Wife On Demand

by Alexandra Sellers

  She would lie slouched in a posture never before possible to her, for example, her long legs stretched out in ungainly elegance, and, forgetting herself in the heat of conversation, would notice suddenly that a man was staring at her legs. In such moments her first instinct was awkward embarrassment... and then a smile of remembering would steal across her face: I am like other women. He is staring at my legs because they are pretty.

  And then, involuntarily, she would smile her surprised joy at the perpetrator, inviting him to share in the wonder of her marvellous legs.

  Not many men were proof against something like this.

  She came home in the summer before her twenty-fifth birthday. Her father invited Jude Daniels to dinner the day she was scheduled to arrive, so that they could meet for the first time alone. He arranged a dinner party of old friends for a few nights later.

  Hope’s departure was unavoidably delayed for several days because the framers who were framing the painting of the clinic she had done as a thank-you to Raoul Spitzen screwed up and she had to wait till it was fixed. She didn’t arrive until the afternoon of the party.

  “I wanted you to meet Jude on his own,” her father said sadly, and Hope replied merrily, “That’s all right, I’ll meet him with the others. It’ll be fine.”

  She met Jude Daniels, and at first sight she knew he was everything everybody had always said: arrogant, sure of himself, and too damned judgemental. The jealousy she had never stopped feeling coalesced into pointed dislike before they had exchanged a word.

  He liked her no better. He hardly smiled as they were introduced, and his black eyes were assessing, with a look of hostility that she did not understand, but was eager to match.

  He was lean and tall and loose-knit. With a shock of dark brown hair falling forward over his forehead, there was an air of uncut diamond about him. He had a very slight, unplaceable accent, which surprised her. She’d had no idea he was foreign.

  Hope was tall, too, though not as tall as he, and looking very European that night. Proud of her new walk and her new shape, she was wearing a short, tight dress in glittering black that left shoulders and legs bare.

  Her legs were long and lovely, and more important, they both worked. Her auburn hair, immaculately cut to enhance the soft natural curl, swept her naked brown shoulders. Her makeup glowed, her jewellery glowed. She looked pampered, beautiful, rich. Her father’s friends were all bowled over by the transformation. They kept calling her “the duckling.” She felt fantastic.

  She was acting as her father’s hostess that night for the first time in years. He had asked her to put Jude Daniels at her right hand, he wanted them to get to know each other, and though the moment the man entered the room she saw what a mistake it would be, she could not change the seating arrangements without upsetting her father. Anyway, she was a little looking forward to plumbing the reasons for that hostility. She had reason enough to dislike him—but how dared he look at her like that when he had never met her?

  One of the other men at the table that night—another well-known architect and an old friend of Hal Thompson’s —did not like Jude Daniels. Knowing it was wrong of her, Hope gently fanned and facilitated Rex Sutton’s hostility during the dinner. She allowed him to subtly confront, when her obvious duty, especially as Jude was her father’s partner, was to prevent such attacks.

  It did not improve her feelings towards him to see that Jude Daniels knew exactly what she was doing and was cynically amused by it—and not a little contemptuous.

  “You don’t even fight your own battles,” he murmured once, leaning in towards her and speaking for her ears alone.

  She had an elbow on the table, chin resting on her hand, listening to someone. She coolly swivelled her eyes towards him. “Oh, yes, I do,” she promised.

  He took her at her word, engaging her as soon as there was a break in the conversation. “So, Hope,” said Jude Daniels, drawling the vowel caressingly, “you’ve been in a clinic in Switzerland, I understand.”

  “That’s right.”

  “For a long time. Were you very ill?”

  His dark eyes half-smiled, but she knew, and he knew, that the smile was for the onlookers only. Hope felt a ripple of hostility run up her spine, as energising as a cold shower. She wanted to fight him.

  “I was recovering from surgery.”

  “You look remarkably well. It must have done you a world of good to really relax.”

  Every word was barbed, and what the hell business was it of his?

  “It does add a certain polish,” she said. “You should try it sometime.”

  “I suppose your career was interrupted,” he said, leaning back and watching her out of the corner of his eye. The subtext was that she was an idle little rich girl. “What were you doing before you went to the clinic?”

  “I was travelling, and painting.”

  “Ahhh, you are an artist?” he said largely, as enlightenment struck him.

  “I paint, yes.”

  “And do you sell your paintings?”

  She laughed, a rich, mocking trill. “If I had a dollar for every person who asked me that question! It doesn’t matter what the person does, I’ve noticed,” she gaily informed the table. “Even an accountant who wouldn’t know a Picasso if he stuck his foot through it feels competent to sit in judgement on an artist—without seeing their work, mind you!—by asking that question.”

  She took a sip of wine, and turned back to Jude, informing him kindly, “I was mostly working to commission for friends.” Although that was not the most accurate way to put it. Mostly she had made friends through painting for them.

  “Portraits?”

  “I painted their yachts.”

  He smiled in a way that made her want to slap him.

  “Is your work shown? Will you have a show here now that you are home?”

