Celebration. Rosie Thomas

from there to the airport. The next three days were crossed through with neat diagonals and the words ‘Ch. Reynard’. The second of those days was to be her twenty-eighth birthday.

      The realization made Bell smile ruefully and she sat down to examine her face in the mirror. Not too many lines, yet, and the ones that she could see were all laughter lines. Automatically she picked up her hairbrush and began to stroke rhythmically at her hair. The one hundred nightly strokes was a habit left over from childhood and she clung to it obstinately, as a link with her dead mother.

      In one of Bell’s last memories of her she was standing at her side with the identical blue-green eyes fixed on her own in the mirror.

      ‘A hundred times, Bell,’ she was saying, ‘and your hair will shine like silk.’

      That was it, of course.

      The thing she was really frightened of, and the thing she wouldn’t let herself think about. Except at times like now, when she was alone with a brandy glass in her hand and the memories were too vivid to suppress. She had seen it all through the agonizingly clear eyes of childhood. Her mother had died, and she had watched her father disintegrate. Day after day, year after year, defencelessly turning into a wreck of what he had once been.

      Bell didn’t think she was remembering her very early years with any particular romantic distortion. Her parents had very obviously been deeply in love. They had been quite satisfied with their single child. Bell had the impression that her father didn’t want her mother to share out her love any further. He wanted the lion’s share of it for himself.

      Selfish of him, probably, but he had suffered enough for that.

      There had been very good times, early on. Her father was a successful stockbroker in those days, comfortably off. There had been a pretty house in Sussex, French holidays, birthday parties for Bell and the company of her witty, beautiful mother.

      Joy Farrer had probably never been very strong. Bell remembered the thinness of her arms when they hugged her, and the bony ridges of her chest when she laid her head against it. Sometimes she had been mysteriously ill, but Bell remembered those days only as brief shadows.

      Then, with brutal suddenness, she was gone.

      One night when Bell went to bed she was there, reminding her not to skimp on the one hundred strokes with the hairbrush. In the morning she had disappeared. The house was full of whispers and strange, serious faces. Her father’s study door was locked.

      It was several days before they told her she was dead, but she had really known it from the moment when she woke up on the first morning. The house had smelled dead. Something in it had shrivelled up and vanished overnight. A housekeeper arrived, but Bell did her crying alone. The sense of loss suffocated her, and at night she would try to stifle herself with her pillow to shut out the misery. She was convinced, in her logical, childish mind, that her mother’s death was her own, Bell’s, fault.

      She had rarely seen her father in those first months. She learned from an aunt, years later, that he had taken to going out all night and driving his car round the Sussex lanes. Round and round, going nowhere. With a bottle of whisky on the seat beside him. By the time he was convicted of drunken driving Bell was away at boarding school and knew nothing about it. He simply stopped coming to pick her up from school at half-terms and holidays, and she travelled on the little local train instead. All she did know was that he was getting thinner, and an unfamiliar smell emanated from the well-cut grey suits that were now too large, creased, and slightly stained.

      Her once-handsome, assured father was turning into a grey-haired stranger who behaved peculiarly.

      It was in the middle of the summer holidays when she was fourteen that Bell realized that her father was an alcoholic. She found the plastic sack of empty whisky bottles in the garage when she was looking for the turpentine. She had been trying to brighten up the dingy kitchen with a coat of white paint.

      That was the day Bell grew up.

      She understood, in a single flash, how badly he had crumbled after the death of his wife. At the same moment she accepted another weight on to her burden of guilt. If only she could have compensated him in some way. If only she had been older, or more interesting to him. If only her mother and father hadn’t loved each other quite so much, and she herself had been more lovable. If only.

      Her father had died when she was seventeen. Cirrhosis of the liver, of course. Bell looked down at her empty glass. It was ironic that she should be making her living now by writing about drink. She toyed with the idea of pouring herself another brandy, but it was easy to decide not to do it. No. Whatever else might happen to her, she didn’t think that was going to be her particular problem. It was enough to have watched it happen to her father.

      ‘Well now.’ Bell looked at her white face in the mirror. ‘While you are thinking about this, why not try to be totally honest?

      ‘Is it that you are scared of Edward being hurt like that one day if you disappear? You’re trying to protect him, in your heavy-handed way?

      ‘Well, yes …

      ‘Or are you really much more frightened of it happening to you? No commitment, therefore no risk?

      ‘Yes.’

      Bell folded her arms on the dressing-table in front of her, laid her head on them and cried.

      If someone else had told her her own story she would have dismissed it as too neat and pat. Incapable of loving, of marrying, because of her parents’ tragedy? Cool and collected outside in self-protection, but a guilty mess inside? Surely human beings were more complex than that?

      ‘This one isn’t,’ said Bell, through the sobs.

      At last the storm subsided. She snatched up a handful of tissues from the box in front of her and blew her nose. A red-eyed spectre confronted her in the mirror.

      ‘What you really need,’ she addressed herself again, ‘is to look a complete fright tomorrow. That will give just the important, extra edge of confidence. Come on, Bell. What’s past is past, and the only thing that you can do now is carry on. At least you seem to understand yourself quite well.’

      She put her tongue out at herself and caught the answering grin. That’s better.

      She leant over and stuffed her passport and tickets into one of the pockets of her squashy leather handbag. Then she zipped and buckled the canvas holdall and stood the two bags side by side next to the door.

      Notebooks, traveller’s cheques, file, tape recorder … she counted off in her head. All there.

      She was ready to go, whatever might lie ahead.

       TWO

      ‘Hello, gorgeous.’ The voice had an unmistakable Aussie twang. ‘All dressed up and somewhere to go? Not with me, as per usual.’

      Without looking round, Bell knew that it was Max Morgan, wine correspondent of one of the local radio stations. She always felt that he only refrained from pinching her bottom because she was big enough to pinch him back. Still, she turned and smiled at him. His aggressiveness was redeemed by his raffish cowboy good looks, and she liked him well enough to ignore the challenge he invariably dangled at her. It was just a little harder to take than usual at five to ten on a Monday morning.

      ‘Hello, Max. Thank you for noticing the extra polish on my turnout this morning. As a matter of fact I am winging my way direct from here to Château Reynard itself.’

      Max rolled his eyes and pursed his lips in a silent whistle of mock amazement.

      ‘Comment? Ze baron opens sa coeur to ze jolie Eenglish scribblaire?’ The parody French accent overlying the rich Australian vowels made Bell dissolve into laughter.

      ‘Something like that. It should be interesting.’

      ‘Too right. See if you can sweet talk him into getting out a bottle