by S F Hopkins
The time had passed slowly at first, then faster as he had thrown himself into his work and other relationships, but he had always been aware that only one woman held him. There was a song – And when I dream, I dream of you. It summed up everything he felt. Time was supposed to be a healer, wasn’t it? So why did the hurt refuse so stubbornly to mend?
‘Are you all right, sir?’
John looked up. The stewardess was gazing at him with concern.
‘Yes. Yes, I’m fine. Why do you ask?’
The stewardess looked round, making sure that they were not watched. Then she reached out a long, slim finger and touched him at the corner of his eye. She took the finger away and showed it to him. It was wet.
‘I…’ For once in his successful life, John was lost for words. He was sitting in a club class seat on a flight to New York, and he was crying! Well, he told himself, not crying – but there was no doubt that at least one tear had been squeezed from his eye during his reverie.
‘If there’s anything I can do, sir?’ The stewardess’s voice was full of concern, but something else was there, too. A promise? An offer?
‘We’ll be serving dinner shortly,’ the woman said. ‘Can I get you a drink while you’re waiting?’
‘Thank you,’ John said. ‘A gin and tonic would be good.’
‘Coming right up.’
He watched her walk away. She was – what? Thirty? Thirty-five? Slim. Shapely. Well groomed. He’d liked the understated touch of perfume that had hung in the air while she talked to him. She wasn’t Alice, of course. But Alice was spoken for. Alice had David. And Alice had rejected him decisively, ten years ago. Another song came to him: If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with. A philosophy that had helped him get through the years of loss.
The stewardess returned with his drink. John smiled his thanks. ‘Will you be in New York long, Mister Pagan? she asked.
‘Call me John. A couple of days. Then I go on to Rio.’
‘Ah, Rio. A beautiful city.’
‘And how about you?’
‘Oh, I have a twenty-four hour layover in New York. Then back to London. And after that, Prague.’
‘Busy life.’
‘It is. We stay in the Hemsley on Park Lane when we’re in New York.’
‘I don’t know it.’
‘It’s a nice hotel. We could radio ahead and get your reservation transferred there, if you like.’ She stared into John’s eyes, and now the promise was clear. John noted the clear blue eyes and flawless complexion. Her blouse buttoned to the throat in the airline’s manner but two buttons were undone – accidentally? As she leaned forward, speaking with that confidential air, he caught a glimpse of lace beneath the soft material. The trace of perfume was stronger now.
‘That would be good,’ he found himself staying. ‘If you could.’ He was aware that his voice had become deeper, more guttural. He gave the name of his own hotel.
‘I’ll make the arrangements,’ she said, smiling. As she walked away her hips swayed enticingly under the severe blue skirt.
When she returned a little later to serve his dinner she bent forward to whisper. ‘Your booking has been transferred, Mister Pagan.’
‘John, please.’
‘Not until I’m off duty. I’m Cathy, by the way.’ She smiled. ‘But you can see that from my name tag.’
After dinner, John moved the back of his seat towards the horizontal. He always found sleeping difficult on a plane, and vivid dreams came during the uneasily snatched rest. Memories of Alice vied with glimpses of Cathy performing a striptease, rotating her hips suggestively as she slowly peeled off her uniform.
He was woken by the pilot’s announcement that they would shortly be starting the descent into Kennedy airport and found that he was visibly aroused. Cathy, standing over him to ask him to raise the seat to its normal position for landing, let her eyes go to the evidence of his excitement. She showed the tip of her moist, pink tongue, then ran it slowly around her lips.
‘You’ll be at the hotel before me,’ she said. ‘Leave it to me to make contact.’
When John reached the Hemsley he found he had been allocated a double room overlooking the park. He showered, shaved and donned one of the two bathrobes that hung in the bathroom.
He studied the room service menu, then picked up the phone and ordered a cold lobster mayonnaise salad for two and a bottle of Krug. They were delivered twenty minutes later, and five minutes after that there was a gentle knock on his bedroom door.
Cathy smiled approvingly at his robe, and even more so when she saw the waiting supper. ‘I need a shower,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you pour the champagne and bring it in to me?’
John did as she suggested. When he carried the two glasses into the bathroom Cathy was already out of her skirt and blouse and was peeling down her dark tights. There was, John realized, something immensely sexy about a woman in uniform – and even more so as she removed it.
‘I hate tights,’ Cathy said. ‘Nasty, sexless artefacts.’ She took the glass from his hand, kissing him on the lips as she did so.
‘You prefer suspender belts?’ he asked.
She shook her head.
‘Bare legs?’
‘Oh, no. Too cold except in the height of summer.’
John was puzzled. ‘What then?’
‘Wait till tomorrow,’ she smiled. ‘You’ll have every opportunity to find out then.’ She placed her glass on the vanity, drew the shower curtain, turned on the shower and stepped into the cascading water. John sat and watched her through the translucent material.
‘It’s so good to wash away the day,’ she said. Then, ‘Are you married?’
He was startled. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not married.’
Something in his voice must have alerted her. ‘But there’s someone?’
