Reunited: Marriage In A Million

‘Set up?’

‘Put in a position where not to do it would have made me look mean-spirited, all mouth and no trousers, so to speak. The kind of television personality who encourages others to do the hard work while she sits back on the breakfast telly sofa, flashing her teeth and as much cleavage as the network can get away with at that time in the morning.’

‘You’re not like that.’

‘No?’

‘No!’

Belle had gone for ‘arch’, but found herself profoundly touched by Claire’s belief in her.

‘Well, maybe not this time,’ she admitted, smiling to herself as she remembered just how easy it had been to manipulate the people who thought they were pulling the strings. ‘It’s amazing how far acting dumb will get you.’

‘So…what? You really wanted to come?’

‘Shh!’ She lifted a finger to her lips. ‘The walls of tents have ears.’ She grinned. ‘All it took was, “If we sent someone for this charity cycle ride it would make a great feature. Lots of opportunities to address a real problem. Get the public to join in with sponsorship.” An idle, “Who could we send?”, accompanied by just the tiniest shiver of horror at the thought, for the director to get ideas about how much the media would enjoy seeing me getting sweaty and dirty on a bike. The publicity it would generate. Got to think of those ratings…’

For Belle the pain was well worth the extra publicity it would generate for a cause dear to her heart, enabling her to support it publicly without raising any questions about why she cared so much.

Knowing that she was the one pulling the strings didn’t take the sting out of her thigh, though. And out here, in the rarefied air of the mountains, spending her time with people who’d financed themselves, who were doing it without any of the publicity circus that inevitably surrounded a breakfast show queen putting herself at the sharp end of fund raising, she was beginning to feel like a fraud. The kind of celebrity who’d do anything to stay in the spotlight, the kind of woman who’d put up with anything to stay in a hollow marriage, because without them she’d be nothing.

She pushed away the thought and said, ‘If you think this is about the children, rather than ratings, Claire, you are seriously overestimating the moral probity of breakfast television.’

It was the ratings grabbing report-to-camera straight from the day’s ride—the never-less-than-immaculate Belle Davenport reduced to a dishevelled, sweaty puddle—that the company wanted and the media were undoubtedly relishing. Why else would they have sponsored one of their own to come along and take pictures? But after a week it seemed that honest sweat had got old; now they wanted blood and tears too.

Today they’d got the blood and no doubt that was the image that would be plastered over tomorrow’s front pages and, when she got home, she’d shame them into a very large donation to her cause for that.

No way in hell were they going to get her tears.

She did not cry.

‘That’s…’ Claire grinned. ‘That’s actually pretty smart.’

‘It takes more than blonde hair and a well-developed chest to stay at the top in television,’ Simone pointed out. Then, regarding her thoughtfully, she went on, ‘So the street kids get the money, the spotlight on their plight, the television company get the ratings. What are you getting out of it, Belle?’

‘Me?’

‘You could have stayed at home, squeezing your viewers heartstrings, but you wanted to come yourself. You must have had a reason.’

‘Apart from getting myself all over the newspapers looking like this?’

‘You don’t need publicity.’

‘Everyone needs publicity,’ she said, but her laughter had a hollow ring and neither of her two companions joined in. ‘No, well, maybe I just wanted to feel good about myself. Isn’t that why everyone does this kind of stunt?’

‘If that’s the plan,’ Claire said, lying back on her bedroll with a groan, ‘it isn’t working. All I feel is sore.’

‘Maybe the feeling good part kicks in later,’ Belle replied sympathetically.

She knew she hadn’t been the only one who’d gone through a three-ring circus to get here. No matter how much she hated it, she understood that even when the redtops had people digging in your dustbin for dirt they could use, it wasn’t personal.

For Claire, though, a pampered princess with a token job working in her father’s empire, the sniggering criticism had been just that. Deeply personal.

What the hell; they’d shown them. With a determined attempt at brightness, Belle continued, ‘In the meantime I’ve lost weight, improved my muscle tone, gained some blisters…’

‘No.’

She gave up on the distraction of her newly-defined calf muscles and caught something—a bleakness to Simone’s expression that was new.

