Читать книгу Special Treatment - Пенни Джордан, Penny Jordan - Страница 6

THE BRIEFING WAS over. Rather unsteadily, Susannah got up and hurried out into the corridor, needing the sanctuary of the small cubby-hole that passed for her office.

Her teeth were clenched so hard that her jaw ached, and so did her head. Her nervous system, always the first thing to react when anything upset her, had gone into overdrive.

‘You rather got the cold shoulder from our new lord and master, didn’t you, darling? I wonder why,’ a slow female drawl came from behind her.

Oh, God, the last thing she wanted right now was to have to parry Claire Hunter’s acid curiosity!

The older woman had been with the magazine ever since its inception. Where her work was concerned, she was brilliant, quite without equal, witty and clever with her malicious tongue-in-cheek reporting of the foibles and fickleness of the fashionable world, which was her métier; but woe betide anyone who forgot to give Claire the recognition she considered her due.

Hazard Maine had not done so, and now she, Susannah, was having to pay the price, she reflected wryly, parrying her colleague’s inquisitive comment with a dismissive shrug of her shoulders and a casual, ‘No idea. New-broom syndrome, I suppose. I just happened to be first in the firing line. That will teach me to arrive at the last minute and get lumbered with a seat in the front row.’

Claire seemed satisfied with her response, and Susannah shut the door of her office behind her in relief. Damn Hazard Maine. Hazard Maine! What sort of a name was that, for God’s sake? He was probably American, of course, and his name was almost as familiar to her as her own. Most of his career years had been spent in New York and Sydney, and he had only recently been recalled to head the prestigious Tomorrow magazine, which was the flagship of MacFarlane Publishing.

She knew already that they weren’t going to get on. But then she had known that ever since Saturday …

Susannah closed her eyes momentarily. As if she didn’t have enough problems in her life, without adding any more! The very last thing she needed was to be on bad terms with her new boss. She and Richard had got on so well. Richard had encouraged and helped her. Richard …

It was pointless wishing Richard back in the editor’s seat. His wife, Tom MacFarlane’s only child, had made it plain that she was tired of sharing her husband with the demands of a highly successful monthly magazine, and Richard had reluctantly accepted that, unless he wanted to lose his wife, he was going to have to join his father-in-law on the board.

Maybe Aunt Emily was right, and it was Susannah’s vibrant chestnut hair that attracted all the problems that seemed to clutter her life. She ought to adopt Claire Hunter’s cool, dismissive approach to life, instead of allowing herself to become so involved in the problems of others—problems which inevitably, in some alchemic way, became her own.

Take last Saturday, for instance. Susannah groaned, pushing long, slim fingers into her already unruly curls. God, the very last thing she wanted to do was to remember that!

It had all been David’s fault, damn him. Susannah scowled ferociously, glowering at her typewriter.

She had been a fool ever to allow herself to become involved with David Martin, and it didn’t help knowing that she had fallen into the same trap as a good proportion of the rest of her sex.

Falling in love with a married man was so … so tacky, she fumed, hazel eyes glowing green as her temper got the better of her. She ought to have known … but how could she have done? They had met initially as guests on a local radio chat show. He had been working in television then, she for a local newspaper. They had had so much in common that, when he suggested dinner and a drink after the show, she had not even thought about refusing. Caution had never been one of her strong points and, by the time she had discovered he was married, she was almost in too deep.

It had been a friend who told her, a very concerned and apprehensive girl-friend who had known her for years, and who had guessed that she couldn’t know what, apparently, everyone else did—namely, that David was married.

Susannah had taxed him with it, and rather shamefacedly he had admitted that he had deceived her, pleading that it had only been by omission.

At first, he’d pleaded, he had not thought it important to tell her that he was married, and then by the time that it was … Well, he had been too scared of losing her to admit the truth.

Torn between the strength of her feelings—her own impulsiveness and the old-fashioned moral strictures she had grown up with—she hadn’t known whether to thank or curse Aunt Emily. Orphaned in the first months of her life, when a freak storm had overturned her father’s small boat, killing both her parents, she had been brought up by her only living relative. Being brought up by an elderly spinster, who was more properly her dead father’s aunt and not her own, did not equip one for life in the eighties, she had reflected miserably at the time. Another girl would have pushed aside her moral scruples and taken what life offered, but Susannah wasn’t like that. David was committed to someone else, and so, heartbreaking though it had been at the time, she had announced to Aunt Emily that it was time she spread her wings, and had started looking for a new job in London.

