Chapter 3
By Saturday afternoon, Bella had read The FT cover to cover, done work prep for the week ahead, tidied the flat and was even contemplating making soup before she decided that was just too boring. So, she called her best friend, Tania, instead.
It rang for a few moments before Tania picked up, sounding breathless.
‘Hello?’
‘Tani.’
‘Bella!’
‘Are you doing anything this afternoon that you can’t get out of?’
‘Hmm… sex?’
‘You can get out of that!’
‘Depends, darling. How urgent is it? Need a witness to your divorce papers? A plus one on your surprise trip to Istanbul? What you going to shock me with today?’
‘Ha ha… none of those,’ Bella said. Tania wasn’t going to stop teasing her about her ‘surprise, I’m getting married, want to come?’ phone call for some time.
‘I’ve been abandoned by my husband for the whole weekend and I haven’t seen you in leggings for ages.’
‘Your husband – why can I still not get used to that?’
‘It’s been months!’ Bella reminded her. ‘Almost a year!’
‘OK, OK, gym it is, then,’ Tania agreed.
‘When can you get there?’
‘Three-ish?’
‘I love you, Tani.’
‘See you later.’
‘Byeeeee.’
Tania and Bella’s usual routine was a gruelling, no-holds-barred workout in the gym, followed by a swim, a sauna, then a long, gossipy meal with gin and tonics to start and a bottle of wine to follow, which pretty much undid all their earlier hard work.
They had been friends since university, where Bella had taken one look at Tania, the only other girl in their maths tutorial group, and fallen in deepest girl crush.
Tania was the most glamorous thing eighteen-year-old Bella had ever seen. She wore tight, short dresses, had acres of highlighted hair, two boyfriends, a French mother, and green contact lenses. She smoked Marlboros, laughed in a dark, flirtatious way and drove to class in a tiny scarlet Fiat.
Newly out of a feministy all-girls school in Oxford, Bella could not have been more different. She wore jeans, Dr Martens boots and dark jumpers, accessorised with a short bob and puppy fat. She always took the Tube and was virginally single.
Bella had assumed there was absolutely no hope of Tania ever talking to her, let alone becoming a friend. But she’d been wrong. Tania was, like the rest of the class, in awe of Bella’s freaky maths genius and determined to get to know her better. Underneath the dweeby exterior, Tania found Bella upbeat and ambitious – and had seen her as something of a project.
First of all, Tania had taken Bella to the gym, then a little later, the hairdresser and finally, out shopping with her impossibly chic mother, Valerie. Bella still followed Valerie’s make-up advice: ‘Always Chanel darlings, anything else ruins the skin – and take it off with cream cleanser, not any kind of soap.’
By the time Bella left university, she was slimmer than Tania, had longer hair, and was madly in love with Daniel, her boyfriend of two years. She also knew exactly where she was going next – straight into a graduate traineeship with Laurence and Co.
Her own parents had been horrified at her transformation, especially her mother. Celia Browning, the wife of an Oxford professor, had put her own academic ambitions on hold to have children. She had settled on a career teaching maths at a good school but had always felt disappointed with her choice, especially as she’d had to watch her husband’s stellar academic career from the sidelines.
What Celia had always wanted for Bella, who had even more ability than her, was the prestigious university path she’d turned down. But Bella had deserted that for a job in the City! The City! Where you didn’t even need a maths O level to get on. No matter how hard her mother tried to analyse it, she basically didn’t understand Bella, had no idea why her gifted daughter had wanted this sort of career.
Celia understood Bella’s interest in her appearance even less. Her daughter’s long hair, painted nails, high shoes and short skirts made a mockery of all the ideals she had tried to instil in her.
Neither of Bella’s parents had yet reconciled themselves to her whirlwind marriage to a forty-something tabloid journalist either. They had argued against it in long and painful calls from their retirement villa in Italy. They had refused to meet Don, not been invited to the intimate wedding and Bella hadn’t seen them since, although once a month or so they had an awkward phone call.
It had not helped Don’s case that her father had once ended up in the Sunday tabloids after a disciplinary hearing about an ‘improper’ relationship with a student. ‘Professor Perv’ they’d labelled him, of course. And Celia had rallied to the cause, standing by her man and claiming it was all untrue.
Her father had taken a leave of absence for a year but had returned once the fuss had died down. Meanwhile, Celia had suffered a major bout of depression, left her job and gone into therapy for years. It was her dad who’d played away, but her mother was somehow the one with ‘the problem’. The injustice of this still enraged Bella.
After their gym session, Bella and Tania went back to Tania’s new flat, where her friend’s fussing over paint shades and curtain fabric made Bella realise how much she might like to have a home of her own, instead of moving from one impersonal rental to the next.
She didn’t exactly envy Tania her love life, though. Bella made the mistake of admiring an exquisite gold bangle Tania was wearing, only for Tania to dissolve into tears.
‘What’s the matter?’ Bella asked, putting an arm round her shoulder.
