‘Good. Although it would take a lot less time if you’d just get off your high horse and accept a car. All right, we’ve been through it all, but you must be the most stubborn, exasperating woman I’ve ever met. I have to go, darling, I can hear Flint surfacing, and if I’m not to be late I have to leave within three minutes.’
Aura hung up, wondering whether Flint would be in the flat that afternoon.
Of course not, she scoffed as she finished her toast and drank a cup of coffee. He had this important, slightly sinister-sounding job; he’d be at work giving the women there a thrill.
After the final fitting of the wedding-dress, she had lunch with an old friend of her grandmother’s before catching the bus to Paul’s apartment, walking the last hundred metres through the downpour that had been threatening all day. Her umbrella saved her head and shoulders, but she grimaced at the cold wetness of the rain on her legs and shoes. Much of this, and she’d have to think of getting a coat.
No, she thought as the last of the autumn leaves fluttered like dank brown parachutes to land in a soggy layer on the footpath, after they were married she’d have a car and life would be more convenient. But she still didn’t regret not having accepted Paul’s offer.
At least Flint couldn’t accuse her of unseemly greed.
Even the perfect, radiant flowers of the camellias were turning brown under the rain’s relentless attack, while pink and white and yellow daisies were being beaten into the dirt. In one garden dahlia plants in a wide bed were still green and leafy at the base; only the stalks that had held the brilliant flowers towards the sun were blackened and stiff.
Aura was overcome by a sudden, stringent melancholy, a weariness of the spirit that gripped her heart. It was the weather, she thought, shaking off her umbrella before she tapped out the code that opened the street door of the apartment complex. June was often fine, but this year it had decided to go straight into winter.
In two weeks’ time she’d be married to the nicest man she had ever met, and they would be flying to a luxurious little island of the coast of Fiji for their honeymoon, where she would have nothing to do but soak up the heat and the soft tropical ambience, and learn how to please Paul.
As though summoned by an evil angel, Flint’s voice echoed mockingly through her mind. ‘It’s about lying in a bed with him, making love, giving yourself to him, accepting his body, his sexuality with complete trust and enthusiasm…’
The door opened to her suddenly unsteady hand. She walked quickly across the foyer, nodding to the porter, her heels tapping coldly on the smooth, shiny marble. In the lift she pressed the button for the third floor.
Oh, she was a fool, letting him get to her like that. Of course she wanted to make love with Paul; she enjoyed his kisses, his caresses, they made her feel warm and loved and secure. That was why she had broken the other two engagements. Although she had liked both men very much, she had been unable to let them touch her beyond the mildest of caresses.
Paul was different. He had understood her wariness, the tentative fear she had never really overcome, and he hadn’t tried to rush her into a sexual relationship before they were married.
Of course Flint didn’t have the faintest idea that she was still a virgin! Forcing her mind away from his relentless tone as he accused her of being no better than a whore, she opened the door into Paul’s apartment.
The flowers had already arrived. Great sheaves of roses and carnations and Peruvian lilies stood in buckets in the kitchen, with sprays of little Singapore orchids and exquisitely bold cymbidiums, all in shades of pink and bronze and creamy-green. After hanging up her coat, Aura tried to banish her odd weariness by walking slowly around the big rooms of the flat, working out where to put vases.
An hour later she was arranging the roses in a huge vase on the hall table when, against the sounds of Kiri Te Kanawa’s magnificent voice singing Gershwin, she heard the front door open. A quick glance over her shoulder revealed the lean form of Flint Jansen strolling in through the door, completely at home, a perfectly detestable smile not softening his arrogant face.
Aura’s eyes evaded his and flew to the cheek she had slapped. Little sign of the blow remained, except for a slight reddening of the skin about the thin scar. Remorse and self-disgust roiled unpleasantly inside her.
‘Hello,’ she said, nervously banishing the fragmented images of last night’s dream that threatened to surge up from wherever she had marooned them.
The smile widened as he conducted a leisurely survey. Aura had slid her wet shoes off and was standing barefoot in a narrow tan skirt topped by a jersey the exact gold at the heart of the big cream chrysanthemums; her bronze and dark brown scarf was twisted a little sideways. Beneath Flint’s narrowed scrutiny she felt like an urchin.
‘The spirit of autumm,’ he said blandly, closing the door behind him and advancing into the hall. ‘Don’t let me interrupt you.’
‘I won’t.’ It was a short answer and far too revealing, but she felt as though someone had tilted the stable world on which she stood. An odd breathlessness made it difficult for her to speak. Turning back to the flowers, she pushed a splendid bronze-pink candelabrum of cymbidiums home.
‘I’m sorry I slapped you last night,’ she said abruptly.
Silence stretched tautly between them. She kept her eyes on the flowers in the vase.
‘Are you? I didn’t leave you with much option.’ There was no measurable emotion in his tone, nothing to tell her what he was thinking.
Her shoulders moved. ‘Nevertheless,’ she said gruffly, thrusting another large sprig of black matipo into the back of the arrangement, ‘I don’t normally go around hitting people.’
‘Your apology is accepted.’ Clearly he didn’t care a bit.
From the corner of her eye she watched him pick up one of the long-stemmed rosebuds. Hastily Aura averted her gaze, strangely affected by the sight of the fragile flower held so carefully in his lean strong hand as he raised it to his face.
‘It has no scent,’ he said on a detached note.
‘No. Most flowers cultivated for the markets have lost their scent. Even the carnations have very little.’ She was babbling, so she drew in a deep breath. Much more of his presence, she thought with slight hysteria, and she’d end up hyperventilating.
‘A pity. I’d rather have scent and fewer inches in the stem.’
‘Not all roses have scent.’
‘I prefer the ones that do.’
She nodded. ‘So do I.’
He held out the stem. Carefully avoiding his fingers, she took it.
‘Will they open?’ he asked.
She shrugged, and put the rose into the vase. ‘I don’t know. Sometimes they do, sometimes they die like that.’
‘Poor things. No scent, no blossoming, no seeding. Hardly flowers at all. I wonder what gave anyone the idea that these were preferable to the real thing.’ He walked into the sitting-room, saying off-handedly, ‘I’ll get you a drink.’
‘No, thanks, I don’t need one.’
But when he reappeared it was with a wine glass in one hand, and a glass of whisky well qualified with water in the other.
‘You might not,’ he said, ‘but I do, and as I never drink alone, you can accompany me. You look as though you could do with something. It’s only white wine, dry, with a hint of floral bouquet and a disconcerting note of passion. Heavy day?’
‘Not really,’ she said, reluctantly accepting the glass. He had made the description of the wine too intimate, too personal, his abrasive voice lingering over the words as though he