Bad Twins

by Rebecca Chance

  Although Christie’s new house was appropriately luxurious, the gardens of the Maida Vale house were to Bella a lost sunlit childhood paradise now occupied by Jade’s brats, who had the golden prize: access to Ronaldo. To console herself, Bella had focused on the fact that he was thirteen when the first was born, would have no interest in a baby; her two little half-brothers would never have been Ronaldo’s playmates. The visits paid to the house by Christie’s children had been extremely formal and as brief as Jade could make them. Bella had been lucky to snatch a few words with Maria to ask her how Ronaldo was doing; there was no time for a quick trip to the kitchen to see him, let alone play together.

  The news had been fantastic, Maria brimming with pride. At sixteen, Ronaldo had achieved extraordinarily good GCSE results, and on hearing this Jeffrey had stepped in, offering to take Ronaldo out of the Edgware Road comprehensive he had been attending and send him instead to a private boarding school at his own expense. From there, Ronaldo’s A levels having proved equally stellar, Jeffrey had sent him to Harvard for his undergraduate degree.

  Where, in due course, Bella also went. She would have taken her MBA at Harvard in any case; it was unquestionably where you went to business school if you were in the top echelon of academia. But oh, how she had hoped that she might cross paths with Ronaldo there! He would be long gone as an undergraduate, of course, but he could have stayed on, maybe, as a TA, working towards a master’s degree or a PhD, attending business or law school?

  But no. She had checked all the student directories and failed to find his name, though she couldn’t help looking out for him anyway; maybe he would come back to visit a professor, catch a football game . . .

  Eventually she heard from Maria that Ronaldo had got a green card, stayed on to work in America. Whenever Bella visited the States, she wondered if she would bump into him. She had pictured meet-cutes as they found themselves side by side in business-class seats on a flight, or sitting next to one another at a bar. Ronaldo would turn to smile politely at his seatmate as he settled in, then realize who she was. And she would see that expression on his face, the mesmerized look Prince Charming gave Cinderella at the ball, and her heart would feel like a snifter of brandy, rich and warm and intoxicating . . .

  Now, she felt just as if she had drunk that glass of brandy. No, an entire bottle, filling her chest cavity, burning hot. She shook her head in disbelief, her eyes never leaving him. Ronaldo, in this Chicago bar! She had absolutely no doubt that it was him, despite more than two decades having passed. She would have known him anywhere.

  The sheer intensity of her stare must have drawn his attention, because he was turning towards her, away from the group of men he had just joined, his dark eyes meeting hers. It looked as if colour was flooding into his cheeks, though she couldn’t be sure of that, because of the diffused, golden glow from the great architectural copper light fixture, large as a Smart car, shaped into gigantic bubbles clustering below the domed ceiling. The bustling, well-dressed people, the chink of glasses and the hum of conversation: it wasn’t completely unlike the ballroom of her childhood fantasies.

  ‘Hey, do you know that guy?’ Robin was saying. ‘He’s really staring at you. Maybe he recognizes you, d’you think?’

  His lips moved to form the word ‘Bella?’, his expression disbelieving. She couldn’t hear him, of course, but it was very easy to lip-read the shape of her own name. She started to nod frantically like one of those gold-coloured crazy waving cats in the windows of old-fashioned Chinese restaurants, her hand coming up to complete the resemblance; she would have stood up but her legs were wobbling, and she was scared she might stumble awkwardly hoisting herself out of the big, soft leather sofa.

  ‘Oh wow, he’s coming over!’ Robin exclaimed.

  Bella paid her not the slightest attention. She was entirely fixated on Ronaldo as he strode gracefully through the crowd, his eyes fixed on Bella, managing somehow to deftly dodge and weave around anyone who crossed his path. He almost ran up the short flight of steps that led to the raised curving area in which Bella and Robin were ensconced, and she felt as if she were a princess and he her chosen prince, racing back to her side, up to the dais on which she sat. He held out his hands, just like the fantasy, taking hers, pulling her to her feet, looking down at her with a smile on his full, beautifully shaped lips.

