Читать книгу Force Of Feeling - Пенни Джордан, Penny Jordan - Страница 6

AS SHE stepped out into the busy London street and flagged down a passing taxi, Campion glanced irritably at her watch. She was going to be late for lunch, but luckily she knew that Lucy would wait for her.

How relaxing it must be to be the adored wife of a wealthy businessman, with all the time in the world at one’s disposal and no pressures besetting one at all, other than the need to look beautiful and give good dinner parties. And then she chided herself for being unfair. Lucy was not just a beautiful woman, she was an intelligent one as well. It was having to deal with Guy French that had made her feel like this. She had never liked the man, and when her agent had first gone into partnership with him, she had warned her then that she wanted nothing to do with him.

Helena had been openly astonished.

‘But, Campion, my dear, he’s the best in the business,’ she had told her. ‘The deals he gets for his authors …’

‘He’s not my type, Helena. I don’t like the man, and I don’t like his methods of business.’ Nor his morals, she had wanted to add, but she had kept that bit back. Now, having confronted him face to face, she realised that she had been quite right to protest. She didn’t like him.

Nor had she liked what he had had to say about her new manuscript.

She scowled ferociously to herself, causing the taxi driver to grimace slightly as he caught sight of her expression in his rear-view mirror.

She could have been very attractive; she had a good body, tall with long legs—he had noticed those as she’d got into his cab—and full, high breasts, even though she had chosen to drape herself in what looked like several layers of the same drab, beige fabric, which did nothing for her pale English skin, nor for her fair hair. And fancy wearing it like that! She had it scraped back tightly into a large French pleat, a style which privately he thought did very little for any woman. If she had chosen to wear it in one of the many attractive styles favoured by the new Duchess of York now …

He stopped outside a smart Kensington restaurant, wondering what on earth this unmade-up, rather tired-looking woman was doing lunching in such an ‘in’ place. She paid the bill and tipped him well. She had nice hands, he noticed, with long, tapering fingers, but her nails were cut short and unpolished.

But, oddly enough, he noticed as she walked away from him that she was wearing perfume. Strange, that … In his experience, most women only wore perfume for a man.

Perhaps she was some sort of odd ‘Kiss-o-gram’ girl, and underneath those drab clothes … Whistling to himself as he let his imagination run riot, he drove off.

Campion, with no idea of what was going on inside his head, walked angrily into the restaurant. The perfume the sales girl had sprayed all over her as she had rushed through Harvey Nichols earlier in the morning still clung to her skin. Normally she didn’t like anything the slightest bit scented, but this was rather pleasant, old-fashioned and faintly evocative of a summer garden, heavy with the scent of roses.

For once she was oblivious to the amused glances she collected as she wove her way through the crowded tables full of other diners. They were women, in the main, smartly dressed and made up, all of them paying more attention to their fellow lunchers than to the skimpy food on their plates. After all, that was what they were really paying for, to see and be seen.

At last Campion spotted Lucy. She was sitting at a table for two, in what Campion suspected was the best part of the restaurant.

She was dressed in blue, a soft, pretty, lavender blue that suited her fair skin and dark hair and, as always when she saw her, Campion was struck anew by her friend’s loveliness.

They had been at school together, and then at university, but no one had been surprised when Lucy had married almost immediately upon leaving Oxford. The man she had married had once been her boss, but not for long.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ Campion apologised, as she sat down and took the menu proffered by the waiter.

‘Problems?’ Lucy asked sympathetically.

Campion made a face. ‘Is it so obvious? Helena’s not well, and I’m having to deal with Guy French,’ she frowned, aware that there was a good deal that she was keeping back.

Lucy plainly felt it too, because she pressed lightly, ‘And?’

‘And he’s querying several points in my new book. I’ve been working to a deadline on it as it is …’

Lucy knew all about the book in question. Campion had been a successful writer of historical fiction in a modest way for almost three years, but some time previously, with the encouragement of Helena, and backed by a large publishing firm, she had agreed to attempt to produce something a little more commercial than her usual skilful and very factual blend of historical fact and fiction.

