Jilly Cooper - Bella

‘So glad you’ve recovered your appetite,’ said Lazlo in amusement.

Cass cooked a marvellous dinner and, afterwards, Bella offered to wash up. Lazlo said he’d help her. But at exactly ten o’clock, after he’d given her back a third plate to wash because it still had mustard on the bottom, something snapped inside her.

Picking up the remains of the duck, she hurled it at Lazlo, missing him of course. Then she selected a very ripe peach and chucked it against the wall, then she kicked over Cass’s music stand.

Lazlo started to laugh, ‘Tell me, Bella, what are you going to do when you grow up?’

‘Stop sending me up,’ she screamed. Then she started breaking plates. That had Lazlo worried.

‘Pack it in,’ he snapped. Then, when she wouldn’t, he slapped her extremely hard across the face. For a minute she glared at him, her eyes watering from the pain. She gave a sob and fled upstairs. In her bedroom her rage evaporated. Feeling bitterly ashamed of herself, she undressed and got into bed.

She lay still, listening to approaching thunder — her eyelids feeling as though they’d been pinned back from her eyes. She heard Cass and Grenville come to bed, laughing fondly. At last she drifted into an uneasy sleep.

It was the most terrifying dream she’d ever had. She was suffocating, drowning, unable to escape. Then she started screaming. Suddenly the room was flooded with light — Lazlo was standing in the doorway. The next moment he’d crossed the room and taken her in his arms.

‘It’s all right, baby, it’s all right. It’s only a bad dream.’

She could feel the warmth from his body. His fingers beneath her shoulder blades. What did it matter now that he was the person she loathed most in the world? He was at least a human being.

‘I can’t take any more,’ she sobbed. ‘I get this nightmare over and over again. I dream I’m drowning in blood — and I know it’s my mother’s. Oh God,’ she buried her face in her hands.

‘Come on. Talk about it.’

‘I can’t,’ she whispered. Then, suddenly, everything came pouring out. She wasn’t really talking to Lazlo, but to herself.

‘I’ve always lied about my past,’ she said in a choked voice. ‘I was so ashamed of it. My mother was very respectable, the daughter of a Christian Science minister. But she fell in love with my father. He was divine, but as bent as a corkscrew. My mother didn’t realize he’d been in prison four times for larceny even before she married him. For a bit he tried to go straight, but he kept getting sacked from different jobs. Then I was born. There was no money, and my mother was forced to go out to work.’

‘Go on,’ said Lazlo.

‘She worked as a char, in other people’s houses, but money finally got so short my father stole the church funds. My mother found the money under the floorboards, and she went straight to the minister, her father, and told him. That night they confronted my father and said they were going to the police. Can you imagine it? Grassing on your own family? My father made a bolt for it. There was a fight; my grandfather fell and hit his head on the fender, and later he died in hospital. My father got life imprisonment for murder. My mother never visited him. He died in prison ten years later, from TB.’

She paused and the faded mirror at the end of the room glinted gold with a strange rose-yellow flash. A violent crack of thunder split the air. Rain exploded from the sky.

‘It was during the court case that my mother discovered my father was already married and I was il-il. .’ she gagged over the word.

‘Illegitimate,’ said Lazlo.

Bella nodded. ‘My mother never smiled again. She moved to another part of Yorkshire, a little town called Nalesworth where no-one knew her. She went on working as a daily and saved enough money to send me to a good school. But I hated it. All the other girls laughed at my ugly clothes and my thick accent. My mother was continually terrified I was going to take after my father. I look like him, you see. She used to beat me and lock me for hours in a darkened room, while she sallied forth to church meetings.

‘I grew to hate her.’ Bella’s voice was so quiet now against the hiss of the rain, that Lazlo could hardly hear it. ‘I used to dream and dream of escaping to London and becoming an actress. When I was seventeen they discovered she had cancer. But being a Christian Scientist she wouldn’t let them give her any drugs. She must have been in agony, and it made her far more vicious. She used to drag her body round the house, running her fingers along the furniture to see if I’d dusted properly. We hadn’t any money so I had to leave school and take a job in the local draper’s shop.

‘And then I met Steve.’ She paused. ‘He was working at one of the local discos. He was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. He seemed to exude Hollywood glamour, the bright lights and freedom. Needless to say, he seduced me the first time I went out with him. In the end my mother found out. She ranted and raved, but she was too weak to do anything about it.

‘One morning I heard two girls gossiping in the shop about Steve, saying he was seducing half the West Riding and running up bills everywhere. I went mad. I rushed round to his digs and found he’d walked out without even saying goodbye to me. He’d left no address. I knew my mother was dying, but I spent all day and all night combing the town for him. I got home at four o’clock in the morning. Two neighbours were with my mother. She was in a coma. She never recovered.’

Bella was shaking like a leaf now, trying to stop herself from crying.

‘They all hated me in the town,’ she said. ‘They drew their curtains and whispered behind their hands about how evil I was. For three days I was alone in the house, surrounded by all those damn wreaths of lilies. But I couldn’t think about anything except Steve leaving me. I was half crazy with misery. It was only after a while that I realized what I’d done to my mother. Then the nightmares started.’

‘What happened then?’

‘I came South. There was a little money left when the house was sold. I got a scholarship to RADA, changed my name to Bella Parkinson, told everyone my father was a librarian, my mother a schoolmistress. Lies I told so often I almost came to believe them.’

She looked down at her hands, ‘Now you know everything.’

‘I knew most of it already.’

‘You did? But how? Did Steve tell you?’

‘A little. I’ve got a good information service.’

Bella gave a hollow laugh. ‘No wonder you didn’t want me to marry Rupert. The bastard daughter of a murderer. Hardly Debrett is it?’

‘I didn’t care a damn about your background.’

She looked up in surprise. Lazlo didn’t seem appalled, or angry or contemptuous, or any of the other things she’d expected anyone she’d ever told the truth to be. For once his dark mocking face looked completely serious.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter what happened before in your life. No-one minds except you. It’s what you are — talented, funny.’ He glanced down at her blotched, tear-stained face and smiled slightly. ‘Yes, even beautiful, that’s important. The Henriques have a pretty seamy past if you study it. Only four centuries back they were raping, looting and murdering to get the things they wanted. They just did it a few hundred years earlier than your father did. Besides, he wasn’t a murderer. He just killed someone in a fight.’

‘Like you did,’ said Bella.

‘Like I killed Miguel Rodriguez,’ said Lazlo, his face hardening.

Gently, he laid her back in bed, and got to his feet. ‘I’m going to get you a sleeping pill.’

It was only when he came back that she realized he was still dressed in the black shirt and dirty white trousers he’d been wearing all evening.