  ‘Bella,’ he said, his mouth making the same shape again, her name. It was hypnotic. She wanted to see him saying ‘Bella’ over and over again.

  ‘Ronnie!’ she answered, all she was able to say with her heart in her throat, the hot brandy in her chest. He laughed out loud, shaking his head once more.

  ‘After all these years!’ he said in disbelief, ‘in such a random bar . . . but why not? It could be anywhere, couldn’t it? Why not here?’

  ‘Uh, guys,’ Robin said, rising in her turn, picking up her bag and coat, her tone tactful in the extreme, ‘I can see you have a lot of stuff to catch up on, and I could totally do with getting back home and running through what we need to do tomorrow, so I’ll get going, okay? I’ll settle our bar tab.’

  Bella barely noticed Robin leaving. She nodded vaguely in her direction. Ronaldo’s manners were much better than Bella’s; he did give Robin a swift apology for being so rude. It was just, he explained, that Bella and he were childhood friends, had completely lost touch and were overcome by meeting each other so unexpectedly. But he barely looked at Robin as he spoke, could not tear his gaze from Bella’s face. Robin was by any standards an extremely attractive woman, and to have Ronaldo hardly glance at her was Bella’s fantasy doubled, tripled: Prince Charming unable even to appreciate another woman’s beauty when Cinderella was present.

  They sank down onto the sofa together, as if choreographed. A waiter appeared and Ronaldo ordered champagne: Ruinart, the best, he said; only Ruinart was good enough for a celebration like this, a crazy meeting in his home city with little Bella, all grown-up now and looking so wonderful.

  ‘I recognized you straight away. Don’t worry, it’s not like you still look ten years old!’ he said, and he reached out to ping her nose playfully with his finger, a teasing gesture he had made so many times when they were young. ‘Of course I’ve seen photos of you kids over the years – I know what you look like all grown up. Bart’s always in the gossip columns. And jeez, I saw about your dad getting divorced, and that story about Conway! How’s the family doing? You guys are going through the wars right now!’

  ‘Hah, Lottie’s over the moon that Jade’s been kicked out!’ Bella said, and before she realized it she had kicked off her shoes and curled up on the sofa as familiarly as if she were with a member of her family, having a gossip. ‘You should have heard her rip Jade to pieces outside the house – it was amazing! Maria must have told you about what happened, right? About Jade climbing the fence, and—’

  ‘Oh yeah, Mum was so happy to tell me all about it! What a total bitch that woman was!’

  He grinned, a beautiful smile, his teeth perfect as only American teeth can be; from that alone, Bella would have known that Ronaldo was now a resident of this country.

  ‘I’d get hauled straight to HR if I used that word around anyone I work with,’ he said cheerfully, ‘but sometimes you just have to. You were never snobs to me, and your mum wasn’t either. But the moment Jade moved in, she made it damn clear that I was the son of the help and needed to know my place, which meant barely visiting the house. You know how I’d come round to yours after school till Mum was finished for the day?’

  Bella nodded. Ronaldo’s father did shift work and wasn’t home by the time school let out, so during the week Ronaldo had usually been at the Maida Vale house for a few hours in the early evening. That was when the children had gathered to play, though gradually the demands of homework had cut into the playtime somewhat.

  ‘So the first time Jade saw me coming in – through the servants’ entrance, of course! – she came downstairs and gave me and my mum the third degree,’ Ronaldo con
tinued. ‘Who was I, why did I think it was okay to be here, she didn’t want a strange kid round the house distracting my mum from her work, etc., etc. That was actually what made Mum angriest, I think – the suggestion that she might not be doing her job properly. It was okay for me – you guys were gone, and I was twelve, old enough to get the bus home and let myself in till Mum or Dad came back. But it really hurt Mum.’