  He was convinced she was an idler, and she was sure nothing would make him think otherwise. If he saw her on her hands and knees scrubbing a hospital ward it wouldn’t change his opinion. A very unfamiliar anger burned in her blood, and her hand shook as she reached for her wineglass.

  “I had some pictures in a couple of shows in Cannes the summer before last,” she said. Not for the world would she have admitted that the gallery owner was a friend.

  He looked admiring over the rim of his glass, took a sip and returned to the inquisition. “In Cannes! And did you sell something there?”

  “A couple of seascapes,” she told him flatly, not showing him any hint of how thrilled she had been to sell a scene without a yacht in it to someone not a yacht owner, how she had felt it legitimised her as an artist.

  “But this is wonderful! I had no idea. Hal,” he called down the table, interrupting the older man’s not very animated conversation, “you didn’t tell me your daughter is a successful artist!”

  “Well, you’ve found it out for yourself,” Hal said with a lazy smile, and for the first time it dawned on Hope just exactly what kind of hopes her father was nurturing towards Jude Daniels.

  No! she wanted to shout at him. He’s your partner, but he’ll never be anything to me.

  “Maybe we can commission the painting for Concord House East’s lobby from your daughter. Why not?” he said, and then, to Hope again, “May I see some of your work?”

  She was deeply unwilling that he should see her paintings, as though to show him anything so personal would leave her vulnerable. “I haven’t even unpacked,” she said. “I haven’t got a studio.”

  “But you will set one up, of course,” said Jude Daniels. She wondered whether everyone could see what she saw, that he was baiting her, or whether to the others this looked like friendly interest.

  “I don’t know,” she said hesitantly. Her life was so changed, she would need time to absorb who she was before looking at questions like what she would do with her future and where she would spend it. “Things are so different now,” she explained, not to Jude Daniels but to the others at the table, peop
le who had known her since before her accident. “I need time...I’m looking for something to do as a stopgap while I get my bearings.”

  Everyone except Jude Daniels nodded understandingly. “Are you still thinking of architecture?” one of the wives asked. “I remember you were always going to become your father’s partner.”

  The woman glanced at Jude as she spoke, and Hope smiled involuntarily, because the woman was letting her know she had picked up on the hostility between Hope and Jude, and that she was on Hope’s side.

  “You were going to be your father’s partner?” Jude pressed, with an odd emphasis, so that she thought. You already had that little piece of information. Why are you pretending you didn’t?

  “Didn’t you know you’d usurped my place?” she responded lightly. To her astonishment his eyes narrowed.

  “That is not quite the way I heard it,” he said. “I heard that you preferred travel to studying for qualifications, and therefore the place as your father’s partner was vacant.”

  Hope’s gaze dropped and her cheeks burned, and though she immediately forced herself to look at him again, there was no doubt that Jude Daniels had won a point.

  Another woman leapt into the breach. “Well, I’m sure among us all we can come up with a job for you to do while you’re reconsidering your life, can’t we, Rex?”

  Hope turned to her gratefully. “Yes, I think that’s what I need—a job for a few months while I sort myself out. I’m so out of touch with everything. I want to be doing something with routine in it.”

  As if the gods had decided to take a hand, the phone rang. A few minutes later, her father came back to the table complaining good-naturedly: it had been from the husband of Eleanor, his office manager, reporting that she had had an accident and was in hospital with a broken leg.

  “But here is the perfect stopgap!” Jude smiled at her. “Why not come to the office temporarily? Then you will be reminded of the joys of architecture and you will have the routine you crave.”

  It was a dare. His eyes told her that he knew she would not accept his challenge, that she was the sort of rich bitch who talked a lot but didn’t intend to get her hands dirty with real work.

  Maybe there was a part of her, just in that moment, that was afraid he was right. That she never had done, and never would do, anything worthwhile.

  Maybe that was why she agreed to do it.

  Chapter 2

  The Rose Collection was the life achievement of Isaac Rose, a wealthy collector of ancient books and manuscripts. This collection, so important that scholars from all over the world came to consult it, had been left to the nation when he died. Several million dollars had also been left for the purchase of a large library of related works which would be housed with the collection, and for the building of the Rose Library.

  Jude Daniels, of the new firm of Thompson Daniels, had captured the trustees’ imagination, and the contract, with a design so unusual Toronto had immediately polarised into two camps. Most of the city’s architects were in the anti camp.

  The architect had taken the instruction literally, and had designed the Rose Library as a rose, a glass flower on a cedar wood stern. The stern was composed of four floors where the precious manuscripts and books of the central collection were to be kept in perfectly controlled light and climate conditions; the rose would house three levels of reading room, as well as the ordinary books in the collection, enclosed in layers of massive glass petals that looked as beautifully fragile as a real rose. Its image would be endlessly reflected in the mirrored walls of two skyscrapers that rose beside it on the south and east, creating the illusion of a forest of roses.

  When Hope went to work for her father, the Rose Library was already more than half complete. The stern was standing, and a delicate tree-like network of girders that would hold the moulded glass was already nearly in place. It was a controversial project, and pictures had been appearing in the papers virtually every week while it was building, but it was all new to Hope.

