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‘You’ve never seen me dressed up.’
‘Well, no, but I’ve seen you dressed down, which was what I thought you might have meant—my apologies.’
Martha cast him an angry look beneath her lashes, and went out of her way for the entire afternoon to be as common as she possibly could. But, far from being perturbed, he took her to dinner and took her home without attempting to lay a finger on her.
Which provoked her, although she could have killed herself, into saying, with her hand on the car door-handle, ‘I see you’re not flashing any fifty-dollar notes around tonight, mister.’
‘Would you like me to?’
‘Suit yourself.’ She shrugged. ‘’Night, then!’ And she slipped out of the car. He made no attempt to stop her.
But over the next few weeks it wasn’t always like that. In fact, over the next few weeks she reminded herself of a cat on hot bricks. She would wonder if she’d ever see him again and tell herself she didn’t care, but knew she did. She hated the way he could, simply by arriving on her doorstep, make her heart start to pound like a drum and all her nerves quiver. But if he left her without touching her she felt incredibly bereft, even while, when he did kiss her, she tried to go out of her way to let him know she didn’t give a damn. Which only amuses him, she reflected once, and had to amend that, Well, not always. Sometimes he gives me back more than I bargained for; sometimes he can be much cleverer and more cutting in what he says, as if there’s a darker side to him than he normally displays.
So this is really crazy, she told herself angrily. It’s as if I don’t know myself any more. Why am I continuing this farce? Because he believes it, an inner voice answered, and you can’t forgive him for that. And that’s even crazier, she thought miserably. But that very evening when he turned up out of the blue and she resolved to have done with Simon Macquarie he all but routed her completely.
‘It’s a beautiful night. Would you like to drive to South Head? We could watch the moon over the sea.’
‘No,’ Martha said ungraciously. ‘Look here, mister, don’t think you can turn up whenever it suits you and expect me to be all sweetness and light and availability.’ She had, in fact, just got home herself from the job she’d at last got—curiously with an opposition catering company and doing exactly what she’d been doing when they’d met. Although this time she wore a conservative black dress and a frilly voile apron.
‘I see,’ he drawled, leaning his broad shoulders against the wall and watching her lazily as she pulled the apron off and threw it over a chair. ‘Has one of your Latin lovers claimed you for the night? You know, Martha, there’s not a great deal of evidence of men splurging on you.’
‘There will be,’ she said flatly. ‘I just haven’t yet met the type who can afford to splurge. Barring you, of course. I don’t know why, but I’ve got the feeling you’re something of a miser, Mr Simon Macquarie. Either that or the world’s not drinking much cognac these days.’ She grimaced. ‘And don’t,’ she said curiously tautly as he moved his shoulders, ‘give me that old spiel about concentrating on my beautiful soul.’
‘No,’ he murmured. ‘I won’t. To be honest, I’m not sure what kind of a soul you have, Martha, but you do have an exquisite body: skin like smooth satin, lovely bone-structure beautiful eyes...Have you ever been in love?’
‘You’re joking,’ she said scornfully.
‘So you don’t believe in it?’
‘Right at this moment, no.’ She turned away with a toss of her hair. ‘But don’t let that keep you awake at nights!’
‘Martha.’
She stiffened as he spoke from right behind her, and said, ‘Why don’t you just go away?’
‘I will, when I’ve done this—no, don’t fight me. We both know now that you quite like it despite the lack of a commercial, paying aspect to it that’s obviously dear to your heart.’
She turned and said fiercely, ‘You’re so clever, aren’t you?’
‘Not always, no, otherwise I wouldn’t be here doing this,’ he drawled. ‘But since I am ...’
What prompted her to kiss him back with sudden tense, angry fervour was not entirely a mystery to her. What it led to was...
They’d turned no lights on but the moon he’d spoken of was enough to illuminate the old settee they sat on, the curve of her breasts where her button-through dress lay open and had slipped off her shoulders, her front-opening bra laid aside, her head on his shoulder.
Nor did it hide how she trembled as he drew his fingers down her skin and touched her nipples in turn, and how she mutely, at last, raised her mouth for his kiss in a gesture that told its own tale.
