CHAPTER ONE
Liza would never have invited Bruno down to her cottage if she hadn't worked through her lunch hour the previous Friday.
It was rare for her to have the chance; she was usually booked for lunch. She sent her secretary out to buy her some cottage cheese and an apple, deciding to eat them in the viewing-room while she looked at a video of one of her new models, to assess the girl's performance in her first TV commercial. Liza hadn't had time to see it until now.
The outer office had been empty when she had walked through it—all the girls had been at lunch, except her own secretary, Maddie, who was operating the photocopier, running off profiles of some of their models for a new customer.
Settling in the dark after she had eaten, Liza watched the video a second time with the volume turned right down so that she wasn't distracted by the sound-track and could concentrate on the model's movements and facial expressions.
Two minutes later she heard Joan Temple talking as she came through the swing door with the other typists. 'It's obvious—she's got a man down there—why else is she so secretive about the cottage?'
Liza's head swung round and she froze, listening with a frown. They weren't talking about her, were they?
'She never misses a weekend, no matter how busy we are! I suspect the guy's married, whoever he is, and either can't get a divorce or doesn't want one anyway. Nobody would spot them if they met out there in the wilds of Essex, the cottage is miles from anywhere, she admits that.'
'But what about Bruno Morris?' Daphne said slowly, sounding upset. 'I mean, where does he fit in, if she's involved with another man? I thought it was serious with Bruno, that they'd announce their engagement any day. The Press seem to think so.'
'Oh, the Press!' Joan said cynically. 'What do they know? They're simple-minded—look at the way they nicknamed her The Snow Queen just because she was too smart to get caught with anyone when the Press were around! They may believe that there was never a man in her life until Bruno came into the picture, but you can't kid me. I bet she's been having a secret affair with this guy down in Essex for years.'
'But sooner or later someone would be bound to see them together,' protested Daphne. 'Nobody can have that sort of secret for long these days! The Press would have found out by now, if it was true.'
'I told you, Liza is too smart to get caught!' Joan drawled. 'But you're right—the Press ought to know. Maybe someone will tell them, tip them off!'
Liza's frown deepened and she heard Daphne give a gasp. 'You wouldn't, would you, Joan?' She sounded half horrified, half gleeful and Joan laughed.
'It's a thought, isn't it? No, why should I spoil her fun? Good luck to her, that's what I say. Men have always played the field and got away with it. Why shouldn't we?'
From a distance Liza heard Maddie call them. 'Come and give me a hand with these profiles, I want to post them off today.*
Liza had thought herself hardened to being talked about. Before she had founded a model agency of her own she had been a top model herself; earning a small fortune in a mere two years of intense and highly paid work. She had attracted a lot of Press attention during that time and since; she was still a public figure because her agency had grown rapidly to become one of the best of the kind in the country.
This gossip was different, though; Liza grimaced distastefully. It wasn't pleasant to know that people who worked with you talked about you in that vein when you weren't around to defend yourself.
Was it just Joan, or were other people talking? A frown pleated her finely pencilled brows. Bruno had been rather persistent the other day when he was asking about the cottage. He had wanted to know all about it: what she did there every weekend, why she couldn't spend more weekends in London. Bruno was a city animal; he loved the ambience of a town: bright lights, parties, nightclubs, dancing and dinner in swish restaurants. He wasn't attracted to anything in the countryside except, perhaps, horses and then only on a racecourse. Not that Bruno rode or liked horses much; but he did gamble and Liza suspected he often lost large sums. He could afford it, or course; he was one of the Giffords, his uncle was G. K. Gifford, the head of the merchant bank and the chairman of an international consortium which owned a wide variety of companies. Bruno was a jet-setting playboy, if you believed the gossip columnists.
Liza didn't. She knew Bruno better than that. He might be a light-hearted, rather spoilt young man with more money than was good for him, but he had quite a few qualities which endeared him to Liza. Bruno was kind and good-tempered, and he needed affection. No doubt people like Joan Temple wouldn't believe it, but he had never tried to talk Liza into bed, although they had been seeing each other for three months. Bruno didn't want sex; he wanted to have fun. He didn't want a passionate lover; he wanted a playmate.
When they went out they danced and joked, laughed and chatted, and Liza never felt the slightest tension between them, no sexual magnetism or awareness.
Bruno was like a teddy bear, he even looked like one— big and bulky with thick, curly, golden-brown hair and round brown eyes which shone when he laughed.
It was easy to be fond of Bruno and hard to take him seriously as a lover, but the Press only saw the image. They created myths of childish simplicity and one of them was that Bruno was a jet-setting playboy. He certainly flew around the world a lot in jets. He certainly loved to play, and he was undoubtedly more a boy than a man, but the label the Press pinned on him was light years from the reality.
Liza sighed, staring out of the window at the glass and concrete of the skyscraper opposite, without seeing anything of it.
She couldn't let Bruno read maliciously angled gossip in the papers. He would hate that, and his family, the Giffords, wouldn't be too pleased either. Liza had never met any of them, but the bank were her landlords; they owned this whole building, all thirty storeys of it, and she did not want to offend them any more than she wanted to embarrass or upset Bruno.
The solution was obvious, but she wished she could think of some other way out of the dilemma. The cottage was her sanctuary, her refuge, her private world, and she had never invited anyone from her other world down there. She liked to keep London and her public life well away. Having Bruno there might wreck the whole atmosphere for her for ever.
No, I'm being absurd, she told herself impatiently. I'll ask him down for the weekend and he'll come because he has been so curious about the place, but, once he has been there and seen the windy, echoing solitudes of the marshes, the birds, the melancholy lavender and navy blue of the sky after the sun has set, the whisper of the tidal ebb and flow between the reeds and the cosy shabbiness of the furniture, Bruno will politely thank me for his visit, go back to London and never suggest coming again.