  ‘Oh, is that why Daddy paid your school fees and sent you to Harvard?’ Bella asked. ‘Because Jade was such a bitch to you?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘I guess. I mean, nothing was said about that outright, you know? But it might have helped. I know Mum went to your dad to boast about my GCSEs. She was royally pissed that I couldn’t study at your house any more, so she was making the point that I had to do my homework on my own with no supervision. Motivate myself. And Harvard happened because my boarding school had all these international students, so it had plenty of affiliations with overseas universities. I got fed into the programme with the rest of the kids. I was really lucky to have the opportunity – it transformed my life. I got a scholarship, but your dad still helped a ton. I’m so grateful to him.’

  ‘I’m so glad,’ Bella said in heartfelt tones. ‘Honestly, it’s nice to hear of Daddy doing something good for once!’

  They both laughed at this. They were so close; their bodies had rolled towards each other on the deep, squashy sofa. She reached out and touched the back of his hand, even that brief contact intensifying the fiery brandy sensation in her chest. He smiled at her. Bella was openly staring at him, seeing the child in the man’s face. Dark almond eyes, thick dark hair, full lips; he had a shading of five o’clock shadow around his jawline, a dark bluish tint, and that was strange, as she had always known him as a smooth-skinned prepubescent boy.

  ‘You’ve got the advantage of me,’ she managed to say. ‘You knew what I looked like as a grown-up. I’m still in shock.’

  ‘But you recognized me straight away!’ he marvelled. ‘I can’t believe it!’

  ‘I know!’ she said, quite as if she hadn’t spent an infinite amount of time in her teens and twenties imagining what Ronaldo would look like.

  ‘When I’d see those photos of you guys in the magazines, you know what I’d think?’ he said.

  ‘No!’ Bella said over-eagerly, greedy for any possible compliment that might be coming. She heard her tone – too high, too excited – and sat back, grabbing at her glass of Ruinart to look at that instead; she was terrified of seeming as gushing and needy as she truly was, revealing the size of the crush she had been nursing all these years.

  ‘I’d think,’ Ronaldo said, picking up his own glass, ‘that nowadays we’d all have phones! Kids nowadays have phones from the time they’re in double digits. We’d have been texting constantly – we’d never have lost contact like we did. Back then, what were we going to do? We didn’t even have each other’s home phone numbers.’

  This had never occurred to Bella before, and for some reason it hit her hard. She stared at him, the glass sweating in her hand. It was such a small thing, a mobile phone, a little rectangle of plastic and metal, but the difference it would have made was absolutely crucial. If he and the Sachs kids had had phones, they would never have lost touch. She would never have lost him.

  And then a horrible thought struck her. She glanced at his left hand. There was no ring, but not all men wore them. And he had spoken so easily about kids nowadays . . .

  ‘Do you have children? Are you married?’ she blurted out, and then busied herself with putting down her glass of champagne on the table so she wouldn’t see him answer yes.

  ‘No. Never found the right woman,’ he said lightly. ‘Still looking! And you?’

  It hadn’t occurred to her that she herself was married. Her expression would have been comic if there had been any spectators to appreciate it.

  ‘Married, but no kids,’ she mumbled, and realized that she had wrapped her hands together and started to squeeze her wedding and engagement rings as if to minimize them. ‘He’s, uh, he’s a lot older than me.’

  Ronaldo nodded politely, as if he understood why she had chosen to phrase it this way, and reached out to refill her glass.

  ‘So you stayed on in the States?’ Bella said quickly. ‘I mean, obviously.’

  ‘Yes!’ He beamed. ‘I love it. It’s so can-do here. That’s a total cliché, of course, but it’s true. Sure, there’s a class system, though they like to pretend there isn’t. But as a Brit, I skip all that. Back home I’d always have been the son of a housekeeper. Coming here was the best thing that ever happened to me.’

  ‘And you live here? I mean, in Chicago?’

  Ronaldo was an advertising agency executive; he lived in Lake Shore East, in a condo with spectacular views, he told her. He’d bounced around the States like an eager puppy, trying out different cities to settle down in as soon as his green card came through: New York was too crammed, LA’s highways insane, San Francisco lovely but too laid-back for him. Chicago had everything he wanted – great buzz and nightlife, with amazing summers during which he made the most of the thirty miles of beach that bordered the city. Did Bella know that Chicago’s motto was Urbs in Horto, or ‘City In A Garden’? Despite the fact that Bella’s family ran one of the biggest hotels in the city, she had to admit that she did not.