She had been lucky, thus confirming the old adage about those unlucky in love, or so she had told herself at the time.

In eight months, she had come a long way from the miserable twenty-three-year-old who had left Leicestershire feeling that nothing in life was worth while.

Richard, her boss, had practically adopted her. He had a keen eye for up-and-coming young reporters, whom he took a pride in nurturing and encouraging. She was lucky to have found a job working under him, so she had learned on the newspaper grapevine, and she was forced to concede that it was right. She was just beginning to get back her self-confidence, just beginning to feel that life, after all, might be worth living, albeit a different sort of life from the one she had envisaged that she and David would share, when David himself had shown up in London.

How he had inveigled her address out of Aunt Emily, Susannah didn’t know. He had arrived late one cool summer night, when it hadn’t stopped raining all day. She had been feeling tired, but exultant. A piece she had done, from an interview with a girl who had accidentally got caught up in a siege situation, had been highly praised by Richard and, as if to confirm that she was at last finding her feet in the fast-paced world of the city, two of Susannah’s female colleagues had insisted on her joining them for lunch. They were older than she was, and far more experienced and sophisticated, and it had been a heady experience to have them including her in their conversation as an equal.

She was, they had informed her, marked out as a woman who would go far.

‘We owe it to our sex to help and encourage one another. It’s time we found a way of beating the Old School Tie male system.’

Susannah had come away from the lunch feeling both elated and drained at the same time, her mind made up. From now on, she was going to concentrate on her career. From now on, no more men for her, married or unmarried.

To open her front door and find David standing there, and, what was worse, to feel her heart lurch in the old familiar way, had been dauntingly depressing.

He had insisted on coming in. He had left Louise, he had told her. Their marriage was over, and he was now free to start a new life with her.

She had been tempted. It was no good pretending that she hadn’t. David had wanted to spend the night with her, and she had almost given way. Only the uncomfortable memory of how Aunt Emily would look at her if she knew what Susannah was doing had stopped her. It was ridiculous in this day and age to have such Victorian scruples, but she couldn’t help it. Aunt Emily had done her work too well. As a teenager, Susannah had believed that, once she met the man she loved, all her moral doubts about the rights and wrongs of premarital sex would simply fade away, but it wasn’t as easy as that.

‘What are you trying to tell me?’ David had demanded incredulously. ‘That we can’t make love until we’re married?’

Put like that, it sounded archaic, and worse, scheming—as though she was bartering her body for a wedding ring.

‘No … It’s just that I’m not ready yet, David … I can’t explain …’

She had been perilously close to tears, shaking her head to try and blink them away, but to her relief David hadn’t been annoyed. Instead he had laughed and taken her into his arms.

‘What a fraud you are,’ he had teased her. ‘What would the world think if they knew that Ms Susannah Hargreaves, that champion of free will and women’s rights, is really a timid little virgin?’

She had been too relieved then to feel angry at his aura of sexual superiority; that had come later. She shivered a little, remembering the glitter of anticipation in his eyes. How much had David wanted her because he genuinely loved her, and how much because he saw her as a challenge?

What did it matter now? There could be nothing between them any more. She had made that abundantly clear to him.

Her flat wasn’t large enough for David to stay. It only had one small bedroom, so he had returned to Leicester, telling her that he would be back at the weekend and that they would sit down and make plans for their future together.

Only, before he came back, she had had another visit. This time, from David’s wife. Susannah knew her by sight, a small blonde woman, who looked permanently harassed.

The sight of her body, bloated by a very obviously advanced pregnancy, had shocked Susannah even more than her visit. Wordlessly, she had allowed her to walk into the flat, to sit down and to tell her in a savagely bitter monotone that David was demanding a divorce and leaving her with their unborn child. At first, Susannah hadn’t been able to take it all in. David’s wife pregnant … carrying his child? She wasn’t completely naïve; she knew that men—for a wide variety of reasons—made love to women for whom they felt little or no emotion. But this child must have been conceived before she had left for London, and now David wanted to pretend that it had never happened. He wanted to turn his back on his wife and child and simply walk away from them. In that moment, Susannah knew that no matter what she felt for him, she couldn’t marry him.