At first, she had been thrilled with the commission. It would give her something to get her teeth into, something with a much broader scope than her usual books, but that had been before she realised what the publishers truly wanted of her. Now she was locked into a contract that demanded that the manuscript be finished and soon, and the changes Guy French was demanding …

She was not that naïve, no matter what he might think, and she had been well aware that she was expected to provide a certain sexual content to her book. Previously her books had dealt more with the historical than the personal aspect of her characters’ lives, but this time … This time her heroine, the Lady Lynsey de Frères, as a very rich ward of court, and therefore a valuable pawn in the hands of Henry the Eighth, would be expected by her readers to do more than simply acquiesce to the marriage arranged for her by Henry.

And the problem was that she knew in her heart of hearts that Guy was right.

He wanted her to be more explicit in her descriptions of the morals and manners of the times—much, much more explicit. He had even pointed out to her that the publishers had already rejected her first manuscript on the grounds that the heroine was too insipid and unreal to hold their readers’ interest. And now she was running out of time, and Helena would not be back at work for another whole month, a full week after her final manuscript was due on her publishers’ desk.

If she tried to cancel the contract now, the publishers would be legally free to sue her and, although she did not think they would do that, it would be a very black mark against her.

Where had it all gone wrong? She had been so thrilled with the original commission, and now …

‘What does Guy suggest you do?’ Lucy pressed her.

‘He wants me to have a secretary.’ She scowled again, as she had done in the taxi.

‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’ Lucy asked her, plainly at a loss to understand her reluctance. ‘I’ve thought for some time that you could do with one. You type your own manuscripts, and it must be very time-consuming …’

It was, but that was the way she preferred it. To Campion, writing was a very personal thing indeed, so personal that on some occasions she could almost feel that she was the character she was writing about, and on those occasions she didn’t want to have someone else with her, watching her, monitoring her reactions. It would make her feel so vulnerable, so … She gave a little shiver, her eyes unknowingly registering her fear.

She had lovely eyes, Lucy thought, watching her compassionately: neither green nor blue, but something in between. With a little care and thought, she could have been a very beautiful woman. They were the same age—twenty-six—and yet at a first glance Campion could have been mistaken for someone easily ten years older. Lucy itched to take charge of her—to make her throw away her hideously drab clothes, to do her face, and to get her to have her hair properly styled.

Her husband, an acute and very shrewd man, had said to her the first time she introduced him to Campion, ‘What happened to her? She’s like a plant that’s been blighted by frost.’

‘A man,’ Lucy had told him carefully. Because, after all, the story was Campion’s and not her own, and she knew how much her friend hated talking about Craig.

‘I don’t want a secretary!’ Campion exploded now. ‘I just want to be left alone to get on with my work.’

‘Well, tell Guy that,’ Lucy suggested reasonably.

‘I have, and he won’t listen. He’s insisting that I must have someone to work for me. It’s almost as though he thinks I need a gaoler, someone to keep me at work. And then there’s this tour coming up,’ she added angrily.

‘Tour?’

‘Oh, you remember. I told you about it. A small publicity tour for that book I did about Cornwall. Guy seems to think that if I can have a secretary, I can somehow manage to dictate huge chunks of the new book in between signing sessions, and she can then presumably type them up while I’m signing.’

Lucy sighed and reached out across the table to take her hand. ‘Campion, be honest, if Helena had suggested this, and not Guy, would you feel quite so strongly?’

Campion frowned and then admitted huskily, ‘I don’t know. There’s something about him that rubs me up the wrong way. I feel as edgy as a cat walking on too hot sand whenever he comes near me …’ She rubbed tiredly at her eyes. ‘I don’t like him,’ she added childishly, ‘but I don’t know why I react so strongly to him.’

I do, Lucy thought achingly, and it’s called sexual awareness, but she knew that there was no way she could say that to Campion.

Instead, she asked carefully, ‘So what do you intend to do?’

