by Lorraine Bowyer

Created on: October 10, 2008   Last Updated: March 03, 2012

The Handbag

A story of heartbreak and betrayal

Beth sat down at one of the window tables in the restaurant and carefully positioned her chair so that she could watch the interior of the room as well as the road outside.

She had ordered a white wine spritzer when she walked in and as the waitress placed it in front of her, Beth ran an appraising eye over the other diners sat around her. She wasn't nosy as such, but had always felt that she had an intuitive ability to assess other peoples' relationships and would often while away time trying to listen in to conversations to see if her guesses were correct.

Beth was waiting for her friend Louisa to arrive for lunch. They had met a couple of years ago when they both went to the Pilates classes that were held in the Village Hall on Thursday mornings.

Although Beth no longer attended the classes, the arrangement to meet for lunch once a month had continued. Louisa had gradually become one of Beth's pet projects, someone that she could really get her teeth into, in the nicest possible way. Louisa was a quiet, self-contained person, not one to open her heart and Beth had initially struggled to find out much about Louisa's past. She had discovered early on that her friend was single now, but there had been a husband in the past and that it had all ended very suddenly.

So Beth had arranged several dinner parties and sat Louisa next to a series of un-prepossessing single men from her husband Jimmy's office. Eventually, Louisa started to decline the invitations. It was only one Sunday when Beth had been speculating to Jimmy for nearly an hour about what the circumstances of Louisa's past might have been, that he snapped at her and announced that her husband had died of Leukaemia. Beth had secretly been a bit disappointed at the news as she had imagined something racier, but it then took her another month before she remembered to ask Jimmy how he knew. It turned out that he had seen Louisa waiting for the bus at the Cemetery; it had been raining, so he offered her a lift. Beth thought how kind this had been as she was aware that Jimmy didn't particularly like Louisa as they had never passed more than a couple of words at Beth's romance' dinner parties.

Looking out the window she saw her friend crossing the road. As she entered the restaurant, Beth saw that she was carrying her Bergamo handbag. Both women had bought their identical handbags from the Boutique in the High Street each believing them to be unique pieces, but

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