The Look of Love (9 page)

‘Hi Fliss!’ Bella said in too-bright a way which she thought made her sound as if she was talking to a toddler. ‘Would you both like coffee?’

‘Please, yes.’ Saul accepted eagerly on behalf of the two of them.

‘Fliss is also my stepdaughter,’ he told Bella as they went through to the kitchen. ‘She got this gig on a shameless
who you know
basis but I intend to make her work her arse off on the project, see if that’ll put her off going into the media,’ he explained.

Bella, nervous, filled the kettle and hauled the cafetière out from its new hiding place in the dresser cupboard. She’d stashed it behind the blender and it was awkward to retrieve. Why on earth hadn’t she put the one thing she was most likely to use within easy distance? Rootling about in the cupboard made her all hot and she could feel the shirt starting to crumple and flop, as linen will. She pictured James tutting at her inefficiency and felt as if everything she touched, every part of this room slightly failed at being on best behaviour under inspection. She told herself it really didn’t matter that much – it wouldn’t be the end of the world if Saul said no. She’d just have to go back to thinking of other income options.

Keith the cat strolled through from the hallway and stopped to take a look at the three of them before flicking his tail impolitely and ambling out through the open glass doors to the garden. Bella had folded these all the way back so the kitchen-to-garden space was as close as possible to being seamless. The air outside was hot and almost completely still. It was one of those beautiful, almost breath-free, early autumn days, as if
the end of the summer could stay captured that way for months, and only the scent wafting in from the pair of urns planted with a mass of pinks showed that the air had any movement in it at all.

‘Nice cat. Is it Siamese?’ Fliss suddenly said. Bella jumped and Saul laughed. He had a good laugh, she noticed, slightly too loud but that was OK; it was spontaneous, unforced.

‘Yes, it does speak now and then!’ Saul said, then added, ‘I meant Fliss, not the cat. Obviously.’

‘It’s OK, I realized. And no, Keith is a Burmese, a chocolate one.’ Bella told Fliss. ‘They look a bit like very dark Siamese, but they’re a lot less noisy.’

‘Like Fliss,’ Saul teased the girl. ‘Looks like a teenager but a lot less noisy. Win–win, both girl and cat, I’d say.’

‘Well it’s a very cute cat. And Saul, I’m like twenty-three?’

Saul pulled a that’s-telling-me face at Bella as Fliss went back to looking prettily distant, staring out down the garden towards the plum trees against the far wall. Given her earlier imaginings about the cat and the hydrangeas, Bella was glad to see Keith was now happily many yards away, sitting in hope under the bird feeder that hung at a safe height from the mimosa along the side fence.

Bella opened her Princess Diana biscuit tin to find that the supply of Shirley’s flapjacks that she’d baked
the day before had been seriously diminished. Molly must have scoffed about twelve of the things. She piled what was left on to a plate and put them on the table. ‘Sorry – there were loads more than this yesterday. Some teenage mouse has been down in the night and raided them.’

‘Well I’m not surprised,’ Saul commented through a mouthful of syrupy oats, ‘they’re completely delicious.’ Fliss eyed them as if they were going to bite her, not the other way round. ‘Go on Fliss,’ Saul teased, ‘just try one. You might like it.’

‘Carbs,’ Fliss murmured fondly, taking a flapjack and licking the edge of it. ‘Mmmmm.’

Bella eyed her enviously – she had the kind of all-bones little body that shouldn’t even need to know a word such as carbohydrate.

‘So … er, what do you think, Saul?’ Bella asked. ‘Now you’re here in my house you probably wonder why I wasted your time. I know it’s a bit tatty round the edges and the kitchen’s dated and … do you need to look at the rest of it? Probably not …’

‘No, no it’s great!’ Saul interrupted. ‘It’s just …’

‘What? You
do
hate it!’ Bella laughed, covering a mood-plummet of disappointment. ‘You’re just trying to find a polite way of telling me!’

‘That’s right,’ he said, looking serious. ‘I want to hang out here and eat all the rest of the flapjacks and have
some more of this delicious coffee and
then
put the boot in. I’m like that, aren’t I Fliss?’

‘Hmm? I don’t really know,’ she said, still gazing at the garden. Were there fairies down there that she was watching?

‘No – you probably don’t actually …’ he conceded, looking a bit downcast for a second. Bella was puzzled. If this was his stepdaughter, presumably they knew each other really quite well? She was enormously curious but (unfortunately) not ill-mannered enough to ask.

