by Daphne Clair
‘What happened?’
‘Well—the other guy ended up in hospital. If there hadn’t been plenty of witnesses to swear he’d started it, Sholto would have been expelled for sure. We had to pull him off in the end. It took half a dozen of us. I think he was out of it, totally—didn’t even know what he was doing.’
‘H-how old was he, then?’
Derek thought. ‘Twelve, maybe thirteen. He was big for his age, though. Well, his dad was a big bloke, guess Sholto takes after him. The other guy was pretty well-known as a bully and a troublemaker, but he didn’t stand a chance that day. I think Sholto even shocked himself. It was the only time I saw him thoroughly lose his temper. But...that’s why I didn’t want to leave you with him the day he... found us together. I was scared of what he might do.’
Tara shivered despite the heat of the day. ‘That day, before—before we went into the bedroom,’ she reminded him, ‘you told me that you didn’t think it was true, what I said about him. Did you really believe that, or were you trying to make me feel better?’
‘Both. For what it’s worth, I thought he genuinely loved you. And I don’t believe he’s the type to cheat on his marriage. He’s never been a ladies’ man. When we were teenagers most of his dates were foursomes—I’d ask my current girlfriend to find someone to partner him. It wasn’t hard to get the girls to agree, he was always a bloody good-looking sod. But he wasn’t all that interested in women.’
‘No?’ It didn’t fit with her assumptions. She couldn’t keep the doubt from her voice.
‘For one thing he had no time,’ Derek said. ‘He had two paper runs and a part-time job when he was only twelve. In the fourth form, after his father died and his mother wasn’t able to work, he cashed in on a craze some of the girls had for making earrings and stuff and offered to sell them on commission to his paper-run customers. Then he started street hawking at weekends, and when his mother died he sold the house and put the money and all his energy into his business. He was too busy for much of a social life.’
By the time he met Tara, Sholto had a successful import-export business, already expanding into Asia, and an expensive modern home that she’d found stark and colourless. With Sholto’s indifferent blessing, she had replaced some of the soulless contemporary furnishings, creating a more comfortable, welcoming atmosphere with mellow antique furniture and jewel-toned rugs and cushions.
To her, Sholto had seemed supremely self-confident and sophisticated. She’d taken it as read that his knowledge of women was as thorough as his knowledge of the business world.
She’d met him when he came into her father’s surplus goods firm, where she was acting as secretary, and she’d been struck by how handsome he was, with his superbly tailored suit and his unconscious air of power adding something extra. And despite the few words in which he’d told her Mr Greenstreet expected him, she’d responded with deep, immediate pleasure to the distinctive timbre of his voice.
When Tara took some papers that her father asked for into the office, Sholto stood up at her entrance, a courtesy few men offered to a mere secretary. But he hadn’t smiled, even when her father introduced them, merely extending a strong, firm hand that briefly closed about hers.
On leaving the office he’d given her a polite nod as he passed her desk, looking mildly surprised when she smiled at him and said, ‘Goodbye, Mr Herne.’
He telephoned a week later for an appointment, and before he’d had a chance to tell her who he was she’d greeted him confidently by name.
‘You must be good with voices,’ he told her.
She was, but his was the only one that had made that much impression on her. ‘What time would suit you?’
When he kept the appointment he’d called her by her first name when he thanked her after she’d ushered him into her father’s office.
The next time he called, he paused in the doorway between the outer and inner offices on his way out and looked back, saying, ‘Harold—perhaps you’d allow me to take you and your wife out to dinner one evening? Tonight, if that suits you?’
Harold Greenstreet looked gratified, and regretful. ‘I’m afraid my wife died a couple of years ago. But—’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Sholto said swiftly. ‘In that case, perhaps your daughter might like to accompany you.’ He turned to her, and for the first time she saw him smile. It completely changed the austerity of his features and made him momentarily look almost boyish. Tara was still dazedly looking at his mouth when the smile had faded, noticing that the curve of his lower lip was less ruthlessly chiselled than the upper one, the only hint of latent gentleness in his face.
