Chapter 31
Having paid for her purchase with a pound coin she found in the bottom of her shabby old purse, Bella hurried back to Jack’s cottage.
She wasn’t quite sure what she was going to do with what she’d bought, but one thing was clear: she had to get it out of the shop.
If anyone else from the village found it, she’d never live it down.
Her first instinct was to shove it in the nearest bin, but she couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t catch someone’s eye, with its vibrant colours and sharp edges. Better to take it back to the cottage and stash it somewhere, so there was no chance of anyone else finding it.
Bella couldn’t believe how much her heart was thumping as she let herself in through the front door.
She paused, once she’d closed it again, and pulled her purchase from her shopping bag.
What was something like that doing in the local shop?
There had been a very limited number produced; how ridiculous that one of them should turn up here.
Sighing, she wandered through to the kitchen, turning it over and over in her hands.
It felt like another time, another life.
She’d been another person. She’d been many people in her life, she thought.
The person she was back then would have laughed at how nervous she was about confronting the past.
One small, flat, rectangular case. One coloured sleeve.
And inside, one circular piece of almost obsolete technology that took Bella back to a place, twelve years ago, that she thought she’d moved away from.
It was a perfect piece of nostalgia from that time, a time when compact discs were already losing the war against streaming music services, but a hard copy of an album would be produced as part of the marketing strategy.
On the front of the CD sleeve was a dramatic picture of a singer, hair blowing backwards as she stared down the camera, clad in a deep crimson satin dress and Dr Marten boots, with heavy eye make-up and an enigmatic smile.
Or, at least, Bella thought wryly, what the photographer, the stylist and later the cover designer had said was enigmatic. Looking at it now, it just looked daft.
This girl had been packaged and marketed as an indie pop sensation.
This girl had supported a number of bigger artists on tours all over Europe.
This girl had had a lucky break, or so she thought.
And this girl had crashed out, exhausted, when the demands of the music industry had become too much, the road too long and winding to persevere. This girl had been Isabella Indigo.
Isabella Indigo had never quite made it big enough to be known outside the medium-sized clubs and venues of Europe, and her dent on the UK music scene had been minimal.
A devoted following of young women who’d identified with Isabella Indigo’s stage persona, the artist who sang of love and loss, of happiness and pain, of moving on but still nursing the past, had struck a chord in the austerity-ridden years of high living costs and increased isolation.
The record company who’d signed her had high hopes, but Isabella’s persona, while attractive to a portion of the market, wasn’t quite successful enough to go mainstream.
After one album and a modest tour, the label moved on, and Isabella Indigo became Bella West again.
For this CD to have turned up in charity shop in a very small English village, the gods would have to be laughing themselves sick.
All the same, Bella felt a wave of nostalgia, a sensation of regret mixed with a large dose of relief at what could, or might, have been.
She smiled to herself as she slipped the CD from its case and popped it into the radio-cassette-CD player that sat in the corner of Jack’s kitchen.
Taking a deep breath, she heard the whirr of the mechanism starting up, and then, after a short guitar-led intro, the vocals started.
I never let you go,
Until you told me so,
Until you said goodbye,
Those tears were in my eyes.
And now I’m all alone,
Just waiting by the phone,
Baby, oh please just call,
I just can’t see at all.
Heartbreaker,
You’re just a heaaaart-breaker!
Dream maker,
You’re still a heartbreaker…
All these years on, she could see why Isabella Indigo had been a bigger hit in Europe than the UK. There was something of Marie Fredriksson in the vocals, which, while wonderfully strident and heartfelt, were a little out of date in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
As Isabella’s voice continued to boom out of the CD player, Bella found herself dancing and then singing along.
She was out of practice, that was true, but gradually, like riding a bike, the words and rhythms came back to her.
By the bridge of the first song she was bopping around the kitchen, using the pepper grinder as a microphone and thoroughly getting into this impromptu kitchen disco.
Sophie Ellis-Bextor would be proud, she thought wryly.
The key change after the bridge was a bit tricky, but by the time the final couple of verses came around, Bella had hit her stride, belting out the last chorus like a pro.
Those top notes were a reach, but as she faced the kitchen window, staring out into the overgrown back garden, she held the last note until the song faded away.
Throwing back her head, she couldn’t resist an ironic, ‘Thank you, Somerset!’ before putting the pepper grinder back down on the counter.
‘Wow! You sound amazing!’
The sound of clapping from behind her brought her sharply back to earth and hot waves of mortification poured over her like lava as quickly as the strains of the second song on the album, a slower ballad, began to play.
There, standing behind her, a look of amusement on his handsome features, was Noah.