Celebration

‘Hello. Tell me if this isn’t a welcome call and I’ll hang up right away.’ Bell’s face split into a smile that showed the dimples at the corners of her mouth.

‘Edward. Do you know, I dreamt about us?’

‘Oh.’ The voice was guarded, the response of someone who had been recently hurt and was quick to defend himself. Bell winced, then let the words tumble on.

‘I’m sorry, it doesn’t matter. What are you doing, this lovely Sunday?’ Outside her window she could see the summer sunshine catching the tops of the trees in Kensington Gardens.

‘Wondering if we should see each other this evening before you go off on your travels. I could come round and have a quick drink with you, then take you to Les Amoureuses. Mary and Elspeth might join us.’

‘Fine,’ said Bell, a little blankly. She remembered his voice calling after her in the dream. Don’t go. Come back to me. But she had wanted her freedom, wanted it so badly that she had hurt them both in disentangling herself. Now she was free, and she had no claims on him any more. Certainly no right to his exclusive attention. But she missed it, even more than she was willing to admit. An evening sharing him with their friends would be better than not seeing him at all and staying in alone.

‘See you about seven, then?’ He rang off.

Bell tilted backwards in her chair, chewing on the end of her pen. When she felt confident, being alone suited her.

At the best of times she was sure that she could take on the world and win, single-handed. She loved her job, and she had plenty of friends. She had planned it carefully, imagining herself getting steadily more successful, travelling and writing and meeting new people. There would be lovers along the way – yes, of course there would. But she was sure that she didn’t want a husband. Her thoughts shied away from that ominous truth. She didn’t want to think about why, not just now. It was too bound up with her guilt about her panicky retreat from Edward, and the fears that gave her those horrible dreams about weddings. And with other things, too.

Work was the thing to concentrate on. Her career was what mattered, after all. Just so long as she could keep going. Keep doing it right. Keep writing what they wanted to read.

Bell pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. She was scared today, and lonely. She hadn’t reckoned with that, when she had blindly broken away from Edward. Sometimes life was very bleak. There were empty weekends when everyone she knew seemed to have gone away for a few romantic days à deux. Parties she had to go to alone, and then escape from in a solitary taxi. And days like today, when she needed a shoulder to cry on, and then someone to tell her that of course she could confront the baron in his château and carry off the role of the calm career woman that she had imposed on herself.

She sighed. Sitting here feeling sorry for herself wasn’t going to help her to do what had to be done at Château Reynard.

She turned to her work again, her determination doubled.

She worked hard for the rest of the day, keeping her attention fixed on the pages in front of her. At last she felt that she had boned up on all the background she could possibly need. She gave a decisive nod and fanned out her sheaf of notes, then snapped them together into a neat pile and clipped them to her list of questions. She would need those to act as a prompt in case she dried up in her first interview with the baron.

Bell looked at her watch. An hour before Edward was due to arrive. Plenty of time to change and then do some packing. Les Amoureuses was a newish supper club with a tiny dance floor, and good French food. It would be hot and crowded. Bell put on a pale lilac round-necked shirt and a pair of narrow-legged trousers in exactly the same shade. On top went a loose violet linen jacket. She brushed out her hair until it made a glossy frame for her high-cheekboned face, and stroked a careful glow of amethyst shadow on to her eyelids. She was ready. Bell pulled a workmanlike canvas bag out of her cupboard and turned back to the wardrobe. Her job meant a lot of travelling, and she was beginning to feel that her clothes would be a credit to any magazine feature on capsule wardrobes. Plans for a few days’ stay in a Bordeaux château with a baron for company required a little more thought than usual.

Moving quickly, she laid out her travelling-wine-writer’s outfits – mostly carefully chosen separates in soft shades, but all spiced with other bits and pieces in her favourite colours, periwinkle blue and violet. Last of all she pulled out a well-loved evening blazer, the grey and violet stripes shot through with multi-coloured threads and lines of gold. Bell knew that it suited her and she smiled with satisfaction as she smoothed the lapels. She was getting used, these days, to her reputation preceding her when she went to interview people. But she was feminine enough to enjoy their surprise – especially the surprise of middle-aged Frenchmen – when they actually saw her. She was so much younger and better-looking than they expected.

She shook the folds out of her blazer and held it up against herself with a little surge of excitement. Perhaps this trip would be fun after all. The blazer was the last item. Bell was noticing with satisfaction that the little collection would fit easily into the canvas bag when the doorbell rang. Edward didn’t have his own keys any more.

She opened the door and stood there smiling at him, framed in the doorway like a picture.

Just as he always did, Edward thought how striking she was. Not beautiful exactly, more interesting than that. She was almost as tall as he was, and thin enough to look rangy. Tonight her hair was loose, waving frivolously around her narrow face. Her eyes were an extraordinary blue-green mixture that changed with the light. Aquamarine.

‘Come in,’ she said softly. ‘It’s lovely to see you.’

