Con shrugged casually. ‘I spotted you on the beach and followed you home,’ he said. ‘What were you doing down there — looking for your naked stranger, or just more trousers to steal?’
It was too close to home, and Verna’s mouth shut with a clunk, cutting off her retort. She stared up at him coldly, then turned away and flung the frying pan into the sink. ‘None of your business,’ she said childishly.
‘Okay. How long will it take you to get ready to go for our drive?’
‘You go to hell!’
‘Only if we can get back by tomorrow morning. I’ve got next week’s column to write.’
He didn’t raise his voice, but stood there totally unruffled and apparently oblivious to Verna’s flaming indignation.
‘And I suppose that’s why you’re inviting me along,’ she cried, ‘so you can gather more ammunition. What’s the matter ... can’t you find enough things in your tiny little imagination?’
She’d turned to face him again, and despite the tears of anger in her own eyes, she was slightly taken aback at the sudden expression of seriousness that flashed across Con’s face. But it only lasted an instant, before it was slowly replaced by one of total incredulity.
‘Oh ... Oh my God,’ he murmured as if to himself. And then louder. ‘Oh, come on; you’re not taking this Dragon Lady the Editor thing personally.’ That magic smile lit up his face as he moved closer to peer down into her flushed face. ‘You are!’ he cried with unstilted delight. ‘You’re actually taking it personally ... you think I’m out to get you.’
Verna stood there and watched his face dissolve with un-suppressed laughter, and just as he seemed about to collapse from it, she brought back her hand and smacked him across the cheek just as hard as she could manage it. The impact drove him hard against her refrigerator, and instantly changed his laughter to rigid, icy anger.
Gingerly, he reached up to touch his jaw, where the mark of her stinging fingers shone like a brand. Verna looked into those cold, cold eyes, and steeled herself for the blow she expected, but when he made no move to strike her, she followed hard on her earlier attack.
‘And just what else would I think?’ she screamed. How can I take it anything but personally, when you make me the laughing stock of the whole damned town? And don’t you dare try and tell me it wasn’t deliberate. Con Bradley, because I wouldn’t believe you if you swore it on a stack of Bibles as high as you are. You deliberately set out to humiliate me, and you managed it, damn you, but I’ll get even if it’s the last thing I ever do!’
Her words flowed even more quickly than her tears, and soon she felt as though both would flood them right out of the kitchen, but Con just stood there, silently, looking at her.
‘I don’t suppose you’d accept that I thought up that approach before I ever even met you?’ he asked. ‘No, I didn’t think you would.’
‘Well, if you did that just makes it all the more despicable,’ Verna raged. ‘Because then it’s just pure, chauvinist piggery, which is about what I’d expect from you anyway.’
‘You really don’t have much of a sense of humour, do you?’ He stood there, looking at her with that infuriatingly placid calm, and asked the question almost as if he were speaking to himself.
‘Sense of humour? I’ll give you sense of humour I’ Verna shouted, turning to grab at die first thing she could lay hands on to strike him with. Her fingers closed around something and she turned with it shining in her hand, striking blindly at the huge figure before her. Then it was as if she’d smashed her hand into a brick wall; her entire arm and fingers went rigid with pain and then a strange numbness, and she looked down at where the kitchen carving knife lay, still spinning slowly, on the floor beside them.
‘Oh ... oh my God!’ she whispered, stricken to the very soul by the seriousness of her attack. Her eyes flashed to meet his, then ran quickly over his body to see if she’d actually cut him. But she couldn’t have ... wouldn’t have, she thought. Would she? She raised her face to meet his blazing, cold eyes again, the words forming in her throat but strangling before she could get them out. 1 ... it’s ... but ... I couldn’t..
Con’s eyes ranged across her figure, eyeing her with none of the passion she had seen in the restaurant and later on the beach. This time they held only a chill loathing, and she shivered under their icy stare.