‘What can I do?’ Campion asked her bitterly, revealing how much she resented what was happening to her. ‘I have to go along with what Guy’s saying. I don’t have any option. Do you know what he told me?’ She took a deep breath, fighting for self-control as she leaned across the table, her eyes flashing fiercely, ‘He actually admitted that he was the one who advised the publishers to reject my first draft. He had the utter gall to tell me that he thought it wasn’t worthy of me—that he had seen more emotion in the writings of a seven-year-old! He told me my book was flat and boring, and that my characters, especially Lynsey, had about as much reality as cardboard cut-outs!’ Suddenly the fight left her and her eyes dulled. ‘And the worst thing is that I know he’s right. Oh, God, Lucy, why on earth did I ever take on this commission?’

‘Because it’s giving you an opportunity to stretch yourself,’ Lucy reminded her gently. ‘You wanted to do it, Campion,’ she told her.

Opposite her, Campion groaned. ‘Don’t remind me. I must have been mad! I can’t do it, Lucy. I know that I can’t.’

‘Have you told Guy this?’

Immediately her eyes darkened with anger. ‘Throw myself on his mercy? Never!’

‘Then what are you going to do?’

‘Get back to work—not here in London. Helena has a small cottage she lets her writers use. I’m going to go there … that way, Guy won’t be able to force me to have a secretary,’ she added childishly. ‘I’m going tonight. It’s in Pembroke.’

‘Wales, at this time of the year?’ Lucy shuddered. ‘We’re already into November … Which reminds me, have you any plans for Christmas? Howard and I will be going to Dorset as usual, and of course we’d love you to join us.’

Lucy had inherited, from her grandfather, a very lovely small manor house in Dorset, and she and Howard spent every Christmas there, and as much time as they could during the rest of the year.

‘Please do,’ she coaxed. ‘I’m going to need your help this year. I think I’m pregnant.’

Shortly after their marriage Lucy had suffered a very traumatic miscarriage, and since then Howard had flatly refused to even consider the idea of them trying for another child, but now it seemed he had relented.

‘Dr Harrison has finally persuaded Howard that what happened before won’t happen again, and I’m giving you fair warning here and now that I’m going to ask you to be godmother.’

Just after three, they left the restaurant, Lucy to go shopping and Campion to go back to her flat to pack for her trip to Wales.

She had been to Helena’s cottage several times before, but never to work, only as a visitor. She had never before needed the solitude it offered. Writing had always come so easily to her—writing still did, it was the emotions of her characters she was having problems with.

She packed carefully and frugally: a couple of pairs of jeans, seldom worn these days, but they would still fit her, plenty of bulky sweaters, and a set of thermal underwear, just in case. Some socks, her portable typewriter, just in case the generator broke down and the electric machine Helena had installed at the cottage didn’t work.

She would need wellingtons, she reminded herself; she would have to buy some before she left. And food, which meant a trip to her local supermarket. Plenty of typing paper, her notes—the list was endless, and all the time she was getting ready her conversation with Guy French kept going round and round in her mind.

He had the reputation of having a very acid tongue, but he had never used it on her. And yet, this morning, he had virtually torn her apart with what he had said; all of it in that calm, even, logical voice of his, which stated his assembled facts as though they were incontrovertible truths. And the worst of it was that they very probably were. Her heroine did lack emotional depth. Campion sat down wearily, too tired to hide from the truth any longer. She had no idea what she was going to do about Lynsey.

When she had tried to deflect Guy, by reminding him that her heroine was a young girl of sixteen, he had calmly countered by saying that in that age girls of sixteen were often wives and mothers and that, since she herself had described her heroine as being spirited and passionate, couldn’t she see that it just wasn’t in character for her to calmly accept King Henry’s edict that she marry a man she had never seen before, especially not when, according to his notes, she had already hinted that Lynsey considered herself to be in love with her cousin?

‘Wouldn’t she at least have tried to see Francis? Think of it—a beautiful young girl of sixteen, rich and wilful, condemned by the King’s will to marry a man to whom he owes a favour, a man moreover who has the reputation of procuring for that same king women with whom he amuses himself behind his wife’s back. Surely she would be angry and disgusted at such a proposed marriage? Surely she would be desperate enough to make a rash attempt to stop it? Allowing herself to be compromised by another man would be one way. And surely she would choose that man to be her cousin, the boy whom she thinks she loves?’

