discovering Laura at the cottage, events had taken a welcome upturn. He found it difficult to dismiss Laura from his thoughts, her presence almost seeming to have followed him into the car. In the back of his mind he knew it was obvious she’d assumed there was something going on between the two of them but what proof had she got? So, she had seen him there. So what? That could be easily explained. And anyway, what was he worrying about, he asked himself. He and Bella hadn’t actually done anything. Ever since his close call with Tina, he had become a little paranoid about one of his dalliances being discovered and Laura could ruin everything. She didn’t strike Ben as the kind of person who would let an opportunity to make mischief pass her by. It wasn’t a nice thought and something which he didn’t choose to dwell on. The blast of a car’s horn focused his attention immediately back on the road. With his mind concentrating on Laura, he had strayed out of the centre lane as a car was about to overtake. It brought him back to his senses, in more ways than one, as the driver of the overtaking car shook a fist at him in anger and mouthed obvious obscenities relating to Ben’s capacity as a driver. The close call had brought perspiration to his forehead and he wiped it away with a tissue. In a couple of hours he would be back with Tina, if she was home yet, and immersed in all the problems of his marriage. He had to find some way of extricating himself from the mess without finding himself ruined in the process. Tristram’s discovery had nearly blown the whole thing wide open but, thankfully, at least Barbara was still happy to go along with their arrangement. Both sexually and financially. Ben couldn’t deny that she exerted a certain power over him and not only because she was very inventive, athletic and insatiable. She was also a party to his fraud and didn’t lose any opportunity to remind him of the fact. The whole thing was becoming very complicated, he admitted to himself, and he would need to be more careful than ever. His brow creased at the memory of something Barbara had said, only recently, referring to a new scheme she had thought up to milk even more money from the firm and he had realised then the similarities between his wife and Barbara. Give them an inch and they’d take a yard. Give them enough rope… Where would it all end? An image of Bella strayed into his thoughts. They had come so close to making love this morning and what he wouldn’t have given for it to have happened. He pictured them in the grass together, her naked in his arms, and his excitement stirred him. Somehow, she offered the solution to his problems, he knew, but he had to get her confidence. The pressure on him was beginning to tell, there was no doubt about that. He’d made two serious errors at work, recently, the worst of them involving one of the firm’s oldest clients and even though he’d salvaged the situation it was serious enough to have been raised at a partner’s meeting. Sometimes it felt as though the net was closing around him and he wondered, for the umpteenth time, how he could have let his life get in such a mess. The interior of the car suddenly felt chilly and he flicked the heater switch, appreciating the instant flow of warm air. A deft touch of a button brought the strains of a Greig piano concerto to his ears and he took a deep breath, expelling it as a long sigh.
“Bella Foxton,” he said, quietly, picturing her in his mind, once again. “Bella, Bella, Bella,” He repeated her christian name slowly in an Italian accent.  Ben Hollingsworth was not in the least way a religious person, and he was driving up the M3 towards London, hardly the road to Damascus but he had a revelation, nonetheless. In an instant, the solution came to him, a moment of electrifying clarity, with the intensity of a lightning flash and his boyish face lit up as he realised he’d hit on the answer. Without the shadow of a doubt he now knew, with unfailing certainty, exactly what he had to do.
Ă‚
The air was still and unmoving around Willow Cottage, the night warm and humid. Bella checked the doors and windows before going to bed quite early, happy in the knowledge that she planned to get up around 6am to resume work on the book. During the evening Ben had never been far from her thoughts as she considered the implications of his question. She couldn’t deny she was attracted to him and they seemed, on the surface, to be quite well suited. The urgency of her need for a physical relationship had to be discounted if she wanted to analyse her thoughts dispassionately and view their long-term prospects. Love? Now there was a question. It was an abstract notion that she had long ago given up on trying to quantify. A sentiment best left to writers and pop stars to anguish over. On a personal level, Bella had had her share of emotional highs and lows but it was so difficult to isolate love from the tangled web of human experience. If love could be certified by identifying specific criteria, as in a doctor making a diagnosis, then was it an essential for guaranteeing a successful relationship? In her experience, among people she knew, love evolved into a comfortable acceptance of one another, warts an’ all. An entirely different concept from the heady passion fuelled by the hormone-driven exuberance of youth. There was something missing between Ben and her which she couldn’t immediately identify and she still harboured a vague reservation about him which was also shrouded in mystery. Fatigue eventually overcame her until she couldn’t
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