirley’s elbow and turned her round, back in the direction of the department store.

‘Will you stop
manhandling
me?’ she demanded, starting to pull away. Struggling was unseemly, but she shook his arm off her as hard as she could. People were slowing, beginning to scent a scene. She
hated
that sort of thing and glared around her, embarrassed and furious.

‘We’ll do this the easy way, in private,’ he said quietly. ‘But you’ll have to come to Security with me, right now, please. I have reason to believe that you have removed an item from this store without paying for it.’

Shirley felt relieved. ‘Oh but I did! I have the receipt! Look, it’s right here!’ She opened her bag, pulling out her wallet.

‘Er, yes, I know you paid for the one item,’ he said. ‘It’s the other one we’re concerned about.’

‘Sorry?’ Shirley didn’t understand. All the same, she walked alongside the man, who, thank goodness for her dignity, seemed to have decided she wasn’t about to do a runner (hardly – at her age and in ballet flats) and didn’t continue to hang on to her. She smoothed her
skirt down … and suddenly felt sick. This was
not
her Jigsaw wrapover. It was the DKNY dress. Where, for heaven’s sake, had her mind escaped to for those last minutes in that changing room? Moments surely didn’t come much more senior than this.

‘Ah! Bella, ma bella!’ Luigi kissed Bella effusively, shook James’s hand with full-strength Italian energy and ushered the two of them towards the best table in the restaurant. There was a view of the little street of cute shops and the small square where the winos liked to get together on the benches outside the tapas bar to sing old blues songs on summer evenings.

Bella looked around to see who was in – this was her favourite local eaterie, popular and busy, and she usually knew one or two of the clientele at any given time. It was her default venue to take friends, work colleagues, the occasional date. She’d been there only a couple of weeks before with Rick, and it had been at this table that he’d invited her, seemingly on a spontaneous, romantic whim, to visit him in New York. All in the past now, she told herself briskly, no point looking back. Now instead of her-and-Rick, it was just her and James, Alex and Molly having decided that sudden emergency Facebooking was preferable to the Nice Family Lunch James had offered.

‘Bella! Hi!’ At a table in the corner, half hidden by a
large potted orange tree, two women were waving across to her.

‘Who are they?’ James asked as she smiled and waved back.

‘They’re two of our local writers’ group,’ Bella told him. ‘We meet up every fortnight at the River Fox in Richmond, just to chat and grumble, you know. Mutual support, all that.’

‘Ah, a chance for the demon drink. You always did like a drop, didn’t you?’ James smirked.

‘Hardly,’ Bella retorted, ‘And please don’t criticize how I live. I barely drink at all, as it happens – I’ve usually got the car with me. And you can hardly grudge me getting together with other writers – it’s a lonely old job being a freelance.’

What was it about James that always put her on the defensive? Maybe it was that he was always on the attack. He’d been such good fun at the beginning too, in spite of his cleanliness obsession.

‘He’s barking, you know,’ Bella’s mother Shirley had warned her, only a month before the wedding twenty-one years before. ‘He went through my larder and washed all the tops of the jars. Some of them were things we hadn’t used in years. I’d think carefully, darling, before saying “I do” to a man who’s going to see germs on every damn surface. I hate to think what he’s like in bed …’ This last comment had been made
very loudly over lunch with a selection of aunts, two of whom came firmly under the heading of ‘maiden’. Bella had only been twenty-two at the time, caught up in the heady whirl of wedding preparations, and had blithely taken no notice – Shirley had a knack of dropping in some sexual reference whenever the opportunity arose, somehow convinced that she had to show off that it was a subject she knew all about, as if nobody else possibly could.

As it happened, that was the one area where James had been content to get down and dirty … or at least at first. Was it after Alex was born? Or was it after Molly when he’d suddenly decided that the warm, slow moments immediately after sex weren’t a time for post-coital snuggling but were just perfect for getting into the hottest bearable shower, lathering vigorously and scrubbing his nails with insulting thoroughness? Their sex life stalled and faltered after that. After all, who wants to make love with a man who would clearly prefer to wear protective gloves rather than risk skin-on-skin contact? In the end, Bella wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d approached her wearing an all-over anti-radiation suit. Borderline obsessive-compulsive, that was James. Unfortunately he was not quite bad enough for anyone to tell him he should consider seeking help with it. He got by OK. Just.

As Bella studied the menu she wondered idly who the
man was with the writer women across the room. Another author? Friend? Lover? Those two were younger than Bella, in their thirties. Chloe and Zoe – Bella could never remember which was which because they were very much of A Look, very neat and Boden-mummy, though she knew one wrote for a teenage vampire series and the other was trying to break into the spicier end of the Mills and Boon range. Both were looking summer-chic in strappy little tops beneath toning cardigans with arty jewellery, and both were beaming lip-glossed smiles at their companion. He was older than them, older than Bella too, and the white of his linen shirt fairly zinged against his tanned skin. Good hair too, mid-brown, sun-streaked and attractively overgrown, the ends forming tiny corkscrew curls. If she wasn’t firmly out of the man market (the words Never Again were her first waking thought that morning, and she suspected this wasn’t a conviction that was going away soon), she wouldn’t have ruled him out if he’d chatted her up at a party. Which one of the women was he actually
with
, she wondered idly as she skimmed a look at the menu; both of them (married as they were) seemed pretty keen, giggling and hair-flicking like a couple of flirty teenagers. Whoever he was, he’d certainly made an impact on the Zoe-Chloe twosome.

‘You’re doing that thing that you always do, Bella,’ James commented, following her gaze to the far table.
‘You’re miles away across the floor with those women, tuning in.’