His earlier stares had made her feel naked, vulnerable but at least desired. This time she felt like some tiny, insignificant reptile, or creepy crawling thing, and it seemed as if she would shrivel beneath the intensity of his gaze.
The silent appraisal went on for days, it seemed, and Verna stood there in total silence, shivering both from his disgust and from the nearness of what she had almost done. And from her own self-disgust, which threatened to shake her apart right before his eyes.
And then he spoke, in a voice that rumbled up like thunder from a grave.
‘My God, but you take yourself seriously, don’t you?’ he said, shaking his head as if he couldn’t quite believe it. Then he turned and walked to the door, shouldering it open as he turned and flayed her to the soul with one final comment.
‘God! It’s not much wonder you’ve kept your amateur status, with an attitude like that.’
And then he was gone, stalking past a wriggling Sheba with a soft, gentle pat on the tummy, and out to cross the street and drop out of sight towards the beach. He never once looked back, though Verna watched him as long as he was in sight.
CHAPTER FOUR
Verna spent the rest of Sunday house cleaning, trying in vain to use physical effort as a weapon against her growing self-recriminations.
The very thought of her attempted attack on Con Bradley made her almost physically sick, and the wounds caused by his final, slashing remark were kept open by her own guilty conscience. The fact that his statement might have been wholly deserved did nothing to assuage the hurt, and Verna’s feelings ranged from a tearful sorrow to a hot, blistering anger at the man who could strike such a blow to her self-esteem.
Monday morning dawned after a night in which she might as well not have bothered trying to sleep, and she stared aghast at the dark smudges under her eyes when she went to brush her teeth.
‘You look like something the cat dragged in at midnight, old girl,’ she muttered ruefully, and then moaned at the unexpected thought that Con Bradley had probably slept like the proverbial baby, despite the near-miss assault. He was just the type, she thought, so terribly calm and self-assured that even a hysterical woman with a knife couldn’t disrupt his cool.
Getting through the morning’s work was an ordeal; everything that could possibly go wrong, did.
‘What you’re seeing is "Verna’s Law",’ she told Jennifer at one point during the morning. ‘What can go wrong, will; and what can’t, we can arrange. It’s days like this I wish I’d got married at sixteen so I could let somebody else do the worrying.’
The two women slipped out for lunch, leaving Dave to mind the office. Technically, it should have been Verna’s turn to sit out the lunch break, but Dave merely shrugged at her explanation of editor’s privilege, saying he’d rather eat later himself anyway. Nothing was said about the real reason behind the switch — the fact that Verna couldn’t possibly have survived it if she’d had to stay alone in the office and wait for Con’s delivery of his column.
If he brought her a column at all, she thought during lunch. It would serve her right if he didn’t, and Verna knew it, but her own assessment of Con as a professional made such a move highly unlikely. He wasn’t the type to let personalities interfere to that degree with any agreement he’d made.
Nonetheless, Verna was vaguely surprised and tremendously relieved when she returned to the office to find the expected envelope waiting on her desk.
‘Did he ... er ... say anything?’ she asked Dave in as casual a voice as she could manage. Her stomach was all aquiver, expecting her young journalist to pass on some vivid and highly deserved message, but it was not to b
e.
‘Nope,’ was the equally casual reply, and Dave was off on his own lunch break without another word.
Verna was all too aware of her trembling fingers as she lifted the envelope and stared at it for some time before reaching for her letter-opener. Then the feel of the cold, blunt blade in her fingers threw up a vivid reminder of the morning before, and she laid both opener and envelope down on the desk as her stomach lurched.
She could feel the tears readying themselves, and blinked hastily, shaking her head in reproach at the surge of emotion she couldn’t quite control. And when she finally ripped open the envelope and began to read that week’s ‘Bib’n’Tucker’, she had only to skim through the first few paragraphs to feel herself trembling with even greater emotion.
