This immediate post-coital moment was, Bella recognized, when she might possibly have been thinking, ‘Oh-oh, I shouldn’t have done this.’ ‘First date?’ she heard long-ago agony aunts raging at her from her teenage years. ‘You slept with him on the first date?’ She half agreed with them; what sort of woman does that? Mmmm, this sort, and with no regrets whatsoever, she thought happily from beneath Saul’s naked body, the most intimate part of which was still inside her. There wasn’t anywhere else she’d rather be.
‘Oh God, that was … just …’ Saul murmured, his mouth a millimetre from her left ear.
‘Shh, don’t say anything.’ She was afraid the ecstatic spell would break. Her heart was still thumping frantically, her breath was hard to catch and when she shifted slightly she felt yet another tiny orgasmic ripple, feeble now after the cataclysmic main event, but as if her body was reluctant to let it all stop.
‘Earthquakes,’ he whispered. She could feel his heart thumping too, a counter-rhythm to hers.
‘Earthquakes and aftershocks,’ she whispered back.
‘You are such bliss,’ he told her, kissing her neck softly.
‘Or am I just a wicked slut?’ she giggled. ‘I didn’t exactly play hard to get.’
‘Well, neither did I,’ he said, still holding her tight as he rolled his weight off her. ‘In the interests of sexual equality I insist on claiming as much easiness of virtue as you.’
‘OK, we’ll share it then,’ Bella agreed.
‘You know what else just occurred to me?’ Saul pulled the duvet over them and snuggled down close to her. ‘We met because of a programme about what to wear. How to look good in clothes. And here we are, I’ve got you looking the most fabulous ever, in absolutely nothing. The viewing public is missing out. No one else gets to see you like this. Well, not tonight anyway. Of course, I can’t speak for tomorrow or yesterday.’
She thumped his arm. ‘Hey, no one else at any time. I’m not that much of a loose woman!’
The butterflies from earlier in the evening had all settled now. This was what had caused them to flit about for all that time: anticipation of the inevitable, as for the whole evening the erotic charge had been zinging and building between Saul and Bella. In the restaurant it must have been obvious to their smiley waitress, who had clocked them inching closer together as the meal progressed, noticed their fingers so firmly intertwined by the end that they had only separated with reluctance for mere seconds so Bella could put her jacket on as they left. And she’d wished them a very happy rest of the evening with a knowing glint in her eye. And the rickshaw driver: he’d recognized a newly loved-up couple when he saw one.
Now, as the two of them lay in exhausted peace, the sounds of midnight Soho crept in from the street below. Bella could hear a distant police car, the whirr-clunk of a bin lorry, an angry drunk shouting, a bottle bank being emptied, the distinctive throb of a Harley-Davidson. Urban sounds, much the same in cities the world over.
‘I didn’t get to see your roof garden.’ She reminded Saul that this was what he’d promised her. ‘Isn’t that how you lured me up here? To admire the rooftop views and the plants?’ Scents of night stocks and tobacco plants wafted in through the open window. Apart from the city night sounds, they could be miles away in a country garden.
‘At the time there seemed to be matters more urgent than a house tour,’ Saul teased. ‘If you remember …’
How true, Bella thought contentedly, how wonderfully unseemly and hectic their haste as they’d hurtled up the two flights of painted stairs. Saul had led her into the bedroom as if both were scared there was a fast-approaching deadline on this moment of passion.
‘Oh, I remember. I’m hardly likely to forget this, am I?’ she smiled. ‘But … I hate to say it, and it’s with more regret than I can bear to think about: I’m going to have to go home.’
Saul tightened his arms round her. ‘Are you sure you can’t stay the night? The garden is at its best in the early morning. Coffee on the terrace out there? All the cute little cockney sparrows lined up on the railings for crumbs of toast? And if pushed, I’ll admit the thought of letting you go is unbearable.’
‘I’d so love to stay, but I just can’t. I really do have to be back. There’s Molly … I know she’s pretty much grown up and she’s got my mother there too, but I don’t want her to catch me creeping in at breakfast time in last night’s clothes. Daughters don’t like to be faced with that kind of thing, trust me. It rates very highly on the – “Eeeuuw!” – scale.’