Faintly startled, Harold said, a shade too heartily, ‘Thank you, I’m sure we’d enjoy that, wouldn’t we, Tara?’
Sholto’s eyes met hers, an expression lurking in the dark blue depths that she couldn’t read. ‘Would you, Tara?’ he asked, his voice soft and almost coaxing.
She felt herself blush. She wondered if her father was waiting for her to make some excuse so that he could propose that his current lady friend might take her place, as he’d obviously been going to suggest before Sholto had pre-empted him.
‘Thank you,’ she said, making an effort to be cool and composed. ‘I’ll look forward to it.’
Her father didn’t seem annoyed. By the time they met Sholto at the restaurant he’d designated, Harold was apparently enjoying the novel prospect of a night out with his daughter.
She’d expected Sholto to be accompanied by his wife, and pictured a very svelte blonde or brunette, with smooth hair and discreetly glossy make-up, probably tall and thin, wearing designer clothes. But it appeared there wasn’t a Mrs Herne at all. Tara quietly rejoiced at the casually imparted information.
Her father did most of the talking, but a couple of times Tara looked up to find Sholto’s eyes on her as he absently twirled his wine glass or stirred his coffee, answering her father in polite but general phrases. Several times he addressed her directly, drawing her into the conversation, and she responded eagerly but was careful not to talk too much, conscious that the men might have important business to discuss.
When they parted afterwards he smiled at her again, and held her hand a moment longer this time as she thanked him for the evening. On the way home she allowed herself to dream, just a little.
She hadn’t seen him again until the day after her father’s death.
She’d tried to contact him that morning, as she’d attempted to contact everyone in her father’s appointment book. Sholto’s secretary said he was out of the country but wouldn’t have forgotten the appointment. They’d had word that his plane was delayed but he expected to be able to make it to Mr Greenstreet’s office. Yes, of course, she said, she’d tell Mr Herne the news; he would certainly understand that it might take time to sort matters out, and might she offer her sympathy to the firm?
Tara didn’t say that the firm consisted now of herself and the files she’d kept for her father.
She was answering an incoming call an hour later when Sholto walked in and smiled at her.
‘Thank you for your concern,’ she said steadily to the caller. ‘Yes, I have your file and we’ll get to it just as soon as possible. Yes, I will convey your message to the family. Goodbye.’
The family, she thought bleakly. That meant herself and her father’s brother and his wife and three grown children. Fortunately Uncle Al and Aunt Pen, whom she’d hardly seen since she was ten years old, had arrived last night from Palmerston North and taken over at home, helping her with the funeral arrangements. But no one else could be of much use here in the office. She had rather welcomed the chance to keep busy, it helped to hold her together.
Then Sholto smiled at her, walking towards her desk, and said, ‘Hello, Tara.’ And she put a hand to her eyes and burst into tears.
‘He wasn’t really in love with me,’ she told Derek. As he looked about to dispute it, she said, ‘Oh, maybe for a short time after we were m
arried he was close to it. I think he was... impressed in some way that other men admired me.’ Yet, before she met Sholto she hadn’t attracted so very many men. It was something about him, about her blind, headlong love for him, that had given her a glow, an appeal that had never been apparent before. That, and perhaps the fact that Sholto had encouraged her to spend money on herself, to buy expensive clothes that made the best of her shapely though unspectacular figure, and to patronise a good hairdresser who cut and shaped and layered her wayward mop of ringleted curls and showed her how to arrange it in suitable styles.
She’d become a part of his image, she supposed now. An accessory to his business and his social life. ‘But when we first started going together,’ she said, ‘it was because he was sorry for me.’
He’d begun by being casually kind, left with no other choice but extreme callousness in the light of her sudden and unexpected storm of grief.
