“Should I?” Bella asked, knowing full well and trying not to laugh.
“Half the women in London, no, correction, England would give anything for a date with that guy and you turn him away!” The stunned look on Jane’s face suggested that Bella had lost all reason.
“But I’m not half the women in England,” Bella reminded her, calmly.
“Jesus!” Jane exclaimed, bitterly, stamping her foot. “Jesus Christ!”
“Jane, what on earth’s the matter?” By now, Bella couldn’t help but be amused at her antics, knowing that she was hamming it up.
“Oh, there’s nothing the matter, sweetie, why should there be? It’s just that you turn away one of the country’s most eligible batchelors, with that little flick of the head of yours, and, as usual, I’m totally ignored.” Jane pushed her bottom lip out, as though she were sulking, and stared into her empty glass. “Probably thought you were talking to a tight head prop from Llanelli, anyway,” she said, gloomily.
From a woman’s point of view Jane was excellent company, being both lively and good-natured with an excellent sense of humour, but the qualities which made her such a good friend were not those that were the first to attract male attention. Not as a rule, anyway. As an adult, Bella hadn’t been given to thinking about her looks much, more or less taking them for granted, although growing up with Laura had demonstrated how important appearance could be. It wasn’t until she met Jane that she realised the torture and frustration that could be inflicted through being five foot four inches tall and a size eighteen. As Jane had once said of her looks, in a typical moment of candour, “If you’ve got it, you don’t think about it. If you haven’t, believe me, darling, you don’t think about anything else!”
Playing matchmaker had been a disaster and taught Bella a memorable lesson. Don’t interfere! Yet she had only acted out of the goodness of her heart and caused nothing but trouble, nearly losing Jane’s friendship in the process. She had found out the hard way that her good friend neither begged for nor appreciated sympathy, end of story. But that had been four years ago and now she had sensed a change in Jane, as if the relentless passage of time was sending her a message and that was what was worrying Bella. On a whim, she decided to go across to Hampstead and Parliament Hill Fields, one of London’s great open spaces, somewhere she hadn’t been in almost a year. Although Jane had been occupying her thoughts, there was also the pressing matter of the next book. The idea of a brisk walk in the fresh air appealed to her as it might be just the thing to blow away the cobwebs and give her some inspiration on both fronts. Inevitably, she couldn’t even think about the book, briefly, without the cottage coming to mind. In some strange way she felt as though it had already insinuated itself into her life in such a manner that it seemed impossible to reconcile herself to the fact that she had known about it for less than a week. Bella was not a believer, in any spiritual sense, but the emotional bonds she built with people went very deep.
In seeking an explanation for her feelings, it comforted her to think that Rupert, her Uncle Foxy, was reaching out from another dimension to act as the guardian of her future, as he had looked after her in the past. He had gone but left behind him an existential legacy to insure that he wouldn’t be forgotten. But she could never forget him, not after everything he had done for her. More than anything, he had instilled in Bella a sense of family, of belonging, something that had never existed in her young life, after the death of her father and the estrangement of her sister and for that she was eternally grateful. Perhaps that was why she felt as she did about the cottage, like it was part of her past as well as her future. Part of the family. It all seemed to fit into place so neatly that the excitement of it all consigned memories of the visit to The Lamb to the far recesses of her mind where it was incapable of intruding into her happiness. Feeling exuberant as she slowed for the junction with East Heath Road, on the spur of the moment she decided to turn left and make for the Spaniards Inn. Some years back a favourite place of hers, it was a sixteenth-century pub said to once be the haunt of the notorious highwayman Dick Turpin. If Bella was seeking inspiration, it just so happened that a breeding ground for myth and legend might provide the right atmosphere.