Looking into Louise’s white, bloated face, she wasn’t sure which of them she pitied and despised the most: Louise, for wanting her husband so desperately that she was prepared to beg like this for him, David, for being so weak that he had allowed his wife to become pregnant and then discarded her, or herself, for not realising the weakness that lay behind that charming smile of his. Well, she realised it now. Aunt Emily had once said to her, when Susannah asked her why she had never married, that she had never found a man she considered worthy of her respect and her trust. Susannah had laughed then, as teenagers do, not understanding what her aunt was telling her, but she understood it now. She loved David, and wanted him, but she did not respect him; she could never lean on him, never trust him.

The interview that followed was burned into her heart for all time. David had pleaded with her, wept tears of frustration and regret, but somehow she managed not to weaken. She had no idea whether or not he intended to go back to his wife. Somehow, she felt that he would, and she sincerely pitied the other woman for all that her life with him would probably be.

She told herself that she had had a narrow escape, that she was the fortunate one, that hers had been the choice, but somewhere deep inside her she still ached and wept for the love she had lost.

And it had been in that mood of bitter self-contempt and misery that she had gone to the Sunderlands’ ‘do’ on Saturday evening.

The Sunderlands were the closest thing she had to godparents. Neil Sunderland had been at school with her father. She had spent many holidays with the family, both at home and abroad, and now that their own two sons were married and living away from home, one in Canada, the other in Australia, she made a point of visiting Neil and Mamie just as often as she could.

Neil had retired earlier in the year from the merchant bank of which he was a director, and they had given up their London house and moved to a small village on the outskirts of Gloucester. Susannah had visited them there several times during the summer and, even though it was the last thing she felt like doing, she knew she would have to go to Mamie’s sixtieth birthday party.

Paul and Simon and their respective wives and children were all coming over for the occasion. Susannah was expected to stay the weekend; the house was a large one, with an extensive garden, and Susannah already knew all about the lavish plans for Mamie’s party.

Mamie was half-American, which accounted not just for her name, but very probably for her love of life as well. She and Aunt Emily did not get on, and no wonder, Susannah reflected wryly—they were as different as chalk and cheese. She could not imagine any girl brought up by Mamie worrying about the ethics of going to bed with a man to whom she was not married!

She got up clumsily, cursing the lack of space in her office; uncomfortably aware of the fact that using Aunt Emily for an excuse for her lack of sexuality was taking an easy way out. She could feel the starkness of a mood of deep introspection crowding in on her, like a winter’s afternoon obliterating the light. How she resented this side of her nature, this dark, and sometimes frightening, gloom that came down over her without warning, engulfing and possessing her.

No doubt, like her temper, it went with her hair, and so perhaps it did, part of a Celtic heritage, like her pale delicate skin and stormy green eyes.

And it hadn’t helped having Hazard Maine ripping into her like that. It was the worst of bad luck that he should have spotted that yawn she had tried to smother behind her hand.

Of course, she hadn’t found what he was saying boring—quite the contrary. How could anyone be bored when listening to a diatribe against the skills of an editorial staff among which one numbered? It hadn’t just been to cover up that she had accused him of wanting to behave like a traditional new broom. She had been so happy working for Richard. Susannah scowled, wondering for how long she would be given the opportunity to continue working for the magazine. Hazard Maine didn’t like her. To judge from his lecture to them this morning, he didn’t like any of them. He had attacked the magazine, throwing them all off guard, warning them that he intended to make changes. But surely those cold grey eyes had rested on her face just momentarily longer than they had on anyone else’s?

To her horror, she had had to stifle another yawn. This time, he hadn’t even attempted to soften his contempt.

‘Work comes first for anyone who wants to succeed on this magazine, Ms Hargreaves,’ he had told her crisply. ‘That being the case, I suggest you either change your job—or your lover.’

She had flushed scarlet, mortified by the ripple of amusement that ran through the room, and all too aware of the speculative glances of her male colleagues. She had a reputation for being cool and unapproachable. Her private life was something she never discussed at work, and with one short sentence Hazard Maine had created an image of her life-style that was totally false, and yet which she was completely unable to correct.

She knew why he had picked on her, of course. Her full mouth tightened angrily. He might be a big man in size, well over six foot and athletically muscled, but he certainly wasn’t in spirit. To hold what had happened on Saturday against her like that … Of all the bad luck! She had never imagined—but then why should she? Neil and Mamie moved in completely different circles from those she inhabited. She had never dreamed …

But then, the weekend had gone disastrously wrong, right from the start …

She sat back in her chair, trembling.