He kissed her briefly on the cheek and followed her into the familiar room. They had furnished it together, bidding for the furniture at auctions and picking up the other things in country junk-shops. In one corner a palm tree flourished luxuriously in a green and gold jardinière. He stared at it, trying to dam up the memories that came flooding back.

‘What would you like to drink?’ Bell repeated.

‘Oh … white wine?’ he said, vaguely. His eyes went to the windows, to the familiar jumble of rooftops and chimney stacks and the greenness of the park beyond. Bell put a cold glass in his hand.

‘Sancerre,’ she said. ‘Tell me what you think of it.’

They had been together all through Bell’s steady climb up the ladder towards the success she had set her heart on. He had shared the special bottles and the celebration meals, advising her and encouraging her.

Their eyes met at last, and she smiled awkwardly at him.

‘Edward, I …’ but he put his hand to her lips to stop her saying any more.

Instead he guided her to the rocking chair in front of one of the windows, and sat down beside her. They sat in silence, staring out at the view, exactly as they had done hundreds of times before. Her fingers wound and knotted themselves in his hair.

‘I feel so … sad today,’ she said at last. ‘I keep remembering all the things we used to do together. How hopeful and excited we were. What a waste.’ Her voice was full of bitterness.

‘No, not a waste. You learnt something about yourself. I discovered a lot too. You were right, Bell.’ He was talking quickly, urgently, trying to convince himself as well as her. ‘You couldn’t have married me, and we wouldn’t have made each other happy. Not in the end.’

She nodded, hoping that he was right and grateful for his generosity.

‘It would be sadder still if we didn’t miss each other at all,’ he reminded her.

‘All those years.’

Four years, to be exact, before she had felt the terror of commitment closing around her. Four years before she had realized that if she didn’t escape now she never would. A long time to get used to having somebody so close. Long enough to become dependent on him. Almost too long.

‘Do you remember,’ Edward said into the silence that had fallen, ‘the first time that we came into this room? We’d only known each other a few weeks, but we were quite sure that we wanted to live together. Happily ever after.’

Bell laughed, remembering. ‘I loved you desperately. I couldn’t believe that I could be so lucky. As soon as we got the keys we dashed up here with an armful of books, that potted palm …’

‘… and I grabbed you and we made love on the bare floorboards.’ Bell leant her head back against the cushions and closed her eyes.

‘I know we’re only remembering the good things, but it was wonderful. All those Sundays when we stayed in bed until lunchtime …’

‘… and then had kippers and a bottle of Chablis …’

‘… and then went out for a walk in the park …’

‘… and then out to see a film and have a pizza.’

‘It wasn’t always a pizza. Sometimes a curry.’

They had met at a party, an ordinary, crowded party in someone’s flat with beer spilt on the floor and a girl in a long skirt crying on the stairs. Edward was in his first year out of Oxford, bored with his job and irritable with the confines of London. He was, without realizing it, very lonely. Then he saw Bell.

She was stretched out in an armchair with an untouched glass of murky red wine in her hand. Edward could see that she wasn’t listening to the man who was perched on the arm of her chair, although he was leaning over her and shouting above the blare of the music. Even in the dim light Edward noticed her intense blue-green eyes, fixed far beyond the tawdry party.

Bell felt even more cut off than Edward. She was just back from a year in France, and was, she told herself, buckling down to real life. It was just that real life seemed to add up to nothing more than a very junior job in the subs’ room of a newspaper. She knew that she was lucky to have even that, and saw clearly that to get a better job she had to do this one as well as she could, but she still felt impatient and restless.

She sighed in the sagging armchair and rotated the sticky glass gently in her fingers. Her eyes flickered over the man, still talking, still straddling the arm of her chair. At twenty-two Bell knew surprisingly little about men, but she knew enough to recognize that this one was planning to sleep with her. She frowned at the thought, knowing that she would fend him off by pretending to be coolly surprised. It always worked. Inside she was puzzled, nearly always shy and unsure of herself, but she was getting better and better at hiding it. The more she played up her natural reserve, the more people mistook it for calm confidence.

That was easy, but it wasn’t at all easy to escape from behind her own defences. She wasn’t really aloof or cold, even though people often thought she was. It was just that as far as love was concerned, even demonstrative affection, she was not even in the beginners’ class.

Bell’s mother had died when she was eleven years old, leaving her in the care of her father. She had no brothers or sisters, and her father was too shattered by his own grief to help his bewildered child.

She had had a solitary, bookish adolescence. When she was sixteen her childish gawkiness had disappeared almost overnight, but by then she was too used to being alone to know what to do with the young men who started to swarm around her. She kept them at bay, politely but definitely, and stuck to her books. She had enjoyed university and had emerged with an excellent degree and several very close friends. But she had never been in love. She had no idea how it happened to other people.

Bell thought, afterwards, that it was in answer to her unspoken question how, that Edward pushed his way across the room and stood in front of her. She saw a man with a quick smile, brown eyes and silky, almost feminine hair pushed back from his forehead. He was nodding at her glass.