The Millionaire Affair

by Sophie Weston

  Lisa’s heart leaped in primitive disgust. She tore herself away.

  ‘Love,’ she spat.

  That was when Alec looked up at her at last. There was a gleam of anger in his eyes, along with the tears. He came lithely to his feet and took hold of her. His lips were clumsy, suffocating, desperate.

  Lisa closed her eyes. She was torn between pity and simple horror. She tried to push him away but he was too intent to pay any attention to her resistance. She wasn’t even sure he noticed. It was faintly ludicrous, this pretend battle with a man she had thought of as a friend for more than three years. She jerked out of his hold.

  ‘But I love you,’ he repeated insistently, as indignant as if she had shot him.

  He had stirred up old memories he had no idea of, and, between them, Alec and the memories had shaken Lisa to her core. They left her too upset to remember to be kind.

  ‘Love. Huh! Don’t insult my intelligence,’ she said, retreating behind the table. ‘You want to get into my bed and you think saying you love me will do it. Well, I’ve got news for you. That doesn’t work with me. Not any more.’

  ‘Lisa—’ He was full of despair. And the beginnings of anger. He advanced on her with unmistakable purpose.

  Lisa stopped even trying to spare his feelings. ‘Don’t touch me,’ she cried.

  She ran.

  The next morning she got out of the house before anyone else was up. She toyed with the idea of going to her mother’s. And rapidly discarded it. Joanne would say that she had enough problems dealing with Kit. Lisa was supposed to be the strong one, the one who found her own solutions.

  In the end she went to the dance studio in Ladbroke Grove. There was an early class in jazz dance. Lisa flung herself into it.

  With such effect, indeed, that as they left the studio at the end one of the other dancers said to her, ‘And who were you trying to kill?’

  ‘What?’ Lisa looked round. ‘Oh, hi, Tatiana. I didn’t know you did jazz dance.’

  Tatiana Lepatkina must be over seventy years old, but she still taught a ballet class at the centre. She and Lisa had bumped into each other first at an enthusiastic salsa session over a year ago. Now they strolled along to the changing room together.

  ‘Dance!’ sniffed Tatiana. ‘What you were doing wasn’t dance. That was pure combat training.’

  For the first time since Alec’s pounce, Lisa laughed.

  Tatiana grinned. She was small and astringent. She was also something of a guru to the younger studio members, though no one actually knew how old she was. She had muscles like an athlete’s and wore full dramatic make-up at all times. Even after she had showered it remained untouched.

  Now they both stripped off and went into shower cubicles.

  ‘I wouldn’t have wanted to come within catching distance of your elbows. Or your feet, for that matter.’

  She went silent for several minutes under the whooshing of water. When she emerged, wrapped in a huge white towel, Lisa was already dressed and combing her damp hair in the mirror. Tatiana put her head on one side, eyes bright with inquisitiveness.

  ‘You are so lucky, with hair like that. Pure gold and natural too.’ She added without a break, ‘Who were you kicking this morning?’

  Lisa raised an eyebrow at her reflection. ‘Was it that obvious?’

  Tatiana nodded. ‘A man, I suppose?’

  ‘Or two,’ said Lisa, only half joking.

  ‘Sounds complicated,’ said Tatiana, pleased. ‘Let’s have something decaffeinated and you can tell me all about it.’

  Rather to her surprise, Lisa found herself doing exactly that. When she had finished, Tatiana looked at her in silence for a moment, narrow-eyed.

  ‘And you’re sure you gave this man no encouragement?’

  ‘Alec?’ Lisa sighed. ‘I’ve never thought so. We all had this agreement right from the start—no inter-house affairs. Everyone stuck to it.’

  There was an ironic pause. After a moment Lisa flung up her hands in a token of surrender.

  ‘OK. OK. I thought everyone had stuck to it.’

  ‘You can’t make rules about feelings,’ Tatiana said largely. ‘Never works.’

  Lisa looked mulish.

  ‘Believe me,’ Tatiana insisted. ‘When I was still dancing, we used to be on tour for months at a time. You always start off saying no attachments. But human nature wins every time.’

  Lisa said something very rude about human nature.

  ‘No point in fighting it, though,’ Tatiana pointed out practically. ‘So—what are you going to do?’

