Dangerous Deceiver

‘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——’

‘Travel! You will! I take showings abroad. I also intend to make you famous—what’s one year when you’re——’ Madame gestured in a very French way ‘—twenty-two? My dear Miss Martha, when you’re thirty and starting to get leetle lines and your ’air don’t ’ave quite same bounce and gravity starts to attract the bust—that’s the time to travel!’

Martha had to laugh.

‘And this is quite an organisation I’ve built up,’ Madame added proudly. ‘You theenk this is some teen-pot outfit?’ Her black eyes flashed and her accent came back.

‘No, no,’ Martha said hastily.

‘Thees is good,’ Madame said proudly, and switched accents adroitly once more. ‘I’m just about to bring out an exclusive off-the-rack range which will be seen in all the best fashion magazines. Seen,’ she said dramatically, ‘with you inside them. But only if you put yourself in my hands, Martha Winters,’ she added sternly. ‘You think I’m flattering you? I’m only flattering the raw material.’ Martha flinched but Madame flowed on unaware. ‘Certainly some fine raw material but still a very great lot to learn. You have somewhere to live? No? You will come and live with me——’

‘No, Madame, thank you very much but I must insist that I find my own place.’

Deep pansy blue eyes stared resolutely into snapping black ones and for a moment Martha expected a Gallic explosion but Yvette Minter laughed suddenly. ‘I like it, I like it, but you see, you silly girl, I have a perfectly private little basement flat under my house that I will rent out to you for a perfectly normal amount, where you will be able to take your boyfriends without me even seeing them. Mind you, while a certain amount of sex is marvellous for the looks, men do complicate one’s life, much as I love ’em.’ And an oddly penetrating black glance now came Martha’s way.

‘Point taken,’ she said calmly.

Whereupon Madame raised her eyebrows. ‘What does that mean? Don’t you like men?’

‘It means I’m not looking for any complications at the moment,’ Martha said.

‘Ah. Hmm. I see. Yes, indeed. So.’

It was Martha’s turn to raise an eyebrow.

‘I see only that some man ’as ’urt you,’ Madame explained, causing a faint tinge of pink to rise to Martha’s cheek and causing her to curse herself silently. ‘But never to mind,’ Madame continued, ‘it is you who will be going round breaking hearts soon. In the meantime, are you on, Martha Winters?’

‘I...oh, well, they say faint heart never won anything. Yes, I’m on,’ Martha heard herself say.

Two weeks later she still felt like pinching herself.

Her basement flat below Madame’s elegant Chelsea terrace house, with its window-boxes and tubs of pansies, black enamelled front door with a polished brass knocker facing a quiet leafy garden in the centre of the square, was small but comfortable. And although at first she’d felt a bit like a rabbit living below street level, she’d soon adapted. Who would not, she thought sometimes, to vibrant, stylish, historic Chelsea? And she was gradually finding her way around the King’s Road and Fulham Road, Sloane Square, Cheyne Walk and the river.

She’d been to the Natural History Museum, the Albert Hall, Harrods, seen the Grinling Gibbons carvings in the chapel of the Royal Hospital, guided by a delightful ninety-year-old, scarlet-coated Chelsea pensioner, and, rain or shine, she walked up to Hyde Park or Kensington Gardens every morning. For there hadn’t been much rain—everyone agreed it was a marvellous spring so far. Of course, she realised there was a whole lot more of London to see, but the truth of the matter was that Yvette Minter might make amazing gestures but she was also something of a slave-driver—Martha had never worked so hard in her life. But she found herself enjoying it, even if she changed clothes fifty times a day or was cajoled, coaxed and screamed at by temperamental photographers, by everyone at Minter’s, in fact, all unable to avoid being affected by Madame’s histrionics at the forthcoming début of her off-the-rack range.

Then one afternoon, about two weeks after her arrival, Martha donned a blue fitted waistcoat that left her shoulders and arms bare and matched her eyes, a coffee-cream straight silk skirt that fell to just above her ankles and had a slit up the front to above her knees, gold suede shoes, clustered pearl earrings and a chunky gold and pearl bracelet, swept a brush through her hair, which she was leaving long and loose, and walked through to the elegant room where Madame’s haute couture clothes were shown to clients.