Bella laughed. ‘I’m just wondering what the score is, that’s all! It’s what all writers do, checking out the what-if and the maybe … you never know when it might come in useful.’

‘Or you could just call it damn rude, poking your nose in. Look, can we just order, fast as possible?’ James snapped his menu shut and glanced around for a waiter. Bella remembered how he’d always been like this when hungry; impatient, bordering on the hostile till the first mouthfuls had made an impact on his stomach. Thank goodness the service in here was reliably swift. James told her sketchy details about his new job (financial services, sorting out the feckless and reckless, with whom she was sure he had very little sympathy), but he didn’t ask about hers. She was rather relieved. On either work or personal front she had nothing but failure to report, and would rather not admit this, not to James, anyway.

‘Is there somewhere you have to be?’ Bella asked, as James bolted his food in record time. ‘You seem very tense.’

James kept looking at his watch and didn’t appear any more relaxed, even with a glass of wine and half a hefty portion of lasagne inside him. ‘Yes, actually. I’ve got an appointment pretty soon. And that’s connected
with what I wanted to talk to you about. I’m coming to live in London again. Just over at Kew. I’m meeting the agent to pick up the keys.’

‘You said at the house that you were coming back … so no more Scotland?’ Bella asked. ‘But you’ve been there years now. I thought you were well settled. And what about what’s-her-name?’

‘Fenella. Don’t pretend you don’t know.’ James grinned. ‘Be careful, you might have me thinking you cared.’

‘OK, Fenella. Does she want to move too? Or …’

‘“Or” is it. We’re over, as it happens. As from about three months ago, actually, but I didn’t want to say anything in case, well in case we weren’t, quite. But no, we definitely are. All over. Definitely.’

‘Oh – I’m sorry.’ And she was – Fenella had seemed to keep him happy enough for several years. Bella had only met her once, at the wedding of James’s niece, where Molly had been a bridesmaid. Bella had been impressed by Fenella’s hat – a high toque in purple satin with what looked like a gold sovereign pinned to the front of it. A bold choice among a traditional mix of pastel and straw.

‘Don’t be,’ he said, looking a bit mistily distant, all the same. ‘She’s gone to live with an old hippy weaver in a croft.’ He shuddered. ‘A woman, as it happens. And with no running water!’

Bella hardly knew what to say, either about the woman or the water situation. She wondered which of these appalled James more. Her money was on the water thing.

Across the room came the trilling of girlish ripply laughter from Chloe-Zoe. Good for them, Bella thought. In an hour from now they’d be outside the primary school, back to being someone’s mother, then later someone’s wife. For now, she was glad they were having some time to be
themselves
.

‘Anyway … about the house,’ James continued.

‘Hmm? The house? What about it?’ Bella said, her attention slowly returning to him.

‘Well, it’s time we sorted it properly, isn’t it? I mean, for me renting is fine for a while, till I find somewhere I like to buy, but prices are higher than Scotland. So the thing is, I could do with releasing some of the equity now I’m going to be living down here. And now the children are grown up …’

Luigi took the plates away and took their order for espressos, which appeared in seconds. James was quiet for a moment, checking the edge of his cup for marks. There wouldn’t be any, Bella knew that, but it didn’t stop him running the edge of his napkin around the cup’s rim before he dropped a couple of chunks of sugar in.

Bella felt confused. ‘Wait a minute … what are you talking about, James? What equity?’

‘The house, Annabelle. That bricks-and-mortar place you and our offspring occupy. The one I still half own, that we never got round to splitting when it came to assets and custody. Remember?’

Her attention had snapped to full alert now. ‘So what do you want to do?’ She laughed suddenly. ‘
Sell
it?’

He didn’t look as if there was any joke involved. Oh surely, surely not?

James frowned. ‘Well, yes – that’s what I had in mind. Unless you can buy me out? Of course now Alex and Molly …’

‘But Alex and Molly still
live
in the house! As I do, in case you’d forgotten!’ Bella protested.

‘For now, yes. That’s why I’m mentioning it
now
. But we’ve got to do some blue-sky thinking here. Alex is already away at university and Molly’s got only months till she leaves school. I mean, you must have known this was coming one day. You’ve had years …’

‘Oh. Right. So that’s it, is it?’ Bella felt weary and defeated. ‘Yes, I’ve had years. I’ve had years of scraping by in a hugely precarious job, raising
our
children single-handedly with barely any input from
you
because
you
claimed that because I’d got the house your contribution stopped
right there!
And that if I sold it at any point during that time, I’d have only half the cash with which to get something else! So thanks, James, thanks
for reminding me how little I actually have to call my own. Thanks a whole
bunch
!’

The eyes of white-linen man across the room met hers as she looked away from James. He half smiled, raised his glass. Chloe-Zoe grinned at her, both with the same ‘look what we’re having lunch with’ expression. She tried to smile back at them but her mouth got all twisted up somehow, and her vision had gone swimmy.

James’s BlackBerry beeped and he glanced at his watch. ‘Look, I have to go. Got to meet the agent to pick up the keys to the flat. We’ll continue this another time, shall we? Get all the ducks set out in a row? Sorry and that,’ he said, pushing back his chair and looking eager to be out of Bella’s orbit. ‘We’ll touch base again soon: I’ll give you the new address and so on. And er …’

‘Oh just go, James. Just
go
.’ And he did, scuttling out fast to avoid having to deal with emotion, something else he’d always considered messy and unpleasant. Bella finished her coffee and sat for a moment, trying to feel calm. She still had half a glass of wine and she downed most of it in one go. So … the score so far this week? No boyfriend, no job (well a quarter of one, nothing much to speak of), and soon no home. Just great.