Meanwhile, in the Gustavus Adolphus Suite, the General rehearsed the next day’s speech with Bella as his audience. The General wore a navy velvet suit which showed off his high complexion and thick white hair to advantage: Bella wore a simple black dress. Both of them admired themselves in mirrors from time to time, when they thought the other wasn’t looking. The General’s wife did not like him wearing velvet: it made her uneasy. Bella’s mother had once urged her never to wear black, saying it did nothing for her complexion. She had worn it a great deal ever since: it was not complexion so much as je-ne-sais-quoi which attracted men, but how was Bella’s mother to know a thing like that? Bella’s mother was a nun and forty-seven when Bella was born, and so far as Bella’s mother was concerned, she was virgo intacta and a bride of Christ. There was talk of either miracle, or parthenogenesis, that is to say, self-fertilisation. It happens in snails, of course, and in some of the higher mammals too: eggs begin to divide without fertilisation, growth starts: the child’s genes are identical to the mother’s: a girl child is born, twin to the mother but a few decades late. And Bella bore an uncanny resemblance to her mother. The Church decided on parthenogenesis, rather than miracle. Had either woman, the mother or the daughter, been rather more likeable, they might well have opted for the latter. Some key in Bella’s makeup was flipped during her childhood; which had remained untouched, or thrown the other way, in her mother, and Bella dedicated herself to random fornication in the same spirit as her mother had dedicated herself to Christ: in a kind of all-or-nothing way.
‘If you practise too much now,’ said Bella, who longed for a drink, and assumed there’d be one downstairs, ‘you’ll lose the freshness.’
He conceded the point and they went downstairs, meeting Muffin and Baf on the way. Bella was pale and composed, Muffin flushed and fluffy and rumpled, in spite of having brushed out her hair after leaving Baf’s bed. Her fringe badly needed cutting. Every hair on Bella’s head had, as it were, been individually attended to. Her mother had kept her head shaven under its cowl: some things simply could not go on as they had done in the past.
Baf looked at Bella with interest, as Bella went ahead down the stairs. She wore thin spiky heels and had to go carefully. Muffin, noticing, was upset and puzzled. How could Baf be interested in a woman who looked thin, spiteful and bad tempered? Didn’t men like nice, warm, rounded, friendly women, who were careful with and responsive to their feelings? Her mother had told her they did. Muffin, unlike Bella, believed her mother must surely know best: or at any rate had, until this very moment. It occurred to Muffin now, as she came down the stairs, that just as the palate has an appetite for sour as well as sweet, so does the male fancy. Perhaps she should practise being just plain horrid, and see what happened.