Later that same day, when the last vestiges of daylight had disappeared and dusk had turned, inexorably, into night, a meeting was being held in a small upstairs room above the saloon bar of The Lamb. The setting was drab, even dowdy, with the brown, lacquered paint on the panelling of the walls peeling in places, and a threadbare, green carpet covering the floor. A pair of crumpled, beige curtains which were slightly too short for the windows had been roughly drawn and the faint odour of mothballs permeated the air. An old trestle table, which usually lay along one wall of the room, with its legs folded up, had been hastily set up and nine chairs had been placed around it. Every one of those senior members of the Knapthorne community, now seated around the table, could remember the chairs from their time at Sunday school. The hard, wooden seats with their circular pattern and the unforgiving backs which consisted of two, arched hoops one inside the other. Like everything else in the room, nothing much had changed after decades of use. Illumination, such as it was, came from a number of wall-mounted lamps around the room, two each on the longer walls and a single lamp on the others. The bulbs, of which there were two to a lamp, were shaped like a candle flame and screened from view behind pink glass sculptured in the form of a shell. At the far end of the room, opposite where the chairman was seated, one of the bulbs had blown some eighteen months previously and had never been replaced. The committee comprised seven men and two women, each and every one of whom had been born and raised in the village. Samuel Handysides, the publican, who had known everyone in the room for forty years or more, chaired the meeting and there was only one item on the agenda. There was none of the usual levity that preceded most of their meetings and the seriousness of the matter in hand was reflected on the faces of all those present.
Chapter Five
It is called the Doppler effect, when the intensity of a sound wave increases or decreases in relation to the distance of an object. An example is the muted sound of a far-off train which intensifies with its approach then lessens once it has passed. Bella experienced something similar as the ringing of her telephone woke her, at first seeming to come from a long, long way off then steadily increasing in volume as she came to full consciousness. Drowsily, eyes still closed, she flopped a hand over the surface of the bedside cabinet searching for the offending instrument until, at last, she found it. For months she had been meaning to dispose of her landline. Now she was convinced it had to go.
“Hello?” She answered the call, her voice thick with sleep.
“Bella, is that you? It’s Maria.” The sound of her mother’s voice rung alarm bells in her head. Suddenly she was wide awake. Although the two of them kept in contact regularly, by e-mail or messaging, it was unusual for her to call unless something dire had happened and Bella could recall all too vividly, as if it were yesterday, when Maria had rung to tell her that Liam was dying.
“Mother! Is everything alright?” Bella was unable to hide her surprise.
“Yes, of course! Why shouldn’t it be?” Maria spoke excellent English, having been privately tutored as a child but her first language had come in very useful when she was married. During her frequent rows with Patrick she would often revert to Italian, annoying him immensely as he couldn’t understand a word she was saying. “Does it have to take a disaster for a mother to call her daughter?”
“No, mother, but that’s what usually happens,” she replied, easing herself up into a sitting position then running a hand through her hair. “So why are you calling at this unearthly hour?” Bella looked at the clock, blinking rapidly as she tried to focus. The hands indicated it was a little after 6.45am. She stretched and yawned expansively.
“Your sister phoned, last night, and told me about Rupert’s will.” At the mention of Laura, Bella’s mood changed instantly, lik
e the sun going behind a cloud. It wasn’t difficult to work out what the call would have been about and Bella could just imagine the whining, nasal tones of Laura’s voice complaining down the phone line. “She told me about the cottage,” Maria said, adding nothing more, obviously waiting for Bella to say something. Bella sighed, wishing the day hadn’t started this way.
“Just what, exactly, did she tell you?” No, she thought, I’m not getting into this. I’ve got better things to do. “Never mind, mother, I don’t want to know. Rupert left me a cottage, in his will. It’s that simple.”
“Laura didn’t sound too pleased, I must say.” Bella closed her eyes, wondering if she should count to ten. “Anyway, I just called to let you know I thought it was extremely kind of Rupert and perhaps I might come over and see it, some time.”
“I’d love you to!” Bella replied, enthusiastically. Maria and her were still close, seeing each other once or twice a year. Laura, on the other hand, had not seen her mother for years and the only time she phoned was when she had something to complain about. A sudden thought occurred to Bella.
“You weren’t mentioned in the will, which I thought was a bit odd.” Maria’s tinkling laughter came down the line.