‘Hmm, fair point … plus I’d be driving you home and then staying for the day’s shoot. It’s “Shape” tomorrow. Real clothes for real women, according to Daisy. I try not to think what the alternative to that would be.’
‘Does Daisy know anything about “real women”?’ Bella giggled, wriggling free to the edge of the bed to look for her abandoned underwear. ‘I’m amazed she deigns to deal with the likes of anyone over a size 10, when her work life is all about people with no apparent space for internal organs.’
‘Oh, Daisy’s no fool. She knows where the money is, and the recession is kicking even the top earners. High end or high street, she doesn’t mind who she’s working with so long as someone pays her. Her job is as fragile as anyone else’s these days. She’ll make you all look great, no worries, because that’s what’s in her interests. Like I said, she’s no fool.’
‘In that case, I’ll look forward to it; I just hope I won’t look too knackered.’
‘If you look the way you do now,’ Saul said, pulling her back towards him and kissing her softly, ‘you’ll be stunning. You’ve got the most fabulous glow about you.’
It was only a lot later in the minicab home (on Saul’s company account) that Bella – half asleep – started wondering about Fliss. Since that one mention when he’d first brought the girl to the house (and oh, how long ago it seemed) that Fliss was – or had been – Saul’s stepdaughter, and the rather sad comment about not really knowing her very well, he hadn’t said anything about his connection with her. He and Fliss got on generally OK on a work level, but didn’t seem close otherwise, which was possibly, Bella conjectured as the cab went across the Hammersmith flyover, because Fliss had been raised not by Lucy. Or had she been with Lucy till Lucy became too ill to cope and then gone to be brought up by her natural father and, possibly, a new partner of his? That could have meant a double agony for Saul – losing not only his wife but also the daughter he’d been helping her to raise. Or not. Fliss would have been seventeen when Lucy died; if Saul didn’t, as he said, know her that well, perhaps she’d grown up with her father from long before that, or even with grandparents. The situation was open to a huge range of speculation. Bella could wait, though curiosity could only hold out for so long. If this relationship were going to run, (and it was off to a promising, if speedy, start), all would become clear soon enough.
No one at home was still up, and all inside the house was darkness and silence. Either Shirley or Molly had left the outside light on for Bella, and, dog-tired but still elated, she set the burglar alarm and then went straight upstairs and took off her clothes for the second time that night, although this time they came off in a rather slower and less urgent manner. She should have showered, really, but she was too exhausted to do more than quickly brush her teeth and give her make-up a cursory wipe-off with some cleanser. Then she collapsed into bed and set the alarm for seven the next morning. Sleep was unexpectedly elusive: behind her closed eyelids the whole evening raced past in delicious cinematic flashback, and she felt tinglingly tense and unable to relax.
Rick had never made her feel like this. Although they’d only had a few nights together, she’d soon realized he was a man who couldn’t make love without first arranging all the necessary accoutrements on the bedside table. She could almost laugh now, thinking of how, when they’d spent a night in a gloriously lush hotel in Devon, he’d carefully and very tidily lined up condoms, a box of tissues, his watch, glass of water and his mobile phone. The arrangement hadn’t included, she’d noted at the time with some disappointment, the frangipani massage oil she’d bought from the spa shop that afternoon, and when she’d suggested it could be fun to give it a try, he’d looked at her as if she’d suggested some outrageous perversion and rather starchily said something about not wanting to get oil all over the sheets. How like James, she now thought in retrospect, and, once again, what a lucky escape. She rolled over in the bed and hugged the duvet round her, still scenting a deliciously evocative trace of Saul on her body. Sleep, she willed herself, sleep; and then when she woke it would be such a short time till she saw him again.
Molly opened one eye and peeked at the greyish daylight sneaking in through the pencil-thin gap she always left between her curtains. She closed the eye again and pulled the duvet over her head. Last night’s awfulness hadn’t gone away in her sleep. She’d slightly hoped it would be like a tooth when the fairy came, leaving a pound under the pillow in place of a manky molar. Anything would do to replace yesterday’s news; it didn’t have to be a present, just so long as it was anything but the thing Carly had told her. But it was still there, at the front of her brain, crowding everything else out.