‘What have you got out of this?’ she demanded. ‘Seriously.’

‘Seriously?’ She looked from Simone to Claire and realised they were both regarding her with a sudden intensity, that the atmosphere in the tent had shifted. Darkened.

‘Seriously.’ Belle took a deep breath. ‘Seriously’ meant confronting the truth. ‘Seriously’ meant having to do something about it. But, forget the publicity, forget the cameras—that was what this trip had been all about. Stepping out of her comfort zone. Putting herself out there. Doing something real. Except she wasn’t, not really. She was still hiding. From the world. From her husband. Most of all from herself.

‘You can see so far up here,’ Belle began uncertainly. Not quite sure what she was going to say. Where this was going. ‘When we stopped for that drinks break this afternoon, I looked back and you could see the road we’d travelled winding all the way back down to the valley.’

She faced the rangy Australian, the petite American, who shared her tent. They’d tended each other’s grazes, rubbed liniment into each other’s aching muscles, they’d eaten together, battling with chopsticks while vowing never to travel again without a fork in their rucksack. They’d laughed, ridden alongside each other since they’d found themselves sharing a cab from the airport to the hotel when they’d first arrived, each of them scared in a what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here? way, yet excited by the challenge they were facing. Outwardly, they were women who had everything and yet they’d seemed to recognise something in each other, some hidden need.

Instant soul mates, they had become true friends.

It was a new experience for Belle. She’d never had girl-friends. Not as a kid, struggling to survive, not in the care home, certainly not in the stab-in-the-back atmosphere of daytime television.

The media bosses, the tabloid hacks, the gossip mags, all used her to lift circulation in a way that made her sister-in-law curl her lips in disdain. And her husband, money-machine tycoon Ivo Grenville, whose eyes burned with lust—the only thing he was unable to control—despised himself for wanting her so much that he’d committed the ultimate sacrifice and married her.

None of them bothered to look deeper than the ‘blonde bombshell’ image that she’d fallen into by accident, to find out who she really was. Not that she blamed them. She wore her image like a sugar-coated veneer; only she knew how thin it was.

These two women, total strangers when they’d met a couple of weeks earlier, knew her better than most, had seen her at her most vulnerable, had shared their lives with her. All of them, on the surface, had everything; Claire was the daughter of one of the world’s wealthiest men and Simone had risen to the top in a very tough business. But outward appearances could be deceptive. She’d been trusted with glimpses into their lives that few people had seen, which was why she knew that Claire and Simone would understand what she’d felt when she’d looked back down the road.

It was steep, hard going, and all the twists and turns were laid out before her—a metaphor for her life. Then, before the threatening crack became unstoppable, she let it go and said, ‘How many more days is this torture going to last?’

‘Three,’ Simone said quickly, apparently as anxious as she was to step back from a yawning chasm that had opened up in front of them.

‘Three? Can I survive three more days without a decent bed, clean sheets?’ Claire asked.

‘Without a hot bath.’

‘Without a manicure,’ Belle added, apparently intent on examining her nails, but she was more interested in Simone’s obvious relief that the moment of introspection that she herself had provoked had been safely navigated. Then, because actually her nails did look terrible, ‘I’m going to have to have extensions,’ she sighed.

Normally long, painted, perfect, she’d trimmed them short for the ride, but now they were cracked, dry, ingrained with dirt that no amount of cold water would shift. As she looked at them, dark memories stirred and she curled her fingers into her palm, out of sight.

‘What’s the first thing you’ll do when we hit that hotel in Hong Kong?’ she asked.

‘After I’ve run a hot bath?’ Claire grinned. ‘Call room service and order smoked salmon, half a ton of watercress served with dark rye bread cut wafer-thin and spread with fresh butter.’ Then, as an afterthought, ‘And chocolate fudge cake.’

‘I’ll go along with that and raise you ice-cold champagne,’ Belle added, grinning.

‘The champagne sounds good,’ Simone said, ‘but I vote we pass on the healthy stuff and go straight for the chocolate fudge cake.’