After a moment’s stunned silence, he’d come round the desk and folded her against his chest, and asked her what on earth was the matter. It was some time before she realised he’d come straight from the airport without having received the message she’d left with his office. When she managed to choke out the words, he’d held her closer and waited for the weeping to subside before he said, ‘Is there anything more that needs doing here immediately?’
He’d faxed a page of her father’s appointment book to his own secretary with instructions to phone the remaining names on it, made two more calls for her himself, and reprogrammed the answering machine in his own voice, suggesting urgent messages could be rerouted through his office, but that owing to Mr Greenstreet’s unexpected death, other matters would be attended to in due course. Then he said, ‘Come on, Tara, I’m taking you home.’
‘He hardly left my side for three days after my father died,’ she told Derek. Although he’d refused to sit with the family at the funeral, he’d been there all through the service and the burial, and the gathering at the house afterwards. And he’d been the last to leave. When her uncle had asked if she’d like to come home with him and his wife, to live with them, and she’d shaken her head, Sholto said, ‘I’ll look after her. I have an obligation to her father. I’d be honoured to fulfil it in his memory.’
He was definitely exaggerating, Tara knew. Her father and he had been business acquaintances, nothing more. If there had been any obligation on either side, she suspected it was probably the other way round.
Harold Greenstreet had been an erratic businessman, indulging in various ventures one after the other, always convinced that the latest would eventually make him rich. Some of them prospered moderately, while others had been financial failures although he’d never had to declare bankruptcy. He’d cut his losses, sell up and move on to a new town and a new enterprise, establishing his wife and only child in yet another home, so that Tara had never put down roots. The Auckland business had lasted longer than any of the others, and had just about broken even. Perhaps with the death of his wife and his own encroaching middle age Harold had accepted that the elusive fortune he’d pursued all his life would never materialise.
Certainly in taking on responsibility for Tara, Sholto could never have sought any financial advantage.
After Sholto’s oddly formal little speech, Uncle Al had cast him a serious, questioning look, and apparently been satisfied with what he saw. ‘We’ll keep in touch,’ he promised. ‘If you change your mind, Tara, just let us know.’
‘After my uncle and aunt went back to Palmerston North,’ she said, shifting more comfortably against Derek’s willing shoulder, ‘I told Sholto I could manage on my own. I knew I’d leaned on him too much. That day was the first time he kissed me.’
‘He didn’t try to take you to bed then?’ Derek sounded slightly censorious.
‘Oh, no. He came round a lot in the next couple of months, checking that I was all right. And he helped me to tidy up Dad’s business affairs, and got an agent to find someone who wanted to take over the firm. I felt too young and inexperienced to run it myself, I was afraid I’d get into debt, and anyway I wanted a change. I got a little bit of money from the sale, not a fortune but enough for a nest egg.’ It had been handy later when she bought the shop, because she hadn’t wanted to use Sholto’s money for it. ‘Sholto knew someone who needed a secretary, and I applied and got the job. And... when I’d begun getting over my father’s death, Sholto started taking me out. We even kissed again several times. But he never stayed the night.’
Derek said, ‘Were you a virgin when you got married?’
Tara shook her head and shifted a little, so that his arm dropped from her shoulder. ‘No,’ she said briefly, moving her legs and digging her toes into the sand. ‘I think I’ll have a swim. How about you?’
They ran into the water side by side, and played about for a while. Soon after they came out the skipper decided it was time to go home.
It had been a pleasant day, but she was tired. Too many late nights, perhaps, she thought. Maybe she ought to cut down on them. If the object of accepting all invitations was to stop her thinking of Sholto, the exercise hadn’t been particularly successful.
She went to bed early that evening, and again many times over the next several weeks. Andy asked her and Derek to go with him and Jane to a first night at the university theatre and a party afterwards. ‘One of the lecturers wrote the play,’ Andy told Tara. ‘All Jane’s university friends will be there. I’ll have no one to talk to.’
