But Babs was five years older, and she had mothered Fee from the moment Jim Garland had brought her and her mother home to his three-year-old daughter, and through all the years afterwards when all they had had to depend on was each other, Jim usually away among his beloved mountains, Angela invariably out pursuing some new man.
Showering hastily, Fee let her mind drift back to Warren Bates, wondering how the teenage attraction between them might have developed if that vile man Simon Rhodes hadn’t interfered so unforgivably.
Then, inevitably, her thoughts returned to the situation she had left behind in Australia, with her name and photo all over the sleazier examples of the popular Press, Mrs Sheldon disillusioned, Miss Betancourt disappointed, and the famous Vance Sheldon himself in a towering rage, blaming her and some of his rivals equally for the way he was suddenly an object of derision all over the country, and ringing her up at intervals, alternately to vent his anger and to attempt to bully her into co-operating with his efforts to restore his previously respectable public image by returning to work just as if nothing had happened.
She hadn’t done anything wrong. Fee knew that most of the time, but the knowledge couldn’t alter the fact that people had been hurt just because she had been so gullible—so stupidly trusting. She too had been hurt, mostly in her self-confidence, because she had misread a situation, and she grieved over the loss of a job she had liked, but it was the way she shrank from public attention that had sent her fleeing for home, that shrinking a legacy from her teens when shyness and her height combined had made her physically awkward in company. She had learnt to move gracefully since, but she still hated attention, and the way the Press had pursued her had terrified her. Sometimes they had actually seemed to be baying, like some pack of wild animals, after her blood.
It took a physical effort to wrench her mind free of the echoes and concentrate on her reflection in the bedroom mirror. During the years away from Hong Kong, she had cultivated a softly sophisticated image, but as she knew only too well, and as Babs had obviously realised, it was only that, an image.
Always slim, the weight she had lost in recent weeks had left her willowy and over-slender now, with the shadowy hollows at her temples and beneath her cheekbones giving her a frighteningly fragile look. She just didn’t look tough enough, she reflected unhappily, and, with the way her fair skin inevitably betrayed her with blushes, how was she going to withstand everyone’s curiosity? But she looked composed enough now, her pallor pronounced, emphasising the natural flush of her sensitive lips while her eyes were always shadowy, their blue colour too dark to be identified from a distance, and her graceful black and white skirt worn with a simple sleeveless black top for this warm July night added to the subdued but subtly sophisticated effect. Only her long dark hair, with its tendency to unruly curls unless she wasted time trying to discipline it, provided a contrast.
Having been hearing sounds of people arriving for some time now, she went downstairs reluctantly, apprehension mounting as she reached the hallway and heard the rising swell of sound from the lounge, the noise reminding her a little of those reporters in Australia even though she knew that this wasn’t hostile.
And what was she going to do if everyone was as kind as Babs and Charles and the people who had phoned? Everyone had been so nice to her, and it just wasn’t doing her any good. She had come home quite instinctively when the pressure had become unbearable, thinking she would be tougher here, among people who had known her since childhood, but it wasn’t working. The support and sympathy she was receiving weakened instead of strengthened, and she was furious at finding herself frequently on the verge of tears in response.
‘Little Fee should be down in a minute,’ Babs was telling someone just inside the lounge.
‘Little Fee?’ At least there was one person who didn’t subscribe to general opinion, and Fee stiffened in shock, instantly recognising the sardonic drawl despite the years gone by since she had last heard it, and in no doubt that nothing complimentary was meant by the contradiction. ‘As I recall, she was always a great gangling girl, lurching around all over the place, tipping drinks over people and depositing herself in their laps. I wonder if that’s how she caught the great Vance Sheldon? It would need to have been something either original or extreme, with a high-flyer like that.’
‘Stop being so vile, Simon,’ Babs protested. ‘Obviously the man took advantage of the child.’
‘Child? She must be—how old?’
‘Twenty-two, but…’
Fee had turned and begun to creep back up the stairs, so she didn’t hear any more, but halfway up she halted and sat down although she was still in full view of anyone who might come out into the hallway. Resolve lifted her chin. She couldn’t allow what had happened in Australia to drive her back into the shell from which she had spent painful years struggling to emerge.
But Simon Rhodes! Somehow she had believed that he would have moved on, now that Babs and Charles and, presumably, most of the people who had made up their hedonistic social circle were all respectably married.
Because Simon wouldn’t be.
Of course, he and Charles had been friends, she recalled, her shock beginning to recede, and Charles had once been almost as enthusiastic a bachelor as Simon, but how could they have anything in common now? As it was, Simon had tended to become bored with people in general almost as quickly as he tired of the women with whom he involved himself, simply because he was so over-endowed with intelligence.
As for his girlfriends, Hong Kong must be teeming with his rejects by now unless he had changed quite dramatically, Fee reflected with an amusement she had never been able to feel back in the days when Simon Rhodes had always managed to embarrass her in one way or another.
She had detested him then, always uncomfortable in his presence and resenting him for it, although she knew her own inadequacies had been partly responsible for that, having been in her teens and recently grown too tall, too fast to have acquired any sort of grace. But Simon had played his part too, a man whose devastating charm and sophistication had made her feel charmless and gauche by contrast, and whose self-confidence and public success had awed her.
Even then, five or six years ago, Rhodes Properties had reputedly made him a millionaire, and a highly visible one, thanks to his energetic social habits. Rumoured to be a genius, and definitely clever, his womanising contradicted both rumour and fact since most of his short-lived romantic or sexual liaisons featured women of distinctly limited intellect, although some great female minds were also said to have succumbed to his undeniable charm.
He was also known to be temperamental, and Fee, who substituted selfish and superficial for all the more popular descriptions, had twice found herself on the receiving end of his temper, the first occasion being when he had rejected one woman in favour of another at one of Babs’ parties, the memory still capable of making her cringe. Fee needed to think a minute before recalling that the woman had been one Ismay Compton. Oh, she had been so naive, raging at him like that after overhearing his coolly ruthless rejection and witnessing Ismay’s tearful departure.
‘How can you be so brutal?’ she had stormed at him on emerging from the downstairs room in which they had installed the computer which, infuriatingly, Simon had helped her and Babs to choose after the latter had decided that Fee needed one at home in order to assist the commercial course she was taking at school and had somehow got the money out of Jim Garland. ‘Can’t you see she loves you, you horrible man?’
‘Quite possibly she does, but love doesn’t last, as you’ll find out for yourself, darling.’ Clearly hovering between amusement and the irritation that was making his eyes glitter, Simon had paused, examining her critically. ‘Although not from me, I’m afraid, if that’s what you’re hanging around in the hope of, as I find teeny-boppers a singularly unprepossessing species. But see me when you’ve grown up and acquired some looks and experience, and I might be prepared to reconsider.’
In those days, she had lacked the composure to correct his arrogant assumption, rage and embarrassment rendering her inarticulate,