It all made sense, but for some reason Campion just could not breathe life into her heroine. She just could not even mentally visualise Lynsey doing what Guy suggested, even though she knew what he was saying was perfectly true.

She had told him as much, adding defiantly that the publishers could sue her if they wished, but she was not going to change a word of her manuscript.

He had looked at her then, his grey eyes focusing on her and turning smokily dark.

For a moment she had actually expected him to get up from behind his desk and seize hold of her and shake her. No small task, even for a man of his height and build, because she was well over five foot eight and, despite her fragile frame, no lightweight either. But instead he had controlled himself and said icily, ‘Quitting, Campion? You surprise me. What is it you’re so afraid of?’

‘Nothing. I’m not afraid of anything,’ she had flung at him, and somehow, before she knew where she was, he had tricked her into committing herself to the re-writes.

And now she had to do them. But her way, and not his—and without a secretary.

All this burning of adrenalin had left her feeling oddly tired. She looked at her watch. An hour’s sleep before she left would do her good. Sleep was something that often evaded her during the night, and she had to take brief catnaps during the day whenever she could.

She went into her bedroom and closed the curtains.

Her flat was as drab as her clothes, furnished mainly in beiges and browns, colours bordering on nothingness.

She undressed, wrapped herself in a towelling robe and lay on her bed but, irritatingly, exhausted though she was, sleep would not come. Instead a multitude of jumbled images flashed repeatedly across her brain.

Guy French, tall, and dark-haired; a man she had heard other women describe admiringly as sexually devastating. Perhaps, but not to her, never to her …

Her mind switched to Lucy. How long had they known one another? They had started at boarding-school together, two small, pigtailed girls in brand new uniforms, both wanting desperately to cry and neither feeling they should.

They had been friends a long time. Lucy’s new circle of friends, those she had made through Howard, looked askance at Campion, probably wondering what she and pretty, glamorous Lucy had in common.

She wondered if Lucy had told Howard about her. Probably, they had that sort of relationship, and Howard was the kind of man who invited one’s trust. How lucky Lucy had been in her marriage! How wise to wait a little while and not to allow herself to be swept off her feet in the first rapture of physical desire, as she had been …

As she had been … How impossible that seemed now! Now, she could no more imagine the deep frozen heart of hers being melted than she could imagine flying to the moon. Both were impossible.

Once, a long time ago, things had been different, she had been different.

Once, she had known what it felt like to have her whole body surge with joy at a man’s touch, almost at the sound of his voice, but that had been before …

She gave a deep sigh and opened her eyes, but it was no use, for some reason, the past was crowding in on her today.

For some reason? She knew the reason well enough: it had been the look in Guy’s eyes when he had asked her in that even, calm voice of his if she actually knew what it was like to feel emotion. She had felt as though her very soul had been raked with red-hot irons, but she had kept her expression cool and unrevealing. Let him think what he liked, just as long as he never guessed the truth.

The truth. Her mouth twisted bitterly. How melodramatic that sounded now! And what was it, really?

She closed her eyes again and tried to focus her concentration on her book, on Lynsey, but it was virtually impossible. Guy’s dark face surfaced through the barriers of her will, and then another male face, equally dark-haired, equally good-looking, but younger, shallower … weaker, she recognised.

She had been nineteen when she’d met Craig, and a rather naïve nineteen at that. Her girls’ school had been sheltered; she was an only child, with wealthy parents who spent a good deal of their time out of the country, and consequently she had spent very little time with them until she left school. And in that long, hot summer before she started at Oxford she had felt uncomfortable with them, alien and alone, and had wished that she had given in to Lucy’s plea to accept an invitation from her parents to spend the summer with them in the South of France.

Instead she had mooned about at home, sensing her parents’ inability to understand her, feeling unacceptable to her local peers, with whom she seemed to have little in common. And then she had met Craig.

He had come to the house to see her father about something, she couldn’t remember what. Her parents had been out and she had been sunbathing in the garden. She had been flattered by the admiring way he had looked at her bikini-clad body. He had remarked on that and she had offered him a drink.

One drink had turned into two, and in the end he had spent most of the afternoon in the garden with her.

Even then she had sensed a restlessness about him, a yearning—a desperation almost, but she had put it down to the same malaise she suffered herself, too naïve to recognise then their basic differences.