She longed to stay in bed all day, see if just a bit more time would do the trick. If she kept out of sight, lay still, breathed evenly and calmly and didn’t see anyone … no, it wouldn’t change anything. You couldn’t un-know stuff you’d been told. And you couldn’t un-know the thing your gutless boyfriend (ex-boyfriend) hadn’t had the nerve to tell you himself. ‘I’ll have to tell you, because I’m your best friend. And everyone except you knows, and that’s not fair,’ Carly had said, sitting on the mad purple sofa in the kitchen. Had there been a bit of excitement about her? A bit of wallowing in the drama of it all? You couldn’t deny it, in all honesty. And Molly accepted that. She’d probably have felt the same.
There were sounds of life downstairs. The crew would be coming in soon after nine and she’d have to be up and looking ready to rock, like a professional. Daisy was going to dress them all up in real clothes at last, and much as Molly would rather slob out on her bed for the whole day watching brain-dead TV, she wasn’t going to let her utter misery get in the way of the chance to be made to look totally fantastic and show all the smirking, gossipy school bastards that Giles had made more than just the one massive mistake in his stupid, stupid life.
Bella was not only last to bed but she was first up, too. As she lay in the bath and saw through the window the weak daylight taking its time to appear, she was reminded that autumn really was on its way, in spite of the day promising to be another hot one. And there was something else about autumn – the near-spooky early quiet outside. The birdsong of spring and early summer was missing, as if they were all conserving energy and avoiding excess and frivolous activity to maintain body strength against the cold to come. And some, of course, had gone. In spite of the continuing warmth, the house martins that made their muddy annual nests under Bella’s gable eaves had already migrated with their fledglings, knowing from the day length that they only had a certain time in which to escape to safety for the winter.
The butterflies inside Bella, though, they were back with a vengeance. As she quickly dried her hair and pulled on her most flattering jeans (Daisy had asked for them all to be in denim for the start today) and a loose, pale-turquoise linen jumper, she could hardly keep her hands from trembling. Saul would be along in about ninety minutes for the day’s shoot. How would they be with each other in front of all the others? If they tried to be cool and suitably businesslike would everyone (or anyone) still twig that something major had changed between them? Surely they couldn’t not notice the erotic sparks?
And … halfway down the stairs (not first down, she could smell toast and coffee wafting up from the kitchen) she actually stopped still and clutched the banister rail at the horror of an alternative possibility: suppose Saul had had qualms and second thoughts in the night? The last thing he’d said as she got into the cab was that he was falling in love with her. Oh, please, she prayed silently, feeling like a schoolgirl with a huge and thrillingly reciprocated crush, don’t let him have woken up with a whole opposite mindset. She shook the idea out of her head – it did no good to second-guess people and drive yourself to nervous wreckage. Instead she focused on the day’s immediate basics. Tea, breakfast, making sure Molly actually woke up on the right side of midday.
‘You missed all the drama last night.’ Shirley was there ahead of her, leaning on the worktop reading the paper and waiting for the toaster to deliver.
‘Did I?’ Bella rather thought she’d had plenty of drama of her own but wasn’t about to tell that to her mother, however much Shirley would relish a full-scale, detailed fess-up. ‘Why, what happened?’
‘You haven’t seen Molly yet?’
‘No? Why? Oh God, has something happened to her?’ She felt cold, suddenly. What kind of cruel cosmic payback would it be, that something dreadful happened to Molly while her feckless, selfish mother was out having raunchy, rampant fun? Maybe even the mothers of near-adults weren’t allowed by the cruel gods to do that, even when they’d put in the full number of caring years and deserved occasional time off. ‘Tell me, quick! Is she all right?’
‘She’s sort of all right. She will be, she’s young and tough and eventually she’ll get over it, even if just now she thinks she never will,’ Shirley said. ‘But her silly arse of a boyfriend, he’ll be stuck with what he’s done for a long, long time. He’s got one of the girls at school into trouble.’
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.’
‘When are we going shopping?’ Jules asked, as Daisy and Fliss led them out to the wardrobe wagon. Saul, Dominic and the camera crew weren’t needed at this point while Daisy took them through clothes selection and some essential trying-on. Bella locked the front door after them all, just in case some sneaky burglar saw an opportunity for a quick thieve while she and the others were being zipped into their new looks. As an excuse for the house being open, she didn’t think this would go down well on an insurance claim for theft.