‘So it’s “just” what?’ Bella persisted, pouring more coffee into Saul’s mug. Her brain whizzed through the ‘it’s just’ possibilities. The space wasn’t big enough, the garden could do with as much of a makeover as the fashion victims, the house frontage didn’t have space enough for whatever vehicles would be needed, there’d be parking issues, neighbour problems …

‘It’s just that we need to get in here from
next week
. How would that suit you? Too short notice or would you be all right with that? Because if you’d need time to think about it, then I’m afraid I just don’t have it. Shooting is another ten days away but the time to get this place styled up to look the way we want it … well, that kind of starts now.’

Bella gulped. ‘Wow. What would you have done if I hadn’t volunteered? You surely couldn’t have scrapped the show?’

‘No, no – I had a studio space on stand-by, but it would have been a lot more hassle building the whole thing from scratch. There’s nothing quite like an authentic home when you’re using “real” people, if you see what I mean. A studio mock-up never has quite the atmosphere. This is so much more natural and everyone involved will relax more. I want to use exterior shots a lot too, so I had a good look at the front of the house on the way in. I
love
the turrets on the corners and the pattern of the roof tiles, the overgrown clematis. The whole place has a slightly crazy mock-Gothic feel to it.’

Bella tried to take this all in. He liked it, he wanted it. The money would buy her some serious breathing time (not to mention eating and bill-paying time) till the payment on release of her next Orchard Girls book. The only downside was how little hope she had of losing ten pounds in the time without resorting to amputating her head. Oh well.

‘Apparently this weather’s supposed to hold for a few weeks, so we should …’ Saul crossed his fingers and tapped on the wooden tabletop, ‘be lucky. It’s just a matter of whether you’ll be up for the disruption. The props guys will sort the details – it’s no big deal to give it a swift update, paint the walls, revamp cupboards and so on …’ Bella listened, smiling. His arms were all over the place, gestures ever bigger as his enthusiasm and
ideas took off. ‘That tiling can go … and we’ll rent in a huge sofa … make it a one-room-living kind of thing. And this is one
big
room – even the one I’d originally picked wasn’t as massive as this one.’

Saul slowed at last, grinned at Bella and said, ‘Sorry – I do get a bit carried away. Will you be all right with this? Please don’t think I’m being critical of your decor – it’s only about what looks good to a camera. We can put everything back exactly the way it was after, obviously.’

‘Hmm – what happens if I don’t want any of it put back?’ she murmured, thinking any alteration, however superficial, could only be an improvement. ‘A revamp for this room is long, long overdue, as you can see.’

‘We can negotiate on that,’ Saul told her. ‘That’s in the devilish detail. Fliss, have you made any notes?’

Fliss seemed to be texting. ‘I have,’ she assured him, without looking up. ‘That’s what I’m doing right now.’

‘Excellent!’ Saul’s conspiratorial smile to Bella expressed a certain amount of surprise at this. Bella smiled back, wondering how much of the Fliss employment was as a favour to … well, his wife, presumably. She imagined Saul in a home setting, fancifully giving him a far more minimalist and stylish place than her own. It
had
to be all cream sofas and feature walls and something signature-mad like a fabulous Vivienne Westwood rug. The wife would be
a still-slender sort who looked wonderful padding around barefoot in ancient jeans and a silky floaty top. Bella pictured her with long brown caramel-streaked hair, and a knack of looking utterly shaggable with it loosely tied up. Tendrils would escape and he’d move them from the back of her neck when he went to kiss her as she stirred something succulent and aromatic at a massive halogen hob …

‘You’re miles away.’ Saul broke into Bella’s mad fancies, jolting her back to earth. Whatever was she thinking of? Whyever did she even begin to think of him kissing someone? She’d almost felt envious there for a second, though whether at the imagined fabulously stylish house or the imagined ongoing hot romance, she couldn’t be sure. Almost certainly the house, she told herself. Saul and Mrs Saul wouldn’t have coffee stains on
their
stair carpet and piles of Oxfam-bound cast-offs languishing in Waitrose bags at the top of the stairs. Oh no … But she would concede that she was thinking about the other thing too, just a little bit. Not that she fancied Saul, it was just that – still dented from the abrupt ending of the Rick relationship – she couldn’t help thinking that the chances of one day sharing a home with some lovable, trustable, desirable man were even slimmer than Saul’s imagined wife.

