Summoning Up Bella

by Peter Newall

Why the silverfish had to eat the only photograph I had of Bella I didn’t know. When I considered all the books and papers stuffed into shelves and cupboards throughout this old house, most of which don’t matter at all, it seemed grossly unfair that they had chosen this particular photograph.

It was a head and shoulders shot of Bella. She was posing rather archly with a camellia tucked behind one ear, looking up at the camera with her thick blonde hair spread out like a waterfall. She must have been sixteen.

I should be able to say I remember the day it was taken, but I can’t. I know it was in the garden of her parents’ house, which I remember well enough, and she liked to pose with a flower behind her ear, I remember that too, but even though I must have been behind the camera, I can’t remember that exact day.

The photograph had lain in a cigar box in my hall cupboard for a long time. I didn’t like to get it out and look at it too often; I’d wanted to preserve its freshness, its quality of surprise, my one photo of Bella. The small glossy paper rectangle stood for something, it proved we had been close, but it also captured something about her, I liked to think. It distressed me inordinately that it had been damaged.

What does a photograph really matter, though? In the end, it’s only a piece of paper, surely it’s what is in my mind that matters, and what I know about Bella, about us, is stored there, not in a photograph. And anyway, photographs take on a life of their own, they are not the person you knew any longer, they never look like that person actually looked, they replace the fragile, moving mental picture you are trying to retain of their walk, gestures, speech, smile, with a fixed two-dimensional image, from which the life quickly disappears. You lose something important when you look at photographs of people you knew, and you lose everything you actually knew about them when you rely on those photographs for your memories.

Her name was not Bella at all, it was Vesna, but I called her Bella as an attempted compliment once, and it stuck, I went on calling her that and it spread to her friends, who also started calling her Bella, maybe as a joke at first, but it became her name, her name for that time, anyway. I don’t know what she calls herself now. And of course she might have a different surname, too, if she has married.

We met in a coffee shop, I remembered, looking at the photograph. She was crying, and the girlfriend accompanying her – I knew her slightly – told me Bella had just broken up with her boyfriend. I was crazy about her on sight, and I spent the next hour trying to cheer her up, trying to chat her up, you might say, but I didn’t feel like that about it, I tried to console her, I bought her a peppermint tea or something similar; people drank that kind of thing in those days.

And I didn’t take her lightly, even though she was only young—young, I thought, how old was I, barely eighteen—I really was impressed by her, she had an inner grace, I thought, looking at the photograph. We were all consumed by the pre-Raphaelites in those days, and she was exactly that, a pre-Raphaelite beauty, with everything that went with it; being alongside her allowed me to imagine myself as a kind of knight-errant, far from the truth as that was.

It’s funny, I thought, looking at the photograph, for all these years I have said to myself, and indeed more than once to others, without naming her of course, that Bella was the one girl I ever really loved. I have said that off and on for thirty years, in fact, even though I suppose it is not strictly true; I knew her so little, understood her so little. She seemed so elusive that even when I held her, which was not often, I never quite believed she was really there.

In fact, I remembered, there were times when she could not go out with me for some reason, and I took her sister instead, a short, animated girl with corkscrew hair, I can’t tell now if I liked her for herself or whether it was just that she was Bella’s sister. Certainly I treated this sister platonically, or maybe I kissed her a couple of times, but nothing more. Of course we were all very young.

That was a winter of complete innocence. Cold clear blue days, the grass burned to a strawy khaki by nightly frosts. Crows sitting on the telephone wires above as we walked along by the railway line. Innocence, because, as I see it now, we basically acted at being girlfriend and boyfriend, as if we’d agreed to a simulation of it, that we’d do it more seriously when we were a bit older. So no fumbling attempts at physical passion; we both seemed content to have it that way.

Standing there in the hallway, looking at the photograph, I felt a great sorrow that we didn’t consummate the relationship, that we never were physically joined. If I had known then that chance would never come… But at that time I thought so highly of her that I didn’t want to exploit her. I held her to be better than that, better than me, really.

I was in a band then, which I hoped would impress her, but when she came to watch us she seemed indifferent. I was disappointed, disheartened, I could say, but of course she was only trying to be cool. What a business it was, striving to be cool as a teenager; I’d forgotten all that.

Even now I don’t know if Bella actually had the qualities I invested in her or if it was just my imagination, but I have always held, as an underpinning belief about my life, about the failure of my life, that in her I had the most beautiful girl in the world, the ideal girl, the one that was meant for me, and I let her go. Yet I didn’t fight hard to keep her when she wanted, on the advice of her girlfriends, so she told me, us to break up.  

Now it’s obvious, I thought, looking at the photograph, that was where I failed, failed us both, so badly. I should never have accepted this girlish capriciousness; indeed, she probably hoped I would overrule her. Instead I allowed myself to be offended, standing on adolescent pride. But then, I was certain it was a passing thing, and I could afford to wait for her because she was the one, and in time we would be together. Later, but too late, I heard from someone else that Bella believed this too, which made me desperately sad.

Anyway, we broke up, although, again, I always thought that was only temporary. Then I went away, to the city, and there allowed myself to be seduced by someone older and pushier. Time galloped on; a year, ten years, twenty years. I comforted myself with the belief that it was recoverable, my time, my life; for a long time I assumed, without thinking, that when I wanted I could simply go back to that point where I mis-stepped and start again, take the other path. To tell the truth, it’s only recently, much closer to the end of my life than the beginning, that I have understood I cannot.

So Bella remains the unrealised ideal. I don’t know what would have happened if we had gone away together, nothing better than what happened with that other girl, I suppose. The details would have been different, but the substance the same. I would have given Bella my sadness and she would have given me hers, in the end. But we never had to suffer that, never had to suffer real life, not together, anyway.

For many years I had in my possession a small square pink envelope addressed to me in a girlish hand, her hand. I was in the city and she still in that provincial town. For years and years I couldn’t bear to take out the little letter and read it again, though I knew perfectly well what it said, word for word. It began with the final stanza from The Lady of Shalott.

She, probably sensing my absence was about to become permanent, wrote to me in words that would have made me weep if I had not told myself young men were not permitted to weep. But still I carried at around for many years, that letter. I’m not sure where it is now. Perhaps I finally threw it in the fire in a fit of paranoia generated by another woman I lived with later, that happened with a few things. That woman’s habitual paranoia made me paranoid, and I tried to exorcise my history, as if it were some KGB file, by destroying anything incriminating. I destroyed something of great value with that letter, I think now, certainly the evidence of something real and heartfelt. 

And that was that. I have not seen Bella since we parted, that spring day on the country railway station platform, so long ago. There is no point in talking about my life since then; it’s so indistinguishable from so many other lives that the details are not worth the telling.  

The strange thing is, I thought, looking at what remained of the photograph of Bella, I always believed her eyes were green. That was how have I remembered her to myself all this time. But in the photograph, now that I looked at it closely, they are ice blue.