  Lisa sighed. ‘Look for somewhere else to live. Alec will never forgive me, and I—well, frankly I’m not too proud of the way I handled it. I got in a panic, I suppose. All that passion.’ And she pulled a face.

  Tatiana, who was rather in favour of passion, was intrigued. ‘Attracted in spite of yourself?’

  Lisa was startled. ‘Not a chance. Men are such idiots.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I had my drama when I was eighteen,’ said Lisa grandly. ‘I got over it and grew up. Why can’t they?’

  Entertained, Tatiana murmured something about human nature again. Lisa frowned.

  ‘Well, it’s a terrible bore. Now I’ll have to go house-hunting and I haven’t got the time. What’s more, my boss will start nagging me about getting what he calls a suitable address, and I almost certainly won’t have the money for that without mortgaging my underwear. And anyway, I just hate doing what my boss tells me.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Tatiana was not only a teacher of ballet, she was a choreographer. Listening to Lisa, she had begun to perceive the story of a ballet. Now here was the dramatic pas de deux: the powerful man, the woman who fights him because she cannot admit the attraction between them.

  ‘What’s wrong with your boss?’ she said carefully.

  Lisa was savage suddenly. ‘He doesn’t like it that a woman has the best trading results in the room. He couldn’t get out of promoting me, but he compensated by—’ Just the thought of Sam’s lecture made her choke with rage.

  Tatiana made a few editorial amendments to her scenario.

  ‘Did he suggest you say thank you in the traditional way?’

  ‘What?’ Lisa looked blank for a moment. Then she understood. ‘Oh, no. He wouldn’t dare make a pass at me.’

  Looking at her pugnacious chin, Tatiana could believe it.

  ‘So what did he do, then?’

  ‘He gave me a lecture on my style. Style! I made half the portfolio’s profits last quarter and he complains about my style!’

  Tatiana was disappointed. She liked more passion in her drama. ‘What is wrong with your style?’

  Lisa listed the points on her fingers. ‘Wrong address. Wrong clothes. Wrong friends.’

  Tatiana began to see that this was a satisfactory drama after all.

  ‘He thinks you are not good enough for him,’ she deduced. She was indignant.

  ‘In bucketfuls,’ agreed Lisa. A shadow crossed her face. ‘And he’s not the first,’ she added, almost to herself.

  Tatiana didn’t notice. She was thinking. ‘Do you want to rent or buy?’

  ‘Well, I’m renting at the moment—’

  ‘Because you could always have the garden flat in my house. As long as you aren’t determined to buy.’

  ‘—but I don’t want to have to go through—’ Lisa realised what Tatiana had said. ‘What?’

  Tatiana repeated it obligingly.

  Lisa shook her head, stunned. ‘I didn’t know—I mean I didn’t realise—I wasn’t fishing…’ she said, acutely embarrassed.

  Tatiana was amused. ‘I know you weren’t. Why should you? You don’t know where I live, or that I have a flat to let.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Lisa, still slightly dazed.

  ‘Well, I have. Just round the corner from here.’ She paused impressively. ‘Stanley Crescent.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Lisa.

  Tatiana waited expectantly. It was
clear that something more was required. Lisa had no idea what. She felt helpless.

  Seeing her confusion, Tatiana smiled. ‘It’s a very good address.’

  ‘Is it? I mean—I’m sure it is.’ Lisa was floundering. She said desperately, ‘I just don’t know much about this part of London.’

  ‘Secret gardens,’ said Tatiana in thrilling tones.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘When you walk through Notting Hill all you see are these great white terraces on both sides of the street, right?’

  ‘Right,’ said Lisa, puzzled.

  ‘Well, what you don’t know is that behind several terraces there are huge communal gardens. Big as a park, some of them. Mature trees, rose gardens, the lot. It’s like having a share of a house in the country.’

  She waved her hands expressively. Quite suddenly, Lisa could see green vistas, trees in spring leaf, birds building nests, space. She gave a sigh of unconscious longing.

  ‘Like gardens, do you?’ said Tatiana, pleased.

  ‘Never had one. Don’t know,’ said Lisa.

  But her dreaming eyes told a different story. Tatiana took a decision.