He had asked her out, to a local tennis-club dance. At first her parents had been pleased that she was making friends, and then her father had cautioned her against getting too involved.

She had known by then about Craig’s background: about the father who drank and the mother who struggled to bring up her five children. She had also learned about Craig’s bitterness at not being able to take up the free scholarship he had won, because of lack of money. Her father had told her bluntly that Craig had a chip on his shoulder, but she had refused to listen to him. By this time, she was in love.

Or so she thought.

Her mouth twisted bitterly. She ought to have listened to her father, but she had thought she knew better. She had thought that Craig loved her, when in reality what he had loved was her parents’ wealth and social standing.

As the summer had deepened, so had her feelings. He had known exactly how to arouse her, how to make her ache and yearn for the final act of possession. Even now, remembering, her flesh remained cold and unmoving, her mind unable to really comprehend how she could have felt that way; but she had.

They had made love for the first time in an idyllic setting: a small, enclosed glade in a local wood, a privately owned lane, in actual fact, but with an absentee landlord. Ostensibly, they had gone on a picnic. Craig had brought a blanket, plaid and soft, and very new. Where had he got the money from to buy it? she wondered now. Certainly not from the job he had told her he had, working for a local accountant as a trainee.

He had made love to her with need and passion, or so she had thought, but there had been none of the rapture she had imagined in the ultimate act of possession, and she had rather disliked the heavy sensation of him lying over her afterwards. She had gone home feeling faintly disappointed, until she remembered girls at school saying that the first time was not always very good.

It had been Craig who had first brought up the subject of marriage. What if she were to be pregnant? he had asked her. It could have happened. And because she was genuinely afraid, and because in her innocence she thought that, since they had been lovers, they must love one another, and because she was lonely and desperately in need of someone of her own, she had listened.

No, she had done more than listen. She had married him. Quietly and secretly, one month after he had first made love to her. Her parents were away at the time.

The newly-weds had been waiting for them when they returned.

Campion struggled to sit up, her throat suddenly tight with tension, her breathing shallow.

She would never forget the scene that followed, nor Craig’s fury when he realised that her father was not prepared to either settle a large sum of money on her, or to support them.

To see him change in front of her eyes, from someone she thought loved her to someone who had married her purely and simply for financial gain, had been too much of a shock for her to take in. She had tried to plead with him, to remind him that even without money they still had one another, and he had turned on her then, his face livid with rage.

‘For Christ’s sake!’ he had said. ‘Do you think I would have married you if it hadn’t been for who you are?’

‘You—you said you loved me,’ she had stammered, unable to understand his abrupt change of character.

‘And you fell for it, didn’t you, you stupid little bitch!’ he had snarled at her. ‘Like taking candy from a baby—only it seems that your daddy isn’t going to play along. Well, I’d better get something out of this, otherwise the whole village is going to hear about how easily I got little Miss Goody-two-shoes here into bed, Mr Roberts,’ he had challenged her father.

She had cried out then, but he had turned on her, his expression vicious, quite definitely not good-looking anymore.

‘I should have made sure that you were pregnant, shouldn’t I?’

And he had gone on to make such derogatory remarks about her sexuality that she hadn’t been able to take in all the insults he was hurling at her—not then.

The marriage had been annulled—her father had seen to that, but somehow Campion had felt as though she were encased in ice. She had gone on to Oxford, but she had gone there a changed person. Lucy noticed it and asked her what was wrong, and she had broken down and confided in her friend. That had been the last time she cried. The shock of what had happened wore off, but the humiliation remained. Whenever a man approached her, she froze him off, and gradually she got the reputation of being withdrawn and sexually frigid. She hadn’t cared. She was never going to let a man get emotionally or physically close to her ever again. Craig had held up for her such an image of herself that it had destroyed totally her awakening sexuality. Whenever she remembered how innocently and joyously she had abandoned herself to him, her skin crawled with self-loathing; gradually, she withdrew further and further into herself.

Then her parents were killed in an outbreak of hostilities in Beirut when they were there on business. She had sold the house and bought herself her small flat. The rest of the money she had donated to various charities.

