Love Is a Four Letter Word (12 page)

She shook her head, suppressing a smile. ‘That reminds me, I've got to phone the old dears. Weekend duty call.'

‘Ah. You're a close family then?'

‘Help yourself to tea.' Bella pointed Will towards the
kettle. ‘In the blue tin, with the adult-proof lid. Coffee's in the right-hand cupboard.'

‘Come on, Dads.' Bella silently willed her father to answer the phone.

‘Oh. Hi. It's me.'

‘Bella-dear! How nice!' Her mother's voice sounded tinged with veiled panic. Bella pictured her in the hallway, twiddling with her silk scarf, looking around desperately for Gerald. ‘Well. How are … things?'

Are you going to be single for ever?

‘All well with the house?'

We don't seem to have been invited for a visit yet.

‘We got your card. I'm glad you liked the lamp. I wasn't sure, you know, whether it was quite … Anyway.'

You're impossible to please.

‘It's very elegant.' Come on. Go and get Dad, can't you. ‘I've started drawing again.' Bugger. She hadn't meant to reveal that. Now her mother would give one of those indulgent laughs, Bella playing at being artistic. How amusing.

‘That's marvellous, dear. I am pleased. It always seemed such a waste when you let it go. You should make use of your talent.'

What a shame that you never stick with anything.

God, she never lost an opportunity to have a dig.

‘How's Dad?'

‘I'll just get him for you.' Relief whistled down the phone line in two directions. ‘Gerald! It's Bella on the phone.'

Will appeared and made a ‘T' sign with one hand laid at right angles on top of the other. A question.

‘Yes please.' She nodded.

‘Yes please, what?' Her father's voice came on the phone.

‘Hiya, Dads. How's tricks? Just getting the staff to wait on me.'

‘As it should be, of course. Is Viv there? Say hello from us.'

‘No. I followed your advice—'

‘Makes a change.' Gerald laughed.

‘Oh, shut up. I've got someone in to sort out the garden.'

‘Good. Does he know his stuff?'

‘Hang on, I'll ask him. Will?' She called through to the kitchen. ‘My dad wants to know if you know your stuff.'

Will's head appeared round the side of the doorframe.

‘Tell him I learnt it all from a garden-design-by-numbers kit when I was eleven.'

‘Did you hear that, Dads?'

‘He sounds all right. Is he single?'

‘Oh,
Daddy
! I've no idea. You're worse than Viv.'

‘Well, is he?'

‘How should I know? Probably not. What's it to me anyhow?'

Will's head reappeared in the doorway, this time at knee height.

‘Biscuits?' he said. ‘I must have biscuits if I'm to be creative.'

‘I was wondering about having a mural on the end wall.' Bella indicated the far end of the garden.

Will said, sure, she could have what she liked, but it could be expensive. His artistic skills didn't extend that far so he'd have to subcontract it. Bella explained she was planning to do it herself.

‘Your
face.'
She laughed. ‘It's such an open book. I can see you thinking, “Oh no, a client who thinks she can paint. She's going to mess up the whole garden with some terrible scene of Tuscan olive groves.”'

‘Not far off. I thought you'd favour a Gothic folly actually, covered in creepers. Some wild romantic fantasy.'

‘Touché. You're pretty close.' She described what she planned: a
trompe l'oeil
crumbling archway, framed by a real climbing rose perhaps, revealing a tantalizing glimpse of a sunlit secret garden beyond, with a path curving off into shadows. He didn't mean to be rude, he said, but it sounded like quite a tricky feat to bring off.

‘I can always paint it out if it looks hideous.'

‘Or train the rose right over it.'

‘Are you this rude to all your clients?'

‘Only the ones on a tight budget. Add another couple of grand and I can be a real smoothie: “A mural! What an inspired idea! And you'll paint it yourself? How delightful! That will give it your own
unique
stamp.”'

‘Doesn't suit you. I'd rather have the rudeness, thanks.'

‘Erm, your downstairs loo seems to have been invaded by boxes. Where are they all coming from?' Will asked.

‘I had to clear some space in my studio. Surely you can manage the stairs?'