  ‘Move in on Monday.’

  Lisa did.

  It was a blustery day that blew the cherry blossom off the trees in a snowstorm of petals. Fortunately she didn’t have much to move. She installed her boxes in the sitting room of Tatiana’s garden flat, paid the movers and took a cab to work. She was at her desk by eleven.

  She was greeted by a teasing cheer.

  ‘Hey, hey, half a day’s work today?’ said Rob, her second in command.

  ‘I moved house,’ Lisa answered briefly. She settled behind her desk and tapped in her access code.

  Rob’s eyebrows climbed. Lisa had told him, raging, about her lecture from Sam on Friday afternoon.

  ‘You don’t hang about, do you?’

  She was scrolling through the position pages on the screen but she looked up at that. Her wicked grin flashed.

  ‘No sooner the word than the deed, me.’

  ‘Sam will be impressed.’

  Lisa chuckled naughtily. ‘I know. But I can’t help that.’

  ‘I bet he checks up,’ Rob mused. ‘Just to make sure you’ve got a proper up-market place this time.’

  Her laughter died. ‘He wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘Want to bet?’

  ‘If he does,’ said Lisa with grim satisfaction, ‘he’s in for a surprise.’

  For Lisa, too, the move turned out to have its surprises. For one thing she had the greatest difficulty in getting Tatiana to name a figure for the rent. Her new landlady had escorted her enthusiastically through the house—stuffed with an eclectic collection of furniture, ferns and objets d’art—the garden—as green and private as Lisa had imagined—and the local shops—everything from a late-night grocer’s to a bookshop which sold nothing except books about food and even smelled like a good kitchen. There was no doubt that Tatiana was delighted to welcome her. But she clearly thought anything to do with money was low and wouldn’t be pinned down on it.

  ‘Look,’ said Lisa, turning up at Tatiana’s door one evening with a bottle of expensive Rioja, some information from the local estate agent and an expression of determination, ‘this can’t go on. You need a contract and so do I.’

  She threw down a printed document onto a walnut sofa table which gleamed softly under an art deco lamp.

  ‘That’s a standard form. I’ve signed it but run it past your solicitor before you sign.’ Something in Tatiana’s expression gave her pause. ‘You have got a solicitor?’

  ‘The family has,’ said Tatiana, without enthusiasm.

  ‘Fine. Call him tomorrow. The one thing that I haven’t put in is the amount of rent. Now, the agent gave me a range for one-bedroomed flats in this area.’ A handful of leaflets joined the contract. ‘Pick one.’

  Tatiana wrinkled her nose disdainfully. ‘When I was your age, girls did not admit that they knew money existed. It was men’s business.’

  Lisa was not deflected from her purpose, but she grinned.

  ‘Don’t wriggle. I’m not leaving until I’ve given you a cheque.’

  Tatiana picked up one of the estate agent’s pages and looked at it with distaste. ‘That’s far too much. Anyway, that one’s got a separate entrance.’

  Lisa had come prepared. ‘All right. There are monthly rentals for nine flats there. I’ve worked out the average.’ She magicked a slip of paper out of her jeans pocket.

  Tatiana took it gingerly. Lisa laughed. She had seen her look at a snail on the garden path with much the same shrinking distaste.

  ‘Talk to your solicitor, or I’m moving out. And that would be a pity. This is a lovely place.’

  The May evening was dark. From Tatiana’s first-floor window the shadowed sweep of trees and lawns looked like a magic landscape. Lisa sank into a 1920s chaise longue under the window and sighed with pleasure.

  ‘Wonderful,’ she said exuberantly. ‘I’ve never known anywhere like it.

  Tatiana’s eyes were warm. ‘I’m glad.’ She opened the wine and poured them each a glass. ‘My family bought the house for me years ago. They thought if I could not, after all, make my living dancing, then at least I could rent out rooms.’

  Lisa accepted the glass of ruby wine. ‘And did you?’

  ‘I’ve done both. Dancing is a hard life. Especially when you begin to age. These days I direct, but it was tough in my forties.’ Tatiana frowned. ‘My family still do an annual check-up, though.’

  Lisa sipped wine, amused. ‘Who’s brave enough to do that?’