‘Jane—’
‘She’ll have to talk to them, and I’ll just be standing round like a big dumb ox. Please, Tara, you’ve got to come.’
It was moral support he really wanted, she deduced. She explained to Derek and they went along. Andy was quiet, but Jane hung on his arm, collecting interested, envious and sometimes incredulous looks from her women colleagues, and a few sly grins and raised brows from the men that made Tara want to clout them.
The next day was Sunday. Tara slept late, found she was out of milk, and went to the nearest dairy, coming back with a carton of milk and a Sunday paper. She spread the paper on the table as she ate a bowl of cereal, skimming the headlines. Royal Visit Next Year? Minister Denies Accusation. Missing Man Found in Bush.
At least there was some good news, then. She glanced at the front page photograph of a grinning man in a plaid shirt, sporting a week-old beard and giving a thumbs-up sign to the photographer.
In the lower corner another headline caught her eye. New Zealand Crew Die in Fiji.
She skimmed the item, expecting to read of a boating disaster. Instead, it briefly stated that two New Zealanders had died on a local excursion flight to one of the outer islands when the small plane crashed into a lagoon. All those aboard had been air crew members on a two-day stopover in Fiji. There were three survivors, but—
Tara’s eyes leapt quickly to the bottom of the article, where the names of the dead were printed in bold black letters. And immediately stopped there, her head pounding with sudden pressure, her mouth opened in horror. One of the names meant nothing, but the other was appallingly familiar. She read it over again, trying to convince herself she must be mistaken. She wasn’t. The second dead crew member was Averil Carolan.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Tara sat for a time with her mind whirling, then got up and slowly went to the telephone and dialled Chantelle’s number.
‘I don’t want to bother you,’ she said. ‘I’ve just read the news about Philip’s cousin. Will you please tell him how sorry I am?’
‘Yes, I will. Thank you, Tara. Phil’s round at her parents’ place now, with some of the family. It’s a dreadful shock for them.’
‘Is... do you know if Sholto’s there, too?’
‘He was this morning. I don’t know about now.’
‘I don’t have his new address,’ Tara said. ‘Could you—?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Chantelle found it, and Tara wrote it down. ‘And here’s the phone number,’ C
hantelle added, reciting it off.
Tara stood looking at the number, biting her lip. A phone call didn’t seem enough, and if she phoned first she was sure Sholto would veto a visit.
She remembered the comfort of his arms, of his presence, when she’d lost her father. The least she could do was go and see him.
The address was in a new, inner city apartment block. She took a lift to the second floor, and knocked on a varnished wood door with a peephole in it.
At first she thought no one was home. Perhaps he was still with Averil’s parents. She pressed the bellpush by the door and waited. But she was about to turn away when the door was opened and Sholto said, ‘Sorry—I was on the phone.’
He hadn’t looked through the peephole, because when he saw her his face closed as if a steel shutter had come down. ‘What do you want?’ he said. ‘I just learned about Averil, Sholto. May I come in?’ For a moment she thought he was going to refuse, perhaps shut the door in her face. Then, without any visible change of expression, he swung it wide and gestured for her to enter.
There was a carpeted vestibule, and she waited for him to close the door before walking through a door into a large lounge.
A glance at the decor reminded her of the impersonal surroundings he’d lived in before marrying her. The carpet was pale grey, the walls ice-blue, and all the furniture seemed to be leather, glass and stainless steel. The day was quite warm, but she almost felt goose flesh rising on her skin.
Sholto silently indicated a two-seater sofa, tightly upholstered in black leather. She sat down and studied his face as he stood a few feet away, one hand in a pocket of his sleekly fitting navy pants. His eyes were slightly bloodshot; they seemed more deeply set. His skin had a sallow tinge beneath the habitual tan, and the almost invisible line by his mouth was more pronounced. He looked as though he’d been up all night.