But although he did kiss her it was brief and strangely gentle, and then he moved her away and closed the edges of her dress for her, before standing up.
‘You don’t want to go any further?’ she said in a strained, husky voice that wasn’t much like her tart voice.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Then ...?’
‘I think we should resist it, Martha,’ he said abruptly. ‘And I probably don’t have to tell you why. I don’t make a practice of buying love.’
Martha closed her eyes then glanced down and started to do up her bra and her dress. He said nothing but watched her bent head.
‘OK,’ she said at last, and stood up herself.
‘Just ...OK?’ he queried drily.
‘What do you want me to say?’ Some of the colour that had drained from her cheeks was coming back—too much of it, she thought shakily but made an incredible effort. ‘Cheers, it’s been good to know you—that kind of thing? Why not?’
‘Martha——’
But she turned on him suddenly like a tigress. ‘Go away, mister. I know that you’re trying to tell me I’m not good enough for you—well, you don’t have to make a picnic of it! Just go away and stay away and see if I care!’
It was at that moment that her downstairs neighbour who lived with his invalid mother and, despite his dark hair and dark eyes, was a very sober, serious-minded twenty-three-year-old dentistry student, knocked on the door to ask for a couple of teabags, only to get the surprise of his life as Martha opened it.
‘Vinny, darling, come in,’ she said delightedly. ‘Simon’s just leaving. Couldn’t have worked it out better if I’d timed it with an egg-timer, could I?’
So that’s that, Martha said to herself several times over the next days. I’ll never see him again, for which I should be profoundly grateful.
But she couldn’t help but be shocked by the pain this brought to her heart.
In the event, she did see him again. Three days later, just as she was about to leave for work, he came with a bunch of daisies.
‘Oh, now look here,’ she began, but discovered her heart was beating erratically with, of all things, hope.
‘Could you just ask me in, Martha?’
She hesitated, then with an inward tremor thought, Have I got another chance? Could I tell him how this all happened, how it got out of hand?
‘Well, I have to go to work in ten minutes but I suppose so.’
‘Ten minutes is all it will take.’
‘I could make a quick cup of coffee,’ she said, trying to keep her voice steady, trying for anything that would give her courage.
‘No. No, thank you. These are for you.’ He held out the daisies. ‘I’m going home this afternoon. I...’ he paused ‘...I felt I should come and say goodbye.’
‘Going home—to the UK?’ Her voice seemed to her to come from far off. ‘How long have you known that?’
He shrugged. ‘Weeks. Martha, there are some things——’
But she took the daisies and clenched her fist around the stems. ‘Well! You’re a fine one, aren’t you, mister? In fact I don’t think you’re any better than the dirty old men who pinch me on the bottom.’
‘That’s something I haven’t done, you must admit, Martha,’ he objected wryly.
‘No, you’ve gone a lot further, you must admit, Simon,’ she parodied angrily, ‘and all in the cause of amusing yourself at my expense. If you must know I think you’re a right bastard.’
‘Oh, come on, Martha,’ he said roughly, ‘what did you expect—a diamond bracelet? Or were you trying to hang out for a wedding-ring? Trying,’ he emphasised, ‘not terribly successfully a couple of nights ago.’
The sheer, soul-searing memory of his rejection that night fired her poor abused heart to fury. ‘I hate you,’ she gasped, and slapped his face with all the force she was capable of. ‘What’s more, if all you can afford are daisies——’ she tore some heads off the offending flowers, totally ignoring the fact that she rather liked daisies normally ‘—I’m much better off without you.’
‘I wonder,’ he murmured, and wrested the battered bunch from her grasp, pulled her into his arms and started to kiss her brutally.
‘Oh ...’ she whispered when it was over but could say no more and he didn’t release her.
He said instead, ‘I came here to try to talk some sense into you, Martha. To tell you to stop this dangerous game you’re playing with men, but I guess my earlier conviction was correct—once a tart always a tart.’ He smiled unpleasantly as she moved convulsively in his arms and added, ‘God help any man who does fall in love with you, my little Aussie tart; they’ll probably regret the day they were born.’
He released her then, picked up the remnants of his flowers, closed her hand round the tattered bunch and left.
‘Oh, Martha ...’