‘Oh, darling. It’s bloody Greg. This must be about the fifth time he’s brought home a pale blue box from Tiffany’s and I’ve thought: “Thank you, God, he’s finally going to propose,” only to open it and find a bracelet, a necklace… any bloody piece of jewellery you like, apart from a ring.’
‘But, Tani… does he know you want to get married?’ Bella felt she had to ask the obvious.
‘Well, it’s not just something you come out with, is it? I bloody well want to be asked. I don’t want to propose to him. It should be obvious I want to marry him.’
‘Maybe he thinks you’re happy not being married. I mean you’re not even living together,’ Bella said.
‘He’s the one who insists we have our own flats. He says it’s a better investment and he only lives around the corner.’
There was a pause, then Tania quickly wiped her eyes and tried hard to stem the tears.
‘I’m sorry. I hate sounding like some sad woman obsessed with getting a ring on my finger… I mean, how did you end up getting married first? You always said you’d never get married,’ Tania added.
‘No idea,’ Bella said with a shrug, ‘a moment of madness on both our parts.’
The funny thing was that Greg and Don were the same age. But whereas Don was a free-thinking, rolling stone, rebel forty-one; Greg was a buttoned-up, banking, masses of personal finance plans forty-one. Maybe Tania craved the security, but Greg didn’t seem to give her that either and it was strange how he wasn’t even hinting at marriage. Men like him were usually desperate to settle down.
‘I want to get married and I want to have children,’ Tania blurted out, ‘I’m pretty sure I’ve made that clear. I’ve hinted a lot, especially when you got married and now one of my team is on mat leave. You’re not going to do that to me, are you?’ Tania looked up at Bella sternly.
‘What?!’
‘Go and have a baby before I’ve even found a husband? I always thought we would do the pregnancy, new baby and career mum thing together.’
‘Whoa! Slow down there. When have I ever said I wanted children?’ Bella asked.
‘Yes, but you always said you weren’t going to get married and look at you now!’
‘Don totally talked me into it… and it’ll never last,’ Bella said, but she was smiling, totally convinced that it would definitely last.
‘Well, he’ll be talking you into babies next, I guarantee it,’ Tania said. ‘He’s in his forties, he’ll start thinking “legacy”.’
‘No he won’t. We love our life. We love our jobs. A baby is not on the cards.’
Don finally came home close to midnight on Sunday. His story had come off and was splashing in the paper tomorrow, so he was in a fantastically good mood. She met him at the front door showered, wrapped up in her silk robe and smelling delicious.
‘Hello, fantasy wife,’ he said giving her as much of a hug as he could without squashing his armful of goodies.
‘I’ve missed you.’
‘This is for us.’ He waved a champagne bottle.
‘This is for me.’ He jiggled his takeaway bag.
‘And these are for you.’ He held out a scruffy bunch of petrol station roses.
‘Thank you. These are for you,’ she laughed and pulled open her gown to flash her breasts at him.
He plonked everything down on the floor and moved in for a proper kiss.
After a few moments, he broke away saying, ‘It’s no use, Bella, I am going to have to eat first, I’m absolutely starving.’
He ate the takeaway in bed, drinking champagne with her and telling her the week’s adventures. When he’d finished, he leaned over, kissed her on the forehead and apologised for his weekend away.
‘You’re so self-contained and self-sufficient,’ he said. ‘I sometimes forget that you might want me around more. I’m not going to dare suggest that you might “need” me around.’
‘Of course I need you,’ she said, wrapping herself around him. ‘We all need to be loved and held and brought to incredible sexual climax, once we’ve done our weekend work prep.’
He smiled broadly. Putting the foil dishes on the floor, he said, ‘Weekend work prep! OK, can we start making up for lost time now?’
Her dressing gown slid down over her shoulders as he kissed and touched her slowly.
She helped him out of his clothes until they were curled up naked together on the bed where they began to make love tenderly, looking deep into each other’s eyes and Bella knew how much she loved him. He was her real-life action hero, he went to war zones, had even resuscitated someone from a heart attack, for God’s sake. Next to Don, most other men seemed pretty tame.
They were still making love when she asked him, ‘Would you like to buy a place with me? A home of our own?’
‘Oh my God… are we ready? Are we going to get serious? Have a mortgage?’
‘Oh yeah, husband… we are.’
‘Have we got time… to look for a place… do the paperwork… have builders in?’
‘Sexy builders, please.’
‘Are you objectifying the builders?’
‘No… I just think… buying a place, doing it up… our place… ohhh— do that again.’
For a few moments they could only concentrate on each other.
‘If buying our home is this sexy, we have to do it,’ Don told her afterwards.
Bella, lying back in the rumpled bed, thought about work. Two major new clients had been taken on and, for the first time, she was going to be heading up one of the projects herself. There was a lot of work headed her way, big, exciting, challenging work. But they could fit in buying a home, couldn’t they? People bought places all the time. It couldn’t be so difficult.
The next day Bella went into town and bought a scarily expensive new work suit, just to underline her new resolve. She had it all worked out.