Con Bradley might as well have slapped her face. The column made no reference to Dragon Lady the Editor; none at all. It was a straight, simple review of the chosen restaurant, devoid of humour, devoid of any sparkle, and so totally removed from what Verna knew her readers had already come to expect that even she felt mildly cheated.
The message was horribly, deliberately clear: You’ve made it dear enough now that you don’t like my kind of column, so here it is — your way! And Verna could have wept at the coldness of it all.
It was, she realised, exactly what she deserved. And that realisation struck her like a physical attack that left livid spots of colour in her cheeks and a heartrending emptiness inside her. He had been right; she had been taking herself far too seriously. Behaving, in fact, with a juvenile selfishness that suddenly seemed terribly repugnant to her.
And with that realisation, she knew also that it was extremely important to her what Con Bradley thought of her as a professional. And as a woman, although she knew it was now too late for that to matter very much. He had clarified that feeling all too well after she had tried to attack him the day before.
‘And he’s right,’ she muttered fiercely. ‘You deserve everything he said, and more.’ The low comment brought a quizzical look from Jennifer, who took one glance at Verna’s flushed colouring and prudently looked down to her own work.
Verna picked up the column and read it through again, trembling with the abrupt realisation that she couldn’t ... wouldn’t ... dare to use it. It would be unfair to the restaurant, for starters, since despite the glowing descriptions of food and service it simply didn’t have the brilliance of Con’s earlier work. She flung it down on the desk again; she’d just have to ask him to rewrite it in his usual style.
Ask? The thought forced a brittle laugh of sheer terror from her throat. She’d have to do better than ask, she thought. Beg would be a better word. For an instant, the thought of begging Con Bradley for anything made her rigid with anger, but only for an instant. She was the one at fault, and there was no getting around it. She tried honestly to look at herself in Con Bradley’s position, and shuddered at the reaction. Even begging wouldn’t be enough, she thought, I’d tell him to go and jump off a cliff.
It took her fifteen minutes of concentrated preparation before she could muster the nerve to pick up the telephone and dial his number. And even when the telephone at the other end began to ring, she didn’t know what she’d say when he answered. She had seldom done anything that required an apology during her life, and certainly nothing that required such an abject apology. She simply didn’t know what to say.
A movement in the comer of her eye brought Jennifer’s presence suddenly to the fore, and Verna slammed down the telephone in a panic. She just couldn’t talk to Con with anybody else in the room, she realised. It would be hard enough in total privacy.
Jennifer gave her a rather strange look at being sent out for coffee so soon after lunch, but she went without any argument, and immediately the room was dear Verna slammed the door shut and reached again for the phone.
It would serve her right if he flatly refused to discuss it, she thought. Then she thought of having to explain the whole to Reg Williamson and — even worse — Garry Fisher, truck her, and Verna almost dropped the telephone in her rushing apprehension.
She would beg. She would get down on her hands and knees in the middle of the main street and beg, she thought. And her heart thudded louder and louder as the telephone began to ring. Once, twice, three times, four times, and she couldn’t face any more. She dropped the receiver with a frightening feeling of relief. Even having to explain would be easier than having to face up to apologising to Con Bradley.
Unless, of course ...
The thought was so outrageous that at first she mentally shook herself for even thinking it. But as the minutes passed, the ridiculousness of the idea was overshadowed by the slim possibility that it just might work. At least for this week. Dragging out her files, she clipped Con’s first two columns and read them over thoroughly, looking at them for the first time through truly professional eyes and ignoring the personal reaction of her earlier readings.
Then she stuck the paper in her typewriter and set to work, flinching at first at the unaccustomed effort of the job, but gradually finding an unexpected pleasure in what she was doing.
When Jennifer returned with the coffee, Verna drank hers thankfully but without conscious consideration. Her mind was totally occupied in the job of trying to rewrite Con’s column in his unique style. It took her most of the afternoon, using the specifics and facts from his original straight report and weaving in her own fantasy of a dragon lady that was even more horrendous than the one he’d created.