  Tatiana sniffed. ‘Well, this year it will probably be my nephew, Nikolai. Couldn’t be more unsuitable. The last time I saw him he was wearing a beard and khaki camouflage gear. Still,’ she added grudgingly, ‘that was on television.’

  ‘What a glamorous family.’

  ‘Nikolai isn’t glamorous,’ corrected Tatiana. She had standards in the matter of glamour. ‘He’s an explorer. Writes books on the behaviour of primates.’

  Lisa’s eyes danced. ‘A bit of a wild man, then?’

  ‘Good heavens, no,’ said his fond aunt. ‘Not a wild bone in his body. He’s always completely in control of himself.’

  ‘But?’ prompted Lisa, hearing the reservation in her voice.

  ‘He wants to control everyone else as well,’ announced Tatiana. ‘And then thinks you should be delighted that he has bothered to give you so much of his attention. Men.’

  Lisa had no men in her family, but she had been battling her way through a man’s world ever since she first went to work for Napier Kraus. She could only sympathise.

  ‘Still,’ said Tatiana brightening, ‘he came over just before Christmas, so I should have another six months before he starts trying to interfere again.’

  She was wrong.

  Nikolai Ivanov was as reluctant to involve himself in his great-aunt’s affairs as she was to let him.

  ‘Oh, not London again,’ he told his grandfather.

  They were walking up from the stables to the back of the château, gleaming like gold in the spring sunshine. The gentle slopes of the Tarn valley scrolled away like a medieval painting towards the river. The vine-clad landscape hadn’t changed since his ancestor had commissioned a picture of his home in the eighteenth century. It still hung in the gallery.

  ‘I hate London.’ Nikolai looked at the unchanging prospect and said with feeling, ‘Who’d be in a dirty, noisy city when they could be here?’

  His grandfather smiled. ‘I thought London was where everyone wanted to be these days,’ he said mischievously. ‘I suspect Véronique Repiquet would have preferred to have her wedding there. She told me London was cool.’

  Nikolai raised his eyes to heaven. ‘Véronique would! I, however, am thirty-six years old. I don’t chase fads any more.’

  ‘You seem to manage to have a pretty good time when you get there, however,’ Pauli said drily.

  Nikolai did not pretend to m
isunderstand him. ‘Oops,’ he said, wincing.

  More than one celebrity-watch magazine had published photographs of Nikolai at last year’s fashionable Christmas parties in London. He had been with a different woman in each picture, as his grandmother had pointed out acidly to her husband at the time. Pauli had just said it was nice to see that Nicki was getting over his brother’s death and enjoying himself again.

  He had tactfully not told his wife about the picture which had fallen out of one of Nikolai’s Christmas cards last year. It had shown what looked like a student party in a cellar. The Countess would have been horrified by the sight of her grandson jamming at the piano, having discarded most of his clothes. Pauli, however, was more realistic, and even, as Nikolai knew, faintly envious.

  ‘There must be friends you would like to look up,’ Pauli pointed out now innocently. There had been a number of lively-looking girls in that picture.

  Nikolai was dry. ‘Which particular friend did you have in mind?’

  But his grandfather shook his head. ‘Matchmaking is your grandmother’s department, not mine,’ he said decisively. ‘All I want is to make sure that Tatiana isn’t being—er—unwise.’

  ‘My great-aunt Tatiana,’ said Nikolai, who had spent several strenuous hours with her and her accountant in December, and was not anxious to repeat the experience, ‘is a self-willed old woman. She has been barking for years. I should think it is a cast-iron certainty that she is being unwise.’

  Pauli did not bother to deny it. ‘But you’re fond of her,’ he pointed out. ‘You wouldn’t want anyone to take advantage of her.’

  Their eyes met in total mutual comprehension. Nikolai curbed his frustration.

  ‘You should have been in public relations,’ he said at last bitterly. ‘Or politics. All right, Pauli. I’ll go to London and check on Tatiana. What’s the story?’

  Lisa did not see much of Tatiana over the next few weeks. She was busy all day; and in the evenings, proving to herself as much as her old friends that she had not left them behind with her move, she went out clubbing.

  Which was why, when the doorbell rang at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning, Lisa was still in bed.