“Rupert looked after me very well when your father died. He was very generous, dear and I’ve never wanted for anything but the arrangement was made on the basis that it was a one-off settlement.”
“I do miss him, you know,” Bella admitted, wistfully.
“He was a lovely man. I often thought I should have married him and not your father…”
“Why do you say that?”
“It’s nothing to bother your pretty head about, only the rantings of a lonely old lady.”
“Mother! You’re not even sixty. And as for being lonely, I’ve never known anybody with as many friends as you. Anyway, talking about my father, I’d like to know more about him sometime…”
“One day, cara mio, one day.” It was the answer she always gave and Bella didn’t pursue it.
“…well, I’ve got a busy day ahead of me so I’d better get up. Let me know when you want to come over, hm?”
“I will. You look after yourself, eh? Ciao!
Bella was incensed! Bloody Laura! Why did she always have to be stirring up trouble? She sat at her dressing table, clad only in her sheer silk nightdress, furiously tugging a brush through her hair as her mind seethed over her sister. I might have known she’d do something like this, Bella thought, in exasperation, though quite what Laura had hoped to achieve she had no idea. Laura and her mother had never got on that well, even before Laura left home. Now, they were almost strangers. It was obvious, Bella reasoned, that her sister’s nose was well out of joint over the cottage and that was only likely to mean more problems. If only Liam were alive! He would have no trouble sorting her out. Laura had thought the world of Liam because he didn’t make fun of her, like the rest of the boys, and he always had time to listen to her problems. One thing with Laura was that she could never disguise her feelings, especially with regard to Liam, and, Bella recalled, you only had to look at her eyes when he came into the room to see how she felt. Knowing how close they had been, she had thought it odd that Laura hadn’t bothered to go to New York and see him when he was dying. But that was Laura, strange and unpredictable. She felt the beginnings of a headache and closed her eyes, briefly. Not today, please, she prayed silently. Sometimes when she sensed a headache coming on it was through the need for food. Although that was unlikely first thing in the morning, the idea of an early breakfast appealed as it might help get her day back on track. As she got up from the dressing table, Bella was determined not to let the thought of Laura spoil things for her. What she needed to do was focus on the important things in her own life, now that everything was coming together so nicely, and not let her sister upset her. If Laura persisted in making a nuisance of herself then she would have to have it out with her, once and for all. The trouble was, she had always felt desperately sorry for her sister and would have given anything to have had a normal relationship with her. Thinking about this, as she removed a short cotton robe from her wardrobe and put it on, took her way back to their childhood, and it was difficult to remember Laura as being anything other than short-tempered and spiteful. A fleeting thought occurred to her then, as often happened, that if she were seeking material for a book she probably had more than an ample sufficiency right on her own doorstep. Little did she know how right she was.
Nothing much ever got Bella down for long. It wasn’t in her nature to let things bother her unnecessarily and if a situation persisted she would try and bring it to a sensible conclusion as quickly as possible. By sheer force of will power she stopped thinking about Laura and let herself concentrate on the exciting prospect of going back to the cottage. Her plan had been to rise early, pick up some lunch from the deli round the corner and get away as soon as possible. Being a Saturday morning, traffic would be heavy and she wanted to give herself plenty of time, not having done the journey by road. She estimated it would take her around three hours to get there and she wanted to waste no time in setting out. It was funny how she couldn’t think about the cottage without being reminded of Ben. Now, the more she thought about last weekend, the more she realised how much she had enjoyed being with him. And she was starting to miss the physical contact of a man, something that she could never starve herself of for very long. If she were honest, the meeting with Jane had unsettled her and forced her to think more positively about getting into a relationship. Although she was younger than her editor by at least four or five years, Bella had already experienced the difficulty, as she had grown older, of meeting men of a suitable age who hadn’t got some kind of emotional baggage weighing them down. She had learned the hard way that it was best to strike out the words ‘Help carry your bags, sir?’ from her emotional phrasebook.
