Venetia’s summer flew by. Work, Jack, work – with a two-week interlude at the Hotel Cala Di Volpe in Sardinia with Camilla, who had insisted Venetia needed the break. Venetia had spent the entire fortnight miserable, missing Jack so terribly she had forced herself to see a shrink on her return. Her discussion with eminent pyschotherapist Dr Margaret MacKenzie in her Marylebone practice had thrown up all sorts of thorny personal issues she would rather have pushed under the carpet, including her teenage abortion and subsequent sexual relationships. But it hadn’t been the quick fix Venetia had wanted. Dr MacKenzie explained that it was not her job to give Venetia any answers, only to guide her towards finding those answers herself.
‘How would you describe your sex life with your husband?’ Dr MacKenzie had asked Venetia from the comfort of her B&B Italia sofa.
‘Laughable,’ Venetia had answered, before telling her that over the past eighteen months she had constantly faked orgasms with Jonathon in the name of carnal duty.
‘And why do you think that is?’ the doctor had replied.
‘I got pregnant at seventeen. My father forced me to have it terminated, and for a long time I thought sex was dirty, guilty, wrong.’
‘Is that how you feel now?’
Venetia squirmed when she thought of her guilt over Jack Kidman. ‘Guilty, yes.’
‘Guilty about the act of sex?’ asked Dr MacKenzie after Venetia had told her about the affair.
‘Guilty about how I feel,’ said Venetia.
And that was at the heart of it, she thought as she walked away from the practice. It wasn’t just raw passion any more with Jack Kidman; it was a deeper, more spiritual connection than that. Infidelity was supposed to be something illicit, dangerous and destructive, wasn’t it? It wasn’t supposed to feel like this: something secure, protected and meaningful. Venetia didn’t need Margaret MacKenzie’s expensive services to tell her that her relationship with Jack was heading towards something more serious.
Ten days later Venetia lay in her lover’s bed, a shaft of morning light pouring through the window over their naked bodies.
‘What are you thinking about?’ asked Jack in a gentle, amused voice, his fingers removing a piece of stray hair from her face.
Venetia shifted her body against his. ‘I was just thinking I should get to work. It’s the show in ten days and I’ve so much to do.’
‘You should have stayed here last night. I thought Jonathon was away on business.’
‘I know,’ said Venetia, ‘But …’
She still did not feel that brave yet. What if Jonathon had phoned the house late at night? What would her housekeeper Christina have thought coming down to make breakfast to find nobody in the house? What if, what if, what if? It was all simply too risky.
‘Can I see you tonight?’ teased Jack, pulling her closer with his arm. ‘You’re starving me of attention.’
Thinking about Jonathon’s return from Geneva that afternoon, she suddenly found herself becoming very cross, angered by the injustice of the whole situation.
‘You’re so bloody selfish,’ she snapped, twisting her long body towards him.
‘Selfish?’ asked Jack, surprised.
‘It’s OK for you. You’re retired, you don’t have a job, you don’t live with anybody, you’re separated from your wife. You can come and go as you please. I wish it was like that for me too, but it’s not. Things are different in my world. I can’t afford to be so bloody selfish.’
She swung her legs out of the bed and pulled on a silk kimono, stalking into the en-suite bathroom to splash her face with water. Jack let her irritation wash over him and sat back in the bed to watch her, furiously flossing her teeth in front of the mirror. She padded across Jack’s huge Westbourne Grove apartment and into the high-tech stainless steel kitchen, opening the fridge to pour a glass of ice-cold milk into a crystal tumbler. Leaning her elbows on the marble top of the breakfast bar, she let the cool liquid slide down her throat. She heard his footsteps behind her and felt a pair of strong arms wrap themselves around her waist. For one moment, she didn’t look back, enjoying the sensation of his fingers touching her skin through the silk of the kimono. She could tell he was naked, too, feeling the shape of his penis push in against her back.
‘So leave him,’ whispered Jack.
Venetia spun around, stunned. ‘I can’t leave Jonathon,’ she said flatly.
‘Why not? You’ve told me you don’t like the way he makes you feel; you don’t have any kids. Do you even love him?’
She angrily pushed the hair back off her face and put the glass down on the marble, unfathomably finding herself wanting to defend her marriage. ‘Love hasn’t got anything to do with it. Jonathon is my husband.’
‘Love has got everything to do with it, Venetia.’ He looked at her, shaking his head, uncharacteristically losing his temper. ‘You’ve serious fucking issues.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning that you make excuses for people, stay loyal to people, no matter how badly they treat you, because that’s how you expect to be treated – badly. You will never be happy until you learn to say no, learn to walk away or learn to just be a little more selfish.’
His words were so raw and truthful and brutal, that she physically ached. ‘If you’d had my father, you’d understand,’ she said softly, too pained to respond with any anger.
Jack came and held her chin between his fingers. ‘You deserve to get whatever you want, Venetia. Don’t let your father make you think you’re not worth it. Because you are.’
She nodded.
‘I love you,’ he said quietly.
Venetia went to take a breath, but nothing seemed to happen. Her throat felt clamped in a vice with a sense of rising panic. He loved her. It seemed about two minutes ago, that night under the stars in Seville when they’d first kissed. Now he was suggesting breaking up the fabric of her life as she knew it.
She pressed her fingers against his back, pulling him as close as she could. She knew what she wanted. She wanted Jack Kidman. But she didn’t know if she was strong enough to have him.
It was half past twelve by the time Venetia got back to her shop. Brix Sanderson was waiting for her on the roof terrace, sipping a cup of Earl Grey tea – no milk, but a thick wedge of lemon. Brix was London’s top fashion PR and one of the capital’s most fabulous dykes. She had a long mane of auburn curls, an eighties nose-job and the urgent manner of someone who always got things done.
‘Nice spread,’ said Brix with a wicked smile as Venetia strode onto the terrace.
‘Sorry?’ said Venetia.
‘This!’ said Brix, motioning towards the table. ‘You’ve got such sodding good taste!’
Even a cup of tea at Venetia Balcon’s shop was an event. The wrought-iron table was covered with an ebony-coloured linen tablecloth. The china was sparkling white, Art Deco in design. Sachets of tea sat colour-coded in another circular china bowl, while napkins, starched white and stiff, were folded like Origami figures on the table.
‘Thanks for coming to the store,’ said Venetia, pulling up a chair. ‘And sorry I had to cancel lunch, I’m too busy to even think about going anywhere other than here or home,’ she said, feeling slightly guilty that she’d had enough time to spend the entire morning in bed with her lover.
She knew that Brix would have been equally busy in the throes of Fashion Week. Her agency, Blue Monday, did the PR for many fashion