John sighed. ‘No. There isn’t anyone.’
She turned off the shower and drew back the curtain. ‘I wouldn’t mind, you know. But I do want to feel that while you’re with me, you’re with me. If you see what I mean.’
John stepped forward with the fluffy bath towel and wrapped it around her. She bit her lip as he patted her dry, lingering over the small, firm breasts. Her legs parted willingly and she gasped as he gently dried her most intimate places.
John woke at three the next morning, his body still functioning on London time. Cathy was fast asleep beside him, her black hair spread out on the pillow, her limbs flung in abandon across the rumpled sheets. How long? he wondered. How many nights was he doomed to spend like this, his hungry male body satisfied but his heart filled only with longing for what could not be?
They had gone from bathroom to bedroom, sitting in their white robes on the broad bed, drinking champagne and feeding each other with plump, succulent morsels of lobster interspersed with increasingly passionate kisses. Then they had stripped off their robes and explored each other’s bodies – frankly and openly, exulting in their mutual desire. It had been a time out of time, a time of giving and sharing. The room seemed still to echo with Cathy’s cries of joy as he had pleasured her with his tongue. Then, when he had raised himself above her, he had smothered her face and throat with kisses as she reached down, holding him, guiding him into herself.
Afterwards they had lain in each other’s arms and talked. She had told him about the end of her relationship, her sense of loss and the fellow-feeling that had driven her to invite him to change hotels. ‘I’m not usually as forward as this,’ she had whispered. ‘You may not believe that, but it’s true. I saw something in you that spoke to my own pain, and I wanted you.’
And John had told her what it was that she had recognized. Possibly for the first time with any woman, he had talked about Alice and what she had meant to him. He had told Cathy how certain he had been that he and Alice would marry. And, sipping the last of the champagne, he had told her of that dreadful day when Alice had explained that it could never be. When she had told him that, you
ng though she was, there was something in her past of which she was deeply ashamed. Something she knew would return to haunt her. Something that would prevent his ever respecting her, and doom their marriage to failure.
Cathy had rested on her elbow, looking into his eyes, sharing his pain. ‘And she wouldn’t tell you what it was?’
John had shaken his head. ‘I tried. Heaven knows I tried. But she was immovable.’
Chapter 4
Three o’clock in New York is eight o’clock in London. While John lay in his hotel bed, thinking about the past, Alice had already been up for two hours. As she showered and prepared to leave for her meeting with the Italian designers, she played back in her mind the end of last night’s dinner.
An English friend might have been more reticent, unwilling to ask what she desperately wanted to know. But Merrill was American, and Americans aren’t like that.
‘Why couldn’t you marry him?’ she had demanded to know. ‘What was this terrible secret you couldn’t tell him?’ And, ‘Why are you so infuriating, Alice? If this man loved you like he said he did, he’d have accepted whatever you had to tell him. Didn’t you trust him enough to put him to the test?’
It was a good question. Wasn’t that what love was – the knowledge that you could trust the person who loved you to go on doing so, no matter what? But she had been young, and what was clear to her now had not necessarily been so then. Perhaps she should have made a clean breast of it and left it to him to decide whether their relationship could survive? Instead of taking the decision for him? Still – whatever she should have done, or could have done, it didn’t matter now. No man who had been treated as she had treated him would ever come back to her. Men didn’t forgive like that. Not even perfect men. She longed for a resumption of her relationship with John – but work would have to do instead.
The car arrived on the stroke of seven, and Alice was in the foyer waiting for it. The driver took her laptop and thin leather briefcase and opened the door for her to step inside. Within minutes she was being driven through the London traffic, heading for Hammersmith and her office. Once there she settled to her breakfast of orange juice, croissant and the strong Italian coffee she enjoyed, while David took her through the morning’s arrangements.
‘The designs are going to knock our socks off,’ he said. ‘We know that. These are going to be the clothes that every woman in Britain will demand to wear, once they see them. Britain? What am I saying? Every woman in Europe. And we have the opportunity to be first to market. They’re offering us world-wide exclusivity for a six week period.’
Six weeks in fashion was a long time; it was worth a great deal of money to know that no-one else would have seen the designs until House of Pharaoh had got them safely into the better stores. But fashion was also a very leaky business, with levels of espionage that would do credit to MI5.
‘How about manufacture?’ asked Alice.
‘We’ll use Wednesday, and only Wednesday.’
Alice nodded. Wednesday was their personal code name for perhaps the only manufacturer from whom it could be said that nothing ever leaked out. No-one else in the company knew who Wednesday were, so no-one could sell the secret to a competing fashion house.
‘If the designs are as good as you say, Marco’s going to ask a hell of a price for exclusivity.’
David smiled. ‘He is. And, if I may say so, that’s your job.’
His words were no more than the truth. Alice’s task this morning was threefold: to assess whether these were, indeed, the designs House of Pharaoh wanted to hang its season on; to negotiate the terms of the deal with Marco Antonetti, who owned the design house; and then to decide whether whatever price she could negotiate the doubtless astronomical starting figure down to was a risk worth taking. Business, she had learned, was primarily a matter of risk management.
