She said her final goodbyes to the Partingtons at the taxi rank, promising to let them know how she was getting on.
London seemed grey and drab after the brilliant tropical colours of the Caribbean, or perhaps it was her own mood which permeated the city streets with dullness. Since the fever had left her she had found herself inhabiting a curious world where nothing seemed to matter; where tiredness surrounded her like a grey pall and where the only emotion she experienced was the sharp pain the merest thought of Zach occasioned.
Her flat was in a small modern block. She had been lucky to get it. Her boss had helped her to obtain the necessary mortgage, and although sometimes meeting the repayments left her shorter of money than she would have wished, she derived considerable satisfaction from knowing that the flat was hers.
The block was surrounded by neatly lawned gardens, randomly landscaped with flowering shrubs and trees; the ancient chestnuts which the builder had had the foresight to leave as a boundary between Tamara’s block and that adjacent to it a spectacular backdrop of colour with their new green leaves and deep pink candles.
Gravel crunched under the taxi’s wheels as it drew to a halt by the main door. Beneath the block was garaging for residents’ cars, although Tamara didn’t own one—she could have afforded it, but thought it unnecessary anyway, living as she did in the heart of London.
She paid her fare, surprised when the driver clambered out to carry her cases into the foyer for her.
‘You look more like you need a holiday—not as though you’ve just come back from one,’ he told her frankly as she tipped him.
In the lift she glanced in the small mirror. It was true, she did look pale. Her faint tan had faded while she was in hospital and she had also lost weight she could ill afford. Her face had a fragile, vulnerable look about it, her eyes wounded; glazed with a pain they seemed barely able to comprehend.
The eight-hour flight had left her tired and drained, and instead of unpacking she went straight into her bedroom, smoothing clean sheets on the bed she had stripped before going on holiday, then crawling under the duvet where she fell asleep almost the moment her head touched the pillow.
It was dark when she woke up, her mind disorientated, so that it took her several minutes to remember where she was. An oblong of light from the living room bore witness to where she had left a lamp burning and her suitcases lay casually on the floor. She switched on the bedside lamp and glanced at her watch. Three in the morning! Hardly the right time to ring Malcolm and let him know she was back, and she had to go in to the office tomorrow. The authorities on St Stephen’s had rung them to explain why her return had been delayed, but still Tamara was not looking forward to the questions she knew her boss would put to her. Even though her body was still tired her mind was too alert for her to be able to go back to sleep. She climbed out of bed and padded around the flat, unpacking her clothes, sorting them into neat piles ready for the washing machine.
People who knew her from the office often expressed surprise when they saw her flat; even Malcolm—not particularly sensitive to his surroundings—had commented rather disapprovingly.
Tamara herself wasn’t sure what had prompted her to furnish her small home with soft pastels and natural fabrics—perhaps some dim and distant memory of the happy childhood she had shared with her parents.
Her bedroom was decorated in soft peaches and greens, the wallpaper and fabrics Designers’ Guild and horrifically expensive. The small nursing rocking chair had been a junk-shop find which she had stripped and lovingly waxed herself, to match the pine dressing table which had been her first purchase when she bought the flat.
Malcolm’s parents’ home was furnished with ponderous Victorian antiques, stiff and formal like them, and Tamara had been able to see that when they were married he would expect her to furnish their home in the same style as that favoured by his mother and father.
In the small kitchen Tamara made herself a cup of coffee. The pine units gleamed softly under the pretty lemon-shaded light—the kitchen window overlooked the balcony which ran the length of Tamara’s flat with access from the living room, and the windowboxes and plants she had growing there fostered the country atmosphere.
She took her coffee through into the living room—again decorated in her favourite colours, although in here the walls were palest green rather than soft peach; a warm floral fabric in apricots and greens covering the ancient settee Tamara had found on another of her scavenging operations among the local junk-shops.
The stained and polished floor had been her greatest extravagance, brightened up with a rough woven striped rug from Designers’ Guild. Tamara loved their fabrics—and their approach, and if other people were amused by the feminine, countrified prettiness of her home she didn’t care.
It was her bolthole, her escape from the rest of the world, and she loved it.
In contrast to the femininity of her home the contents of Tamara’s wardrobe were bleakly stark; as though all the repression she had learned from her aunt had been swept away in the furnishing of her home, only to reappear when it came to her personal appearance.
For the first time Tamara felt the desire to experiment with more than the basic foundation, eyeshadow and lipstick she kept in her dressing table drawer, and sitting on the tube on her way to work she found herself covertly studying the girls around her, trying to draw comparisons between their appearance and hers. Aunt Lilian had not approved of make-up, ‘tarting up your face’, she had called it, and while the adult Tamara had acknowledged the narrowness of her aunt’s comments, there had still persisted a tiny feeling that make-up should be minimal, utilitarian rather than enhancing, and yet today she found herself wondering if she too could wear that pretty shade of shimmering lilac eyeshadow and that soft pink lipstick.
As she walked down Bond Street her attention strayed to shops in a way it had never done before, especially one displaying an exquisite selection of frivolous underwear. Chain-store undies—and very plain ones at that—had always seemed perfectly adequate to Tamara in the past, and yet now she found herself staring at silk briefs in palest écru, trimmed with satin ribbon. She imagined Zach’s fingers on the satin ribbons—on her skin, and then pulled herself up quickly, her face on fire with resentment and embarrassment. What on earth was the matter? She was mooning about like an adolescent or a problem page junkie, imagining that seductive underwear would somehow achieve a miracle and make Zach love her.
‘Well, well, you certainly believe in living dangerously!’ Tamara knew her boss well enough to respond lightly without committing herself. She had been told by the authorities before she left the island that while her employers had been put in the picture as regards her spider bite nothing had been said about the circumstances in which she had got it except that she had been walking in the rain forest, and Tamara had agreed that that was the way things wou
ld stay.
Nigel Soames had been Tamara’s boss for three years. They worked well as a team; Tamara cool and controlled, Nigel sometimes erratic but possessed of the verve and flair that made him such an outstanding success in his job, which was the discovery and promotion of new writing talent. The publishers might be an old-established firm, but that did not mean it was old-fashioned; Nigel had had several notable successes in recent years, including an almost but not quite libellous autobiography by a prominent television personality whom Nigel had caught at a vulnerable moment when he had just been refused a plum job and had consequently been in the mood to be far more forthcoming about his colleagues than he might otherwise have been.
Another coup had been a ‘faction’ novel by a Hong Kong entrepreneur which had reached the best-seller lists in the first few weeks after publication.
Both these and other successes had a habit of draining Nigel of the fierce energy which seemed to burn in him while he was nursing his authors along, and it was Tamara’s job to sustain him through the lulls between ‘discoveries’.
By the time she had removed her coat she could see that Nigel was on another ‘upper’. All the signs were there; the preoccupied, restless manner, the constant pacings of their small office, the incessant coffee drinking and the long abstracted silences, and Tamara blessed Nigel’s ability to completely steep himself in whatever he was doing, primarily because it took his attention away from her. Apart from commenting that she didn’t look very brown, and calling her ‘Miss Muffet’, he made very little reference to her absence.
As always when he had a project going, there was no stopping for lunch.
‘I think I’ve hooked him,’ he told her enthusiastically, ‘and it’s going to be a real big one. I can’t tell you about it yet.’
Tamara hid a small smile. Nigel had once worked in Fleet Street, and still retained the reporter’s instinct for keeping a story to himself until he was ready to commit it to print.