He explained that many clients didn't like the gardener to use the upstairs one. Some of them wouldn't even let him in the house. In the past, he'd gone for a pee behind a bush in the garden because these people had made it all too clear they weren't expecting him to cross the threshold. He always took a flask because he could never count on even being offered a cup of tea.

Bella was outraged. Didn't it make him angry?

He shrugged.

‘Some people are like that. It's no good getting
yourself worked up about every little thing that annoys you. You'd never get through the day.'

‘But I love ranting about things that annoy me. It's practically my favourite pastime.'

‘Hmm? What's your favourite then?'

His words were accompanied by that look again. That peculiar, assessing look as if getting her measure, as if he were trying to see inside her head.

‘Arguing.'

‘Besides,' he said, ‘I got my own back. I slapped on another grand to the bill. They could have built a whole separate tradesmen's loo for the money.'

‘The bathroom's round to the right.' Bella pointed up the stairs. ‘Oh, hang on.' She followed him upstairs. ‘I think I used up the soap.'

He watched her foraging in boxes.

‘There's definitely some in one of these. Hang on, hang on.' She caught sight of his expression. ‘Do you find it amusing that I can't find anything in my own house?'

‘I do. Why don't you just blitz all the boxes in one go and unpack everything so you know where it is?'

‘Because of the DAMP!'

‘Ah, now I know why you're letting me use your posh loo. You want me to have a quiet word with my brother-in-law-in-law, don't you?'

Bella opened the door to her studio to look for another box. There was definitely some soap somewhere.

‘But this is fantastic!' Will was standing in the doorway, looking at the almost-completed mural on the wall with the crack. ‘You realize I feel like a total prat now? Why didn't you say you were a professional?'

‘But I'm not really. You know I'm only a so-called creative director, which is fancy-schmancy for designer. I only paint for me. You can't earn a living at it.'

The crack had been incorporated into a painting of an old, peeling wall including a half-open window. On the window sill there stood a small stoneware pot. Part of the wall was brightly lit, as if illumined by the fake window, the part beneath the sill in deep shadow.

‘I bet you could earn a crust doing murals.' He pointed at the window. ‘I thought the pot was real. And this bit of tree that you can see through the window. It's a winter-flowering cherry, isn't it? Maybe
Prunus
x
subhirtella
“Autumnalis.”'

‘Show-off. I haven't a clue. It's whatever that is out there, in the neighbours' garden. It was in bloom when I first moved in.'

‘This is bloody good, you know. I bet you I could get you a couple of commissions if you're up for it.'

‘You mean I'd be a proper artist?' Bella clasped her hands together. ‘Oh, I've dreamed of this for so long! Slaving away in my humble garret over a hot paintbrush. Going without cream doughnuts in order to buy paint. At last my genius has been recognized!'

‘Do you do this about everything?'

‘Sorry, sir. Can't help it, sir.'

‘You're doing it again.' Will shook his head. ‘I'll tell you one thing though—'

‘Should I get my notebook?'

‘Can you shut up for a second? If you always joke about something that's really important to you, you're selling yourself short.'

‘What makes you think painting's important to me?'

He said nothing. He leant against the door-frame and just looked at her. She felt herself flush as if he had accidentally caught sight of her naked.

‘So what if it is?' She crossed her arms and bit her lip. ‘Still got to eat, haven't I?'

‘Of course. But if you don't take your work seriously, you can bet your bollocks no-one else will either.'

Bella laughed. ‘Bet your bollocks? Good grief. Where
on earth did you get that from? Haven't got any bollocks. I'm a person of the female persuasion, in case you hadn't noticed.'

Will went into the bathroom and closed the door.

‘Your metaphorical bollocks,' he called from the other side. ‘Which you certainly have got.' She could hear him weeing, which felt very intimate. Bella started to go downstairs. ‘And, yes, I had noticed,' she heard his voice from above.

Over a number of phone calls, a few faxes, and many cups of tea in the following fortnight, the garden plan was finalized and a modest budget agreed. Some of the construction work – the patio, the pergola – was to be carried out by Will's subcontractor Douglas. Will explained that he could keep the costs down if Bella helped with the clearing and planting, and it would speed it up. ‘My other projects are all civic stuff at the moment, so we could do most of it at the weekends if you'd prefer it,' he said. ‘Then you can help and oversee it and change your mind completely and say you'd envisaged something rather more Versailles-ish and please could we move the garden a little to the left.'

