‘Does she… does she know how you feel, I mean…’
‘About you?’ Mel shook his head. ‘Not specifically. ‘Oh, she knows that all is not as it should be, perhaps even how I feel about you, but nothing else. I’m going to go away for a while, India. I know that my duty, I suppose I should call it, lies with Alison and my children, but I need time to come to terms with it, time to gather my strength, if you like…’
‘Where will you go?’
‘I haven’t decided.’
They left the restaurant in a silence which continued during the taxi journey, almost morose on Mel’s part, and pitying on India’s—not just for Mel, but for his wife as well, and it wasn’t until the taxi stopped that she realised where they were. The taxi had come to a standstill outside the expensive block of apartments where Mel lived.
‘Come in and have a drink with me, please,’ he begged, and India hadn’t the heart to refuse.
She had been in his apartment before, but never late at night, alone with him. It had a curiously sterile appearance, despite the obvious expense of the furniture and fittings.
‘Alison hates this place,’ he told India over their drink. ‘She prefers the country. I think I’ll give the apartment up. After all, I’ve got to a position in life now, where I can quite easily work from home… Alison and I should never have married. We’re too different.’
‘How did you meet?’ India asked him gently, sensing his need to talk.
‘At a charity function. She was what was then called a deb—her mother’s family are very well connected; not much money but generations of blue-blood and the “right” marriages. She was small, and dark, and was the only person there who didn’t seem to look down on me. I was very conscious in those days of my “nouveau-richeness”. To cut a long story short, we both convinced ourselves that what we felt for one another was love and we got married. It didn’t take very long for the gilt to tarnish. Alison tried to re-model me along the lines of her friends’ husbands; and then the boys came along and she seemed to lose interest in me altogether…’
‘You loved her once,’ India reminded him softly, ‘and she loved you. You both have a responsibility to your children and to each other.’
‘Responsibility!’ Mel laughed bitterly. ‘God, that’s a sterile, relentless word. Come on, I’d better get you a taxi.’
‘It isn’t very far—I’ll walk.’
‘No way.’
Reluctantly she allowed him to order her a taxi, smiling a little at his insistence on accompanying her downstairs to the street when it arrived.
‘What do you think’s going to happen to me?’ she teased, her expression changing when she saw the haunted look in his eyes. Oblivious to the taxi and the passing traffic, she put her hands on either side of his face.
‘Oh, Mel, please don’t look like that,’ she whispered. ‘It will all work out… I know it will.’
‘Will it?’ With a muffled groan he pulled her into his arms, kissing her with a fierce urgency which she did nothing to prevent, knowing in her heart that this was his final goodbye.
Held fast in his arms, overwhelmed by pity, she was unaware of the sleek green Ferrari speeding past them, or of the bitter cynicism in the eyes of the man who observed them.
Another hour and she’d have to call it day, India decided wearily. She had spent the last week working on designs for dresses for one of her oldest customers and her daughter for the latter’s eighteenth birthday party. Celia Harvey was small and plump with smooth dark hair and an almost Madonna-like expression, and India would dearly liked to have dressed her in something soft and flowing, almost pre-Raphaelite, but she had been told in no uncertain terms by the young lady in question that she wanted something slinky and sexy à la Anthony Price. Her mother had raised her eyebrows in despair, and India sympathised.
Well, either Celia would like it, or she would have to find herself another designer, she decided at length, frowning critically over the multitude of careful drawings she had sketched. Her head was beginning to ache with familiar tension and she flexed her back, rubbing the base of her neck tiredly. Jennifer and the girls from the workroom had left hours before, and outside the streets were in darkness. She glanced at her watch. Nearly nine. Another evening almost gone, and all she wanted to do was to go home, soak in a hot bath and then go to bed.
She grimaced as she remembered the letter she had received that morning from her accountant. It was time they had a meeting, he reminded her. The trouble was that her clientele was expanding all the time, and it was becoming too much of a burden for her to design, and run the financial side of her business. The obvious answer was to take on someone to deal with the financial side, but who? It was at times like this that she missed Mel—selfishly, she admitted. She hadn’t seen him since the evening they had dined together at Jardine’s, and she had presumed that he had gone away, as he had said he intended to do, to sort himself out.
She herself was badly in need of a holiday. Summer had never seemed farther away. London was having one of the worst springs on record, with cold, blustery winds, and almost constant rain.
Of course it was impossible to find a taxi when she emerged into the street. Rather than wait for a bus she set off at a brisk pace in the direction of her flat, and got caught between bus stops in an icy downpour which soaked through her raincoat, the fierce wind making it impossible to keep her umbrella up. To cap it all, a speeding car, screeching round a corner in front of her, sent freezing cold water all over her legs, soaking through the hem of her coat, and by the time she reached the sanctuary of her flat she was both frozen and bad-tempered.
She ran a bath, and luxuriated in it for half an hour, feeling the strain of the day seeping away. With her newly shampooed hair wrapped in a towel she padded into her small kitchen to heat a bowl of soup. When she worked as she was doing at the moment her appetite seemed to desert her. She could have done without Celia’s dress right now; she already had enough orders to keep her going until the autumn.
She was becoming obsessed with the salon, she told herself wryly. Jenny had been saying only that morning that she never went out anywhere any longer. She had pleaded the excuse of there simply being not enough time, but Jenny had scoffed and quoted direfully, ‘All work and no play make’s a spinster dull and grey.’
Something must have happened to her sense of humour lately, India acknowledged, because the comment had jared.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Jenny had said later when she apologised. ‘We all suffer from it from time to time.’
When she had unwisely asked, ‘Suffer from what?’ Jenny had eyed her assessingly and said, ‘Frustration, of course.’
Was that the answer? She wasn’t consciously aware of the need for a lover, but then perhaps she had grown so used to ignoring her natural urges that she was no longer attuned to them; and spring was notorious for having an odd effect on the lonely.
But she wasn’t lonely, she told herself. She had plenty of…
The phone rang, cutting across her thoughts. She padded into the hall and lifted the receiver,
‘Miss Lawson?’ a crisp male voice intoned decisively. ‘You may not remember me. Simon Herries.’
Her free hand clutched at the silk robe she had pulled on as though by some means he was able to see how little she was wearing. Her mouth had gone dry, her heart pounding heavily.
‘Yes, Mr Herries,’ she managed. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘It’s not what you can do for me, but what you can do for Melisande,’ she heard him say in response.
‘Melisande?’ India frowned. ‘I thought she was in the States filming.’