Martha came back to the present with a bump as she observed the new tears in Jane’s eyes. ‘Janey,’ she said ruefully, ‘you wanted to know—now you do. And I was supposed to be cheering you up, not the opposite!’
‘But it’s so sad,’ Jane protested.
‘No, it’s not, not any more.’ Martha jumped up suddenly and strode over to the window. ‘I made a fool of myself; I guess we all do that sometimes but I’m much wiser now.’
‘And you just can’t forget him, can you?’ Jane said softly. ‘Is that why there’s been no one else?’
Martha was silent for a long moment, then she said wearily, ‘Jane, wouldn’t you hate to think of yourself reduced to that by a man who was no more in love with you than——? I can’t even think of a comparison. So yes,’ she said shortly, ‘there are some things that are hard to forget.’
‘But you didn’t give him much of a chance to fall in love with you by the sound of it, Martha,’ Jane objected.
‘I wanted him to, though. I can’t tell you how much... Oh, what the hell?’ She turned back from the window defiantly. ‘The thing was, despite all those wild hopes and dreams, do you know why I kept up that appalling act? Because I knew deep down I was so way out of his league that he would never do more than amuse himself with me.’
‘But why?’ Jane asked intensely. ‘You’re beautiful, you’ve got spirit, you’re intelligent, you——’
Martha held up a hand. ‘All that’s——’
‘True!’ Jane insisted.
‘Pretty girls are a dime a dozen,’ Martha said scornfully. ‘If I fell by the wayside no one would even notice. The thing is, in those days I was raw,’ she said baldly. ‘Oh, I don’t mean I was uncultured or uneducated but I was certainly unsophisticated,’ she added impatiently. ‘I had lived all my life on a farm not quite beyond the black stump but not far from it and I only knew about sheep and horses and motorbikes—don’t you see?’
‘Yes, I do,’ Jane replied. ‘Not that I agree with raw, except perhaps in your heart.’ She stopped and waited.
Martha paced around a bit then tossed her long fair hair back with something like a shiver.
. ‘Displaced, dispossessed, dumped in a big city with no qualifications—of course you were raw,’ Jane said quietly. ‘With pain and anger, with a huge chip on your shoulder against life and all those who lived it with wealth and ease and assurance—and hungry for love. You were also nineteen,’ she added prosaically as Martha cast her a look that told her clearly she was verging on the dramatic, then grinned. ‘Don’t forget your hormones, ducky. Every magazine you ever read tells you they can make a girl’s life hell!’
Martha stared down at her, then her beautiful mouth curved into a reluctant smile and she plonked down on the other end of the settee. ‘Promise me something—don’t let’s lose touch——Oh, no,’ she said helplessly as more tears fell but Jane started to laugh through them and protest that this was the final shower...
It was an eight-hour flight to Singapore, then nearly twelve to London, which gave Martha a lot of time to think, and she sighed several times and wished rather devoutly that she hadn’t unburdened herself so to Jane because it had brought it all back and made her wonder how long it would take to forget Simon Macquarie.
I suppose I should take my own words of wisdom to heart, she thought with irony once, and remind myself that if it hadn’t been for him I mightn’t be where I am today. She laid her head back in the dim cabin as the 747 flew through the night and most people slept around her, and acknowledged that as a direct result of that stormy encounter she’d made a pledge to herself that one day she would be the kind of girl a man like Simon Macquarie could fall in love with. Assured, sophisticated, worldly and certainly not a hot-tempered, rash spitfire who had to wear abbreviated clothes to make a living.
Yet it had been clothes that had got her started towards her goals. Not that she’d even considered modelling clothes as her chosen career; it had chosen her one day out of the blue when at yet another wearying cocktail party a young man with a ponytail and two cameras slung round his neck had touched her on the shoulder and told her in broken English that he could make her into the next Elle MacPherson.