  Yes, Ronaldo acknowledged, the winters were harsh, but coming from Britain, he couldn’t settle down on the West Coast. He needed to live through full seasons: it was great to have snow in winter and the glorious Chicago summers, watch the changing of the foliage that was so famous in America. He’d been learning to paddleboard, he said, patting his completely flat stomach, as he was really starting to have to take his exercise seriously if he wanted to keep eating the local deep-pan pizza . . .

  Deep-pan pizza! Had Bella ever tried it? She hadn’t? He supposed whenever she was here on business they took her to fancy restaurants. She said that actually, she mostly ordered from room service when travelling, to wind down after a long day’s work, and that was what she had been planning to do that evening . . .

  From then on, events moved so swiftly they seemed to blur together, a TV show on fast-forward. Ronaldo whisked her away in a cab to a branch of what he said was the most famous pizza place in Chicago, Lou Malnati’s. There were practically no choices, he explained, because these toppings were just the best: plain cheese; spinach, mushroom and tomato; sausage or pepperoni; that was pretty much it. They ordered three, so Bella could try the full range, and Ronaldo would not allow any of them to be thin crust. Her first time at Lou’s had to be all deep dish, he said, because she was finally eating out properly in his adopted city.

  Curled into their red leather booth, her stockinged feet once more under her, drinking cheap red wine, Bella could not remember when she had been happier. This was totally spontaneous, down-to-earth, like a date, like being normal, not someone who lived such a five-star life that she had no idea of the last time she had gone out to a chain restaurant, sat in a diner booth, kicked off her shoes.

  When they finally admitted defeat, pushed the still-brimming pizza plates fractionally away to signify that they were finished, laughing at their crazy ambition, they didn’t sit back in the booth. They stayed leaning forward, elbows propped on the table, their faces close. Ronaldo apologized for bringing Bella Sachs, of all people, to such a destination; Bella promptly fell over herself to tell him that she had enjoyed it more than anywhere she had eaten out in months. He asked how long she was staying: could he make amends by taking her somewhere seriously chic and smart tomorrow night?

  Bella’s schedule was tightly planned, every section of her world tour fitted together as perfectly as the workings of an antique grandfather clock. Tomorrow was another full day in the office: the next morning was an early flight to Dallas and then an equally full day of meetings there. It was unthinkable that she could go out after work twice in a row, drink this much – God knew what state she would be
in tomorrow morning, they were well into their second bottle of Chianti! – and get on a plane in any decent state to send her bags to the Sachs Dallas on landing, so that she could head for the Texas office and the team who were waiting to be briefed by her.

  Even tonight had been insane. She ought to get an Uber or a Lyft straight away, head back to her suite, take a sleeping pill, hope that tomorrow’s hangover wouldn’t be too painful. She opened her mouth to tell him this and heard herself say instead:

  ‘That sounds lovely! I’m here for quite a few days, I think. We have lots to get through and I haven’t visited this branch in a while. But can you spare the time? Two nights in a row? I know people in the States book themselves up really far ahead—’

  She was fishing pathetically to see if he had a date planned for tomorrow that he would be cancelling for her; she was positively babbling.

  ‘Bella,’ he said gently. He reached across the table, across the pizzas that were covering almost its entire surface, one shirt cuff trailing a little in tomato sauce; he glanced down and grinned as he saw what had happened, not remotely caring about the stain on his shirt as he took her hand. His shirt collar was open now; he had taken off his tie, and Bella did not know where to look.

  There was nowhere safe. His skin glowed; they had always joked that Ronaldo had a permatan because of his Portuguese heritage. His face, his hands, his muscled wrists, the strong column of his neck, the tight dark curls of chest hair just visible above the button of his shirt: it was impossible not to wonder what the rest of his body was like. When she dropped her gaze to the hand holding hers, she could see dark hairs twisting around his watch strap, and she wanted to unbutton the cuff of his shirt, push it back, reveal his forearm.