  Much against her will, she was entranced by the four-foot-high model of the Rose Library which now graced the lobby of Thompson Daniels’ offices, and fascinated by the half-finished building, even shrouded as it was with scaffolding. Not even her hostility for Jude Daniels could make her deny that it was one of the most beautiful buildings she had ever seen. The site was not far from her father’s office, and on her lunch hours Hope would stroll over to watch the men at work as, one by one, the massive curving sheets of glass were installed.

  She was not alone. It seemed to be the favourite occupation of Toronto’s downtown lunchtime crowd, watching the Rose Library go up.

  It didn’t make her like Jude Daniels any better.

  At night her father would talk to her about the younger man as if Jude were his own son, as if she shared his admiration for Jude and would one day share his affection, as if her interest in a man who in fact set her teeth on edge was unquestionable.

  It was from her father she learned the past that Jude rarely told people. He had been born in Czechoslovakia. His mother had died as a political prisoner there when he was five, after the Prague Spring had turned to such a chilling winter; Jude and his father had escaped to Canada later. Life had been hard for a child with a father who grieved constantly for his wife and the life they had lost. His father died when Jude was seventeen, leaving him virtually alone.

  Perhaps, if her father had not liked Jude so much, Hope might have disliked him less. Perhaps, if she had not felt that in her absence they had formed a father-son bond that excluded her, she would not have resented what she thought of as his arrogance so fiercely. But as things stood, there was antagonism in the air whenever Hope and Jude met.

  Which was very often. On her first day, her father, deaf to her subtle pleas that she was too busy learning the ropes to have lunch out, insisted on their all going for what he called “a long, convivial lunch,” to replace that introductory dinner they had missed because of Hope’s delayed arrival.

  “Now, where are we going?” her father asked jovially at twelve-thirty, as the three descended from the offices in the lift. Hope had naturally booked the reservations.

  “The Rotunda,” Hope said. “I’d like to see it.”

  The Rotunda was Toronto’s newest restaurant, and had been built by a man named Norman Cooper, another one of her father’s friends who disliked Jude.

  She glanced up at Jude’s face as she spoke, wanting him to get the message. She was unprepared for the way his dark eyes flicked to hers, and for the unreadable expression that crossed his face.

  “Ah,” said her father, and there was a silence, while Hope took in the information that there was more to Norman’s dislike of Jude than she knew, and that she had somehow hit a sore spot with her very first shot.

  “Is there a problem with that?” she asked innocently.

  “Not what you’d call a problem,” said Hal Thompson in comfortable reassurance.

  Jude was looking at Hope with a calmly assessing look that made her both nervous and irritated. “You have not been there before?” he asked Hope, in his deep voice.

  “No, but I hear it’s a talking point, and I wanted to see it.”

  His long mouth stretched out in a smile, as though he suspected her of deeper motives. Hope was mystified.

  The Rotunda was massive, in the post-modern style. On top of a thirty-storey building in the heart of the downtown area, it was built to a circular design under a high glass dome. In the centre of the main floor, she noticed, were the workstations, where the dishes and linens were kept and the waiting staff collected the food that came up on dumbwaiters from the kitchens below.

  The tables were set all around the perimeter of the dome on two levels. Coming off the elevator, they were greeted by a wall of sound: only open a month, The Rotunda was a popular lunch spot, and at the relatively early hour of twelve-thirty a third of the tables were already full.

  The maitre d’ led them in a semi-circle around the edge of
the central area to a curvilinear staircase, and up to the balcony level. Here the floor was made of glass. The main area of the floor was of smoked glass, with circles of clear glass at intervals that allowed you to look down at the floor below as you walked, or if you sat near one.

  And vice versa. Hope, who was wearing a skirt, was crossing the middle of a circle, gazing interestedly down, when four male diners below lifted their heads to gaze interestedly up. After that she detoured around the clear circles.

  When they reached their circular glass table set near an exterior wall of smoked glass, Hope sat for a moment in silence, gazing around appreciatively. Up here, the noise was approaching din, which gave the comforting impression of being in the thick of things. She could see that Norman’s theme was circles: there were few straight lines anywhere. The dome itself was composed of bands of glass piled one on top of the other, and where they diminished at the top, what the eye saw, looking up, was a series of concentric circles.

  “So, Hope, what do you think?” Jude asked, when she had been gazing speechlessly for a minute or two.

  “It’s incredibly impressive!” she enthused, leaning over the table to be heard because the background noise was high. “It’s Norman’s masterpiece, Dad, don’t you think? It’s a work of art.”

  Jude’s eyelashes fell lazily over his eyes, as though to hide his reactions from her. Hope guessed that he was feeling professional jealousy, and a little flicker of glee smote her. “Look at the way he’s dealt with his influences!” she went on enthusiastically, and babbled on in art appreciation style until she realized that what Jude was hiding from her was amusement. He was laughing at her.

  “You don’t like it, I take it,” she said with cold fury.

  “No, I don’t like it,” he agreed mildly. She was irritated because she had to lean towards him, straining to hear. Jude did not shout to be heard.

  “Why not? Because you didn’t build it yourself, perhaps?”

  “I’m sure you do not want me to repeat myself.”