He hadn’t, of course. But she’d slowly worked her way into both photographic and catwalk modelling with André Yacob’s help, not only photographically but because he’d been able to impart to her some of his almost uncanny love and understanding of fabrics and clothes—and in the process enhanced both their financial positions quite considerably. Which had given her the leeway to go about sophisticating herself, as she thought of it, and to help her parents after the awful tragedy of losing their farm, until they both died within months of each other. That was when she’d decided to fulfil her longheld dream of travelling abroad, and although André had nearly burst into tears and had begged her to stay he’d finally succumbed to her determination and come good in a surprising way. Since she’d had a pair of English-born grandparents and was able to get a work permit, he’d said she might as well keep her hand in at the same time and had written to a friend of his mother’s in London—a dress designer, Madame Minter—introducing Martha. Consequently, Martha had an appointment to see Madame Minter the day after she arrived. Although not well-known in Australia, Martha had heard the name and heard it spoken with some reverence.
But if it comes to nothing I’ll just start my holiday, Martha thought for the umpteenth time somewhere over India; now why don’t you go to sleep?
But even when she did fall asleep she dreamt about Simon Macquarie watching her with that dispassionate, lazy amusement he was so good at, or occasionally with something darker in his eyes and mood that she detected but couldn’t understand—as she systematically pulled up beds and beds of daisies...
‘Well?’
‘Dear, oh, dear!’
Martha took a deep breath in the rather barn-like studio above an exclusive Chelsea shopfront that featured only one exquisite black silk dress in the window behind the gold scroll on the glass that said simply ‘Yvette Minter’, and thought, This is all I need! Because, on top of jet-lag, her luggage had been lost, she’d had to cope with her first dizzying experience of London, buy herself some clothes and now, only twenty-four hours after landing, was confronted with this angular, autocratic French woman who’d looked her up and down and, in only slightly less fractured English than André’s, commanded her to strut her stuff in a strapless gold evening gown with a huge, billowing, unmanageable skirt. And now she was shaking her head sorrowfully.
Martha’s chin came up. ‘Look, I know I might not be looking my best, Madame Minter, but I can’t be that bad,’ she said drily.
Madame Minter pulled a scrap of lace from her pocket and applied it to her eyes, still shaking her head sorrowfully.
‘OK!’ Martha tossed her head. ‘Say no more, love!’ And she reached behind her to unhook the dress.
‘Stop, you foolish child,’ Madame Minter commanded, and put the hanky away. ‘I only express thees emotion because I wonder where you ’ave been all my life—ah, the ‘auteur, the wonderful disdain. I ’ave not seen the like of it for years!’
Martha’s mouth fell open.
Madame Minter continued, though, ‘And just a leetle touch of vulnerability now and then! Plus the athleticism, the legs, the river of gold ’air, the eyes like deep pansies, the delicate bone-structure so sometimes you will look like a great lady, sometimes like a tomboy. Ah, when I ‘ave finished weeth you, Miss Martha, London will never know what ’as heet eet. And we’ll sell an awful lot of my clothes, you and I,’ she added in brisk, perfectly unaccented English.
‘I...I’m...’
Yvette Minter smiled. ‘I cultivate my French accent for clients, you know. And sometimes under strong emotion it cultivates me. But tell me, why has André been keeping you to himself all this time?’
‘I...Do you mind if I sit down?’ Martha said. ‘When I’ve taken the dress off, of course. One thing: I refuse to pout, I always have, but it upsets some photographers.’
‘Who’s asking you to pout? I loathe pouting women myself!’
Which was how, later, she came to be sitting in a cramped office wearing a silk kimono, drinking strong coffee and listening dazedly to Madame Minter.
‘You will be my in-house model,’ she was saying. ‘I sacked the last one, silly cow. I mean to say——’ as Martha blinked ‘—she actually began to remind me of a stately bovine. She had these large unblinking eyes and she never moved with any...flair. Naturally, when I show my collection,’ she went on without pause ‘I employ other models, but you will be assured of a place. I have a showing coming up in about a month—dear, oh, dear!’
Martha frowned. ‘What?’
‘I could have designed it all around you. Never to mind, the next one——’
‘Madame, this is all very flattering but——’
‘You wish to discuss terms and so on?’ Madame eyed her shrewdly. ‘What kind of a contract I intend to put you under? One year minimum,’ she said succinctly.
Martha blinked. ‘Well, I’m not sure,’ she said slowly. ‘This is supposed to be a holiday, really, and I want to travel——’
