Celebration. Rosie Thomas
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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.
‘Can I try and find you a glass of something else?’
She stood up and put the tumbler down carefully on the mantelpiece. Staring straight into Edward’s eyes, she answered, ‘I don’t think there is anything …’
‘In that case,’ he said decisively, ‘I shall have to take you away from here.’ He took her hand and guided her across the room. Bell heard the stream of anxious talk from the armchair stop in mid-sentence.
‘Bell? You’re not going, are you?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered, not loudly enough for even Edward to hear. ‘I think I am going.’
Out on the shabby landing they stood side by side, staring into the kitchen where a beer barrel was dripping on to a carpet of newspapers. An array of green and brown wine bottles stood in a litter of French bread and cheese. Their eyes met, and they smiled at each other.
‘Have you got a coat?’
‘On the bed, in there.’
The bedroom door was locked now and he retrieved it from the pile that had been flung out on to the landing floor. They picked their way down the stairs, past the girl in the long skirt, and out into the street. To Edward, for the very first time, the thick London air smelt clean and invigorating.
He took Bell out to dinner and then back to the door of her flat.
He saw her every day for a week before he kissed her, and it was a month before he felt he was even beginning to know her. Every time he saw her he was surprised by the way her beauty unfolded. At first he had seen her simply as an attractive girl with unusual eyes, but gradually he noticed the luxuriance of her dark hair, the fragility of her long neck and the bloom of her skin, and the vulnerability of her mouth.
Her face kept changing.
For Bell they were weeks of enlightenment. Slowly she discovered that Edward could be trusted not to disappoint her. He was never dull, never at a loss. To her delight she found that if he wasn’t beside her he was a step ahead, waiting for her to catch up. She found that she could be herself with him, as with no one else. She began to show him aspects of herself that she had buried deeply years ago, when she was a little girl convinced that her mother had been taken away from her to punish her own wickedness. Not even her closest friends knew about her spurts of temper, or her bleak fits of pessimism. Bell stopped hiding them from Edward, and her feelings for him quickened when she saw that he accepted her faults as gratefully as her merits.
The habits of years fell away as she accepted the rhythm of life with him. She began to think in the plural after what felt like a lifetime of solitude.
One evening, Edward brought her home as he always did. They had been to see a film, and then for a meal at the tiny restaurant around the corner. Bell had watched the candlelight making black shadows in the hollows of his face as he talked and she had realized, with a little shock, that she knew the contours of it as well as she knew her own face. She was faintly surprised when she remembered that she was still keeping part of herself from someone so well-loved.
In the deserted flat Edward took Bell in his arms to kiss her goodnight.
‘Don’t go,’ she had said, in a small clear voice. ‘I’m sorry it’s taken so long, but I’m ready now.’
There was no need to say any more. Edward put his hand on the catch of her bedroom door and it swung open. They stepped into the dim warmth of her room. With infinite tenderness he took off her clothes and knelt beside her.
‘Are you quite sure?’
Her eyes were luminous as she answered, ‘Quite sure. I love you, Edward.’
He had been astounded by the depth of her passion. It was as if she had flung herself blindly into an uncharted sea, and found that she could swim like a fish.
They had been very happy, Bell recalled. Until their need for each other had become claustrophobic to her, threatening rather than secure. Until she had begun to have dreams about being trapped underwater, or about failing to rescue him from burning tenements. Or about jilting him. She remembered her early-morning dream, the feel of her billowing wedding dress gathered up in her fists to leave her free to run, and her mouth went dry.
It had been painful, and it still was, but she had done the right thing. She wished that there had never been any nagging sense of something missing, so that she could have been happy with Edward for ever. But it was not to be, and now even in her loneliest moments she delighted in her freedom. It had been hard to win, this independence, and now she had it it felt like a prize.