Across the Mersey - Annie Groves [80]
A group of young men and women on the other side of the dance floor were laughing at something and jostling one another, as they played some sort of noisy game. Alan had stopped drinking to watch them. Trixie emerged from the middle of the mêlée, flushed and laughing, and triumphantly clutching a man’s handkerchief.
‘Oh, I say, well done, Trixie,’ one of them congratulated her whilst the others all clapped.
Three older couples were occupying the table next to their own and Bella heard one of the women saying indulgently, ‘Dear Trixie, such a good sort. She runs the local Cub pack, you know, and all the boys adore her.’
Bella gave Trixie with a sour look. She was the one everyone ought to have been fussing around and praising tonight, not Trixie. She was, after all, the only young bride here; Trixie was just Trixie, a dull boring maypole of a girl without looks or style. Trixie couldn’t hold a candle to her and yet somehow and very unfairly she had managed to make herself the centre of attention, whilst she was left here alone as her husband stood at the bar and the other two couples they were seated with made excuses to go and get some supper. Bella could feel the sharp prickle of unwanted tears stinging the backs of her eyes.
This time Alan just better have bought her those pearls she had shown him in the jeweller’s window, that was all. Otherwise …
She stood up and made her way to the bar, giving Alan a doe-eyed look of still newly married adoration as she put her hand on his arm and stood close to him, before pouting and then reaching up to fuss over him and straighten his tie, and whisper just loud enough for the others to hear, ‘It’s lonely at the table without you.’
‘I always said you were a lucky chap, Alan,’ one of the older men told him.
A couple of the other men laughed and warned him teasingly, ‘Just you wait until you’ve been married for a few years; she’ll be waiting for you with a hard rolling pin then, not soft words.’
They might be talking to Alan but it was her they were looking at. Bella revelled in being the focus of their attention, clinging to Alan as she laughed and pouted and flirted, and made sure that they saw her as an adoring young wife whilst Alan saw how much he was envied by his friends for being married to her.
This was what she had expected and wanted from her marriage: this attention and admiration; this knowledge that other men thought she was more attractive than their own dull wives, and her own husband’s recognition of his extreme good fortune.
What had been merely a fiction when she had come to join Alan was now, as she basked in the attention, fact. She was what she had wanted to be. How all the still unmarried young women must envy her, especially poor Trixie.
Bella preened and posed, her eyes sparkling and her lips readily parting in a smile. She was the first of their set to become a wife. Others would follow her lead, but she had that lead and she intended to keep it.
Yes, she was feeling very pleased with herself, Bella decided half an hour later, standing in front of the mirror in the crowded powder room, reapplying her lipstick.
Two girls, whom she knew vaguely, were standing next to her, one of them admiring the other’s engagement ring, whilst she spoke breathlessly of being in love with her fiancé.
Deliberately Bella looked at her own wedding ring and smiled at them, interrupting their conversation to say complacently, ‘Personally I don’t think it’s possible to know what love truly is until one is married. Being a wife is so very different to being a fiancée.’ She gave them a smile that said she was in on a secret from which they were excluded, showing off her married status.
Trixie was standing behind her, her plain face looking even plainer and her brown eyes stark with misery. Good, let her be miserable. Bella was sick of hearing Alan’s mother and