The first effort, she discarded. It was simply awful. The second was better, but she simply couldn’t match his unusual style of putting words together. It wasn’t until she hit on the idea of writing the column herself — as Dragon Lady the Editor — that everything seemed to flow together.
It began with an apology. She had inadvertently burned her poor columnist’s fingers, she wrote, which ought to teach him to try and filch cane toad fillets from her private stock. Of course it meant he was unable to review their visit to Il Gambero, but instead of firing him, she was condescending to write the column for him.
And she did — in a style that portrayed herself as a sneaky, scheming, totally awful old witch, and her poor columnist as a sweet, innocent little fat fellow who was totally intimidated by her. She stole his trousers, filched his money and had her black familiar’ bite him on the ankles. And that was on a good day.
Into the narrative she wove the delights of the huge oysters and superb fish dishes they had enjoyed, along with all the comments Con had originally made about the food, wines and service. The facts were his, but the rest of the column was her own — and to the reader it would appear an appropriate response to his earlier efforts.
Or would it? Verna tried her best to look at the job from as coldly a professional viewpoint as she could manage, but it was too close to her. The next step was obvious, but she felt strangely reticent when she passed it over to Jennifer and demanded an honest opinion.
It must have been obvious to the girl that something very weird was going on, but she coolly read through the column, chuckling happily at some of the better lines, before she returned it. Verna was slightly ashamed at the letdown she felt at noticing Jennifer hadn’t as obviously enjoyed this column as much as the previous ones, but that feeling disappeared at the girl’s first comments.
‘You really must have done something awful to him,’ Jennifer said with unexpected candour, ‘It’s a rather neat way to apologise.’
Verna’s heart sank. It can’t be that obvious,’ she said. ‘Is it?’
Jennifer shrugged. ‘Only to me, I reckon. And probably to him.’
‘Well, I certainly hope so,’ Verna sighed. ‘I’m going to be in a lot of trouble if he doesn’t accept it.’
Dave returned to the office then, and both girls dropped the discussion. Verna turned her attention to finishing off her page layouts, and before she realised it, five o’clock had arrived.
The next day was the usual rush to deadline, but Verna foun
d time to implement another little touch to her carefully disguised apology. Working through her lunch break, she carefully drew a small figure of a rampant, fire-breathing dragon puffing clouds of smoke and flame at a little stick figure of a fleeing man. A female dragon, obviously, since she’d added a hair ribbon and tied it in a bow on the creature’s crest. It took her only a few minutes to rearrange the page to accommodate the artwork at the bottom of the restaurant column, and when she was finished, Verna breathed a non-sulphurous sigh of honest relief.
Giving a quiet thanks to the wondrous versatility of offset printing methods, she finished off that final layout and treated both her young journalists to a beer when the day was over. Dave only stayed for the one, pleading a very heavy date, but Jennifer insisted on returning the shout, and Verna allowed herself a few relaxing moments to enjoy the younger girl’s company. Sheba was safe enough in the high- fenced yard, and was hardly likely to starve to death if Verna was an hour later than usual.
The icy brew was a welcome relief after the closeness of the office, and Verna felt herself begin to unwind for the first time since her flaming encounter with Con Bradley.
Also, she quite liked young Jennifer, who displayed a wisdom and maturity that often belied her years.
But she wasn’t ever going to be able to cope with the younger woman’s exceptional candour, she felt, startled when Jennifer suddenly said, ‘I’m glad you’re going to make things up with Con Bradley. Was it something really horrible that you did to make him angry?’
Verna was stunned momentarily, unable to think of any reasonable answer and yet loath to bluntly dismiss the question as being none of Jennifer’s business.
‘Well ... yes, it was, I guess,’ she finally said, hoping Jennifer would be kind enough to let the thing drop at that point.
‘You don’t want to tell me, do you?’
Verna shook her head with a slow smile. ‘It’s a little bit ... personal,’ she replied.
The Sugar Dragon Page 6
