Across the Mersey - Annie Groves [66]
They had been later arriving at the hotel than planned and the porter who had let them in had been scowling and unwelcoming. The room itself was nowhere near as elegant as it had appeared in the brochure, and smelled slightly stale and damp.
Bella eyed the double bed, with its slightly grubby-looking dark green sateen eiderdown, with distaste.
Their bedroom at their new home had been freshly wallpapered in a pretty pink and white floral paper and she had insisted of having the most expensive bed linen Lewis’s could supply, and a lovely pale pink eiderdown and matching coverlet. Her trousseau contained a silk lace-trimmed nightdress with a matching peignoir in the same soft shade of pink, just like she had seen Vivien Leigh wearing in a photograph in Picture Post; only, of course, it would look better on her because she was blonde.
She didn’t want to waste her new finery on a setting that so obviously did not deserve it, but since she had nothing else with her she would have to do so. She looked at her reflection in the room’s single slightly tarnished mirror. Her tweed going-away suit, with its fur collar, was the new season’s latest design, the last shipment they were likely to get from Paris, Lewis’s À La Mode Gown Salon had told her. Her hat matched the blue flecks in the tweed exactly and highlighted the colour of her eyes. She was wearing the single row of pearls her mother had removed from her own neck to fasten round Bella’s before she had left the reception whilst looking pointedly at Alan. Bella’s mouth compressed. She had not just hinted, but dragged him to the jeweller’s to show him the double row of pearls she had expected him to give her as a wedding gift, and when he hadn’t produced them she had been furious.
Angrily she removed the pin from her hat.
Alan was sprawling in the room’s single armchair, watching her.
‘You might at least have thanked Mummy and Daddy for everything they’ve done for us,’ she told him as she took off her hat and shook her hair free.
‘Thank them? For what? Forcing me into marrying you?’
He lifted the hip flask to his mouth and then when he realised it was empty, he threw it so hard into the empty fire grate that the grate dented it.
Two spots of angry colour started to burn on Bella’s cheeks. Not once since the night at the Tennis Club had Alan mentioned the circumstances of their engagement and subsequent marriage, and Bella had assumed that he would never do so. He had wanted to marry her really, she had told herself, and it was only that Trixie who had put last-minute doubts into his mind.
‘You’d as good as proposed to me. Everyone knew that.’
‘Proposed?’ He gave a coarse laugh. ‘That’s rich. Propositioned you, maybe, and only that because you’d been chasing after me so hard ever since we’d met.’
‘Me chase you! I’ll have you know there were plenty of other boys wanting to take me out.’
‘Yes, for the same reason as me. Because they wanted to fuck you and they reckoned it would be easy to get into your knickers,’ he told her crudely.
Bella was genuinely shocked. Spoiled and indulged all her life by her mother, and allowed to grow up believing that whatever kind of behaviour she indulged in in order to get her own way was acceptable, she had no awareness of the interpretation others might put on that behaviour, or the boundaries she ought to have put on it herself.
She would no more have genuinely allowed Alan or any other man the kind of sexual favours he was referring to before marriage than she would have contemplated marrying a poor man with no prospects. Physical desire, the intensity of emotional passion – these were not things she had ever experienced, nor did she have any wish to do so, nor any understanding of them. Desire, for Bella, was something she felt for a new frock or a piece of jewellery, for marriage and status.
In the world Bella had created inside her head, a wife permitted