ill. And when she came to pack her clothes to take back with her to London, it disconcerted her to find how few of them still fitted.
She knew she had lost weight on the island. Everyone did. They were racing around so much and there was often not quite enough food to go round. But the emails said they all started going back to normal the moment they got home. Whereas she … She looked at herself in the mirror. Could she have lost more weight over this last crazy week? She had been eating, hadn’t she?
But, thinking about it, she realised that she hadn’t, or not much, not since her dinner with Lottie. She was never hungry at breakfast. At lunch-time she walked round, glad to get out into the air and move after the confines of her cubby hole. Bella tried but she couldn’t remember buying herself so much as a sandwich for lunch. In the evening, she could only be bothered to eat if Lottie was there.
Could her stepfather be right? Bella felt a flicker of alarm. Lottie’s older sister had had a bout of anorexia in her teens and she always said that it crept up on her. She’d started losing weight, everyone admired her, so she decided to lose more. And then she couldn’t stop.
I’m not a teenager, thought Bella. That’s not going to happen to me. I am in charge of my life. But she might have to take care to remember to eat, for a while.
The possibility did not even occur to her mother, though. ‘You can’t be too thin,’ she laughed.
They were at Janet’s golf club by then, where her buddies from the Ladies’ Section were frankly envious. They’d never had much time for Bella before. It was mutual, though Bella tried not to let it show, out of a sort of exasperated affection for her mother. They either interogatted her or offered advice on man-catching so explicit that it made Bella wince, which she tried to hide. But they were experts in diets.
‘Wish my daughter could lose a few pounds. You look like a model, darling,’ said the Social Secretary, her eyes snapping.
How could you say ‘darling’ and make it sound like ‘ratface’? The woman looked like a witch, too, with a thin scarlet mouth and expressionless Botoxed face. Bella was not impressed. But her mother preened, so she bit back a sharp retort. The husband of the Botoxed one had been knighted in the last New Year’s Honours, and Janet was dying to get them to come to her next drinks party.
‘She must be in love,’ said the Captain of the Ladies’ Section. She was wealthy singleton with a racy past and an eye for other people’s husbands. Bella often thought that the others only forgave her because of her mansion on the hill and her top-of-the-range Mercedes convertible. ‘That makes the pounds fly away, I always find.’
Everyone laughed sycophantically, though no one was really amused, thought Bella. The thin ones didn’t like the reminder that they didn’t have lovers and the fat ones didn’t want to remember that they weren’t thin.
I want to get out of here.
But Bella made the effort and laughed too, though she was starting to feel stifled. It often happened when she was with her mother’s friends.
‘Have you got a boyfriend, Bella?’ said the witch queen.
‘No,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said her mother loudly. She gave that trill of artificial laughter that always made Bella want to put her head under a cushion until she stopped. ‘Of course, her lovely Francis will be abroad for a while yet.’
The Ladies’ Section knew marketing when they saw it.
‘Broke up, did you?’
‘No,’ said Bella. Well, you couldn’t break up if you were never an item anyway, could you?
Her mother relaxed visibly. The daughter’s boyfriend was a very important status symbol in the Ladies’ Section. Bella started to count the hours before she could decently leave.
Her mother tried to persuade her to stay until Monday morning. ‘You know how dreadful Sunday trains are, Bella. You might just as well stay the night. You can go up with Kevin on the train tomorrow and then straight into work.’
But Bella felt that if she stayed any longer she would scream. ‘I’ve got all those clothes to take back,’ she said. ‘Don’t want to haul them through the rush hour. Besides, I want to get myself sorted before the start of the working week.’
Her mother argued but her stepfather came to her rescue.