‘Sorry. I was just …’

‘… imagining the chaos to come,’ Saul supplied for
her. ‘Don’t worry, honestly. The props boys will sort it all for you. You won’t have to do a thing except be here for the shoot. But before even that, you and the rest of the victims have to meet Dominic and Daisy. They’re your makeover team. She’s frocks and a bit overwhelming, he’s finishings and very rarely gets a word in.’

‘Finishings’ is hair, make-up, accessories,’ Fliss explained, suddenly coming to life. ‘That’s actually my field of interest. I want to be a fashion journalist really.’

‘Oh … right. So this is …?’ Bella asked.

‘Filling in time and getting to know people, like networking?’ Fliss told her. ‘And making a list of Essential Tips to maximize one’s
look
.’

‘Got any tips going spare?’ Bella laughed as she cleared the coffee mugs and stashed them in the dishwasher.

‘Hmmm.’ Fliss scrutinized her thoroughly and thought for a moment, her thin little face contorted in concentration. Eventually this smoothed out into a broad smile. ‘OK. Never wear a shade of white that’s lighter than your teeth.’

‘Er … Right. Thanks for that,’ Bella said. Bummer, she told herself, instantly vowing she’d never wear this once-favourite linen shirt again. She’d file this moment under ‘questions better left unasked’.

Shirley was glad she hadn’t worn the mauve shoes. Their heels weren’t particularly high but were quite spindly, and she’d forgotten how the floors of the Royal Academy had these annoying metal grids here and there. Given her recent luck, she would be sure to trap her foot in one and break an ankle.
Not
the thing you want on a first date. Or did this count as the first? On the cruise, she and Dennis had spent so much of their time together from the moment they met in the corridor, being shown to their respective cabins, only two away from each other. ‘We’ll be able to wave to each other from our balconies,’ he’d joked as the ship’s smiley stewards simultaneously unlocked their doors.

Shirley, who would have sworn solemn and repeated oaths that she was
not
looking for a man, had nevertheless been rather skittishly delighted that Dennis was also travelling alone and over dinner that night, as the ship pulled away from the French coast, the two of them bonded as experienced and confident lone voyagers, outdoing each other with tales of Ships I Have Known. And when the ship docked at its various destinations, it somehow seemed quite natural that Dennis and Shirley should quietly avoid the organized tours and venture ashore together. After several trips to Barcelona with groups of mostly female shipboard companions, it felt a lot more grown-up to be having
leisurely tapas with one thoroughly civilized man at a backstreet bar off Las Ramblas than to find herself resigned to a lunch choice of the group majority, just to keep the peace. Frankly, you could have enough of herded widows.

‘Did you enjoy Venice best? Or maybe Barcelona?’ Dennis asked as they made their way slowly through the Byzantium exhibition.

‘Oh I couldn’t choose! Both were so wonderful, in spite of the crowds and the heat. It’s amazing to think of the historic connections with all this …’ she said, indicating the exhibition’s treasures. ‘Coins, icons, fabrics, pieces of sculpture, fragments of building and mosaics, so many of these from those places. When you’re there you can
feel
the link to this history.’

‘Well it’s all around you, isn’t it?’ he agreed. ‘Though I have to say, now we’ve seen all this, I’m honestly not sure I can take much more of it.’

Shirley laughed. ‘Oh I always get that! Exhibition overload! We could get some tea, perhaps?’

‘No – I can do better than that,’ Dennis told her. ‘I’ve booked us a table for lunch at the Wolseley. If that’s all right with you?’ He took her hand as they approached the stairs. As Shirley felt the warmth of his skin, the slight roughness of his palm against her soft one, she recognized that the extra thumping in her heart was of elated delight, not something to phone NHS Direct about. It had been a
long, long time since she had felt like this about someone. And better yet, it was clearly reciprocated.

There were, Shirley thought several hours later, as she lay in bed beside Dennis in the Ritz hotel sipping Veuve Clicquot and deciding between a miniature coffee eclair and a raspberry millefeuille, just enough advantages to being older to make one’s increasing age bearable. The best one was how the rest of the world perceived you. If you were lucky enough to have a sexual encounter – especially a spontaneous, out-of-the-blue one like this – it was absolutely nobody’s business but your own. When she left this famous building, she would have no sense of the Walk of Shame, as she’d heard it described. For who would imagine that two people of her and Dennis’s age would have spent an afternoon making such passionate love? It didn’t all have to end with the menopause.