She hung up after fifteen minutes, feeling vaguely depressed. She looked in the mirror and saw an ill-dressed, unfeminine, overtall and utterly unsexy woman with hair chopped into no particular cut and a body too well toned by a life that had always involved physical exertion. She had no problem kayaking along treacherous rivers through dense undergrowth, but there were no treacherous rivers in the city of London and that particular talent was useless. She had no use for make-up in the steaming heat, but here her face felt naked. The clothes she had always worn, loose-fitting and functional, were fine on the compound, but she was fast realising that dressing sensibly to cope with heat and mosquitoes was good in the jungle but depressingly laughable in a city. Her hands, strong and hard-working, now seemed like hands a man should have and not a woman.
Had she forgotten somewhere along the way that she was a woman? The thought made her even more dejected. She thought of her stepcousin with her beautifully manicured nails painted the pink of candy floss and felt graceless and gauche in comparison.
Henri thinks that I’m attractive, she thought to herself. But did he really? Or did he just think that she was the best of the bunch?
Five hours spent on Oxford Street and the King’s Road was no sop to her deflated spirits. She spent a great deal of time wondering which shops were worth visiting and looking around her in a bewildered, confused fashion. Several times she had literally been swept along by the crowds of shoppers like a tadpole caught in a downstream current.
The pace was swift and left no room for uncertain young girls with no particular agenda aside from gathering the skeleton of a wardrobe together.
In the end, she found herself outside Harvey Nichols, took a deep breath and handed herself over to the experience of a shop assistant. She did her best not to convert the vast quantities of money she was spending on clothes into an amount that would have bought a lot more important things in Panama.
She bought two skirts and jackets that would do for when she went into the company to work, jeans and shirts and jumpers for casual wear, and shoes that made her feet feel ten sizes smaller and looked, to her unaccustomed eyes, positively ludicrous. She threw caution to the winds and indulged in lingerie that wasn’t sensible. She allowed herself to be persuaded into two dresses which, the shop assistant assured her were perfect, with a firmness that defied contradiction—especially from someone who had no idea what might or might not suit her.
‘But they’re tight,’ Destiny protested weakly, looking at the black dress and the deep green dress with concern. Tight clothes were anathema in blistering heat and she had never possessed anything that clung. Least of all clung to her curves. ‘And they’re short.’
‘They’re sexy,’ the shop assistant explained, casting a critical eye over her victim and pushing her towards a changing booth.
Destiny emerged feeling like a tree inappropriately clad in a bikini, but when she looked in the mirror she realised with a twinge of pleasure that she was nothing like a tree. Tall, yes, but slim and with curves that had rarely seen the light of day.
Her legs seemed to stretch on and on and on, long and brown and slender, and her breasts, not camouflaged by baggy clothes, jutted out provocatively.
‘Of course, you should get your hair cut into something fashionable,’ she was told.
It was shoulder-length, and years of DIY home cuts had lent it a rough, uneven edge, all the more apparent because it was so incredibly blonde.
‘I like my hair,’ Destiny said. ‘I’m not going to have it short.’ Back in her work gear in Panama, stripped of these wildly glamorous plumes that seemed to turn her into a sexy woman, of sorts, and with a cropped haircut, she really would look like one of the men. No chance. Her mother had always insisted that she have some length to her hair and she wasn’t about to abandon that piece of advice now.
But buy the clothes she did. The whole lot. She also bought make-up, which took ages because the choice of colours and shades of everything almost defied belief. At the end of it, the shopping bags seemed as heavy to carry back to the house as a dozen bags of medicine, school-books, containers of plant specimens and the kayak rolled into one.
It was worth it, though.
She knew that when, at seven-thirty, she looked at her reflection and what gazed back at her was a striking woman in a short, tight black dress, wearing smart black, albeit hideously uncomfortable, shoes and a face that was a blend of subtle colours. Blushing Pink on her lips, which made her tan stand out, a hint of Passionate Petal blusher and length enhancing mascara that made her eyelashes look as though they had taken growth hormones.