There was no one there apart from Madame herself, who proceeded to walk around Martha, dressed in her inevitable black, but this time definitely a cocktail dress, with her mouth pursed. ‘Yes,’ she said finally, ‘we did right with the ’air; those subtle lighter streaks are very good and a little shorter and all one length so you can toss it around and it settles just a little wild as if some man has been running his ‘ands through it but still looking très bon—it’s very good. And the ’ips under the silk—quite delectable!’

Martha said, ‘Thanks,’ casually but eyed her warily for she’d learnt that it wasn’t only when Madame was with clients or in the grip of emotion that her French accent surfaced; it was also when she was being devious, and she was capable of being extremely devious at times. ‘So?’ She looked rather pointedly at the empty gilt chairs.

Madame put her hands on her own hips. ‘So?’ she repeated arrogantly. ‘I’m having a little cocktail party at home this evening, just friends, and you are coming, Miss Martha, that’s what!’

Martha sighed. ‘Madame—look, you’ve been wonderful about renting me out your basement; you haven’t bothered me in the slightest and I hope I haven’t bothered you at all—but I think we should keep it that way.’

A flood of genuine French greeted these words which Martha endured stoically, enraging Madame even more until she burst into English, saying finally, ‘It’s business, you stubborn, ungrateful child!’

‘I thought you said it was friends.’

‘Friends, yes, but friends who will talk about you—don’t you understand anything? Is Australia such a hick place they don’t even——?’

‘Now look here...’ Martha broke in.

‘No, you look here; it’s part of my campaign to make you famous and what do you do? Throw eet een my face!’

Martha grimaced. ‘It so happens I hate cocktail parties.’

‘This one you won’t. That I guarantee. I have never given a party in my life that anyone has hated! Martha Winters—please,’ Madame said, changing tack so suddenly that Martha blinked. ‘I would like you to come with the very best intentions in my ’eart. I would like everyone to see this fabulous girl who is so soon going to become a sophisticated, wonderful woman——’

‘Stop. I’ll come,’ Martha said, laughing at the same time, as she shook her head a little dazedly.

‘So you jolly well ought to,’ Madame said severely. ‘This place Australia—are they all like you over there, so wary, so stony-hearted, so——?’

‘Madame, I said I’d come!’

It was Martha’s first glimpse of the first-floor reception-room of Madame’s house, and she couldn’t fail to be impressed by the looped, draped, tasselled yellow velvet curtains about the tall windows that overlooked the square; by the palest eau-de-Nil wall-to-wall carpet that was dotted with exquisite Chinese and Persian rugs; the beautiful, spindly, inlaid pieces of furniture; the flowers and lamps; the vivid pink silk-covered chairs.

But of course it was still an ordeal—to be introduced and overlooked by an ever-growing number of people, to try to make conversation with complete strangers without sounding gauche and, particularly, colonial. I really should have got over these kind of nerves, she told herself once, sipping a very dry sherry. How many times have I paraded before hundreds of strangers? But that’s different; I can detach myself then—not something I can do now at the same time as I’m hearing my accent stand out so obviously—not that I care what they think about my accent, so why do I feel like this? Martha asked herself impatiently. Perhaps, she went on to think with a slight shrug, looking round the room suddenly, I can concentrate on the possibility that one day I could own a room like this...

‘Miss Martha?’

Martha turned as Madame’s voice penetrated her reflections.

‘I ’ave a very special guest to introduce you to—my nephew. Simon, this is my new protégé, Martha Winters—is she not stunning?’

Martha froze, her lips parting and her eyes widening as she looked up at the tall man beside Madame who was wearing a beautifully tailored grey suit that sat superbly across his broad shoulders. She took in his quiet air of assurance and authority, his brown hair, his long-fingered hands which had once made her shiver with delight to think of them upon her body—and looked at last into Simon Macquarie’s grey-green eyes.

CHAPTER TWO