‘We’re not going shopping,’ Daisy told Jules. ‘The viewing audience all know what a shop looks like. The other programmes like this have those pointless scenes of women looking pathetically confused in high street stores, flicking through rails of ghastly cheap things. There’s no need for that. Dominic and I have done the choosing for you – that is what I’m here for and what I do for a living. And besides,’ she added, ‘much of what we have here isn’t yet high-street available. The viewers will love that. You’ll love it.’
‘Sounds like an order,’ Dina whispered to Jules as they boarded the wardrobe wagon. This was a massive truck parked out in the road. Inside, four long rails of clothes were arranged, one for each of them. The interior resembled a theatre dressing room and was surprisingly large, having a pink velvet chaise longue and a bulb-lit mirror the length of one wall, which made it all horribly hot.
‘How did the A-lister go yesterday, by the way?’ Bella asked Daisy as she had a first wary look at the contents of her rail. ‘Did she like what you’d collected for her?’ She pictured the bemused actress, even now wandering London in a skirt made out of long, purple, polyester hair, and wondering if she should comb it, plait it or just stroke it a bit.
Daisy grimaced. ‘Nightmare! The bitch had put on weight! Deliberately! It seems it’s not good in the current economic climate to look too thin. Apparently it smacks of not being able to afford food, so well-fed is the new size zero and if the world doesn’t recover sharpish, everyone will be desperately showing off that they can stuff themselves to the size of the residents of Tonga. Nothing fitted her. Selfridges had to courier round a whole repeat batch in a bigger size.’ She closed her eyes as if to wipe out the memory. ‘Apart from handbags, of course; thank the Lord for extreme handbags. Dominic was in heaven there.’
Daisy turned her attention back to the truck’s clothes stock.
‘OK – bearing in mind the principle of egg,’ she said, ‘I’d like you each first of all to pick out one dress, a skirt, two tops and what you consider the perfect trousers. I’m going to see how you all do on your own first.’
Bella, pulling her own jumper off in order to try on a silk top, became aware of a ringing sound somewhere beyond the truck. An alarm, fire or burglar. She was vaguely hoping for the sake of the sound man that it would have been sorted before the afternoon’s session, when Fliss opened the truck’s back door and the noise became a lot louder.
‘Mum?’ she said to Daisy. ‘There’s an alarm going off. I think it might be …’
‘Not “Mum” at work, Fliss!’ Daisy snapped. ‘I’ve told you before.’
‘It’s my alarm, isn’t it?’ Bella dropped the silk top and pushed past them all, running down the steps and across the gravel to her open front door. Bloody hell, how had that happened? Who was in there? But more important – had she heard that right? ‘Mum’. Daisy was Fliss’s mother? Bella’s heart thumped hard and her brain was a confused whirr. Putting a very obvious two and two together, she came up with … Saul and Daisy as a couple. As the other marriage. Why the hell hadn’t Saul told her?
‘Wait! Bella, we’ll do this together, it could be dangerous!’ Jules caught up with her by the front door. The two of them ran into the hallway and there was James, prodding hopelessly at the burglar-alarm keypad and looking flustered.
‘Bella, you’re only half dressed!’ he said. ‘Have you been out in the street like that in just your bra? That could be a sign of …’
‘No of course I haven’t!’ Bella almost spat the words, more furious with Saul than with James. Damn. Now she was at a disadvantage, facing James in just her jeans and her pale blue polka-dot M&S satin special. ‘But I’m hardly likely to expect a burglar to hang about while I get dressed, now am I?’
‘But I’m not a burglar! And you’ve changed the code! That’s why the alarm went off,’ he told Bella and the collection of hyped-up onlookers who’d gathered behind her. ‘Now the police will come and you’ll have to pay for a false call-out. Not 360-degree thinking, that, now is it? Oh – hello Dina! How nice to see you again!’ James had spotted Dina and was smiling at her in a disturbingly eager way.
‘James, what the hell are you doing here? And how come you have a key?’ Bella demanded furiously. She wanted to hit him, clout his stupid, over-pink face with its ‘I’m always right’ expression. Not so much because he was there, invading her territory like this for whatever reasons of his own, but almost entirely because a whole Connect Four-style grid’s worth of puzzle tiles were tumbling uncontrollably into places in her brain that she didn’t want them to reach. They’d started to tumble the second Fliss had so casually called Daisy ‘Mum’.