‘You sure you're happy?' Will said. ‘You can do any amount of fiddling with the details later but we've got to get the foundations right at the beginning or it'll never work.'

‘So,' said Bella, ‘the acid test: do you share your brother-in-law-in-law's belief that work is more of an interesting concept to be discussed rather than something to be actually done, or can you make a start soon?'

He could. He would. He was raring to go, he said. It was up to her.

‘So what's he like then?' Viv leaned back in her chair at the tapas bar.

‘Oh, hello, this is a bit of all right.' Bella turned round the wine bottle to examine the label. ‘Who?'

‘Your garden man. Is he a rugged man of the soil? Tough, but secretly sensitive underneath?'

‘Not as such. I think Will and sensitive are not words that would naturally fall in the same sentence.'

‘Still, you seem to be spending a lot of time in his company. I miss you. And Nick's hankering for your prawn thing again.'

‘Glad you both appreciate me for my lovable qualities and not just my magical way with a piece of ginger root.'

‘So, when are you next seeing him?'

‘I am not “seeing him” at all. He is coming to start
work
on Saturday morning.'

‘Bet you get up early to put on your make-up. Tastiness quotient?'

‘What are you like? You're obsessed. You're supposed to be past all this.'

‘I have to have some vicarious pleasure, don't I? Don't you feel sorry for us dreary couples, stuck in our routines, the highlight of our week a Chinese and a
video on Friday night? Anyway, you must have thought about it.'

‘Why must I? I'm not the one who's obsessed. I told you, I haven't got the energy to have a relationship. All that going out and doing things. Being pleasant. It's too complicated anyway. Your lives get all interwoven, then afterwards you have to try and disentangle the mess. Don't look at me like that.'

‘Like what? There isn't always an afterwards, babe.'

‘There is with me. The relationship's just the bit that happens before I get to the afterwards.'

Viv sighed. ‘So, is he tasty or what?'

‘He's not really the kind you have mad passionate fantasies about. Not handsome, but quite attractive. Cuddly. His eyes are nice. He's sort of solid-looking, like a tree, as if you could lean on him. And he has this little scar – here.' She raised her hand to her eyebrow.

‘Not that you've spent any time looking at him at all.'

Bella wrinkled her nose. ‘His hair's a bit peculiar, springy, bits of it stick up oddly.'

‘Golly. Wild hair. How awful.' Viv's eyes widened, taking in Bella's sprawling curls.

‘Very droll. I'll have you know I've got fourteen asylum-seekers nesting in here – would you have me comb them out onto the street?' Bella knocked back the remainder of her wine. ‘Anyway, he's certainly no dashing Mr Rochester. He's just an ordinary bloke.'

‘Do I get any wine at all? Don't write him off though, babe. Remember, Mr Rochester did have a bonkers wife locked in the attic. There's a lot to be said for an ordinary bloke.'

When Bella had first moved in, the weekends dragged terribly. She floated from the shops to Viv's back to home, drifting from room to room, ineffectually shifting things from one place to another, tackling the occasional task as if it were an epic obstacle requiring
mammoth reserves of energy – the making of a velvet cushion-cover, the stitching of a curtain hem. Now, the weekend seemed to retreat before her, like Christmas when she was a child, impossibly far off. The week at work stretched out, a predictable cycle of meetings, designing, staring glassy-eyed at her computer, and chatter, nipping out for cappuccinos – I
think you mean
cappuccini,
Bella-darling.
She found herself drawing more often. Her layout pad filled with sketches of her colleagues in a gallery of postures, her pen moving at speed over the paper, capturing the way they stood, sat, leaned, stretched and worked.

On Thursday, she trawled through hundreds of transparencies, her eyes blurry from squinting through a magnifying lens, her back aching from hunching over the light-box. Almost every hour, she went and dawdled in the office kitchen, wiping the surfaces and cleaning the coffee jug and chucking out the dodgy milk, anything to kill time.