‘Are they flying in this morning?’ she asked.
David shook his head. ‘They stayed at the Ritz last night. We have a car picking them up. Indeed,’ he said, looking at his watch, ‘They should be here in three minutes.’
They were not, of course, there in three minutes, as Alice had known they would not be. Marco Antonetti took an artist’s approach to the tyranny of the clock. It was good of House of Pharaoh (though no more than he expected) to send a car for him and his team; but the car could wait until Marco was ready to step into it.
Marco and Alice had met many times before, and there was no doubt that the liking Alice felt for the Italian was returned. There was also no doubt that all the friendship and affection in the world would not reduce the Italian’s demands for what he knew to be outstanding work.
House of Pharaoh had a facility custom-built for days like this – a large viewing room complete with catwalk down which the models could strut their stuff and a dressing room for them to change in. The only door into the dressing room was in the far wall of the viewing room, which itself could only be reached through a door from Alice’s office. There was one key to that door, and one alone, and Alice had it. This was the key she handed to David when the models and their locked bags were safely in the dressing room, and it was the same key that she retrieved from him when he had locked the door. No cameras or cell phones were allowed into viewing or dressing room, and both rooms were swept regularly by a security firm that numbered foreign embassies among its customers. Alice, David and Marco sat beside the catwalk and waited for the show to begin.
It was a knockout.
There are certain fashion houses so famous and so rarefied that no real woman is ever expected to wear their clothes as part of normal life. They promote concepts, colours, shapes, to be taken up by those lesser firms vulgar enough to exchange actual goods for money. Other companies manufacture clothes for the mass market – good clothes, highly wearable clothes, but always half a season behind and never with quite the cut, quite the material or quite the cachet of the famous names. Others again invest huge sums in PR and marketing to build a brand that will sell to those who need the reassurance of knowing that people will recognize what they are wearing. These are the firms whose products sport a visible logo, their customers women who only know they exist because other people react to them.
And then there is the tiny handful, the crème de la crème. Their clothes are real clothes; their customers women who value originality, cut and material enough to pay a stiff premium for something that all other women will envy but few can afford.
House of Pharaoh was one of that tiny handful.
David and Alice sat stunned as the series of masterpieces passed before them. When it was over, and the last model had returned to the dressing room to change back into her street clothes, Alice raised a hand and pointed to the discreet oak cabinet by the door. David crossed the room to open the cabinet and withdraw from its refrigerated interior three glasses and a bottle of Krug.
‘Two, David,’ said Alice. ‘I don’t think one bottle will do justice to what we have seen today.’
David smiled and extracted a second bottle of champagne.
Marco purred. ‘You liked it, cara?’
Alice sought her words carefully. ‘Marco,’ she said at last. ‘You know I am your warmest fan.’
‘And I yours, cara.’
‘You are one of the greats. Perhaps the greatest of the greats. But today…today, Marco, you have surpassed not only yourself but everyone who imagines himself your competitor. That was the most outstanding collection I have ever seen. From anyone.’
It was to the Italian’s credit that he did not look for one moment as though he found the compliments excessive. ‘You will take the line.’
‘All of it.’
Marco swallowed his champagne in three quick draughts, and David hurried to refill it. ‘We will need total secrecy,’ he said. ‘And twelve weeks exclusivity. World-wide.’
Marco inclined his head.
‘And your price for that?’ Alice asked.
‘For that I can offer no price,’ said Marco. ‘But
for four weeks exclusivity, I make an offer you cannot refuse. Though my partners will not thank me, I make this low price because of the love I bear you.’
And he named a figure that would have bought a year’s lease on the hotel in which he had passed the previous night.
David looked stunned, but Alice nodded judiciously. ‘That I cannot accept,’ she said. ‘But for eight weeks, I am sure we can deal.’
And she named a figure she knew to be realistic that was a tiny fraction of Marco’s opening shot.
The Italian’s face was split by a huge grin. ‘Carissima, you will bankrupt me. But House of Pharaoh is dear to me. Let us split the difference.’
‘Very well,’ Alice said. ‘Six weeks it is. At my price.’
Marco roared with laughter. He waved his glass, which was somehow empty again. ‘David,’ he said. ‘How can I toast the deal we have agreed without champagne?’
Chapter 5
The clothes were locked again in their bags, and the bags in Alice’s private strong room. Cars took the models to Heathrow for the flight back to Turin. The dressing room was locked, and then the viewing room. Alice took charge of the only key to each. Work would keep David in the office, but Alice and Marco entered a silver Mercedes and were driven to Covent Garden for lunch at the Ivy. David had suggested the River Café, which was both closer and on Marco’s route to the airport afterwards, but Alice was not about to risk a British American version of Italian food on a man from Turin.
Marco was in expansive mood. ‘You and I, cara,’ he murmured. ‘We are at the height. And, may I say, it is a pleasure to deal with someone so gifted yet so professional. And, of course, so beautiful.’
Alice smiled. Marco was famous throughout the business for his outrageous flirting, but also for the faithfulness of his marriage to Anna.