Breakfast, followed by a shower, restored her sense of well-being and the headache had eased. Now, all she wanted to do was get on the road, as soon as possible. Eager to get the cottage looking the way she wanted and with a deadline to meet for her next book it was all the incentive she needed to get cracking. Selecting something to wear was easy. In common with most women, Bella enjoyed dressing up. Every little part of it, from painting her toenails to choosing the right lingerie, trying on one garment after another then picking the right accessories. It was part of the female ritual, a mystery to most men, as was the application of make-up. Certainly, in Bella’s case, the effort was worth it because nobody could argue that she looked stunning but, for all the pleasure it gave her, she was never happier than in a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt. As far as she knew, none of her female friends were aware that she frequented op shops, looking for clothes, on a regular basis, and obtained as much satisfaction from picking up a bargain as she did when purchasing a brand-new designer label. Satisfied she hadn’t forgotten anything she needed to take with her, Bella was having one last check to make sure everything that should be switched off was and that all the windows were securely locked, when her mobile rang.
“Typical,” she muttered, not recognising the number on the screen. “Bella Foxton?” Relieved it wasn't Laura she didn't immediately recognise the caller's voice either.
“Bella? It’s Ben. How are you?”
“I’m fine,” she replied, a smile in her voice, yet caught off-balance by his call.
“I’ve been looking for an excuse to ring you but couldn’t come up with anything so I thought, to hell with it, I’ll ring anyway. I wondered about lunch, on Sunday?”
“Oh, Ben, I can’t. You’ve literally caught me as I’m about to go out the door. I’m going down to the cottage for the weekend.” Bella felt more than a little disappointed. She would have looked forward to seeing him but there was no way she was going to cancel her trip, though she was flattered by his call. And he was married, she reminded herself.
“Oh, what a pity. Never mind, it was a long shot, anyway, I suppose.” Ben wasn’t about to
let it go at that, however. “I am going to need to see you, to tie up the loose ends of your inheritance. How about lunch, on Thursday? You could come to the office first.”
“Sounds fine. I’ll look forward to it. Look, I don’t want to appear rude, Ben, but I would like to get away as soon as possible, what with the traffic and it being the weekend. Just give me a time and I’ll be there.
“How’s 11.30 sound?”
“Terrific. I’ll see you then, ok?”
“Alright. Enjoy your weekend. I’ll be thinking of you.”
As she took the M25 to get south of the city, Bella thought about the implication of those parting words of his on the phone. It might just have been a comment made on the spur of the moment but it certainly put a more personal emphasis on things. What would his wife say, for instance, if she knew what he’d be thinking about over the weekend? The thought amused Bella but only because she was seeing herself in a different light. Not so long ago, the illicit nature of the liaison alone would have been a temptation in itself. She recalled a quote from a literary friend, who said that Dickens had summed up adultery perfectly with the title, A Tale of Two Cities, with reference to duplicity and complicity. A sudden cacophony, right beside Bella made her jump and put an abrupt end to her speculation. A driver in the next lane, on her right, had given a blast on his air horns, accompanied by flashing headlights, as an inducement to the driver in front of him to pull over. With the traffic moving at over seventy miles an hour and all three lanes busy what did he expect the car in front of him to do, she wondered. A quick glance to her right identified the driver as a young male, probably early 20’s, with a clean-shaven head, his eyes hidden behind a pair of sunglasses. It was a cloudy, overcast sort of day, threatening rain. Without warning, as a gap opened up in her lane, the car on her right accelerated and swerved in front of Bella, causing her momentarily to brake sharply and she watched, in disbelief, as he passed on the inside of the car in the outside lane. In a triumphant gesture to the other driver, he stabbed the air with the middle finger of his right hand then swerved back into the outside lane. Fortunately for her, the car behind wasn’t too close but, if it had have been, a serious accident could have resulted. Bella had broken out in a cold sweat, regardless. As her pulse began to return to normal, she thought of the wide, quiet main street running through Knapthorne and the rural peacefulness of Spinney Lane. What on earth was she doing in this rat race? As far as she was concerned, the sooner she arrived at Willow Cottage the better.
The Knapthorne Conspiracy Page 8