No man would ever again be tempted to make love to her because he thought she could be his ticket to rich living.

Over the years, Lucy had tried to coax her to change, to dress more attractively, to meet other men, but she had always refused. What was the point? She didn’t want a man in her life in any capacity, and what man would want her?

As Craig had already told her, her only attraction lay in her father’s wealth; he had wanted her for that alone. Making love to her had been a necessity, a means to an end, and he had let her know in no uncertain terms just how lacking in pleasure he had found their coming together.

She actually flinched now as she remembered his insults. Her father had tried to stop him, she remembered tiredly. And, afterwards, her parents had both tried to offer her some comfort. They had never criticised or condemned her; she had done that for herself. They had tried to reach her, but the gap between them was too deep. They had never been a close family, and now she was too hurt and bitter to accept their pity, and so she had buried her pain away deep down inside herself where no one could see it.

Why couldn’t she use those memories of how Craig had made her feel to flesh out the character of Lynsey?

She knew why. It was because they had been so false, so dangerously deceptive, and as for the physical pleasure of Craig’s lovemaking … There had been none in his possession, and she cringed from the memory of it, knowing that here again the lack had been hers.

She flinched again as she recalled Guy French’s last words to her this morning.

‘Perhaps you’d have been better off casting your heroine as a nun, Campion,’ he had drawled mockingly. ‘Because it seems that that’s the way you want her to live.’

She had left the office while she still had some measure of control. She had been tempted to tear up her manuscript in front of his eyes; in fact, when she thought about it now, she was surprised by the violence of her reaction. She shivered slightly and got up. She wasn’t going to sleep, so there was no point in lying here thinking about things that could not be changed.

It was almost six o’clock, and she still had to go to the supermarket. It was a long drive to Pembroke … She almost decided to delay her departure until the morning but, if she did, Guy French would probably be on the telephone, telling her he had already found her a secretary. He was that kind of man. No, she needed to leave now, while there was still time.

While there was still time … She frowned a little at her own mental choice of words. It was almost as though she was frightened of the man; almost as though, in some way, she found him threatening. She shrugged the thought aside. Guy French was a bully; she had never liked him and she never would.

The media considered him to be the glamour boy of publishing, although at thirty-five he hardly qualified for the term ‘boy’, she told herself scathingly. He represented everything male that she detested: good looks, charm, and that appallingly apparent raw sexuality that other women seemed to find so attractive, and which she found physically repellant.

She had seen his eyes narrow slightly this morning as he came to greet her, and she had instinctively stepped back from him. He hadn’t touched her, letting his hand fall to his side, but she had still flushed darkly, all too conscious of his amusement and contempt.

No doubt to a man like him she was just a joke: a physically unattractive woman with whom he was forced to deal because it was part of his job. She had seen too many men look at her and then look away to be under any illusions. She wasn’t like Lucy—pretty, confident. Craig had destroyed for her for ever any belief she might once have had that she had any claim to feminine beauty. Ugly, sexless—that was how he had described her in the cruel, taunting voice of his, and that was how she saw herself, and how she believed others saw her as well.

But there were other things in life that brought pleasure, apart from love. She had found that pleasure in her work. Had found … Until Guy French had started tearing her novel apart, and with it her self-confidence.

That was what really hurt, she admitted—knowing that he was right when he described her characters as unanimated and without depth. But she had been commissioned to write a historical novel with a factual background, not a love story dressed up in period costume.

She could, of course, always back down and admit defeat; she could tell Guy French to inform the publishers that she was backing out of the contract. They wouldn’t sue her she felt sure and with withdrawal would stop Guy from hounding her. There were other books she could write … Moodily, she stared out of the window. Her flat was one of several in a small, anonymous, purpose-built block, with nothing to distinguish it from its fellows. Once, as teenagers, she and Lucy had talked of the lives they would lead as adults, of the homes they would have. She remembered quite sharply telling Lucy that she would fill hers with fresh flowers, full of colour and scent.

Fresh flowers! It had been years since she had last bought any … the wreath for her parents’ funeral.

Impatient with herself, Campion went to get her coat and her car keys, and then headed for her local supermarket.